Aviva Romm: Overcoming Survival Overdrive Syndrome
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2017
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s guest, Dr. Aviva Romm, has been referred to as “the face of natural medicine in the 21st century by Prevention Magazine.”
She’s a Yale-trained, board-certified physician with a specialty in women’s health and obstetrics; a midwife and herbalist, and a founding member of the Yale Integrative Medicine Program’s Advisory Board.
Dr. Romm practices medicine in New York City and is a nationally sought speaker, author, and consultant. She is also one of the nation’s leaders in botanical medicine and is the author of 7 books on natural medicine.
In this week’s episode, we begin with her service-mission to Haiti after the earthquake, then find our way back to explore the key ideas from her groundbreaking new book, The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution. Aviva describes a pervasive yet often undiagnosed condition—Survival Overdrive Syndrome (SOS)—which leads to the feeling of being in perpetual survival mode, overcome by everything from fatigue, overwhelm and brain-fog to pain, disease and even death, when left unaddressed.
We also explore how so many of us push beyond what our physiological and psychological systems are adapted to be able to handle healthfully, all in the name of a success that ends up leaving us gutted and exhausted. Critically, she offers ways to identify the symptoms of SOS that can so quickly drain our Vitality Buckets and make our good life feel perpetually beyond reach.
And, we talk about the key steps to take to advocate for ourselves, find the right answers and people to help us, and also begin to walk the road back to health ourselves through a series of simple, yet proven lifestyle interventions. Her full recovery protocol is offered in an immensely “doable,” practical and powerful 4-week program in her book.
Mentioned in This Episode:
- Dr. Aviva’s 2014 Good Life Project video episode: Medicine 3.0: What Got Us Here Ain’t Gonna Get Us There
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So SOS stands for Survival Overdrive Syndrome and it was just sort of an accidental term. |
| 0:09.0 | It's not a real medical term, but as I had so many women in my practice sitting across |
| 0:14.4 | for me or women emailing me and writing to me on Facebook, I kept hearing this theme. |
| 0:20.4 | And it was actually a theme of repeated words. |
| 0:23.3 | Dr. Rom, Dr. Aviva, Aviva, I feel like I'm chronically stuck in survival mode. |
| 0:28.9 | I feel like I'm always in the on position. |
| 0:30.8 | I feel like I'm always just trying to keep up, you know, I'm like just trying to stay |
| 0:34.8 | afloat. |
| 0:35.8 | And it was this sense of really truly like life survival being on the line, not in terms |
| 0:42.9 | of necessarily having enough food, but feeling that the stress response in them was so overactivated |
| 0:48.7 | and they couldn't keep up. |
| 0:50.2 | So what if all those symptoms that you've kind of been feeling over the years wasn't |
| 0:58.2 | just all in your head? |
| 0:59.4 | What if you know, passing moments of low energy? |
| 1:02.2 | What if moments of pain, joint pain, inflammation? |
| 1:05.9 | What if moments of fatigue, stress, anxiety, overwhelm? |
| 1:10.0 | Moments of your brain just kind of feeling like it's a little foggy and not quite clear. |
| 1:14.4 | What if those weren't just in your head? |
| 1:16.1 | What if those were on things you just had to live with? |
| 1:18.4 | What if those weren't things that you could just take a pill to make go away, which very |
| 1:23.4 | often really doesn't make it go away? |
| 1:25.3 | Just pushes it down the road and makes it worse. |
... |
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