Drink-Spiking Awareness

Your central nervous system is the thing standing between you and illness. Through the autonomic branch and the stress axis (the HPA axis), it sets your heart rate, digestion, sleep, inflammation and immune response minute by minute. When it can settle after a threat, you recover. When it is kept on alert — by a spiking, an assault, a controlling partner, a group that watches you — the stress chemistry that protects you in the short run starts to wear the body down. Researchers call that wear allostatic load. [McEwen 1998]

Abuse creates disequilibrium, and the illnesses that follow are well documented. The landmark ACE Study of 17,000 adults found that people with four or more adverse experiences had four to twelve times the risk of depression, alcoholism and suicide attempts, and markedly higher rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease and liver disease. [Felitti 1998] Among adults, intimate-partner violence is tied to chronic pain, headaches, irritable bowel and other gut disorders, gynecological problems, insomnia, depression and PTSD. [Campbell 2002] A Swedish cohort of more than 100,000 people with stress-related disorders found a 36% higher rate of autoimmune disease (46% higher after PTSD). [Song 2018] None of this is weakness. It is a body doing exactly what it was built to do, for too long.

The good news is the same system that gets dysregulated can be regulated on purpose. Slow exhale breathing, cold water on the face, safe touch, heat, nature and real sleep all speak directly to the vagus nerve and tell the body the threat has passed. Regular sauna use alone was associated with sharply lower cardiovascular mortality over twenty years in Finnish men. [Laukkanen 2015] Resetting isn't a luxury after what you've been through; it is the treatment.