Stress, Situations, Symptoms and Parkinson’s Disease

March 17, 2022

Limiting Beliefs, Hope and Healing

By Lilian Sjøberg, Danish coach and trouble shooter, good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.

Stress and Symptoms

It is in the nature of chronic diseases, such as Parkinson’s Disease, that symptoms manifest most when our survival instincts (fight, flight, freeze) take over our body’s function. This is why the severity and range of symptoms can vary moment to moment, hour to hour, or day by day, according to how stressed or how relaxed we are in that moment, for most chronic diseases. Here, I use the word stress in its widest possible interpretation, to denote anything which may be troubling us in the present moment, e.g. feelings, accidents, trauma, troublesome relationships, financial problems, small unresolved situations from childhood that may seem insignificant to an adult.

It is not possible to glean these most essential clues, unless we stop looking at the problem as just a brain damage issue, or as simply a disruption in chemical systems which are, in fact, more complex than any scientist can get to the bottom of in an entire lifetime. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of wild animals, and to the real world, lived experiences of people with chronic issues.

The current approach to PD and other chronic diseases won’t change until enough people understand this real world evidence, new text books are written, and the old knowledge passes out of memory, maybe thirty to fifty years from now. Most people can not afford to wait for the clinic proof to be in place, so have a choice to make:

1. give this real life evidence based knowledge due thought and attention, change habits, and continue to make this choice every day for life;
2. stay with whichever devastating symptoms manifest, and fulfil the current belief that there is nothing that can be done but degenerate.

How Symptoms are Situational

It is easy to prove this idea by studying one person at a time, but there will probably never be support for large scale trials, or the millions of dollars that these would cost. Instead, we must use our logical skills, do our own research, and test out on ourselves.

One of the principle tests we can perform on ourselves, or with anyone affected by PD or another chronic disease, is to observe whether symptoms vary over short timescales, either hour-by-hour or day-by-day. If they do fluctuate, then there is a reason for this, and it is probably stress-related. We can investigate this for ourselves by keeping diary notes to see which factors provoke the change in symptoms, e.g. diet, sunlight, weather, moon, temperature, humidity, the company we keep.

If it is genes or previous toxin damage which are causing the symptoms, since these don’t change, the symptoms would be fairly constant too, like the color of eyes. If the weather is extreme, we will see some correlations. However, under otherwise stable conditions, symptoms do still vary by a significant factor during a day or week. Maybe it is only the minute before falling into sleep that symptoms are lower, but that is also a clue.

Indeed, many people with PD will have encountered the experience of tremors becoming more significant in restaurants when people are watching, or freeze in crowds when there is a need to hurry. What is then behind the change in symptoms?

Diary notes are our own proof of concept, and we will soon have our own handful of examples before a week has passed, with careful notes. In my online course, I provide a tailored diary format that I designed specifically for the purpose of keeping such records, which can be printed out, together with instructions on how to fill it out for optimal benefit. Keeping notes is also critical for evaluating if an intervention is working, because we tend to forget the past and think that current problems are the biggest. A video is the best way to record and remember the pre-intervention status.

Another place to look is to the changing prevalence of chronic diseases, such as PD, in the population. Indeed, one can find many articles which say that the percentage of people with PD is increasing, and it is becoming an epidemic. This is also an essential clue to the root causes of the disease, especially when we look at it from a global perspective, we see that industrialized countries are hit the hardest.

While it could be due to the food we eat or pollution, one other factor is obvious. The character of our lifestyle has changed markedly over the last century. We have developed from hardworking farmworkers and labourers, to sitting still as office personnel. From producing our own vegetables by digging our garden, to online orders. Even the elevator and television can be operated without the force of muscles.

As our bodies and brain are still essentially the same version 1.0 from 100,000 years ago, in this modern environment we can get out of our natural balance due to lack of movement and exercise. Daily physical hard work once provided a mechanism for reducing stress.

While we are now more aware of lifestyle diseases, such as being overweight and smoking, we have turned a blind eye to our instinctual stress responses. Hard physical work and exercise helps because it burns off the excess adrenaline that people produce during a hectic day at the office. It helps us to fulfil the cycle of instincts towards a calm body, which the animals do by running away or fighting. See my article on survival instincts for more information as to why we produce excess adrenaline, and why this is a problem in diseases like PD.

The Placebo Effect – Believing Better is to Come

If we take all the medical studies made after 1960, we will see a phenomenon called the placebo effect that relentlessly teases scientists creating new drugs worldwide. Rather than seeing this as something which gets in the way, it is better to actually see it as a superpower that is an essential factor in diseases. It is the innate power in the human body which is so significant that it can often out perform a medical substance. Indeed, a lot of potential medications are dismissed in the clinical trial phase due to the participants finding just as much relief and healing from a sugar pill given to them in the study, instead of the medical compound.

On average, one in three people can let a pill with no active ingredients influence their health just from the belief that they are getting help from experimental medication. What is happening here is that the person is getting hope and faith in the possibility of getting better, and this hope and belief actually facilitates the healing.

When we are caught in our survival instincts, we get all sorts of symptoms. When we can totally relax out of survival mode, we have less symptoms, just wellbeing, and we can even seem to be “cured” for minutes or hours until our instincts again react, and put us back into survival mode. Examples include people with PD under hypnosis having their tremors stop, or having notably less symptoms when enjoying the company of good friends. The placebo effect works because it allows the person to relax and hence, at least temporarily, to emerge from being stuck in survival instincts mode. So, the most essential step to becoming better is to start believing that you can become better.

The Nocebo Effect – No Hope for the Future

The way in which some doctors deliver diagnoses, and also some existing medical beliefs about diseases, give us the opposite of a placebo. This is called a nocebo. It occurs when doctors unfortunately tell us that there is nothing we can do and that our condition will only worsen over time. This in itself can trap us in our survival instincts, due to the fear of degeneration hanging permanently over us.

Some disease diagnoses even come with an estimated schedule on decreasing health. According to the nocebo effect, this results in a self-fulling dark prophecy and becomes true simply because we expect it to become true. indeed, If we stay in the stressful state of hopeless and inaction, we will be blocked from ever escaping out of our survival instincts, so symptoms will indeed get worse, as expected, and, as symptoms get worse, we will become even more chronically stressed about our situation.

I had a client who slowly reduced her PD symptoms. Her doctor then gave her an even darker diagnosis as he believed that healing from PD was not possible, and hence that he must have gotten the original diagnosis wrong. The absurdity was that this new diagnosis gave 8 years of life, and as she had the PD diagnosis for 5 years, he told her that she would die in 3 years. No witchcraft could have done a better job of creating a nocebo doom. Luckily she believed me, and is now only taking medication in the morning, with no symptoms for the rest of the day. It took 4 months before he withdrew the new diagnosis.

Trusting Internal Validation

Even after such a turbulent diagnosis, the people who eventually become better are the ones who chose to trust in themselves, and the innate ability to heal. They have noticed that their symptoms vary with situations, and have chosen to do more of the things that make them calm, symptom-free, less stressful, and less stressed.

This skill of self-sensing can come more or less intuitively. The sense called interoception, which help us feel what is going on inside us, can come in handy here. Still, this sense is often detached when we are caught in our survival instincts. Hence many people with PD are seldom capable of using this at first, but with the right practices can learn to tune in better.

Blame and Shame are also Limiting Beliefs

When I start talking about this, the first thing I often hear from people is that they feel like I am blaming them for their disease, and am saying it is their own fault. I am definitely not saying this. In the same way as I would never accuse a child of being the root cause of neglect, abuse, or bullying, even later in life, no one is to blame for, say, picking the wrong partner or the wrong job that became toxic after a long time.

Certainly, as long as no one learns about any of this in school, no one is to blame.

My Way into This – Pattern Recognition

I have for five years used my biological knowledge, and collected information about how people around the world became better from various diagnoses, such as Parkinson’s Disease. A few of them had the skills to put their knowledge into web pages and in videos. They made long recipes for their journey towards better health. At first glance, I could not see any similarities, but reading more and more of those stories, the patterns emerged which were common in their journeys to recovery.

The Way Out – via The Patterns of the Recovered

My studies revealed that we need to learn to relax and be calm in order to get out of the diseased stage, and the common approaches all include:

• elimination of the reasons for going into survival instincts mode;
• using up the surplus adrenaline that, by nature, is produced every day, via exercise and physical work (new belief: dopamine production is not the problem, it is that when we are stuck in survival mode, we convert dopamine too fast in to adrenaline);
• doing more and more of the activities which help to remain in a calm state or help to escape from survival mode.

People who have already helped themselves heal via taking themselves out of prolonged stays in survival instincts, also have in common that they search for information, methods and resources which can help them, and continue until they find the techniques which work for them.

They continue relentlessly until they have reached a far lower amount of symptoms, and a regime that makes sense for them. They spend whatever money is needed and will always find a way that matches their economy. Their health is the top priority. They have no doubt about this.

It is from these recipes which I have investigated in depth, that I can provide the overviews given above, and also in my survival instincts article, and I go into much more practical detail in my online course.

Summary

Symptoms are situational.

The severity and range of symptoms often vary considerably with the situation we are currently in. Examples include the differences in symptoms when we are in crowds, or in good company, in summer or winter, and in particular, in stress or in relaxation.

Any good theory of chronic disease needs to explain these fluctuations, and I propose that getting stuck in survival instincts mode, or defensive stress states, is in the majority of cases the greatest factor that negatively impacts on symptoms. Likewise learning how to relax and how to get unstuck from our survival instincts is the most beneficial factor and quickest route for reducing symptoms.

Part of my own “HOPE-shortcut” method is keeping track of symptoms with meticulous diary records, giving the ability to connect the fluctuations with the situations. This is the most practical way to make sense of our real world, lived experiences of symptoms, and hence for moving towards healing and progressive symptom reduction.

In alignment with the placebo effect, the main purpose of the self-observations is to focus the attention on the positive things which reduce the symptoms, and realising the situations which makes things worse, so as to eliminate the root causes . The more often a symptom occurs, and the more it varies according to a given situation, the easier it is to find the root cause. So by using the most varying symptoms as a guide to what to investigate first, a much faster result is achievable.

About Me

Learn more about my work, the online course, contact me, connect with me, and join our facebook group.

 

A post from May 17, 2022

This is a companion piece to Lilian Sjøberg’s recent interview “A Novel Approach for Reducing Stress that Fuels Parkinson’s Symptoms”, on the Parkinsons Recovery Radio Show.

Lilian is a contributor to Out-thinking Parkinson’s, a Danish coach and troubleshooter, good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with chronic diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.

Below are the questions asked by the host, Robert Rodgers, and the precis/short summaries of Lilian’s answers, in lieu of a full transcript. The relevant timestamps are also provided, for finding and listening to the corresponding full replies.

01:50 How did your interest in chronic diseases begin?

It is a long story. My husband got cancer when we were 30 years old, and we where told that this type of cancer was over-represented with young men with a high level of education. Indeed, he is now a professor. So from that day, I knew that we could think ourselves into a disease. Major diseases always come with a specific personality trait and there is a very mental side, even where we traditionally think of diseases like cancers as a physical disease. So that caught my interest.

Later, when I became a therapist, I heard several stories about people with what we today call physical diseases, that became better due to mental therapy. As I did not like the short timeframe available for helping people with cancer, I took up chronic diseases, and made my small experiment with local people with chronic illnesses. I gave them five long therapy sessions, and every time saw that I could reduce their symptoms here and now, even if not forever.

I was amazed. If people can reduce symptoms like tremors for minutes and hours, then it of course it is possible to do it for longer periods.

I looked on the internet to see if there were others like me that were interested in, and capable of, reducing symptoms.

I only found a few therapists, but I found a lot of survivor stories from people writing about their own progress.

05:05 What did you find by seeking out stories of recovery from around the world?

I found that they all had a long list of how they reduced symptoms, telling everything they did from the start until they had recovered.

All the lists were unique at first glance. But reading more and more a pattern emerged. I could see there were four types of activities involved.

06:07 Why did you pick Parkinson’s out of all chronic illnesses to start with?

To make a long story short, I chose to dig into Parkinson’s Disease, as people have a normal lifespan, so no hurry. Also, the symptoms are more visible, so it is a lot easier to see when my therapy helps. Tremor is a good example. You can catch it on video, so people can see it. Yes, it is possible to reduce tremors via mental therapy.

07:15 How was learning about adrenaline a breakthrough?

I found the common denominator to all these activities which people did to recover, and that was adrenaline. So all the activities survivors did could be explained by the fact that they targeted adrenaline. The common thing was a reduction of adrenaline!

08:32 How did your biology background inform you, and what can we learn by looking at animals and their survival instincts?

As a biologist, I have a lot of background knowledge of cells, physiology, organs, and also animal behavior. So that is a very good pool of knowledge to draw from when looking at humans. and the nature of both a healthy person and a diseased person.

We can learn a lot from looking at animals. We are an animal, and even though we live in a modern world, we still have a complete set of survival instincts, this has not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Our brain is operating in the dark. Even though we can see, the brain still only gets inputs from our senses and must interpret that. The output is the same as for our ancestors: we go in and out of fight-flight and freeze many times a day. Some people more than others, but in this respect, we are not a lot different from the meerkats in the desert we see on television.

All-day long, we are alarmed (that is dopamine) and dependent on what the body and brain automatically calculates. We are either going back to a calm state, or the signals are converted to switching us into our danger instincts of fight, flight, or freeze.

Going into fight and fight, we see tremors as symptoms, building up tension in the body, and freeze is the same freeze state you also see in Parkinson’s Disease. So Parkinson’s symptoms are right in the middle of our danger instincts. In this way, people with PD show all the signs of being in our danger instincts fight-flight and freeze, and going in and out of these.

11:02 What did you learn by looking at videos of shell shock in world war one?

I have used three hours a day for three years (more than three thousand hours) searching the internet for videos and studies that could give me answers.

When I made my small test experiment with people with different diseases, I found that I could help them all with stress reduction. Regardless of diagnosis, I could help them reduce symptoms. Among these people was a war veteran with severe PTSD. So this brought me to old videos from the first world war where they mention the word shell shock. Seeing these videos is like seeing a concentration of all chronic diseases, and the easiest one to spot is Parkinson’s, as tremor, stiffness, problems walking, bad posture, and frozen faces are seen in nearly all of these videos.

So the conclusion is clear from my perspective. While shellshock as is now called PTSD, it is a result of a short period of a terrible war. Chronic diseases and Parkinson’s Disease, on the other hand. are a result of a whole long life in a stressful environment. Even if you have a fun job it can be very stressful, filled with pressure and ambition.

11:08 What is the best result you have achieved with working with a person with PD?

I was lucky that one of my first clients with Parkinson’s Disease got a new neurologist. This doctor thought it was strange that he did not have the symptoms any longer and sent him to a new DAT scan. He passed without a sign of PD, and was ordered to stop using the medication. So he is now free of the diagnosis. He had traumas from a father that attacked his mother with a knife. This trauma made him tremor when he was out in crowds, as he instinctively was searching for dangerous people. I helped him to remove this trauma and others as well.

The problem here is that as stress symptoms such as tremors are natural, you can never be cured of them, but you can come closer and closer to normal.

The normal is to get a tremor when you are excited, scared, or worried, but going back to a calm normal state with no tremor when the source of excitement or danger is not present.

We need to remember that this is our survival instincts. We are not a master over this, it is our automatric instincts that decide. The only thing you are a master of is after hearing this podcast, is if you want to continue to have these traumas for the rest of your life or if you want to get help from me or other therapists that are specialized in diseases.

17:11 What are the blocks to your method working?

I find that people lacking time is the big problem. So if you have both children and a busy job this is difficult.

If you are a lonely mother it is difficult.

It is difficult to help people taking a lot of medication, as their symptoms are controlled by the medication. We do not know if a symptom is related to danger instincts, or it is related to a side effect of the medication.

As my coaching is based on symptoms being both natural and signs of stress, they are the key to becoming better. They are the portal to mental and physical health.

19:17 What insights does your stress test provide?

I have made a Stress Test that can help people to evaluate which stress type they are. This can be a kickstart to becoming better, and to begin to understand this new world of stress symptoms and survival instincts. It leads up to my online course, which I call Overcome Parkinsons, a systematic way to better health. that is now on the platform called Skool

I chose the word HOPE for my webpage as this is the first thing we need to install in a person with a chronic disease. The next thing is to help people to learn to interpret their symptoms and flare ups in stressful situations

After this, I describe the four strategies I found in survivor stories and an explanation of why they work.

I then coach people to take action going from passive to active and to help themselves.

Go to my Social media and Overcome course

Including some supplemental questions and answers, after the 21:38 mark.

If you liked that there is a follow on video on youtube with the second time rob interview me

A post Gary Sharpe helped me to compose February 3, 2022

By Lilian Sjøberg Danish coach and trouble shooter good at seeing patterns, with a masters in biology, who has studied how to help people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) from a practical perspective for five years.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived in small tribes, and, like herd animals, survived due to our instincts. Our brain and body process information in a heartbeat and often decide to put us in a survival state. We may react with these survival instincts to sensory input, shadows, sounds, and tactile stimulation. Dopamine and adrenaline are essential in this process. After an alert, orienting state for seconds or minutes, our brains may make the subconscious decision to fight, flight or freeze. Eventually, after seconds, minutes or hours we return to a calm state again where normal body functions take over (digestion, cell division, reproduction, memory). Better safe than sorry.

We can observe the animal world to understand more. Meerkats in the dessert, for example, where alarms are constantly shouted over the herd, induce flights to the safety of the burrows, and then recovery, re-emerging for play or hunting food. This process is repeated many times a day. Better to alarm one time too many than risk death. Humans are similar, wired for moving back and forth between our survival instincts and calm states. We are just not very aware of this, and being in a modern society and disconnected from a tribe is masking this awareness even further, yet it remains the case that a healthy person will still go in and out of the instinctual survival state many times a day.

The problem is that today, when our survival instincts are triggered, we often cannot complete the process, because running away or fighting is not an option. So the adrenaline lingers in the body for hours, days, and even weeks, preventing us from returning to 100% healthy normal body function. This, combined, with the lack of many hours of hard physical daily work, with recreation in front of the television not helping, is slowly trapping us in bodies that gives us all kinds of symptoms. The nature of the stressors has also changed. Instead of the tiger, it is things like the terrible divorce, the lousy task at work, or the angry teenagers, which are the root course for our body going into its survival instincts.

In combination with most people’s sitting still for too long daily, stress can now load our bodies with permanent chemical cocktails of adrenaline and cortisol. Then “symptoms” emerge and become a new normal. Each person gets their unique cocktail of symptoms.

Being in a half-working body too long can lead to all sorts of symptoms. An analogy is driving a car with more semi-flat tires on the left side all the time. We can drive, but side effects in the shock absorber and steering mechanism will slowly emerge. We can maybe change some spare parts, but the flat tires are the natural root cause, and if we don’t address this, more problems will occur.

“Star pictures are for stars what diagnoses are to symptoms. It is a grouping made by humans. The stars and symptoms do not care.”

Right now, we divide the symptoms into diagnoses of chronic diseases, but the root cause is the same. Some sets of symptoms lead to the medical diagnoses of Parkinson’s Disease, but we can connect the dots between these signature symptoms and the survival instincts. So, we can also call it the long-term effects of staying in survival instincts for far too long time a day.

To help shake off the gloom about this, I call our survival instincts our superpowers, because it is a more resourceful way to look at the body and the problems we might be experiencing. Try saying “thank you, body, for keeping me safe, but now it is time to bring me out of the safe survival state and back to the normal range of health and grow.” This ought to give us a little more faith in the dispositions of our body.

Fight, flight and freeze are the most potent superpowers (but not all) to help us survive. Our instincts can lock the body down 100% to avoid a dangerous situation, known as “death feigning” or “playing possum” in the animal kingdom. Things in modern life, from which we cannot escape, cause us to go into this type of survival instinct, but we seldom finish the cycle to recovery. We become trapped in intermediate stages that can lead to the permanent symptoms after a long term. So, the first signature symptoms of PD called freeze correspond closely to what happens when someone is frozen stiff by their survival instincts. If we are prepared to contemplate this, it is straightforward to see that these have the same biological roots and physical manifestations. Old idioms tell us about this shut down of the body, e.g., “to be frozen in fear“, “my blood froze”, “my blood ran cold”.

The second signature symptom of Parkinson’s Disease is tremor. Tremor can be due to the body tensing up to prepare for the fight or flight, or the releasing of tension when the danger has passed. So, this symptom too is also found in survival instincts, especially in going in and out of survival mode. Old idioms tell us about this also, e.g., “shaking like a leaf”, “knees are knocking”, “ shaking in my boots”.

The third signature symptom, called stiffness, that people with Parkinson’s Disease (PwP) experience is also a superpower, which we will discuss in a future article.

The fluctuation in degree of symptoms is then related to calmness or a semi-instinctual states. With a lack of nuanced vocabulary, we say the increase in the symptoms is stress-related, but it is more complex. We often hear how PwP display increased symptoms in person-specific situations, such as going to the bathroom, crossing a road, being in a crowd, or queuing at a cashier, where a tiny signal triggers the survival instinct and puts the PwP’s body on pause to ensure survival. It can become a pattern as the triggers are enforced several times, so it gets easier and easier to get caught in this instinct pattern.

Again, we can look to the animal kingdom for evidence of this theory. Dog trainers know that a dog shivering or trembling occurs when the creature is experiencing too many stressors in a short time, and needing to relax in between tense situations. Farmers also know this problem arises in domesticated animals which cannot complete the cycle of survival instincts, because they have nowhere to run or hide. The same goes with humans, e.g. when we cannot escape from a bully, nor fight with an unfair manager. We too can get stuck in a stressful situation and start tremoring. In tense situations like eating at a restaurant, talking to strangers, trying out new activities, more tremoring can occur as nervousness or excitement builds up.

A situation like a soccer game on television can bring a tremor forward for PwP. Although there is no real threat in sight, the excitement of wanting to join the game and “fight” alongside a favorite team, also releases adrenaline. I helped a man with PD evaluate when to shut off the TV to prioritize a good night’s sleep. He got into an excited tremor state due to his favorite team’s soccer games. After a good match, adrenaline lingered for hours in his system and made sleep impossible. He got punished with many symptoms the next day, which was not in line with his job. He ended up quitting his job as he found it was also a root cause in giving him tremors in stressful situations.

We can demonstrate the increase in tremoring due to going into survival instincts in real time, by stressing a PwP out, e.g. by shouting at them. However, this is hardly ethical. Instead, we can turn towards video records from history. Every war had victims that exhibited symptoms due to getting stuck in their survival instincts, especially in the first world war where all people, young and old, were enrolled in the fighting. We can find on youtube several recorded videos, such as the one below, that show us the physical manifestations of the impact of getting stuck in extreme instincts. In that case, it was called shell shock.

Apparently, 15% of people in the war manifested symptoms due to staying long-term in the potent powers of survival instincts. The historical videos show a variety of movement disorders manifesting, including paralysis and tremors, and people even went blind and deaf people due to events that did not physically touch the person at all. Even office people that knowingly sent their comrades to their deaths could show symptoms of being trapped in their instincts.

Shell shock or PTSD can occur in young people exposed to a short period of terrible fear like a war. However, more subtle or prolonged episodes can impact us too. I have heard stories of symptoms arising due to: having a spouse who was physically or mentally unhealthy for a long time; a very stress related job; being a witness to accident involving a death; seeing parents fighting with knives; living in a house that was close to demolition; being hit by violent parents on a daily basis. The earlier the episode, the more insignificant it can look to a grown-up: a playful dog that knocked over a toddler; siblings teasing each other; a father hitting a child once as a punishment; being in an early theatre play; misunderstanding grown-ups talking about serious matters; parents demanding high standards for how to perform.

We can go in and out of instincts on a daily basis for many small or large reasons, e.g. due to a crow flying into our window, the mailman bringing bad news, our children getting a divorce. If it is a long lasting problem, it can hold us in instincts for hours, weeks, and months. For some people, we find that they have encountered enough subtle or terrible episodes during a lifetime, that it can sum up and result in the manifestation of a conglomerate of stress-symptoms unique to that person.

In summary, it is not just animals and people in history who experience the triggering of the instincts every day, and modern society is doing this to us in new and subtle ways which we may not be aware of. Unfortunately, the medical system is not very aware of this connection between symptoms and stress. This might because they are focussed on imbalances of chemicals in the brain, and on trying to cure the disease by fixing this problem. Personally, I don’t believe we can ever fully understand what is happening at the cellular level in the brain, since no simple formula or three-dimensional model can give us the understanding of the multi-facets of what is happening at that level. Indeed, a hundred years of brain studies have not brought us much closer to a solution, so why not clear the table and take another approach?

Instead, we have the overview of our knowledge of animal behavior, observations from history, and the real life experiences of PwP, by which we can arrive at practical things which PwP can do to help them. We will discuss these strategies in more depth in a future article, but here is brief overview:

• (strenuous) exercise to burn off the adrenaline (but build up slowly, remember that it takes a month before your stamina equals this high level of exercise) three times a week 50 minutes in a sweating exercise like spinning;
• natural activities to support mindfulness (social activities, hobbies, and awareness of the stressors modern life);
• learned activities that provoke the mindful state (Qi Gong, Thai Chi, and the like);
• reduction of the root causes that bring on the instincts (psychotherapy and physical therapies).

For faster progress, get help and support from skilled people. With ongoing work, 1-2 years from now, one will see enormous progress. Remember, it took time to develop this disease, and it will therefore likely take a similar amount of time to get out of these instinctual patterns. The effort is worth it when the alternative is rapid degeneration.

Discover more about Lilian Sjøberg, and support her work, including an online course she has developed for people affected by Parkinson’s Disease, based on five years of researching practical solutions and helping PwP.

In this powerful conversation, Lilian sits down with one of her clients 58 year old, to share a deeply inspiring story of transformation. Through her work, she is illuminating for the world how stress manifests not just mentally but physically—here, in the form of shock following a serious accident, which contributed to debilitating symptoms years later.

Together, they delved into therapy to uncover the root causes of these symptoms, rooted in stressful traumas. By processing and releasing these traumas, he has experienced significant relief from the physical effects of accumulated stress, as well as the associated embarrassment.

Remarkably, he has not yet completed the full 12 sessions he originally purchased, because now more important tasks has taken center stage in his life. This shift in priorities is itself a profoundly positive sign of the progress he has made.

Join us as Lilian and her client explore this journey, highlighting the profound mind-body connection and the hope that knowledge about stress reduction and tailored trauma therapy can bring to those living with the physical echoes of chronic stress .

You can listen to the audio interview, or you can read a shorter version of the interview below.
It is people from Lilians HOPEshortcut Community who have requested most of the questions.

Audio recording:

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Lilian: People are really interested in your timeline, and since we’re exploring this connection between stress, trauma, and Parkinson’s, I’d love to hear the bigger picture too. How would you describe your childhood?

Interviewee: I’d say it was happy, loved, and secure. My mom and dad split up when I was about seven, but looking back now, 50 years later, I don’t feel like I had a difficult childhood at all.

Lilian: And school? How was that time for you?

Interviewee: Relatively happy. I still keep in touch with some friends from my primary school, the under-11s one. Then I went to a school in central London for bright boys. It was fairly strict, but again, looking back, I felt happy. By 16, I’d kind of outgrown it a bit and became a slight rebel, so I went off to sixth-form college, which was unusual back then.

Lilian: It sounds like you were a pretty confident teenager.

Interviewee: Teenagers always have their insecurities, but yeah, relatively confident.

Lilian: What about further education and your early career? Any major stress there?

Interviewee: I did a degree and a master’s. Exam time always brings some stress, but compared to others, I took it in my stride. People used to call me quite relaxed when everyone else was panicking.

Lilian: And your jobs afterward? You’ve had a few roles. any high-pressure ones?

Interviewee: Right after university, I worked as a biomedical engineer designing medical equipment until I was about 30. Then I left to start my own business supplying equipment to hospitals. There were stresses, running a business, building it up, managing staff, but I wouldn’t say I was significantly adversely affected by stress. As the person in charge, there’s always a certain level of ongoing stress, though.

Lilian: Then there was a switch – an accident. How old were you, and what happened?

Interviewee: I’d just turned 50. I was married, father of three school-aged kids. We were having a family barbecue in the garden. I went back to the barbecue after heating it up, but the gas had gone out. I reignited it without realizing a big cloud of gas had built up. There was an explosion, and I got quite badly burnt.

Lilian: Did you feel the shock in the moment?

Interviewee: It was like in the movies – everything went into slow motion. Then the physical bang of the explosion, and afterward this huge sense of shock. At the hospital, my body went into a kind of shock state, whole-body trembling. They gave me something like morphine to settle me down.

Lilian: How bad did the doctors say it was?

Interviewee: They didn’t really spell it out at first, but you could see on their faces it was serious. I was taken to a specialist burns unit, but compared to what they usually see, they said, “This isn’t too bad.” My legs were the worst—skin burnt off from the knees down, all bandaged up. There were lesser burns elsewhere, mainly from the waist down because gas is heavier than air and sits lower. It took a month or two for full physical recovery.

I came home bandaged up like the Michelin Man, legs wrapped, lying in bed on the top floor, kind of in isolation, waiting for the skin to regrow. They used ointments and mesh to help. I was amazed how the body heals itself. Within four or five weeks, I had fresh skin on my legs.

Lilian: Did the accident force you to close the company, or did you just take a break?

Interviewee: No, by then the company had a good management team. I was minimally involved during recovery, and things ran nicely.

Lilian: Let’s talk about the timeline after the accident. When did you notice your first symptoms?

Interviewee: Looking back, on a family holiday in France the summer after the explosion, I noticed I couldn’t smell anything. I didn’t think much of it then. About two to three years later, during the COVID lockdown, my left foot started dragging and catching on the floor sometimes. Everything felt weird back then, so I kind of ignored it, didn’t want to go to a doctor or hospital and risk picking up something worse. I was officially diagnosed in 2022, but the symptoms probably started 12–18 months before that.

Lilian: What made you finally seek help?

Interviewee: Symptoms built up. I had what was diagnosed as frozen shoulder—stiffness and restricted movement in my left shoulder, plus the earlier foot issues on the left side. Eventually I saw a neurologist, and within minutes he said it was Parkinson’s disease.

Lilian: How did that diagnosis hit you?

Interviewee: Complete shock. I thought it was some nerve entrapment. The shock affected me for about six months. I imagined a much worse future, incurable, degenerative, progressively getting worse. I felt like I had only a handful of years left moving normally, hoping for a cure around the corner.

Lilian: What changed your perspective?

Interviewee: I started researching things that could help symptoms. Exercise made a huge difference, my mood and outlook shifted to optimism and hope. There was a real turning point: we had building work done, and the builders put metal girders in the garden for foundations. I thought, “I can’t walk along that beam—my balance is gone.” But each day I tried, and suddenly I felt almost all my symptoms ease from the balance work. I’d run back to the house feeling things weren’t only going to get worse—there was something I could do.

Lilian: And medication—when did that start?

Interviewee: At diagnosis four years ago, the neurologist started me on low-dose Rasagiline (1 mg). He said we’d probably review it in six to seven months and that in seven to ten years I’d likely be on a cocktail of three or four drugs. But with exercise, sleep, and later stress work, my medication hasn’t increased. I’m still basically on that starter level after three years. I haven’t been on L-Dopa, but I’ve been on low-dose ropinirole (a dopamine agonist) for about a year—just one tablet a day. We decided not to increase it after starting our work together.

Lilian: When were your symptoms at their worst?

Interviewee: Usually tied to stress or anxiety, tremor in my left hand, curling up of the hand, anxiety, trouble multitasking, feeling overwhelmed. Never extreme, but dragging my leg, facial rigidity, reduced smell, reduced arm movement.

I felt embarrassed going out because of the gait issues. I’d worry beforehand about social events, and that anxiety made symptoms worse—almost self-fulfilling.

Lilian: You mentioned a trip to Spain with old friends—how did that change?

Interviewee: The year before working with you, I spent half the weekend in the hotel, anxious about my walking, stressed, and I left early.

This year, after we talked through the fears and resolved some underlying stuff, it was completely different. A bit of anxiety at the airport, but then I was fully engaged for three days—fantastic time. My brother even said, “Are you on some new medication? You look so much better.” Huge difference.

Lilian: And trips into central city—did that anxiety ease too?

Interviewee: Yes. I’d get anxious the day before about department stores or traveling in.

Now, after working through the stress triggers, I have a more positive mindset, if I’m not walking great, who cares? Lots of people aren’t. I notice it when I look around, and then I walk with more ease. Very quickly after one session, I tested it and had a much better experience.

Lilian: So now symptoms don’t restrict your activities as much?

Interviewee: Not at all. I don’t let them hold me back, and life is more enjoyable. It’s a virtuous spiral.

Lilian: Most people believe nothing can be done about Parkinson’s. What made you look in another direction?

Interviewee: Seeing positive effects from exercise, noticing symptom-free mornings after good sleep, and knowing stress intensified everything for me. I considered general counseling, but then I found you, and it fit perfectly—what I was looking for.

Lilian: If we make the bold claim that the barbecue accident—the shock, the freeze response—tipped you into Parkinson’s, what do you think now?

Interviewee: I agree. I fleetingly wondered if the accident caused it right after diagnosis but dismissed it because it didn’t fit conventional theories. Now, after our work, I’m fairly confident it was the most significant trigger. Lying on the hospital table, whole body vibrating in shock—that was worse than any Parkinson’s tremor I’ve had, but similar in concept.

Lilian: Do you have fears about the future now?

Interviewee: No more than the average person. I’m generally positive—more so now—and feel symptoms are much more under my control with exercise, meditation, yoga, stress reduction. Some even say getting the diagnosis was lucky, it forced lifestyle changes that help prevent other issues. What I thought was the end of normal life might have been the start of something better.

Lilian: How has this changed you beyond the symptoms?

Interviewee: I’ve become more accepting, if walking isn’t great one day, I don’t worry. I have lost some of that need to be “perfect.” It’s helped the family too, I’m more outgoing again, less withdrawn. My wife notices; she laughs at me doing my dancing exercises. Life feels lighter.

Lilian: Any diet changes that helped?

Interviewee: About a year after diagnosis, we shifted—with my wife’s help—to a more Mediterranean-style diet. Healthy anyway, but hard to pinpoint its exact effect compared to exercise, sleep, and stress reduction, which I notice immediately.

Lilian: You didn’t go heavy on supplements or experimental stuff?

Interviewee: As a biomedical engineer, I tried things like red LED light therapy, but nothing helped dramatic. I avoided the supplement rabbit hole you see in patient groups—people stacking dopamine boosters in untested combinations. For me, stress reduction, exercise, yoga, and meditation have had the biggest, most noticeable impact.

Lilian: Anything else you’d like to say to the world?

Interviewee: Just that I’d encourage people to try stress reduction work with you, Lillian—because it works.

The interviewer is Lilian Sjøberg, a practitioner focused on trauma healing and stress reduction for Parkinson’s symptoms (via the HOPE Shortcut method). The Interviewee is a man in his 70th sharing his personal story and how it ended up in a diagnosis of Parkinson.

Lilian: I’d like to start by hearing a bit about your life story. You have a particularly compelling background that’s relevant to anyone born before 1984. That year medical science recognized that infants also younger than six months have a fully developed nervous system capable of experiencing pain like adults. How did this discovery relate to your early experiences?

Interviewee: It’s hard to overstate the impact. I underwent surgery as a baby (approx. 1953) around six months old without any anesthesia. I was essentially operated on while fully conscious and in pain, likely strapped down and immobilized. That was my very first experience of the world: born into torture. It set a foundational message that life begins with betrayal and suffering.

I didn’t trust anyone after that—not even my mother. It wasn’t a great way to start.

Lilian: In my work helping people with Parkinson’s, we focus on reducing accumulated trauma and stress, because the earlier the trauma, the deeper its lifelong effects. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is the worst, how would you rate the impact of that infant surgery on your life?

Interviewee: Easily a 10. Overwhelming.

Lilian: When did you first connect this to your life challenges?

Interviewee: Only about two years ago. My parents had mentioned the scar from the operation, but I didn’t think much of it until I started exploring after some breath work sessions. I researched infant surgeries online and learned they were routinely done without anesthesia back then, often with babies tied down. That realization hit hard.

Lilian: How do you think it affected you physically over the years?

Interviewee: I’ve always found it easier to have out-of-body experiences than to feel fully in my body. Coming back into my body feels difficult. I was never fully dissociated in a dramatic way, but there was always a sense of detachment. Pain that intense, especially as an infant, triggers survival mechanisms, like leaving the body to cope.

Lilian: That’s a classic freeze response: when pain is overwhelming, the body numbs out or dissociates. In later sessions, you’ve described moments of feeling truly “at home” in your body for the first time, like returning after being away. That infant surgery was likely one of your core, foundational traumas, perhaps the biggest.

Interviewee: I agree.

Lilian: You’ve also faced other health challenges, like neck cancer. How did you handle the diagnosis and treatment?

Interviewee: Surprisingly easily. I had a compassionate doctor, and when I agreed to surgery, there was this powerful exchange of energy across the desk, it felt supportive. I paid privately for the best care. But my distrust of authority figures runs deep, likely tracing back to that early surgery.

Lilian: That distrust showed up again with your Parkinson’s diagnosis. Tell us about when symptoms began.

Interviewee: About two years ago. It started in my right arm. I couldn’t sign my name properly anymore. Then jerkiness in the arm, progressing to more pronounced tremors. A friend noticed my walking was off; I wasn’t heel-striking correctly with my right foot. I felt slowed overall. The specialist diagnosed Parkinson’s after I described the symptoms.

Lilian: How did the diagnosis feel?

Interviewee: On one hand, expected; on the other, horrible. They didn’t discuss the future much, which was actually a relief. I’ve avoided dwelling on progression because focusing on worsening seems to make it happen faster. I’ve chosen not to know every detail, life’s surprises are better than constant fear.

Lilian: The doctor suggested medication?

Interviewee: Yes, but I refused. I tried it for a week. It caused constipation and made me feel out of control of my body. My early experiences taught me not to trust doctors or pills.

Lilian: You’ve noticed stress accelerates symptoms.

Interviewee: Definitely. Major shocks slow me down even more. Like after a friend’s death, when things worsened noticeably and I had to stopped driving.

Lilian: So you sought alternative paths: Any standouts?

Interviewee: Yes, Saunas, rebounding, medical Qi Gong, Brandy Gilmore’s work, and many more. Nothing dramatically reversed the core slowness, though many other symptoms improved or slowed. Slowness has been the persistent issue, possibly age-related too, but the trauma work we’ve done has helped the most.

Lilian: In our sessions, we’ve released trauma after trauma. You’re unusually skilled at sensing body memories and letting them surface. How do you do it?

Interviewee: I quiet my mind, focus on the symptom or topic, and let impressions float up without forcing or over-analyzing. It’s natural for me just allowing what’s there to emerge.

Lilian: That ability lets us process multiple body-stored traumas per session. For example, we linked specific stiffness in your thighs and calves to teenage sports competitions and the intense stress of racing starts. Even athletic pressure from youth tied into proving you weren’t “weak” after early vulnerability.

Interviewee: It felt nonsensical at first, but it made sense upon reflection. Untangling that stressful history has been incredibly helpful.

Lilian: Your career was also competitive, climbing the corporate ladder while staying driven. A common thread: always striving to be the best, perhaps to counter early feelings of helplessness.

Interviewee: Yes, without realizing how competitive I was.

Lilian: We’ve worked on the early traumas with your operation. Doctors saved your life, but the trauma lingered. You’ve shifted from anger to a neutral feeling. Any final thoughts for others with Parkinson’s or chronic conditions?

Interviewee: The trauma-healing process gives real hope. Symptoms improve during sessions, though sustaining hope between them is challenging. Releasing these old layers, especially the infant surgery, has made me more forgiving and present. It’s not a quick fix, but addressing root traumas and stress offers a path forward that conventional approaches didn’t.

Lilian: Thank you for sharing so openly. Your story highlights how early, unrecognized trauma can shape a lifetime, and how revisiting and releasing it can bring profound relief.

Sara’s story and her emerging proof
of what stress reduction can do

I have asked Lilian to allow me to share my experience with HOPEshortcut.com so far. My name is Sara Sutton, and I am from Utah, USA. Diagnosed 7 years ago with Parkinson’s, I had experienced symptoms for two years before that time. Having to quit my job and slow down due to tremors, stiffness, pain and bradykinesia gave me time to contemplate my situation.

How did this happen to me? How did I come to this uncontrollably deteriorating physical condition, which my neurologist assured me would continue to get worse for the remainder of my life?

That is when I tried to discover the origins or causes of my symptoms.

My neurologist’s diagnosis was very short on answers. He explained to me that basically, if a person with symptoms responded to Carbidopa/Levodopa then it was a good probability that they had Parkinson’s. What???

Millions of people around the world have an incredibly wide range of onset and placement of body symptoms but they are all grouped into one box by a medication which could affect even a wider range of body symptoms, Parkinson’s or otherwise?

My first response to C/L was projectile vomiting! But as symptoms progressed, I gradually tolerated Sinemet. By that time, I needed help with dressing and showering etc.

Eventually, the neurologist suggested DBS surgery, and feeling I had no better alternatives, I went for it in January of 2023. The change was dramatic. I was able to dress, shower, and drive a car again. But DBS is not a healing therapy, and symptoms have and are expected to continue to develop and worsen. 

I realized that my symptoms were always worse under stressful situations, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about this until I found the book by Lilian Sjøberg “Interviews with People with Parkinson’s: Clients in inspirational conversations 

The information in this book and on Lilian’s website, HOPEshortcut.com, opened me up to the understanding that with guidance, I can make improvements in my health and symptoms by managing them directly.

Drawing on Lilian’s knowledge and aid, I have completely dropped my medication from 5-6, 25/100 carbidopa/levodopa per day to zero.  I learned from Lilian’s research how dopamine chemically breaks down into adrenaline, which answered my questions about how to avoid over-medication and dyskinesia in the future.

Since cutting out my meds, I am calmer and have been able to overcome insomnia for the first time in 5 years, with the luxury of sleeping 8 hours at night.

With Lillian’s coaching, I have become less anxious, my pain is greatly lessened, my balance and gait have improved, and I have more endurance each day.  I am even dialing down my DBS amplitude so I can directly treat more of my symptoms.

Roberts and Lilian’s new book is an inspiring attestation to the validity of her empowering theories. 

I have found her community meetings to be highly motivating, and have met inspired, like-minded people who share this journey.   

I am joining Lilian’s course, which begins in January 2026, to continue my healing. 

Sara Sutton