EP 113: Reduce Stress and Chronic Inflammation with Re-Origin Founder Ben Ahrens

Mimi MacLean:

Welcome to the Lyme 360 podcast for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean, mom of five, founder of Lyme 360, and a fellow Lyme warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health practitioners, and experts to learn about their treatments, struggles, and triumphs to help you on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you.

Hi, welcome back to Lyme 360. This is your host, Mimi MacLean. And today, I have on Ben Ahrens, and he is the CEO and co-founder of re-origin. And he has consistently sought new solutions, innovations to help humanity regain and optimize its health. Over the years, Ben's path has led him through many areas of health, including serving as a celebrity and professional athlete fitness consultant, featured as a speaker and organizer at dozens of health and alternative medicine conferences globally, as well as being a certified practitioner and bioenergetics, holistic health and integrative nutrition. Ben has acquired an intimate understanding of how to support people who desire to change their body, mind, and spirit. Re-origin is his company and it's a science based, self directed, neuroplasticity training program with coaching, live programming, and a supportive community specifically designed to help you get back to a happy and healthy life. 

And at re-origin, they help you reduce anxiety and diminish many symptoms that stem from chronic inflammation and stress. It is proven and possible, and can make a difference in your life in as little as 30 days. Ben is also a chronic Lyme warrior. Thank you for joining us today on Lyme 360. Please subscribe below so you can get notified of the next podcast. Also, go to lyme360.com and sign up for a newsletter, where you'll receive our weekly newsletter about the most recent podcast and other exciting news that is happening in our community. Also, while you're there, check out our shop page. These are links that are to products that I have enjoyed and that have helped me on my healing journey. And any sale helps support the cost of this podcast. 

Ben, thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to talk about your program, your website, because I feel like what you're targeting is not really talked about much, as far as healing, especially for Lyme patients dealing with the limbic system and neuroplasticity and healing that. Right? I feel like that's the last thing that people kind of, when they finally [inaudible 00:02:30], they're like, "Okay, let me focus on this part." Talk about re-origin and what it is, and why you wound up starting it.

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah. So re-origin is basically a brain retraining program for chronic conditions like Lyme disease, anything that stems from a chronic inflammatory cause, which is unfortunately so many things in this day and age. And it really started with my own experience 10 years ago getting really sick with chronic neurologic Lyme disease and spending three or four years bed down with oxygen tanks and catheters into my arms and all this kind of stuff, that I know unfortunately many Lyme patients experience.

But to a point that you just made, I really reached a point where it was clear that the treatments and conventional things that I was doing didn't seem to be moving the needle in a meaningful way when it comes to healing and recovery. And I remember this kind of pivotal moment in my thought process where I had actually gone to the Marion Institute in Massachusetts and seen a talk by Dr. Thomas Rau, who's the practitioner at Paracelsus, which is a biological medicine clinic in Switzerland. Basically, he made the point that roughly 40% of people in the Northeast, if you were to randomly pull people off the streets and test them, if you could test them accurately for Lyme, about 40% he predicted would have Lyme, meaning the spirochetal infection.

Now he said of that 40%, far less than 2% would get what he calls Lyme disease, which is where they become sick and symptomatic, or certainly to the point that I became. And this turns out to be true, and we know it's true because even statistically speaking, if a cold virus or something breezes through a room of 10 people, roughly three of them would get sick and symptomatic and seven wouldn't. So hearing that and thinking in this way, the question that came to mind is: Why is it that some people respond to these pathogens in certain ways? And why is it if we're not getting better and we should be, that response keeps going? And perhaps the most important question: How can we change that response so that our bodies can do what the bodies naturally are designed to do, which is to self heal? And that question or those series of questions led me down this rabbit hole to learning about the role of the brain as the kind of chief operating organizer of all of the bodily organs and cells and systems, and how if we basically change the brain's response to symptoms and stress and inflammation, that it can actually through downstream measures change how our immune system functions, and ultimately change how our body heals.

And so I know this sounds very theoretical and nice, but we can get into some of the practical things and how that evolved into what is today a neuroplasticity or brain retraining program, an actual step by step process that people can do. But going through that experience and starting to piece these pieces together, for me resulted in over time, a full recovery, and a just mind blowing curiosity and interest in what the human body and human being is really capable of. 

Mimi MacLean:

So you would say at this point looking back, this brain retraining was a pivotal part of your healing.

Ben Ahrens:

Yes. And I kind of backed into it through the experience of what it feels like, where I actually gave a TED Talk some years ago where I spoke about ... The title of that talk is One Deep Breath because there was certain points where I felt so stuck and so agitated and so panicked and so stricken with pain and symptoms that all I could do it seemed like was to take one deep breath. And the interesting thing is that when I really did that mindfully, I started to feel a little bit better afterwards. It was like there was a tiny little space of reprieve and of almost peace I would call it that I could only seem to find after this conscious deep breath. And so I started practicing it more and more, and little by little, I started feeling a little bit better. Some of the brain fog lifted. By no means was it a cure all to take one deep breath, but it gave me a little bit of wiggle room whereby I could learn more and I could learn how to expand that space.

And in retrospect, I learned that by doing things like that, by inserting this space between stimulus and response, or a symptom and our agitation response to it, that we're actually calming the stress response, which actually can bring down inflammation in the body. So what seems very simple in a lot of ways can actually have profound impacts on our physiology. 

Mimi MacLean:

That's really interesting. So when you were going through this, how long ago was this?

Ben Ahrens:

This was nine or 10 years ago now.

Mimi MacLean:

Okay. And at that point, I think I'm not sure where it was at that point, but there's definitely a couple things now that you can hear people kind of talking about this. Were you kind of the pioneer? Were there other programs out there? Or were you self teaching yourself this? Or did you sign up for another program and then just made it better? I guess I'm thinking to myself, okay, you're lying in bed. You don't feel well. You're taking some breaths. But where did you go from there? Where did you say, "Okay"? Did you take another program? Or did you just kind of and fine tune one? Or I guess what was your next steps to building re-origin?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah. For me, the point of entry was I was seeing a neurologist at NYU Langone Medical, and he actually had me go to a neurocognitive rehab doing some neurocognitive rehab sessions there to start to tune down that stress response, so that was my introduction to neuroplasticity, doing some kinds of neurofeedback. And I became very interested in that. That put me on the path of reading Norman Doidge, and then listening to some podcasts on neuroplasticity, which led me to realizing that there was ... I think there was the Gupta Program at that point in time, which I went through, and just continued to learn about all of these different ways of how we could essentially self regulate. And I think now there's tons of books and programs and courses out there, and I think there could be 100, and we could use thousands more because there's no shortage of people that could benefit from these various approaches of learning how to ultimately self regulate.

Mimi MacLean:

Now would you say because ketamine has become a little bit more prevalent on the scene, is that doing the same thing, what ketamine does as far as resetting your limbic system in your program? Do you know how that differs?

Ben Ahrens:

Well, I'm actually not sure familiar with ketamine. I'm certainly not an expert in it, so I wouldn't have too much to say there. I will say that from speaking with one of our board members about these various techniques, one of the things that seems to differentiate a neuroplasticity program like this from what would be a sort of ketamine or external invention type of therapy is the self directed nature of it. So one example I often share with people, and this is not to say anything either way about ketamine therapy, I again know very little about it, but I can speak to how I kind of think about these things, and having gone through many, many, many types of treatments, many that are self driven versus many that are kind of bestowed upon me from the outside. 

When you do something that requires your own almost contraction of certain mental muscles, there seems to be a long-term benefit to that act in and of itself. So I don't know if you remember from the '80s and '90s, and what became really popular in exercise were these things that people would strap on, and they would pulse your muscles for you. Those ab belts, they would do the contractions for you. And it could certainly contract your muscle if that's the goal, but it actually does very little to establish the neurological connection between your brain and muscles. That would make it easier for you to do the contractions. So there could be a time and a place for that, like in rehab. But there just seems to be boundless benefits to doing it through these internal means.

Mimi MacLean:

Right, right. So one thing I have read up, and when I talked to a neurologist, she was saying, "Even if your Lyme or your condition has improved or is gone, sometimes your body and your nervous system still thinks it has it." And so it's almost in this fight or flight kind of pattern, so it's like you're still revved up, even though your Lyme is gone. So you might be like, "Wait. My Lyme tests show negative, but I'm still feeling terrible," and that's kind of where your program comes in, where you're retraining.

Ben Ahrens:

Exactly. So that actually goes to the origin of a lot of this research, back to I think it was 1971. There was this really seminal paper published called Conditioned Immunosuppression. And rats were given injections of sugar water combined with a virus several times during this acquisition phase. And they realized that the brain essentially learns to create certain associations of events, or triggers, or even symptoms with certain subconscious bodily responses because what happened next was very interesting. They gave the rats just the sugar water injections, and they noticed that they had the exact same immune response as if they were giving them the infection, even though it was just a benign substance. 

And similarly, there does seem to be this learning component. There was even a paper written or an article published in Scientific American just few months back called The Brain has Special Memory for Past Infections. And they were talking about long COVID in this case, and how you're absolutely right, if you've been sick for a long period of time, the brain can essentially learn to overprotect, and specifically these parts of the brain like the limbic system, or even more specific structures like the amygdala. But these areas of the brain that are essentially responsible for keeping us safe and keeping us alive, they can almost do their job too well. They can kind of learn that they have to constantly be on the lookout, and they can kind of overdrive that stress response. And that's something that is one seeming to be very plausible and more and more accepted explanation for why symptoms linger after say an initial infection or trigger might pass.

Mimi MacLean:

And so tell us a little bit about your program. What does it entail? I know it's self directed. Right? But you also have a community piece to it. So do you mind just kind of diving into that?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah, sure. So when people first join re-origin, they get entered into a community. They can see it functions very much like social media. It's available in a mobile app. It's very intuitive and easy to use. Unlike social media, it's very curated based on neuroscience principles and based on things like the science of small wins and positive psychology. So it's meant to show you things that are going to encourage you, make you believe in your ability to get better because we all know for anyone that's been sick with an illness or feeling stuck for any period of time, I feel like the very first step to recovery is believing that it's possible for you. And I think it's so easy through things like learned helplessness and just that reinforcement of having tried, quote, unquote, everything, and not being able to make headway, it makes sense that it gets conditioned into the brain neurologically that we feel like we can't move forward.

And so everything about the re-origin community and the video program is aimed at supporting you through neuroscience to help you move forward. And then there's a video component. It's about seven hours of videos broken down into bite sized five minute videos that also are designed to give you that science of small wins each time you finish one. And these videos really teach you the basic science and understanding about what's happening in your brain and body when you experience these lingering symptoms. We notice that a lot of members tend to feel better even just having watched that first section of the program, which is prior to doing the actual exercises. And I believe that's because sometimes just understanding that there's a reason why you feel the way you do can alleviate some of that tension and the nervous system can start to calm down. And then we walk people through a series of science based exercises that are all really aimed at interrupting and replacing these old pathways and conditioned responses, like I mentioned in that paper, into ones that are more advantageous to overall health and healing to occur. 

Mimi MacLean:

That's great. And then once you finish those videos, is there ongoing, or is it you're kind of done, and then you take the ... Do you do those every day, the different breathing exercises or the exercises that you suggest?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah. So typically, people will go through the program in anywhere from two weeks to six weeks, depending on their schedule and level of comfort. Then they'll get to practicing the exercises once they get about halfway through the program. It's about 10 minutes of brain retraining, actual brain retraining exercises that we recommend to do up to three times a day, and doing that incrementally. So people might start with just doing maybe five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening, and then expanding that to three 10 minute sessions throughout the day. And well, I know everyone always asks. We do these info calls where anyone who's interested can pop on for a free info call, and it's not a sales call or anything. It's actually just Q and A with myself, and I walk through what the program looks like, how it works.

One of the questions that always inevitably comes up is: When will I be better? How long is this going to take me? And of course, there's a bit of nuance to the answer of that question that has to do with your unique condition and your history, how long you've been sick and all the rest. But typically, what we see in terms of people's journey is this 90 day kind of progression over three phases, where the first phase is, we call this isolating, so you're kind of learning these individual exercises and techniques and practicing them solo. And a lot of times, people feel better in the very beginning because even doing this like I notice taking a single deep breath or taking 10 deep breaths are going to have a positive impact on the nervous system. But even more so than changing your nervous system in real time, what I'm more interested in is doing it in a way that's enduring, that's conditioned so that you no longer eventually need to think about this stuff. It becomes your new default state.

And the exercises, by the way, they involve things like breathing patterns, changing your posture, but they're a little bit more involved than that. And we can get into some of the important modalities that they draw on. But that second phase, if the first one is isolate, so you're kind of practicing these individual techniques, then we want to integrate them. Now how do you integrate them into your everyday life? So this program is no longer something that you simply need to add onto your already busy schedule. Instead, it's something that you have these tools in your toolkit now. You've practiced them I the first 30 days. Now in the next 30 days, you can deploy them as needed. And then we get the place we want to get to in any sort of phase of development is the final phase. We've done isolate, integrate. The last one is improvisation.

So this is where we start to get to that point and we see a lot of our members get to this point where they no longer need to really think about these exercises. It's just sort of they become aware that their conditioned responses are changing. They're not holding the same tension patterns. They feel relaxed in situations where they might've previously felt stressed. And they're able to kind of expand that gap or that space between the stimulation and the response. 

Mimi MacLean:

That's good. I think we all need that because the more you get upset, the more you get yourself riled up, it makes you feel worse. You know? What have we not covered that you think we're missing? Is there anything else that you would like to discuss or dive into?

Ben Ahrens:

One final part of re-origin that I think is really helpful for a lot of people is the group coaching that we offer, and the community itself, which is I think so much of what we believe we can do is based on our kind of immediate surroundings and experience. And I know what it's like from being someone with a chronic condition who was bed down for many years and feeling really stuck and reaching out and everything. And I know what it's like to go down those rabbit holes of research and Googling and all these kinds of things as if your life depends on it because it really does, or it feels like it does. 

And there's a point at which that's about beneficial. It can lead you to a program like this. It led me to this research and creating this, which helped me out. But there's also a point at which it can kind of curl back on ourselves, and we find ourselves in this hall of mirrors where our anxiety around the condition can be reinforced by a lot of negative information and fear based information that happens to be on the inter webs. So for that reason, we've really tried to, and I think done a great job, to construct the re-origin in a way where the moment someone sets foot virtually in this community, they kind of get that sense of hope. They're seeing other people take steps, make progress, and it really starts to help break free from that learned helplessness, that invisible chain, that holds us back and helps us take the steps, which at the end of the day, are not complicated. They're fairly simple, but if done consistently, can really lead us to a new level of health and wellbeing.

Mimi MacLean:

That's great. Now where would you say you are? Do you think you're 100% back? Where are you in your journey of healing? Are you back and better?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah, I always like to say I'm 150%. 

Mimi MacLean:

You are, good for you.

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I've been 100% for a long time, and always looking forward to new challenges and new opportunities to practice these techniques. And I will say it did not happen overnight. It happened over a series of months and even years to gradually recondition myself first out of that constant fight or flight response and back to a place where I could come back to part-time work, and then back to an office setting, and then back to full-time work, and it took time. I think the biggest shift that occurred is feeling the sense of momentum, feeling the progress. And when I started to realize that I was moving in the right direction, all of those questions about how long is this going to take me and when am I going to be better again, those questions actually fell away. And I know it might sound weird to not think about those, but they almost become unimportant when you find yourself and feel yourself taking steps that are working.

And lastly, I'll just say it's not a linear process and it certainly wasn't for me. I had many times where I was making good progress and then something knocked me back. And I again thought to myself, "Uh oh. Am I going to be with this again? Or is it come back and everything?" And there was a lot of ups and downs, but generally, the trend was up. And in retrospect, it was the best experience of my life because it gave me, of course, not only the ability to create a program like this, but really the ability to learn how to self regulate in so many different types of situations that I now actually look forward to challenging experiences because it's just more opportunities to practice and to grow.

Mimi MacLean:

That's great. Looking back on your life when you were saying in a room, 10 people are exposed, three get it, or 2% who get Lyme, what would you say looking back on your life was a reason what caused you to be one of the 2%? Is it stress, or the way you handled stress, or was it what you were eating? Could you kind of put your finger on, okay, that probably was one of the reasons why I was more susceptible?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah. I couldn't put one finger on it. I could probably if I could use all five fingers or maybe 10 fingers, I could put all those fingers on the various different precipitating factors, but certainly stress played a role, adverse childhood experiences. There's been a lot of research, and this whole field of trauma psychology is becoming extremely popular now, which is good because it's shining this spotlight on a lot of different things that can serve to increase what's called the allostatic stress load, or the total accumulated load that the nervous system bears over a lifetime. And some of these in biological medicine terms, they really make no differentiation between psychological stress from past trauma and physical stress from toxins, or foods, or things in the environment that might be causing the autonomic nervous system to shut down.

But in my case, yeah, there was a lot of different things. I'll just list maybe the top three. [inaudible 00:24:38] with that. I would say there was some unresolved childhood traumas. There was acute stress. I was operating a water sports camp here on Eastern Long Island that was extremely stressful, a lot of responsibility of 200 campers' lives and those kind of things, so there was acute stress of high physical activity, psychological stress, and some times of not sleeping. And then there was the acute pathogen, the Lyme infection. And for me, you could argue there might've been many, many other things going on, but I would say those are the main three things that came together to create this perfect storm scenario. 

Mimi MacLean:

Thank you so much. This has been amazing and I really appreciate it. So for anybody who would like to check it out, it's re-origin.com. Is that right?

Ben Ahrens:

That's right.

Mimi MacLean:

Yeah. You also have an Instagram page as well. Right?

Ben Ahrens:

Yeah. The Instagram is actually re-origin spelled out in one word, re-origin_official.

Mimi MacLean:

Perfect. Thank you so much, Ben. I really appreciate it.

Ben Ahrens:

Thank you, Mimi.

Mimi MacLean:

Each week, I will bring you different voices from the wellness community, so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on, and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week if you want to learn how I detox and you want to check out my Detox for Lyme Checklist, go to lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme 360 Warriors on Facebook, and let's heal together. Thank you.