Show Notes: To Be and Do Podcast

Host: Phillip Amerson

Guest: Dr. Steven Curtis

Welcome to another thought-provoking episode of the To Be and Do podcast with Philip Amerson! In this conversation, Phil welcomes Dr. Steven Curtis, a neuroscience-trained clinical psychologist and author with over three decades of experience in performance psychology. The discussion centers on Dr. Curtis’s forthcoming book, Rebalancing After Stress, Trauma and Addiction, and dives deep into the ways stress, trauma, and addiction impact our brains, our relationships, and the social fabric around us.

Here are three key takeaways from the episode:

1. The Pervasive Impact of Chronic Stress Post-COVID

Dr. Curtis highlights how the COVID pandemic fundamentally shifted our baseline for anxiety and stress, with lingering effects that continue to shape daily life. He shares that 75% of people now feel physically or mentally harmed by stress—a dramatic increase exacerbated by public health crises and societal change. The episode underscores how chronic stress damages our ability to connect with others, leading individuals to become more self-focused and less empathetic, which in turn harms community relationships and wider social order.

2. Understanding Brain Imbalances and Performance Impairment

Dr. Curtis explains the neuroscience behind chronic stress, trauma, and addiction with the metaphor of a teeter-totter: when the emotional region of the brain (driven by fear) grows stronger, it inhibits our rational or prefrontal skills. Over time, this leads to measurable cognitive impairment, including memory issues and decreased intellectual functioning. Dr. Curtis notes that many people, especially seniors, fear dementia, but frequently the real issue stems from anxiety and stress rather than neurodegenerative disease. He debunks common misconceptions and emphasizes hope—most memory problems can be addressed and do not signal inevitable decline.

3. Modern Challenges: Screen Addiction and Youth Mental Health

The conversation raises alarm over the rise of screen and cell phone addiction, especially among young people. Since smartphones became commonplace, rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed, with Dr. Curtis referencing university statistics that show nearly half of incoming freshmen now struggle with diagnosable mental health issues. This screen-driven stress isn’t just an individual problem but a “public health tsunami” with global implications affecting decision-making, relationships, and personal well-being.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where Dr. Curtis will share practical strategies for rebalancing our brains and lives, fostering healthier self-motivation, and rebuilding community resilience in the face of modern stressors.

Thank you for joining us on To Be and Do!

Greetings everyone. This is Phil Amersonagain with the To Be and Do podcast where we think about the importance of interdependence and not just independence, where we think about relating to others and how our society can be improved for individual persons and for the whole social order. Today I am thrilled to have Dr. Steven Curtis with us. Steve is a neuroscience trained clinical psychologist with what Steve, more than three decades of experience?

I guess so.

Depending. How long is that in dog years?

Well, I think it was an affliction that came over me in high school and I've been stuck with it since. Actually, I'm only 19, Phil. I've just had a really hard life.

Well, for those, for those of us of us or those of you listening who wouldn't know this, Steve and I occasionally bend the elbow together at a nearby establishment, although we've cleaned up our alcohol intake quite a bit. And I get, I have the privilege of hearing Steve as he develops research in neuroscience and he has a book that's coming out and that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk with him today. The book is entitled Rebalancing After Stress, Trauma and Addiction. And Steve has worked a lot in performance psychology, especially around athletics and around musicians and business leaders. So, Steve, tell us a little bit about the book. When's it coming out and where are you headed in this one of how many books have you written now?

I guess got about five books mostly. Well, all of them have been focused on performance psychology as a specialty within psychology, so different from others that you're aware of, like clinical or social. So this is performance focused on how best to help people perform at a higher level, regardless of what they're trying to do. And in most cases, it's a very similar equation. People are not managing the challenge of the performance that they're facing and they don't perform as well as they might. And of course we like everybody, we want to watch athletes who are performing at their best. But it is a rare thing, especially in college athletics, which is where I was focused high school, college. And I did work with some pros.

But in college, 90% of the time championships are won because one team does not perform as they might. And they, we call it choking. It's not fun to watch, but one team will choke and the other performs better. Maybe one team gets out choked, but it's, it's a rare thing for two teams to show up and really play well. And then on the music side, I taught at the School of Music here at Indiana University, and we Have a very good school of music and lots of great performers come from all over the world. And the challenge there is, it's maybe even tougher because all these folks have to be professionals to leave town. And so we get lots of waiters and waitresses in town who are excellent singers, but they can't win an audition business. Very, very competitive.

So I felt like the musicians were living with greater pressure to perform and create a career for themselves than most of the athletes who are just here to fulfill their scholarships.

Yeah, so many years ago we lived in Bloomington earlier and we had a plumber who was a musician but couldn't make it elsewhere. And I just loved if I could get him to sing while he worked. He was a great baritone at a.

Restaurant for a while where all the waiters and waitresses were singers and they would burst into song as part of their duties. And it was a fun thing. And some would stand up on a table and give us an aria.

Terrific. Well, I think I know the answer, but our listeners probably don't. Why do you think stress is such a critical issue right now?

Well, all of us listening to this podcast, of course, I don't mean to make light of this at all, have made it through the COVID The COVID was major heads up that we're not safe. And the message was very clear. And people learned to live with a much higher level of anxiety about just being in public. And we all became very good at living with fear. That fear has sustained since COVID and Now we have 75% of people saying that they're being damaged physically and or mentally by their stress. And that's of grave consequence for performance. Just as human beings getting up every day and doing what we need to do. And with your focus on in this podcast on connecting with others, when we're afraid, we don't do that well.

We tend to hide and we are not looking and we really can't feel much empathy for someone else. If you're afraid, the first order of business is to take care of yourself. And we do that. Well, most of the time we're very focused on ourselves and maybe our families, of course, but it does sometimes this doesn't extend much beyond that.

Well, I know this is a time when fear is a currency that's used by politicians and others. I think your book is trying to document how there's a growing sense, a growing problem of stress, growing problem of trauma and addiction that are the results. Yes.

The book is called Rebalancing and the premise basically is that with chronic stress, trauma or addiction and. Or addiction, we end up with brains that are out of balance in predictable ways and very consequential ways for our capacity to live in the world. We are impaired. And I think a lot of times most of the patients I work with just don't understand how impaired they are because it's been a very overused analogy metaphor of the boiling frog. We've grown into high levels of stress, and we're stroking along day to day thinking we're doing fine. And in fact, we're not very fine and we're not functioning well. If we measure, by any measure, easy measures, we're just not performing at a high level. We're not taking care of anything that's difficult.

We don't have the. I should give a little background here. The neuroscience of this is telling that when there's chronic stress, the imbalance that happens is in the order of. You think of the brain as a teeter totter with rational skills in the prefrontal region and then emotional in the more further back regions in the brain. That's a teeter totter with mutual inhibition. So if emotions can emotions increase based on fear? We have an increase in the size and the strength of the emotion brain, including the amygdala caudate, the lower parts of the brain, including then the adrenal glands, which receive messages from the emotion brain to release stress hormone. And those are released, the adrenals are a big part of this problem because they release the stress hormones into the body. Cortisol, epinephrine are released, and then we feel the fear throughout our bodies.

The muscles tighten up, and we have lots and lots of consequence from that or physical health. So we tend to have high blood pressure and heart disease eventually and some lung problems and just lots and lots of body consequence to living with a body that's ready to run or fight all the time.

Yeah, well, one of the reasons.

I was just going to say. And the other side of the teeter totter is the rational brain, and it's inhibited by a strong emotion brain. So eventually it starts to atrophy. And in ptsd, you see fewer dendrites and synapses in the prefrontal region, meaning these folks are not capable intellectually as they might have been. That can be measured both at the neurological level and then at the functional level, where their intelligence suffers. And I worked with a number of Navy SEALs in Southern California who had been in combat four or five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, and when they come back, they're the best and brightest going over there. They come back after four or five tours and they're making terrible decisions to a man or woman. They're drinking too much.

You ask them what they do for fun, and they're riding motorcycles in the rain at 140 miles an hour at night. Looking for thrills, Matt. To balance out with some endorphin release. The painkiller gets released, and it helps balance off their very high levels of really uncomfortable anxiety.

Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you. One of the reasons I wanted to speak with you is you're one of. I think you're a rare person who has both a substantial and significant research science experience and in brain science, neurological disorders, but you're also a clinical practitioner and you're continuing to do that. And I'm intrigued at the way you link those two worlds and allow the science, I suspect. Well, actually, I know that your views about research and the research that's needed and the future ways of intervention, those are informed by what you experience as you work as a clinician.

Right. The brain science can be pretty clear that things change, and you can measure those things. But how they are expressed, how these damaged brains expressed are expressed, is very individual. I mean, there are trends, certainly, but each person can show the consequences of an impaired and unbalanced brain in different ways. So we have just mostly very, very anxious folks who have difficulty. And I work a lot with neuropsychological evaluations now with people with brain damage and with dementia. And the consequences of chronic stress and fear are substantial in the direction of memory, cognitive capacity, intelligence, overall general capacity to solve problems and think clearly, that prefrontal atrophication of the prefrontal region really gets in the way. And of course, these folks don't realize that they might be lost 20, 30 IQ points just from the stress they're living with.

And many times they come thinking, gee, I've got a. Got a dementia problem here. And about 90% of the time it's not dementia. It's just they've got a memory impairment, just like the soprano at the School of Music has anxiety when they get up to sing and they can't remember the words. The capacity to remember is very much a function of the emotional condition of the person. If they have depression and I'm sorry, anxiety and depression, they're very likely to not be able to think in a straight line and remember things easily.

So. So one of the things that you and I have discussed recently is the fact that a Growing number of seniors are fearing that they're entering early stages of dementia or maybe they're full blown. I know you run across that talk a bit about what you've seen and maybe how, how people can think more clearly about this.

Well, I think I, I think I had a good memory at one point, but I'm not sure.

I remember when you did.

Oh, thank you. Tell me about that. The, the, the dementia fear is substantial. Many of the people we see have had family members that they've cared for, they've been aware of, who gone through the sequence of dementia, the terrible sequence that we, most of us have been aware of. So they come into the evaluation with lots of fear. I mean, it's just in physics you can't measure particles because you, while you're measuring or changing them. And when I try to measure memory with folks who are afraid they have a memory problem, it's a difficult situation and I have to take that into account that the person as soon as I start the memory testing gets really anxious and as soon as they start to miss one item or another on the testing, they get more anxious. So I have to put a large asterisk next to the scoring and say this person is living with performance anxiety just as the musicians and athletes live with performance anxiety when they're required to perform.

These folks are impaired because of their anxiety as they go into the testing room. So then I am happy. In most cases their intellectual processes are good, which is a good sign overall that they're thinking clearly when they're not being tested for memory. It's like the memory testing brain makes it worse. So I have happy to tell them that most of the time I'm telling them they don't have dementia, they have a memory issue that can be addressed and there are some things they can do in their life to rebalance, get the prefrontal functioning better, learn how to calm themselves down and live with, with more, well, freedom from that fear. Most of them leave with a great sigh of relief saying, gee, I don't have dementia and with some direction for what they can do to make things better.

Well, we're going to talk about that in the next episode, but before we do, there's one other fascinating thing I'd like for you to speak to and that is your perception that the percentage of folks struggling with PTSD is a growing one in our society and maybe talk some about that disorder or that dilemma so that folks, when we get to the other episode will understand that is one of the issues you address.

Yeah, it's very, very common. And I think it's a matter of degree sometimes of ptsd, you have the formal diagnostic criteria that you have to use if you want to use that diagnosis. But the symptoms are an array that can happen, you know, just with some depression and some anxiety and tendency then to addiction. Those are all hallmarks of the PTSD syndrome. So short of formal diagnosis, I see many people coming in with chronic stress, which results in almost the same consequences as ptsd, which usually includes some trauma, by the way. But without trauma, you can have chronic stress for lots of reasons. The loss of a loved one, moving from your family home, loss of career, failure to adjust to being retired. Lots and lots of major changes in life can.

Can result in a brain that's very similar to a PTSD brain. And if you have some mild cognitive decline and then you have some trauma, the numbers are very, very pessimistic for moving toward dementia. So the brain with severe stress then can easily shift into Alzheimer's or dementia process. And we talk about it as a process, and the process, of course, even that, even when that is diagnosed, that can proceed at varying rates, I think a lot, depending on how people live and what stresses they continue to experience. So the dementia is a great fear in our culture, and rightly so. And the huge stress that we all live with, especially after Covid, I think really the numbers of people with memory problems and with dementia has gone up considerably. I know just chronic stress is much, much higher than it was. We had 2017.

We had 14% of the incoming freshmen at IU and in schools around the country, 14% with depression and anxiety. And in 2021 into the pandemic, we had 42% of the incoming freshmen, almost half living with depression and diagnosable anxiety symptoms. So it's a massive change, and it has not diminished much since then. I think the advent of the cell phones have only increased our basic anxiety. We're on call, basically, literally on call with our phones 24. 7. For other family members and the needs of people around us. That's another source of major stress in our culture.

Well, as you may know, I think. I think I've got these numbers right. I live near the university campus in Bloomington, and walking home from campus, I saw young people approaching me on. On the sidewalk. I think I counted. I started counting. I counted 46 students walking toward campus, and 31 of them were working on their telephone at the time.

Yeah. And walking into you or traffic.

Well, some of them. Some of them were doing both, yeah.

It is a massive, massive problem. And there you can date changes in the rates of depression and anxiety to this advent of the cell phone in, what, 2008, maybe 2007, it became a common requirement for teenagers. And since then we've had a very significant shift. I see it as a major public health problem here. That's really what we're discussing is it's not just an individual anomaly, it's a public health tsunami. And it's not just in our country, it's around the world. And the consequences of cell phone addiction, and I diagnose that frequently, or screen addiction, I think I told you a variety of different variations on that theme. I see them all the time.

And I was gonna remind you I shouldn't laugh about this, I guess, but it was difficult to keep a straight face when the man comes in and tells me he's addicted to listening to sermons.

Don't tell them about me.

Well, this man said he was listening to sermons all the time and. And I said, well, how many do you listen to? And he says, well, about 18. And I said, 18 in a week? And he says 18 in a day. 18 to 20 sermons a day. And he had a speaker system set up in his shower so when he was taking showers, he could listen to sermons and be washed in the blood, I guess. I don't know. But.

Well, with that, we're going to call an end of this episode and there is hope we will not be preaching a sermon in the next episode. What we will be doing is listening to Dr. Curtis share thoughts about rebalancing, how we can have more effective self motivation, self control and community motivation and community control so that these difficult situations of modern society can be better addressed. So this is Phil Amersonwith the Be and Do podcast, and we are glad that you were able to join us and look forward to hearing from Steve Curtis in the next podcast.