Barbell Shrugged - [Stress Resilience] Navigating Injury and Anxiety w/ Emily Hightower, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #735

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

As an Educator and Coach at SH/FT, Emily Hightower leverages her expertise in the neurophysiology of trauma and resilience to help clients master their stress response and improve their quality of life. By combining over 25 years of experience as a breathing expert, yoga teacher, river guide, and wilderness EMT, Emily empowers high performers to disrupt limits, align with nature, and heal their bodies and minds. Emily developed SH/FT’s Skill of Stress course and teaches the N=1 Exposure Experience and Mentorship program with Brian MacKenzie. Her experiential teaching approach enables clients to understand and direct their stress response to drive optimal performance under pressure while promoting long-term balance. Before joining SH/FT, Emily founded Intrinsic, where she helped combat veterans, athletes, and clients recovering from substance abuse resolve past traumas and gain clarity using a science-based approach and tools such as breath, exposure, somatic yoga, archery, and integrative nutrition. Earlier in her career, Emily’s practice was based in a neurology clinic, where she integrated her approach with cutting-edge neuroscience and research. Her clients include the United States Special Operations Command Adaptive Care Unit and other Veterans services in the US and Abroad. She also served as the Education Director for the Headwaters Institute, facilitating river education seminars on 28 watersheds in the US and Chile. Emily is a Master Yoga Teacher with 16,000+ hours of teaching experience specializing in Pranayama Breathing. She lives with her husband, Brian Hightower, and their son and loves to ski, run rivers, and bow hunt.   Emily Hightower on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged Family this week on Barbell Shrugged. Emily Hightower is coming back to the show. For those of you that are in the select awesome group, people hanging out with us inside Rapid Health Optimization, you know her as our stress resilience coach, kind of on the behavioral health side of things, and have probably had a super awesome conversation with her that helped a ton with recovery, downregulation,

just helping to get through lots of potentially stressful lifestyle factors. And we're always honored to have her in here. I feel like I always learn something about life with her. And Emily Hightower actually just got is currently healing from a nasty skiing accident that we walked through and kind of like the default patterns that we all go through, through injury. And then we take a deep dive into anxiety, which is a very eye-opening thing for me. I always enjoy getting into the behavioral health side of things because I feel like it, it really provides like a framework to, to so many of the issues that people deal with. And some of those like limiting beliefs that people have in themselves when it comes to performance. So it's always a pleasure to have her on.

Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where you can access a free 90-minute video breaking down lab, lifestyle, and performance analysis from Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Andrew Varner, Doug Larson, Emily Hightower. Welcome back.

Thank you. This is podcast number two. It is. I'm very honored. A lot has changed since, especially in your, you have an exciting story to tell us. You have recently come across a very unfortunate injury, and I would love to dig into how all of us and the behaviors we take on

that are probably universal amongst all humans, that we just don't even know that we go through the process when we have some sort of traumatic experience, specifically kind of on the physical side with injuries. But tell the story. I want to hear it. Sure. Okay, so there I was. Yeah, right. Once upon a time.

Once upon a time on my 50th birthday with a bunch of my favorite rad women friends who shred. Post charcuterie board had just enjoyed that's the problem lunch that's the problem charcuterie board got carried away we really did seven pounds of cheese and meat in my body in my body yeah it probably threw off my balance um i think chartreuse is usually paired with wine was alcohol at play here i will say it. Um, although that would have explained the fall bit better, but this was just, uh, one of those freak moments skiing Highlands bowl. If anybody knows of that area, it is a very special place. You have to hike, uh, out it's inbounds it's

controlled for avalanches and everything, but it's, there's no lift service to it. So we hiked in the sunshine, got to a little cornice and decided to drop in. A few turns later, I was just falling and caught an edge. Body rolled forward and the ski stuck and didn't release. So it's a classic ski injury. I'm, you know, 50 years and it's never happened to me. So like I shared with you guys it was just my turn that was literally the first thought I had I heard two pops one in the ankle one in the knee and my very first thought was like oh you really can hear the path that's loud now I know what that was wait so the ski stuck in the snow and your body kept rotating and your knee and your ankle took the bulk of the trauma here?

Took the force. When I came out of the roll, my ski was still attached and had to get out of the binding knowing I'm pretty sure my ankle was broken and it turns out it was. For me, this was a moment where I used to be in emergency medicine. That's how I started my career as a wilderness EMT. I've worked with patrol up there. I love those guys. And I knew what they were in for. So my other first thought was like, oh, I'm so sorry, you guys. Like, this is a really long extraction.

So my girls surrounded me and checked in and I knew right then and there that I was going to have to apply. You know, this is kind of what you train for is these uncertain moments. So it was kind of an awesome experience in a weird way to get tested. You know, at Rapid, I'm going to oversimplify your role here and say, like, you're one of our breathwork specialists, and you can totally clarify how not. Stress resilience. That's what I label you as. I like that.

That's totally right. You're our behavioral health specialist. You help with stress protocols and many other things here at Rapid. When you're in a very stressed situation, you just broke your ankle ankle and you can comment about the other specifics on your knee and what have you but you're laying in the snow now and you're not going anywhere anytime soon and you're in pain and you're not just like on a ski lift that sounds like there's a lot of traffic on even like you gotta hike in so it's not like there's a hundred people around you seeing that you're sitting there um you know it's gonna be many hours until people around you seeing that you're sitting there.

You know, it's gonna be many hours until you get out of there. It can be many hours until you have any type of like pain relief or, you know, medications or injections or whatever to help you feel better in that situation. How are you using breathwork type practices to keep yourself calm and focused, not panic, especially when now you're just laying in the snow, you're probably getting cold and there's other additional stressors building. Yes. All of those things, right? There's an environmental stress, there's physical pain, there's social stress. I don't want to put, you know, ruin everyone's day. And one thing I noticed in my response that was really helpful was, and I actually thought about

this in the moment, like if I were given a breath protocol right now, it might have screwed me up. It was really helpful that I had the breath principles. And like just to work skillfully in the moment with what it feels like to empty your lungs and really pause and just get still and get present. And then relax and receive a nice in yoga, the Ujjayi ocean breath. That's what I leaned into right away. It was just this, you know, Darth Vader sounding, um, that kind of breathing always helps to bring you into present reality and stop the monkey mind from thinking, how long am I going to sit here? I've ruined everyone's day, like what's really wrong with my body and just go,

I can handle this moment. There's this is just a moment. And if I'm really in my breath and in my body, it's not that bad. So that was really helpful. And then once the, you know, patrol has to hike to the peak to get the toboggan. So you're waiting for a while. And then that is a long time. It's a little while we had. I don't even know how long time kind of dilates and changes. But my patrollers, Andy and Ashley at Highlands, man, they were awesome. And another guy, Beer Man, is how we'll call him because my

friends all know patrol so they're like can we request beer man they showed up and that's when it got real for me was being strapped into the litter I've never experienced that I've seen hauled off all the time and thought oh that sucks but what happens is the meat wagon you know it's they try to make it a nice spa experience with the wool blankies and the backpack bolsters essentially you're getting drug out upside down uh your straps in and i kept thinking about other people actually like what would this be like if I weren't an avid skier, and I didn't have the orientation of this is temporary, I know what's happening, because you're real surrender. So there's claustrophobia, my goggles were getting pushed down over my nose.

So that nasal breath tool was getting challenged. Visually, I could only see like a little sliver through the tarp. And then you're hitting bumps the whole way down. So I guess I'll just share that what helped me the most that was there for me was to tie into the experience fully to let go of why did this happen? What's next all that and just get really present with, wow, the sky is blue. Look, there's a plane overhead. Wow, those trees, I never look at trees in the bowl like this from underneath. There they go. Like I wonder what part of the bowl I'm in. And again, the whole way down breathing. As you guys know, I do a lot of cold plunging. So I was able to use some of those skills to contract on the exhale and build some

heat, relax on the inhale to let it spread. But I was still shivering like a saw. It was interesting. Did you find that you were able to kind of disconnect from the pain or kind of like view the pain of the injury in a more objective manner? The pain is over there and I definitely am witnessing it and feeling it, but I don't have to have a reaction to it, which would then immediately lead into essentially hyperventilating yourself and making things significantly worse. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, absolutely. And I've coached so many people with chronic pain to use the techniques that were available to me when you just nailed it. There was a, I would say compartmentalization and acceptance, not dissociation, but really actually engaging

with it to say, wow, my knee is hot. There's a hot spot there. Oh, I can, I feel sharpness in the ankle. And there's an acknowledgement and a breathability to that. Like this is what's happening. And again, I knew that, you know, I had a good perspective, like, oh, this is next I'll go to the ER and I'll get images. And I kind of just knew that nothing was, you know, permanently or terribly wrong. How did your friends handle it? Were they calm around you? I feel like I've been in situations where there's an injury or something happens and all of a sudden, like everybody around freaks out.

And then the person that's actually injured is like, can everybody chill out and just actually help me? Like, this isn't about you and your story right now.. Like we just focus on the person that really needs the help. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be

doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros, we're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com.

You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. We just focus on the person that really needs the help. Yeah, not these girls. They were awesome. They're pros.

One of them is an ER physician assistant. They've been on patrol themselves. They're outdoors women. So, I mean, the jokes were instantly flying and the shit giving about, you know, what, how high maintenance I was. And that for me is, it helps me respond really well. Yeah. The last time I had a real injury, Doug went to the bar right after. Just left me at the hospital by myself.

Put him in an Uber. You'll be fine. Yes. What's a shoulder? You don't even need it that much. Right. Those are good friends. I'm going to go have a drink and wait for you to get out. We had some mountain biking to do.

Me and Travis. It was a one-day deal. Let's get that. We had flights the next day. When you see everybody, their true colors come out and how they handle, uh, stress very quickly and how much stress they've actually been exposed to. Yeah. I mean, my buddy, Sarah came with me to the ER.

My husband met us at the base and, uh, we were having fun in the ER, you know, again, this isn't a life threatening injury. But we had to kind of reel it in because she's like, please be distal fib. Please be distal fib. It's like a cold. You're fine. Let's just pray for a distal fib fracture. You know, and in the other rooms, I was keenly aware that there were people suffering a lot more than I was. So yeah, I mean, I mean, the whole process is, is humbling. Now.'s been, this is my fourth week. I'm conservative when I'm injured. I can learn a lot from other people that, you know, like I will baby an injury too much.

So I'm leaning in, doing a lot of rehab, exploring. It's yoga every day it's like how can i line up my body with this new edge so that the patterns of movement that i'm doing now make me stronger instead of lay down patterns of compensation that are going to cause problems yeah yeah so humbling. Regarding the, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Regarding the mindfulness slash breathwork practices that you were using on that day when you were physically in pain, getting hauled off the mountain, in what ways are those techniques or tactics similar

and or different to say, if you were stressed because that had happened to someone who you were close with, you're not physically hurt. They're hurt. Now you're worried, You're stressed. You have anxiety over something that isn't physically affecting you, but still there's like the mental struggle. Are the kind of the breathwork practices and or the mindfulness yoga meditation type practices the same or different? How does that work? That's an interesting question. So you're saying if I have mental

stress, basically, I'm concerned about something outside of myself that I can't control. I will say that when it's in your own body, there is that power that you can lean into into your physical body, even if it's injured, we can accept anything, I think, if we're present. And I mean, that's how human beings are, we are profoundly resilient creatures and our suffering usually comes when we are not capable of accepting the present moment. And that defines mental stress. We are worried about the future. We're worried about something out of our control.

So in the same way, if we can accept, Hey, this isn't my business. I can't control this. What can I control? I feel like that's where breath can, if we practice it when we don't need it, the breath becomes this tool that kind of bookmarks a place in you of center that you can rely on when things are out of control. It took me a long time to figure out how to presence myself. For a long time, I really felt like I just didn't get it. And there's, of course, there's levels of getting it, so to speak. And I'm at a certain level now, far beyond where I used to be, but I'm sure there's many more levels to go here. But do you have a technique, tactic, or method for teaching someone how to presence themselves?

So, yeah. Well, let me ask you, what works for you? What did you find? She did that. Helped you. I know. Just flipped it right around. Welcome to Barbell Shrug hosted by.

That's right. Part of the reason I asked is because I do think it's a difficult thing to teach because you're teaching this how to have an inner experience. So you can kind of explain it to somebody, and then when they say they get it, you have to just kind of believe that they get it. It's like it's hard to verify that you taught it and that they learned it, right? So that's why I was kicking that question to you. For me, if I'm, say I'm ruminating on a thought and I'm just, I keep cycling back to the same, you know, if you look at, if you study like cognitive behavioral therapy, they call it automatic, they call it automatic negative thoughts, right? If I have this automatic negative thought, something I'm thinking about, I consider myself

to be truly present when I can actively forget about what I was thinking about by, um, by, you know, you know, feeling the desk in front of me, feeling my weight on the chair, um, where I'm, where I'm sitting, um, you know, listening to the sounds around me. I'm trying to like, just at the deepest level possible, um, be experiencing the five senses that I have. Right? Yes. That was awesome. So I wanted to ask you what you discovered, because it is so universal, that one term for what you just described is just called orienting, orienting your senses to the present moment. The physical body grounding, literally accepting and connecting your brain to the fact that anything touching a surface is doing so because of gravity.

There is a physical presencing that occurs in your body when you're aware of gravity and orienting through sound, picking up on the far middle, near distant sounds, and then the breath inside your own body is another form of orienting that helps you get present. And this is ultimately why it's so fun

to work with athletes, because we do have a metric in athleticism, you know, whether it's archery or tennis or golf or CrossFit, if you're not present in your body, you instantly get a negative result, you know, whether that's an injury or compensation pattern, or you get nerves that take you out of the game, because you're attached to outcome, those same skills and athletes, you get a way to train them and practice them. You know, so especially when there's low pressure, resistance training or repeating a skill, those can be translated to presencing yourself when it's mental emotional strain in your daily life in relationships and family dynamics at work. Um, I think that there's a, there's an

edge that athletes can, can kind of gain if you think about during your training, Oh, this applies to my daily stress. Yeah. To be honest with you, I used to think that, um, like presence in yourself and kind of meditation and these types of things were um i don't know what the right way to put it is but kind of like um kind of too like hocus pocusy for me when i when i when i when i was younger um i'm a big fan of steven kotler's book stealing fire yeah that book you know says many things but essentially it's about using extreme physical activities to kind of automatically presence yourself right if you're if you're in an mma fight then you're kind of automatically going to be in the moment you're

not going to really be thinking about something yeah you kind of have to be there and if you're all of a sudden not there and you get punched in the face all of a sudden you'll be back there you're gonna be back in the moment very very quickly um whether that's that's cold plunging which is a you know a nice safe way to to physically stress yourself to a very high degree you're in in the moment you're not thinking about your bills and the and the argument that you got in with this with this person in your own head from two weeks ago or whatever like you're going to automatically presence yourself um i find that knowing that that's the case and using extreme physical tasks for their own unique benefits.

I like going to jujitsu because I like jujitsu. But also, I always notice that when I leave jujitsu and I'm driving home, all of a sudden, thoughts from my day will start to come back into my head. I'll be like, oh, yeah, I was worried about that thing all day long, and I forgot about it for two hours. And then now I'm driving home, and I'm starting to just think about things again. But I can't go to juj jitsu twice a day every day anymore i have things to do and so as i've gotten older um the the conscious active uh process of of presencing myself has become um more of a goal for me and i I've found over time that it's exceptionally useful

in just many, many settings. Basically, anytime I'm not feeling great, I have this tool to call upon that I can instantly bring myself back to the present moment. And of course, I'll cycle out of the present moment if I'm legitimately stressed about something, but then I can bring myself back. And then you cycle out and then you bring yourself back. It's this constant process of bringing myself back into the present moment if I'm legitimately stressed about something, but then I can bring myself back. And then you cycle out and then you bring yourself back. It's this constant process of bringing

myself back into the present moment. That's the practice right there, right? And that's back to the beginning of like train so that it's there for you when the unexpected happens or when the stress passes your current threshold of understanding what stress is. When something goes, you know, capital T trauma, something goes wrong. I'm not talking about a ski accident, you know, like something very unexpected goes wrong. We get tested in life, all of us do. And I think if we can be aware that that presencing tool

can come in many different ways. This is the leading edge of human performance in sport right now, in life, in all performances. What separates the good from the great is the great have that resilience, that ability to return, to let go of expectations, attachments, disappointments, and then to also be able to do that in a life that might turn out differently than you planned. Right? Which is essentially all lives. No one's life turns out exactly like that was going through. Yeah. I have a question on kind of like the stoic kind of like mindset that goes along with some of this stuff and being present and kind of like unaffected by these stressors that are around you. Maybe not unaffected,

but realizing that all of that stuff is really external to your existence and that you are able to control kind of like your own mindset, no matter how chaotic things may be, um, and, and whatever your next actions are or the mindset that you can keep around them, um, that can also be very off-putting to people. Sure. I agree. Yeah. Stoicism in general. And many times if... Like, like you don't care type of thing? What do you mean? Yeah. If my stress resilience due to a decade plus in business and athletics and whatnot, I'm more prepared for the unknown thing to happen because it happens all the time. Like, it's just like, if things only went well, I would think something was guaranteed to be wrong.

Like something is not going to, something's going to happen here. And if you are working with somebody or in a relationship or whatever it is and they don't really have those experiences or haven't built that um kind of like that resiliency and they do get overwhelmed or excited about specific things and you go great well let's just keep going and see what actually happens it'll be fine they're like it's not gonna be fine you're like it'll be fine. They're like, it's not going to be fine. You're like, it'll be fine. They're like, it's not going to be fine. You guys are not connecting. Yeah. Like how do you kind of manage that gap in a conversation or in a, just in life? Because I feel like it many times can happen where somebody else lets you down and you go, yeah, all right.

Well, they're probably dealing with something. I don't have time to think about them. So I'll just keep doing me. And if it really gets bad, then we'll deal with it then. But I feel like building that kind of that stress resilience muscle is a huge asset, but it also has an ability in a way to like alienate you from people that don't. I think I hear what you're saying. I mean, I think at the end of the day,

what's coming forward for me with that is that, you know, we can't compare pain and stress to each other. Everyone has their reasons to flip out. I know that I had a huge temper tantrum last night out of nowhere. It was like five year old temper tantrum. Yeah. I was on my crutches and I was trying to like pull the blinds down at night. And I couldn't reach because our entryway in this old Victorian house is cluttered with everyone's jackets and shoes. And I decided to use my crutches to pick up things like chopsticks and throw them out of the way. And my husband's like, babe, I can pull the blinds down for you. I'm like, I can do things by myself. And he and I know each other so well, we've been together 22 years or something like that. And he's an example of one of those occasionally stoic people. I don't get a

lot of sympathy in this house. He was a professional international rugby player. The dude has hurt himself a lot. He's tough. And I've come to really appreciate it because his steadiness when I had my temper tantrum didn't come with any judgment. Right. So I think that's where the off-putting stuff for me happens is if I'm the one having a temper tantrum, I flip my lid. If someone's stoic and not compassionate, then it's off-putting. But if they have their center and they're present and they know that it's not their business, right? My husband's really good at being like, oh, this is her issue and not entangling or trying to fix something we're always working on. Right.

But that's kind of my take on it. I know that in my work with people, I get the chance to observe people are, are so wonderfully available to this work and we'll share their edges, you know, what's causing them the most stress. And I have no judgment on that because everyone has stories. I totally frame that as if I was like the superior being in a certain way when somebody could very easily just look significantly more challenging in life than I've ever had to really confront. But I, I appreciate the part about the judgment that goes along with it.

Like you're allowed to not have to have a, a, an emotional reaction or freak out along with the person to kind of like exacerbate things without it coming with the judgment side of things. Passion doesn't mean that we drop in with someone where they are and share in the pain and commiserate. I think the compassion at its finest is when we really sit with somebody's experience without judgment and say, tell me more. I want to understand what you're experiencing. And then they get to be seen. And that's the first piece of self-regulation for any of us in our own bodies is not making meaning of our reactions. It could be from an acute stress. It could be from a chronic, unmanageably difficult life scenario. And the person on the outside, even the one experiencing it, can't always tell you or point to what's causing the dysregulation.

I'd love to dig into something we were talking about pre-show a little bit on the anxiety side. I've always really just framed anxiety as fear of the unknown of the future. And how do we get better at, because nobody actually knows what's going to happen, but how do we kind of improve that muscle to be okay with things that we, that we don't know going forward. You know, anxiety is fascinating because it's part of our human condition. Everybody gets to experience anxiety, right? To some degree. And in our Western culture, looking for, you know, diagnoses and disordered medicine, it becomes a label, like this person has anxiety. And that can be useful for a small percentage of people that really need interventions at a clinical level. But I like to kind of frame anxiety as it is a signal from your body that's telling you two things. It's telling you what you're afraid of and what you care about, period.

And, you know, I don't know if we can get away completely from worrying about the future because our brains are wired for negativity bias to keep us safe. We're designed. It's why we're such a successful species is because we're designed to think of all that could go wrong in order to then take action in the present to mitigate those potential problems, right? The difference is throughout hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, if you follow evolutionary science, then we were designed to move stress through the body. If you had to worry about something in the future,

you went and did something physical about it. You went and hunted or built a shelter. That's how you build the house so that the wolf can't get in. Yeah. Whether it's- You got a bigger dog. Yeah. And now, so much of what we worry about is not something we can move physically through our bodies. It's news around the world that could impact us, that we're told could impact us, that creates this fear response. So, again, it's showing you if you're anxious about something going on on the other side of the planet, it's showing you what you care about, what you're afraid of. breath with somatics, physical practices to get here now. Usually the things that we're worried about, if we can let go of what we can't control, then we can just say, it's not my business. What's my business right now is to take care of my body, my breath, what's in front of me today.

It's oversimplified because it's simple. It's just just hard we argue for the things we're afraid of it's it makes us justify the discomfort by listing all the things that are wrong and then we're just focusing on all those things and we start to pattern more anxiety in you know similar to my comment about the kotler's book and the extreme physical activities presencing you, do you feel like there's like this kind of teeter totter effect of like, the more you move your body, the calmer your mind is, and the less you move your body, the more active your mind is?

It's like, if you're just sitting around in your house, on the couch, you're gonna you're gonna be just spinning inside your head thinking of shit, and getting worried about the future. And if you're, if you're on an all day hike, then you won't do that in the same way, in my experience. 100%. Yeah, in the last three weeks, I've been very immobilized. The first two weeks, I was really immobilized.

I noticed an immediate effect on my mental health. I mean, the zones model that I use, it's like your window of tolerance or your zone of connection narrows. And I think movement is so essential because think of that when you're on a hike, you have to engage your mind and body in present time, foot placement, breath, decisions on the trail, which way you're going, what did you bring with you? And once you're out, you have what you have with you. And there's a release in that. When you're staring at a screen, you don't have what you have with you. You're seeing the whole world in the palm of your hands, showing you what you don't have, what you need to buy, what you need to worry about. So I'm really in'm really into self reliance and self sufficiency in the outdoors for that reason. I think one of the problems with movement in our culture is that exercise can be addictive for that reason, as as an escape. And it can be used like any weapon to actually create anxiety. If it becomes like your only tool to release, or if you're really

addicted to high intensity, but you have like a really high resting respiration rate, and you're not looking at that data, dealing with functional patterns of movement and breath, then the very tool that could be helping you mitigate systemic anxiety can be the thing that exacerbates it. Yeah, when you work with clients, and here at Rapid, we have a lot of very successful clients that have high pressure jobs and things like that. And so anxiety kind of just goes hand in hand with being kind of an authority figure or, you know, running a company or whatever they're doing. Do you distinguish between work? There you are. Yeah. I said, do you, when you're working with clients, do you distinguish between worry and anxiety specifically, or do you just lump those into the same general category? That's a great question. I think it depends on what the physiology is doing. You know,

they go hand in hand. Warriors genuinely show patterns of dysregulation. You know, if you worry as a practice, you are paying interest against your own nervous system. So I do distinguish that though, because, you know, like some of the people I work with will present with very low perceived depression, anxiety, and stress. And one of my clinical instruments that people fill out before we work together. So, you know, think of a person who presents as like, I'm not depressed. I'm not anxious. I deal with stress. Well, right. That's? That's what they're saying on the form. Their data shows a resting respiration rate of 17 or 18 breaths per minute at rest.

Their CO2 tolerance is maybe 14, sub 20. So this is a person that has learned to cope at running hot all the time. And it's not going to feel good for that person to be told to calm down that's not going to work right so that person worrying has gotten them success likely they're they're likely a high performer who has used that negativity bias to predict potential problems and face them and get things done so my work is how do I engage them with the reality of their bodies, their breaths, their minds, to not lose the value of their drive and their work, but to connect to the consequences 10 years from now, if they don't learn how to

functionally breathe and presence themselves and like, how good do you want it? Do you want to just keep on spinning the wheel for the current success that you're experiencing? Likely if they're working with me and with Rapid, they want to also feel good and have longevity. And that's where looking at the data can really help engage in some tools. Yeah. Second, you said about about using the anxiety to to get things done to be productive etc do you do you mean andrew's talking about this all the time like meta emotions matter a lot like if you're angry that's one thing but if you're angry that you're angry then that's different now you have an opinion about your emotions you can't you can't

control your emotions so to speak they kind of just emerge in consciousness. But if you're angry that you're angry, then I feel like that's way less mentally healthy than just being angry about something. You might have a legitimate reason to be angry about something, but then being angry about it is the thing that kind of tears you down, in my experience. It's just my opinion, of course. Do you work with clients and counsel them on how to feel about how they feel? Well, yeah, I agree that being angry about being angry is more toxic because now you are arguing for your limitations. You're designing patterns in yourself.

So we do a lot of thought work to question the origin. And you know, what are you busy believing? I love the work of Byron Katie. So a lot of the stuff I'm talking about with your business and someone else's business and what you're busy believing comes from her thought work. So if people are interested in disrupting some of those argumentative patterns that, you know, I'm an anxious person kind of thing. Oh, I'm just wired that way. Like, are you? Is that true? So it's bi directional, there's thought work, and then there's the physical understanding that in this moment, it's a new moment, and your body is present. Your body might be feeling anger. So let's feel it. Right? That's like you said, organic feelings happen to all of us. There's a huge spectrum of human emotions that I don't

think the game is to control all the time. I think like the temper tantrum I had last night was awesome. It felt great. Yeah, just turning into a five-year-old for a minute. And then we all had a good laugh. And so I think it's important to allow for emotions and feelings because that's how you diffuse them. And then they don't pattern into like what you think of as your personality. So I don't know if that answered your question but there's a lot there how do we start to recognize like um kind of have this like framework that i i feel like i i live in most of the time of like whatever i'm doing on a daily basis i'm just practicing whether it's a good thing or a bad

thing which then turns into the habit that i'm going whether it's good or thing or a bad thing, which then turns into the habit that I'm going, whether it's good or bad, and how I structure days and, you know, whatever I need to do to get to where I am today. But if those, if we practice, like being anxious or worrying, and we're doing it so consistently, doesn't that begin to like really hinder the ability where, um, to, to move forward in your life and, and kind of like grow out of the phase that you're currently stuck in? I think it's a huge opportunity. Uh, when any of us realize that we are in a pattern of behavior that's not who we really are and it is really tough to see when you're in it i know i have my patterns and grooves and it's hard when you bump into yourself and you realize wow i've really carved a pattern of worry, anxiety, depression. Again, our culture identifies those as like a personality

almost, oh, this person is depressed. So I think some helpful tools around that are to use different languaging, you know, I'm, I'm experiencing depression, I'm feeling depressed, I'm physiologically anxious, etc. Not I am, I have. But yeah, I think we are our patterns, ultimately. So being willing to read what's going on without judging or making meaning of who we are in that is the first step for me. and then being able to disrupt those patterns and open up some space to change. And it takes practice. It takes exposure to some of the triggers or activation stories that have created those patterns because they don't come from nothing. They're there for a reason. A lot of us learned survival tactics early in childhood and throughout our lives that served us really well. So instead of making ourselves wrong for how we are, I think it's really important to first go, where is this coming from?

Oh yeah, thank you. Thank you for this response. I can see where this served me. If it served me still, I'd be happy about it. But if I'm not happy about it, let's, then let's make some changes, you know? Yeah. Cause I feel like if you, if you play the game long enough, it turns into the identity. And then once you've labeled yourself that it gets really hard to break free because it just becomes, and, and we, even if we were to kind of, not just the anxiety or worry, but if you were to look at, you know, people's vision of their own health or their own fitness or their own social status or whatever those things are, you get so entrapped in that identity that you've given to yourself that it becomes really hard to break free because you don't know who you are on the other side of it.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting conversation. I really do. I mean, I think there's a lot here. I think about this stuff a lot because our culture really teaches individualism. You know, what's your identity, your avatar, your brand? Get yourself out there. That's success, right? As if you're popular and you've got a sellable thing. And it's a really important topic, especially for kids. We are not our brands. We are not our interests. we are not our brands we are not our interests we are not our successes we're not our failures we're not our range of human emotions um i think at our core we we all have so much more in

common as human beings that we're really designed to be tribal to to be in a community that supports each other where you get to have different roles over time. So I think that's a really important challenge to just voice for a lot of people. I know for me, it's a challenge. You put something out there and it's like, well, that's how I felt in that moment. But you're only seeing 30 seconds of me in that moment that I felt like publishing. It's not who I am by any stretch. So, uh, you bring up kids. How do we, how do we pass these lessons on, um, I have a five and a two year old, my little two year old is not going to sit down and just sit

there and breathe with me. I know it for a fact. but i would love like when uh when do you kind of start bringing things up like this or um ways to presence kids that are running around with a legitimate not having a prefrontal cortex yet to actually be able to disconnect and like make a logical decision. And they're just running around with a lizard and monkey brain. Yeah, gosh, I, you know, all I know is as a mom myself is that we have a 17 year old and I, I could run my mouth off for an hour with the things that I wish that I knew or did differently. But I can count on a couple hands here, the things that I think I would repeat that seemed to work well.

And I know that with young kids, they mimic. That's how they learn is through mimicking. And so everything we've talked about today, I think just applies right there in parenthood. If we can not make wrong the when a kid's lid flips, the urge is to discipline or or give them a lesson, you know, teach them how to behave. And if we can model that we're willing to accept like what's going on, you know, and just hold space and be present ourselves. I've recently read something like when your kid is reacting, if you can get calm, if your kid is angry, if you can get loving, you know, at 17, 17 year old boy, that doesn't work as well. Everything gets annoying. But I do think they're paying a lot of attention to how we handle stress.

And I think they're paying a lot of attention to what we do when they're stressed. And if we blow our lids and tell them they're wrong for how they're feeling, then those are going to be really hard emotions for them later on to process. It sounds like just good leadership advice in general might be how you use that with employees versus children or whatever may change. The tactics may change, but the principle I feel like stays the same. People want to be heard and understood before they want to listen to your advice just across the board. Oh, 100%. And I don't engage in anything that I can think of because someone told me to do it. I can't.

I can't think of anything. I'm a very autonomy-loving person. It just doesn't work for me to take Oz, our son, and say, it's breathwork time. But I was really happy. I can imagine my mom saying that to me when I was 17 and I was upset about something. Breathwork time, sweetie. It'd be like, mom. That's breathwork time, you know, but I was really happy. My mom said that to me when I was 17 and I was upset about something. Breathwork time, sweetie. I don't want to hear it. I'm going to wrestling.

I'll just choke somebody. How's that sound? Yeah, exactly. But you mentioned the story and identity and brand, all these things a moment ago. Granted, it's good to quote unquote know yourself, to know who you are at a deep level. That's something we're all continuing to strive to do over time, though you never really truly know everything about yourself, but it's good to know yourself. But at the same time, it's good to not be too attached to who you think you are.

I was in Sedona arizona um maybe 10 years ago now and i of course want to go back because it's been way too long because i like that place uh but i was talking with a guy and he he said that he didn't exercise uh one time and you know in college where they've had him write an essay so to speak like you know many pages about who are you and And then when they got done, they said, okay, tear it up, rewrite the whole story. Who are you? You can't repeat anything. And then they had to rewrite. Well, now who am I? If I'm not all those things, who am I? They rewrote the whole thing. They said, okay, tear it up. Now who are you? Rewrite it again. So they

did it three times to like, like dig through the layers of like, like who, who am I really? Am I really just those? Am I really just the first story? Am I also the second story? Am I also the third story? Am I a combination of all these things? Like, do you, do you help people kind of rewrite the narrative of who they think they are in

any, in any context? Well, first of all, that exercise sounds profound. I would love to try that and see what emerges. I wonder if it would work now that I know the game. Yeah, it's tough when you know the end game there. that they are innately worthy, that each one of us is innately worthy, and stripping away some of those attachments to who we think we need to be in order to get love, respect, appreciation, and really take a look at where our energy is being spent. And at the end of the day, we're talking about state, anxiety, depression. We're talking about energy energy where are you putting yourself so it's a huge part of my work I feel like if I do that well for myself included then we emerge out of some of this work feeling

more connected whole and less attached to we think we're supposed to be in this game. You know, on a similar note, and I mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy earlier and automatic negative thoughts. I know one of the practices and you kind of said something very similar to this earlier was when you have an automatic negative thought and in cognitive behavioral therapy, they will have you sit down and write all the reasons that thing is not true. Maybe it is true, but it might also not be true for many reasons. And so you'll sit there and like, logically, rationally write down why, you know, if it's like a very general thought, especially it's like, I'm a failure. Okay. Well write down all the reasons that you're not a failure. Well, you did this other thing last week and you did a great job

at that. And you graduated college and you got a good GPA. And like you could write down many reasons why you're not this very general thing called a failure in this example. Like do you ever use kind of written practice like that where people are able to kind of logically unwind an emotional opinion about themselves? Yeah, we do. We have a bunch of journal. Journaling is a huge part of our Shift Health program that I designed with brian mckenzie and it's the first module is called reality and it's about disrupting attachments and really looking at your day-to-day reality what lens are you seeing the world through um so a lot of our written journal prompts are are similarly aimed at tearing down limiting beliefs. Writing is such a profound way to uncover subconscious material that's super valuable

that we tend to suppress again for those patterned reactive responses about our identity, how we're supposed to be. So it's incredible how much space that creates to just see that the wheel you're kicking all day isn't even true it's just one wheel you could sit around and kick like a merry-go-round um so hopping off that can be hard because they have momentum and journaling is one of the tools we use um but with trauma healing it's also about identifying that that you have a somatic response to those thoughts there's a cues inside of your body when you have certain thoughts or misbeliefs and i've come to believe that if you feel really dysregulated when you have a thought that's your body telling you it's not true if it were were true, it would feel amazing. And what we do instead is we

feel this dysregulation because the thought we're having is so uncomfortable. And then we use the feelings, the anxiety, the worry as justification that we need to go work on that thought. We need to go work on ourselves to fix this thought we're having. I'm not good enough. I always attract this kind of person. I never finished what I start. And the body goes, oh, that feels awful. And we use that as like evidence. Oh, see, I really need to work on that. Instead of going, wow, I wouldn't feel this discomfort if this thought were true. This is my body that is ever present, doesn't know how to lie, saying something's off with what you're saying here. You know, when you think a true thought, the body hums, feels centered, feels good.

Yeah, yo, kind of final question as we're wrapping up here. What are your thoughts on like kind of the AI therapist type thing that has been popping up more and more lately? No, I don't even know about that. I could just be using AI. How do you know that I'm not AI right here? I'm just a deep fake. No, I've never even met you before.

You're just a talking box on my computer screen. I'm just pulling all this data from you. I have not actually been hit up on whatever platforms of social media advertising for AI therapy. That is wild. Is that real? I mean, it's got to be real. There's no way that everything's not going to change it. I wouldn't.

Maybe there's not a lot of them, but see, there's one called PI. PI.AI was one that I heard and I played with for just to see what it was. PI.AI. You can go check it out. It's like an AI personal therapist. Like, it's just a chat bot. You sit there and like, it'll ask you how your day is and you'll tell them how you're doing. And it'll just sit there and facilitate a conversation with you. Um, and I've, I've,

I don't know what the actual data says on this, if there is any data, but I've, I've heard that, um, you know, some people may actually get, um, have better results because they're, they're not actually talking to a person, so they don't fear judgment from a person. So they're more likely to be more honest in some cases. And they, they don't, they don't fear judgment from a person. So they're more likely to be more honest in some cases. And they don't think that the, you know, the word's going to get out about how they're feeling, like they're not being judged on at any level, because they're just talking to a chatbot. They know it's not real. But at the same time, because they can actually say the real truth, without fear of judgment, they're more likely to actually say how they're doing, because they're just talking into a black box. Wow. Oh, I did not know that was even out there. That is

disturbing and wonderful all at once. If somebody is feeling better because they're talking to a chatbot, I think that's a start. I think that there's a huge, huge mental health crisis going on. And a lot of people are in a lot of pain. And so what makes me sad hearing about that is that I'm old school. So I really believe the solution circles back to that tribal piece where we're connected to each other and interdependent, and feel seen by other humans that we risk telling someone else what's going on with us. And we learn that, oh, it's not even that bad. In fact, everyone else deals with this too. Even our darkest, worst behaviors and fears, when they're seen by another, again, with that compassion, that's a different level of healing. That's, you know, where I hope that we can all go.

So my take on that would be, hey, if you're really struggling, and you get a little relief from an AI bot that you're comfortable talking to, use that as practice, like titration to realize that it's okay to be honest about what's coming up, and then go connect to some human beings that can validate, you know, that, that really, that's a tough one for me to swallow. It has some real experience. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly shouldn't solve, can't solve all the problems, but yeah, it might be just a

small tool amongst many other tools, but yeah, without real human connection, you're, you're never going to get where you want to go ultimately. I mean, that's how I'm, I mean, my husband runs a regenerative farm, you know, and his hands are in the soil. Like we're kind of old school and I want things to move in that direction. So I get a little, there's my edge. When I hear about AI stuff, which is my edge.

I'm not sure where that's taking all of us. But I hope that anyone listening to this that's suffering can go get their hands in the soil eat some real food and call somebody if they're hurting i totally agree with you that's like the the utopian world where it's like we just get to go play around in the dirt go yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah. Make fire and sit around it. That's where I think most human beings happen. I feel like every time I make a fire in our fire pit in our backyard and my whole family is staring at it, I think about the millions and millions of human beings that have stared at fires with their family over the last like a hundred million years or whatever it is

that we've been literally lighting things on fire and trying to stay warm yes this is like the most shared experience in all of human history love that um but it's it's a very unifying thing it is it's my favorite part of the morning I lucked out with a man that likes to, you know, make a fire every day in the winter and while the coffee is going and it's just, it's the way to start our day around here when it's cold. I love it. Emily, where can people find you? Oh, let's see. Instagram is Emily Hightower. I think there's a bunch of underscores, underscore Emily, underscore Hightower, underscore think there's a bunch of underscores. Underscore Emily, underscore Hightower, underscore. There are a lot of us called Emily Hightower out there.

There are probably some bots. Test it out. I'm also at Shift, ShiftAdapt.com is where you can find my work and through Rapid with you guys. Doug Larson. Emily, really enjoyed this conversation as always. my work and through Rapid with you guys. Doug Larson. Yep. Emily, really enjoyed this conversation as always. Love having you on the Rapid team. So thanks for coming on today and say hi to Brian for us.

I certainly will. Thank you guys so much. This was great. Awesome. Every time I talk to clients, they always bring up how much they enjoy meeting with you and having you kind of dig into the softer side of things and helping them with the mindset stuff. So very much appreciate your work and being a part of the team here. Oh, thank you. Well, it's mutual. I'm really

honored to get to work with your incredible clients, beautiful humans. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore shrugged and make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside rapid health optimization will receive. You can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.