Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Break Subconscious Habits and Heal From Within with Dr Nicole Le Pera #318

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Today I’m pleased to welcome a podcast guest who has become one of my favourite voices on social media, sharing her wisdom on the concept of self-healing. Dr Nicole Le Pera is a clinical psychologist who felt frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy and was drawn towards a mind, body and spirit approach. She believes that we’re each responsible for our thoughts, behaviours and reactions – and therefore we have the power within us to heal ourselves from past trauma.   Describing herself as The Holistic Psychologist, Nicole says it’s her mission to help you ‘consciously create a new version of yourself’. Her millions of followers on Instagram and YouTube love her clear and insightful posts which identify patterns, beliefs and behaviours we might want to change. Nicole’s latest book is How To Meet Your Self: The Workbook For Self-Discovery. As it sounds, it’s a practical guide to finding out who you really are, the patterns of belief you might be stuck in, and how to overcome them.   We begin by talking about the fact that many of us feel ‘stuck’ in our lives. We’re stressed, anxious, perhaps our work or relationships aren’t going well. It can feel like something’s missing or broken, but we’re not sure what and so we blame ourselves or our circumstances. But Nicole explains that what’s really going on here is that most of what we think, feel and do is a reflection of our past conditioning. We’re stuck in patterns formed in childhood that no longer serve us – or reflect who we really are.   For many of us, it’s our relationships with our partners or children that can help us to finally observe these patterns. Or sometimes, she says, we need to reach rock bottom before we can start the journey of recognition and self-healing. We talk about how exactly to recognise those experiences from childhood that might have shaped your core beliefs. We look at how these beliefs can manifest throughout life in physical stress responses and hard-to-break habits, through to self-sabotaging, destructive behaviours that can leave us feeling deeply unhappy or unwell.   And we discuss Nicole’s definition of emotional maturity as the realisation that your core beliefs aren’t fact – you can override and change them.   This is a very thought-provoking conversation, which I think will get you looking back at your childhood and reflecting on how it might have shaped who you are today. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/318 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

When we feel reactive, it does feel like the world is handing us our feelings. The world is happening to me. I have no space. I feel mad because of what you do. The reality of it is we can't control that other person. And so I begin to create change for myself, regardless of what the other person does or doesn't do. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. How would you say life is going at the moment? Are you thriving? Do you feel as if you're getting the most out of your life? Or do you feel a little bit stressed or anxious? Are you having

problems at work or perhaps in your relationships? You see, when people are struggling, they often feel like something's missing or broken, but they're not sure exactly what. So they end up blaming themselves or their circumstances, but this can often make things worse. Well, my guest today is on a mission to explain what is really going on here. She believes that most of what we think, feel, and do is a reflection of our past conditioning. We're stuck in patterns formed in childhood that are no longer serving us or really reflect who we really are. Dr. Nicole Lepera initially trained as a clinical psychologist and as she began working she started to feel frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy and

was drawn towards a more holistic approach that combines mental, physical and spiritual health. Now Nicole believes that we all have the power within us to heal ourselves from past trauma. And over the past few years, going by the name of The Holistic Psychologist, she has quickly amassed over 5 million Instagram followers. And she has just published her second book, How to Meet Yourself, the workbook for self-discovery. Her new book is a guide to help you identify the patterns and beliefs that are keeping you stuck and then provide you with practical tools to start the process of change. Now, for many of us, it's our relationships with our partners or children that can often help us to finally see these patterns. Or sometimes, Nicole says, we need to reach rock bottom before we can

start going on this journey of self-discovery. Now, during our conversation, we talk about how exactly we can start to recognize those experiences from childhood that might have shaped our core beliefs. We look at how these beliefs often manifest throughout our lives in a variety of different ways. Physical stress responses, hard to break habits, self-sabotaging, destructive behaviours to name just a few. We also cover a wide range of different topics including the true meaning of emotional maturity and this powerful idea that your core beliefs are not fact. It's absolutely possible to override and change them. You know, I think this is a conversation that's going to have you looking back at your childhoods and reflecting on how

it might have shaped who you are today. It's thought-provoking, but it's also empowering and hopeful. I really hope you enjoyed listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Nicole Lepera. Now, Nicole, there's a lot of people around the world at the moment who are really struggling. They are feeling stressed out. they're feeling anxious, they feel stuck in their lives, they're not kind of sure how to get out of it. And I know in your latest book, there's lots of practical tools for people to help them. Now, my intention for this conversation is for it to be super practical practical so people can actually get some tools to start applying in their everyday lives. But before we get to the practicalities,

I think for me, I wanted to address or put to you what I think are one of the underlying themes that underpin a lot of your work, and that's this, most of what we think, feel, and do is a reflection of our past conditioning and not a reflection of who we actually are. Absolutely. I mean, even just hearing you used very common words that I would hear very frequently in my practice. Those words being stuck, right? I can't change. I'm stressed. That's a very, another really, really big one. And what I hear and what I felt both as a clinician in the room, right? Tasked with helping these people become unstuck, relieve their suffering. And also as a human who had many different ways that I was stuck and anxiety I was carrying with me since childhood, I felt very disempowered, unable to help people use the massive amounts oftentimes of increasing insight, right? So many of us have these moments

of knowing better, accumulating a lifetime of patterns that don don't serve us things that we're doing habits that we want to break and accumulating so much even awareness yet in those pivotal moments we really really can't change and so for me it began this journey of beginning to explore first and foremost why that is the case why I was struggling not only to create change and relieve my own suffering as a human but why I was really struggling to help my clients at that time create change themselves. And what began as a really disempowered journey into curiosity, what the heck is going on here and why can none of us feel better? Why are so many of us so stressed and so stuck? And really it opened a door of information, I think is the

best way to start it. I think any change starts with information that then I was able to apply. And again, to speak to your point, really understanding that the reason why so many of us are stuck isn't in necessarily the present moment at all. It's all of this past junk and conditioning that we're carrying with us that's causing us to remain in those really disempowered, stuck, stressed out cycles. that's causing us to remain in those really disempowered, stuck, stressed out cycles. This past conditioning, which many of us are unaware of, you know, we play out our present day lives and this past conditioning is affecting our health, our happiness, our relationships. And, you know, when I go through your story, it seems that you had what many of us these days have,

which is you ticked the boxes that society had asked you to tick. You were a clinical psychologist, you had a successful private practice. Yet, despite having the things that you thought you needed to have, you realised there was something missing inside. And I can absolutely echo and resonate with that in my own life. But the more people I speak to on this podcast year after year, it's not actually that uncommon. Right. It's not that uncommon. And I had the very similar experience of hearing, right, when I would complain, I'm exhausted. I don't feel fulfilled. I don't feel connected. Even to speak to your point, despite having checked so many accomplishments that I thought would provide me that fulfillment, that life that I was looking for, that connection in particular in my relationships. And when I didn't have that translating into my lived experience, the first thing, if I'm perfectly honest, that I felt, and I don't know how it was

for you and anyone listening is I felt shameful. I felt, you know, I began to wonder, okay, well, what is wrong with you now, Nicole? There must be something wrong with you that you've created this whole world around you again, that's being validated by the outside world. And yet I couldn't see how much, even that world I created was coming from a point of disconnection. There was a service, all of that performing that I've done and accomplishing that I began to do from early, early childhood for me was my best attempt at keeping myself safely connected to that earliest environment. So in a very real way, it was coming from, again, a protective, it was playing a protective role instead of really coming from my deeper inner

space. And whatever that name is for any listeners, whether it's spirit, soul, essence, I think what's happening quite collectively, and maybe you experienced, and what I know it was happening for me in the moment or in those many moments was that disconnection was really, and all the symptoms of it were really coming to the surface. The reality that I wasn't serving my, and this is the purpose of my new workbook is really the journey to reconnect with that self. So to really simplify it, I was living in a very conditioned way that while I was accumulating a lot of validation from the outside world, again, it was serving a purpose and it wasn't coming from that pure state of just who I was. And for me, then the journey that I began in my first book,

How to Do the Work, really illustrated the need for a really comprehensive roadmap of this journey and what it could look like of peeling back all the different layers to speak to your point of the physical habits that are impacting then our mental world, how we feel and ultimately what we do, how we're showing up again, all of the habits and patterns that we continue to, to reference throughout. So for me, it was really in the new workbook, I'm hoping provides that map of a journey of reconnecting with who we really are. Because I think for so many of us, that holds the answers of why we feel so disconnected at minimum and so suffering at, I think, the depths of our despair.

Yeah. Well, I think you've definitely done that. I think it is so practical, the new workbook, done that. I think it is so practical, the new workbook, that I fail to see how anyone wouldn't get at least some degree of benefit, if not completely life-changing benefits, from actually applying the tools and practices that you put in there. In your experience, I'm interested as to what causes people to wake up, to realize, oh man, I'm reacting here. This is what my mom used to do. This is how I was as a child. And speaking personally, I feel it's through relationships with other people that we can often I feel it's through relationships with other people that we can often see these patterns the most. I think my marriage with my wife has been an incredible mirror for me to look at some of my childhood patterns, but also becoming a father and then observing the way I would parent sometimes and the things that I liked, things I didn't like. So that's certainly been my experience.

Relationships have been a huge part of my way in. What have you found for yourself and with your clients? Relationships, I think, are a very common one, whether it's like you're sharing partners, children, family members, close friends, whatever it might be, because what partners offer, and this goes back to your previous question around kind of this idea of we become really subjective to ourselves. We're all we know, our habits and patterns, whether it's in our internal world, or again, like we were just talking about how we're living, the way we're taking care of our body. That's just what we've come to know for many of us for decades as who we are. So the simple way I describe that is we're really subjective to our own experience. We don't have that more objective or separate vantage point that even hearing you use that language

that I'm sure some listeners have probably heard used before of mirror, right? To me, that's what that means. I have now a reflection that's a little bit more separate, might allow me to see different aspects of myself, my way of being and how other people experience me that with my blinders on, it's harder for me to see. So I think a lot of, for a lot of us that happens in a relationship, for a lot of us that happens when we're at, you know, that, that rock bottom, I think that some of us can describe or have had experience where life really does feel like it's exploded or imploded around us, maybe for circumstances outside of our control, or maybe as a result of our own habits and patterns that we've carried with us. And so for some of us, it's this idea of life can't get worse. I feel

so terrible now. I have to start looking or making new choices somewhere, somehow. And then there's the whole batch of us that I think I would describe myself. A little bit of it was the relational piece. A lot more of it was just this gradual accumulations. And like I was talking about earlier, where I had actual physical symptoms beginning to break through, um, exhaustion that I was living with brain fog, just always feeling like I had a sheet, um, over, over my brain, quite literally really having a hard time thinking, remembering really started to turn into having a hard time remembering, remembering, really started to turn into having a hard time remembering my words mid-sentence, talking to some clients. At moments I started to actually lose consciousness or all of my energy just kind of shut my body down. So I wouldn't describe that

as necessarily a bottom for me, the way I describe that, or I conceptualize it as all of the moments of overwhelming stress that my body wasn't equipped to deal with, again, because I never learned in childhood how to, accumulated so much over time that my physical body now actually started to speak those limits to me. So, and then of course, there's many different avenues of having what I think we're describing here as an awakening, where you even used a very beautiful emblematic word of, I observed, right? In my relationship with my children, with my partners, I'm able to see myself. And the reason why I'm honing in on this word is because it's referencing one of my favorite and what I believe is a foundational practice of what we're talking

here about here, which is creating change. The first step of changing anything is becoming conscious to what's happening now to the role I'm playing, maybe in the habits that are keeping me stuck. So learning how to observe even our habits at minimum, what are the things that I do? First thing, when my eyes, how do I care for my body? When my eyes open each and every morning, how do I care for my mental world? How do I relate to others, right? These are all areas that we have most of us become very habitate. And when we become conscious simply means when we can observe ourself, when we can maybe utilize the loved ones, the supported, trusted loved ones, of course, not everyone in anything that has an opinion about us, right? Those people that we trust to give us

their feedback, like our loved ones, our partners, our close friends, right? Then that could allow us to use their observation that's more objective to see or to create space, I should say, for new choices. Because the reason why so many of us are stuck, just to put language to everything we're talking about here, is because of the habits locked into our subconscious mind. They're making the choices for us, which is why we feel so disempowered in our life. To create a habit of consciousness means in those moments where that old habit is at the ready to dictate what happens next, we can inhabit that conscious space and say, yes, compelled to scream yell you know uh do whatever i'm going to do to self-harm my body not take care of my body whatever it is and instead in

this moment i'm going to make a new choice new choices over time translate to change to transformation yeah you know what you said there about awareness yes Yes, awareness, of course, is one of those critical first steps. But alongside that awareness, you need honesty. You need a real radical honesty with yourself to go, yeah, you know what? I've contributed to what just happened there with my partner. I've contributed to what just went down with my child. And that's hard for people because that sort of honesty, without that, you actually will always remain stuck. You may get some changes, but you'll hit a ceiling very, very quickly. So at least for me, Nicole, I would say one of the reasons I feel so happy and content these days

compared to how I used to is that I feel, yes, I rely on other people, but most of the reliance comes onto myself. Like if something happens, if I get triggered, if I feel reacted to something, if a comment bothers me on social media I'm like okay it's not about them right put the mirror up why is this bothering you because if you were cool with this that wouldn't bother you and honestly that one practice alone has been transformational and what it does and I know this is a big theme of your work it puts me in charge it means I don't need to be reliant on that person or that thing or that circumstance being a certain way. I now can make some changes to change my perception of it or reveal something within me where I'm not sort of okay or cool. Yes. I'm smiling, not only because I'm relating to

so much of circumstances in my past life that, you know, I'm hearing you speak about, but there's just, there's so much here. And I think I want to first start by acknowledging or understanding as speaking from my own lived experience of being that what I'll call it is an externalizer, right? This idea that I don't have any control, the outside world greatly impacts me and I become reactive. And the reason why most of us feel like that as I have, and the pattern I would see this translating to in my romantic relationships in particular is I would get to a point and I have been a serial monogamist since the moment I started dating when I was 16 years old and had my first boyfriend.

I was always finding myself in a relationship and I would be very happy as most of us are in a new relationship. And over time as, you know, issues would, would occur unable to see the role that I was playing. I would point my finger outward. I would determine all of the ways this partner wasn't showing up and meeting my needs. And so therefore deeming them the quote unquote wrong person for me. I'm sure this might be language that many listeners have even heard themselves narrate their own relationships. And before long relationship ended low and behold, and I was looking for the quote unquote, right person. And again, really understandable because I was living like most of us in that very reactive state where my subconscious emotionally driven

autopilot was more or less reacting me throughout my day. So my lived experience for some, what I'm referencing is two decades of life. I was well into my twenties, entering my thirties, living very reactively. So what most of us are having the experience of is stimulus or really simply, as I often simplify things, thing happening out there. And there is no space that I was just describing. Thing happens out there, results in before I can even control myself, my reaction. And the reason being because A, many of us aren't even conscious. We're allowing our autopilot to dictate what we're doing. And B, even if we are conscious in that moment, much of our autopilot is driven by our

nervous system. And our nervous system plays a huge role in our brain functioning. And again, I'm going to really simplify all this. When our emotional brain is lit up to a certain extent, we actually lose all of this logic, all of this well-planned, you know, new choice I'm going to make in the future. And I am locked and loaded and reactive. So I really want to sympathize being that person myself of it is the world around me. We're left to only have that experience because that's what we've lived. We haven't had that moment of conscious intervention where I'm able to see, and this is a whole nother, I think, wealth of information and something that was a gifted piece of new knowledge for me,

even being a clinical psychologist. And I'm leading into this for a very intentional reason, which is that emotions happen in our bodies. They're not actually connected to the outside world at all. There's a very complicated process that contributes to our emotion, which involves our mind and narratives and filters, many of which we've carried from our childhood. It also involves our body and our nervous system and different states of dysregulation. And then lo and behold, as all of these factors interact, now we feel mad when something happens out there. The reality being though, the event didn't give me mad or anger, right? I'm feeling that based on my unique variables, many of which I just described based on my past conditioning and a very complicated process that's happening inside me,

right? So when we really talk about participating in life, again, when we feel reactive, it does feel like the world is handing us our feelings and we don't have any point or space to make a new choice. And as we become conscious of ourselves and observe that the moment I became mad, maybe was activated by the, you know, text response I didn't get from my partner, using very much a personal example from my own lived experience, right? I became mad when I interpreted that lack of response, right? And now this is because I've become conscious. I've observed my internal world. As time is ticking by and I'm not getting a response, my mind is starting to narrate.

This is what I'm talking about when I'm saying we are so habitual. Our mental world is narrating our life at all times. That's what our human brain desires to do to make sense of the world around us. And it doesn't tell news stories. It tells the same version of events. So if I really tune into those moments when I become whatever emotion it is, I can begin to see myself in real time as being a participant because yes, something outside will happen. I won't get a text response that I want, or someone will do something or say something to me, or I will see that, you know, stressful, annoying comment online. And if I take a moment to pause and become conscious, what I will have the gift of seeing, even though it'll be very difficult. When we're talking about radical honesty, we're talking about really coming to

terms with, again, how the role we're playing in everything we feel about the stuckness that we've carried for a lifetime. So when I'm being honest with myself, it's really painful to say, oh, Nicole, yes, it was the text that started this chain of events, but then it was how you interpreted the text. And for me, most interpretations led me down some road of hurt, sad, angry, right? Now I just described a process that while of course, details will be different, feelings will be different, interpretations will be different for everyone listening.

What I'm trying to illustrate is how I, and mainly my past has played a role in how I feel. So now that I've located myself as a participant, right now I have some choice in the matter. I can shift from being very understandably. So the world is happening to me. I have no space. I feel mad because of what you do. And now I can locate everything else and all of the different factors that I might be able to affect change around because the reality of it is also something we tolerate very limitedly as a human is we can't control that other person. I can't make the person, my partner, whoever it is, miraculously text me back when I want. The only thing I control is myself. How am

I dealing with, how am I interpreting what's happening? And that can I begin to create change for myself, regardless of what the other person does or doesn't do. There's some people, Nicole, may be thinking at this moment, okay, Nicole, I get that for you, but you don't get my life. In my life, it's different. In my life, my friends do this, this, and this to me. My partner doesn't do this. My kids are like this. You don't get it, right? So for that person who's listening or watching and that's going on in their mind right now, how would you address them? I would, again, sympathize and share with them how I too was that person. For a very long time,

I would read. I was so fascinated with people, you know, being fascinated by the mind, you know, quite typically as a clinical psychologist, not surprising, I'm sure to hear me even state that. I was always like reading about people who would, with their body, superhuman feats of strength, of health, of wellness, with their minds, abilities to create incredible change and be these like inordinate humans. And I would read those stories and not see it

as a point of inspiration or possibility for myself, I very much am imagining like that person listening, this hypothetical person. I'm sure there are many. I would read that and kind of my subconscious would roll its eyes and say, okay, well that you are able to because, and I can't because. You can because, and I can't. I would limit my ability when I would see other people achieving, doing, being in some way that maybe on some level I did desire for myself. And I think what we're getting into now is talking about one of the major things that most of us are carrying from the childhood that impact even the filters that I was describing, right? There's a reason why all of my roads lead back to how I'm not considered,

right? All of that again, began in childhood and was ingrained in me as a belief. And so many of us have these deep rooted beliefs about ourself, about what we're capable of or what we're not capable of, that in those moments where we see someone else living in representation, and if it isn't what we believe to be in possibility for ourself,

we will say, and it might not just look like internally rolling our eyes, we might outwardly diminish, tear down, criticize, make that person wrong in some way for how it is that they're living their life. And all of this, again, comes down to what we believe ourself to be possible of. And something I want to acknowledge

because we're kind of dancing in this category or this topic of beliefs now is beliefs aren't fact. Beliefs, in my opinion, begin from a thought that has oftentimes was the first assigned meaning. to pull back and objectively know what was happening. So we make very immature assessments of the world around us. And so for when we don't have the opportunity to have a consistent caregiver available to us, we make sense of it based on a lacking in ourself. The more frequently we have similar type experiences in our childhood and we assign similar type of meanings to those events, before long, now we're forming beliefs, beliefs that become verified, validated by the environment around us because our brain can't take in the fantastical amount of stimulus, stimuli, information in any given second even of our human existence. So what the

gift our brain does for us all outside of our awareness is it vets, it filters things that are personally relevant to ourselves, mainly first and foremost for our own safety. And secondly, that pertain to us and our story, our narrative of our life and our beliefs are one of the number one filters that we go to. And if things make sense based on how they've once made sense to us now, we'll accept that information. If things don't fit in. So for me, right, going back in time, me coming to believe in absence of having an emotionally available caregiver who was stuck in her own stressful cycle, unable to put time, attention, and be emotionally connected to me is where I first narrated events when mom wasn't available

to care for me emotionally is because I'm not worthy of being considered. The more that happened over time, I now have a formed belief that I'm a human who's not worthy of being considered. So now I'm left with no option, but in those moments where the text doesn't come, to filter out any possible alternate opposing information that I am actually worthy to this human, I more or less delete that from my existence to continue to confirm how unworthy I am. We love to be a self-confirming machine of our beliefs.

So for the many of us who are rolling our subconscious eyes, maybe even combating things that we see possible in somebody else, the reason might be, again, not because it's actually an impossibility for you at all. It might be based on all of these conditioned beliefs and filters that you've been applying to your life, literally locking you in to only being able to see yourself in that limited way. Just like, again, I once was.

Yeah. That idea that we have these core beliefs that, first of all, are not necessarily true, but they're what we have assigned meaning to early on in life. This idea that we almost want to find evidence to confirm this belief that may actually not be true. We fight for that evidence. We go, no, no, this is proof. And then we use language like, this always happens to me. And we use one example to go, this is why this always happens to me. But we forget about the 99 examples that are there, where this doesn't always happen to you, but you like, you know, it's almost as if it's a comfort because there's a familiarity with this belief system. Of course there is because we've grown up with it. And we think it's who we are

until we realize that it's not. And it's that simple, right? I know it's not that simple, but on one level it is. It's really interesting. You said, of course, you're interested in the mind as a clinical psychologist. And the last few days I've been studying your life, your books, your work in preparation for this conversation. And I see so many similarities, even in terms of our professional careers, in terms of the frustrations we were having. It's funny because as a medical doctor, I've realized that knowledge is not enough because I can give patients knowledge. They can make some changes feel better, but then revert back to what they were doing before. And over the last few years,

Nicole, I've been thinking there's something else going on here. There's some other root cause. And for me, it all comes down to the mind. What are our belief systems? What are we fighting for? Do we have compassion for ourselves? I've never seen someone change their health in the long term until they start practicing compassion towards themselves. Whilst they're using willpower to beat themselves up, to make the change, sure, the results can be short term, but there's always a ceiling where they then start reverting back. So I'm, I would think, just as fascinated with the mind as a medical doctor. So first of all, I wanted to share that. The second point, which I really think speaks to a lot of your work as well, is that

I've realized in my own life, Nicole, so many aspects of who I thought I was are simply not true. I've always felt, and my friends would tell you, that I'm super competitive. They would say, wrong and will not lose. That used to be me. I would not lose. If I ever did lose, it was so painful. When know, when I realized on this journey, Nicole, that actually I didn't even enjoy winning. Just losing was actually too painful. I didn't enjoy it. Winning was just a relief. It was a relief that I didn't lose. And I, you know, I've spoken about this before on the podcast, but a lot of that comes down to, you know, in childhood, I thought that I was only worth something when I was top dog when I got full

marks and again I don't blame my parents for that they were loving me they're trying to do the best they're trying to push me to do the best that I could for myself but what's really interesting and I'm trying to get to the point here the point is take that one example, Rangan is competitive. Well, actually, no, Rangan is not competitive. There was a version of me that was competitive because if you think that you're going to get love when you're top dog, well, developing the strategy of competitiveness is a very clever solution to that. That's like, oh, well, if I'm competitive, I'm going to go top and therefore get that love. Until you wake up, you become conscious and realize, I don't need to be that person anymore. And so yes, it's been a lot of work. And some of the things that I've done,

I've shared on this podcast before. But I think that's a very powerful idea for people that who you are right now is not who you have to remain. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which

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many of us wear aspects of our identity, which might've been again, choices, ways we've had to adapt to for you, for me, remain connected for all of us to that first earliest relationship, whatever it might be. The reality for us as a human infant is we are dependent on someone else. We can't continue. We can't carry on life physically. We can't take care of ourself as a baby. We are in a state of dependency. We are wired as an interpersonal being. Literally, again, we can't survive.

Our nervous system can't continue to develop without a relationship. So for survival purposes, and I know this might even seem really extreme and dire to hear me talk about it like this, but again, all of this is wired into our body. So coming for me, almost opposite of you from a system of studying the mind, my huge revelation that when I was describing to you, feeling really disempowered, trying to make sense of the why, for me, a lot of my answers lived not in the mind at all,

but in the body. And that intercommunication, right, that's happening all day long between our mind and between our bodies. So now going back, right, to all kind of tying this all beautiful conversation together and bringing in this concept of familiarity, because again, when we lacked safety,

when we lacked attunement, when our needs weren't consistently met in childhood, in that state of dependency, we will always pick staying connected because we need to, again, for survival-based reasons. So what we will begin to do because we are incredibly attuned, adaptive creatures is we will do just that. We'll modify ourselves. We'll squash down certain emotions or we'll amplify like you and I did performance aspects of ourselves to get the little limited attention, love, connection, validation that was available in those earliest, most important environments. And then the more, because connection is so greatly important to our survival, to our emotional ability to regulate ourselves into

adulthood, we will always choose that connection over ourselves. So we'll repeat that now, expanding outward from those first early, usually family or whoever those immediate caregiver relationships are to now our peers, to when we enter romantic relationships, we'll continue those same patterns, feeling again that we're not worthy enough. We won't, this person won't still remain connected to me if I show them these feelings. If I lose a game, if I show them that I'm not perfect, there is a deep root of belief for many of us

that we won't be loved. So we shift into, and we keep making those same adaptations, again, based in that very inaccurate belief that we will lose love and we will lose connection if we don't. And then what some of us do, and this is, I think, what happened for me, and I don't know for you, but I wrapped that cloak around me. I became the achiever as my full identity. I almost, again, bringing all these concepts beautifully to life, I was so subconscious to the fact that I felt so shameful just being me because again, in childhood, I didn't have that space. I only really got my attention in my family when I was celebrated, right? For the victories I was making. When I

brought anything else that could have been stressful, I would only stress an overstressed system entirely. So I showed less and less of me and the blinders were so strong for me that I only saw myself as this achieving being. It became everything about who I was. And in those moments where I felt it threatened or challenged, when I possibly wasn't going to win, when I was maybe being told by someone a less than favorable experience of myself, when I wasn't the perfect partner, for instance, and I was hearing upsetting feedback about how someone else was experiencing me. All of this feels, again, when it's become my identity, as it has for so many of us, these beliefs have become in these roles, I should say,

have become my identity. Now, any sort of feedback feels so threatening to who we are. And that's when we can shift into all of these different states of dysregulation, of reactivity, of trying to squash the person and defend who we are. Because again, we've lost sight of all of the rest of us. We've limited ourself to this, again, this one safe being based usually in protection because based on our lived experience, that is the only way that we were able to feel safely connected to those around us. So going back to this idea of familiarity, we'll repeat that which is familiar

because if I even entertain taking off this cloak or not showing up, right, and embodying this role, now what I'm faced with is the unknown and the uncertainty of the unknown, according to my subconscious, where there could be a possible life changing threat. And again, this might sound really dire, but this is all being driven by our nervous system who doesn't have the logic, right? It's very much evolutionarily driven. We don't want to walk into that unknown space. So this is why,

again, going beautifully full circle, we'll remain in our stuck patterns and stuck habits, having the world implode or explode around us until our world is no longer because it's familiar. Because even for some of us, right? Reading a story, entertaining the possibility of having a new possibility and not be limited or not being who we think we are is so threatening to our unconscious mind,

to this possibility that we might be more than we imagine ourselves to be. And that's scary because I don't know what life looks like, feels like, I don't know what to do next when I'm having this new experience of myself. So I will rely on those old habits, on that familiarity because it's predictably safe. because it's predictably safe. Predictably safe, but much of the time, very constricting and very exhausting.

You know, that when you said you wouldn't even, you wouldn't even play games that you couldn't very quickly figure out, yeah, I can win at this. Hey, that is, that was, let me be really clear. That is no longer me. That was who I was, but I've chosen to no longer be that person. It's such an awful way to live because you close your mind to, you know, I wouldn't play certain sports if I didn't think I could win. I thought, Rogan, how ridiculous is that? That you won't actually participate in something that you might enjoy, might be fun, you just can't be the best at it. And it's really liberating when you go,

I don't need to cling on to that anymore. I can actually let it go. I can be aware of it. I can choose to do some work to let it go. And this thing about identity that you mentioned there to let it go. And this thing about identity that you mentioned there and how we strongly identify with our core beliefs. We think that's who we are. There's a beautiful section in your new book where you write about this with some really, really awesome exercises, which I think are going to really, really help people. You said when people kind of try to challenge your identity, often our approach is either to yell and scream or to kind of shut down and avoid. And I read that and I thought, yeah, wow, that's exactly the two things I think I would have done in the past. I think I'm pretty sure people hearing this right now, I would, I'd be surprised if someone can't resonate with that particular sentiment. And I think we're leaving, and this is, I think,

a great place to return to. We're leaving out a big part, I think, of this conversation and possibly a big reason why you can maybe even listen to this podcast, right? Hit stop right now and still not be able to, right? Create action in those moments, still have this beautiful awareness that you just shared. And it's still not enough, still find ourselves screaming, yelling, reacting or shutting down.

And it's, I'm not necessarily, I'm pleased to hear that you resonated with those two descriptors in that workbook, though I'm not surprised because there's a universality in those reactions because they're governed by our body. So the big part, you know, that we're leaving out and coming from the system that you were very much trained in, one of the big reasons why in those moments, right, we're reacting in a very out of control, emotional way quite often is because again, our body has become involved. One of the reasons why no amount of

logic, or you can listen to this conversation up until this point, a million times over and like have that locked in your awareness that you can do differently yet that moment of change or that moment of that new choice presents itself. And lo and behold, it's some hours later and you're shameful again, because you didn't do differently. And I referenced this a bit earlier, but I think it begs for a bit more of a conversation now, which is that when our nervous system is activated, when we're feeling threatened by that statement, that's now challenging my identity. Now my body is involved, even though again, there's not, it's not the tiger on the planes, right? That, you know, I think traditionally, a lot of us have heard, you know, activates our fight or flight system. It's that statement that

to me has been perceived as a threat to who I think I am. So it could be that comment on social media, right? That now has activated my nervous system. Because if I'm viewing what you said as a threat to my identity, now my threat system, my body's threat system has literally become activated, which means now, right? That blood is starting to course through my body, my heart rate and my muscle tension might be increasing. And a very important shift is happening in my brain where my emotional brain, again, I'm really gonna simplify this,

has taken over, like I was describing earlier. And I've almost cut off access to that very powerful place that holds the new plan of action, the new choice, the future, right, that's different. Even that grounded response, I've lost access to that. So for a lot of us, and because so many of us did not have that safe, secure connection, that attuned parent figure that allowed our nervous system to develop our own ability to become stressed and to become unstressed, to create safety then for ourselves.

to create safety then for ourselves. Our nervous system is a hair trigger away from a stress response. It is only that comment and that filter of threat that it takes for now my body to feel so dysregulated in those moments that no amount of logic is going to change what I do, is going to even give me the possibility to make a new choice.

This is where all of the daily ways that we're caring for the nervous system that lives in our physical body, the nutrients, that hopeful, hopefully nutrient dense foods that we have access to the sleep, the rest we're giving our body, the slight movement and removing of tension through our musculature by stretching, by any sort of gentle movements of our body's muscles, right? The breath work that we're maybe doing to help regulate or learn how to intentionally regulate our breath. Our breath is one of the major indicators that our nervous system response is getting activated. The quicker we're breathing or the more shallow we're breathing, the more

likely our nervous system is indicating there's a threat happening. So again, going back even full circle to my journey into holistic work, what I came to realize kind of taking an opposite journey for you is that all of this talk of the mind, and of course you and I even just spent a big part of this conversation talking about how powerful these beliefs are, ingrained from our earliest environments and our meanings and our perceptions, repeated over time, ingrained in us. Incredibly powerful mind.

Again, in my first book, a whole chapter is devoted to the power of belief itself. Yet for my journey, for my program, we left out the whole of the body. All of the messages, again, that my nervous system might be reacting to. Messages of safety or lacking of safety that come from my childhood environments. Dysregulation, maybe I'm the person as I once was. My nervous system was never feeling safe. My body never felt able to relax. My digestion, my breathing was never regular, calm, peaceful. My sleep, everything was disrupted. My body was always in a flight response. So no matter how much insight, awareness, even tools, right? I could read many books about holistic wellness and creating change if in those moments I don't incorporate my body. If in all moments consistently previous, I don't

care for my body at all. And I am someone who, while I've been very athletic my whole life, we are not a healthy, well family in terms of our daily body habits. So for me, that means building the foundational practices, the lifestyle practices to make sure that my body is healthy so that in those moments, not only can I come to the awareness that I'm having, right? A belief that's coloring how I'm interpreting the situation. And now I'm feeling some kind of way to actually deal with those feelings, to actually learn how to regulate my body so that then I can have access to that new choice in my mind. Because again, full circle, that's why so many of us are stuck. It's not because we don't believe we want to do differently. And for some of us, it's not even lack of information. So many of us,

again, with the internet world, and one of the things I am so passionate about is keeping the resources that I put out on all of the daily social media platforms free, understanding that so much of our community or the self-healer community is international that maybe doesn't have access to these tools. However, I am aware that no amount of tools will create change unless we apply these tools. And for so many of us, that does mean taking care of our body or beginning to take care of our body. Because again, for a lot of us, that's why we're stuck. We can have so much logic, so much insight, so much awareness. And in real time, in the moment where I need to consciously make a new choice, my nervous system completely overrides it and takes over. And I fall back right into those reactive patterns of, you've guessed

it, screaming, yelling, or shutting down because those are nervous system states of activation. You know, I just love the kind of mirroring whereby you through psychology have come to the body and me through medicine has ended up at the mind. It's just beautiful to hear that, you know, on two different sides of the Atlantic, two different schools of training, but sort of coming somewhere in the middle to recognize that actually they're both important and actually even separating them out on one level is, I guess, problematic on one level. I guess it's where we are these days. We have to in order to get the message across. But I really love that. There was something in your book, I think you wrote, that every single patient who came to see you for psychology treatment also had physical symptoms. And I

think that just speaks to exactly what you've just been talking about. Yes, absolutely. And I'll speak from a personal note outside of seeing that very real pattern with numerous medical type diagnoses, these often of chronic ailments kind of being tacked on to, and for some of the clients, multiple even psychiatric or mental illness diagnoses as well. And saw very similar in myself and even more so in my mom. A lot of my journey, I was actually talking to my dad yesterday of, you know, how much of my own journey and witnessing my mom in particular struggle with chronic illness for the entirety of my life. My mom had me when she was 42.

I had an older sister who was 15 years older than me and an older brother who was 18 years older than me. And by that time in her life, she was pretty chronically ill with an undiagnosable, though we did attempt pretty you know, pretty consistently seeking the cause, the treatment, the, you know, way to help relieve my mom's very clear suffering, spent a lot of time in bed, debilitated with chronic pain in particular and living witness to that. And, you know, very much considering though, my mom only had a couple of handful of

psychologist therapy type appointments later in life, usually with the family involved. And I was in family therapy with them after a period of no contact though. She didn't officially have a diagnosis, but being a psychologist, I know for sure my mom had a lot of anxiety and a lot of trauma in her past as well. So my mom was very much a very personal lived example of that comorbidity. And for me, the endless searching and suffering that I'll speak personally comes along with watching someone that you love not being able to find that one cause and trying to seek relief. And I think the reason and the answer lays in exactly what we're talking about here.

My mom very much going down the traditional system, the silo approach, right? If possibly it's something wrong with my mom's autoimmune, then she's at an autoimmune doctor and then maybe it's her joint. So now you're at a joint doctor. And again, whether or not those doctors are talking to each other.

And like I said, there was really no mental wellness or emotional treatment anywhere into the more recent past for my mom. So again, the silo approach, I think, and not seeing my mom or any human as an integrated system, how I understand what was happening with my mom is very much what was happening and beginning to happen in my own life. Deep-rooted trauma that I imagine for my mom included was passed on in utero from her own mom, carrying her, living really in a poverty-stricken environment in upstate Pennsylvania, having a father who was very misattuned, having possibly

some severely traumatic incidents that she wasn't really clear about happening in her teenage years, right? So for me, I hear trauma, trauma, trauma, dysregulation, stress in the body, imbalances that are causing all of these, again, comorbidities, a lot of diagnoses and not yet relief. There was no one thing that ever helped my mom to feel better. And again, so for me, what I was sharing with my dad just yesterday was how not only did I see, you know, that breakthrough of symptoms that I was describing beginning to faint. I saw myself on the cusp of a choice point, right? Entering the same sort of system, endlessly seeking just like my mom for the one cause to treat the symptom or, and that was a

pivotal moment for me. I was gifted with all of this incredible information about epigenetics, about the nervous system, and was really able to pull back and have a new understanding that while I was very genetically similar to my mom and I did see what was likely going to be my future of possibly also accumulating a lot of medical diagnoses, much similar to her, right. I was able to make a different sense of it and to understand a different root cause, which then allowed me to begin to make different choices with how I managed it. But again, I share that with everyone because, you know, there is such a personal connection and the irony of it

all isn't lost on me. And I just actually lost my mom. She died last May. What I believe is as a result of her body, just getting to a point of shutdown from the chronic pain, the illness, the dysregulation that again had lived in her body for 80 plus years. Well, first of all, I'm, I'm really sorry to hear about your mother. Thank you for sharing that. I think for me, Nicole, I think this is a really important point to highlight to people listening, this interplay between body and mind. Throughout my career, I've seen a lot of symptoms that my profession calls medically unexplained symptoms. Big buckets, and depending on which statistics you read, it could even be 60%, some say 70% of symptoms we see are medically unexplained. And the truth is, the way I see it,

is that there's always an explanation. Do we know the explanation or not? But there's always an explanation. My belief now is that, by and large, the body doesn't make mistakes. The body wants to heal. That's your starting point. You go down a different thought process. What's going on and why is the body responding like this? And you mentioned a lot about the nervous system, right? And I've spoken a lot about stress in the past and how in the medical literature, 70 to 90% of symptoms are often thought to be in some way related to stress, but stress plays out through the nervous system. You've beautifully been talking about our nervous system. And I think a lot of people just don't realize that if you have got chronic stress that you are not appropriately managing,

if your nervous system, as you put it, is dysregulated or unbalanced, that can manifest in a whole range of different symptoms. It does not mean that someone is saying it's in your head or you're making it up, but these symptoms are real, like digestive problems, low libido, headaches, mood problems, all these kind of things. I think that's so important that we compassionately get that message out. You beautifully do this on your books, on your Instagram page, but I really just wanted to highlight that because I often feel that people think, oh, you're saying it's in my head. No, no, it's not in your head. This is real, right? So as well as that, you have this concept which you talk about a lot, which is feeling safe in your body. And I really wanted to go in here a little bit to really help people understand what that

means. And I know for you, maybe this is one of the first practical things we can talk about. I know your breath for you was one of your ways in. And I think that kind of fits quite nicely with feeling safe in your body. So I wonder if you could just expand on that, please. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to reiterate that it is so, so much not in your mind that the symptoms that you're feeling are, in my opinion, actually are in your body. That chronic pain that my mom was debilitated, unable to get out of bed with was pain in her body. It did translate through the physical organ, right? That is our whole system, our physical person. So absolutely reiterating and going back again to stress, even I think one of the beginning things we talked about

on this podcast and you referenced stress and stuck and a couple other things. So stress absolutely imprints our biology. And that's what I was referencing when I was talking about my mom coming from, you know, a poverty stricken, under-resourced, even just environment where she was being housed in utero by her parents. Because again, when we, our first environment is our mother's, you know, belly is the person with whom in the utero, I should say, with whom we we've grown. That is our, our first environment. And we are then impacted. And this is why it gets confusing. And it often becomes a chicken or the egg conversation for us. And why so many of us see similar, right? What we think is genetic diagnosis,

these symptoms, characterological, you know, things in our family as with ourselves. So for me, I saw anxiety running through my whole family line, if you will. So of course it was easy for me to understand that I got, I've received the genetic chip passed on through my genetics, my DNA for anxiety. Not of course, realizing as we now know that while genetics are part of the story, we haven't actually been able to find the singular genes that code for much of anything because the bigger part of the story is the environment in which these genes are either going to express or not express themselves, right? So now this is why I'm locating the uterus, right? And this other

context, circumstances, political, cultural, and everything, all the different spheres of influence that are going to impact that first environment, namely around how much stress and how safe that human body feels in whatever stress is happening. And in the field, there's been now extensive research

on the many generations that were impacted by, you know, atrocious events like the Holocaust or like systemic racism. How into our literal bones of these lineages, what is impacted is stress response systems, is the HPA access, is all of this. If we're going to, again, want to simplify it, dysregulation that we've been talking about that is actually being wired into. So you might not have been physically exposed to the Holocaust yourself, though, if that was somewhere in your lineages, in the environment in which, right,

all of these DNA cells of future generations were developing, then you wired into your system probably have some version of that dysregulation. So this is again, why it becomes very chicken or the egg and why stress and our ability to cope with stress is going to play a huge underlying role because that then determines how safe our body feels. And when our body doesn't feel safe, I mean, we even reference some of the systems that become immediately dysregulated. My breath doesn't become calm and even and deep from my belly, which sends my body signals that it's safe, that it can relax, that I can even

access those deep belly muscles to breathe from. When my breath is shallow, when it's barely there, when it's constrictor, I'm holding my breath. Chances are, again, my system is mobilizing, is getting ready for action. My muscles are a really great indicator. If my muscles are feeling tense with blood pumping through them, right, my body is probably telling me that it's getting ready to fight or flee a perceived threaded hand. When I don't feel or my body isn't sending me signals that I'm calm, I'm breathing calmly, my muscles aren't tense, my posture might be opened, receiving the environment. I'm able to visually scan and be present to my environment. If I don't feel in that way, chances are my body for some reason is perceiving a threat in my environment and possibly a threat that my body doesn't feel equipped to deal with.

So when we drop into our body, we can get really practical here. Maybe even while I was talking, some listeners are able to be like, oh, wow, I can attune to how do my muscles feel right now? Can I be consciously present to how my breathing is? If when we're dropping into our body, again, we notice that our body is feeling tense. Our breath is feeling really quick. Our heart rate is feeling really elevated. Then we might have indication that our body isn't feeling safe in that moment. And for some of us, we might not ever have a moment where I feel calm, open, receptive, present. And again, for me, that indicates as I once never had those moments that chances are again, because your body is not yet feeling safe. And this is again,

where we can begin to talk about intentional practices to create safety with the breath, going back to that, being one of them. And the reason why for me, my breath became my back pocket practice was twofold. When I dropped into my body, what I had noticed was I had been so overwhelmed by stress for so long to the extent that fighting, becoming combative, fleeing, trying to avoid the stress was no longer adequate enough. And I entered the final stage of nervous system state, which is a shutdown. So when I was describing losing consciousness, being really numb, being disconnected, I often describe it as my spaceship where I was living almost at a distance from myself. Probably no surprise. How was I describing me and all my relationships, right?

I'm disconnected, you're the problem. We're not close. I don't have the depth that I want. Again, not understanding that the reason I didn't have the depth that I want, it was because I felt not safe at all in my body, so much so that I decided to live the majority of my life and I got very good at it.

Talking to me, you might not even know how disconnected I was because my habits, right, just talking, just performing, just overriding how I felt were so strong that I was able to quite literally live my life from that automaton disconnected state. So as I came to that awareness, I discovered how disconnected I was from my body. And I realized that, well, to be able to reconnect with my body, my body has to feel safe. And what my body felt like was a tense, constricted, hunched over my posture, even from years of being so tense, my upper back and my neck muscles in particular, I even started to get a hunched over posture where I just saw evidence. If I looked at myself in the mirror of all of this energetic

constriction of all of this right threat of all of this nervous system reaction that I had been living in. So coming to that awareness, I discovered how unsafe my body felt. Of course, I wasn't going to want to check back in. My muscles felt tense. I didn't feel like it was a safe place. It was sending me all of the signals that it wasn't. And then I got really committed, not only to the general daily care things that I was referencing earlier, watching what I was eating, make sure that I was getting myself into bed at an earlier time so I could get the hours of sleep that I needed. For those tense muscles, for me, it meant learning to stretch,

building in a gentle stretching practice to try and relieve some of that tension. And then my breath. My breath is something that all of us have that we carry around with us day in and day out and learning how to intentionally teach my body how to send signals of safety through my breath. So for me, I learned how to teach my body, how to do deep belly breathing, that deep, calm, even breathing that will send that signal that my body is safe enough to inhabit. And I share this because it was really hard in the beginning, all of my posture, all of that tension. And often when we do talk about, or in the circle, my membership, when we do breath work month and we talk about the deep belly breath, I'll hear often very similar to my experience.

It's hard. I can't breathe from my belly. I'm so hunched over my posture. It's difficult. I made a daily commitment to practice by laying down, putting a hand on my belly and just making the commitment before I got out of bed every morning to take five deep belly breaths. Now that did two things for me. First, that taught my body and was five moments of breathing where my body was getting a new signal that it was calm, that it was peaceful, that it was safe. And it also primed my awareness of the tool

because the first thing and the thing I like to reiterate all of the time, whenever I'm talking about these tools, whatever it might be, breath work, journaling, they are not magic. It is not one and done, right? Those five breaths in the morning are helpful. Though, if I'm not calming my body down, regulating myself throughout the day, especially as I start to feel myself fall into a reaction, reactive state, then those deep belly breaths really didn't help me right in the moments where I really need to change. So reminding myself then that practice, I built a foundation. I began with that as a small daily promise because

none of us, again, like the unfamiliarity, the threat, the possibility of threat that comes with newness. I will often talk about not making an intention for me. It wasn't going to be a 30 minute breath work practice because I had never practiced breath work. So making a promise that seems so small that it can be manageable. So I got really consistent with those five breaths every morning until I started to feel confident that I knew how to breathe from my belly and that I could then take that tool with me. And then I built on that foundation because my breath was something that I could sit here if I'm even talking to you and I start to feel myself be

activated, right? I'm talking about something emotional and I'm starting to feel my heart rate get elevated or I'm with my partner and I'm starting to feel myself get agitated. I want to scream and yell right now. Those are the moments where no one even has to know necessarily that I'm intentionally and internally regulating myself, helping myself stay grounded in this moment so that I can retain the choice for what happens next. So for me, the breath was a go-to, like I said, because it was something I could carry along with me and I could use in those moments, both consistently all the time, because we need, again, that foundational practice

so that then I can, in those moments in real time, create that regulation. Because that's the difference between, oh, I meant to do that thing, but I was too emotional and now I'm screaming and yelling too. Okay, I can stay calm enough and grounded enough because I'm regulated enough that I can remember to make that new choice and I can do it even though it's going to be uncomfortable.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. I mean, there's kind of three key things there for me, which really, really landed, which I've also found to be incredibly helpful personally and professionally with patients. and professionally with patients. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be.

In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better

decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every

morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal,

that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. First thing is that you started really small. I love that language of a small promise. I often use that sort of language myself. You know, you make that small promise to yourself and you keep it. Just that small one. Don't make it too big because then it gets harder to keep. So I love that it was five belly breaths, which it's going to take under a minute that probably, depending on how fast you're doing them, or maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but everyone's got time for that. Okay. First thing. Second thing,

I love how you acknowledge that even something that sounds so simple can actually be very difficult if you are tense and tight. Actually, if you've never ever breathed all the way down into your lower abdomen, it can be, am I doing it right? I feel there's an obstruction there, right? So I love the fact that you acknowledge that because I think sometimes people will hear these conversations or see things on Instagram and go, yeah, but I know they said it's really easy, but I'm really struggling to do this basic thing. So I really appreciate you highlighting that. And the third thing for me there was this idea that it's not magic, right? That that in isolation is not going to transform your entire life. Yet, although it's not magic, I kind of feel the effects of it are magical because if you do

the first thing in the morning and you just give yourself that awareness that you've maybe never had before. When the day gets busy and stress comes in and obstacles arrive, you may at some point go, hey, wait a minute. Why don't I just try what I did in the morning? In some ways, it sort of primes you. It doesn't mean it's guaranteed you'll use it later on in the day, but I think when you do these things in the morning, you're much more likely to tap into them later. So yeah in the day. But I think when you do these things in the morning, you're much more likely to tap into them later. So yeah, those are three, I think, very powerful messages that I resonated with there. So thanks for sharing that. In your latest book, you also talk about the physiological side as well as many other breath practices. And I wonder if you could talk people through that because that's something

that I think is so calming, so easy, and so effective that I'd love people to start implementing it straight away, basically. Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's just a ton in the workbook I do outline several. My intention is always quick and easy, right? Because to speak to the point, we really do want to set ourselves up to use these, right? As a lifestyle tool to have those moments of memory. Because again, while practices and creating and carving out separate time for practices is absolutely can be the foundation of creating change. And for a lot of us doing something in that container of my private moment in the room with just myself, learning how to belly breathe helps me develop the confidence. There's something else about small daily promises because so many of us have set in so many intentions to change.

We begin to feel really disempowered and unable to change. We begin to doubt ourself. And something you said earlier, I just want to touch back on before we go into the side is you talked about self-love, not feeling worthy, not like kind of all of that conversation where it's not just enough again, to have the idea that I want to do better. If I don't feel right, that I'm worthy of doing better or confident that I'm worthy of doing better, that I can even make a new choice. It's going to be really hard for me to do that. And in my opinion, that empowerment comes when we begin to show ourself a new alignment between intention and daily action, because a lifetime of setting intentions that we don't act

upon have led us to have that belief that we can't, that we're not confident, that it again, is reserved for someone else. So while it feels like a huge, even like canyon to jump over, feels like a huge, even like canyon to jump over if we don't yet feel confident or empowered to make change, chances are it's because again, you've been setting intentions that haven't aligned within action. And the way out of that to rebuild is by those small daily promises.

It might seem so small that you are rolling your eyes, but psychologically over time and psychologically over time, you're showing yourself that alignment. You're showing yourself intentions kept by actions. And that will then translate to a bit of confidence, a bit of empowerment where you can become the person that says, you know what? I do keep the promises I make to myself, even when they're difficult. So one of the reasons why I'm always doing bite-sized practices. And again, there's several different types of breath work that you can see in the workbook. There's a million different types.

I started out on YouTube University, just Googling different simple, easy, again, because I have seen breathwork practices can be upwards of 30 minutes an hour. You can get a breathwork practitioner, as I've seen kind of advertised now, to help us through. And again, for a lot of us who've never done that, that feels so big, so overwhelming, that might not be the small daily promise. So it might be one of these more bite-sized practices of breath work that feel more approachable and that make us more likely

to be able to then integrate them because it's about the habit of using them, the consistency of making that choice. So one of them is a practice of a psychological sigh, it is called, or physiological, excuse me, sigh, it is called, and essentially sighing. I think a lot too, I watch animals a lot. And there's a lot that is similar

in terms of our nervous system between ourselves and animals and how animals function and different ways that we generally, or our body, something you said earlier, how wise our body is. I couldn't agree more. Like our body is so much wisdom. It is a self-regulating machine. It has ways.

It naturally releases tension for us. And I bring up animals because I think many of us might have pets, dogs included. And one of the things I'm always fascinated is when an animal becomes activated or there's a lot of energy or stimulated or stressed to release the stress, this is somewhat connected to the side, but a little different, but I think it's a good kind of illustration. They'll begin to shake usually their legs, their limbs. And when that is happening, what it is doing is it's a release valve, in a sense, for that built up energy, whether it's the excitement, your dog doing the, I think they heard it's called the zoomies around the room.

And there's a lot of, you know, energy that got agitated in the dog in that moment. Or maybe it had a stressful, there was a loud bang outside, maybe thunder. And then it releases tension. There was a loud bang outside, maybe thunder, and then it releases tension. So very similarly, we can use different types of shaking actually in our own human body to release tension. And sighing. Sighing is something that naturally our body does even outside of our own awareness. We can, though, there's an intentional practice of a physiological sigh.

And the sigh, again, is a natural way that generally that kind of self-regulating machine that is our body that we're both acknowledging, our body does in and of itself outside of our awareness to calm our energy. And of course, we can intentionally practice a physiological sigh by, we can just do that right now. We just take a moment and we can tune in. And of course, understanding that there's so many different ways in which we consume our podcast. If anyone is, you know, feeling safe and settled into their seat, to their bed and to wherever they are listening to this. Sometimes if we're kind of working with our body, I like to personally

close my eyes and you put a hand on my chest, on my thighs, wherever it's comfortable, just to ground me in the fact that I'm in a body right now. And again, if we feel safe for me, I like to close my eyes, really turning my attention away from the very distracting external world and turning my attention into my physical body. Maybe before we even get started doing a quick sigh, we can just tune in. Maybe if you did make a choice to put a hand on your chest and on your belly, we can just do a little quick self-assessment around some of the concepts we were just talking about.

And I'm just going to get quiet just for one second while you just turn your attention and see if you could just try to feel your physical body breathing. And if you did choose to put your hands on your chest and a hand on your belly, maybe use that as a marker for where your breath may be coming from. Is it coming from shallow in your chest? Can you even feel it? Is it coming from shallow in your chest or is it coming from even deep in your belly? So I'm just going to fall quiet just for one second. We can do that quick assessment. All right. Now that was just a little self-knowledge, self-inventory. And again, practice that. this even simple drop

in practice right here, right now, attuning to where you're breathing from. And now together, we will do a physiological sigh. And what that looks like is we're going to, we can, whatever is most comfortable. I like to breathe through my nose. So we're going to breathe in our nose. Let's say we'll breathe in for four seconds, and then we're going to breathe out for double that for eight seconds. We'll make that manageable. So in a second, we're going to breathe in. One, two, three, four.

And then breathe out for double that. Letting all of that air out. And again, you can play around a second time. Maybe we want to breathe in for three if that felt long, breathing out for six. Really the focus here is elongating, sighing, all of that breath out of your body. You can experiment with that for a bit, breathing in and then out, sighing it all for double the amount of time you've chosen, giving you some individual choice in this. And of course, taking a moment to drop in with your body, noticing shifts in tension, release, and continuing this practice. I mean, I don't want to take up all too much time, but that is a general gist, again, a self-assessment, drop into our body, attuned to

how it is that we're breathing. And then the practice of this physiological sigh, we're going to double that out-breath again, producing that sigh-like experience, and then always dropping in, checking in over time. Some of you beginning to notice actual shifts and changes in tension. Our shoulders may be dropping a bit down, maybe our jaw releasing a bit. And again, it doesn't immediately happen overnight miraculously,

but the more we practice, whatever type of breath work it is, it might even just be checking in belly breathing. I urge everyone because it is such an important, or it can be such an important foundational practice to find, because there are so many different versions of breathwork practices, find the one that resonates, that works, and that is more most likely for you to be able to utilize throughout your day. Yeah. Thank you, first of all, for sharing that. It's incredible, Nicole, just how powerful these

things are. Because I do lots of breathwork myself. I have a variety of different practices I'll be building up over years. But even with that, in the middle of that conversation, stopping to do it, I realized how much tension I was holding. I thought I was relaxing this conversation, but clearly my body had a different signal, a different message to tell me, which is, oh, maybe you're not. Maybe you're nervous. Maybe you want to make sure the conversation is as good as it can be. It's going to be as helpful as it possibly can. And I think why I'm sharing that is that none of us are perfect, right? Even if you know this stuff and practice it, you can still utilize these simple free tools to create that self-awareness, to help you balance your nervous system, to be aware of where you're holding

tension. So I think they're deceptively simple breathwork practices. You know, I think, I know it's easy to get, oh, what, tell me, you're going to tell me to breathe, are you? You know, and I, you know, I get that we've probably all had that response at some point in our lives, but yeah, you know what, we are going to tell you to breathe because it's that powerful when you do it with a bit of intention. Yes. I think that to speak to the point, I think we're both been having a bit and acknowledging the irony and the simplicity yet the complexity and the magic in this simplicity. I even just had a moment, we two months ago in our membership, the self healer circle, we were talking about very much applying this conversation,

something that we call an empowerment pause which is in that moment of time right before i'm getting ready to react just hitting literally a pause maybe just taking that one deep breath before i respond or react or you know do whatever it is that i'm going to do and so oftentimes we roll out content for a month and many members will begin to engage in that content and we'll start to then hear. And what we've been hearing in the more recent weeks in the portal, and it's been very much reports of that magic, something so simple, even just like taking a second before I instinctively pick up that phone call that I always pick up, taking a second before I go to say the thing I always say in that moment. Literally, it might be the difference between

what could seem so simple as just a second. There've been so many members that are literally one. It just, I have chills even thinking about it. They reported that their child, I think it was their son has been looking at them recently, acknowledging, saying like, who is this mom? Like even something so simple as a pause is so palpable for even, and I share that about the child acknowledging, for even those around us, right? It can be, and that could be something that we just, you know, roll our eyes about. Oh, breath work. Oh, just, oh, what do you mean? Just letting it ring three times before I answer?

Well, yeah, because that might be the difference of not answering. As simple as that is, there is so much magic. As simple as that is, there is so much magic. And what I'm hearing and why I'm sharing these reports back from members and children and seeing is literally that magic. And I know living that experience, it is magic. When you begin, when you go from feeling victim, reactive, out of control, and shameful as a result of it to even one moment, even if I still did the thing that I instinctively, you know, didn't want to do, if I was conscious, right. That just feels like literally a magical victory. And it is because what I am. So why I am so passionate and I love how even you're like, Oh, I dropped into my body. And for sometimes it's even excitement. I was talking to someone the other day and she's like, wow, you're talking really fast. You're like super passionate about this. I am like, I'm super excited. And we do, our body gets rolling. Tension starts to happen. It might not even be negative stress that I'm feeling. It might even be positive, right? My energy is flying around and just having that really simple moment to just even be present really can be the magic that creates the foundation for, in my opinion, the ripple

of transformation. Because that's why I am so passionate. The reason why I brought that up was because I do see, I do hear, and I get chills when I hear a child saying, I experience you as different. Because now that child might have a different map conditioning experience that they now bring into their world. And quite literally, I say it's the domino effect that in my opinion, the magic that changes the world outside of the transformation that so many of us will see that I know I've seen that has felt like magic in my own life. I am literally like you, a past self who couldn't stand not to win. I am so much identified with so much more than that. Now I feel my own magic. And in my opinion,

we translate our magic and our magic changes the world. And it's these really small moments that we can roll our eyes that we can, you know, forget about again, because we're so dysregulated. And if we can begin to first become conscious to create that footing, that grounding in that here now, then over time we can gift our ourselves with these magic making choices. I mean, I just love that. I'm also so passionate about this, Nicole. And you know, this ripple effect, it's amazing how this small thing will build over time. So it may be that you start off with that breath. It may be that when the phone rings instead of three times, you wait for that fourth ring before you pick up. And in the moment, it may not seem like much and you may even still react, but you're just

building. You're just starting to put a magnifying glass on this bit of self-awareness and bit by bit that then becomes, I've seen it in patients, I've experienced it myself, where you become a bit more, how can I put it, emotionally mature at handling relationships. So you start small, you get to the point where, let's say you're feeling triggered, you don't quite know why, where you can actually say, hey, listen, do you mind if we continue this in about five, 10 minutes? Because at the moment, I just don't feel able to give you a rational response. Like 10 years ago, there's no way I could have said something like that. But over time, you can go, actually, you know what, something's bothering me here. I know I'm not calm. Let me just,

you know, to use your language, self-regulate. Let me go do something to calm down. So let's have a productive conversation a little bit later. And it all starts with these kind of small steps. And there's a phrase in your new workbook that you talk about. I think it's in the section on resilience about, is it a window of tolerance that you write about, which I really, really love. And I wonder if it's a good part of the conversation to bring that up, because I kind of feel that it speaks to what we've just been talking about. 100%. And I will speak being very honest and acknowledging that I still have my moments of emotional reactivity or emotional immaturity. And I want to define first and foremost for everyone who's like, emotional immaturity. I would never, right? I am in my 40s, 50ifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, whatever it might be. How could I be emotionally immature? Emotional

immaturity is my definition, at least as I apply it to is that state of developmental ability around particularly what we're talking about here, emotional, right? Our emotional coping skills are tools. And when we were talking earlier, what I said is I'm not a magic mind reader that you were able to so resonate with those different ways, screaming, yelling, right? Icing. I don't talk to you. I take my toys out of the sandbox and I don't, you know, I give you the silent treatment. I wasn't a mind reader to know, you know, what, what that it was that for you. It's because again, there's so much universal, you know, it is a very childlike way and many of us laid and printed in our neurobiology, our mind and bodies

at a time where we were developmentally immature. We didn't have the resources to cope. And so if we really want to begin to define window of tolerance, stress resilience, what it all really means, it's really just that ability that we've kind of been referencing this entire conversation to deal with stress, to become stressed and then to become unstressed or to go back into that safe,

calm body. And what a window of tolerance means is to be able to tolerate more and more degrees of life stress without completely losing it, becoming dysregulated, screaming and yelling, to be able to tolerate more and more stress and safely continue to respond, which might be the best choice many of us can make in that moment, which is to remove ourselves before we become overreactive. Because this is applying everything we've been talking about. I can remain conscious in my conscious awareness, feeling my body begin to tense, right? Feeling my blood begin to boil, feeling my, my fist begin to clench, almost hearing what I'm going to retort next to you, right? I can become conscious in real time of all of that happening. And then there becomes a point of no return, right? Once my I'm locked and loaded enough,

and I feel threatened enough, I am screaming and yelling. And now I'm in a cycle of that dysregulation. So if in that moment, right, I can retain that conscious awareness and I'm getting ready to lose control and I can ask for that pause, go calm my body down, actually reenter that conscious, calm brain grounded state and then re-engage the conversation then. So when we are emotionally immature, it is because a lot of us without that modeling, without that calm, safe caregiver who

actually with us went from dysregulation when we're crying and upset and allowed their nervous system calmly holding us, bringing us back down to safety. If that didn't happen then consistently enough, we will, as we've always done, like we've been talking about, adapt. We will create the way to make ourselves safe by screaming, by yelling, by icing, maybe all that we saw our caregivers do. And we adopt oftentimes either what we see done or the only strategy that can fit for us or keep us safe in that system. So again, we become, and oftentimes it's in moments that when we become dysregulated, that we fall back and we rely on those older, more emotionally immature coping skills. So as far as I see it, I'm going to make a really big global statement here. I have met very few adults who have a wide window of tolerance,

who are able to deal with the natural stress. And this goes all back to what we were talking about emotions as well. Stressful environments happen, of course. Our ability to tolerate the stress, how can we cope with the stress is going to impact how safe I feel and how I embody my life in that moment, more so than the environment. This is the example where we can have two individuals,

maybe one who had a safe attuned caregiver who has a wider window of tolerance, which just means that they can deal with more and more stress. So living the same moment as someone who didn't have that attuned caregiver who can't deal with stress, that moment's gonna land differently.

Same stress outside for both of those humans because one's gonna feel more confident and capable and have had the experience of their body becoming dysregulated and safely learning how to calm itself down without it imploding or exploding. And the other person isn't going to have had that experience. So they're going to remain overwhelmed, unable,

and probably emotionally, immaturely reacting. The only way that at that one time, they were able to deal with this, which is again, why it becomes so important, this entire journey of becoming consciously aware of those older coping skills that we're bringing with us and the role that my body plays. Because just like we were having a conversation of teaching us a new, in terms of realigning our intention and action around these small daily promises, to teach ourself confidence and our ability to deal with our emotions happens in those moments. Happens as we become consciously aware of dysregulation. And as we make those new choices, not to scream or yell this time, to remove ourself, to separate, maybe to do some

deep belly breathing, maybe to ask directly for support. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by now. Can we go take a walk? Can we calm down together if we do have that safe, supportive individual? Now, the more consistently we do that, what we're actually doing is we're widening our window and teaching our self-confidence that we can tolerate and deal with our emotions so that then over time we become less likely to rely on those emotionally immature, even though I still have my moments. If I'm not sleeping well, if I'm not caring for my body well, if I'm too stressed, I might still scream, yell, or silent treatment you, my favorite go-to things to do. However, the more regulated I am, the more conscious I am,

the more my resources are replenished, the more likely I am to rely on all of the other new memories I have, which is I don't have to scream and yell or ice you to keep myself safe. I have other things that I can do, whether it's taking care of myself, separating, doing my breathing, moving my body, calming myself down. Or I've also now learned to ask for support, to allow support that I never had in, to learn now how to co-regulate or come back to calm with that other person. So again, I want to acknowledge

all of the other emotionally immature moments that many of us will continue to live. Again, it's not that magic light switch. We don't have all this information now, but emotional immaturity goes away. We know how to tolerate and deal with our emotions. We have a wide window of stress tolerance. Absolutely not.

Again, this is why holistically we have to become conscious, see how dysregulated we are, and be a participant in those moments so that we can actually teach our body how to go from a little more stress back into calm and then a little more and a little more. more stress back into calm and then a little more and a little more. I really appreciate you sharing that you still have those moments. Me too. And I think, you know, people will look at you, Nicole, with your millions of followers on Instagram and

your expertise in this area. And they may start making the assumption that, actually, Nicole never reacts. She's totally calm. She's got the best relationship. She sleeps eight hours a night. She's coming to a book tour, but she's going to make sure she's got enough time to look after herself.

But actually, you're human like the rest of us. And it's about progress, isn't it? It's not about perfection. It's about progress. And't it? It's not about perfection. It's about progress. And I think that's so important that these patterns are so deeply rooted in us that even if we think we're making progress, we probably are making progress, but sometimes we can revert back. And that doesn't mean that the last five years of therapy or the last five years of breathwork or journaling or whatever it might be that you're using to help you, it doesn't mean

they're wasted. It just means there's more work to do, right? And it's a journey. And I think you sharing that, I think is really, really powerful. Yeah, of course. And I would even want to challenge what some of us do label as setback. Because what I know happens, and again, applying all these concepts, the more conscious we become, what could feel like and what we might apply the label of setback to, in my opinion, could actually be thrown over in the other category of progress, of evolution, of change, because so many of us, it does feel so much more uncomfortable. So for me, using my example, right, as I began to see how disconnected I was and reconnect with my body, I could have said, oh my gosh, I'm feeling worse because I was. I mean, what began as uncomfortable feelings, you know, creating this awareness, giving me the opportunity to look deeper at this stuff,

feelings, you know, creating this awareness, giving me the opportunity to look deeper at this stuff. The more time I spent looking at the reality, right? Radical honesty of the experiences that I was carrying, creating, continuing in my life, the more uncomfortable and pained and worse, if we want to just put a label on it, I felt. So again, I often like to even challenge because so, so many of us could say, oh, I feel worse now, I'm going backward. And in reality, what is happening for a lot of us is we're just becoming consciously aware and present to how it's been. We've just gotten so savvy at distracting ourself

with the endless life and stimulation around us. Or again, we're so locked and loaded with those blinders on of our autopilot that we're not even aware of what's been going on or what is actually been trapped in our body all along. And if we want to, another word, I think I want to say that I'm still living into myself is in my opinion, what I'm coming to realize is that life is about that word that we just keep saying, progress. It's about evolution. I don't actually think, I used to call it my proverbial hippie hammock in the sky

that I'm just like looking for it. This like done, the sacred place of doneness. D-O-N-E is the word that I'm pronouncing here. So where is that? I haven't found it. I don't know if there is that end point, that finish line. And what I'm starting to really realize, especially as I explore even more of our energetic nature, just thinking about what energy is, right? Neither created nor destroyed. It just isn't

a process of moving, changing, shifting, evolving. And again, back to the human existence, I think that's uncomfortable. We love certainty. We love an endpoint. We love a goal. We love concrete. For even some of you, I'm sure it feels challenging maybe to even hear me say we're a process. You know, we're an evolution. We're an energy. We're movement.

We're not ending point stagnation at all. And again, going back to, I mean, even just like idea of progress of life itself, the more comfortable, because I loved endpoints. I love to-do lists and I love getting to complete and something, again, I've learned about that to-do list and to speak to your point of me even sharing my daily challenges. It's in these moments where I am busy, even for exciting things like new books and opportunities and conversations I can have with incredible people like you. So close to the surface for me is that overachieving self

that wants to just embody that role and forget about everything else I just talked to you about for an hour and a half, my body, the daily self-care. For me, the more busy and more opportunities I have to perform, the easier it is for me to forget about the wholeness, about the foundation on which I, the person who, yes, I still inhabit the role of conversation, of teaching, of sharing, of writing books, but that's not all that I am. I can feel loved and enough, right?

Just as I am now. So again, I share that to also offer how sometimes, right, it's not even just feeling like we're setting back and it's not even a negative place we shift back into. For me, again, it can be very confusing, very validating, right? Well, who needs my body? I'm achieving and I'm going to put out another great book and give me the next project. And again, validation from outside. But what I have learned is if I don't stay committed to the human that's embodying these roles, the foundational, you know, peace and regulation and safety that I need to be truly who I am, that it's only a matter

of time before I fall right back into that immature reactivity. And again, I start to feel the impact of that. There's something you said there, which I think is very important to highlight for me. When we think about addiction, I think a lot of us think about addiction to substances, you know, sugar, alcohol, drugs. sugar, alcohol, drugs. But there's another addiction that I've been thinking a lot about over the last few years, and that's this addiction to our stress hormones, right? We've lived a certain way. So speaking to this idea of the familiar self versus the unfamiliar future, right? You mentioned there about people may not like the fact that this is a process. There is no end point here. No, it's always going to be a little bit unfamiliar. You're just getting better and better. But there's still going to be those moments where it's like,

oh, this is an area where I've got a bit of work to do. Oh, here's another area I've got a bit of work to do. This is not failure. This is progress. This is an opportunity for growth. But one thing I've seen in myself in the past, but I observe a lot these days, is that there are sanctioned and celebrated addictions, like a work addiction. And I've noticed, I know people, this was me, I was on holiday with my family recently and we went abroad and something really quite remarkable and profound happens for me. I could just sit there. I always get up early. I love to get up early before everyone and do my own self-care practices. But I'd often sit there with a coffee and then the coffee would be finished. I'd be on the balcony and the sun

was shining. And I'd just be for 30, 40 minutes. I wasn't trying to put a podcast on. I wasn't trying to do something else. I wasn't even trying to write a journal, as helpful as that can be. I wasn't trying to do something else. I wasn't even trying to write a journal, as helpful as that can be. And I thought five years ago, I could not have done that. I needed to be busy. I needed to be doing stuff. And something you just said there really made me think about that because I think many people, they think,

oh, I'm not a drug addict. I don't have a problem with alcohol. Yeah, but they can't stop working. They can't sit still. And I think the underlying drive behind it is actually not that dissimilar. I wonder what your perspective is on that. 100%. And I think if we even want to, you know, addiction, how any sort of addictive behavior, let's make it really global, is defined again, really simply is, you know, sort of addictive behavior, let's make it really global, is defined again, really simply is, you know, the feeling of being compelled to engage in whatever activity it might be. And you just given a bunch of different examples, socially approved and not so socially approved, of course, right,

despite the possible dysfunctional or negative consequences. So really what an addiction embodies is this idea of right. Continuing to do. And this is where I think it gets confusing for these more validated or celebrated ones like work, like achievement is that even I'm sure I'm imagining people listening, hearing me say that they're like, well, there is no, there is no, there is no downside of working, right? I'm, I'm motivated. I'm successful. I might even be building, you know, generational resources, financial for my family, right? There is no downside. With I think the reality being, and I think what we're insinuating and why we are throwing it into the camp of, yes, it actually becomes a compulsive

behavior is because I think the downside for a lot of people that are engaging in that type of achievement work-based addiction is they're not attuned to the impact that it is actually having on your body. I don't believe the human body is. And again, I think a lot about just us, us over time evolving as a species and what life looked like, right. Eons ago versus what it looks like now for us. And it looks quite different, right. Nine to five work weeks weren't really right. And working in the way that we work and living in the cities, the way that we live wasn't really the natural environment that our bodies needed. I also have learned, right, that anything that's really consistent is something that I'm coming to the awareness of, like the 80, 90, you know, supersized work week that so many of us with this idea that we do that every week, season after season,

to me, that's so unnatural, right? The human is seasonal. We go through, and I'm sure people can even, you know, attest to, yeah, in the winter, my energy feels different than in the spring and the summer, right? We are fluctuating, even going back to this idea of energy, right? We are moving, fluctuating creatures. So even for the many of us, again, who have been celebrated by these endless working achievements, again, I could make an argument that the consequence often, again, is exhaustion, is overstepping emotional limits, is what aren't you tending to now possibly, or putting your time and attention on because it's all going devoted, right, to work. And more so, is there any other way, because what I view addiction or any of

these self-regulating behaviors is an attempt to do just that, to relieve suffering, to relieve pain, to help me feel a bit better or to navigate, maybe it is the stress hormones that my body has gotten so used to. So I see any behavior that we're habitually engaging in, maybe it is the stress hormones that my body has gotten so used to. So I see any behavior that we're habitually engaging in, maybe even compulsively engaging in, if it is our only way, right? If working is the only way that I can feel better, right? Then again, we might want to get radically honest because anything that only, that limits us, right? For an opportunity, like there's no other way to release this tension, to feel safe, to regulate ourself in that moment. Then again, I might call it to just to explore a bit. If you can make other choices, if there can be other resources, other ways that you can care for your body. And it's again, speaking

very similar to a lived experience, sitting in silence, in stillness, meditating, right? All these traditional things that for a very long time I'd heard could be really helpful was nothing that I ever in my body felt safe doing for a very, very long time. To sit in stillness, we have to have some level of safety in our nervous system. Our body has to feel it is okay to stop moving, to stop scanning, to stop being on alert for that threaded hand. And if my body is a ball of tension, if I have cortisol racing through it, maybe from nothing that's even happening objectively, immediately in my environment right now, maybe because I'm reliving an argument I had this morning, maybe

because I'm worrying about something to do tomorrow, maybe because I'm reliving an argument I had this morning, maybe because I'm worrying about something to do tomorrow, maybe because I've never released, right, this trauma I've carried with me for a lifetime. So now, while I might be hearing that meditation, wanting to give myself this moment of stillness that, you know, you might've heard is so helpful, when I actually go to stop my body, what I'm tuned into,

what my mind is going to scan down and receive messages around is that it's not actually safe. What are you doing, Nicole? My muscles are tense. My heart rate is pounding. There's something threatening. No, absolutely. You can't stop right now. You got to get your ass moving and get away from this problem and, and, or constantly race in your mind, right? If my body is sending a message that I'm tight, that I'm threatened, that I'm stressed, it's only a matter of time that my mind is going to need to make sense of why my body is so stressed. So if we really want to simplify this conversation, there's so many of us who can't just sit still, just relax, just meditate.

In those moments, the reason maybe why you can't embody peace is because your body isn't embodying peace because your body is activated and it won't allow you. So going back to this idea of right, stress addiction, hormone addiction, I call it emotional addiction, right? We can become so familiar ingrained in our body's muscular tension that that is our state of being. So we can't logic away. We can't just say, just chill, right? Because our body isn't chill. Yeah. It's such an important point you've raised because I think a lot of people end up feeling bad where they hear about solitude or meditation or mindfulness and go, I can't do that. I've tried, I can't do that. But you just beautifully

explained that it is a process. And that's a beautiful part in this book where you write about this idea that actually, you can't hack this process. You can't speed it up, nor would you want to speed it up. And I think that's a really beautiful sentiment for people. The process is where all the gold is. You get all the discoveries along the way. You kind of don't want to go from A to Z without passing through B, C, D, E, F. Do you know what I mean? Even though in the moment you may think you want to get to the end point, the goal is actually by going through that journey, I think. the goal is actually by going through that journey, I think.

I actually very intentionally and strategically capitalized on the one. So the new workbook, of course, is entitled How to Meet Yourself, being two separate words, that self I'm referencing being your authentic self, imagining that most people who happen upon the workbook or have heard of my work are really eager to get to that meeting of that authentic self, right? I imagine that's why people would pick up a book like this for the end of the journey. So very strategically and intentionally for all of the reasons that we've unpacked on our conversation here today, I've separated the workbook into three major sections with almost like a prequel, if you will. And the prequel is all about, and I'm sure by this point in the conversation,

this might not be surprising to hear, creating safety and consciousness. How can I be conscious in my body? And what are some tools like the physiological side breath work? Because I think as many of you have been listening, I hope our understanding how integral safety is to be in a safe body really then does allow us to begin to explore deeper feelings, deeper wounding that we're bringing from our conditioning. And it ultimately eventually allows us to then meet our authentic self. So while I'm very aware that once you progress through resourcing yourself with safety, creating tools, we enter into the realm of the body for everything that we've talked about because it is so foundational

because so many of us are living with dysregulation, sending those signals to our mind. Once we build in that foundational reconnection to our body, begin to meet our body's needs, then we progress peeling back the next layer, which is in terms of our mind and all of the beliefs and our inner child and our ego and our shadow and everything that's living up in our mind,

often driving people pleasing behaviors again, that keep us again, disconnected from ourself. And then it is only when, right, we've peeled back all of that layers of the onion that now we enter into the authentic self section. So again, I say I've done that intentionally with the hope that readers of the workbook, while I do hope it to be a book we can live with, a roadmap that many, maybe some of us choose to read from cover to cover and then go back and really begin or embody the journey. My hope and suggestion is that it is proceeded sequentially, right? We don't just go right to, or it is you proceed through it, I should say in a more sequential right? We don't just go right to, or it is, you proceed through it, I should say, in a more sequential manner that we don't just dive right into.

Because again, it will be very difficult to connect with that deeper space of passion, of purpose, to feel passionate, purposeful, creative, and imagine as if we have to, I'm sure this again won't come as a surprise, feel safe enough. When we're not safe, our body is not gonna prioritize. It's gonna prioritize our survival into that next moment, dreaming, imagining, creating that is so far down on our

priority list that we won't be able to connect. So even those of us who try to skip through to section three, um, again, acknowledging how important it is to peel back all of that onion and to go back to something about that porch that's striking me that I just want to offer here now. My opinion, I'm of the opinion that our goal, when we peel back that onion and create these moments where we can attune to what we really want and who we are and meet our authentic self and then be that person in the world, that's the goal, I believe, for our human existence, if you ask me, but hopefully the goal for this workbook. My hope is that that goal translates into many of those moments on the porch, meaning of pure existence, consciousness, presence of just being, not doing. And this is, again, the reason why I want to emphasize this. Healing can even be something that we hyper do, right? There's

so many of us that I've heard, right? That won't allow that moment on the porch where I'm just staring off into the distance because I might assume or assign that that's not me healing. I'm not being accurate. I'm not really getting down into it. In my opinion, the goal is actually to have more moments. That is life. Life does live in each little present moment, shift, change that's happening here now. It's not being hyper-focused, hyper-analysis of my thoughts, hyper-viewing myself in every given moment, always thinking I should be doing something different. It's actually being able to inhabit that. So what life looks like is less doing even internally. Again, I see so many people that are like, do you ever take time off, Nicole, from healing?

I'm like, that's the goal is to just always be right in that state of pure presence. The goal isn't healing, isn't hyper-focus, hyper-analyzing, hyper-judging, hyper-criticizing, even hyper-doing internally either. Awareness, again, is a state of just simply being, of witnessing, of again, having more moments on that porch or wherever it is where you're just in your presence of the moment at hand, whatever that might be.

There's two quick things I hope we can cover. One is to do with relationships, Nicole, and that is that many people who follow my work, I imagine you follow your work, who listen to this show, will often say, hey, Rangan, I get it. I understand, but my partner doesn't. And with all your expertise and wisdom, I wonder if you can share some insights that may be helpful for people who are listening, who are doing the work, and maybe they're going to get your workbook and do even more work on themselves, but find that they're in an environment where the person around them or the people around them are stuck in patterns that they no longer

want to be a part of. Do you have any advice for those people? no longer want to be a part of. Do you have any advice for those people? Absolutely. So again, acknowledging first the natural human tendency to want different for other people in our life. And usually again, simplifying it, it usually comes, you know, kind of in two ways. We want differently because this relationship I'm in with this person, I'm struggling in some way, right? Like me, it's not deep enough. There's dynamics that aren't serving me. I don't feel seen, heard, whatever it might be, right? I want you to change so that I can feel different. Really simplifying, that's one version

of why we look outward. We urge people around us to change. Another version is I'm doing all this incredible work. I'm making magic in my life and I see you suffering. Maybe I'm not even doing a super lot of magic in my life. Maybe I just see you suffering and I love you and I want you to feel better and or I am making magic and I want you to have this magic too.

Again, really natural to wanna relieve the suffering of our loved ones by taking them along our journey with us or want them to have these amazing changes, transformations that we're having. So very, very natural, I think to have any version or all versions of that desire for someone else to change. And like I referenced earlier, I think one of the most difficult aspects of the human experience is really understanding how limited we are to changing other people. Even our, and again, this, I know this might be difficult to

hear. And while I can't fully relate, cause I don't have children of myself, I at least personally believe this applies even to our children. We can punish, we can try to right, shift and change and urge them to behave in certain ways, probably even for their best interest. Though in reality, what likely will happen in those moments is just like we did, we'll adapt, we'll modify, right? That child will listen to you per se, but the question is, are you really changing, right? Who they are?

Can you even? So I guess what I'm ultimately bringing up is the reality, in my opinion, at least that we can't change anyone outside of ourself. For all the reasons that we've even been talking to together today, change is a lot. It's the daily commitment of new choices more often than not, right?

It has to be the human who's going to then show up and make those new choices. We can wish well, we can want well, we can love everyone around us and want different. We might even want relief and need relief in our relationship with that person. Though, again, to allow that to happen for us, we have to focus on us. So that is of course to say, if there's a problematic dynamic, dysfunctional, if there's active abuse, right? As we come to this awareness, it doesn't mean condoning. You don't hear Dr. Nicole say, oh, well, we can't change them. So then we just continue to allow it. Absolutely not, right? To protect ourself,

change the dynamic to keep ourselves safe. We might have to put up new boundaries, new limits, limit contact, communication, whatever it might be. We though have the responsibility to creating, to separating ourself from that person. And then the beautiful byproduct, as we continue to make the changes that we need, regardless of what they will or won't do and acknowledging that probably for a lot of the receivers of us being different in whatever way it is, at minimum, they're going to be surprised because you're going to be violating some expectations that a lifetime of your relationship have validated. If you're always there on the second call, the second phone ring, right? Going back to that example, the other person is going to be surprised when it rings

seven times and you didn't answer at minimum. And then of course it can get much more complicated when their conditioning gets involved, when they begin to make meanings over you're not right. And then the reaction might not be welcoming of your beautiful new change that you're making for yourself and the better of the relationship, right? It could be screaming, yelling, upset, hurt, abandoned feelings, whatever it might be. However, the more we stay committed, regardless of how they're reacting to our changes and stay committed to creating that change for ourself, one of two things happen, sometimes both. The first things is we actually do change the dynamic. We create safety where we need it. We

create space for our own needs to be met in the fact that I didn't answer that call, regardless of how you feel about it. My needs now, right, are being considered in that moment. So over time, I'm actually shifting the dynamic myself. Even if you keep calling me, right, I won't answer. So now the dynamic feels different inherently for me, regardless of if you've done anything. Second possible byproduct is over time, our loved ones might be looking and experiencing us in a new way that they too want to become then inspired to change. So that desire, right, that often does come from a very well-intentioned space of, I don't want you to suffer, right. I want you to be on this amazing journey with me alongside

of me, right. Might be the motivation of them seeing and experiencing back to that child, right. Partners, again, have said this to other members of the community. Wow. You're different. What are you doing? I want more of that. I want that for me. So again, motivating, I think a lot of us very well intentionally try to say directly, maybe even, you know, throw out some ultimatums or consequences of what will happen if you don't change. And again, that, that isn't the way to change. We stay focused. We change what we need to change for ourselves so that we can experience this relationship differently so that we can create safety maybe where it is necessary. And then the more we change, not only is a byproduct of the relationship dynamic going to shift, but they might actually, this person we desire to change might begin to take a more active participatory role. And if they don't, again, as I always say, everything that's happening around us is always information, something we can learn to make then a different choice next time with how we continue maybe to navigate that particular relationship moving forward. Really, really

powerful. Very, very helpful, Nicole. You know, I always enjoy researching every guest I speak to on the show. I like to immerse myself into their life, into their work, and really almost try and feel who are they? What is it that they're all about? And one of the big questions that came up for me is that as someone who appears to have got a lot of their self-worth throughout their life from external validation, you've been through this process. Yet through that process, you have blown up on Instagram, which I think speaks to how many people need the wisdom that you're sharing. But now you're in a situation where with, what is it,

over 5 million followers now, maybe even more, you are probably getting levels of external validation daily that very few people get. So what I'm interested in is how do you manage that? What I'm interested in is how do you manage that? That appears to be a trap or a potential trap for you based upon your past. For me, it's really fascinating to say, well, what do you have to do to make sure you don't fall into that trap of getting your self-worth again from the validation that you are absolutely getting on Instagram? I really appreciate this question and it's really interesting to think about. So interestingly enough, while external validation

has very much been that point of connection to my mom in particular, there's always been a part of me that's felt really uncomfortable, vulnerable with showing myself publicly. So outside of performing, say for like softball type instances in a much more controlled setting where mainly I was looking to be celebrated by my mom, I was incredibly, incredibly shy. And I never, I mean, public speaking, the fact that I even like have individual eyes on me, right. As an idea, as a concept, I, I was the little girl, the adolescent, the teenager who was hiding usually in the back of things. So saying that to say, um, that while again, external validation for me, it was really the point of contact being my mom, those closest to me. When I thought about a more global,

more public appearance, it was inherently really scary. And the reason why I'm sharing this is when I made even the decision to create that Instagram account, which was the first account that I went up as the holistic psychologist, some like three plus four, Jesus, four years ago now, us for Jesus four years ago now, I even forget the year that was created. It for me was an exercise in my own healing journey. And what I mean when I say that is I had come to the awareness again, that people pleasing comes very much into this, that I had learned so much how to perform in different ways in my relationships, not only just in succeeding, being of service, being the friend that I thought you wanted to be, being the person I thought you needed to be. I had performed so much or filtered so much of how I chose to be from what I chose to share my thoughts, my ideas,

my feelings, to how I interacted with someone based on my concern about how it would be for them, right? How they would experience me, the impact I would have. I was always performing with someone else in mind. So sharing all that to say, I came to the realization somewhere in my, you know, when I was entering in my thirties, coming this whole conversation, coming, hitting that bottom,

peeling back all my layers of conditioning. I really saw how much I censored things I believed and how much even in my field, I was taught to do that. I mean, one of the major things we're taught when we're training to be a clinical psychologist, at least is to remove the person that we are and to be that blank slate in the room. And while of course I understand for practical reasons

why that's so helpful. Again, I was receiving all of this messaging, right? That me, my story, Nicole, me just sharing my thoughts was not, not appropriate for many different reasons. So the action of creating that Instagram account was actually for me, a commitment to being a person, to having a platform, to beginning to share. And I had no expectation or idea of how many people would resonate. It was an intention I set to be like, I'm going to start to just to talk about Nicole, about what I went through, right. About what I was struggling with and how I was beginning to heal.

And like I said, I was, I was scared. I wasn't necessarily looking, um, to be seen in that, that very, very public way. So up until now, I still have, it's much easier when I don't, the virtual world, let me put it this way, is helps because the idea of being on a stage of having that validation, even of seeing it in comments for me, still brings up a bit more of discomfort than kind of that positive, I think, feeding

that I think that your question is giving me the idea of, interestingly, and this all kind of brings up the concept a little bit about being addicted to our own stress hormones, addicted maybe to our own belief, our own emotions. What is difficult for me is not the positive feedback. It is so much easier for me to delete that, to like see the very nice comment and be like, Oh, that's so nice. And to focus more of my time, attention and upset emotion on the negative comments. So for me, again, because what the negative comments, there's this idea again, right. That I'm not good enough, that seeing who I am is and can be, and often is misinterpreted and reacted to negatively.

That is more kind of my continued difficulty. And the way I understand it is again, the conversation we were just having, there's so much of me that's so used to feeling shameful, not good enough, immersed in my stress, being felt like it's not appropriate, right. For me to show all of this, that of course I'm deleting any sort of validation of actually, Nicole, you're being celebrated. People do see all of you and they love, right. And are validating all of you. It's so much easier for me to put that monocle back on in my stressed body in that moment and be like, I'm going to go look at all the crap and feel crappy about myself. So interestingly, it's the opposite. I think that

I am contending with, and again, all of it makes sense to me in the context of what I know me and my conditioning and even this conversation to be just giving me another moment of choice. Sometimes I do go down the rabbit hole of negative and often more often than not, I try to make the choice not to, and to actually allow in the positive validation that you're talking about to allow myself to sit with that's what's more uncomfortable the fact or the reality that you might actually see me and like what you see and I might actually be enough to you I'm actually getting chills that's more uncomfortable than me sitting in the reality that you just hate what I'm saying and you think I'm you know crap yeah

I really appreciate your honesty there I really do and I well, I, like many millions of others around the world, are delighted that you did set up that account. I think the content is genuinely life-changing for so many people. So it's amazing to see all the success you have had, you continue to have. I'm absolutely convinced your next book, the latest How to Meet Yourself, is going to be very, very helpful for so many people around the world. Thank you very much for writing it. I really appreciate your time today, Nicole. It's been wonderful to talk to you. You're someone who I've wanted to talk to for a couple of years now. So it really has been an honor to speak to you. For people who are struggling in their life, Nicole, right at the end of this conversation, have you got any final words for them?

Absolutely. First, I want to thank you. This has been, like I said, I was so, so grateful when we were able to connect and make this work. I'm so, so honored to be a part of this conversation with you. I'm so grateful for the conversations you facilitate for the collective to hear, you know, some of these topics. I'm so grateful even hearing how similar, you know, we've been on our own professional, personal journeys of evolution. So always connecting with other humans really, really is, is so much of, of, of my why of being me and of having right. These moments of connection. So, so beautifully appropriate. Um, I wanted to, to acknowledge that. And also to everyone listening, I just want to celebrate where you are right now in this exact

moment where, wherever it may or may not be. There is so much life in this present moment. There is so much, again, we, we, we diminish, we delete everything, right. That we've been through the entirety of our journey thus far. And we tend to focus more on where we're not yet, what is not yet working. And again, I don't in any way, I'm not saying this as a meaning to minimize. I'm just saying, again, to gift the opportunity for the choice you made or to give you the, I should say, acknowledgement for the choice you made and the gift of the opportunity to tune into this. I mean, you made that choice for each of you today to hit listen, to expose yourself to new information and to be present to it. And that's

an incredibly powerful choice for, again, all of the reasons that we talked about. New information can feel really threatening. Hearing new ideas, hearing even new tools that might even over time create magic in your life can feel very threatening and very challenging. So the fact that you hit play, the fact that you've gotten to this point in the podcast, the fact that you're showing up for yourself in this way is definitely nothing to minimize. So I want to end in celebration of that choice because it's upon that choice that you can build literally an infinite amount of other choices and create incredible magic and transformation, not only in your own life, but in my opinion, for all of us sharing this amazing earth together. Dr. Nicole, you are

transforming many, many lives all around the world. Thank you for joining me on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice,

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