Her Discussions by Dr Faye - Psychologist: Methods To Manage Anxiety, Stress and Burnout

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

ad Discover probiotics that actually work. Smart Strains delivers the right strain, dose, and format, backed by real clinical trials.Have a look:https://smartstrains.com/?utm_source=herdiscussions&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=herdicussionspod&utm_id=Faye+BateAiley is a leading voice in somatic psychology. She was a Prima Ballerina and Miss Canada before her own trauma led her to become a chartered psychologist.We’ll explore how to manage anxiety and burnout, stop living in survival mode, improve your nervous system, and release tension.What you’ll learn:⭐ how to stop living in survival mode🧠 1 concept that can improve 80% of your nervous system❄️ why you freeze instead of getting things done👀 why you can’t make eye contact💪 3 reasons your body is tense all the time☀️ why a walk may work better than gratitude listsResources & links mentioned:Ailey Jolie: @aileyjolieHelen (Ailey’s physiotherapist) https://tmjphysio.co.uk/helen-cowgill-physiotherapyLinks to subscribe / follow:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/her-discussions-by-dr-faye/id1835829612Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5viLYizHD4Zy6J42iqtPRoCan I ask you a BIG favour? 💙Please leave a review or rating. It helps us grow the podcast and bring you more amazing guests.Share with someone who needs this; it might help them live a happier, healthier life.Follow us on social media or join the broadcast channel to send us your questions for our guests. I'll leave the link here: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/?igsh=MWhuaXFweGtucTB3cA==https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/?igsh=MWhuaXFweGtucTB3cA==🛑 Disclaimers & legal:This podcast is for educational / informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, or financial advice. All opinions are those of the speaker(s).

We can be totally disconnected from our body after trauma, or we can be so acutely aware of our body after trauma. You put experiences like that consequentially together over a long period of time. That's going to cause developmental trauma. Ailey is a leading voice in somatic psychology. She was a professional ballerina and Miss Canada before her own trauma led her to become a chartered psychologist. Creating kind of a beautiful image on the outside was one of the ways I distracted away while I was hiding all this self-hatred.

For me, both of those choices were really driven by trauma. Until that staff is really acknowledged, it does continue to play out. We'll explore nervous system dysregulation, anxiety and burnout. We're going to come on to our section called Real or Real. Why do people burn out, then, in your view? When people win, they are rarely burnt out at that moment. It's not a negative to feel overwhelmed because you have responsibility. People depend on you, people are relying on you to do something.

Great. Thoughts? Good question. Before we get into the episode, I'm super excited to share with you a brand that captures exactly what this podcast is all about. Science-led, evidence-backed progress in women's health. Today's sponsor SmartStrains has developed a range of clinically proven live bacterial supplements, each designed for a specific health need and only formulations backed by clinical trials and recommended by global health guidelines.

No vague promises or one size fits or blend, like so many others you see on the shelves today. Make sure to check out their website to learn more about the live bacteria formulations that genuinely make a difference. And thank you so much to SmartStrains for sponsoring today's episode. I'm so excited that SmartStrains have even given you guys

an exclusive code for 20% off. Just use the code, Faye 20 at checkout. Limited to one use per customer and can't be used alongside any other day. counts. But first, please do not forget to subscribe or leave a five-star review on whatever platform you're using to listen to this podcast. It really, really helps us grow so that we can continue to help you live a happier, healthier life. Thank you. Ailey, our community sent in so many questions about stress and anxiety. But first, I read that you were a prima valerina and Miss Canada

Yeah. At 19. Yes. And then you decided to become a somatic psychotherapist. Could you explain what led you to go into this? And also, in really simple terms, what is a somatic psychotherapist? So I will define somatic psychotherapist just so that people understand what I do and how it may be different.

So a somatic psychotherapist is trained clinically in the same way. a regular psychotherapist would be trained. So we are trained to listen to stories, to know how to process trauma, to weave cognitive narratives together, to reframe. We have that skill set. But we also have additional skill set of both listening to the story that someone is saying through their words, but also the story of the body. So that means I'm going to notice when your eye contact breaks. I'm going to notice how many times you blink. I'm going to notice, okay, your breath is actually not moving into your abdominal cavity. And I'm going to use what I notice. I'm going to gather. I'm going to gather evidence through my time together, but also through what I experience in my body. So I have to

kind of already know, did I come into this session anxious? Did I come in a little stressed or with tension? I didn't. So actually sitting in the presence of this person after a few moments, I'm really tense or I'm really anxious. And we're going to kind of have a little bit of an inner dialogue around what's going on with our body that we may be picking up from the other because we know, and you could probably add to this, our mirror neurons are constantly communicating with the other person, they live in our prefrontal cortex, and they give us really wonderful information around the people we're around in regards to safety, danger, emotional resonance. And so we use that information in the therapy. So a client may be sharing a story, and it can be

sometimes a bit abrupt as well, and we'll say, I noticed when you said that your affect changed. Or have you noticed through this session, you haven't been. breath taking a big breath at all or notice you're not breathing right now or it's really hard for you to make eye contact can we pause here and can we notice what it would be like to bring eye contact in or what it would be like to take eye contact away for the rest of the session and it's really interesting when you just make those body-based contact statements how much of the experience of therapy changes because how often first of all in our waking life when we're walking around, does someone actually deeply listen to us to just our cognitive verbal story? And then also

how rare is it that someone sits across from us and gives their full presence, not just my mind, my entire body. And I'm monitoring that entire body to actually be deeply attuned and listen to you. And with that level of presence, something interesting does happen. And the story does start to change. So that's kind of what a semantic psychologist does. I know if you take a little scroll on Instagram or TikTok, they'll be like lots of videos of shaking and catharsis and screaming. And that can totally be part of it. I'm not going to sit here and say that I have not screamed, no, and held my client's hand at the top of my lungs or had sessions where we sat on the floor together.

Those things happen. But when they do happen, they've been really built into the therapy and they're really built on this strong foundation of trust through those simple moments of saying, it's really hard for you to make eye contact with me today. Let's play with that. So it's got this little bit of experimental element to it. So that's my first answer to your second question. Yes, I trained, did a lot of ballet, had a small little moment performing with the Royal Moscow Ballet when they came to Canada and then spent some time in the Miss Teen Canada, Miss Canada world, which feels like a whole other life. For me, both of those choices,

were really driven by trauma. And I feel always forever so grateful. Obviously not for my experiences of trauma. I wouldn't wish them on anyone. And if I could, I... But that was the circumstances in which I was born into and what happened to my body. But while those experiences of trauma were happening as a little person,

I did have dance. And so it was this one place where I could express freely and move my body and be in connection to something else. And it was this one place where I felt so safe. And like anything, when that's like the only place you feel safe, you're probably going to take it to an extreme, which I absolutely did. And it led to a lot of perfectionism, a lot of overachievement and also a lot of compensation. I had a lot of shame and self-hatred and confusion around the trauma I'd experienced and was experiencing. And creating kind of a beautiful image on the outside was one of the ways I distracted away from that.

And I can definitely see that now with my personality. I'm quite introverted. A lot of the things that you would associate with someone who does pageants, like really don't fit my personality. But nonetheless, it created this beautiful mask for me to kind of still be in the world and move through the world while I was hiding all this self-hatred. And so what led me to semantics, I think you can kind of pick up some of those themes there with the dance and movement being this place of free expression.

I went through, I guess, what you'd call it. like traditional eating disorder treatment. I, you know, did the inpatient, did the outpatient. And to great credit of those therapists, I was relatively well. I was functioning. I did respond well to that treatment. But nonetheless, when I was about 22, I would say, yeah, 22. So I'd already gone through treatment.

I just kept finding myself in these, like, really harmful relationships, like with really unwell people. wonderful people, but like very unwell. And I was like, this is weird. Like I went through all this therapy. I know that real like kind loving relationships are possible. Didn't see them in my childhood, but I've been with enough therapists to know how to communicate. And yet I like am really drawn to these kind of like twisted dark souls. Like what is this? And so I decided to put myself in, and there's a great amount of privilege in this, decided to put myself in, a trauma center program that was outpatient. And at that time, Gabour Matte was not Gabourmeti.

He was just one of the clinical directors and clinical advisors at this treatment center. So all the therapists that I saw were already deeply in the work that he offers today, had deep relationships with him. And those therapists offered somatic psychotherapy. It wasn't really well known at that time. It wasn't spoken about. I remember going to the sessions and being like, that was so weird. What is happening here? This place makes no sense. And like, you know, the therapist would invite us to meditate before, go to acupuncture, do gentle movement, and then come into a therapy session. Or remember one therapist, like the whole session, I had to have my hand on my head to contain myself. And I was like, this Donald was so weird.

It changed my life that. Whenever I'm all overwhelmed, I feel the impulse with the client to just like contain. Because it's still so ingrained that that's how I soothe my anxiety. and you look in the research behind what he was doing posturally, totally checks out. So I had this embodied experience quite young because I do think in what I've perceived in the field coming to somatic psychotherapy and training in that way is usually something therapists do later in their career. And because it is quite fringy and it is getting more mainstream, but it's quite unknown. So that's a bit of my journey to where I am today and also what the heck is a somatic psychotherapist because it's not a common thing.

You know you need fiber for a healthy gut, but do you actually know how to get it? Quaker's been serving up fiber since 1877, with over 100 great-tasting good source of fiber options to choose from. Whether you like old-fashioned oats, instant oatmeal, granola, or oatmeal squares, Quaker makes it delicious. Mmm, so good. Get your fiber with Quaker. Shop Quaker's good source of fiber products at a store near you. That was a beautiful answer and I think that it will resonate with so much of our community because I know that a lot of them are also perfectionist, high achiever women.

When you were saying you created this mask, I think that's something that I relate to a lot where maybe my self-worth was not at its best. I probably used these obsessions or academic validation to mask over the fact that actually at my core, my self-worth was probably not great. And I know that that is something the community will really, really resonate with. We're going to come on to a section in just a little bit called buy or buy by, where we'll ask you some products that, whether you'd recommend them or not. But before we come into that, I wanted to ask you,

who do you think benefits from somatic psychotherapy over maybe traditional psychotherapy? Because I think I've seen, again, probably some TikToks, which is not the most reliable source of information, where I think the way someone described it is, you know, a lot of women are quite emotionally in tune. They kind of understand their feelings or they think they understand their feelings, but maybe they don't necessarily understand their nervous system reaction

or, you know, it may be more suited to those. If you feel like you understand your feelings, maybe even you're a little bit of an overthinker, then maybe somatic therapy might be a better fit. But yeah, what's your, who do you think it's better for? You are naming it, absolutely. I think with how semantics has been presented in online realms, it's presented as sometimes even just like a practice that you step into and you shake and you move.

And I'm like, that's all great. But that's more semantic movement. That's not semantic processing. Of course, I'm a stickler for semantics because I have a master's degree in this, but I don't expect everyone else to be. So no judgment. But semantics psychotherapy is really great for those. people who already have a strong cognitive framing. Because when those people go to therapy, if they

already know their story and they've reframed it in their mind and they can identify all the villains and all the good people, all the characters are well known, they'll go into talk therapy and like, they might not get a lot out of it because they've already done that over processing. And we are in a culture that really does train people to do that over processing. And in some environments, that includes critical thinking, in some environments not, but we are pretty over-intellectualized and pretty disembodied. So I always start my somatic therapy by kind of gauging with my client how much of their history, how much of their narrative is really clear and cohesive and known to them because we need that strong cognitive kind of structuring to actually go into the body.

And so exactly what you're saying there, the people that, you know, are quite, you know, maybe they know how to identify their emotions already, they know their history, they kind of know the areas of growth, they're going to be quite quick to benefit from semantics. It's still going to be hard. It's always hard when we've maybe really developed our mind to drop into our body and connect. It's still going to be hard. But they're going to respond a lot easier, whereas individuals who you might assume are going to really flourish in somatic psychotherapy like my dancers and my artists and my creatives, it's really hard for them because this is something they know quite well. They know the territory of the body or it's become a tool or a vehicle for creativity. But it's not actually

something that they have that type of relationship with. And the mind also doesn't have a story. So then we have to kind of go in and get that strong cognitive framing so we can drop into the body. Because unless we have that, it's not going to feel safe to be in the body. And that's like the piece that I always emphasized to people is that somatics really does rely on having some type of felt sense in your body or in your mind. There has to be a capacity because when you go into your body, you're going to be confronted with things from your own past that you've suppressed that have been too hard or have been overwhelming. These don't have to be big acute single incident traumas. They could be developmental traumas, consistent moments where our attachment needs weren't met.

but you're also going to hit both intergenerational stuff that lives inside you that comes from your ancestry we're getting into the realm of epigenetics here but one thing that i speak most kind of focused on is we get into cultural pieces too when you go into your body you're going to be confronted with your internalized narratives of ageism or misogyny and you're going to have to kind of feel the stickiness of that and also while feeling the stickiness of that live in a world where those narratives are still being told and they're being perpetuated and a culture's kind of thriving off them in many ways. And so the cognitive piece I always say is so important even though I know it's not what you see on TikTok. It's not what you see on TikTok. Isn't that

true for a lot of things? Gosh. And we've got our section real or real where I'm really excited to hear your opinions on a TikTok video we've picked for. you so I'm very excited for that a little bit later on. Now we're going to move on to our buy or bye bye section. First on our buy or bye bye section is a weighted blanket. Yes. I personally love a weighted blanket. We know that it produces the same effects as like a baby being tightly held. And so it does activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which kind of puts us in that beautiful rest and digest place. For some people, a weighted blanket is like the last thing they ever want because the compression and the tightness can feel claustrophobic or threatening. So I'm a

big fan of them. I also probably overuse them and to the point of overheating sometimes. So beware. But they do, they do create some really wonderful responses in the nervous system if you are someone who, when experiencing compression or tightness, goes into a parasympathetic state. Nice. You mentioned a phrase there which I think is in, I think if more people understood it, they would understand their nervous system just immediately so much better. It's one of those terms that I think, you know, you could understand 80% of your nervous system if you just understood this word. Parasmpathetic system. Could you explain that to people who've never heard that term before? I can and you can please jump in. So a parasympathetic nervous system is a part of our

autonomic nervous system. We have two branches, our parasympathetic and our sympathetic. Our parasympathetic is really in control of our rest and digest. So this is the state that ideally when you go to a yoga nature class, you get into, or a spa day, or any of those things. And it's so needed because it's the nervous system state that allows the gut biome, a lot of our cells to rejuvenate and actually gives our body a little bit of that rest point. And so we need the state. We need kind of this calming down. We call it, call it the calming down, often in common culture. But it's also associated with our window of tolerance.

And so when we get into a parasympathetic state, we can replenish and restore so then we can go back out into the rest of the world. Oddly, I do think people talk more about sympathetic and not wanting to be in a sympathetic or we must regulate our nervous system and always live in parasympathetic. and it's ideally that these two states of the nervous system are, it's not like you can be in just one. They activate at the same time and we're doing this kind of lovely dance between the two of them and not getting stuck in either. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then you said sympathetic, maybe for anyone just really bringing it back to basics. What about the sympathetic? What's the explanation for that part of the nervous system? So sympathetic nervous system is really associated to our fight and our flight. It's also associated to high cortisol, anxiety, hypervigilance of scanning, looking around. But I also tell people it's like it's the thing that gets you up and gets you going in the day. So we could pathologize and demonize this as being bad and wrong.

And we don't ever want to be in this state because it's associated specifically in the realm of like TikTok and social media is associated with trauma responses. But it's also a lot of our momentum during the day as well. One thing I always say to my female clients is that our sympathetic nervous system is also associated with our tend and befriend. So we have our fight and our flight, and we also have like our fawning response or tending and befriending. And if you've been socialized female, more commonly, you're going to move into that response pattern of making friends, soothing the other, appeasing as a part of your sympathetic response instead of, you know, fighting or running away. Interesting. That's really, really interesting. The next item on our buy or buy

is a essential oil diffuser. I love them. Shamelessly. I definitely probably drive my partner a bit crazy because they're always going. I like always. They're just like constant. And I'm a bit picky about them. So I actually like bring them from Canada with me. Really? Yeah. Because the quality and there's just a little bit more testing and scrutiny around what they release in Canada versus here in the essential oil diffuser land, which I've researched. Anyways, we're moving that aside, we know that essential oils, they obviously stimulate the olfactory system, which is connected to our limbic brain, which is the emotional center. For someone like me and how I know my nervous system and my experiences of trauma, I find

smell and scent unbelievably soothing. Like there are certain ones that bring me back in through my limbic brain, my emotional center to specific memories that felt so wonderful and safe and gentle that as soon as I smell cinnamon, I'm just happy again. Like it has that much of an effect on me. I also have had clients who like smell is not their safety resource point at all. And this is, you know, commonly spoken about in PTSD. we can get a little smell of something and maybe not even remember the full memory, but our body is going into sympathetic, some of that like maybe fight response or tension or bracing.

And so this is also sometimes a part of somatic work is really learning. What of the many senses that we have, because we have more than five, which ones actually bring me back into center and more into that regulated nervous system state? So I love an essential oil. They're everywhere in my life, but I know they're not for everyone. I think that's a really important point for anyone trying to navigate social media where products are just being pushed on you. Yes.

And, you know, being sold as the solutions at everything under the certain. Because it is for so, you know, in this society, we really are taught to ignore our bodies, ignore our responses. But, you know, really not just looking at the products, but tuning in to how those products makers feel is so, so, so important, not just taking everything you see on TikTok as gospel and you need to buy this right now. I didn't ask for the weighted blanket,

do you have any recommendations that you like because they can get quite high in price? And I guess for someone who they, you know, maybe you don't want to spend that money and then for it to feel really claustrophobic. Yeah, such a good question. My weighted blanket is My weighted blanket was a gift from my partner

But I have looked recently I've been like, whoa, this is such a massive price range I mean there's so many things you can try Even before putting that claustrophobic feeling I mean like if you're someone who has three blankets on you And that's wiggly and uncomfortable Or you don't like a big squeezed hug Don't go near a weighted blanket like this is not

So you can get this kind of tightness compression feeling Before even purchasing that would be my answer to that one. So not one specific product, unfortunately. No, that's really, really, really helpful. Next is a yoga mat or resistance bands. Yeah, I have them both. I have all the things here.

With both of these products, I would just encourage people to not let them be the barrier for entry. Yes, it's wonderful to have a yoga mat, to be like, this is where I do my gentle movement at home. but it's also not needed. You don't need to be on your mat. You don't need a resistance ban to do those exercises or to engage with your body in that way. So if that helps you get out and add gentle movement or movement into your day, wonderful,

but it's also not needed. And I'm someone who I used to travel the world with my yoga mat. And now oftentimes it just kind of sits there and I do my gentle movement, not on it, because I actually can't be bothered. Nice. Nice. That's such an important point, not making it a barrier for entry. Yeah. Journals or guided self-help notebooks. Yeah. I don't know. So I would love to answer this, like, so enthusiastically. Yes. Being trained in semantic therapy, being trained in narrative therapy, loving writing, loving the practice. For me, they've never worked. I find them a bit too formed by positive psychology.

And so then I find like doing the prompts oftentimes leads me to bypassing things. And I've tried really hard. And so that's my encouragement for people. It's just to really look at the prompts. And what angle are the prompts coming from? Are they the same every single day? Are they just framing the positive? Are they allowing you to have some space for the negative?

I know Danielle Leport used to have a beautiful product that actually had space for both. I really loved it. I also know Rupi Carr has a book called Healing Through Words, and that one I've really enjoyed doing. But I know that there's a lot of them out there, and I've been really surprised. I still don't know a client who's actually made the full way through the journal, like actually through. I think it sometimes can these issues of, like, you know, not being able to, The prompts not providing access to go into those deeper places can be a little bit of a turn off for people, even though I would love to say yes. Because in theory, I totally back them.

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. But for anyone listening, what do you mean by positive psychology? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Good question. Obviously, affirmations, doing affirmations, daily gratitude practices are wonderful and great. and they can be like putting whipped cream on garbage. And I say that to my clients. Like if this feels like putting whipped cream on garbage, there is research that actually just focusing on the positive

also brings your mind into duality to be aware of the negative that's stopping you from feeling the positive. So sometimes it can be really helpful. Just take that out. So just going to take it out. And we're going to look for moments where you genuinely feel a little different. I'm not even saying happy to my clients. like just acknowledge the moments when you feel a little different and then build off those,

work with those, those moments where you did actually notice the heat of the sun after three months of rain in London. Like, let's go there. Instead of, I'm going to write all the things I'm grateful for that I actually don't feel grateful for. And that's where my caution point is with some of those books, even though that's obviously not their intention. Sometimes it just can be a by-product. That's really interesting. You say that about positive affirmations because I've said before as from a imposter syndrome's point of view, I think women just, again, have lost sight of how they truly feel and actually in losing sight of how they truly feel, lose sight of what is true.

And that I think lends itself to imposter syndrome. So when you, I learned this when I was starting working as a doctor where actually in my first, first few weeks, you're just learning. You are kind of bad at, you're not great at your job at that point because you've just started your job. And I found that actually accepting that in myself, saying right now you have a lot to learn and not trying to mask over it by doing a positive affirmation and saying, fair you're brilliant, fair you're this. Well, actually, I was not at that point, but instead focusing on if I did something little that was good, I focused on that. Or if someone gave me a piece of feedback that was helpful to me, you know, focusing on that,

focusing on the points of truth rather than just trying to mask over everything. So, and that was something I experienced. So I feel very validated that you kind of reiterated that. You know, sometimes it is, it's important to get comfortable with what is actually going on and tune into that rather than just putting whipped cream on garbage. Yeah. And I think now my like little resistance or a version, which I'm very aware of, inside myself also comes from just seeing how commodified that one practice has become, like having your whatever journal beside your green juice and your dad. I'm like, how many pictures of that are there on Instagram and videos? And I'm like, okay, this is really interesting because ideally in an ideal world, if we are getting in touch with our bodies and we are really coming home, We actually start to let go of some of that stuff, of some of the capitalism or needing to purchase something or needing to put it on social media.

Those practices, and the journal could still be a part of that, I have no idea, those practices actually become less interesting to showcase to the world because we're just actually living in that state. And so we don't need these external markers like it's kind of become that we're like, well or happy or balanced or all. all this things. And I think that's a part of where my aversion comes from. It's just like, if I see another video with one of those journals in it, I don't know. I think that's so fair. That's a really useful viewpoint, really, really useful viewpoint. Because do you know what? I've been there where I'm like, maybe this will fix my mental health. I mean, it's everywhere. Yeah. Yay. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. That's brilliant. Foam roller or a massage tool. Also, really big fan of both.

Um, our fascia holds so much. So if you don't know, fascia is kind of the spider wet, I'm going to describe it as the spider web tissue that kind of holds your whole body together. Insert any commentary you want to put on. No, I think that's a brilliant way to describe it. That's my very simple term that way I discovered declines. And because it is that connective tissue when we do something like foam rolling or a facial roller, we do start to kind of move that around. And we know that when we experience stress, overwhelm or trauma, our body braces and holds tension unless we complete our stress response cycle. So any of those tools can be really amazing to just kind of subtly poke at or subtly change some of that tension and that

bracing and lead to what it feels somatically like a release. It's not a release of the experience, just so it can feel like a release or a sense of release. So I use them often. I'm often like face rolling while I'm doing emails. I have it all the time. I actually got told by my physio my TMJ physiotherapist that I needed to stop because I was oh I had like over like work overworked a muscle in some way so it's causing like tension somewhere else so she was like no more for like three months you need to stop so I'm just like compulsively that's the perfectionist overachiever that I can really really relate to I'm like oh I can do this I'm going to do it 150 percent she was like never twice a day I was like okay never mind so I'm off it right now

but I deeply miss it. Nice. You said something that I think is really, really important to go into a bit deeper is the stress response cycle. Can you talk us through what that is? Yeah, absolutely. So it does tie back to our autonomic nervous system and the parasympathetics. So again, that's that rest and digest, place that you maybe get to go when you do yoga

nieder or something like that and are sympathetic. So that fight or flight or kind of tend and befriend, fawning, which is more socially trained. into people. So when we go through any type of experience, that could be getting on the tube and feeling claustrophobic, because maybe you don't like compression or tightness on you. Don't get a weighted blanket if this is you. Or it could be, you know, seeing a thousand emails and you're like, I don't know how to answer this. Or an experience of trauma, any of these things that overwhelm our body's capacity to stay connected to self or other are going to put us in this stress. response cycle to some degree or another. Obviously, when we see our emails, it's not going to be

as an extreme of expense as potentially a trauma. Maybe it is for you, not my place to judge that or say, but nonetheless, it activates the stress response cycle. And so when that happens, and we don't get to actually complete, so when thousands of years ago, or maybe not even, depending on your ancestry, when we get into our stress response cycle, maybe we saw a threat, a lot, lion, someone that we thought was going to harm us, the stress response cycle would mobilize and we would fight or we'd freeze. And then later as civilization, but also the technological development, we kind of had those more tend and befriend. And so what happens when we go on that stress response, our body still thinks that the lion or the threat is there and it starts

to mobilize. But because it is just emails, we don't complete it. We don't actually run. We just kind of move on with our day. And essentially that accumulates throughout our day and our lifetime. And it leads to patterns of tension, to bracing, disconnection from the body, numbness, all these types of things. So when someone comes to see a somatic psychotherapist, what I'm actually like really listening for right at the start, and this is why the narrative is important, is to find out when they experience a stressor, overwhelm, again, trauma, could be a relational breakdown, it's not my job again to judge. Whatever activates the stress response, where do they most commonly go? And I've been trained to be able to read that through their breath pattern,

through their eye contact, through their movement, and through their posture. So I already have a sense of that. And then my job is ideally, when they're sharing about their present moment, through acknowledging the body and naming the breath or the eye contact or whatever it is, inviting them to kind of amp up that stress response a little bit in the therapy room, which we can do through the body. So then they actually get an experience of completing. So completing could look like shaking. It could look like saying no really loudly. It could look like getting up. It could look all different types of way. But this is the kind of stress response cycle. Emily Nijowski does a wonderful job of tying the stress response cycle into pleasure and sexuality. And I always invite people

to go give her kind of a checkout in that area because she does a wonderful job of bringing it out of the realm of trauma and into just our daily lives like I've just tried to do because it does oftentimes get really associated to trauma when in actuality it's happening all the time. Yeah, yeah. That's really, really interesting. Final bye or bye-bye is acupressure mats and foot massages.

I love it. Again, have them both. I have an acupressure mat for my feet that sits under there when I see clients. So, yeah, definitely practice in those. Again, not for everyone. I know some people that absolutely detest them, do not like them at all. I've had periods in my life where I can't go near them because it just feels my body feels too sensitive. There's too much hypervigilance.

I'm in a stress response from just like my body's way too open. overwhelmed for that type of contact. And then there's sometimes it feels great. So again, you kind of already know, like, if you are someone who, when stressed doesn't like to be touched, that would be something I'd invite you to, like, be a little bit more gentle and exploring. Maybe you just get the acupressure ring, you can kind of tell before going into like purchasing the whole thing.

Fab. You also mentioned something a little bit earlier on that you've got TMJ. Yes. Oh my gosh. I got my first ever facial massage. And like I'm not someone who consciously is aware that I'm stressed, but subconsciously, you know, or in my body, the signs are just, you know, always there. And I got this facial massage as part of a YouTube video

where I was looking into really like high-end beauty treatments. And it was at the end of a week where I was just filming every single day, like eight hours a day, just getting in an Uber from one place to the next, constantly all day. And this Friday and she starts going on my job. or like an inside bucle massage. And she was like, wow, that's, that's very, very, very tense. And then she did the one side and not the other one.

And oh my gosh, the difference I could feel in my jaw on one side was, it was ridiculous. And I know that I definitely hold a lot of attention in my jaw. And I know a lot of my friends who definitely have like TMJ because they get so much pain associated to it. So we'll definitely have to come on to that a little bit later on. And also burnout. I can't wait to hate all your opinions on burnout.

At first we've got some community questions. So the first community question is how can trauma affect the mind-body connection? So trauma can in many ways just cut off the mind-body connection. And I use the statistic loosely, but we know that the mind filters in like point. 0.001% of all of the sensory information around us and the body filters in the rest. And that quote is from a book called The Awakening Body by Reggie Ray. So you can go read about it over there. And so when trauma happens, it essentially or it can overwhelm the mind. So the mind doesn't have a story of it. It may not even have a memory of it. And the body takes in everything else. And again, the definition of trauma that I like to use,

is it's anything that overwhelms our capacity to stay connected to self or to other. And so when we're overwhelmed and we lose that capacity to stay connected to you, my mirror neurons can no longer regulate with yours, I can no longer feel my own breath because, again, my body is taken in way more of the experience than my mind. This is what creates trauma, but also severs the connection with the body. One thing that I feel like is really important to name and how trauma, interrupts the mind-body relationship is that there is a lot of dialogue as I just contributed in around how trauma can numb the body or lead us to be disconnected from the body.

One of the other things that it can do is it can lead us to be very hypervigilant of our body and very, like, sensitive and aware and maybe even experience things like hypochondria because our threat response in our brain, our amygdala, the fighter, you know, that's constantly the little firefighter in there who's looking around for danger is now super primed. It's like body is different, don't know what's going on, something has happened, and now I'm going to fire every time I feel a sensation that's outside of my normal, outside of what I knew before this trauma occurred. So we can be totally disconnected from our body after trauma,

or we can be so acutely aware of our body after trauma. And this is how it changes the relationship. And there's no way of predicting which way someone is going to go. that's that's really really brilliant because I had a the first time I became a bit more aware of maybe the body response to trauma was a TikTok um where the person was saying how you can tell maybe if you're in flight or flight by if someone sneaks up behind you or someone is nearby and everything is just making you jump that hypervigilance and I saw this TikTok and maybe a couple days later I noticed that I'm at that period of my life

when I definitely had recently gone through something quite traumatic and was working very hard at the same time, very, you know, stressed. And everything just really made me jump. I was so, so, so skitty. So that's really useful. The other part of that question for the community, the community question was how can we strengthen that mind-body connection

if it has been severed? Absolutely. This is the work of interceptive awareness or cultivating your interceptive awareness. So your interceptive awareness, I know it could be like a little bit of a daunting word there. It's just your capacity to be connected to your body, to feel your body. We strengthen our interceptive awareness by noticing our breath patterns, by using self-touch, which stimulates oxytocin and lowers our cortisol. We just become aware of those signs of fullness of hunger. I always say to people if you want to kind of reconnect to the body, this is going to be a part of

the process. And there are so many ways for myself, bringing it back, I named the alfactory, like using smell as a way of like noticing my body and using your senses in this way to actually start to be able to sense into what's happening inside. Because this is not something that we receive education in or training in or awareness of. So it's going to be really hard. Most people, when I start working with them, they don't know what thirst feels like in their body. They don't know what hunger feels like.

So it's like, hey, let's go back to the basics of just, do you actually feel your rib cage, move as you breathe? Let's start there. And we subtly and slowly build on it. It's like building any of their muscle. And this is actually one place where I do think that metaphor actually plays out quite well. It's a lot of places it's overused. And I'm like, oh, don't know if fitness needs to be applied here. But this is one area where absolutely building our interceptive awareness is like building a muscle.

And to do that, we do need to engage with it. Nice. I love that. The next community question that we had was somatic symptoms. Why do we have these and how do they develop? And what is the best way to manage them? Yeah. So somatic symptoms are.

are oftentimes a result of that stress response cycle not completing. So when the stress response cycle doesn't complete, we don't get that moment where like, I got away from the tiger that was chasing me or the threat is totally gone and my body can kind of shake her process. I have a small puppy right now. And so whenever she has an overwhelming experience, like a bus goes by or a dog barks, she looks at me with her little scared eyes and then she shakes. And I'm like, that's for stress response cycle completing.

She looks to me. She's attuned. She radars me as a safe person. And then her little nervous system goes, oh, I need to discharge. Okay. Now I can come back into self. We are just like her. And so we need to complete our stress response cycle.

But obviously that doesn't happen. And it's been trained out of us in a lot of ways to be still or to be rigid or just also not engage in some of the practices that we would mean to complete our stress response cycle. And so when that happens, and you'll probably be able to add to this, we experience chronic tension or bracing in the body. And all of that has a cumulative effect on our fascia, on our musco-skeletal system, on our hormones, and on our brain. And slowly over time, we, A, start noticing maybe the chronic tension or the bracing or the excruciating pain in our TMJ. but nonetheless, that's been an accumulation over a very long time of things that have been happening in the body, maybe under our awareness. I would love to talk to you about your personal self-care routine and living in this fast-paced life because I imagine you are an incredibly successful woman in yourself and I think that that often lends itself to having a more dysregulated nervous system. But first, we're going to come on to our section called Real or Not Real.

Real or Real, as in Instagram Real. And I'm going to play a TikTok, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. You're not a candle. You can't burn out. A human being cannot burn out. I think that that's a misconception about hard work. I don't know successful people who are still in the game, who are burnt out by a long day. Their response might be, I want to go do something.

different for a minute. But my business partner, Grant Cardone, he says, you're not a candle. You can't burn out. A human being cannot burn out. Can you feel moments of pressure, stress? Yes. I don't take any of those moments as being a bad thing. It's not a negative to feel overwhelmed because you have responsibility. People depend on you. People are relying on you to do something. Great. So why do people burn out then in your view? The thing that people do is not actually leading to where they want to go. But if I think that by doing this work, that's going to be hard and I'm going to hate and it's going to suck, that I can actually get what I want and my life would be changed. I would recognize that this is a step that's necessary to get to my goal. And when people win, they are rarely burnt out at that

moment and you only really get burnt out if you don't see how the sacrifices that you're making are actually going to lead you to achieve your goals and to reach your potential. Thoughts. My day kicks off with the refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym. Pre-Kid pickup, back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift. One more Celsius, got to keep the lights on. When the three alarm hits, I'm ready.

Celsius, live, fit, go. Grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at Celsius.com. Many thoughts. I take my long pause. Burnout is absolutely a real phenomenon. I mean, in 2019, the World Health Organization put it in the ICI-11. Consistent workplace stress does has impact, and in a lot of Asian cultures, there's documented names for death related to workplace stress of working more than 55 hours a week. So the comment of burnout not being real is just like, okay.

maybe from your place of privilege, this isn't real. I think this is the really important thing to hold, specifically in a comment like that. And we could really get into her and per story and make judgments. Or there's the place where you can step back and go, like, if we are in a place of privilege, where we get to reach our goals, see the trajectory of all the work and effort we have into manifesting or creating the life that we want, if we have that privilege, Of course it's going to breed a mindset like that. Even if you came from a place of marginalization or being impoverished and you've scraped your way out,

there were probably some privileges or some people with a lot of privilege who helped you up that trajectory. And when you find yourself in the position that someone, it seems as hard to find herself, even in that conversation has had, you probably no longer have those scarcities or realities of, if I take a misstep, I'm going to lose everything, unless you are intentionally kind of gambling and, you know, investing in very high-risk ways. You're unlikely ever going to find yourself in a place where you are defaulting or feel like there's nothing left to catch you. And so logically, I can follow her and be like, yep, I can get it if we don't have a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose.

We're, you know, not going to experience burnout because we have that. But the reality is that most people are going to experience burnout because our system is not designed for all of us to thrive, to reach our highest potential, our goals. do I wish it was? Absolutely. But is it? No. And can we be real and honest about that so that we can acknowledge that things like burnout do exist. We are candles. We do die. Like we do have endings. If we aren't taking care of appropriately, if we aren't cared for by our society around us, we are going to have negative mental health impacts. And so for me, any of us, myself included, we can't see the privileges in which we have and they are our blind spots. And that's just someone speaking from a blind spot.

I think that's explained absolutely wonderfully. And it makes me think of the time when I was working as a doctor, but then trying to do all the social media stuff on top of that. So I was working, you know, 50 plus hour weeks just in the hospital. And then I was working two hours in the morning before I went into the hospital for all the social media stuff, making sure. My assistant had stuff to be cracking on with the day during the day. Editors.

And then when I got back after a 12-hour shift, I would put in two extra hours of work and then go to bed. And often people I meet would say to me, like, you know, how are you still alive? How are you doing all this? And I was teetering on the edge of burnout for those two years. The only thing that got me through was, A, knowing that it was just two years I could just get through,

but also those privileges where my boyfriend would pick me up for my shifts whenever he could, you know, that's a privilege that not everyone has, or he would, I don't think I cooked a single meal myself for months because he would do all the cooking, all the washing, just to make sure that I was supported in trying to make all this work. Those are privileges that not everyone is aware of, or if I had quite a stressful shift, or say, you know, to come to this podcast today, I know that I do a better job during the recording if my nervous system is calm, I'm regulated,

I'm able to review all my notes and stuff before I come in. So I booked an Uber to come here instead of getting London public transport, you know, all these little things that really contribute. And actually when you're not in a different position, you don't have access to those things. You've got to keep so much. many plates spinning at once. So I really love how you've explained that. And it really resonates

with me as well. The next community question that we have is how to deal with stress and anxiety and PCSD from being bullied as a child. So I'll break these two questions apart. Sorry, I've been asking some big, big questions. I'm going to pull them apart because I want to give the experience of being bullied like as much tenderness and care to itself. So how to deal with stress and anxiety? We know that anxiety runs the same circuitry in the brain as excitement. And I love that piece of information because it really does. And this is where maybe some of those journaling books we spoke, but earlier might be quite helpful.

If we can change the story around our anxiety or also just slow down and get really like aware, is this anxiety that's actually fueled by my threat response? Or am I on the verge of something new and unknown? and that's scary, but also something I want can be really helpful in just pulling those apart. And then working with anxiety in such a way where we do keep really questioning, is this some part of my brilliant body that's picking up information that my mind doesn't have access to? And so this is going on and I'm feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Or is this just my response to something new because of my past environment?

maybe this is how my body has been conditioned to experience the world. There's no judgment in that. It's just completing the stress response cycle so that the anxiety can lessen. To your second part of the question, I do, and why I want to, to the second part of your question, I wanted to pull them apart because I don't perceive or how I speak about bullying is not really in the realm of anxiety or stress response. I do really hold it in the realm of trauma. And I know that there's kind of a rhetoric of everything is being called trauma.

And so when I say the experience of bullying, I pull it out of anxiety and into the realm of trauma. I'm specifically talking about developmental trauma. And developmental trauma is not a single incident. It's ongoing and it's continuous. And the example that I really love to give and we'll keep it quite sweet and quite simple, we've all can remember or we have seen a small child who maybe has gone to school and made an amazing piece of macaroni art. You know, there's like glitter and paint and all the things and they're like super excited. And they come home and they go to show mom and mom's on the phone or like mom is busy with the other three children or the maternal figure or parental figure just doesn't have capacity.

Because that child is very resilient, they go, my art is still amazing. I'm going to find someone else in this household to go show. So they go to another paternal figure if they're there or someone else in the household. And again, really excited about their macaroni art. They want to show. They want to share. They want to be connected. And again, they get maybe that rejection or they get a dismissive response.

You put experiences like that consequentially together over a long period of time where the child came with a developmental need, an attachment need, an emotional need, a psychological need, a a psychological need, a relational need. And it goes unmet, that's going to cause developmental trauma. So if we hold that as developmental trauma, and it's often harder because of the climate that we live in socioculturally for those clients to acknowledge that they've experienced trauma because they go, well, I had a great mom. All my needs were met. Like they were always there? I'm like, no, no, but were they there for the macaroni art?

Like, this is what I need to know. because those moments add up to something quite significant. Bullying is the same. It doesn't have to be so overt in the ways of, you know, maybe being physically harmed or a terrible rumor being spread around you. It can also be that social alienation that the children do when sometimes they ignore someone or they, you know, put someone as the black sheep for three months.

That adds up for that entire period of time. that child's relational, peer, emotional, and psychological needs are not being met. And that has an impact. And that is something that I spend a lot of time with. Specifically, it's come up more commonly, at least in my practice, with my female clients. And there could be many reasons for that is that they often do have this experience in their younger years. And that it's really, really hard for them to put a label on it, to acknowledge it as trauma, to even name that it's impacted them, even though it's so present in not only the relationships

they have with other women, but also their romantic relationships too. And I think that there can be a lot of internalized shame and there's a lot of narratives to just like let the things go that happened way back when. But until we actually acknowledged that, yeah, that rumor actually did impact your sexuality or it did change how you behaved or because of you were ignored, in the classroom, you did start to dress in a different way. And that actually did play out into your 20s until that stuff is really acknowledged and really held and really met by someone who goes, yeah, I see it impacted you and it wasn't okay. It shouldn't have happened. I'm sorry. It does continue to play out. So whenever I have a client come in and they say they've experienced bullying,

my whole nervous system and whole heart and whole body just becomes so attuned, so present because they're commonly culturally disexperiences that, A, we don't name or we name them in a really dismissive minimizing way. And that's absolutely not what they deserve. It's really interesting as you were going through a lot of those examples, even the macaroni art. I thought of one example in my life that seemingly seems so, so, so small. And I never would have thought of that as a traumatic moment as such. but and then you know when you're saying about the the social stuff as a child and you know everything you were saying were bringing up these these memories where I was like God they probably

have impacted me a lot more than I have realized or created a cascade of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that would be beneficial for me to address so fast-paced living in today's society what is your routine for dealing with the constant? pressure is the constant information that is being fed to us that is inherently quite dysregulating yeah i wish that i had like a really beautifully prescriptive routine that was like do this this and this and you'll be fun i don't unfortunately and just like a lot of other people i experience the city that we both call home london to be quite overwhelming and just constantly a lot and my nervous system is bombarded and I walk around everywhere with my loop earplugs,

which I love. That may be the one thing. Love a good pair of loop ear plugs. I also love my loops as well so I can relate to that. But besides that, whenever I'm speaking about the realm of self-care, just as one way, I think, of moving away from the commodification of it and from moving away of people feeling like they need to spend more money to access well-being or that spending money is a sign of caring for themselves. It's not. It doesn't have to be. There's so many ways to take care of yourself.

I always just go back into the basics. And those are the things that I challenge myself with because I still find them like really hard. Like to be like with my, you know, body and the illness that I live with, I need nine and a half hours of sleep. Like anything less than that, the last time I got nine and five hours of sleep, my hair got caught in a vacuum.

Oh, no, yes, which is like quite a meltdown moment for me. But like, I seriously need that. I've learned that about myself. It's tried. It's tested. It's true. That, that for me is self-care, giving myself those nine and a half hours, ensuring that I'm drinking all of my water, that I have three beautiful meals that have all of, you know, different color vegetables and they're cooked with care and love and intention. I bring my self-care back into those.

really basic foundational blocks. And the way I think about is actually of like, I know all of the blood in my body in three months is going to turn over. I know every single cell in my body is constantly changing. How can I support all of the little changes that are happening inside of me through this action or this behavior? How can I make the foundation of the body that's changing and evolving and growing care? And so I don't go to like think of the spa or,

or even the yoga class anymore. It's so much more those basics for me. And I found with that took off a lot of the pressure as well too. And yeah, a lot of the pressure. I'm definitely not as up on the wellness or biohacking trends anymore. But I do get my nine and a half hours asleep now and that's pretty good. And that's it. You know, that's not as sexy as what sells on social media, is it?

The nuanced approach is never what gets the most attention. No. And the whole biohacking thing, It's like you could be doing all these crazy wonderful trends. But if you're sleeping less than six hours a night, there is no point whatsoever. And that's what I personally completely resonate with in terms of the social media trends and stuff.

Last question before we ask the final question that we ask all of our guests, you mentioned that you struggle with TMJ. I do. What is TMJ? And how, for the goleys out there who do hold a lot of attention in their jaw, how have you managed to tackle that? Yeah. So this is like my tension point.

It's where all of it lives. I know there's some loose research around the TMJ and hips paralleling each other in regards to muscle structuring, just even energetic components when we look at Chinese medicine. And so for me, I've always kind of, because I've had that frame, always kind of held like, okay, like, is my trauma, you know, are there trauma links here, are they not? And like, someone can go down that realm and explore it if that's interesting to them, but I'll kind of keep it on the TMJ focused. I do a lot of facial rolling as I named, but I also highly recommend people if they do have TMJ, go to a physiotherapist who's trained in

TMJ. I was so resistant for such a long time. I was like, I will deal with this by getting things like Botox into my masseter muscles did not help me at all. I've had surgery on my jaw for my TMJ. Like I've had like this whole journey and the one thing whenever I have a client who comes and they have a tense jaw muscle and you can kind of see it in someone's face too and how it changes the face if you're like a clencher. And you have done things like somatic therapy and maybe it can't address or this is just your muscular patterning. I don't have a lot of tension in any other area of my body. This is where it all likes to live. I could probably go into a nice psychospiritual answer for you, but I'll save that. I would recommend people go to a physiotherapist because when you have someone

who actually knows how to track where all this tension is coming through your cranial nerves, through your sternum, through your abdominal, how you're breathing. Wow. It changes. And every time I see Helen, I have a spiritual experience. Helen is not in a bougie place. She's in the most kind of basic and boring clinic in Chelsea. I love you, Helen, if you ever listen to this. But like, and it's incredible. So all the girlies out there go see a good physiotherapist who's put their life into learning how to take care of this one area of your body because you are deserving of it. And there's someone who can help you. And you'll just a few sessions and it is a game changer. We might have to get Helen's details to put in the description for all those galies.

That's absolutely incredible because I've, I've done the masses of Botox. And, Yeah, still there. Still there. Yeah, for me, it didn't change matter. I was like, oh, my face is just kind of thinner now. Yeah. Same same. Yeah, aesthetically, I was like, fun, but like, the issue. Yeah. Brilliant. I'm going to ask you the final question that we've been asking all our guests. And that is, Ailey, what do you wish every woman knew before she was 25?

Oh. I've asked a lot of big questions, but maybe that one is the biggest. That one is the biggest definitely. Oh, I'm just thinking of so many of my clients under the age of 25, but also my younger self under that age. There is one thing that I wish that women under the age of 25 knew is that their body is their only home. They are the only person who can actually ever be there. It belongs to no one else. It's theirs.

and that there is an entire world and systems and structures and people who are doing everything they can, every single day to take you away from that home and tell you that it's not. And that would be the thing that I wish I could go back in time and wrap my younger self in and also wrap all of my clients in as well. I love that and I feel wrapped in it now. That was so beautiful. Thank you so, so much, Ailey, for you. for coming on this podcast. I hope the listeners have had such a, as much of a calming experience as I

have. You're so, you explain things so wonderfully and it's in such a calming way. I'm really, really, really, I'm grateful. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. It was lovely to spend time with you and you just have, again, a very warm and friendly and very inclusive energy. And I really loved your questions. So thank you. Thank you.