Her Discussions by Dr Faye - Why Women Feel Guilty for Asking Doctors for More Answers | Ways to Speak Up

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

This episode is sponsored by @larocheposay and their NEW Effaclar Supra molecular Face Moisturiser: a lightweight, daily gel moisturiser that is ideal for oily to combination skin prone to visible shine. It features Supramolecular SA.B3 Technology, combining Salicylic Acid (S.A) and Niacinamide (Vitamin B3) and helps to target imperfections and control excess sebum.Have you ever been told your symptoms are all in your head? Or that it's just stress?This week, I’m joined by Dr Sula Windgassen, a leading health psychologist, psychotherapist and researcher specialising in the connection between physical health and chronic stress.We talk about:🩺 3 things to do if your symptoms are dismissed🌬️ When breathwork can actually make you feel worse👀 The #1 reason a second opinion really matters🧠 Is there a difference between anxiety and physical symptoms?🚩 Why even a kind doctor can still medically dismiss youResources & links mentioned:Dr Sula’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_health_psychologist_/?hl=en‘It’s All In Your Body’ by Dr Sula: https://www.healthpsychologist.co.uk/itsallinyourbody‘Healing and the Mind’ documentary: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0MW5NZR1O96HRRVQXU497YNIDY🔔 Join the HERd* broadcast channel here: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/?igsh=MWhuaXFweGtucTB3cA==📱 Find us on socials:Instagram & Tiktok - @drfayebatePodcast Instagram & Tiktok: @herdiscussionspod📩 Want to reach out?Email: [e-mail]🛑 Disclaimers:Opinions are my own. This content is for educational / entertainment purposes and not medical or financial advice.

Have you ever been told your symptoms are all in your head or that it's just stress? It was four out of five women said that they had felt ignored or not listened to by healthcare professionals. When you're not believed you're not safe. Today I'm joined by Dr Sula Windgassing, a health psychologist, CBT and EMDR therapist and researcher whose work explores the connection between physical health, trauma and recovery. I don't think enough doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals actually realise how much power their words and language. have on what comes after. You can absolutely say to a woman,

I believe you, what you are going through is having a severe impact on your life. That is not okay. I hear so many shocking stories of women being dismissed, and I see the trajectory of how that dismissal has a massive impact, not only on the mental health, but on the physical health as well. How do you know if your symptoms are anxiety,

something physical or both? To some degree, at least at the outset, It doesn't really matter. By the end of this episode, you'll understand what medical dismissal can do to the body, why stress and symptoms are more connected than we realise, and how to get support without being made to feel like your symptoms aren't real. So we're going to talk all about health dismissal and what it can actually do to your body. But first, I would love to understand a little bit more about what brought you into this field,

into psychology and mind-body connection. Well, I was caught between psychology and law before uni, and I did law for a year and then realize it was the wrong decision. Did psychology. Got very fascinated in the field of health psychology because I had an amazing professor called Darrell O'Connor. And he talked about this field that I'd never heard of, which was psycho-neuroimmunology. So how psychological experiences can physically change your neuroendocrine system. your immune system and therefore like your physical health and he presented all these fascinating studies and I was just like this is mind blown it's like you know science meets mystical

was really interested in that but got dissuaded from doing psychology because I think I was just like oh it's so competitive and I didn't really know which area I wanted to be in I was seeing a lot of people have experiences in supporting roles that were quite traumatic I think for them and so I just wasn't sure, took a side step into marketing during my final year of uni where I worked as a marketing assistant for a small firm. And then they offered me this big promotion at the end of uni. If I worked for them full time, I'd be a marketing manager age 21. And I was like, oh, wow, like that's big. And I think I was just keen to make money and, you know, see what the working world was like, so I did that. That's when I started getting health issues and it was a whole big journey

with these health issues, but in the end, I think it meant that I realized how much your social experience, the evaporation of my community from university, the lack of meaning and the work that I was doing really contributed to the disintegration of my health. I was having these recurrent urinary tract infections that then morphed into something that doctor just couldn't really help me understand. And I was just, yeah, massively depressed, really and hopeless and just feeling like, well, this is my life now. My dad at the time had said, try mindfulness.

I was resistant at first, but when I did do it with him, we practiced together after watching a documentary and then had a chance to reflect back with him. I was like, oh, I can see how I'm relating to these physical experiences in a way that is contributing to them. But the language is really hard because you get to feel and experience your body in a different way when you do that sort of a practice.

I was lucky, I think, because I don't know, I had that experience really early on. But when I had that experience, I was like, well, I need to investigate this more. And the more I did mindfulness, the more my pain receded, the more my pain receded, the less stressed I was. And so it became this virtuous cycle,

which then, you know, after a period of doing much better, I was like, I need to go back to uni and understand this more. Do you remember what the documentary was that you watched? Yeah, the documentary is called Healing and the Mind. It was a Bill Moyer documentary with John Kabat-Zinn,

who's like the grandfather of mindfulness, well, secular mindfulness in the West. He followed one of John's early mindfulness-based stress reduction groups. And the documentary is so powerful because you are introduced to mindfulness almost from the lens of some of his participants in this group where they're doing this raisin exercise where you just observe a raisin in this, you know, mindful way.

And you can see people like, you know, their expressions and they're skeptical and just as you are. And then you see the course of this group unfold as people really come to relate to their bodies themselves differently. And it's so moving and you can see not only the power of the process of mindfulness, but also the group and being amongst other people that really get it and, you know, can relate to what you're going through. There's an interesting discussion, discourse on social media at the moment, Gabel Matte,

who said it. And, you know, there's some things that Gabel Matte has said that I really don't agree with. Some messages, I think, are really powerful. But he was the one who started saying, you can either, as a woman, you can either choose to be a bitch or get an autoimmune disease. and I might be misquoting there, but the idea that as a woman, you need to have boundaries, need to not spread yourself too thin, not be a people-pleaser, not try to be everything to everyone, and put yourself under extreme stress that way or get an autoimmune disease.

What are your thoughts when you hear that statement? And possibly does it align with anything you were taught by, was it, Darrell Lowe? O'Connor. Yeah, because that sounds like his area of exfittes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't really like dichotomies. I just don't think they're too broad. And, you know, be a bitch, I guess, is have boundaries, which doesn't make you a bitch.

No. So, yeah, there's lots of problems in that. But in terms of spreading yourself too thin, you know, really taking everybody else's feelings as your responsibility, internalizing other people's thoughts of you, all of those things can have an impact on our immune system. And they do have an impact on our immune system. In fact, I was just reading some research of a researcher called Dr. Cole, who was looking at genetic expressions. And what he found was cumulative experiences of rejection and kind of social judgment,

activated gene expressions that were related to kind of pro-inflammatory responses in the body by 200 to 300%. So if you think about the way women are socialised to be to really care what people think, to really respond to what people think, it makes a lot of sense that that accumulated stress

would have an impact on what our immune system's doing. Let's talk about what happens when women aren't believed. I think so many women will recognise the feeling and in a recent survey done by the British government,

I think it was four out of five women said that they had found, ignored or not listened to by healthcare professionals. Now, obviously, the women who responded to that survey, there will be a degree of selection bias. You're more likely to respond to that survey that makes where you're able to vocalise that concern. That's an awful statistic. Four out of five of those women had not felt listened to by doctors. So when we say medical dismissal, what does that actually mean? I think it's really important to define that right, because it often gets conflated with medical misogyny and medical gaslighting.

And I think both of those terms, obviously both of those would cause dismissal, but medical dismissal doesn't automatically equate to those things. Because things like gaslighting mean that the person doing it is intending to make you doubt your reality right. Whereas I think for a lot of healthcare professionals, that's not what they're intending. A lot of time medical dismissal happens from well-meaning doctors, which is the unfortunate thing. I always hear women say to me, my clinic, and it was a woman too. And I'm like, yeah. And actually, when you look at the research, there isn't a difference in terms of how much people report getting dismissed, whether it's a woman or a man.

Medical dismissal isn't just when you feel like you're being talked down to or intentionally disbelieved. It's also when you just aren't getting hurt. And that happens, you know, for systemic reasons. It happens because there's not enough time because your letters lost in the Royal Mail, whatever that is now, you know. All sorts of things mean that you don't get the care that you need or deserve. And in a consultation, you might not get the time because of, you know, restraints. But it also can obviously then also relate to the manner in which you're being treated or spoken to. So there's varying degrees of how it can show up.

But I had a really interesting consultation the other day where someone was like, it's really odd because everybody was being so nice to me. You know, the doctors were being lovely to me. They were being, you know, really listening to me, really understanding. They were treating me kindly. But they ultimately were saying, this is your anxiety. And it transpired. It wasn't her anxiety at all. You know, there was something that needed to be investigated further.

So it's not always about the manner you can be treated really kindly and still be getting dismissed because you're. symptoms of being seen as psychological in origin or whatever it might be. I've just finished writing a significant project. And in this significant project, there's a section that's dedicated solely to that it's just anxiety lie. Because if you are struggling with symptoms that you don't understand, you probably are anxious. It doesn't wipe out the symptoms.

Women who have maybe symptoms that could be suggested. of endometriosis, you could absolutely have anxiety and have endometriosis. You can absolutely have anxiety and be perimenopause or you can absolutely have anxiety and have recurrent UCIs. In fact, they probably go hand in hand, you know? And just the way that it's just anxiety has been used to, one, wipe out physical symptoms. But two, minimise the symptoms of anxiety. anxiety can be debilitating and the way that it's just anxiety has become synonymous with

it's nothing. Yes, exactly. It's really like a crime. The title of your book is just a really, really, really, really brilliant title. It's all in your body. So it almost like flips it. It's all in your head, you know, round. And the thing is, if it's in your head, it matters. Why is this so important to you? Why was that the title of the book?

For so many reasons, right, I think it's really helpful for you to identify exactly that just because it's a psychological experience doesn't mean it doesn't matter, doesn't mean it's not powerful, doesn't mean it's not having an impact. And that relates to like mental health taboo and stigma. It's interesting how many doctors will say, you know, have a special interest in mental health, but we'll still then be very keen to pass off physical symptoms as just anxiety that needs a perception that that's then straightforward, which of course it's a special interest in mental health, but we'll still then be very keen to pass off physical symptoms as just anxiety that needs, and a perception that's then straightforward, which of course it's a not, you know, having worked with lots of people with anxiety disorders, it's absolutely not. So I think one of the reasons for this title is to help people see that everything is in our body, everything's physiologically mediated. I mean, there is a philosophical thing that we won't go into there, but pretty much, you know, for me to have this conversation with you, to be generating these thoughts, there's electrical activity going on in my brain, you know, and then that has to be converted via my voice box and so on and so forth. If I was just in silence, there would still be physical activity going on there as I'm processing where my attention's going.

So absolutely everything has a biological, physiological underpinning. And if that's what we're valuing, then we can substantiate all of these psychological experiences physiologically. But beyond that, this kind of physical matter element is not the key part of it either. I suppose what I really wanted to do with the title was try and flip that narrative of it's all in your head on its head so that people understand that's a nothing phrase. You know, as you say, Faye, if it's all in your head, that still matters. That's still something that needs exploration.

But there isn't this dichotomy between head and body that the two need to be explored. And exactly as you said, we can have two things at the same time. We can have multiple morbidities, multiple mental health diagnoses. We see, you know, there's lots and lots of data showing. The more physical health difficulties, the more mental health difficulties, the more mental health difficulties because, of course, you know, not only does the physiological strain of having health difficulties probably impact on the psychological, but also the practical and the emotional element that comes with it. So we need to start looking at this in a much more nuanced way.

And I was hoping that the title peaks that curiosity, not just of people that can relate to it's all in your head, but the doctors and allied health professionals that treat them to. A little bit controversial. I truly believe that the way that women are more likely to experience depression or anxiety about twice as likely as men is the reason mental health stigma exists. Because common mental health conditions are more commonly experienced by women, then having these mental health conditions is seen as more feminine. And when in a patriarchal society where being more feminine is seen as lesser, then of course mental health stigma exists. You know, you create this false dichotomy. And it does so much damage.

If you feel, if you're struggling with depression and anxiety, you're not going to want to go out and exercise, be social with your friends, be, you know, nourish your body. But also if you're struggling with physical symptoms, you're also not going to be doing those things that nourish your body. Of course they feed into each other. And by creating this false dichotomy, we do nothing but. Damage. Coming back to women feeling dismissed, there was a recent story, have you heard about the Yale

facility scandal? No, I don't think I have. It was very, very, very sad. There was over the course of five months, women were having that eggs collected. So needle inserted, have you heard, needle. Was this the retrieval documentary they did on it? Yeah. Needle inserted into the wall of their vagina to retrieve eggs. And they were saying, I can feel everything, I can feel pain. And the doctors were saying, I've given you the maximum dose of fentanyl. I can't give you anymore. This happened over five months. I think 95 women are known to have gone through the procedure. Five months in, an anethyst notices that one of the caps and the fentanyl is loose. And they look, they check, and a lot of the fentanyl had been swapped for saline. So many of these women were getting injected with saline.

and no one was listening to them. But what I found really, really interesting about that story, awful story, was the way the women created a narrative that they must have a low pain threshold. Yeah. Almost as soon as they had been dismissed, they had made it their fault.

Why do you think so many women start doubting themselves after being told their symptoms are just normal or just stress? It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think if you haven't been in that situation, you might imagine that, no, you would just know if you're in that degree of pain. But especially when you're empathetic, conscientious, that shapes a lot of how our brain processes things. And then that can have a big impact then on our memory, on our sensation, on our emotions. and women are particularly conscientious and we are particularly interested and aware of social dynamics. So I think we are more likely to be impacted by that particular thing.

There's something that I talk about in the book, which is, well, two things, introspective awareness, which is our ability to recognize our bodily signals. Pain is a bodily signal, but so is hunger, thirst, you know, touch taste, all of these things. and then this process of multi-sensory integration is the process by which our brain combines all sorts of data, not just the interceptive awareness data of what's physically going on in the body, things that we might not actually be able to be aware of consciously, but that are going on under the bonnet. So for example, how our immune system is functioning,

with our emotions, how we're feeling in that moment, with our prior context, what's happened before, and then with, you know, our perceptions based on what's going on in the moment. And the social feedback element of that is huge. So if you're getting messages like this might be painful, we know that our brain is likely then to, you know, be able to gauge what's going on better. If you're getting messages, this is not likely to be painful.

Then your brain has to factor that into the calculation. it's obviously not the only thing because the pain and the no seception there is going to have an impact. But after the fact of the experience, so the experience in the moment can be influenced by these different things coming together. But afterwards, that complicated calculation,

we don't have a good memory, even for emotions, right? If you asked me how I was feeling four hours ago, it would be hard for me to remember maybe with accuracy and especially not in an embodied way. But if, you know, I have a lot of people telling me you agree, then that, that's going to have a big impact.

There's that element of things, which our brain basically calculates these things in a slightly different way where essentially our cognitive appraisal overtakes our actual embodied appraisal. When we don't want to upset things and we don't feel confident, I suppose, or like safe to advocate or to disagree, then that's the easier route for our brain to take.

It wasn't as bad as you thought it was. It was probably you. and that then causes the least stress. Actually for us as women, where if you do advocate for yourself, if you do quote unquote make a fuss, which is how we're made to feel if you advocate for yourself, that often comes with more stress, more emotional strife. And our brain just wants to avoid that.

So it'd be like, no, you were wrong. And that, I think, is how it maintains. Can you tell us anything about what you are trying to understand? That hasn't been researched before. I was shocked, Faye, because in my clinic, time and time again, and of course it's a biosample, but I hear so many shocking stories of women being dismissed, and I see the trajectory of how that dismissal has a massive impact, not only on the mental health, but on the physical health as well. And we make sense of it, we formulate it, we do all of this work, but I can't help being mind blown by,

how different things would be if there would be different messages at particular times along that journey. I got curious, like, what do we know from the research about how medical dismissal actually does impact the physical outcomes of people? Because I can see that all of the time. You know, it makes total sense that those experiences

had an impact on pain, on fatigue, on whatever it is. And when I looked, I found that we don't even have a measure of medical dismissal. We have like proxy measures and adjacent measures, but not specifically of medical dismissal. Healthcare communication satisfaction, those kinds of things, but not medical dismissal. Stigma, but not medical dismissal. But yet we've got all of these statistics and figures saying that women are being dismissed. Black women, Indian women, Asian women are being dismissed.

And yet we haven't got a measure of dismissal. So if we don't have a measure of dismissal, how do we have a measure of the impact of dismissal? We just can't. What I was looking to see was, can we show that medical dismissal actually changes physical outcomes as well as mental health outcomes? And I found that we don't have a measure in the first place. So the first thing that we're doing is making this measure. We've got a thousand people, men and women, to fill out a questionnaire, a first kind of draft of a questionnaire, which will be validated alongside other adjacent measures. and then we're going to create that into a validated questionnaire itself.

And the long-term plan is really to see when we measure that, you know, what does that look like for different groups? What does that look like longitudinally for people? Can we show that the worst experiences of medical dismissal also then predict worse health outcomes? Because honestly, we're not moving the needle in the healthcare system in terms of it still happens. We see all of these stats now. It still happens.

But if we have a, you know, definitive stats to say, more dismissal, worse outcomes, maybe we can use the economic argument, you know, to be like we need to change this. God, but you're so right, isn't it? We need to make an economic argument because women's feelings are not important enough. Not important enough. God. So when someone has symptoms but doesn't feel believed, what can happen in the body? I mean, so many things in the body.

can change when you don't feel believed. I think if we think about being believed as a fundamental signal that you're safe, because when you're not believed, you're not safe, so, you know, if we just take this in going to the doctors, if you turn up with symptoms and you say, this is what's going on for me, and a doctor says, okay, I believe you, then you've got all of these choices that then open up potentially of what can then change for you. If they say, no, you don't, then you have no choices and what you're faced with is I have to continue suffering and nothing's going to shift. And I'm essentially powerless because this person doesn't believe me. And especially when it's so hard to get a GP appointment, that is fundamentally an unsafe experience. It means I'm stuck with

the thing that is causing me suffering. If we recognize that link right, not being believed means you don't feel safe. I think often when we think about safety, we think about it as basic safety, you know, being free from violence or harm. But even using that definition, if your own body is causing you violence or harm because of things going on that you don't understand, but they're painful or they're really uncomfortable or they're, you know, changing how your body's working, that is a form of harm. So that basic safety needs is violated there by not being believed. But we also have other core safety needs that, you know, our brain is constantly on the lookout to see how we're doing on this. So feeling in control, if we feel powerless, we've got so much

research showing how our body reacts adversely to not feeling in control. I mean, not to, none of us have 100%, but to a certain degree, feeling like we're being cared for that we can rely on other people that they're going to support us to some degree. Feeling valued like we matter, like our experience matters. So when you're telling someone, I'm in pain and they're like, essentially, don't care, just go off and deal with it on your own, then we feel like we're insignificant, we don't matter. So all of these, I mean, there's other safety needs as well, but all of these safety needs are being calibrated in the brain. And when they're being violated, the brain's making this calculation of basically threat. And from there, there's lots of different downstream

things that can happen. Our autonomic nervous system can start activating that sympathetic branch, the fight or flight branch, which sees adrenaline, noradrenaline course through our system, which physically changes things acutely in a moment. So lots of people who will have gone to the doctor and had bad experiences, often they'll feel that sense of heart racing because their autonomic nervous system is powering on. But also the more chronic stress response can switch on as well, where our cortisol, we start secreting cortisol because our hypothalamus is kind of shifting things again. And then to bring it back to introspective awareness, our own experience if our body can change.

So if our brain's like we're not safe, it's looking out for what we need to be aware of internally as well as externally. And if that is pain, that's not being remediated by the doctor in front of us, then that's where the spotlight goes. And that attentional spotlight then amplifies that no-susceptive signal or whatever it might be,

if it is no-susceptive signal. No-siceptive, like pain receptors. Exactly, exactly. That will then amplify that signaling and then we'll experience it more. And that is a physical process. You know, people try to make this distinction between no-susceptive pain as real pain and other pain as kind of not real pain. But they're all mediated by physical processes. They're just slightly different ones. So essentially, our body's responding to threat, so many different pathways,

and there's so many different things that can then change in our body. That summarizes actually the next question very nicely. So my next question was going to be you talk about safety as in a psychological as well as a physiological process. So understanding the role that the nervous system has to play in that and the role that pain receptors and actually the role of where you are placing your attention and how that all has an impact, would that be correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's great, you know, this increased awareness of nervous system regulation.

I think that's helpful in lots of ways because it does help us see that there is this interplay between what's going on psychologically and physiologically. But our body's so vast and interconnected. We have these core regulatory systems that have so much overlap with each other and so much impact on so many different things, from fatigue to pain to gut sensation. So I name them as the metabolic system, the immune system, the neuroendocrine system and the cardiovascular system.

So all of those systems can be impacted by feeling unsafe. You might be listening to this fresh-faced first thing in the morning. or in the afternoon when your skin's oiliness has crept back in. Either way, let me share the quickest ways you might be making oily skin worse from someone who spent my entire 20s aggressively powdering over the problem. The first mistake is scrubbing your face like a kitchen pan, trying to strip the oil away. When you strip all that oil off, your skin panics

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This one combines two of the key ingredients for oily skin, salicylic acid and niccinamide. If you are an oily girl like me, please, please, please stop hiding yourself away. Oily skin or any skin concern at all is nothing to be ashamed of. I regret all the years I let my skin stop me from living my life. So please do not do the same. I will pop some links in the description so you can try it out for yourself. Do you have any case examples where processing the trauma of being dismissed has maybe like helped someone feel safer in their own body again? I mean, so many.

This is what got me really interested in the area. because I'm a health psychologist, so I tend to see people who are dealing with health issues of some kind. A lot of times people experiencing post-viral fatigue or chronic fatigue will come see me. A lot of people with recurrent UTIs, a lot of people with endometriosis pain. And, you know, across those different experiences, there's been, I mean, it's been fundamental to process those experiences of dismissal. but what's been interesting is I only realized it kind of after after the fact of doing a lot of these sessions with different people, that that's where it went to, it went to processing the experiences of dismissal because I use a psychotherapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, so EMDR. And what EMDR does essentially is it helps your brain get in a zone where it can turn towards things that have been really threatening in a way that you wouldn't necessarily be able to,

without having your brain in that zone because it's too distressing. It's too aversive. So your brain uses shortcuts, whether it's distraction or, you know, busying yourself or just getting so so over-activated that it's intolerable. So EMDR helps you go there and it helps your brain then kind of pull up all of these things that are related to the distressing thing that you're going towards. And across the board of these experiences, so fatigue, pain, pain. in chronic uti, pain in endometriosis,

we had started at the point of, let's try and help your brain understand that it's not stuck in that worst place of being with these symptoms, i.e. when you had no knowledge of what they were, when there was no support, when you know, yeah, when it was just really overwhelming physically, let's go towards that.

And then naturally what the brain would gravitate towards wasn't necessarily memories of being in extreme pain or in extreme fatigue. it was these consultations where they've been told, this is you now, you know, that's all we can do for you, you know, here's a leaflet, or this isn't what you think it is, that's not a thing. And so then we'd pick that memory to work on because that was the thing that kept coming up. And when we started processing those memories, I mean, just so many things changed.

And one of the big notable things was this shift from what we were talking about at the beginning of, oh, it's my fault, I don't quite believe myself, to so much more compassion and so much, I don't know, like confidence coming out from within of like, oh my gosh, like that's what happened. That's so unacceptable and healthy anger. And also then change relationship with the body, starting to trust experimenting with it, whereas before it just felt so fragile because if I do anything that makes it worse, then I'm stuck again at that same thing of the doctor telling me, oh, well, that's you now. really powerful, but it just shows, again, how fundamental those consultations are. I don't think

enough doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals actually realise how much power their words and language have on what comes after. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess in a stretched NHS, I think it's important to distinguish that medical dismissal is not acknowledging the limitations of a service. I posted something recently about GPs dismissing period pain as normal. I got a lot of stick for GP bashing. And my response was if you're a GP who does that, then I absolutely am bashing you. I'm not bashing all GPs. There's many, many, many brilliant GPs who don't do that. And I'm not, I'm not bashing them. And then someone said, well, you know, what am I to do? Refer this woman on to a 12-month waiting list. My response was,

well yes because the argument they had was well I can't do anything so what's the point you can absolutely say to a woman I believe you what you are going through is having a severe impact on your life that is not okay I am very sorry that the situation we are in right now is the waiting list is 12 months but I am with you and I am advocating for you versus turning a woman away making her feel not believed, all because you think that that is better than putting her on a 12-month waiting list. I just thought it was the most ridiculous argument

I've ever heard because you are not recognising the benefit that just simply telling a woman, I'm with you. I believe you and I'm with you and it might take a while. The NHS is not perfect, but we are on the same team.

Really frustrated me. And I think the work that you were doing shows that actually by dismissing, what I want to be clear is acknowledging the limitations of a stretched healthcare service is not the same as dismissing medical dismissal. Yeah, and I think, you know, that's a really, I mean, an interesting perspective of that person.

Ridiculous perspective. As a medical professional, validating someone's symptoms, they don't see the value in that. I think a lot of the time, I would hazard against the majority of time, actually that is where a lot of benefit comes from even more so than treatment that may come later down the line, you know?

Totally, totally agreed. And I think if anybody, if there are medical professionals listening, that would have assumed the same thing or similar, that actually, you know, quote unquote, bedside manner doesn't matter that much. It's what you do with, you know, the treatment that they get or whatever it might be. Re-evaluate because you have so much power as a professional regardless of what treatment you're able to give somebody, just as you said, the amount of time,

so for every person that I've worked with that has been like, that scarred me for life, that experience, I've had so many people being like, if it wasn't for that doctor, and that doctor or that nurse or whoever it was, just saying that or, you know, just, you know, giving me some space to talk about it, I don't know where I'd be,

or just even asking questions. And often those professionals haven't been the ones that did the surgery or got them on the right pills or whatever the medical route was. It was the ones that just said, this is horrendous for you. I'm really sorry. And acknowledged the feelings of the healthcare system as well to be like, yeah, we're in this, we're in this situation. It's not ideal. You know, we should be able to do better for you. We can't.

But these are things that you might find useful. I've worked with a company on, I mean, try. to get into healthcare professionals' minds, that just asking, validating, and then empowering with something like you might want to look up X, Y, and Z. That doesn't need a prescription. That doesn't need, you know, even the precise details of a particular professional. It just needs validating of a particular concept. And then somebody's like, okay, at least I can go away and that person cared enough to think of me and what I might do after that. And that can really transform the whole process. You're completely right. Do you know what? I'm actually,

I'm very passionate as well about the health, the physical and mental health of healthcare professionals as well. And I think in this world of, you know, wellness has never been bigger. Optimisation. Culture has never been bigger. Health awareness has never been bigger. But the health of healthcare professionals is often completely left out of that equation. I guess maybe I'm saying this to redeem myself after being accused of GP bashing. But when we talk about feeling in control and feeling believed, I hope that actually that gives healthcare professionals back a sense of control. Because if you're in a stretched NHS, a stretched healthcare system and you feel hopeless and like you don't have enough resources to do a good job, a reminder from yourself that your voice is the best

resource you have, your empathy is the best resource you have, your ears to listen and validate people's concerns in a stretched healthcare service, you always have that and that has so much power. I know how difficult it is. You know, I worked in the NHS in a stretch mental health service. And yeah, it's really hard, you know, we can't downplay that. I think it's hard because, you know, you're looking for ways to mitigate the impact of systemic issues.

But that is a fundamental way that you can actually make your job more enjoyable and less stressful, is by, and this might be counterintuitive to a lot of people, but is by recognizing that you've got a human in front of you that you could really positively benefit in the way that you're talking to them, regardless of like what comes back acutely, just in knowing that kindness explicitly seeing somebody, you know, making it explicit that you see somebody and believe them, just that is powerful. And if you're doing that day and day out and knowing that you're doing that, that is a force for good, regardless of like the systemic things. Just to share a bit of the science as well behind this, there's this interesting study of a monk

who's called Matthew Ricard. I don't know if you've come across him. No. He does a lot of collaboration with neuroscientists and he was asked in, this was years back, to, get in a functional MRI machine to practice compassion. When he practiced compassion in the machine, the research was like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Your scans aren't showing what?

The scans show of other people that practice compassion. It's like, I'm practicing compassion. And so they talked through, what are you doing? And he was saying, well, I'm thinking of,

you know, the scenario that they'd given him. And I'm, you know, thinking of how much kind of love and goodwill that I'm sending towards those people. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Stop doing that. We want you to essentially think about what they're going through and do that instead. And he was like, okay. So he did that and he was like, oh, he talked about this afterwards. Like, I felt burnt out very quickly and this was a really unpleasant experience. So then when he came out, the scans matched up, you know, with what was what he was doing in the second condition to other people when they practice compassion. And so what that helped. And so what that helped. them figure out was we often confuse empathy with compassion. Compassion is this kind of tapping into

a well of positive regards and benevolence and warmth and well-being, you know, wishes for well-being for someone. Essentially, if the word doesn't put you off, love for like fellow humans, whereas empathy is feeling and empathising with that distress and essentially just feeling it with them and that does burn us out. We need a bit of empathy for compassion, but often we can use that as a vehicle of then just inhabiting compassion. And I think if you know that as a healthcare practitioner,

that could be very protective. A lot of the questions that I get is, do not take home your work? You know, does it not affect your mental well-being? And it just truly doesn't. I mean, if I was doing it all of, you know, without any breaks in adequate preval, of course, but it just doesn't because I come from a place of compassion.

So I'm always excited, hopeful of how I can show up for that person and what can happen for them, you know, based on the work that they're doing. And that is really protective. That really resonates with me because I sit at an intersection where all my friends from medical school are obviously doctors and then all my friends from where I grew up and none of them are doctors. So I hear their concerns.

They feel dismissed. They feel not listened to. And then I speak to my medical school friends and like my doctor friends. And they are burns out. They are struggling with the emotional load that they carry every single day. And there have been certain times when I've been working in hospital. And I've had certain interactions with patients when I've been extremely tired or quite emotionally burn out. And I've gone back to like my on call room or whatever.

And I've started typing up my notes and had this realised. of Fay, that's not the doctor you want to be. You've just been quite short with that person. You've lacked empathy. You're falling into the trap of a doctor that you said you'd never be and you are being that person. When I look at the points

where I've had to have a little word with myself and go, Faye, snap out of it. You're kind. You want to be there for people. You don't want to be that doctor with a straight face who doesn't take anything on board. But they've normally been at points where I've experienced

quite heavy emotional things in the hospital. And it's been in the aftermath of that that I've almost had to completely shut off because I can't let it all in. Because if I let it all in, I'll be locking myself in the toilet every half an hour for a little cry. So I think that's even,

that's a beautiful perspective for me to take on that it's, you can show compassion without almost like downloading all the emotions because it's just, it's impossible. It's really impossible. But that doesn't mean that you have to shut off your care for that person in its entirety.

We're going to come on to buy or bye-bye. If you're not familiar with buy-or-bye-bye, I'm going to show you a piece of paper. I would love to know whether you would buy this thing or say bye-bye to it. There's only one rule. We love nuance. We love balance. Just give it all the context that you want because we never get enough context on social media. Asking chat GPC for answers.

Take away the medical value or lack of value. I want to hear from a health anxiety or a psychological perspective. what are your thoughts? I would say choose your model wisely and maybe give it some pre-instruction. So if you know you're health anxious or you know that you're really worried about particular things in your health, maybe let the, you know, clarify that. And also just the process of identifying what are your specific fears can just be very helpful psychologically anyway, regardless of what comes back.

But then you might have a more reassuring and informative. feedback because we do need and quick answers to some health issues or health, you know, experiences that we're not getting in the healthcare system so it can be helpful there. But if you if you don't set it up in the right way, my husband the other day, he had a, he had some kind of weird stomach pain or something and he put it in. And I think it was chat GPT. So it was some, it was actually quite a long time because the chat chvety was like, oh no. time is of the essence here.

It's just a little stomach thing. So obviously if you get that back and you are health anxious, that's not going to be what you want. So I think you have to set your model up to help you and put in clear parameters of like what kind of information is going to be helpful to you and what kind of information is going to be unhelpful

and just even considering that I think can be useful. Journling apps. I mean, bye, I think. I think journaling is a really good way of helping you get to some of your subconscious, just the process of turning towards yourself and your experience when you're writing. I think it often pulls out stuff that you haven't quite been able to access just by thinking. So good. I don't know any specific apps though, so I don't know if there's any good ones or dodgy ones. We did an episode with a somatic therapist

and myself and my best friend, we've got a great relationship where we both are unpaid therapists. I probably shouldn't say that because neither of us are qualified to be doing that. But we're very good at, both of us are very good at intellectualising and analysing. However, what both of us are not very good at is recognising the sensations. Where would you say is the limit of intellectualising or dissecting your problems? I think once you understand your problems, then that's your checkbox. Like, okay, you know it. That's when you have to be exploring other options of working with your feelings and sometimes that's by doing things slightly different and you get a different experience so like more behavioural stuff I think none of us well I know

none of us really explicitly learn how to feel feelings like if you if you think about it did anybody ever tell you oh you feel this way this is what you do next no absolutely not or did anyone even ask you like how how do you experience excitement or anxiety No, no. At any point in our lives, we don't get those questions asked of us. We don't get that curiosity cultivated. So we just have these like automatic experiences, kind of like physical sensations. They overlap.

But we kind of heuristically figure out, this is what I do when I feel this way, this is what I do when I feel that way. I don't even feel that anymore because, you know, whatever. Some of those heuristic ways that we've got work for us really well. some of them work too well in that we then manage to avoid the distress and we then just keep doing it. So intellectualising is a great one. Oh, I really understand that and I can get into the meets of that and I can make even more sense by whatever. And that can feel good and it can regulate emotions. But it precludes us then from exploring another way to be.

And usually it's only once you get to your 30s, maybe 40s where you recognise it because either there's some health issues or the difficult emotional things you've been having just a recurring. And usually that's at the point that then maybe that sphere of things of like, how do you feel your feelings then? That was one of the first questions I ask and how do you deal with difficult feelings and people often say, well, I don't really or exercise is a big one. Exercise is great for regulating. But if it's the only thing, then we've got to be asking questions about well how do you feel your feeling? It's an unpopular thing to tell people that they need to do

because it does involve getting uncomfortable a bit. But feeling feelings isn't the same as the way you feel feelings when you're most dysregulated. It's about the attitude and the intention. So I can feel sad and I can feel sad in this ruminative way of like my life so hard and heavy and this is what I've got to look forward to. and I'm, you know, and all of the stories enveloping me as I'm feeling sad and I just feel trapped and heavy.

Or I can feel sad and be interested in kind of what my body's doing to process that sadness, feel it in my chest, feel like my body heaving if I'm crying, and just try and stay with the bodily and felt experience, rather than what the mind's generating, which is often then just feeding back into the layers and layers of emotions. And when you do feel that differentiation of feeling feelings, you then start, your brain just start to prefer to go for, let me feel feelings rather than have feelings feel me if you like, because it's less heavy. And the more you do it, the less they stick around, the less heavy they are. Nice.

Okay, that's really helpful. Breathwork. By for the most part, what I will say is there's an explosion of breathwork teachers with varying degrees of being trauma informed and also perhaps recognition of, you know, the people that they've got learning the breathwork. So, for example, a lot of breathwork is like activating the body with like quick short intakes of breath. There's all different ways that you can do breathwork. It's not all the kind of down regulating stuff. And if you've got a particular. reactive system or if you've got something like autonomic dysfunction with pots or something like that, then that breathwork actually might then cause more difficulties. It doesn't mean that you're completely precluded, but you need somebody that knows your baseline physiology. Or there's breathwork that puts you in different poses, which can feel quite vulnerable. And if you've had any kind of sexual abuse or trauma, then that can actually make you very vulnerable. And I think there's this

kind of culture within these practitioners have been like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. You just got to feel and let out the trauma, but actually that can end up being retramatizing in the wrong setting without the right kind of closing down and regulating, and especially if it's done in a group. So, yeah, you want to vet your breathwork practitioner and think about your history and what might be important to you. And a reminder that not everything works for everyone. Exactly. And I think that that is something we're seeing a lot of where almost like the the optimal way to do something. It feels like there's an optimal way to do everything.

Yeah. You know? And if you're not doing that, there can be a GILS associated with not doing the best, the optimisation of everything. Recognised and everyone's bodies are different, everyone's experiences are different

and finding what works for you and what you once again is that's a really powerful reminder. And I actually had never thought of it in that context. That's very helpful. Thank you. Cold plunges? I mean, for me, bye, I love a cold plunge. You love a cold plunge?

Fair enough. Do you know what? Like, I will take the sauna. I will take the, you know, all the other, the steam room, everything. And I will skip the cold plunge. Do you know what, I'll tell you what, though, every Christmas, me and my family, we do a cold dip on Christmas morning. The rest of my family started doing it. And I was like, no, I'm not doing it.

But they all said that by the end of Christmas, they all feel so much more. You know, after like on Christmas day or like, you know, you know, you get the high, then you eat so much food, and then you're like, oh, it's over, I'm a bit depressed now. I noticed significantly our energy on Christmas Day at 6pm, we're all still going. We're up on our feet. We've got so much more energy,

but we're also almost like this euphoria. We've all created this hypothesis in our head that that is to do with the cold plunge. It is, I swear it is. I mean, I haven't looked into it, but I swear it is that's what I associate with the cold plunge as the euphoria. Yeah. But I do think there is some good science,

the alternation, right, of sauna, cold plunge, sauna, cold plunge, which then also makes the cold plunge a bit more palatable. What I think maybe it was is it's like a deprivation of comfort before we indulge for the rest of the day. And I think it makes you feel more grateful for the indulgence. I don't like getting in the tub though. Something about the sea. I can do the sea.

No, I know what you mean. I do, yeah. The only time I've done it has been in like, this sounds so bougie, but in lakes or in the sea rather than like in in I have done it in tubs but usually like in a not in tubs in a spa where they've got like you just descend down rather than have to lower yourself in a tin can private health tests I mean I think it's so sad because I mean it has to be a buy often because we're just not getting the testing when we go to the doctors which is like it's crazy to think this in 2026 is where we're at in the healthcare system like

I think it is really important to get the health test because we do see the impact of long waiting times and you need to be informed about your health and often then you can utilise that back in the NHS. So, I mean, of course it depends on what they are because there's all sorts of nonsense tests that promise things that or, you know, say they'll find things that they won't really find and things like that. So you have to do a bit of research and cross-checking. Yeah, I think a lot of time you have to. Asking for a second opinion. Definitely by.

I don't think there's any caveat here. Even if you get back the second opinion is the same as the first, at least you feel reassured and you can get a sense of trust. I think, okay, maybe there is a bit of a nuance caveat here. Sometimes it is confusing because different doctors do have different ways of looking at things like everybody. And so that can bring more complexities to the picture. and that uncertainty can then, you know, add to the cognitive load and burden. But then in that case, you can also ask for a third opinion as well to try and help

and then crowdsource some, I don't know, way of kind of bringing together the understanding from the varied opinions. But I do think a second opinion is just important. So so much of your work focuses on the mind-body connection and actually what's going on in the mind can improve your physical symptoms and what. obviously physical, how you're physically functioning can help the mind as well. I think where women have been dismissed so much, have you tried breathwork or have you trying mindfulness, can feel synonymous with dismissal. So what would you say to a woman

who's listening right now who has been passed from pillar to post, dismissed time and time again, maybe it's symptoms of endometriosis or PMS or, you know, even perimenopause. I know, many of our listeners are perimenopausal and you're saying to them think about mindfulness. It can almost feel minimising because mindfulness is just so beautifully simple. It can be very, very challenging, but the concept is so beautifully, wonderfully simple. It can feel like you're saying you are taking these serious debilitating symptoms and you're telling me to do what? pardon, what would you say to them?

I mean, I think that the context is everything. If a doctor is saying to you do mindfulness at the expense of any other investigation or support for health, then that's not okay. That's not going to be helpful to you. Like we were saying before, it's not one or the other. Whenever any psychological support is suggested in the context of health, I don't think it should be suggested at the expense

of biomedical exploration and treatment. I think they should go together. It should be an integrated effort. Specifically on the mindfulness element, I consciously don't use the word mindfulness. A lot of what is incorporated in my practice is mindfulness, but I don't use that language anymore to describe what I'm doing

or even set up a mindfulness practice sometimes with people that I've been working with for a while because it's got this connotation of, as you say, minimizing the whole of you and your experience and all of this suffering into, let's just try and, you know, shift your mindset and get that a bit better. I've lost that from my language a lot of the time. Instead, you know, we'll then just do a practice so somebody can experience their experience slightly differently and see how that might have an impact on what's going on for them.

But psychology shouldn't be at the expense of a further medical treatment. And I think that's just the key takeaway for medics and anybody listening. We had an interesting community question that I'd love to ask you. Is how do you know if your symptoms are anxiety, something physical or both? To some degree, at least at the outset, it doesn't really matter for that reason, right? That if you've got a physical condition, let's say it's endometriosis or multiple sclerosis or something of organic origin that we could see in tests, working on your anxiety is still going to be really helpful

for your physical situation, but you still need to explore what's going on physiologically. If you've got health anxiety, and it's an anxiety disorder as opposed to it's coming from a physical condition, it's still helpful to go and get medical exploration so that you've got some good answers to begin with. And then, you know, with health anxiety, the thing is the health concern jumps around.

But even after you've been to the doctors twice, well, it would be more than twice, but had different explorations for two different things and gotten that back from the doctor, that's only going to help you deal with the health anxiety because you've got that clarity of, yeah, it really isn't this now, and that allows you to do the health anxiety work in therapy. So it almost does.

doesn't matter, work on the anxiety, but also go and advocate and get, you know, support for your health condition. That has been a really, really wonderful episode. I'm extremely grateful for the knowledge that you've imparted. I think it's such an important topic in women's health, especially. But there's a final question that we ask all the guests at the end of every episode. And that is Dr. Sula, what do you wish every woman knew by the time she was 25? I wish she knew that your body is your barometer and if you learn how to listen to it, which also includes listening to how you're feeling, you develop this inner wisdom that will really help you with anything, with navigating health issues, with navigating difficult emotions,

and especially with kind of trusting your intuition. and, you know, that's actually gold and we don't get to how to do that. So, yeah, I would want her to know that. That's a beautiful note to finish on. So thank you so so so much. And we will leave the link for the book in the description. Brilliant. Thank you.

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