Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Perfectionism is Sabotaging Your Weight Loss (Why You Can't Keep It Off) with Dr. Nicole LePera

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

What if the biggest thing standing between you and better health isn't your diet, your workout routine, or your hormones?What if it's the relationship you've built with yourself?In this conversation, I sit down with psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Nicole LePera to explore how our earliest experiences shape the way we move through adulthood. From emotional eating and food noise to perfectionism, people pleasing, burnout, and the struggle to trust ourselves, so many of the habits we think are personality traits are actually learned survival strategies.We also explore why healing isn't about becoming someone new. It's about reconnecting with the parts of yourself that have always been there.If you've ever wondered why you know what to do for your health but still struggle to follow through, this conversation offers a completely different way to understand yourself.In this episode, you'll learn:Why the first five years of life shape the way your nervous system responds to stressWhy food noise and emotional eating often point to deeper unmet needsHow small daily promises help rewire your brain and build confidenceThe difference between guilt and shame, and how each affects your decisionsWhy learning to rest can feel uncomfortable for so many womenPractical ways to reconnect with your body and begin healing old patterns_More on Dr. Nicole LePeraDr. Nicole LePera is a holistic psychologist, trained at Cornell University, The New School for Social Research and The Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She is the founder of the global community healing membership SelfHealers Circle and the author of #1 NY Times Bestseller "How to Do the Work" "How To Meet Your Self" and "How To Be The Love You Seek"Website: theholisticpsychologist.com Instagram: @the.holistic.psychologistTikTok: @theholisticpsychologistReparenting Your Inner Child SelfHealers CircleFor more resources related to today's episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep351_Connect with Dr. Mindy:Join Reset AcademyWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Dr. Mindy on InstagramSubscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletterDisclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

If you are loving the conversations on my podcast and you want to go deeper with me, come join me over on Substack. It's where I share the conversations I'm having behind the scenes, the research that I'm obsessed on and paying close attention to, and really the thoughts I don't always get to unpack here on the podcast or any of my other social media. We're taking women's health, fasting, hormones, food systems, mindset, aging, and what it really means to live like a girl in today's world to a whole new level. You'll also get early podcast access, deeper essays on my thoughts around how we can all stay healthy in this modern world. You get community, you get conversations, and exclusive content that I only share there. I'm not joking when I said this is my new

favorite place. It is currently where I am at. So you can head on over to substack. Dot, Dr. Mindy Pels.com or just search Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pels directly in the Substack app. I'm super excited to have you over there. Please introduce yourself. And let's dive in to some really good conversations. Hey, Dr. Mindy here.

And welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. By the time a child turns five, 90% of their brain has already grown. 90%. And in that same tiny window before most of us could even speak in full sentences. We were already learning how to handle stress, how to soothe ourselves, how to feel safe or not, in our own bodies. We didn't choose any of it. We just absorbed it. I grew up in a turbulent household, and for years, I thought I had moved past it. I fasted, I studied biochemistry. I built a career teaching women how to hear.

heal themselves and their metabolism, but there was one thing I couldn't outrun. The first time I ever did a 24-hour fast, I hit a wall of panic that I didn't even expect. My body wasn't just hungry. It was terrified. Some part of me was convinced that if I didn't eat, I was going to die. And it took me years to understand why. Somewhere in my childhood, food and my mother's love had gotten fused into the same thing. Not eating didn't just mean an empty stomach. It meant losing her. It meant losing love itself.

Once I saw that, I could finally unhook from it. I tell you this because I know I'm not the only woman walking around with an inner child still running the show. So many of us eat. right, fast right, exercise right, and still don't get the results we're chasing. And we blame our macros. We blame our willpower. We blame our hormones. But sometimes the missing piece isn't in your protocol at all. It's in a pattern that was wired into you before you ever had a choice in the matter. That unresolved piece, it doesn't stay quiet. It shows up as the body that won't release weight no matter what you do, because some part of your nervous system still believes it isn't

safe to let go. It shows up as food noise that isn't really about food at all. It shows up as the woman who is disciplined to the point of exhaustion, terrified of what happens if she ever loses her grip. This is why I have brought you Dr. Nicole LaPera. Dr. Nicole is a holistic psychologist trained at Cornell University, the new school for social research and the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. She's the founder of Self-Healer Circle, a global healing community, and the author of the number one New York Times bestsellers, How to Do the Work, How to Meet Yourself, and how to be the love you seek.

She has most recently released a book called Reparenting the Inner Child, and that's exactly why she was the perfect person to bring in to discuss this topic. In this conversation, Nicole and I go straight into the inner child, the nervous system, and why no amount of healthy habits can outrun a body that doesn't yet feel safe.

We talk about why food noise might be a childhood pattern wearing a nude disguise. We talk about the woman who was never allowed to rest and what it costs her. We talk about how healing isn't about becoming a different person. It's about finally becoming the person you were meant to be. So if you have done everything right and you still feel stuck, this is the one for you. And if you see yourself or a loved one or a friend or a coworker in this episode, please send it out to them. This topic is critically important, not just to our health, but our overall happiness. Ready?

Let's dive in. Dr. Nicole La Pera. Enjoy. Well, let me start off by just saying, welcome, Nicole. I'm so excited to have you here. and there's so much I want to dive into in this conversation. So welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast. Thank you for having me, Mindy.

As I was shared beforehand, could not wait to get here as well, and super excited to dive into this. Yeah, thank you. So I want to start with this statistic that I found that has been really, really hit me hard. And here it is. By the time a child turns five, about 90% of their brain has already grown.

And the wiring for how they handle stress, soothe themselves and regulate emotion is largely laid down before they can even choose it. Okay. I grew up in a turbulent household. I read that. I know what happened to me from zero to five. I know you're on a mission to change the way we handle stress and to re-parent ourselves. Help me understand this statistic. I mean, I'm wondering why that number and that stats, isn't in my new book because what that is beautifully describing. I'm shocked I missed it is what I have, and many of practitioners are now calling the inner child. It is that literal hardwiring at a time during our experience where we didn't have language, we didn't have logic. What we had were sensations and survival

driven responses. And as our brain is growing, learning, taking in information from our environment, we are quite literally developing the roadmap for exactly as that stat was describing for things like how we handle unpredictability, conflict, disconnection, and generally speaking, how we get our needs met. And so then for the large majority of us, even though our bodies grow, we age, our circumstances change. Some of us find ourselves in completely different geographical locations. Yet that inner child, all of those programmed habits come with us. And I think that's probably about a decade ago plus where I found myself feeling very frustrated alongside a lot of clients that I was seeing that it didn't seem like insight awareness was able to shift

those patterns so that's really where this work and this book in particular has grown out of the insight and understanding that I now have for why that early time is so important for what is exactly learned and why in that early childhood kind of time frame. and then, of course, what we can do to create the change that we deserve. Yeah. Yeah, and that's what I really want to dive into what we can do. And when I read that stat, when I read your book, which I love your book, and I was highlighting all over it and saw myself in so many places in it.

And when I look at my following and my audience, you know, I see so many women that eat right, they fast right, they exercise right, and then they don't get the result they want to get and there is like this missing piece that it's like the elephant in the room that nobody's talking about and I think when we look at trauma a lot of times we think of trauma in our 20s or our 30s or our 40s but what you're offering is that there is a pattern to our thinking that gets developed when we are much younger than that help me understand how this plays out with our health habits it's it's a pattern that lives not only in our mind and this is where really saw kind of foundational transformation that happens.

It's a pattern that also lives in our body. It's a felt sense. It's instinctual reactions. It's those moments where, right, our response is disproportionate. It's for a lot of us, the identities that we play that we don't seem to understand why it is that we keep repeating the same patterns. And again, because that early learning is, of course, our mind is always trying to make sense of the world around us, to gain understanding about ourselves at our place of it. in particular, though at the same times it's also sensing the world around us, right? Our body is responding to experiences, caregivers that were present and also everything that was

absent. And our nervous system to some degree learns a definition of safety based on those earliest experiences. And to be clear, the language of safety in our nervous system doesn't translate always to what is objectively safe. It simply means what is familiar. And that's why we will carry not just the beliefs in our mind that for some of us, right, we can change.

We can hear a conversation like this, my work, your work, understand, right? What's healthy? What's not healthy? What I should or shouldn't do. Yet in action, one of two things happen. Those urges and autopilot is too strong that we can't even create the change that we want. or to the population, it sounds like you're speaking to as well. Or we do all of the right things.

We check the boxes. We create the lifestyle habits that we know will translate, right, to a different felt experience. Yet if our nervous system can't register safety, if for whatever reason it's interpreting threat in our environment, especially within our relationships, then no amount of healthy habits are going to change the messages that are coming from the bottom up or from our body to our mind.

How do we know if our nervous systems locked in a state? Like you have a lot in your book about the different types of parenting that we've been exposed to. But the safety of the nervous system from my lens is one of the most important pieces of getting a result with your health. because if the nervous system is locked in some kind of unsafe situation, the biggest thing that I see in my world is it won't drop weight. Because why would, there's no, there's, I don't, I'm still think I'm running from a tiger. Why would I want to drop weight? I'm still have another priority. How do we identify that? Because it would free so many women who think that they just didn't get their macros right or they didn't, they didn't fast long enough, or they haven't found the right. exercise, but really it's the nervous system still feeling unsafe.

So let me kind of start the answer by maybe describing what a regulated, right? Nervous system could feel like and then we can kind of travel into probably the experience that the larger majority of us are having. So a healthy nervous system, right, means that we're embodied. As simple as that sounds, it means like we feel like we're in a body, right? We're able to pay attention. We feel our muscles when they tense, when they feel at ease. We can more or less tune into the rhythm of our heart, we feel our breath. And in terms of our muscles, they feel at ease, relaxed enough, though at the same time, if we needed to, want to do up and act, move about our environment, we would have the ability to do that. Right. Now, this is contrasted by a lot of us

who live in a body, maybe even now, if you're tuning into how your muscles feel, a lot of us carry a lot of tension in certain places, in our body in general. or we feel as if we don't have muscles at all. Like we're stuck in inaction. Like even if I needed to get off this couch because there was a fire in the next room, it would be hard, right, to inspire action. Those, right, are signals that our nervous system is in a state of stress. It's either activate it to fight or flee with all of that tension,

where we might have gotten to the final step where now we're completely depleted of energy. The little energy we have is going to other. other priorities in our body, not necessarily to get us up and move us about the world. So muscles, again, healthy. We can get up. We can move. We can do if we need to. A regulated nervous system, our breath is slow and deep. Our heart rate is more or less regular. Now, what I'm not saying, though, is that doesn't mean that there's not moments of stress where I have a reaction. I become tense. I act in the world. My heart rate elevates a little bit. And then I can calm down. So with that from a more psychological perspective, we can still upset.

We could still have, you know, uncomfortable emotions, but we have the ability to, A, stay present, right? No, we're having an upset, not just reacting from it. And we can bounce back, right? We can come back down to calm, release the tension in our muscles, our heart rate goes back down to normal, our breathing normalizes, and we're calm and grounded again. So larger majority of us, again, we're living with tense muscles or we don't have the energy that we want our needs. We're either holding our breath all day long or it's so quick and short. It's coming from our chest. Again, signals that our body is in an unsafe experience.

And again, our heart rate kind of fluctuates based on that with it elevating as stress rises. So that often then looks like emotionally we become overwhelmed, overreactive, shut down maybe in moments where we do need to act or to assert ourselves. And of course, there's many other versions of living in a state. but I think the first kind of pillar of awareness begins with A, can I become connected and present? Can I become aware of how my body is feeling? And can I begin to notice those three major areas? Because those are usually indicators that a state is either being generated, like we're in a state or for some of us, we're stuck. We're living in a state.

Right. It's funny. I just brought this question to my membership group about embodiment. How many, and I asked the question of how many of the words. women on the call felt like they had a relationship with their body or living in their body or how many felt like they were, you know, in their head. And like 90% of them were like, I'm in my head. I don't, like they couldn't even fathom what it was like to be in the body. How if, and I think trauma does that, right? And lack of safety. And I mean, we live in a culture

women aren't safe in general. But what are some techniques to start to get into that nervous system that you described and get back into our body? I will always break change, healing, right, transformation into two really simple as I often do steps. And the first step you'll always hear and applies to this question as well is awareness, right? Becoming aware. And so the women in your community are very beautiful.

Like, yeah, I'm aware. I'm not in a body. I'm ahead. analyzing, I'm thinking, I'm worrying about everyone else. I'm not here in this vessel. That's a beautiful awareness. We don't have to shame that that realization because that was, and developed the habit of not being connected to one's body, was actually, in my opinion, just like all of these habits that began in childhood, they were very adaptive. They were at one time, the safest, the best thing that we can do when what? When the emotions or sensations in my body

were too overwhelming when I was physically alone and or when I was emotionally alone. And especially when the person causing the harm was perhaps a caregiver, right? So in those moments in childhood where we're not actually independent, we can't leave, we also can't soothe ourselves, our nervous system can't regulate on its own. So for a lot of us, the safest thing that we could do, and this began way back then, was begin to check out in different ways, right? Begin to live in our mind. In childhood, for a lot of us, it begins, like, in a fantasy world

and an imaginative world where we imagine we're part of a different family or different things are happening in our life. Or it can be translated to doing, producing the school system, right? I think creates an entire, you know, experience of thinking, of doing, right? And some of these things are celebrated, depending on what gendered body you're born into, depending on what society. A lot of things have been normalized, such as not living in our mind.

What was coming to mind when you even said that was, who was it, Descartes, who said, I think therefore I am. There's even, right, there was, we're still trying to figure out what we really are as a human. And there has been theorists that have thought, thinking is what makes us be. And so what we've now understood is that that's part of the story, the things that we think,

But another big part of it is how do we feel? Yet we have this environment, these relationships where being present or embodied was the most unsafe thing that we could be. And so checking out in all these ways that either worked given our individual circumstances and or were validated by our greater kind of belief systems and societal beliefs. And now we do have an epidemic, I believe, of a lot of adults in general. who either spend little time in their bodies and or ill-equipped don't have the tools to be with the stress and the discomfort that they are experiencing in their body. So they'll continue to rely on these adaptive mechanisms. Is this where addiction because a lot of the people that come to our community are food addicted and they're using food as a way of soothing themselves? And then they're gaining weight and then they don't want to be in their body because they can't even handle the wait, I had a woman in my community the other day say that she's 84 now, and she said that when she was in her 40s and 50s, she used to look in the mirror and scream at herself and tell herself horrible things. And I asked her, I said, tell me how you got over that.

And she said she read a book, the book, Radical Forgiveness. And she had to go through a process, much like what you're offering in your book, to start to heal what was wounded as a little child. Is that the food addiction and the food noise that we keep hearing about? I think addiction in general, though I'll say focus on food, I believe it is a coping habit that is developed. Again, at a very early time when we either could not or did not have the ability to be regulated or safety, create safety,

and or when we have the experience of deep-rooted shame, when we're made to believe that for whatever reason, And we're not worthy, we're not worthy for the care, right, to have the comfort and the support that we need it. So I believe food addiction, right, kind of goes into that category of some habit that we have learned very early on that is aimed at making us feel better, regulating upset emotions, and we're gaining a sense of worthiness. Food also, if we want to kind of unpack all the different layers of it, is often the first

point of connection between us and a caregiver. Our core needs, right? Is hunger. That's my mom. That's my mom right there. And it's my mom too, right? Because my mom having, did not having the emotional resources herself being raised by much older generation adults who believe that children quite literally were seen and not heard. Did not have any conversation about emotions, attunement.

So simply could not connect with us, her children. And I'm sure the way that she wanted to. But what she could do. was connect with us through food. And so for me, I have had and still do have a lifelong, just a relationship with food and nutrition that I continue to unpack, though one of the deepest connections for me was quite literally that food was a moment to connect with mom.

Right? So now food for a lot of us, in addition to the neurochemistry of certain foods and how they literally change our physiology to start to feel a certain way, I mean, a whole rabbit hole about society and messaging about food and bodies and how it relates and all of the changes and shift that have happened in that, I think, has resulted in a lot of us, you know, having dysfunctional, so to speak, relationships with food and or, like you were describing earlier, having maybe the right tools or knowledge about food and how we want to use it, understanding that it is a need that all of us have, but not having that safe relationship with food or intaking and or don't have. access to the food that we need to create the health that we desire. How many of you felt your brain go offline the minute you hit your 40s? When my brain started to go offline in my early 40s, I was crazy scared.

I went from being the woman who could hold everything together to not being able to get through a full workday. The positive thinking that had always been my superpower, it just disappeared. Worst case scenarios replaced it. anxiety I didn't recognize, a version of myself I didn't sign up for. I thought something was deeply wrong with me. And then I went looking for answers. What I found didn't just help me.

It changed the entire way I understand what it means to be a woman moving through this season of life. Your brain is not broken. It's remodeling. That's why I wrote, age like a girl, to really lay that out for all of you. It's part science, it's part my own story, the messy, humbling, ultimately beautiful story of a woman who had to fall apart a little before she could figure out who she actually was. If you're in that right now, I want you to know you are not alone, and this is not the end.

It might just be the beginning of the most powerful chapter of your life. So age like a girl. It's available now at Dr. Mindypells.com slash books. And please know, I am always cheering you on. It's so interesting because it was fasting that actually helped me understand what my mom, how she had intermixed mother's love and food. And I literally, when I first started fasting, I was like having a rough moment on my first 24-hour fast.

And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. And then all of a sudden I realized, oh, no, not having food means not having mother's love. And oh my God, I use food as my emotional support system. And it was in that moment that just completely, it's like once I saw it, I was like I could unhook myself from it. I'm smiling because I had a similar moment in tears, probably in a bathroom somewhere on similarly. And when I first started to become aware of A, the fact that our gut and our brain is connected and that the food I'm eating does translate to how I can think, how I show up emotionally, right,

how I embody myself in general. So I started to become more aware of food and start to experiment with different types of eating behaviors. And a lot of them are really hard and put me in a similar position of difficult moment as putting it lightly. but because all of that conditioning was also coming up for me, right? The idea of withholding food for certain periods of time in a fast or, you know, only prioritizing certain food groups in different, you know, kind of eating styles and, you know, I was trying to say, and I remember crying over, you know, I experimented a little bit with like a carnivore type diet. I was only going to eat protein.

And at one point, I'm like, oh, my God, cheese and bacon and burgers. What is so, this is so great. And I would cry over my cheese bacon burger because I couldn't have. the potatoes that like I desperately need it in that moment. And I'm like, why am I crying over potatoes? And I came to realize it was just like kind of that limiting, like you're saying, loss of connection, what I wanted, how I was feeling good in the moment with the eating that I was doing. All of that just came crashing down and spent a lot of tears unpacking my own relationship with food.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because I love my body. I feel very in relationship with it. but the last piece for me to unhook was, oh my God, mothers love and food, they're together. And wow, that was just, it totally changed me. And now that we're talking, I've been really contemplating the food noise that everybody claims they have. And I'm wondering, and I'm not saying that they don't have food noise.

I understand that it's real. but could food noise be when food is constantly talking at you from the refrigerator? Is there a possibility that there's something underneath that that you either got or didn't get in childhood? I think, yeah, I think any time, right, we're feeling overwhelmed by a choice. When I mean to say that is, right, the thoughts about the food or is overwhelming hijacking, the feelings about the food I want to eat, right? anytime where we lack flexibility in thought, in action, and feeling even, right, I think those are great indicators. It's something deeper.

Not that we have to judge what's happening, but that there is possibly something deeper, right? So in those moments, right, where we lack flexibility, right, where we can maybe become aware that there's food in the fridge, it might be food that I want to eat. Okay, I can now put that thought down. and unless I'm inspired to go eat the food in that moment, right? I can leave that thought for later when I want to go eat the food. I'm not overwhelmed by the thought to act, right, where the food noise isn't overtaking my kind of internal mental world and or, right, I don't feel so compelled to act that if for some reason something were to get in my way or my own self would be like, oh, wait a minute,

I mean, I don't want to eat that food right now. I wouldn't be able to not like stop the action. And I think those are great moments to just. become curious, right? Maybe begin to drop in and in those moments where the food noise is increasing in volume, maybe get curious. Like what else, you know, might be happening? What's, what are the thoughts going on in my mind? What is the meaning I'm making of the food? How am I feeling? Does something else happen in my relationships, in my environment, right? Is something else maybe inspiring the action? Yes, it could be that I'm hungry. I need nutrients and I'm going to go

eat that food to get it, but it also could be a need for comfort, for connection, a simple need of something to do because sitting here, right, is in bringing up other thoughts about something else that are too uncomfortable. So I'd rather distract myself with hyper fixating on food than maybe sitting in the grief or the loss or the anger that I'm experiencing in that moment. Yeah. You know what I'm thinking as you're talking? I'm like, did anybody have a normal childhood? I don't think so. I've not met the person yet. You let me know, Mindy. I'm on a tour to find.

I mean, jokes aside, though, because I do think, you know, like, for a long time, I would have said I did. You know, and it is taking me this level of understanding and kind of the unpacking that the field itself is doing in terms of expanding what trauma really is as we even gain an understanding of how our body processes emotions, very natural experiences that we have very little awareness in the scientific community of what they are, what to do with them, right? how to kind of process them. So I have not met too many people that have had fully their needs met for different reasons. Again, information has changed. Resources have changed. We're parenting by humans who are impacted by their environments, by epigenetics, by everything in between.

Well, it's interesting. As I read your book, I had sort of two brains talking to me. I was going back to my childhood. And then I was thinking about my own children. and I was like, oh, God damn, I needed this book before that. Like, I think everybody should work on their stuff before they have children because it's really, you just bring it all out. It's, you know, you can't help it because you can only parent from your own awareness.

It's really incredible. Okay, talk to me about discipline because you also have a lot in this book about the woman. and I'm going to say woman because my audience is strongly women. I know your book goes to both sexes, non-binary, all of it. But discipline, the overly disciplined human, what happened to them in childhood? So again, discipline, I think it's one of those. Misunderstood, usually because the lived experience of the outcome of discipline, right, has had on us.

Because I think discipline gets a kind of sort of a negative, to some extent, especially when the experience has been over-disciplined, right? In authoritarian, where maybe violence and if not abuse was used to define and maintain limits, because that's essentially what discipline is, right? The ability to say, here's a line in the sand, right, proverbial that I won't cross or that you shouldn't cross, and here's what will happen, the outcomes should that happen, right? And then discipline in childhood, of course, those of us who have ever been around a toddler, knows that the parent's job is to develop the boundary, so to speak, and to discipline or

give the child awareness of consequences when those boundaries are crossed. Though, over time, that then translates to the child and then who becomes an adult, their ability to be disciplined themselves, right, to keep themselves accountable, moving in action, right? And if and when they have consequences, evaluate them and modify their behavior accordingly. So discipline, again, very general concept of awareness and may. to some extent of limits or boundaries. And so when in childhood, when one of two things happened, right, our environment was so out

of control, so unpredictable, right, and or no one around us was defining any limits at all for us or themselves or anyone in their world, typically, right, what would have happened for a child in that environment, it would have felt probably pretty unsafe, pretty unpredictable, and predictability immediately will feel unsafe to our nervous system, especially, right, if what was happening around us was chaos, was trauma, right? Then it would feel very highly unsafe. So a beautiful adaptation in childhood for some of us is to try to gain control in any way possible of ourselves, of our environments around us, of other people even, we extend that control outward in an attempt to gain a sense of predictability or simply safety.

So for a lot of us that can turn into, right, to some extent, yeah, on the one hand, discipline is a healthy thing. It keeps us and others moving toward goals, you know, taking care of ourselves, being respectful of other people. Well, and our culture loves it. Our culture applauds discipline. So I'm sitting here thinking like, wow, so you create an adaptation so you can have control and then the culture reflects back to you.

we love disciplined people. We love it. They're celebrated. A lot of times they're the ones who we're advancing if they're in a professional setting, right? Because a lot of times that goes hand in hand with we're rigorous, we're disciplined, and often we're performing, holding ourselves up to those very high unrelenting standards. More socially, too, it can look like gripping tightly the plans over preparing, struggling to delegate, to ask for help, and again, lacking flexibility. Because, again, to be clear, there's 100% of time and a place for discipline.

I think even around certain healthy habits. Of course. Yeah, I try to hold a looser disciplined relationship with them, though I do think sometimes there can become too rigorous, too controlled, right? We are, women in particular, are very seasonal, cyclical creatures. So, right, the best day routine on this Monday might not translate. two Mondays from now based on what my hormones are doing or two years of Mondays from now because now I've aged two years. So discipline again, I think very a few of us can define our

own limits with limits and boundaries that work well for us, can hold ourselves accountable in action and moments where it's aligned and reasonable that we do that, including, you know, holding others accountable as well. But I do think there's this whole world of being too disciplined, again, celebrate it by society, sometimes clothed and healthy. habits where we can't miss the gym, even if you're like me, having a cough and you should probably miss the gym today, you know, because you said you were going to and that's what you do on Mondays. I think sometimes life, going back to this idea of flexibility I mentioned earlier, I think that's often more of a healthier, a gauge of a healthier habit when some days you can shift, you know,

or modify your plan in a way that maps on to what is needed in your body. It's so interesting. I always think when we understand concepts like this, it gives us compassion for people. I have been thinking a lot recently about the group of humans that are attacking fasting. And they're basically saying, you need to have breakfast. And Dr. Mindy doesn't think you should have breakfast, which is not true. And so I had to come up. I got so tired of answering these questions. was like, but this influencer says I shouldn't skip breakfast and you say I should skip breakfast. And I kept thinking, just think for yourself. Think for yourself. What is going on here? And so I had to come up with a term called flex fasting. So I could explain, you get to choose your

eating window and your fasting window. But you just gave me a level of compassion for those people that are like, I need more control than that. I need you to tell me how much protein I should have at each meal. I need you to tell me when my eating window should be and when my fasting window should be. And I'm wondering if the level of compassion I take from this conversation is, oh, there was something out of control in their childhood or in their life. So this control needs to be there for this moment. And on the deepest level, right, what I'm hearing in that person is I don't trust myself to do that. You do it. Right? I don't. I won't know if today's a day I fast or our own fast.

How will I know? What if, you know, so I don't have, because that's what we're really talking about. We're talking about knowing our limits, knowing when we're getting there, reining it in, saying no, pausing, resting, all of the eating, doing, right? All of that is built in self-trust, which is built in self-connection. So until we're in a body that can determine or kind of can sense a body as it's starting to signal that it's arriving to a limit, and then the trust that you have to have or create in yourself to identify, oh, those signals are happening now, I'm at my limit, and then to be able to honor the limit when, again, a lot of us have all of these different beliefs about

what we should be capable of, what a nice person, all the things and reasons why we overstep our limits and takes over. So what I'm hearing in that is the case for a lot of us because we weren't given the environment. That's how it's developed in childhood self-trust. a child. And so we're talking a lot about kind of a lot of, like keeping a child too close to home, right? Not letting a child venture out and discover that there are boundaries and limits with consequence is equally problematic to giving a child no limits, right, to letting a child just go and do and never have consequences because neither child will have the ability to develop trust, right, to learn their own signals about when they're approaching limits and then to learn the consequences.

of what happens. Of course, within reason, I'm not suggesting that people go out there and allow their kids to go into unsafe circumstances. Of course, this is within reason, but that's what we're doing for a child. And so without that, that's what I'm hearing in many of your clients, many people that I have worked with over the years is I want you to do. And I get the same answer to me whenever they want to know the protocol, which I will never give. Because while I do have many different steps that one could take, my goal is to inspire you to become your protocol, right? Your body to determine what choices are most aligned for you. But that's what I hear in those moments when people look at me, when they look at you or when they look at anyone, their friends even,

tell me what to do. What I'm hearing is I don't trust myself to know or to follow through on what I know. Is there a way we come back into trust with our bodies? Are there techniques? Like one of the parts of your book that I loved and thought a lot about was a term you you call relational neuroplasticity. And I love neuroplasticity. Get me some good neuroscience. Love it. And I'm super happy. And I was thinking like, okay, so if somebody is, if I say eat breakfast and somebody's like,

okay, I'm going to eat breakfast. And then the next day I say, you decide. What do you want to do? If they actually start to have an experience with themselves of making their own decision and seeing that they get a positive result, is that how we start? Is it just practice? And then we get new neurons that start to say, you know how to do it. You know how to do it.

So I came up with a concept. And it's called a small daily promise. And when you join my community self-healer circle, every month we have a topic in healing. and every month we talk about it in terms of what's one small daily choice, you know, aimed at the goal of this month. So this month we're talking about burnout, right? So what's one small choice that you can inspire yourself to act on consistently over time that can maybe help you manage or stress your burnout, you know, replenish your energy sources?

So one small choice. And the reason, a couple reasons why I have that concept. I speak on it. I teach from it is because, first of all, again, your nervous system, even if it's a healthy habit, like we've been talking about, we'll register as new. New is unfamiliar, possibly unsafe. There will always be some level of resistance.

So this is for all of us out there who want to jump into the deep end, right? We hear the podcast, we read the book. We have four new things we can do, so we're starting tomorrow. Our life is going to be different overhauled from top to bottom. Often what we're doing it, while we might be able to white knuckle, a complete life overhaul for a couple of days, maybe even a couple weeks, chances are we're probably going to fall back into old habits because we've kind of, we move too far into the unfamiliar and by doing that we've stressed our body out. So while it's frustrating,

because naturally, especially if we are suffering, we don't feel good, we don't feel good in our bodies, right? Of course, naturally we think, our logical mind says, mine does I know, well, five new things quickly will get you to feeling better. However, those five new things might be what takes you right back to the starting gate. So Small Daily Promise A makes the change while it still will be challenging, right? It's approachable. It's accessible, which is the reality to create change. We have to show up differently in real time in our daily life. And so creating too high of an expectation for ourself is only going to challenge our nervous system. And the second reason is because it builds our self-trust by setting an intention to do something new, which isn't yet our autopilot.

It's not instinctively what we do in those moments. Right now we set ourselves up for the beginning of self-trust. Because each and every time, and we don't just want to set an intention throughout the window, right? We want to show up. We want to take that action sometime in our day. And we want to notice when we either did or non-judgmentally also notice when we didn't. Understanding that we probably didn't, again, because we either forgot and our autopilot took over or it was just too difficult, right? that resistance was there and we'll try again tomorrow.

And that builds self-trust because now a couple things are happening. We have an intention, right? We're showing up in a moment. We're giving ourselves the opportunity. If we do it incredible, we're already now starting to fire and wire some new neurons together in action. And if we don't, right, we mind herself that we're human and that tomorrow a couple moments from now will be another opportunity to do that.

So that's building self-trust, whether we did. the thing or not because what we're doing is we're building the accountability. We're saying, right, I want to do something new. I'm going to show up for myself, right? I'm going to be accountable in this moment and I'm going to honor that change. And again, I love neuroscience. It maps on to literally Hebs law, things changing. We repeat that long enough and we actually have some new action plans that we can start

to rely on. Yeah. I mean, going back to my mother's love with food, it really was through a fasting lifestyle that I really started to like unwind. I'm like, oh, there it is again. Oh, wait, this is what I got. And the awareness was so powerful for me. What about guilt? A lot of my following, the women applying my principles, they set out to do it right. They mess up. And then they're like, oh, I had that piece of food. I was going to go 24 hours in fasting. I only went 17. And they turn on themselves. And they start to feel guilty. I know for me, when I go to that place, it's actually my father's voice in my head.

That was like, see, you're a fuck up. And it's like ties in to the parent who was the one constantly riding me. Is that where guilt stems for? Is there a bigger picture here? So guilt, and I want to kind of bleed into very similar, though different emotion, but oftentimes can either be experienced together or somewhat similarly, shame. Yeah, I was going to, shame was my next one. So, yeah.

We have this conversation somewhat together because they're somewhat related and they originate in childhood and they can very much continue to drive our current habits. So what guilt says really kind of surfously is I feel bad about what I've done. What shame says, so instead of feeling bad about an action, as is the case with guilt in a simple way, shame is where we don't necessarily feel, we're not, feeling bad about what we've done, we're feeling worse, put it this way, about who we are. Perhaps what we have done reflects on who we are. So that says more, I feel bad about me, who I am in this moment. And both those emotions, shame in particular, right, is what is known as a social emotion. And so all of our emotions, believe it or not, whether it's guilt, whether it's sadness and loss and happiness and joy and anger and anxiety and, you know, fear.

They have an evolutionary purpose, meaning when they happen in our body, right, they map on to different sensations, like, you know, temperature changes, different sensations that are happening in our body, constriction of our muscles, right? We all kind of understand that's the thing of feeling. But they're telling us a message. And it's evolutionarily driven. When I say that, I mean, it's an important message. Like anger is a universal indicator that I am being violated, right?

Either you're violating my physical space, my emotional space, and or I'm violating myself because I'm neglecting or abandoning and none of my needs are being met. Fear, very common reaction. We're all going to feel fear when something is threatening or unknown in our environment, right? Because it tells us to pay attention and if this threat is too big to get the heck out of here. So all emotions, believe it or not, while they don't come with a handbook, they are necessary for us to experience. and shame in particular because humans, right, we're not the biggest, baddest mammal on the planet,

meaning we could get killed by a lot of the animals that we're sharing space with. So we learned very early on, humans, that is, our ancestors, that we are much safer in a group of at least another person, if not a whole village of people, then we are alone. So shame is an emotion that grew out of our ability to connect with others

that allows us to not only, attuned to or sense the very objective rules of the community, the things that we have to do to stay a part of the community or get kicked out, but also the nonverbal things that we have to do to belong. And because belonging is safety and survival, it's so important. So I went to that very long been to kind of set up because we need to feel that and it starts so early. Shame does. Why? Because again, as an infant that's completely dependent, our first village, right, is whoever was in our home. We needed to belong to them enough to inspire them to show up and feed us or keep us safe enough the next day. So in childhood, if and when, as I think you and I both agreed, the larger majority of us have not had all of our needs met in childhood, when we don't have a caregiver that's either present to us physically or they're neglectful or abuse. or they're emotionally distant or whatever it is was the case because our mind is always trying to make sense of the world like I was sharing earlier in those moments especially again I'm not talking

about a one-off moment I'm talking about the consistent actions or inactions of caregivers around us in our childlike way of trying to make sense of it we don't have the ability the maturity the understanding to zoom out right like we gain an adulthood and say oh well this is why mom dad or whomever couldn't be present because of their childhood, because of their work, because of all the reasons why it has nothing to do with us. The safest explanation that will land on, which is also evolutionarily valuable because we can't switch out the parents, we can't leave them, right, is to land on the determination, the belief that we are unworthy of their care.

And then, of course, we get really attuned and savvy to determine why. We're too dramatic. We're too much. We didn't succeed enough. We didn't do it, right? All of the messages that we've now gathered that explain why it is or so we think why it is that we're unworthy. And then we keep that belief with us and we live from that belief. And then we react, right, when we hide the shameful parts of ourselves or we become, that's when all this modifying happens.

Again, to gain belonging because shame is important. It still will be. But shame, right, has taken over. And it's to some extent become the foundation for a, a lot of us, the new identity that we continue to embody because there is that still belief that that is the only way that I am worthy of this connection, this one, this need, this joy, this happiness, whatever it is. Wow. So part of this whole conversation in your book that is interesting for me is I've been doing so much work on my childhood before I even came to

your book. I too, I had a psychedelic journey where I was like, I had a great child. childhood. And then like the next day, the beautiful people led me through it, they're like, how are you feeling today? And I was like, oh, my childhood wasn't so pretty. So, but I've been able in to start to watch my behavior and go, oh, yeah, that's because mom behaved this way, or that's because the environment was this. And it's been very, very freeing. And it has helped me start to break apart some of my behaviors. So if somebody's listening to this and they're like,

oh, my God, I didn't even look at shame as being a coping mechanism I used in childhood. Like, where do we start as we have an awareness that who we are today was created by the environment we grew up and it's a very, very big daunting task. Yeah. And I appreciate the question. I also appreciate you sharing kind of the moments that experience, psychedelic, kind of the awareness is, the recollections even, right? The fact that you can call to mind or maybe only that psychedelic journey you could.

But right, like the kind of revisiting. Yeah. For a lot of us, right, is 100% part of the journey of where to start is, right, we gain awareness of the stuff that happened and how it's impacting us now so we can move forward. There are a lot of us, and I have spoke to this often kind of earlier on when I was beginning to share it, honestly, with a little bit of shame and worry about what it meant, because what you would hear me share is, and I was very aware of this, probably from about high school age when you start, you know, you start to have relationships, friendships, and, you know, they get a little

curious about what it was like when you were a kid, you know, you started having awareness of other families are different at this age, and so conversation maybe comes into your peer group and I never could recall what it was like. I had little to know. I read that in your book. Recollection of my childhood. I couldn't tell you what a holiday looked like. I couldn't call it to mind.

And so for a long time, quite honestly, because we've held a lot of health-related anxiety in my family, another whole story mapping on to very real health traumas that have happened, not only in my family of origin, but with my mom's family. So I was convinced because my whole family, it just lived our whole life waiting for the diagnosis it was going to take us out.

I was convinced that this was some version of a cognitive kind of decline that was structurally wrong in my brain. And so I wouldn't, while it was like a running joke in my friend group for a while and then it turned into, oh, Nicole was just partying. That's why she doesn't remember. And I landed on that

being the reason for a while too. Anyway, I was scared. And so I finally started to share it because I finally understood that what happens for a lot of us, and again, this goes into neuroscience, which you both love of the hippocampus and cortisol's impact on it where. And if you notice, I'm very intentionally saying recollect. Because the reality of myself, all of us who can't recall the story, we're living in.

Right. We're living it in action. We're repeating the habits and patterns. All of the ways that I gained safety in that environment are still here today. So the answer to the question then, right, where do I start? I think it's important to speak to that. because often I get people who are like, well, what do I do? Can I not heal if I don't know, right?

I don't have memories. I'm like you, Nicole, I can't recall what happened. Like, am I doomed? And so the answer is we start now. We start with what we have because chances are you're reenacting, right? The lack of safety, how you adapted, who you had to become right now, which then also means you might not be exactly sure who you are, what you want, what you need. And that's okay.

Because again, in this shame, judgment-free zone, you've never practiced. Chances are no one's ever asked you or created the safety for you to explore the answer. So with awareness, right, we start now. Not just the hypothetical, not the awareness that you can gain because you're listening to this podcast and now you have a new insight into your own pattern. The awareness I'm talking about is in real time connecting with your body, right, kind of tying all these strands together. building moments, building checkpoints in your day, right, tuning into how I feel. What do I need? Getting comfortable with not immediately knowing, right, breaking the habit of outsourcing, asking other people, even professionals like myself, right, and just sit in curiosity.

And the more you do that, right, I think the more you find your way to the answers. Can you start asking yourself questions like I feel guilty because I didn't go 24 hours with my fast. I only went 15. I told myself I was going 24 today. Could you take a moment like that and just do some self-inquiry and say, okay, why am I not able? I keep hearing flexibility throughout this whole conversation. Like why am I, why can I give myself permission to have done 15 hour? where is this need to have to have followed the rules exactly that I had set this intention?

Like, is it, is that, is that an entry point in to just start questioning where did this thought come from? Where did this? Why do I keep thinking this? Yeah. And what does it mean? That's a really great thing to explore. Okay, you went 15 hours instead of 24 or whatever it was. What does that mean about you, right? Often we're not reacting necessarily to the objective reality. Those are numbers, right 15, 20, 35, number, right? I don't really have an emotional connection to those numbers. But the meaning, right, that's likely where the guilt is coming from. Why is it that?

Like, even just reflecting that question back from something, I should have went 20 hours instead of 15. Well, why? Right, right. Let's see what you're, there is a why there, right? There's a, you've associated, oh, well, because I'm a, you know, an unmotivated, I'm undisciplined, I can't hold myself to anything. and I said I was and that's why.

I'm a loser who can't do anything I say. I'm going to know. Right. Not necessarily this case. But right, that's so now, okay, that's more information now, right? Or because you told me to and it worked for you, right? Now there's another piece of information from someone else who's that would be their answer. So a lot of times it's just following the tape.

What is it meaning? What is this action? What narrative are you assigning to it? And that will, I think, give us a great starting point because, again, we're not often reacting to what's happening or not happening, just like we're shame developed. We're not necessarily reacting. To some extent, we're reacting because mom or dad

wasn't meeting our need in any way. But what we're more emotionally reacting to is the meaning that we've assigned to us because we're not worthy. That's going to hit and probably be a wound that we then carry with us, inspire all these adaptations where we try to make ourselves worthy and exhaust ourselves doing it.

Right. But that's where the wound came. Not the action or inaction. and so to speak of the person, it's the meaning that we made of it, even when it's our own action or inaction. Yeah, so is worthy. There's so many women that are just struggling to feel worthy. And when I wrote Age Like a Girl, you probably know, have you heard of Carol Gilligan?

Yes. Yeah. So I've stumbled upon her work and I was like, oh my gosh. And she studied, my audience knows the story, but she studied teenagers in the 1980s. I'm like, that was me. And I was like, she studied me. And I realized that at that moment that at the core of all the, so many of the women, probably all of the women that I work with is this desire to be worthy because that's what

our culture has taught us. If we behave, if we look a certain way, if we act a certain way, we are lovable and we are worthy. So is there a piece where we may have gotten a message from childhood? and then that message is continues to be ingrained in us because of what the culture says back to us. 100%. And typically, right, we're worthy, even beautifully said it been right to be loved, connected with. Right. Human need. We never leaves us from childhood. Even though we grow and we develop the ability to self-regulate something we couldn't do in childhood, can do it as an adult, still feel safer with other people, still feel overwhelmed at time in our, are comforted, right, by a calm nervous system. So, right, still kind of have that exact same need hasn't necessarily changed,

even though we've grown. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just, it's such, it's one of those things that I battle with, with my community, because when I used to sit down in clinical practice with women who wanted to lose weight, I would say, why do you want to lose weight? they're like well you know I would feel better in bed with my husband like I don't feel safe in bed I don't like the way my body feels I don't like it touched or I want to you know I want to feel good when I go to buy clothes and so then I would start to dial it down and I would get to the point where it was like not only do I want to be worthy but I want to be loved and what I finally figured out is that really the person they wanted to be loved by

was them by themselves. If we've had, we've all had such crazy upbringings and some of us crazier than others, is there a strategy for loving yourself? Like, can you be 100 pounds overweight and still love yourself? Can you have not accomplished all your dreams and still love yourself? I feel like there is a path there that I would love for women to find. So again, I think this is another moment where we can get curious about maybe what our definition and or expectation of love is. Right. Word. We often hear it.

We throw it around. But what is it really? And I spent my whole last book on how to be love. You see talking about love because it's really misunderstood. And it doesn't, while it, yeah, it's a warm feeling. Often it makes us feel good and connect it. I believe that it's a much more comprehensive emotion where it. to love can become not just an emotion but in action right we can show up lovingly even if we're

uncomfortable right or don't like in don't prefer what is happening or someone else is doing right we can love someone in a moment that's difficult so to speak and so when we apply that more action based right less it's only warm and fuzzy definition of what love really is right now 100,000. When we think about what does loving myself mean, I could even make a case that we reflect out our own feelings about ourselves to other people. If we don't feel we're not loving ourselves and showing up in action in ways that we show ourselves that we're worthy of the care that maybe we did not feel worthy of in childhood, right?

In the action of caring for ourselves, of showing up, keeping small daily promises, even in moments that are uncomfortable, even in moments where I don't feel. feel good about how I look or what I'm doing, can I still show up in the practice of love, the embodiment, right, the action of being present to all that is the positive, the negative, the neutral, right, and still showing up in support and in connection with myself. And that is what I, the definition of love that I'm more aligned with. I can make a whole case that it maps on to neuroscience and heart, you know, heart, you know, now that we understand the heart is a very powerful organ.

And so, again, it's not just so in emotion the way some of us think. So to answer your question, then we can rebuild self-trust through daily actions and reconnect with ourselves and cultivate true authentic love, which also makes room and space for the less than shiny parts, for the parts that we feel bad about, for the moments where we maybe could have showed up differently and we didn't for whatever reason and who still accepts ourselves and shows up in that connection again and again and again. I'm thinking that back to your two questions that you have people ask every day, or the two things that they do every day. One of the things that I've noticed is that if you start a new eating plan or you start a new exercise plan, you make a commitment to yourself, just yourself, not an achievement goal, like I'm going to lose 30 pounds. Just that I'm going to go to the gym three times a week, and I'm going to. going to do this for me and then you go three times a week, that's actually more important for loving yourself than going to the gym and losing weight or looking better and hoping to love what you see in the mirror. It's the congruency with you that starts to build the self-love. I love that the

congruency with you in whatever state, whatever emotion, whatever limitation, whatever expansion, whatever joy, whatever it is that you're feeling. That goes back to when I was talking about self-trust, right? I actually think there's such value in the universal experience of not staying committed to our new habits in those periods, the days, the weeks where we fall back into old habits. And I don't remember. Oh, those things over there that I was doing, they were helpful, right? Because, again, a couple things.

You create a discipline, intention, you followed through on action. Maybe you give yourself a little bit of time to experience yourself the difference that you might feel, doing this things versus your typical habits. And then you also give yourself another valuable experience, which is you fall back on old habits. You remember somewhere down the line without shaming yourself that you want to return to the things that feel better when you do them.

And then gradually you do them again. And so again, that is such a trust-building experience, like the congruids at the gym. Before I'm seeing it on the scale, I'm living it in action. And that, again, means embracing the days where we don't feel like it, but we're doing it anyway, or we don't feel like it, and we don't do it anyway.

And then we show up two days down the line, and we do it then. So, and what I have found is that a lot of people can actually get to the gym in this, in the scenario we're running, is there's two, they don't want to go the gym, let's say. They wake up, they're like, today was a gym day, and I don't want to go. And then there's this moment of, oh, if I don't go, then I'm not going to lose weight or I'm not going to look a certain way. and then that ties into all the belief systems that you had from childhood, all the belief systems of what you had, the culture says you should look like. And now it's what I call outside in living. You're living for the expectations of everybody around you. But what I have found and what has

propelled me to the gym on days that I don't want to go is when I say, I need to feel congruent with me. I need to feel proud of me. Is it going to be better? am I going to feel more proud of me that I listen to my body needs rest today? Or am I going to feel more proud of me because I went to the gym even though I didn't want to? When you flip that, I call it inside out living, where you're just in a relationship with you and you start to just follow that line. That is where I see health habits that people couldn't stick to start to become easier. and easier 100%.

I'm shaking my head. Just thinking about all the periods in time where for me, the greatest shift in action was not doing the things that maybe I know are helpful. It was those moments where I tuned in to me and what I needed in that moment. And especially moments where I made a choice based on what I need it,

especially in the moments where that could either directly or indirectly impact someone. else because those are the moments that have been the hardest for me. I know those come into play sometimes where we try to trick ourselves. We think, oh, I'm going to get the trainer, have the workout buddy, right? Make myself accountable. Not to me because there's a lot of days maybe where I don't want to go to the gym. I go now because you're counting on me. Right. And so that, how much money do we spend on that? Let me hire all these people so that they're waiting for me. Because you're going to hold me accountable to myself. And so I'm sharing that because as someone

who's observed myself enough, those are difficult moments because the part that's activated in me is the appeaser, the pleaser who doesn't want to disappoint anyone who struggles to tolerate disappointed myself, let alone disappointing someone else, even if you're someone on the periphery, like a trainer or someone I hired, right? There's still that voice that is like, oh, well, you know, you told them that you were going to be there. And, you know, especially if now financially, you know, it's going to, you know, impact them in their bottom line and or whatever, you have to pay for it. now you're paying for something you need to go to write. I should just go because them. And so I'm thinking back to more recently, actually, within this past year, I had a season of time

where there was a couple months for just things happening in personal life and life in general. I was feeling very overwhelmed. And while I understand, I'm not someone who loves the gym, though I understand that moving a certain amount of times a week is very helpful for me to release, to exercise the muscles, all the things. And I do happen to have support in doing that. I have a trainer that I see twice a month or twice a week to hold myself accountable. And so for me, the greatest shift, I think, in my own healing was during that period, about six weeks, two months,ish, where I was feeling so overwhelmed that my body was feeling so depleted, that moving was honestly the last thing that my body felt like it wanted to do.

And I also, I was very clear, I didn't want to go to the gym. But I had that voice, right? Your trainer, what will she say? She's waiting on you, right? Is she going to be disappointed? You're going to let her down. You're going to let her down. And you know what?

I did. I called her up. I have a nice, good enough relationship with her. I told her exactly. I was saying, hey, I'm feeling really pressured by just knowing you're there. For me, what I need is I need to block off the next month. You're not going to hear from me, see me. I don't even want to know that I don't even want to wake up next Monday and think,

Jim, should I go? Should I not go? I just want to take it away so that I don't have to struggle with the feeling bans. The feel bands is like all my guilt is. is the feel bad. I don't have to struggle about feeling bad about you two days a week for the next four weeks when I probably am going to feel the same. If things change, I'll text you.

But that to me was the greatest shift because, right, so much aligned. I wasn't doing the things that I know physically do help me live in a more regulated body and nervous system. But I was listening to what my body needed in that moment, even when I knew someone else was going to be impacted to some extent by my choice. by my choice. And you didn't have guilt about it? Well, as I saw myself, like, that first week, I did have a lot of, like, the moment of, like,

what am I going to do? And I would inevitably cancel, you know, and not go to that and not go to that. And that week, I would say I was really percolating in the guilt, the should do. Transition, yeah. And once I decided that I would probably continue to feel all of that distress, and that was not anything I wanted to add to what I was dealing with at that time, that once I made the choice to kind of tell her not to expect me, then no, I felt very free to live in the energy, which is what I was wanting, which is to stop action and just replenish. Yeah. Why do you think rest is so hard

for so many of us, including women? And, you know, for me again, going back to the work I've been doing on myself. I finally got a hold in the last couple of years that my dad used to yell at me when I sat on the couch. And then, and my mom never rested. So I had no, no visual of humans resting in my household. And if I sat on that couch to rest, I was yelled at. And one day I got a hold of this in the last couple of years that that's why I don't sit on the damn couch. So I tried to sit on the couch and it was like, it was like torture. Every little thing in my brain was like, what are you doing? You're being lazy. You got things to do. Oh my God, it's sunny outside. You need to get outside. Like every, I don't know, there was like a whole circus of humans up there. And as I started to tell

people more, the story, so many women were like, yeah, I can't rest. I can't sit on the couch anymore. What is it about resting that terrifies us? Thank you for sharing your own. journey because I think that's a very common entry point where rest gets associated with a lack of safety because of direct messaging and or right how action and doing versus resting what the beliefs were how that was embodied in the home what we saw modeled and right for a lot of us right it becomes the doing action like we're talking about earlier becomes a protection right if I'm moving So in addition to what have I learned rest meant based on that messaging like you have received and others have received, right? What is rest or what is movement allowed me to avoid?

Right. So for some of us, just like doing, focusing attention on something else allows us to avoid the overwhelming, uncomfortable, you know, emotions underneath. And again, for a large majority of us as well, much like myself, doing, right, was very associated in childhood with attention, with safety. with connection, right? Me doing, performing athletically or academically were the moments where my mom was on the sidelines paying attention to me, celebrating me. So for a lot of us, again, what we have associated with rest, what we have learned rest or pausing or not doing has meant for others, right? It's the action of doing has played a protective mechanism. And for all those reasons, it goes back to, again, theme throughout this conversation, to feel. the benefits of resting, a body has to be in a parasympathetic state. And if we're not, right, those are the moments where we're sitting on the couch and we can't sit still. We're shaking. We're getting up. Our mind is racing, right? Because what is likely the case is that our body isn't in rest on that couch, meaning our muscles aren't at ease. I'm not

allowing the couch to hold me. My breathing isn't calm and slow and deep. And right, all these indicators that my body is at rest. What is more likely happening is I'm in a completely sympathetic driven response, right, where my muscles are tense. My mind is racing. My heart is racing. I'm holding my breath.

I'm breathing quickly. And so while I appear, I'm at rest, right? My body is not at rest. It's indicating that, again, because of what we learned about rest, because of what's coming to the surface, the uncomfortable emotions that we become more present to and we're at rest, all of that then inspires us back into the action that feels safer. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you nailed it.

That's exactly. I'm like, yep, yep, that's me, that's me. And it's giving me a thought about emotions because we do live in a culture where we don't like our women to be emotional. and I've been really thinking a lot lately about the anger and the rage that's coming out of women and I'm like, go, go, like rage it because, you know, as women, we haven't been given permission to be angry and everything in our culture is set up so that we are rewarded for just being compliant. So a lot of women are waking up and having so many emotions that they've never.

never had this skill or have been taught what to do with. What do you do with those women right now? How do we help those women? I like you, want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate when we can reconnect with the underlying anger, resentment, rage, whatever degree of that core emotion of anger that it is. Again, acknowledging that anger is so important. It is indicated for some of you listening perhaps a lifetime of unmet need. You've put everyone else first. You stayed quiet. You didn't assert yourself when you needed to. And so here's that lifetime of anger. So celebration, right? Because again, that emotion, even if you weren't paying attention to it, if it was suppressed, if you were channeling it in all these ways, doesn't mean it wasn't there. It was still there beneath

the surface, probably driving a lot of the protective habits. Anger in general, I think, and it's interesting I had this thought as you were asking the question. I wonder how much that habit of like teaching, you know, females, women in general, right, to be less mad came from, because I believe anger in general is an emotion that while it's normal and human and we all have it, I don't think any of us in either gender have had healthy models of anger. Right. Because what a lot of men have experienced and maybe women have experienced at the hands of men is anger that is explosive, that is dangerous, that is abusive. And so it just got me thinking, I wonder how much of, right, that, and again, to be clear, because I haven't yet said it, I believe we're talking in a gender,

I believe we all have different energies in our body. I believe female identified people, right, have the ability to assert anger, to be common nurturing, kind of we both have the masculine and feminine energy to different degrees. However, I think very few humans, and I think some of these cultural lessons that absolutely get wrapped around gendered expression. I do think are born out of cultural dysfunction, right? We have a culture who's similar to grief. I don't think we know how to cope with it. I don't think we know how to cope with it in a healthy way.

And so celebrating all of us out there as we get more attuned to or connected with our anger, though does still mean that we do have to find healthier outlets, ways to assert ourselves. Ways to even just discharge, right? Slamming the pillows, going to the, what are those rooms now where you can rage room. I know. I'm still got that on my bucket list. I'm not done it yet either and I'm dying to, but there still has to be an outlet for literally the physical energy of it. In addition to for a lot of us, women in particular, learning to healthily assert ourselves to find boundaries, hold people and us accountable to those boundaries, right? Show up in self-defense. because that's what assertive, healthy, expressed anger is. It allows us to define those limits and to protect ourselves if and when we need to. So for a lot of us, again, that's a journey. I think it comes from a society that is very ill-equipped.

Sometimes, right, the good girl, boy, whatever person is developed in protection to having had contact or experience with perhaps an abusive, explosive version of anger. though again the goal still is because it's important we need ourselves to inspire action and protect ourselves in certain moments so finding those outlets learning those tools to finding those boundaries is all going to be part of the journey and what do you say to the woman whose identity was tied into being the agreeable one or the or the one that everybody got along with i mean this is also i'm i'm in the thick of understanding my childhood and my mother was like you're like literally like you're the nice one. Everybody loves you while my sister was tearing up the house. And so then I had to figure out, like what happens when I start to upset people? It was a part of my identity. I had to

heal and let go of. And I think a lot of women listening to this conversation as they're having ahas might also have an identity attached to this that they have to let go of. How do you change an identity attachment? Yeah. And again, being agreeable, pleasing, appeasing, right, whatever. the language that aligns is, oftentimes, again, they originated in our earliest environments, earliest relationships to preserve connection, right? That's where the identity started to get created. We got attuned. We heard directly. We felt indirectly. All the different people or, you know, parts of ourselves that we had a show that got formed into, for a lot of us, the good personality, the agreeable problem, right? I relate to a lot of that. I became, in my family, the moniker was the

quote, unquote, Christ child, never does anything wrong. I was doing a lot of things wrong. I just wasn't showing my family. I got very good at being secretive, but I learned, don't bring stress to the home. They're already stressed, right? Me too. That was fine. Just don't say it, you know?

And so, but that's how I was seen was Nicole. You just, you know, and it took until more recently, my sister was like, you just like, yesed mom. And I'm like, yes, I did. I just told mom, whatever it is that, you know, she wanted or needed to hear. I was agreeable to preserve connection because what my mom would do, she wouldn't explosively yell she would shut down. She would give the silent treatment sometimes for extended periods of time. So again, being agreeable often has a function in childhood, some version of it is to preserve connection. A lot of us, again, form an identities where that just becomes who we are.

I can't be anyone else. And in adulthood, right, it translates to saying yes when we mean no, over extending ourselves. but all of the while, kind of going back to anger, quietly building resentment. Because resentment, right, is anger that has been around for far too long. It usually indicates that our needs have not been met. We've been overextending ourselves saying yes, being agreeable to the point of our own neglect and abandonment.

So to that person, not only will I say with awareness, with seeing yourself in action, noticing when you're immediately saying yes and pausing and learning how to break those habits, It's learning where your limits are so you don't continue to overextend yourself and then get ready for anger. Because somewhere down the line, you're probably going to then connect with all of the anger that decades of agreeableness has begun to accumulate. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm very familiar with that scenario. And when I come to your audience, I'll tell part of my story.

but I had to remove myself from everybody because the anger of all the years was just coming out of me and I had to like isolate just to kind of work on navigating that. So yeah. So anyways, I love this conversation. I hope it gives women who have been beating themselves up and trying to figure out why they can't get the result with their health. I hope we just offered them a whole new toolbox. So thank you for going to the places that we want. went to. Of course. This was such an honor. Such a great conversation. I could have went for another hour.

I know. I know me too. I'm like, you're like a jute box. I like put a coin in and I'm like, hey, what about play this song for me? I have a lot. I want to play back to you too. So we get must have to continue. Yes, I love it. So I named this podcast, live like a girl for for many reasons. But what does living like a girl mean to you? Because it's different for us all. I love that. Living like a girl means to me, I think it means to me embracing all of all parts of me. You know, I think I've chopped off so much of me and I think a girl can be so many things. We can be oppositions. We can be contradictions. We can be what society says we should be. We could be the farthest thing from what society says we should be. We can look how we want.

And so I think I'm learning and my journey is in first and foremost discovering all of the different parts of me, especially the parts that I felt too shameful of and then learning how to be that embodiment. I love that. I saw a reel of Viola Davis, and she said that her goal in life is to get to know herself as deeply as she can before she exits this planet. And I thought, bingo. Yep, that's me. That's exactly me. And that's what I just heard. And that's in your statement. So thank you for the work you're doing in the world. I don't think most people know. how hard it is to put yourself out there to deliver a message over and over and over again, especially in this temperament right now. And what you're bringing forward is critical. It's critical. And I just want to thank you for putting it out there boldly and showing us all a different way to heal ourselves. So I really, that's important that I wanted to pass on to you because

you hit a certain level with your social media. You hit a certain level with your social media. You hit a certain level with your career and people get pleasure in cutting you down and you continue to appear to move forward. So I know what it's like to receive that. And I just want to thank you for continuing forward with your message. Thank you. And that means I'm feeling myself getting emotional. And my habit is I want to deflect and say something else.

But I'm just going to receive that in this moment. It really truly means a lot, especially coming for you. I feel the same wholeheartedly. I've been such a champion of you, your work. I definitely see, as I experienced myself, all of the different ways that ideas can get misinterpreted, that we do and still are put in boxes, sadly sometimes by women of our own gender

and our own profession. And that's a whole other conversation. I'm sure you can relate to. So thank you for saying that. I needed to hear that today. I will keep that in my cup as I keep it filled. And I hope you feel the same because I'm just such a fan of what you're doing

and the way you embody this work and the leader that you are in this field. So thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm going to say everybody needs to go get your book. I devoured it this weekend, highlighted the heck out of it, saw myself all over it. So I'm assuming the books everywhere that you can find books, but anything we need to know about your book or how people can connect with you. Books should be everywhere. Major book retailers, hopefully your favorite local bookstore. If they don't yet have it. Call them ask for it. We love them to stock it. I would love to support that. It's also available. Kindle, all of my books are on Kindle audiobooks. So however it is that you like to consume content, though, if and when you cannot even support me a dollar in terms of books or

memberships, both of which are available, please come follow any of the social media. It is such an important conversation that me and my whole team are so, it's such a priority for us to make sure that this information, this awareness, these tools, these resources. So whatever social media you're of a fan of this day and age, whether it's TikTok or X or Instagram, where it all started. YouTube, we're really building out that channel recently. So come find some version of the handle, the holistic psychologist, and be a part of this conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Nicole, for giving me so much time. Even on a day, you're not feeling perfect. So appreciate you. And everybody, go follow Nicole. This is an important message. So thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you.

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The healing accelerates. The consistency becomes easier. The loneliness of the health journey just literally dissolves. And that's what I have been watching over and over again happen inside my reset academy, month after month. women who come in frustrated and depleted, they start to find their rhythm, they start to reclaim their energy, and the most beautiful part is they start rebuilding trust with their bodies. Inside my academy, you get monthly trainings, live coaching calls, and an incredible community of

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