Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Can Understanding Your Ancestral Emotions Transform Your Health? With Dr. Julia DiGangi

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Dr. Julia DiGangi is a renowned neuropsychologist and she joins Dr. Mindy for an enlightening conversation that delves deep into the interplay between the brain, leadership, and emotions. Dr. DiGangi, whose extensive research has been conducted at prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, brings her expert insights into how our emotional responses are fundamentally within our control. She discusses the ancestral nature of our emotional states and highlights three to four key emotional cravings that shape our behavior. Throughout the episode, Dr. DiGangi provides powerful strategies to overcome mental hurdles related to health habits, offering a blend of complex insights and actionable advice. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep238 Dr. Julia DiGangi is a neuropsychologist and expert in the connection between the brain, leadership, and emotion. Research shows that the #1 threat to leaders' effectiveness is an inability to handle emotional challenges. Dr. DiGangi's innovative work shows leaders how to build emotionally powerful teams that thrive in high - pressure circumstances. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Dr. Julia D. Ganges. Okay, this is a deep one. This is so deep. I want you really to listen all the way through because there is so much juiciness is what I'm going to call it in this conversation. So let me tell you a little bit, a little bit about Dr. Julia Degongi, and then I want to tell you what you're about to listen to because it is one of those conversations that will blow your mind.

So she is a neuropsychologist and an expert in the connection between the brain, leadership, and emotion. We talk all about emotions. Her lab and clinical work has been conducted at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. She's worked with leaders at the White House global companies, international NGOs, and the military. Her understanding of stress and resilience has informed her work with the UN, like this woman knows what she's talking. talking about when it comes to emotions. So here's what I want you to know about what you're about to hear. And you're going to see a thread in a lot of the conversations and guests I've

been bringing on to you. And the biggest thread you're about to hear is why your emotional response to people, to situations, to things in your life is actually within your control. In fact, it's the only thing that matters when it comes to emotional health is your reaction to it. Now, in the past, I feel like we've had discussions about, well, your traumas are revealing themselves. We've talked about how the brain changes at menopause, and that's informing your reaction. But she brings a really different approach here. And she talks about how our emotional state is ancestral. That was fascinating. Definitely passed down through our genetics. and that our emotional state is built off of three to four different key things we are craving.

And I'm going to let you listen from her mouth what she says those things are. Now, with this understanding that we can control our own emotional reaction, what I want to also bring forth to you is listen all the way through because at the end, I talked about areas that where we are finding hurdles, mental hurt. with our health because of our emotional response to be a being able to actually perform a health habit or not or failing at a health habit. Like what do we do when emotionally we are struggling with our health? And she came up with some really powerful strategies for you all.

So I feel like this discussion starts off a little complex and then it gets very action oriented. So please stay all the way through. I think there is so much peace that will come from a conversation like this. And as always, if you have questions, when I post this on socials, answer them on the reels that I put out there, leave me reviews. This is a conversation that is so deep, so nuanced, and has the power to change your life.

And I'm so proud to bring it to you. So as always, I hope it moves your health, your happiness, your life forward, and that you enjoy it as much as I enjoy talking to her. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Okay, well, let me just start by welcoming you to the Resetter podcast. We have some really in-depth discussions on this podcast.

and I think you have something to offer us that we haven't talked yet. So I just want to start off by saying, welcome. I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. Well, I'm super excited to be here. So thanks for having me. So here's the lens in which I look at everything through, and it's through a hormonal lens. And one of the things that I have come to realize is that the perimenopause,

menopausal process has this massive hormonal change that is going on that often gives women an exaggerated emotional response to stressors that didn't bother her in her 30s or her 20s. Those same stressors now are really, really agitating. In fact, I recently read that the number one symptom of menopause, everyone thinks it's hot flashes, but it's actually irritability. So I would love to start this conversation with what is the difference between, a thought and an emotion because what I found in my perimenopausal journey was the thoughts

turned into really exaggerated emotions without all of those neurochemicals to soften it. My emotions were very heightened. So can you help us understand how a thought turns into emotion and what the difference is? Yes. I'd like to kind of take the question and sort of feel it in a different way. So I am a neuropsychic. which means I'm a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain. So really all of my work, all of my brain research has focused on emotion. So what is emotion? Emotion is quite literally energy. Yeah. I don't mean this metaphysically. I don't mean it metaphorically. I mean the reason I can do my fMRI and EEG research is because emotions are neuroelectric zings in your brain. That's

really govern all of the meaning in your life. So this is one of the biggest shifts that I want to bring to people. The meaning of your life rises on the energy of emotion. So I want you to think about any single thing in your life that has meaning. Are you a good person? Were you a good parent? Are you a good leader? Do you have enough money? Do you have enough? I could give you a million of these questions. It depends. How do you feel about it? Okay? So human meaning is constructed almost entirely in the energy of emotion. So we don't need to get too academic about this, but I think a phenomenal way that's really useful to think about emotion is emotion are like the Google Maps of your life. Okay. So we're all driving down the interstate of our lives and we get these

neuro-electrical zings. Like, I should immediately leave this conversation. I'm driving out of my little, like, my little Google Maps GPS is like, Julia, at the next intersection, immediately say no and hold a boundary. And what do I do? I behave in the exact opposite direction. Okay. So when I say that emotion is an energy, I again mean this quite neurobiologically. So what a lot of us are doing is we're getting these somatic signals, these neurophysiological signals that are intended to guide our lives in alignment with the highest truth of our energy, but then we are thinking and behaving in the exact opposite direction. Okay. I'm going to give you a few examples of this. I say I want to hold a boundary. So I feel like I feel like I want to hold a boundary. But then when push comes to

of, I have a thought, or more importantly, I behave in a way that I disrespect my own boundary. Right. I have a feeling like I want to speak up. I'm really frustrated about something. I'm really, I've been heard about something. I have a feeling that I want to speak up. But what do I do? I keep my mouth shut.

Okay. So in all of these moments, what's happening, and this is a really key point if we want to talk about energy and irritability and quality of life, in each of those moments, I have divided the energy of my emotion from the energy of my thinking and my behavior. Well, I always talk about there's an emotional physics to our life. There's an emotional math to it. Okay. If I continuously divide the energy of my emotion from the energy of the way that I'm thinking and behaving, the consequence is very logical. I start to feel depleted. I feel burnt out. I feel like nothing's working.

I feel like my life is out of control. Okay. So the imperative to unite emotional energy with the way we're actually living in our lives is essential to feeling like we have powerful, resilient, meaningful lives. Okay, so my neurochemical chemistry brain kicks in because I think, well, where does the emotion, come from? So you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is that it's energy. And so where does the energy come from? And I guess my brain goes to like, let's use something like serotonin, for example. So if I am a 45-year-old woman and I'm losing estradiol, well, estradiol also stimulated serotonin.

So now I'm losing serotonin. So I'm not feeling like as happy. There's a different emotional state there because of a neurochemical change. Would you just say that that's a different energy that I'm now feeling because my neurochemical system is different than it was in my younger years? Well, so I think this is something that's really important to point out is that there's no, and I think this kind of blows people's mind. There's no single agreed upon definition for emotion. Wow.

One time. Yeah. It's a fight, sometimes a friendly fight, sometimes a contentious. fight in the field. But I call myself ruthlessly pragmatic. And so I'm always thinking, where does the rubber hit the road? Like people have lives to live and they want their lives to feel good. So when our lives don't feel good to us, we can get very abstract about it and we can do all the research. And I think this is profoundly powerful. It's why I'm a scientist. But we have to start thinking, if I'm in a moment in my life and I don't feel good, what can I do to improve function?

And I think what happened a lot of times to women is for an entire lifetime, we have been denying the truth of our energy. We have been behaving in ways, behaving and thinking in ways that do not align with the emotional energy. So the brain is the most extraordinary machine on the planet. It is an extraordinary technology. And it sometimes frustrates me and sometimes it kind of humors me that people pay more attention to the intelligent operative. of their cell phones or not chat GPT, then they pay attention to the machinery of their brain and their nervous system. Yeah. Okay. So the brain is very exquisite. But when it comes to pain, so all of my work is really what I call the relationship between the brain, emotional pain and

emotional power. Okay. I think one of the most powerful things about my work is I take emotions, which are wildly complex. Yes. And I clarify them in a way that's extremely empowering. Right. So when it comes to pain, the parts of the brain that mediate physical and emotional pain, there are some overlapping components, which tells you the body registers distress, the way the body's going to register to stress.

So if, for example, I go to put my hand on a hot stove and I burn my hand, I will immediately pull my hand away and I will never do that again. In neuropsychology, we call that one trial learning, meaning the imprint was so strong in my nervous system that I never have to go back and touch that stove again. Okay. What happens, though, in our experiences of emotional pain or emotional distress, and this is a very important point I want to make, I'm going to use the term emotional pain over and over and over in our conversation. Okay. But I want people to understand I'm talking about a continuum. Okay.

emotional pain is any emotional sensation that does not feel good to you. Irritability, frustration, inadequacy, irritation, rage, being mad, being pissed off, being lonely. The reason is, I always say the brain is the most precious real estate on the planet. It's less than three pounds. The circuits in your brain that give rise to your bad feelings are the circuits in your brain that give rise to your bad feelings, right? You understand what I'm saying? So there's not like, one part of the brain that controls trauma and another part of the brain that controls when you're in normal rush hour. Right. Parts that control distress.

Okay. Okay. So if I get physical pain and I burn my hand on a hot stove, I'll never do that again. But when you think about your emotional pain, the ways you're irritated with the people in your life, the ways that you're frustrated, the ways that you feel like you've been neglected, every single one of them by definition is chronic. Hmm. Okay. Like leftover from the past. Like you're keeping carrying it through. Well, it just keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Okay. So if you're taking it, say you're frustrated with your family. No one has ever come to me and been like, I've been frustrated with my family one day, one time in the year 2003. It's like I'm continuously

frustrated. Yes. You're people's relationship with social media. We're consistently triggered. So if we want an intelligent handling of emotions, regardless of where we are in terms of our human development, right, we've got to understand what's really happening with emotion. And for a lot of us, what's happening is we're replaying these chronic patterns of emotional pain over and over and over again. So unlike the stove, where I touched the stove and never do it again, we're engaging in our lives emotionally in the same ways over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and expecting a different result. And does that come from some initial emotion you had as a child?

Like, where does that come from? So this is a fascinating conversation. Yes, it comes from, I mean, what's really profound is, yes, it absolutely comes from childhood coding. What we're starting to learn in some of my work has been in gene-by-environment interactions. We're starting to see, I'm sure people have heard of epigenetics. Yep. We carry quite literally in our DNA, our ancestors pain.

Wow. Yeah, I've heard this before. And so explain how that is because that seems so baffling to me. I mean, it's a wild question that we're still really sitting with. But, you know, a great experiment was when, so if a mother is bearing an offspring, there's always a question about the maternal environment. Right. So what was happening to the fetus in utero, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The fathers tend to be a cleaner cut because the fathers can just give their sperm and

then the baby's not growing in that maternal environment. So with mice, which mice are surprisingly quite genetically similar to humans, what researchers do is they traumatize the male mice. I'm not a animal researcher. Right. I was just, I was going to say, I know. But what they found is when they take mice and they traumatize one sample of the males and don't traumatize another and they have those babies and then those babies become mothers. Are you with me still? Yep. Yep. One of the ways we measure, let's say, mouse emotional intelligence is by these kind of licking behaviors or the way they nurture their young. And you see statistics. different behaviors more than a generation later based on, and the mice were all treated

precisely the same, the same environment, the same feeding, the same. So what they're starting to think is the traumatization of the male mice then gets passed down to the sperm, and then those sperm are then carried by these mothers, and then we see those offspring display different traits. So this is profound. I mean, when we say that we carry the pain of our ancestors, this is not abstract. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that from, it was a study done, I believe, on kin or children of Auschwitz survivors, that I had heard that there was a level of anxiety and stress that got passed down and they started to see it in the second generation, I think. So I can understand it from that standpoint, which actually leads me to the question then, well, I don't know what my ancestors went through. I don't know what emotions I was born, what emotional palate I was born with.

How do I figure that out? And then if it came from my ancestor, how the heck am I going to overcome that? Totally. So I want to say something here. And I make this point in energy rising, which is that we learn. from the physicists, then energy can never be destroyed. It can only be transformed. Yep.

Our bad feelings, please hear this. Our painful feelings are an energy. And if we could destroy them by avoiding them or pretending they weren't there or numbing ourselves from them or watching a lot of Netflix or leaving relationship after relationship, we would all have transformed our pain by now. But plenty of us are sitting in our lives having done effort after after after effort after effort, we're feeling very exhausted. And the levels of pain in our life, the levels of irritation and irritability and disconnection and fear and anxiety and stress are pretty similar. Why? Because pain cannot be destroyed. It can only be transformed.

Okay. Well, how do I think about my brain? Because you're making a a great point. It's like, well, I have no idea what happened to my grandparents and my own parent. So my helpless, absolutely not. But to understand this, we have got to understand what the brain really is. Okay. And the best way to think about the machinery as a brain of the brain is as a pattern detection machine. Okay. Okay. Great. Your brain is quite literally moving you through life going apple, apple, still in the blank. The future is just to fill in the blank, right? It's a new day. It's a new person. It's a new job. It's a new opportunity. Fill in the blank. Right. So the brain is going to predict, it was apple, apple,

apple, apple, it should be an apple again. Well, fine. It could have been a banana. It could have been a coffee cup. It could have been a dog. But okay, apple, fine, no problem. A lot of times, this is wildly adapted. This is why I'm sure we've all had this experience where we're driving home. we're listening to a podcast or we're talking to somebody on the phone. We end up in our driveway. We're not quite sure how we got there. Right? So this is that pattern detection ability of the brain moving us perfectly,

unconsciously, automatically through life. Great. So the brain is not really going apple, apple, apple, apple. What is the energy? What is the entity that your brain is really like what is the apple? in this analogy. It is emotional energy. It is patterned emotional energy. If people get this, they will change their life. Okay. So you have a core emotional pattern that you have held since childhood. I do the way I wrote energy rising is I wrote it into eight neuroenergetic codes.

So each chapter is a code and it's a blueprint for how to work with your emotional energy and your nervous system. One of the blueprints is what I'm talking about now, this kind of coding that we receive in childhood. So hopefully we have sort of a good emotional pattern, and we also all have emotionally painful patterns. Well, I'm here to help people reform their pain. The things that are going well in your life, good. I'm trying to help make the bad stuff and make those even better. So we all have a core emotional pattern, and you get to choose yours, but it's going to sound something like this. I'll give you a few examples. Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me. Things never work out for me. Or I can't get what I want. I can't get what I want. I can't get what I want.

Or I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. So what happens is, and again, remember the way I started this conversation, the entire meaning of your life rises on the energy of emotion. So I'm going through my life running a core emotional code that's unconscious until we do work like this and have conversations like these and read books like energy rising. And so I get into a new fill in the blank, a new house, a new year. I join a new workout program. I get a new partner. And I can situationally get a bump. This is why people usually feel in January, for example. But we know that before February, weary, 85% of New Year's resolutions have failed.

Yep. Why? Is it because people didn't really mean it? No. I believe people are very honest and I believe of them what they say. It's because this core emotional pattern is so powerful that we've got to understand how to work directly with it. So if I get into a new whatever job, relationship, outfit, I might feel good momentarily, but I will always gravitate back to the core emotional pattern.

So if I show up in rooms, new opportunities, new jobs, new days where I, at a fundamental am running the emotional code, no one here likes me. I promise you I will manifest the room where there are people in that room who do not like me. Right. Because the brain is superimposing meaning over reality. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I told. Yeah.

Yeah. I look to the right right now. It is a sunny day. I see beautiful trees and green grass. If I look to the left, I see a closet door and my roar shocks. I have artwork hanging in my wall. Both scenarios are true. Let me tell you, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my research and then you can kind of jump in here. But when I see meaning is constructed by emotion, if I had a million lifetimes to live, I would live it on this altar of human pain. in human power because the only way we change our lives is by understanding, regardless of where we are in development, adolescence or perimenopause or menopause, how to work with the energy of our emotions in that moment. So I am a human emotion researcher. We have a paradigm. It's called the faces paradigm. So researchers all over the world use this paradigm. And the reason we all have to use the same paradigm is because, Mindy, if you're kind of showing people one thing and I'm showing people another thing and other people, then when we get back together and we have different

results in our experiments, well, is it because maybe we just showed people different things? So everyone's using these same four faces in this face is paradigm I'm about to explain. So we work people in these big scanners or we hook them up to EEG electrodes and we show them happy faces, angry face, sad face, neutral face. Now, the reason the scientist initially even included the neutral face was because you needed a baseline. In the scanner, you need to say like, okay, I'm going to show you something neutral. And then when I show you something scary, we're going to measure brain activity so we can see the difference from baseline. Yes? Yes. So the neutral face was just supposed to be this placeholder,

but this extremely fascinating thing started to happen. People started to have all different kinds reactions to the neutral face. Some people said the neutral face was just neutral. It was boring. It was bland. It was neutral. And other people started to say, that face is not neutral. That face is scary. That face is threatening. That face is menacing. Who's right? Who cares? I am in the business of human power. If we want to influence ourselves and if we want to influence each other, we have got to meet ourselves in the truth of our emotion. So if the neutral face was just neutral, then everyone would have agreed. But people are having different reactions.

Why? Because of the emotional coding that they're bringing the situation after situation. Do you see what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So the way I interpreted what you just said was that because, because. Because it was neutral, what the emotion you bring out is the one that or the emotional energy you carry, and let's just say it's ancestral, like you said, it's ancestral.

It reveals itself in that neutral face. So if somebody saw the neutral face and said it was neutral and somebody said it was angry, it's really about your ancestral emotional energy that showed up in the neutrality. A hundred percent. And, you know, so I grew up in a home. where there was a lot of volatility, there was addiction, and I got, and there was a lot of wonderful things too. Again, like, I always will say that when it comes to a moat relationships and emotion, I don't want to get too far afield, but part of the pain of our relationships is the people

who are hurting us aren't all bad. If they were just like a two-by-old race, we would just feel like what shit sucks. I'm out of here. Yes. So it's the people who we love the most because they're so wonderful are also the people who are causing excruciating pain in our life. So I grew up in a home where there was a lot of volatility. There was a lot of rage. So I got really good at reading neutral faces and basically what we call emotionally monitoring. So the reason I became a psychologist is I had profound empathy. I'm very connected to people.

I can read people really well. Well, part of that came through my pain. So to your point about a neutral face, I learned that neutral faces weren't neutral. Right. Right. Oftentimes, I was waiting for the other shoot. I was waiting for all the hell. Don't show me that neutral face.

I'd much rather see an angry face. But don't comment with that neutral shit because now I'm just waiting for the storm to come raging. You see? So a lot of us who call ourselves empaths, who have a lot of deep emotional intelligence, we come to read emotion before maybe other people can see it overtly. And so neutrality is anything but. Right. Okay.

So I have to ask this question because it's come up in many of the conversations here on this podcast, which is what, and I want to answer what we do with this ancestral emotional situation we've been given in a moment. But what happens when people are freezing their face with like Botox and fillers and things like that? And we're not, this is something I've noticed even in having conversations with people. Sometimes it's really hard to read people's emotions that we have created a bit of a culture that has a very neutral face. And what I have found as somebody who's been interviewed by those people or I'm interviewing those people or interacting with them is that it's hard to read where

they're at. And so what I'm thinking that you're going to say is that when the face is neutral like that, it's a mirror for you to see what your emotional, let's just say baggage, your energetic baggage is that you were born with and have been given. Because there's a lot of frozen faces right now. Well, and isn't that just such a commentary on our culture as a whole? It's like we, I always say the most powerful frequency on the planet is truth. And another word, I believe in the, I'm at my core, I'm a talk therapist. Talking is my medicine and I'm very, very good at my job. And we know neuroscientifically that the reason we think that talk therapy works isn't just because anecdotally it works. Like we have powerful evidence

that shows that language really changes the brain, right? So I think a lot about my word choice. I think another synonym for truth is reality. Okay. So in order for me to change my life, I have to push off against the truth of what is. And so I think a lot of people rage against aging. So even to your point about like perimenopause and menopause,

and it's like we've all been told that this very, very natural process of human evolution must be frozen in time. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So then I stunt my own, and by the way, I'm not making any commentary whatsoever about people's, the way they want, what they want to do with their body. I think more power to them. Right. Right. I'm talking about the emo. So people go to do Botox and fillers and it empowers them and they feel. But I think there's this other question is like one of the most power, I've done a ton of incredible research. I've really had a glorious career. I started my career at the White House.

I worked on U.S. presidential campaigns. I did a lot of international humanitarian aid and international relief. And to be able to work with people in such sacred spaces, it's really been extraordinary. In one of the most extraordinary research projects of my life, I interviewed people who were dying about what it was like to live and what it was like to die. And one of the things that I carry with me so profoundly is like, do we trust the energy of life itself? And if we trust life itself, we've got to be more okay, not because we have to, like, you better get it together. But it's safe. It is safe to trust ourselves.

It is safe to trust our bodies. it is safe to trust the unfolding. And I think a lot of, you know, there's a lot of stuff that comes up for us when our bodies start to change. Pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause, right? And I think sometimes it's met with so much fear. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to go back to something I said about the brain. It's such a big, big, big, big piece of this. And I hope it gives people hope when they can really see it. So I said the brain is a pattern detector, right? Apple, apple, apple, fill in the blank. There's really only one affective, one emotional state that the human brain can't tolerate. Ooh, what's that?

If I'm angry, I know what to do about angry. Angry, angry, angry, angry, angry. If I'm sad, I don't feel good, but sad, sad, sad, I know what to do with sadness. If I'm happy, happy, happy, I know what to do with happiness. If I'm contemptuous, I know what to do. The only emotional state that the machinery of the brain cannot metabolize is the energy of confusion. Now, I don't care semantically. You can call it confusion.

You can call it uncertainty. You can call it ambivalence. You can call it ambiguity. Neurologically, it's the same. It's the sensation of apple, apple, apple. What comes? next. What comes next? Right. And so what will happen is just like the lungs are going to breathe, it's like inhale and just keep inhaling and just keep inhaling and just keep inhaling. At some point,

the lungs are going to do what the lungs are going to do, meaning they're going to exhale. So your brain can tolerate, well, frankly, it's very, very brittle to uncertainty and confusion. We can expand it when we have powerful conversations like these. But what happens is the brain hits any moment of uncertainty, and it can only tolerate that blank space for so long before it's going to predict. Yeah. So this is why I'm sure we've all gotten, like just yesterday, my best, best, best, best friend, I told her something that I thought merited in immediate response.

And she did not respond to me right away. And I was starting to get a little bit annoyed. And when I really kind of went into the annoyance, I was like, why didn't she? And I was like, oh, did she not think that I was? And as soon as I like kind of really gently reflected on myself, like, oh, I just feel a little bit sad. I was able to clean it up. But my point here is when we start to have an emotion that we don't like, it is worth asking ourselves, what was the uncertainty I told myself I was unwilling to tolerate? Well, I just want to, just so I'm understanding this, right, that what the biggest thing that I'm

taking away, and I had a sense to this, but you've given me new language to understand this, is that when we're interacting with people, it's not, our emotional response is not about what the other person did. It's about this ancestral emotional energy that I have been birthed with and have been patterning my whole life. Yes. And I want to be really clear just because, like, I'm fundamentally a trauma, I treat trauma, I treat anxiety. You could have had a great childhood and then be traumatized. Like, it's not all ancestral, of course. I don't think they're doing that. But like, my point is we're shaped by all of these forces.

Our childhood, our traumas. You know, I have patients who they've had infidelity. That's devastating. I could have trusted people before my infidelity and now I can't. So the point is it's all of these factors. But to your point, which I think is your core message, we often think it is the situation. Yes. The motion.

Yes. And I am coming here with this big, on our intuitive shift and saying, no, very often, it is the emotion that creates the situation. Ooh, that was good. That was good. It is good. And the reason it's so good is not because I'm saying it,

it is good because it reconnects you with the power of your life. If it truly is the situation that causes my emotion, I am fucked. It's true. It's really true. You're powerless, yeah. So, you know, one thing in my audience. knows this. I've been, you know, in the last couple of years deep into working on traumas in my life. I've done EMDR and I've done breath work and I've done psychedelic journeys. Like I've been really

trying to work on my response. What psychedelics have you used if you feel comfortable to yeah, of course. Yeah, psilocybin, MDMA and 5MEO DMT. And they were all done with therapists and in a very controlled environment. And was one of them more profound? for you than another, or I know they all had their own. Yeah, it's really, it's really hard to say. They've all been different. I mean, I feel like psilocybin really gave me an idea of create like a bigger vision that I wasn't able to see when I wasn't. And so being able to talk through some of those. And I also saw how interconnected everything was. MDMA, of course, is great at just bringing down the defenses and really pulling me into my heart so I could

see things more objectively. And five MEODMT was like seeing my ancestors. Like it's from another world. So, but each one, what I did is I came out with a checklist of like, here are some traumas, some wounds, some things that showed up. And I took it to my therapist and was like, let's work on these. And I say all that to say that I've, at 54 years old, I've really hit a point where I understand now what you're saying is that my, emotional state is my responsibility. And so if somebody is triggering my emotions, it's a mirror for me to see, oh, isn't that interesting? Why is this? And I like how you're saying it. Why is this energy showing up? Because now I can work on it and I don't need the situation to change. And as I've been doing that

for the last couple of years, what has shocked me is some of the most difficult relationships in my life are effortless now. I got emotional when you said that. I felt that this is what I want people to know is if we shift our relationship with our own emotions, our lives become expansive and possible and we don't have to take a wrecking ball to that. That's right. Yeah.

So how do we do that without, you know, some people listening are like, well, I'm not doing a psychedelic journey. I don't have the money to go into EMDR therapy. like how can we do this with this understanding that it's that our emotional health is within our own control. Okay. So I want to go back to this thing about uncertainty and or confusion. Let's go. Either one of those words is fine. The future is inherently unknowable. Okay. And it's unknowable in big ways and in lots of ways we can totally tolerate in a lot of ways that like we find

impossible. Like we're just like, this is excruciating. Right. So what happens is. And I want to show people the mechanics of this. So what tends to happen, I work with a lot of kind of people who are high performing, like high performing parents. Maybe they're even a stay-at-home mom, but they're just like giving all, like, there's just a lot of labor. And I work with like leaders and I work with entrepreneurs. So people just like doing and doing and doing.

So when I start to feel at my core uncertain, what that's going to do is it's going to create a sense of unsafety. Okay. So great. The brain is at its fundamental core. It's about ensuring safety. So what do I then do to create safety? Well, I start to say this uncertainty is making me uneasy.

It's making me anxious. So I'm going to create certainty. Great. This seems like a very adaptive, logical strategy. So I then start to say I'm going to create certainty by doing a lot to the external environment. Now, in energy rising, I write about what I call the overs. And I think you're going to recognize some of them. The over-verting- I feel like you're already talking about me, but go ahead. I feel so seen and not in a good way. I do feel quite seen right now,

but go for it. So the overs are things like overthinking, overworking, over-getting, over-analyzing, over-functioning, over-rotating. I mean, should I go overdoing? Should I go on and on? There's a million of them. Yeah. So if I, for example, give to someone, that's very lifegiving. It's very enjoyable. It's very pleasurable. But when I overgive, I am only doing that because the core energy is an impulse of fear.

A lot of us love to work. But when we overwork, we're only doing that because we're afraid. Afraid of failing, afraid of being found out, afraid of not. Okay. So when I don't know how to metabolize uncertainty properly, I want to create certainty, that's fine, but I try to create certainty by engaging in the overs. So if I can work enough and give enough and function enough and think enough and analyze enough, then I will be safe.

Are you with me? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Now listen to this. So my primary area of expertise is anxiety. I'm an anxiety researcher. The best definition. I can give you for anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty.

The best definition for anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty. In other words, the more I try to get out of uncertainty by demanding certainty, I start to obsessively chase certainty. The more anxious I become. Interesting. Okay. This is at its extreme. So anxiety is on a continuum. Everyone has mild to moderate anxiety, very normal. But if you start to get into pathological conditions, PTSD, OCD, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic. These are all anxiety disorders, but they're on a continuum. Right.

The very thing that causes these things is actually a disturbed relationship with certainty. I'll show you. So there's a lot of variance of OCD. Let's take that as an example. I'm happy to use any disorder. One of the variants is checking. Okay? So I go and I think is my stove on. I go check.

And when I check externally, I do the checking behavior. I look at the stove. I get a little bit of relief. But then in a little while later, I feel that uncertainty in my body. I go back and I check again. I feel the uncertainty rise. I go back and I check again. Now this certainty seeking is really.

I have patients that cannot go to work because they are checking their stove so much. So how do you break that? What you have to do is recognize. And this is a very counterintuitive thing. If I had one word to describe all of my work, it would be either counterintuitive or opposite. If the brain is a pattern detection machine, apple, apple, apple, and I want change in my life, I've got to be willing to say banana. Well, guess what?

The first time I say banana, you think that's going to feel good? It's going to feel like, uh-uh, it's got to be apple. Okay. So I've got to first say, my real problem here is my inability to sit with uncertainty. Ah, it's like a root cause. It's the root cause of anxiety. But here's the thing. What is the opposite of uncertainty?

It sounds semantically like it should be certainty, which is why we're all out there trying to produce external heart of certainty. The opposite of uncertainty is not certainty. The opposite of uncertainty is trust. I was just going to say it's faith. Yeah. So what are you trusting? You're trusting that it's all going to work out. You're trusting that your highest good is always unfolding.

Like it's it's when you get in the hyper, I would call it like the hypervigilant brain. I could definitely feel my brain go into that place often. And what you're saying is when that shows up, you have to just create a statement. If you're going to create a banana statement, it would be, it's all going to work out. I'm trusting that it's unfolding as it needs to unfold. Yeah, that feels a little, I think that's beautiful. I would worry that that's a little too theoretical for people. A little woo-woo.

No, no, I think that's the like. Give me something else to say. Yeah. Okay, so I would say, tell me specifically where you're having stress. So I was a few minutes late to our conversation. And the reason I was a few minutes late to our conversation is I was running a coaching group. And one of the people in the coaching group said, I struggled this week because I went somewhere and I just kept changing my outfit and changing my outfit and changing my outfit. I kind of got in this loop where I just kept changing my outfit. So I was really stressed and I said, well,

okay, what was the stress about? And they were like, I don't know. I just felt like I could not go out until I looked right, but everything I did like it just didn't feel right. So I would say, what is the thing? So you see what's happening is this person is trying to seek certainty. Can you see what's happening in the nervous system? Right. That once I get the right outfit, it's going to feel certain like it's okay. Right. So she's outfit, outfit, outfit. outfit and her anxiety is going up. Yeah. So I say, okay, well, tell me the thing that you think you cannot tolerate.

Well, the thing I think I cannot tolerate is I think I cannot go out in the wrong outfit. If we want to expand our emotional power, an emotional power is our ability to accept our wholeness and to be able to trust ourselves and life itself. I've got to say, what are the ways I don't trust myself? Well, I don't trust myself to pick out an outfit. Well, I need to start building the muscle. This is an actual muscle of trusting my ability to pick an outfit. That's it.

Not that I feel good in the outfit because you see people want to take the mountain in a single leaf. If you try to take a mountain in a single leap, you will fail. Don't do that to yourself. So my job right now is to say, I'm going to trust that I'm going to pick an outfit. And that's it. I don't care if I feel good in it. I don't care if I feel anxious. I don't care if I feel like people are looking at me.

Right now my work is to show myself that I have the muscle memory to pick an outfit. Right. The way that we build, because I want to show people that this is an actual musculature. Yeah. So if it sounds unfamiliar right now, it means that you got to practice it. You got to practice. Yeah, yeah, go for it. One of the exercises in energy rising is something I call hold your emotional shape.

Okay. And one of the things I think is extraordinary about energy rising is it's very practical. It's like how does the science, how do we actually show up in the science? Right. So we have a very strong analog with physical health. If I want to get more physical power, I go to the gym and I start to lift more weight or I start to run. And my body quite literally shakes. My muscle might start to tremble.

my legs might start to quiver, my heart starts to race, I might start to sweat. And this is a really important point. No one in the history of getting more physically powerful has ever ran from the gym, fled, screaming, oh my God, I'm shaking, never to return to the gym ever again. Yeah. And in fact, a lot of us don't like that shaking or that sweating or that heart racing, but we find it satisfying because it is the clearest evidence that our physical system is getting stronger.

Yeah. It is precisely the same on the emotional power side. Okay. If I go and I'm not used to liking the way I look and I say today I'm just going to, I'm going to set a timer and in five minutes I'm going to pick an outfit and I'm going to go out. The first time I do that, I'm going to shake like hell. Yeah. And the shaking, I'm literally going to shake.

My voice is going to tremble. My legs are going to shake. I might sweat. I might feel a little bit dizzy. If I shut it down there, it's just like me shutting it down and never going back to the gym. We change our nervous system through intensity and frequency. That's it. That's the whole show.

So if I'm not willing to engage in the emotional resistance, I will never get emotional. stronger. I don't need to be hopeless about that. Because a lot of people can say my life, I can't change my life. You can change your life. So what happens? Okay, so let's just walk a scenario through. Let's use the outfit idea. So, and the health thing is really interesting because that we should maybe use that as an example, because a lot of what we're seeing right now is science is being held up as like, well, the science says it this way. So now we're certain that your health is supposed to be a certain way. And I think that that's a very difficult place to be in because the human body is way more complex than we know. There's so much we don't know. But now we've

created a culture of people trying to find the certain path. How much protein should I eat? What exercise should I do? What menopausal HRT should I take? Like everybody's looking for these certain things. And it's just obsessive certainty seeking. Can you see it again? Yeah. I'm like, so I'm seeing this. And then what's happening is that. we're like, oh, well, that person doesn't know, so then this person must know. And so as somebody who is leading a pattern of thought in the health world right now, I feel like it's getting us more and more unhealthy to be looking for these certain things. Yes, because they are moving their locus of power to all these external experts.

And by the way, what a couple of things. First of all, when you take hard academic science, like, and you translate it to a CNN article, It's like, we eat one piece of chocolate a day, you will live 15 days longer. It's like those who are like legitimate scientists. Like we're not really, we wildly understand the nuance, right? And the other thing about science, and I want people to hear this because we are now held up on this pedestal. Faith in science, trust in science, faith and science, trust and science are sisters. there is no scientists in the world that can produce evidence unless they were first willing to act in faith.

Every time we run an experiment, we got to get all this money for the NIH, we got to get our participants for the study, we're running these machines that cost thousands and thousands. We have to have faith always precedes evidence. Right. But what I'm saying is there has to be this renaissance, and I think it's an extraordinary time to be alive with all this, because I think the science is amazing. there's this rise of AI, but what is happening is there's a paradigm shift on the planet and the intelligence of trust, the frequency of trust, is now starting to answer back. Do you understand? No, no, because go deeper there because.

So, I mean, we could have four more shows about this. But to your point, people are outsourcing their power. Yes, agree. Can I trust this expert? Can I trust this expert? Well, what this is going to do to the brain invariably from a neuro-coccal, from a neuropsychological, perspective, is it going to confuse you. That's it. That's exactly what I thought. Yes. Well, then what do we have to find out of confusion. We either have to find more experts or you

have to say, let me listen to myself like I have never listened to myself before and let me tap fiercely into the energy of self-trust. So, okay, so let's use fasting as an example because many of my listeners fast. And what I see is that when many people will go into these fasted states and they feel liberated and other people go into just a short little fast and all the emotions and the relationship with food comes up. And so they're in that struggle. So I want to go back to that point where now they're in struggle and somebody comes along and says, oh, fasting doesn't work. A new study comes out. I'm sure you saw the one about 91% cardiovascular increase, which really wasn't a study at all from intermittent fasting.

And now they're in this discomfort place. And they see something or they see another shiny object that says, oh, wait, you're supposed to eat protein first thing in the morning. And so instead of sitting in the discomfort of how can I make this fasting work for me, they've now outsourced their belief system and they're like, oh, oh, it's bad. See, I knew. It was difficult, I knew it was bad. And I'm just using, there's a lot of examples we can use like that. But what I know about the human body is the human body has a rhythm to it. And it's always trying to come back to homeostasis. And there's so many things that work so well for us. But when we're looking for this certainty, oftentimes we won't find it. And then we get lost in the science

rhetoric. And we're in a moment like right now where people are like, well, tell me the scientific study on it and they don't even, they haven't really fully understood what even the scientific study is and how the human body works. So what do we do when we hit those places where I'm uncomfortable with this health change and yet I don't know where to turn now. I'm confused. So how do I not give up? I mean, I totally feel your point. And it feels so, it feels so demoralizing, right? Yeah, it's hard. I want to hear the emotional energy. it's like it's like a little girl pleading like I'm trying so hard I'm trying yes I'll do this okay I'll do this I'm trying and then you like read this next study and you're like oh my god I can't drink

water out of my closet because I'm going to get some kind of you just like can can you feel the like just the energy just drop like yeah so what's the frequency no matter what I do it's not enough no matter what I do. It can't be safe enough. No matter how much I... Okay? So what we've got to be willing to do is to face ourselves. Now, I know that this can sound wild,

and this is why I love doing when I first released Energy Rising, there was all kinds of different... The books had been very well received, and so I've had to do all kinds of different media. And the hardest media for me to do, actually, is like talking to journalists to get like three sentences. I just want to bling my eyes 25 times. And I'm like, can we sit down for 4,000 hours? And they're like, no answer the question. Right. So I love doing these podcasts because you can really expound upon this. When someone says to me, okay, like this study,

it's not, it's not, it's making me feel for why. What at the core is like it's making me feel like, I don't know how to protect myself. Right. Well, how are you trying to protect myself? Right. Well, how are you trying to protect myself. Well, I'm trying to do all these external things. I'm trying to find the answer to my emotion. Can you see at the core it's really about emotion? Right. This is a really important point. If you had no, a literal synonym for problems is emotional pain. If you found out you were going to die because we're all going to die, but you had no negative asset, no panic, no fear, no stress, you would have no problem. If you got fired from your job tomorrow, but you had no panic, no fear, no humiliate, you'd have no problem. So when people say I'm running around like with a

chicken with my head cut off, trying to find the perfect treatment, a perfect study, the perfect fountain of youth, can't tell me what that makes you feel in your body. It makes me feel afraid. And so I need someone from the outside to tell me I am safe. So it, so at the core, At the core, we don't trust ourselves. At the core, we don't trust ourselves. And there's two things we have to trust. Is we've got to trust ourselves and we've got to trust God. And if you don't like the word God, then you say the energy of life itself.

Right. That life itself is bigger than me. And I am not living life, but life is living through me. Yeah. And if I think that some other things, some other studies, some, I think the study, I think the studies and the fasting is wonderful. Like, I've improved my own nutrition remarkably over the years, and I feel so much better for it. Yeah.

But there is nothing on the planet that the final frontier, and this is a hill I will die on, the final frontier in our life is our own painful feelings. Hmm. And managing them, dealing with them, understanding them. Because here's the thing. on the days when I feel good in my body and the days when the people are listening to me and the days when things are working and the days when my husband is listening and the days when my kid is cooperating.

Feel great. It feels great. But the world around me is giving me my power. Right. The world around me is giving me my agreement and my safety and my permission. Yeah. My power, and this is why I think energy, this is why I wrote energy rising, is in the moments when I say, who am I in the resistance? Who do I say I am in the confusion?

Who do I see I am when you won't agree with me? One of the most powerful things we can do is decide that we're powerful enough to be misunderstood. Oh, that was good. That was good. And so, you know, if we bring it back to, we talked early on about women and, you know, how we've, you know, you kind of alluded to adapting the ways we've adapted, I'm just going to say, to the patriarchal world. What I am discovering in just working with so many women is that we've never asked ourselves, what do I want? We've never turned within and been like, what is my heart saying? And so because we have been raised in a culture that has had us adapt to the culture. So when we come to the place we've come to in this conversation where it's self-trust, where it's listening to your own heart, a lot of women would say, I can't hear anything.

I don't know. That's a muscle I haven't used. I mean, we've been so separate from our bodies. I'll tell you, so I had my first, this is like, I feel a little embarrassed, but I'm going to tell it because I think it needs to be said. I had my first child after I had my PhD. And I brought this cute little outfit to the, for my, not the baby, I brought this cute little outfit for myself. Like I just, like I wanted to, I'm an emotion person. Like I wanted to feel like beautiful and held.

I brought this, basically the skirt in this top. I, the baby came out. My stomach was still distended. I was wearing a catheter. I was wearing, you know, we all had the ice pads on our vagina. I had no idea. Like, it's embarrassing to say, but I thought you gave, you had the baby left you. I'm like, can you see that my, my intelligence around this was stunted at five years old?

I thought the baby came out of my vagina and then my body just went like Gundy. So to your, I feel like we're so severed from our body. Yeah, we so, yeah. Purposefully. just want to point that out. Well, then when we're supposed to trust our, and like, if you think about, and this is some of the stuff I talk about in Code 5 when we talk about the early childhood stuff, what happens to the brain in years zero, early life, zero through three, is it's magnificent.

A million neural connections are being formed every second. We're now starting to understand that learning begins in, in unrum. Right. I love that. What's happening in the brain is really quite extraordinary. So at the most powerful moment of our lives, let's say, like, zero to, let's go zero to 10, okay? We're getting all kinds of messages, some from very well-intentioned parents, things like this. Eat the broccoli.

But I don't want to eat the broccoli. I don't like it. Eat it anyway. Go tell him that you're sorry. But I'm not sorry. If you're a good girl, go tell him you're sorry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Stand up. But I don't want to stand up. I just want to sit.

So we're getting all of these messages from the most powerful people in our lives who are our parents. And again, they're not doing anything even wrong. This is just how we are in human development. But we're getting message after message, some quite ostensibly innocuous, that we should sever ourselves from the very neurologic impulses that have been designed across 150 million years of evolution to be used. are neurologic Google Maps. Why would I trust my body when I'm getting signal after signal after signal that what I'm feeling, I'm too emotional. I'm too much. I need to sit down.

I need to be quiet. My body doesn't want to be this thin. You should be this thin anyways. Yeah. Yeah. My face wants to read. Don't regroup your face. You see?

Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you, it's so I so am a thousand percent congruent with what you're saying because what I see is that in that level of thinking, there is so much suffering for women, like so much because we're trying to perform in ways we don't even realize it. And to your point, we're trying to slow down aging. And we don't even know that maybe on the other side of menopause is something amazing and maybe things like wrinkles actually give emotional feedback to people. And like there's so much we're missing in the context of health.

And you just nailed it. And I think it's what I would love to see in my lifetime is I'd love to see women come back into connection with their bodies and into themselves. Amen. Yeah. And how we how, you know, I don't want to get too nuts here because I know especially we're coming to the end. But you look at all these. So my life has really been about social justice. So my brother is significantly disabled.

I came from a family with a lot of mental health struggles. This is why I did all the international humanitarian aid work. So I feel like biology is such a strong tool. Our bodies are such a strong tool for justice. How in the world can I respect other people's pain? How in the world can I respect the destruction we're doing to this planet? Right. Until I know how to sit and respect my own body.

Oh, so well said. So well said. Yeah. Wow. well, I can see that there's, we do need to bring you back for many more conversations, but what I'm hoping people listening to this are gathering will, A, that you're in control of your own emotional destiny, and B, that it's going to take work. And thank you for writing books like yours and for coming on podcasts like mine so we can have this conversation.

because I, you know, I hit a point in my career where I was like, I'm not offering up one answer solutions anymore. It has to come back to us understanding our bodies as women. And it's not easy to teach something that's so multifaceted and has so much nuance to it. So I feel like you're on that same path doing that with emotions. So I just, I love, I love connecting with you and I feel like there's so many people like us. Yes. Agreed. Like the body has a natural intelligence. And one final point I want to make about the brain, the part of the brain that is thinking and evaluating and judging and weighing and assessing and analyzing, this part of the brain is the newest part of the brain. Okay. Yeah. And it's extraordinary. It's the reason we put

rovers on Mars and like do calculus and all the things. But it's a little bit like, letting your toddler govern your life. It's like the body has an intelligence. Like the body knows how to breathe. The body knows how to move energy. The female body knows how to literally create life. Yeah. It's like this tiny part of the brain, which, yes, it's extraordinary when we use it to do what it's supposed to do for. But it's like when we use this part of the brain to assess every single thing about life and change. It's like letting the toddler run the show. So I guess the punchline here is like,

it's okay to trust biology. It's okay to trust life itself. And it's okay to trust the fullness of ourselves in this. And when I talk about emotional power, my synonym for emotional power is wholeness. Yeah. That all of me belongs. Yeah.

Not just the pretty parts, not just the nice parts, not just the part that seemed really put together. I take all of my energy. Yeah. Yeah. So well said. So well said. Okay. Well, I'm sure everybody's going to run out and get your book.

I know that, you know, diving deeper into this is going to be one of my fascinations. So thank you for this. Before I ask you the last question, how do people find you? They can find me. Well, hopefully they'll pick up energy rising and let me know. People have been reading it and letting me know what they think about it. It's just been such a beautiful moving experience. And then I'm on social media.

So I'm at Dr. Julia de Gange on Instagram, Dr. Julia de Ganges on LinkedIn. And I'm just Julia Degangy on Facebook. And you can feel free to check out my newsletter, which is Dr. Julia de Gange on Substack. Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you for your work. And here's my last question. I always find this question so fascinating.

It's the one that I've chosen to do for the year. And that is, what is health to you? because we are all chasing something that we have different definitions of. So what would you say when you know you're healthy, what is health to you? For me, the answer is very clear for me. Health is integration. It is, for me, am I integrated in the way that I am feeling with the way that I am behaving? Yeah.

Yeah. The healthiest human being is a whole human being who knows how to make space for all of her parts. You know the word that comes to mind when you say that is congruency with yourself? It's like, you know, one of my guests said health was, you know, the physical, the mental and the spiritual connecting together. Well, that's just lining things up. And what I heard is like you being congruent with all your parts is phenomenal.

So thank you so much for this. Thank you. I got a great time. Agreed, agreed. And I hope everybody rushes out and gets your book. find you on socials and yeah, leave us comments and reviews because it'll be really interesting to see what kind of questions we get and then I want to bring you back. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate you. Likewise. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode.

I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and Let me know what your biggest takeaway is.