The Squeeze - Jennifer and Karden: Healing Your Nervous System

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

This week, Tay is back with a solo episode featuring nervous system experts Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin! They begin by sharing how they met and how their unique backgrounds led them to specialize in the nervous system. Jennifer and Karden explain how our nervous systems are hereditary and passed down from our ancestors, and why they’re now struggling to keep up with modern-day life. They also introduce their new book, The Secret Language of the Body, which outlines their innovative 'AIR' approach. Finally, they explore what the Window of Tolerance is, share the first steps to healing our nervous systems, and provide some examples of vagus nerve interruptions!Find Jennifer and Karden on Instagram! https://instagram.com/iamjenmann/ https://instagram.com/kardenrabin/To email us your questions or share your story, you can reach out to [e-mail] sure to rate, review, and follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode! Plus, follow us on Instagram:The Squeeze: https://instagram.com/thesqueeze/Tay Lautner: https://instagram.com/taylautner/Taylor Lautner: https://instagram.com/taylorlautner/& TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@thesqueezepodcastTo learn more from The Lemons Foundation, follow https://instagram.com/lemonsbytay/ and visit lemonsbytay.comEpisode Sponsors:Use code SQUEEZE at checkout for 15% off your entire order at www.vionicshoes.com when you log into your account. 1 time use only. Get your free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase at drinklmnt.com/SQUEEZE. Also, try the new LMNT Sparkling - a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water.Trust your gut with Seed's DS-01 Daily Synbiotic. Go to Seed.com/THESQUEEZE and use code 25THESQUEEZE to get 25% off your first month.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The following podcast is a dear media production. Voo A-I. The most important thing is to be loud. Make the facial expression. So you're tapping over your chest. Voo-a-i. Jen and I met. Ted, did you hop on Clubhouse?

I did not. We had a weekly show. Jen stumbled into our room. And we became friend. We began our first program helping people recover from chronic illness. You're a superhuman. How are you doing it? For anyone, you know, that's usually a sign that you might actually be doing too much.

I have, like, weird things. Main one is when I get my nails done. We'll, like, get anxious, gotten up from the chair before to, like, go to the bathroom. The only organ in your entire body responsible for producing pain is your brain. When life gives you lemons, what do you do with them? Over here at the squeeze, we talk about it. Jen and Cardin, welcome to the squeeze. Hi, Tay. Thanks for having us.

I'm so excited to finally be chatting with you guys. I want to know, where are you out in the world and how did you meet? Because I know the time of this taping was, it played a factor here. Indeed, yes. Okay, so I'm normally in Bali, but I'm currently in Italy. And Cardin is in the Berkshires. And so we usually have morning. and night evenings.

But now that I'm in Europe, it's been a little easier. Cardin, do you want to share how we met? Yeah. So, by the way, Berkshires means like Massachusetts. That was going to be my follow-up. Yeah. Some folks know, some folks don't. But like, it's where Krapalor, the Center for Yoga and Health is.

And this cool place called Tangalwood is out here where the Boston Symphony spends it's summer. So just to give people a sense. So Berkshires, Bali, Italy. Jen was born in Uganda. We'll talk about that on another podcast. Yeah. She's a child of the world.

I was born in Jersey, but you can add that part out. But, you know, Jen and I met by, like, pure and total happenstance, but probably fate. For a hot minute in 2021, T, did you hop on Clubhouse at all? I did not. I'm not one with the trends, but, yes, I'm aware of it, but I did not. I did not. So, you know, it existed for about six months, and it was supposed to be the, the social media app to displace all social media apps.

And it was absolutely a great time for a while, but it was the most epic time suck. But for those of who never on it, it was basically like if podcasting, TED talking live with an interactive audience was made into an app, that's what it was. And so me and my great colleague, Charlie Murrell, we had a weekly show, if you will, called or Room,

called Ask the Pain Guys. And what we did is we offered a brain and nervous system-centered discussion around chronic pain, because that's where most chronic pain comes from. It's based in the nervous system, not the body. And Jen stumbled into our room while she was in the midst of her own nervous system-led recovery from chronic illness. And what she had accomplished in her healing and what she had accomplished in her healing and what, I was talking about in that room where gelled really, really beautifully, but they were also very different approaches. And I actually was looking back in time to the DMs because you couldn't talk on club outs. You couldn't message one another. So we ended up exchanging a few initial

messages on Instagram. And we became friends. We began working together. And within a very six months, we began our first program helping people recover from chronic illness. Wow. Dang. Look at that. Social media, man. The way it networks, it's so great. There's no reason under this sun that some guy in the Berkshires should have met some, at the time, Jen was living in London, by the way. Like, those stars should have never crossed. And so much has come from that completely unexpected rendezvous. Oh, my gosh. I love that. Well, I'm so thankful for Clubhouse and for setting that up, setting you guys up together to partner. and work together. I love to give our listeners a little background of you both individually, just how you got started in your work and kind of like what you specialize in.

Awesome. So I was a professional ballet dancer, had a bunch of injuries. My career rerouted to helping people move better, feel better. So from Pilates, yoga, movement therapy, posture techniques, Felden Christ, like all of these very functional ways of feeling better and moving better. And then I just kept being drawn into the clients who, you know, had issues that just wouldn't go away. And I was also really curious about their connection with their mental health. I was noticing some crossovers and I myself had had a lot of anxiety my whole life, a stutter where at one point I couldn't even speak for multiple. years. And so then I went back to school. I studied by medical sciences, physiotherapy in London.

And in my second year of being like super happy, excited, but also really overwhelmed and just taking on way too much, TAY, everyone was telling me, you're a superhuman. How are you doing it? And that's for anyone, you know, that's usually a sign that you might actually be doing too much. But, you know, as an ex-pro athlete, that that wasn't going in. You know, I was like, I keep going. I keep pushing a little bit of perfectionism, high achieving. So I found myself in my second year of physio school with all of this expertise. But feeling already my body starting to send me messages of, you know, something's not right.

And it had been a few years by then. So some aches and pains and fevers. And then one day I was doing a yoga class. I was also a yoga teacher. And I hurt my neck a little bit. And then a few days later that turned into a flu, turned into 30 plus symptoms from nausea, not being able to eat. Like acne covered my whole face completely. Not being able to get out of bed. Severe fatigue. lung inflammation, heart stuff. So all of these symptoms in a short amount of time. And then I transitioned to when I fully recovered from that after being completely bed bound for a year and a half and conventional medicine really offering no succinct answer, I found my own way. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to help people now.

Because if I recovered in just a few months from something that all these doctors told me that would take years probably even never recover. I was like, that's it. You know, I was already in on that path anyway. And the universe just literally bombed me with this thing that kept me bed down and was like, you're going to recover. And then your recovery is going to be other people's roadmap. And you should follow that. So yeah, and then I did various courses. And I, specialized in the areas that I was very interested in around a nervous system-centered approach. And here we are. Yeah.

And so now I help people through our program and, you know, our book and stuff help people recover from mind, body, psychophysiological disorders. So combination of, you know, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and body symptoms. Yeah. Wow. That's me. I love that. How about you?

So I got into this work initially, let's say, 17 years ago now. After college, I went to massage therapy school because I had a real fascination with the body and health. And I was just really drawn to the work. And for the first 11, 12 years of my career, I worshipped at what I called the throne. of structure and function. If I can just get all the parts of the body aligned appropriately, appropriately, and if I can get this person moving right, then their pain should go away. Yeah. Because that's what I was taught. That's what I was promised. And by the way, that's what worked some of the time, you know? And so for 10 or 11 years, I developed a really

successful career as the guy who was great at getting people out of pain. And I loved it. I was obsessed with it. And I kept learning, kept learning, kept learning, kept learning. And there kept being clients that weren't getting better, even though all the right things were being done to their body. But the other thing secretly in the background is that starting with a injury doing far too many deadlifts at CrossFit, I started to develop a low back pain pattern, which progressively got worse and worse and worse and worse, where about 10,000. 10 years into it, even though I'm a professional making his living, helping people get out of pain,

I'm at the point where I can't stand for 15 minutes without just pure agony of horrendous low back pain, sciatic pain, bilateral bolts of lightning going into my cabs and my groin. It was terrible and nothing was working. And when I was on the brink of evaluating surgeons to help me with my low back, I stumbled into a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. And it's a little book. And again, in the same way that Jen and I should have never met, I should have never stumbled into this book. Not only that, when I did stumble, it kind of, it stumbled into me. if you could have seen the eye roll that I did when I saw the title of this book, right? I was like, you know, this has to just be some cheesy shit, right?

Not only that, I'm this freaking expert on how to make this stuff better, right? So not only was I never supposed to find the book, but the initial reaction was like, fuck this book. But I had to go to the bathroom, and so I needed something to read. So I'm on this warm, seated, toto bidet. Beautiful. reading this book, and instead of talking about what's structurally wrong with my back, John Sarno starts to ask questions, are you a perfectionist? Are you a workaholic? Do you have X, Y, and Z tendencies? How often do you feel anger? How often don't you feel anger? What's the

relationship between stress and relational issues and the presentation of your low back pain? and he unfolds an argument, which we now know to be the absolute true science behind pain. His argument, by the way, is a little antiquated now, but that, TAY, the only organ in your entire body responsible for producing pain is your brain and your nervous system. It doesn't exist without that. And so your brain is making decisions all the time about when pain is happening and when it's not. And not only does it sometimes make those decisions incorrectly, it often confuses emotional pain brain circuitry with physical pain circuitry. And there's a lot more nuanced scientifically to it. We're not going to get into it this moment.

But I read that book. It fit like a glove. And just from reading that book, I had the first significant improvement in my pain in years. And once I got moved into that model of like, did I just read a book and influence my brain and now unremitting, agonizing pain that was compromising my career and leading me towards surgery, did it just go away? Am I neo? Is this the matrix?

Like what just happened, right? And, you know, the long and the short of it is that that threw me on the, the most incredible journey of my life where I could never go back to how I practiced before, right? Nothing against wonderful physical therapy, PT, exercise. All these things are critical for our health, but they're often meaningless when it comes to pain and illness. And since then, I explored the work.

I've trained with some of the most, the luminaries in the brain pain space. I've also become a somatic experiencing practitioner. And I've combined all that work, Jen and I call ourselves nervous. system medicine practitioners because we use nervous system-based therapies, work that comes out of the fields of trauma to specifically help people heal the physical deficiencies, the pain, the chronic illnesses, the recurring syndromes that don't have a good explanation and that are resistant to all their treatments. We help people heal them by basically moving their nervous systems out of survival and repression mode into thriving and feeling mode.

And then miraculously, they get better like you can't believe. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's been something that we've like on this mental health journey. Us as a couple of myself have just really learned that like your brain is like truly like one of, if not the most important organ, obviously next to your heart. But like how truly important it is. And you know, we take all these medications for all these other organs and we do all these other

things to better them, but we need to actually be giving our brain like the same amount, if not a lot more attention because what it does, like, we've only like scratched the surface of like what our brains are like truly capable of. So I love like having these conversations and like diving into how how we can work on, you know, healing our brain and our brain then healing us. for lack of a better term. You just set it up so beautifully. I just want to mention like a really, you know, you probably have a lot of people talk. You might have heard in the nutritional space about the gut brain access, right?

And everyone talks about basically how important your gut is to your brain health, which is true and great. But speaking of how people aren't focusing on the right place, they're not focusing on the brain and nervous system is when they talk about the gut brain connection in that enteric nervous system, it's all about how we're, we can use supplements and nutrition to make our brain better. But no one is looking at the glaringly important features. How is the function of our brain impacting the dysfunction in our gut? Yeah. Right. Everyone can relate that the moment you're in an experience of stress, let's call it fear or anxiety maybe before you're going to go do an audition, before you're going to be speaking in public, the fear and anxiety of someone not returning your text, right? Or the fear and anxiety of, I'm in trouble. What happens to your gut?

instantly. You get nauseous. It might cramp. You might get the runs. You might have to pee. And for a lot of folks, they might get so worked up that they have to have to vomit. And so when you're working on your gut, for example, and IBS issues, and you're not paying attention to your nervous system or your brain, nothing's going to work because you're ignoring the thing that's causing the problem. Like you're ignoring the brain part of the gut access. Yeah. No, it's so true. And that's like, that's something that I've like figured out and have been working on because I've I've had stomach issues like growing up my whole life I mean I was lactose intolerant like born out of the womb so I have had these issues for a long time but as of more like recent over the past like five years or so like

every time like my stomach tells me I'm anxious before like I can actually like compute it like I'm like I get nauseous and it's just it's crazy and I have like you know, I do take supplements to help with my digestion because I obviously struggle with that due to things I was born with. But it's also so important to like, I'm like, oh, wait. But I know that's happening, but I can't really take anything like to help the nausea. But what's causing it? It's like, oh, it's actually like my brain that's just like feeling anxious. And that's how it's presenting itself. And that's something that I've discovered. Like I can't. I have like weird, weird things, I think, because I, I'm better for my PTSD, but I worked as a COVID nurse, and I have like a lot of struggles from that. But my like main one is when I get my nails done. And it sounds so weird. And I don't know like what it is, but every single time, especially when I get my toes done, I think it's like a mixture of, I don't know, a lot of things. But every time I go, I will like get anxious and like awful nauseous.

I've like gotten up from the chair before to like go to the bathroom. because I think I'm going to throw up, but I'm like, no, it's just like my anxiety. And that's like the biggest thing that I know every time I go, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to feel good. And like, I try to talk myself out of it. And sometimes it does, like, I'm able to, like, do affirmations and kind of like get myself out of it. Or I've like figured out some triggers. Like I do cold water in my feet, like with my toes now instead of warm water because it helps me, but things like that, like, I know I'm going to, like, feel nauseous, but that's not because of, like, my stomach. That's because of something that my brain is doing that is not enjoyable.

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or Sunnycars. Something that you guys talk about, which I think is really interesting, is how, like, the way that our brain and nervous system work, how it comes from our ancestors and, like, that it's hereditary. Can you explain, like, how that works and how it's, like, failing us today? Because I think that's something that's so crazy. Like, I didn't really think that that was something that could be inherited. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most ancient systems in our body that literally has allowed us to survive through all of these hundreds and thousands of years because the nervous system's primary goal is your survival and your safety. And so the way in which we've evolved to now be here alive and, you know, have food at the supermarket and like water in our fridge.

is through all of that evolution of essentially our nervous system preparing us to run away from a tiger so that we could survive, to go find safety with our village to feel safe and then recover from the fact that we just have to run away from a tiger. So all of these nervous system, you know, regulation that we talk about today is actually how we've been moving through evolution and life forever. And it's really a part of who we are. And one of the key things about why we talk about this is because we live in a world that is really modern.

And we compared to, right, when we were running away from tigers. And how many messages, notifications, emails, news, notifications do you get Tay on your phone only? Like every second, right? I actually forgot to put my phone on silent mode when we started this interview. And I was hearing like, bing, bing. And I was like, what is that? Like, literally, we can't have a break.

And so our nervous system is really wired and has evolved not to be at the stage at which we're at right now. So it has evolved for us to experience short-term stories. and then recover from it and then find a sense of settlement and regulation. But in this world, this fast-paced thinking world that we live in, our embodied nervous system is trying to survive and help us find ways to move through life. And some of these ways, which are coping mechanisms and coping patterns, are such things like anxiety, depression, and people pleasing, and, you know, high achieving. And these patterns are there because at a time when there was nothing else that could have

helped us, our brain in that moment collected all of the past information, everything that's happening right now, predicted what could happen in the future and was like, right, this situation is super intense. We need to learn this pattern here right now. make sure that we keep repeating it forever and ever and ever, because this experience is really overwhelming. For any of us who've experienced, you know, adverse events as children or traumas or, you know, at home or at school in early childhood or later on in our teenage years, it's a lot, right? We, our brain was not yet developed at that time. So we really are

looking to the adults around us to help us feel safe and ask our, So like is this is what I'm feeling and what I'm experiencing. Is it, is it okay? Do, does someone need to help me right now? And if someone's not there, what do I do? It's like this perpetual, you know, kind of cycle of finding your own way when in that moment you never felt safe. And so our, that is one of the things that our nervous system really hasn't caught up to yet because in the present time, stress is really long-lived and chronic for so many of us. How many of us experience anxiety or stress? I mean, stress is 100% of us. Anxiety is like 95% of us. Chronic anxiety is like 89%. I mean, so many of us, right?

And it's really when you start to understand and learn that your body is trying to communicate with you in, It's language through sensations and feelings and symptoms. Like, hey, maybe this is something that needs to change. And maybe, you know, it's giving us clues. And so, T, about what you were saying earlier, you know, like your toes and your experience. You're like, I know when I go there, that's going to happen. That is an experience that your brain has kind of imprinted and saved.

And it's like, okay, when I go do this, this happens. But it can be changed. It can be rewired. and you can actually feel a sense of safety in that moment where your nervous system rebuilds its own pattern in those moments where, you know, for whatever reason, your brain is like, threat, alert, we need to be on edge, we need to be hyper vigilant, this is not safe. And sometimes those moments don't make sense. And that's okay. I just posted something yesterday. And it's actually a quote in our book that goes, you may not remember, but your nervous system does.

And that's why sometimes you're anxious and you don't know why. It's why sometimes you're triggered and you're like, but I'm getting my nails done. Like, this is so random, you know. I saw this post and it said mental health and then mental was crossed out and it was just health. And I love that because mental, physical, brain, body, the system, systems in our body, the organisms, the organs, it truly is one. And why the nervous system is so

important is because it helps them all communicate. And the brain, which is the coordinator and the orchestra conductor of all systems in the body, when it receives the information, you know, that we're safe and that, you know, we have these patterns that are helpful. And that's when all the organs and the systems and the cells are communicating in a way that's like, okay, we don't have that much cortisol here. I think we're good. You know, we don't have this other thing that's happening over there. We're good. You know, immune systems working, lymphatic systems flowing. So, yeah, it's all connected and I love it. Okay, I'm done. No, that was amazing. I love that. And I think that's a great little segue into getting into your guys' book. Cardin, I'd love to know

where the idea of the book came from and what the secret language of the body is. I can do that. So the most direct answer is that right around this time last year, a little bit earlier, Harper Collins asked us if we wanted to write a book to teach people how to heal their nervous systems. And the reason why they asked us that is that that's what we've been doing for, three years with our online programs. And also what we've been sharing on social media and Instagram for all that time as well. And, you know, some of your listeners may have read other phenomenal books in the space like Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger

or in an Unspoken Voice, Gabor Matte's works. And what often happens when you read those books is You're like, holy shit, this is me. This is why. This explains it. I feel so validated. Oh, my God, I'm not crazy. Thank God. Why didn't anyone tell me this before?

But then, now what? Yeah. Now what? Now what, yo, right? Bessel is great in that in the end of his book, he provides at least five research-backed approaches. But even all of those approaches largely require a therapist relationship, which we're huge advocates for. But it's like, go to this thing for healing, go to this thing for healing, go to that thing for healing.

And also, their standalone approaches, all of which are very powerful. But what Jen and I have been doing for years, especially with our online programs, is like, look, the body heals itself. right even let's say you get let's say you have a terrible injury like you get a bullet wound you get a bullet wound and you go to the hospital and yes they save your life right they they stitch you up and they they prevent you from dying but once they prevent you from dying who grows the blood back who grows the scar who fights off the infections in the body your immune system your immune system your immune system your connective tissue system, your connected tissue system. Like, it's really all of the best healing is centered around supporting the body's capacity to fix itself because that's what it's designed to do.

When you have trauma, attachment injuries, nervous system dysregulation, your organism's ability to do that is compromised. Like the brain and the nervous system don't know how to maintain a state of homeostasis and safety in which or a parasympathetic state where recovery, healing, happening. even normal maintenance of the function of your your metabolism and your hormone system. See, these books explain that, but then again, you're left with what now? And so we in the secret language of the body, we teach people exactly. It's a manual on how to. All right, you tend to have chronic anxiety.

All right. Here's why. Here's what's going on at the level of your mind and thoughts that we need to. start repattering because they're perpetuating it. But this is also what's happening in your body and why we need to deploy vagus nerve techniques to help from the bottom up move the nervous system back into a window of tolerance and safety. But, and I heard this on one of your great podcasts with that attachment expert, T. Anyway, she's on the doctors. Judy. Judy? Oh, Judy. Yeah. That it. It.

But all this stuff, the dysregulation in the present is rooted in the past. So we also have to go do work in the mind body in the past to retrain it back into safety. And so Harper Collins asked us to write the book and we had this golden beautiful opportunity to see, can we take this three-month course experience where we've helped people literally go from not having left their home in 10 years to seeing their children's choral concert for the first time. Can we take that experience and put it into 350 pages in a book? And that's what we did. And the book revolves. I'll just simply also say it's called the secret language of the body because as Jen was indicating all, I know, tell you said it perfectly.

My stomach tells me I'm anxious before my head does. I fucking loved that. And Jen clapped her hands to you. Why, Jen? Go. I love you just, you're tramping at the bit. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, you go. You go because you're on the roll, but I love it too. Just simply that, like, in Jen and our's world, there's no difference. You don't need your head to tell you because your head and body, like, as she said, they don't distinguish with one another. So you feeling a sensation in your body is the information. It is the anxiety, is the experience.

Your brain, secondarily labeling it as, I think I'm anxious now, is fine. But that's like David Attenborough watching a safari being like, hmm, the tiger is running down the zebra. That's like, that's your delayed response to your own. Like, my gut is telling me I'm afraid, right? Like, yeah. Oh, wait. I actually have, sorry, actually I have something really funny to add. And then I know you're on a roll. But, so I have a guilty pleasure. And unless you ask me, I'm not going to share what the reality show is. But basically, I was watching it last night because my son is really sick. Yes. So I was watching.

Watching Love Island. Cardin, do your eye roll. Listen, have you seen all of the wheels of the husbands in the background being like, what are you watching? And then they're like, who's that? Oh, it's Jordan again. It's like so funny. Anyway, wait, I want to say something. And one of, you know, I was just like falling asleep because my son's really, really sick right now.

So I've been breastfeeding and I'm so exhausted. So I was like, Love Island, make me. feel better. And this guy that's, you know, just one of the guys that's on it and, you know, he's just saying random stuff. All of a sudden, he just comes out with this advice to one of his friends and he says, you know what? Your mind is too smart. But your gut, your gut just knows. So go with your gut. And I was like, wow. That bro is speaking the secret language of the body. He knows. Maybe he's read the book. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. Could we get our book on that show? Okay, you guys are probably getting sick of me by now saying this, but if you haven't purchased Seeds, DSO-1 at this point in your life of hearing me preach about this product for years, you got to keep listening because what are you doing? Come on, we got to get on board. Seeds, DSO-1, daily symbiotic, has just truly changed my life. It's impacted my gut health.

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So the book teaches the air approach, awareness, interruption, and redesign. And believe it or not, it's that simple. We need to become aware of the conversation, the nonverbal conversation that's happening in our body mind. We then have to learn how to interrupt, right? So in your case, Tay, I'd be like, whoa, I'm noticing that there's all these signals of anxiety as I go to the nail salon, right? Well, I need to be really curious about that. What's the emotion in here? Is there associated memory in here? Is there parts of these feeling that I'm not even tracking? Is there underlying emotions that are in anxiety? Because by the way, anxiety isn't an emotion. It's a physiological experience on top of an emotion. What's the emotion there that's actually going on? What is the

core belief that I'm not even tracking that's associated with this. You've got to become aware of all that information. Then we have a host of tools. Now I need to interrupt it. This loop is not effective. And also the nail salon is not the COVID ER, nor is the nail salon, you know, the front lines in the Ukraine. Like, I have to start interrupting this response that my body's having and bring it into safety. And then lastly, with R, I need to redesign. I need to consciously help to associate my neurology in my body that this experience is not only safe, but perhaps like for many other people who enjoy the salon, pleasurable. Yeah. And that's what the secret language of the body teaches people how to do.

Yeah. Wow. I love that. I was working through my nail salon thing as you were saying that. And I guess I didn't think that there was like a quote unquote event associated with it. I just was like maybe it's like the fluorescent lights or there used to be all of the little like COVID dividers in there and it was like really stuffy. And I was like maybe that's what it is because I definitely like developed claustrophobia

from working through COVID. But I did have this was actually after after I was finished with COVID. I actually ended up getting COVID, not from working. Ironically, I worked in a COVID unit for however many months. I never got it but got it out in the world. And I actually had it really bad. I was like out of work. I was on disability.

I like couldn't like could barely do anything. And right when, right when that kind of first started, um, I probably say like three, three-ish weeks after I had like gone in, I was in bed, I was done.

Um, and then I kind of was like, okay, it's time to get up, get moving. Um, and I don't like sit well at all. Like I have to be doing stuff.

And my nails were grown out. So I was like, okay, I need to go to, at the nail salon. And I actually ended up, like, coming, like, so close to passing out in the nail salon and actually kind of blacked out my car after. Um, because I was so, like, I couldn't do the laundry. Like, just the, I didn't have any energy. Um, I had a lot of like, just, I ended up having, like, a long COVID thing. Um, but I remembered, I didn't think that that, like, affected me.

Because, like, it wasn't anything the nail salon did. It was just, like, something like my body, you know. So I guess I forget that that like happened and I was like fully like I stuck in the car for like 30 minutes after like I could I had to like lay down. My husband was gone in another state working. I was luckily I had a girlfriend with me who was staying like living with me. So she like drove over and like drove me home because I was like I can't I'm not going to be able to drive. So it was just a crazy thing. But go ahead, Jen. I want to hear what you want to say. Oh no. I was going to say. I mean you're. Speaking my experience, I was also diagnosed with long COVID because my chronic fatigue happened at the same time. Little did they know is I was already experiencing symptoms before I got COVID. But COVID was, you know, one of the last straws to break the candles back. But I had that experience with taxis. So I would my, when I was really sick and especially the beginning of my chronic illness journey, My husband would carry me down the stairs.

He would put me in a taxi. We'd drive to the doctor. He'd carry me out. And then the doctor would give me doming news. Or I'd do a test and they'd be like, we don't know what's wrong. Or I had this awful experience where we drove for like 45 minutes in a taxi in central London. You know, there's traffic. And I'm so anxious at this point.

my, I have like a fever. You know how the experience is when you have that. Yeah, I was experiencing the same thing. So, um, when I, when my husband carried me upstairs, I saw a neurologist who was a specialist in, you know, post viral syndromes. And she said, oh, for a session, it's, uh, you know, it's just a half an hour session. And we're going to do this. Then I'm going to help you. It's going to be amazing. I'm going to tell you exactly what's wrong. And at that point, I'd done so much. And I was like, she's going to cure me. I don't know why and how, but this is going to be amazing. So we do the session, and all she did was like a routine check that I actually knew what

she was doing because it's the same routine check you do on a physiopatient. So I knew exactly what she was doing. And I was like, she's testing my sensitivity. My nerve response is like, where's this going? So after half an hour, it ended. And she was like, okay, so it's a thousand pounds. And if you want more, you have to come back next week. And I, in that moment, I had a really severe panic attack. I felt like I'd been really violated because I was barely. Yeah, like I had like, aside from the physical experience of like, I felt like acne, sweaty, disgusting.

But it wasn't that. It was, you know, I had a fever. My lungs were hurting. My legs. I couldn't even talk or keep my head off the pillow. So imagine being there. So from that moment, especially getting in a taxi for me for like the following two years would literally trigger some of the symptoms of the chronic fatigue. So I would get like heat in my body. I would get my heart palpitations, anxiety.

So my brain had coupled the experience of. being in a taxi and the sensory overload of what had happened before, during, and after with this traumatic experience of before the continuous, you know, all the doctors being like, no, you're never going to recover. We don't know. We don't know. This could be this, could be that. You could be cancer.

To then this final kind of big event where I was like, I felt so, you know, like, how can you take advantage of me like this? She hadn't told me how much it was. It was horrible. So I just wanted to share that because it's a very similar experience in the way that we teach people to move out of that. And how I moved out of that is through kind of what Cardin talked about, the air approach and retraining the felt sense in your body, becoming aware of the signal of the messages in your body, even before you go, becoming aware of the thoughts of your breath, like, oh, what's my? mind saying right now, rewriting that experience for your brain? Because all your nervous system is doing is it's protecting you from a past experience that was overwhelming. And it's like, right, anytime there's a pattern that looks like it's going to feel claustrophobic,

overwhelming, over, you know, a sensory overload, we're just going to, you know, have panic and anxiety because that means that you're hypervigilant, right? And when you're hyper vigilant. You can make sure that you're like tracking everything, that, you know, that you're keeping yourself safe, that you can run away, that you can hide. So really your nervous system take all of this to say that you're extraordinarily adaptive. And it's amazing how your brain came up with this pattern to help you cope with a moment that was really impacting in your life. And that influenced, you know, your mind and your body in those moments. And, you know, You know, you can rewire that and move through it.

Absolutely. I wanted to give you that. I love that. Yeah, that's reassuring. I know my husband's always like, why do you keep going if you like keep feeling like anxious every time you go and you like feel anxious? TAY, we're going to do a pod in a couple of months when discuss your joyous experience at the nail salon after we do a little bit of work. Yeah. No, for sure.

But I'm like, he's like, why do you keep going? I'm like, because I know it's not like, clearly I'm fine. I can go to nothing at the nail salon is like, I'm not in harm there. Like, I know that. But I know when I go, these things happen. And I'm just, I get stubborn. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to, I want my nails done. I'm going to keep going.

And if I have to like deal with that, I'm going to figure out how to like get through that and not. Yeah, I just, I know it's there. He's like, why do you keep going? I'm like, because it's not actually there. But it is there. But it's not. There's nothing harming. me there. So I'm going to keep going and I want my toes to be painted and my nails look cute.

I did have a question. On the note, like, thinking about like pain, you guys talk about this window of tolerance. And when I hear tolerance, I'm like, oh, like pain tolerance. What does, what is a window of tolerance and can that, like, because I know different people have different pain tolerance. Is this like the same thing where people can have bigger windows of tolerances if I'm putting it in the current term. I can't wait to like, I can't wait to like learn so much more about you because I think if you was like GI fucking Jane plus like combat nurse, like you're one tough cookie. And even it's like tolerance on the row.

So no, it doesn't mean that at all. Okay. Actually. So the window of tolerance is a concept first described is it by Siegel or Deb Dana or Both Jen Segal, Dan Segal first, yeah. Yay, look at that. Go brain. And so when your body and sorry, when your nervous system perceives itself as not in danger as safe, right?

It's like in a good zone. It isn't what we call generally the window of tolerance. And inside that window of tolerance, it can go up into arousal, which is like a sympathetic state, which is I have a lot of work to do and I have to run a. around all day and I have to respond to emails and all this sort of shit and then go up up, up, up, up into sympathetic activation, which by the way is in the direction of what's also called the fight or flight response. But the fight or flight respond is just the extraordinary end of the sympathetic activity of your body. And you can go up, up, up, up, up to there

and more or less function fine without any adverse effects on your body, symptoms, without any adverse behaviors like fucking snapping at your husband or binge eating, right? Yeah. And then on the other end of the window of tolerance is we go down towards rest, Netflix watching, sleep, enjoying the spa, being able to let go of time, and to be able to go down there without adverse symptoms. Because on the parasympathetic guys is what we call dorsal, which in its extremes are depression, disassociation,

lethargy, CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, low injury. That's the bottom of the parasympathetic pole. So if we're in our window of tolerance, we are going up and down our activity scale without negative consequences. What happens inside either trauma, a pervasive trauma, or acute stress is that we are forced out of that window of tolerance. So when you were serving in the COVID ward, okay, you were probably routinely having to rupture your window of tolerance where you were feeling, anxiety. You were getting exhausted. You were snapping. You were moving. You were feeling symptoms because your body was basically going into the place that it's supposed to go when it's talk about that inherited evolutionary hardware that it's supposed to go in for a very brief period of time to not die

from a saber-thews tiger. Right? Yeah. Yet you're having to stay there for way too long. Or if you've got a really bad childhood with neglectful parents or abusive parents or you live in an area of violence, you're always there. You've been there for three fucking decades. And it's up in those zones, either the top or the bottom of the window of tolerance, the symptom presentations are very different. The behavioral presentations are very different.

But when your body is operating outside of that optimum window of living, up and down, that's where basically every single non-communicable disease that afflicts mankind comes from. and our job. And by the way, once you rupture out of it, you tend not to be in that window tolerance anymore. You tend to ping pong.

You can know this. Like people go, boof, into really, really active, and then they crash. Active crash. Boom, boom, boom. Or like, active, active, active. I'm going to binge and do and smoke a shit ton of cannabis and crash. Right? Boom, boom, boom.

There's no more a lovely oscillation. Yeah, it's funny that you say that. I feel like I get into that. that sometimes, like, Taylor multiple times has had to be like, babe, like, you need to chill. Like, I, it's better now, but when I was first, like, when I first left the hospital, I was always like, because you're always trying to do 17 things at once. And, like, I'm always like how, I do it now. I'm like, how can I walk through the house and drop everything off that I need to by only doing, like, what's the quickest way? What route should I go? Like, just like things like, things like that to multitask and, like,

better do things when it's like, no, actually, I have the time in the day to actually make one single trip for everything. And that's something that is hard for me to learn. But I'm slowly- That would be part of the redesign step though. I love that, TAY, right? Awareness that you're bringing like the ER mentality to straightening up the house. Yeah. When instead you could interrupt that maybe with some like breathing or a vagus nervy, nervy thing. And then the redesign is to like lean into the, like this like maybe the the the medium pace or the slow pleasure of just being through your home and doing your thing yeah no that's so true that's something oh go ahead Jen I was going to say do you want a Vegas nerve interruption tool right now oh yes hit me

and I'm telling everyone is listening if you're listening go watch the video because it's gonna be good yeah exactly so so Tay when Cardin was saying interruption it's that moment of where you're like, oh, I've just become aware that that is what my body wants to do. And my mind is like, okay, how can I go do, do, do, do, do, do, do make everything fast and make sure that I do it all in one go. And then I'm done. And then I go on to the next thing. And you're like, oh, wait, I'm doing that. Okay. Okay. Interrupt now. Let's interrupt. And then you already have another solution, which is like, okay, which is what you shared earlier. I might do this. And and you can say I'm going to explore how I feel doing it a little slower or doing like,

I'm going to put the keys there, and then I'm going to have a snack, and then I'm going to sit down and just like have a chat to my husband, see how that feels. But something that helps is using the somatic experience of your body, like the nerve signals that are sending sensory information back into the brain. So you're going to start in the moment where you decide to enter. You're, hopefully you're standing. If not, you're going to stand up and you're going to shake your whole body. So you're shaking your arms as if you had like water on your body.

So you're shaking and you're like shoulders and you're like your hips, your legs, your feet. Like literally like your like water, get off my toes, you know, like your whole body. Right. Then you're going to start to stomp your feet where you literally feel the experience. of that feeling from the bottom of your foot moving up your whole body. So your brain is like processing that information. You'll start to feel like a vibration and your brain is reorganizing from automatic pattern to new sensory information.

And it's like, okay, let me process this. So the stomping, stomping, stomping, probably like 10 times. And then pause for a moment, feel the vibration. And then we're going to do a little tapping or light slapping. You know, you can define it either way where you're going to lightly start to tap your arms and your chest. Probably a little, I don't know if it's going to make noise, but like a little bit stronger than what you're doing, where you feel like you're giving yourself literally like a little slap and it's like you feel the vibration. And then you want to go all the way down your body, the front of your legs, and then all the way up, the back of your legs.

So again, there's that vibration, energy moving, or discharging, that experience of stress, anxiety. And then we're going to end with a vocalization. So our vagus nerve innervates our vocal box here. And when you talk, it's stimulating your vagus nerve. And when you sing, it's stimulating it even more. When you hum, when you exhale loudly while you're talking. So the last one is a vocalization. And it's going to involve two exercises at one.

So one is you're going to tap your chest the entire time. You can either have your hand flat over your heart or in, I don't know, what is this called? A little fist kind of, half fist. Soft fist or cat paw? Oh, cat paw is perfect. Yeah. So over your chest and you're going to inhale through your nose and in one exhale, you're going to say, Voo a-i. And I really want you to like explore the facial expression. So our vagus nerve has

these nerves that it connects with, connects to that go into your face and that in our face is how we connect with the world and how we come into that social engagement, that co-regulation. So we're really telling our brain, we're discharging the energy. We're changing the pattern here. And then we're feeling a sense of safety. So I'm going to show you what that looks like and talk it through. So you're tapping over your chest, inhaling, and in one exhale, you're going to say, and the most important thing about this is to be loud and to make the facial expression like, because you're stimulating facial muscles that a lot of us don't usually use. And so your brain is like, whoa, what's happening here?

And it's that the muscles that we use when we connect to other people. So that's a nice little interruption technique that you can use. It's a rock star interruption technique. It is. It's a rock star interruption technique. And it's so, like, simple, too. You don't need anything to do that. Not only do you not need anything, TAY, you don't need to think. Yeah.

Right? Like instead of being like, oh, like, what do I need to do or how or what's what do I need to coach myself or what affirmations or what positive self? Fuck talking and start taking care of your goddamn body. Yeah. It needs you. Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much.

I'm so excited to get this episode out. And I'm so excited for our social clips because I'm clipping your little technique there. And that's going to just be absolutely amazing. But I'll leave a link to the book. Thank you guys for actually making something that people can read and use. It's so important. And it's something that I strive to do every day is to provide something that people can actually implement into their lives. So thank you for doing that.

We'll leave a link down below and some other links to some other little goodies that you guys have going on. But thanks for spending time with me today. It's been so fun. Yay. You're so welcome, TAY. And we truly, I love and support your mission in the world. And I hope we can really, I hope that this added to it because you're doing really beautiful. Oh, that's so sweet.

Thank you guys. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.