Well with Arielle Lorre - 215: How to Regulate Your Nervous System to Manage Stress, Trauma and Urgency Culture with Dr. Nicole LePera

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Dr. Nicole LePera aka The Holistic Psychologist was trained in clinical psychology at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research. She also studied at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. Frustrated with traditional psychology, she has created a movement that unites mental, physical, and spiritual health and equips people with the tools necessary to heal themselves. Today we discuss how generational trauma, genetics and our early environments wire us neurologically and physiologically to adapt to stress — either in a healthy or a dysregulated way. She explains how we are a product of our habits and how changing habits, reactions and coping mechanisms can change our brains and nervous systems structurally. She also describes how we can overcome habits that aren’t serving us, living in “hustle culture” and her new book, How to Meet Yourself.     Visit athleticgreens.com/blondefiles for a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase.   There's never been a better time to try Match. Download the Match app today.     Use code BLONDE15 for 15% off the full range at JSHealth Vitamins... Carefully formulated to care for you.     Visit Clare at www.clare.com/BLONDE to get started and receive 10% off your order.      Get filtered shower water at www.jolieskinco.com or follow them @jolieskinco on Instagram to learn more!     Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any order. Get yours at DrinkLMNT.com/BLONDEFILES.       Produced by Dear Media.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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all about how to meet yourself. And we all know that when we know ourselves, when we are our authentic selves, and when we are being the best version of ourself, that's when we attract the best person for us. And Match agrees. Match believes. Match believes the most important relationship is with yourself. So in a world where you can choose to do anything or anyone choose you first, because dating someone who knows what they want and won't settle for less, that is sexy as hell and matches latest study of over 5,000 U.S. singles says there's a new triple threat on the dating horizon, therapy, self-care, and emotional maturity. 87% of singles say it's very important for their partner to prioritize their mental health

and 81% report they engage in self-care at least monthly. Two-thirds of singles want to better their mental health, including 71% of Gen Z and 75% of millennials. and two-thirds of singles are open to therapy, including 73% of young singles. So mental health is in, knowing yourself is in, and showing up for yourself is in. And if you do you, you already know the best relationships, show up when you show up for yourself first. There has never been a better time to try match. So download the match app today. Hey, welcome to the Blonde Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being,

to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits, and I'm bringing it to you real and unfiltered. I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I have a great episode for you today. I'm talking to Dr. Nicole La Pera, aka. the holistic psychologist on Instagram. With over 5.8 million followers on Instagram and beyond, I'm sure a lot of you fall into that category and she doesn't need much of an introduction, but I'm going to tell you a little bit about her anyway. She was trained in clinical psychology at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research. She also studied at the Philadelphia

School of Psychoanalysis. And as a clinical psychologist in private practice, Dr. Nicole LaPera often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy. Wanting more for her patients and for herself, she began a journey to develop a united philosophy of mental, physical, and spiritual health that equips people with the tools necessary to heal themselves. Nothing short of a paradigm shift, Dr. Lepera's teachings empower the individual to break free from trauma cycles and create who they want to become. And after recording our episode, that was the one word that kept coming to mind. And I think I said it throughout the episode as well that a lot of what she was saying was really empowering. So we talk about kind of generational trauma and how that is passed down and how our genetics and our environments and our relationships at a young age kind of wire us neurologically and physiologically to adapt to stress either in a healthy way or a destructive way. And the way that she explains it today in that these things are imprinted in us before we are even conscious and a lot of it lives in our subconscious, I think is so empowering because it kind of takes the burden off a little bit and takes away the shame. I think so many of us feel like

we're in fight or flight all the time and we are reactive and we don't know how to you regulate ourselves and we feel a lot of shame about that. But a lot of it is just kind of how we are wired. And so we talk about that. We talk about what happens neurologically and physiologically when we are stressed and when we're under chronic stress. And we talk about how to change our habits and how to structurally change our brains and our bodies. That's the hopeful piece here that you can actually change your brain structurally, which we know because of neuroplasticity. And again, this is something we talk about in the episode. And also we can change our nervous systems. So we get into all of that. We also talk about this urgency culture, hustle culture that we are living in

and its effect on our nervous systems and how to overcome our habits that aren't serving us. So please enjoy Dr. Nicole LaPera. All right, welcome. I'm very excited to have you here. You have been on my top guests that I wanted to have on for years. So I can't wait to be talking to you and talking about your new book. And there are so many things that I want to cover, but you have this new book called How to Meet Yourself, right? So I want to talk a lot about that. But I kind of want to start with the ways that we get away from ourselves.

Let's do it. Well, first, Ariel, thank you so much for having me. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to connect with you and your community. Jumping right in, yeah, there are so many ways I think that we are disconnected from ourselves. some of us sometimes, even outside of our conscious awareness. And I think the number one thing that keeps us disconnected is our habits. All of the habits that most of us began to learn and repeat in our earliest childhood environments that at that time served us, giving the context of those environments. Of course, the humans or the people involved, though the reality as humans that we continue to

live is we repeat the habits. We bring them with us, even if ultimately they don't serve, of our ever-changing environments and our developmental capacities as we change and grow. And a lot of those habits, of course, aren't in service of who we really are yet. We continue, again, to repeat them, remaining disconnected and unsure of why we're not fulfilled and we're not feeling, you know, close to those around us. Are there kind of universal habits? I mean, I know that this varies, obviously, from person to person depending on their family and their history and their environment and all of that.

There's the nature and the nurture. But are there certain things that you've seen that a lot of people learn when they're younger that's kind of ingrained in them neurologically and these similarities that people might share? Yeah, I think the first place to start, which I actually very intentionally began, the workbook that I broke into three different sections, though the first section is beginning with the body and all of the different habitual ways we've learned to care for our body, from the food we eat to the amount of rest. or movement we give ourselves and even one more particular, more important aspect of the body that I'm interested in, which is our nervous system, which is really simply how we deal with stress. And I see that a lot of us, you know, have adapted in our childhood when we didn't feel safe, or we maybe didn't feel supported or have an attuned caregiver to help us learn how to cope with stress in a much more responsive way. I think the number one thing we repeat that into adulthood

is a much more reactive relationship with stress where we can't cope, where we either are exploding outward or disconnecting from the world around us, again, all in service of coping with an early stressful environment, but then gets repeated over time, not allowing us to, again, be responsive to be in that conscious awareness and ultimately to choose what we're doing when we're having any emotion that is. I can really relate to that a lot. I have been sober for almost. nine years. And so I've explored a lot about like, why did I become an alcoholic? It's not anywhere else in my family. Maybe if you go generations back, dating back to people that I don't even know,

but I kind of came to believe that I had an inability to self-regulate. And my parents were around and I had a great upbringing and all of that. But for whatever reason, I feel like maybe chemically I was a little bit different. I'm super, super sensitive. And I didn't know how to regulate that within my own body. And as a result, I sought out things externally. And before I even picked up a drink or a drug, it was other things. It was relationships. It was shopping, all these different things that we kind of reach for to make us feel okay inside. And so when I got sober, obviously, I had to unlearn all of that, which can be really difficult. That stuff is ingrained. I would imagine into your brain, you can probably speak more to that. My audience loves the science of it.

maybe we can go into that a little bit. I appreciate, Ariel, you speaking, you know, from your own personal journey. And I would have to agree, you know, I think that any habitual behaviors, you know, substance use included, you know, gambling, relationship behaviors where we just feel ourselves almost compulsively driven to doing these things. I very much, like you're describing, view them as at one time, they were our best attempts at creating safety or at self-regulating. And, you know, very similar to you. When I look back at my childhood, I have. I had present parents. All of my at least physical needs were consistently met. There was always dinner on the table, so on and so forth. And what I didn't understand was how absent in terms of

the emotional support. So very similar to you. And at a very young age, I discovered drinking and smoking pot and, you know, using that to help me cope with for me was an overwhelming amount of anxiety that lacked the support in the home. But interestingly, I think sometimes when I'm talking about these compulsive behaviors. I also like to describe myself living this journey of those that are validated or even affirmed and celebrated by society because what I saw in myself was this endless compulsive feeling drive to be doing, to be achieving, to be succeeding. And, you know, for me, I now understand that as another way that I was attempting in absence of feeling safe and secure just being who I was in childhood shifting into this compulsive doing mode. And I just like to

offer that one as well because again, I think sometimes we live in worlds and societies and cultures where that's validated, right, where we can be celebrated by always keeping ourselves on the go. And again, in my life, I truly believe that is another version of my best attempt at one time to regulate through very overwhelming experiences emotionally when I didn't have the safety to just be with myself and emotions as they were. I felt like I always had it do as a means of distraction in a sense. We are talking a lot about habits in this episode and I believe that we are basically all of the tiny habits that we embody. So you guys know that I have some wellness habits that are non-negotiables and one of those is athletic greens. So athletic greens is a micro habit that I

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Again, that's athletic greens.com slash blonde files to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. If you missed my interview with Jessica Sepple, the founder of JS Health Vitamins and the JS Health app, definitely run, don't walk, go and listen to that episode. It was on November 14th. We talked so much about so many of the issues that women especially are dealing with right now when it comes to our bodies. And we talk about how to get to their root cause and help to navigate a lot of those. and of course her range of vitamins are a big part of that. So I love JS health vitamins because they are solution focused,

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It has a cult following worldwide. And it works by reducing symptoms of acne and pimples, along with other common concerns while supporting gut health. You have to check out the before and afters from the community. showing skin transformations. They're incredible. I posted mine before on Instagram. It was really kind of wild. They also have hormone and PMS support. They have amazing vegan protein and probiotic powders. And they are always gluten-free and GMO-free made with ingredients you can trust to high Australian standards. So JS-Help vitamins gave me an exclusive discount code for you all so you can try the range yourself. I definitely recommend them. They're really made with women in

mind. Use the code Blonde 15 at checkout for 15% off sitewide at www.jshealthvitamins.com. And the link will also be in the show notes. Again, that's Blonde 15 at jshealthvitamins.com. Are you looking for some good, clean positivity? Good. Me neither. I'm Maddie Murphy and I host the Bad Broadcast, a weekly comedy podcast dedicated to talking about everything we'd love to hate. I searched my whole life to find my passion. Little did I know I had been practicing my true talent every single day. Complaining. Join me every Monday wherever you listen to podcasts and be sure to follow me on Instagram at the bad broadcast to answer our weekly questions and for a chance to be featured on the show. See you there. Yeah. And to your point about distraction, I say this all the time on my podcast and I'm sure everyone

listening knows exactly what I'm going to say right now. But I feel like, now more than ever, we are so distracted. We can wake up in the morning and pick up our phone and we're off to the races and some people are on their phone until they fall asleep at night. And there isn't one point during the day where you are with yourself, maybe with your thoughts. And this has been me, so I'm not calling anybody out if you're listening and this resonates. We've all been there, I'm sure. But I think it's gotten to the point where then it's really overwhelming to even think about being present and facing maybe the thoughts and the emotions and all of that. So do you have any tips for anybody listening who might be feeling like that? It's not only overwhelming to

think about doing that, going back to something you very wisely said in terms of it being wired into us. It's almost like it's overwhelming to do that as well. And what I mean when I say that is these are habits that we are talking about are wired into our neurology, which means that we are reacting, you know, in these very habitual ways, even outside of our awareness. And, you know, as humans, as counterintuitive, I think, is for many of us to live and to hear, we don't actually like to do new things. Because in the uncertainty of what could happen next, it's unpredictable. I've never done this new thing before. I've never, you know, embodied this new choice in myself. It will register to my subconscious mind, which is driven to keep me safe, to allow me to survive,

it will perceive that as a possible threat. So this is, I think, why many of us have lived this experience of having maybe even supportive professionals around us, giving us the tools and the insight and the awareness to go do this new thing the next time we become reactive or explosive around stress. Yet if we're even aware that we're nearing that explosive point, when we begin to do something new, to drop in, to remove ourselves, to calm our body down, our body is going to feel so unfamiliar that we will feel so uncomfortable. And before we know, it will be reliving those older habits. So the way out of all of this, and I really like to simplify change, any change process,

which I imagine is what we want to do. For the context of this conversation, we wanted to maybe change our relationship with stress and or our emotions from a much more reactive one to a much more. a responsive one, as far as I see a change happens with two simplified steps. And the first step is to become conscious. What are the current reactive habits and patterns? What is my relationship to stress now? And once I become conscious of what I am doing in those moments where I am losing control, if you will, emotionally, then over time I can gift myself with a new choice. Because if I don't start to make new choices, and again, this might sound really simplistic, my autopilot, that's

subconscious part of my mind where all my habits live that I was just describing will determine what happens next. In a simple, I won't have the say that I want to have. So change happens when first I take those moments to explore. What is my relationship with stress? Do I feel like I'm responsive? Do I even feel connected to my emotions and how I express them in the world? And, you know, if I don't, then I can begin to make more choices to have a more conscious relationship with my body, first and foremost. I think that's probably kind of reassuring for people to hear. I've heard you talk about this on other podcasts. We're wired on a subconscious level to just continue doing the familiar because the unfamiliar is seen as a threat. So I think so many of us, myself included, are like,

well, I know that this choice would be so much better for me. Or I know that doing this again is not going to get the results that I want. But I can't stop doing it. it. It's so much easier to stay in those uncomfortable places with the familiar than to branch out and do the unfamiliar. And I think that awareness, that knowledge that like, it's not just you. It's actually your brain, right? Yes. It's your brain and it's your body. And this is what I think I can continue to come up against when years ago when I had my clinical practice and I would work with individuals who would come into my office week after week, and we would work on increasing, right, that awareness, giving them the tools. Like you said, setting them up to make this new

choice in that moment. And, you know, ultimately, it not only is difficult to remember to do these new things, but we really have to understand that we're working with our body. And what that means is in that moment, no amount of, you know, insight, awareness, kind of thought-based or mind-based knowledge is going to shift the dysregulation maybe in my nervous system. And or the senses of stress that my body is experiencing. So for me, that really illustrated the importance of including the body. And simply what I mean when I say that is insight is great, right? I can have the tools that I want to use in that moment unless I embody, which might mean

regulating my body, teaching my body how to go from a more stressed, overwhelmed experience to a more calm, responsive one. That might mean doing something with my body or in my somatic world. And a lot of us, we just have the tools in our mind. We think we can willpower them away or just think our way to responding differently. And this is why I came up against, you know, in my practice, that wasn't enough until we in those moments actually do something different with our body, remove our body, help our body to regulate when it's feeling overwhelmed. No amount of insight is going to shift the messages that my body will continue to send to my brain. No amount of telling yourself to calm down from the mind down, if you will, will calm your body down unless you actually make the choice to calm your body down through that more somatic or body-based practice.

There's a saying in recovery that you can't think your way into feeling better. You have to act your way into feeling better and it's all action-based. And that was one of the most valuable things to me, I think, when I did first get sober and I didn't know how to manage stress. I didn't know how to self-regulate all of that. And I didn't have to know how because people, people told me just how to take contrary action. Take the contrary action to what you normally do and to what you feel like doing. Usually the right thing for me and the thing that's going to produce the most change is the opposite of what I feel like doing. And I think that is aligned with what you're saying. But again, it's so hard. It's so much easier said than done. So what are some ways that people can change that somatic experience? If say they're feeling like they're going into fight or flight, or I think you talk about fight or flee, what are some maybe grounding practices or things that they can do to change their body's response? So when we're in, you know, fight or flight

mode, just to kind of describe the physiology of that. Fight or flight happens, you know, oftentimes is our best attempt to deal with a perceived stress at hand, quite literally and simplistically, we're going to fight it to overcome it or we're going to remove ourselves from the threatening experience. So to do both of those things or any either of those two things, our body needs energy. It needs to be mobilized, which looks like and feels like we might feel the blood pumping our heart rate might increase. We might actually feel that physically in our chest. Maybe if listeners even put a hand on their chest right now, they might feel the physical evidence of their heart beating very fast. Our heart pumps blood. So we might feel blood rushing. We might even feel or, you know,

a sense of redness. We might become flushed or sweating as a result of this energy. All of that mobilized energy, right, is going to help us physically overcome or remove ourselves from the circumstances. In terms of our muscles, we might start to feel tension. Our muscles are getting ready to throw the punch, of course, metaphorically, or to run away to flee the scene. So when our energy, and again, I'm simplifying this, is mobilized for action, the best thing that we can do to help ourselves regulate to come back into that safe place so that we're not overwhelmed is to slow our energy down, is to maybe calm our breathing from that quickened place, from a chest-based, quickened breath to maybe a deep, calm, even belly breath.

To calm our energy down might also look like instead of kind of agitating our energy to give ourselves slow movements, to take a slow walk around the block. And of course, I'm simplifying this. But what's important for, I think, listeners is when our energy, is too much overwhelming and we begin to feel that tension in our bodies, learning how to calm it and to release it will help bring our body back into that safe space. I've never heard it put that way. And I know for myself, whenever I feel like I'm going into that fighter flight or that

tense place, I've never heard it explained as being mobilized for energy. I mean, that takes a lot of the burden off of it, I think, and a lot of the narrative that there's something wrong because it just sounds like physiologically there's a reaction that we've been primed for for eternity, right? Yes, absolutely. And I will describe kind of the fallout of that is over time, you know, for me living with that fight or flight energy, you know, started to look and feel like muscle constriction for as long as I can remember my neck, my shoulders, this tension, right, of all of this constricted energy. in my body. And so, yes, I am appreciating, Ariel, that you're acknowledging because one of my

hopes of even going into the brain and the body and the physiology is to do just that, is to help people relieve themselves, possibly of the shame that they're carrying, right? A lot of us even, our bodies become a walking kind of memory of this fight or flight. We're always kind of tense waiting for the next shoe to drop. And again, it's nothing is wrong with you. And I, for a very long time, use language like, well, this is my anxiety. I'm an anxious person, right? I have no way out of feeling this way, not understanding that, yes, I was embodying the experience of having overwhelming anxiety, but it was in response or reaction to my environment, not from the genetic chip that is uncontrollable or unchangeable. And again, to speak to your point that you made when we began this

conversation, we all have genetics. We all have those, you know, physiological aspects of our DNA imprinted on us from, you know, decades, generations before. And we all have environments. So for a lot of us, I do think we carry shame and we really disempower ourselves because if we believe something is inherently who we are, so for me, if I continue to believe that I am anxiety and there is no other way for me to be or experience this world around me, then I'm going to be really limited on how I continue to show up in the world, as opposed to creating space for the possibility that I am anxiety now because it has been a lived reaction or habitual reaction that my nervous system has embodied for me for decades. So it feels like I'm anxiety, yet I can relieve myself of the shame and gift

myself with the possibility of a different future. If I see it as a reaction to an environment, now I can start to make choices and change that internal environment, giving myself more opportunities to feel safe and then therefore more opportunities to have an experience of myself that's outside of anxiety. So empowering when you say it like that. If you're like me, you may be looking around your living space and looking at some beautiful interiors online and thinking it might be time for a change in the new year. And obviously we all want to create a beautiful home that reflects our personal style, but that can be really expensive, especially if your style is kind of changing. I don't know about you, but one day I like something really modern and contemporary, and then another day I like something more traditional.

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share it with a friend. And Element will give you your money back. No questions asked. You mentioned, you know, having this genetic component may be passed down for generations like we touched on in the beginning. But can you touch on a little bit like generational trauma and, how these things can be passed down. You can get into the science if you want to. Absolutely. We love that here. I'm going to do a simplified version, though. I think the reality and a fact of it is scientifically that might surprise some people to hear. Then we actually put a ton of money in the scientific community into the human genome project, which simply its goal was to determine where are these, you know, aspects of our DNA. Can we code down to our genetics, many different things that a lot of humans are strong.

with, whether it's medical diagnoses or, you know, mental health, psychological diagnoses, or anything in between. And the reality of it is we've never found, except outside of a few very minimal, particular instances of diagnoses, there isn't just one gene that codes for all of the different complex experiences and symptoms we experience as humans. So what that means is, yes, we are all genetically coded, passed on from generations before us, though what is also passed on, we now know are epigenetic changes, which really simply are the DNA's instructions. So now when we combine the DNA that we have that, again, doesn't map onto, oh, well, this is the code for this diagnosis, we now have an interaction between the DNA and the environment around us.

And so for a lot of us, this is why. And if I look back in my lineages, I see very similar presentations. I see highly anxious individuals reacting, responding and embodying the same. We could even call them characterological type behaviors. And it can, I think for me for a very long time, was confusing. It could make sense that, oh, because genetically we're similar in these ways. Though what is also similar are the habits and patterns that we're teaching these generations that are creating these environments around us.

And what we do know actually is passed on throughout generations, which has an incredible impact, is our ability to tolerate stress, where they have documented, you know, individuals who were, you know, in lineages that were impacted by the Holocaust or currently systemic racism. And that in and of itself will imprint our body's ability to tolerate stress. And what we now know and why I focus a lot on the nurse,

nervous system is our body's ability and even in nature of the conversation you and I are having today, our body's ability to tolerate stress goes so much beyond these stressful moments that we're talking about. It really controls our nervous system. That is how we navigate the world. So in reality, some of us, you know, are impacted genetically with, you know, dysfunctioning in our stress access. It's called the HBA access for anyone interested in the actual science of it. And you will see, you know, the passing on of these, you know, stressful, stressed-based, overwhelming experiences. But again, not in the way that I think we once thought, not in the way where we find that one exact gene that's going to, you know, contribute or constitute or result in this particular diagnosis is.

It's really a much more of an interactive process. And again, really also is impacted by the choices that the individuals, by their actual abilities to tolerate stress, by how those around us are showing up and showing us how to show up then for ourselves. I was thinking of another analogy, maybe not the best analogy now, but it was in regards to addiction. And I heard that genetics load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. You've probably heard that before as well. But really, it seems like it's just the nature, nurture thing, right?

I mean, it sounds like it could be kind of predestined a little bit for some of this stuff. And then your environment will determine which way that goes. And then to complicate it further, right, then that can be imprinted on us genetically, right, on our physiology. And that is why I think, you know, when we do scan brains of different individuals, we will structurally see. And I would imagine if I had my brain scanned, you would probably see my brain look different in terms of its stress access, in terms of how it functions, you know, based on this. So this is where it can get really confusing in terms of this chicken or the egg concept, right, where we can make a mental normal. map and MRI study, like, yes, the brains are different. That must mean that we were genetically born with this different brain. And maybe we were. But those changes might have been a result of

these stressful environments then impacted and passed on through generations. So we're really an interactive living system in a lot of ways in terms of how experiences that we have had or that generations before us have had can actually begin to shift and change our. our physiology and our neurology. The hopeful part of all of this information is our brain remains neuroplastic, our body remains neuroplastic, which simply means able to change. So just as much as so many of us might be living the neurological, physiological, structural changes that are apparent from all of this lifetime of dysregulation and ability to deal with stress, at any time we can begin the process, because of course it's not a light switch that happens overnight, of actually

changing our neurology of the way our mind and body are firing and functioning so that we actually then begin to see structural changes in the other direction. That was going to be my next question. I was going to ask if we can change neurologically and physiologically, like actually change our nervous system or if we can just learn new habits and then those become habitual, but it sounds like it actually changes the structure of our brains, obviously neuroplasticity. But how does it change your nervous system. What does that look like? The habits, just to go back to something you're saying, and the change, right, become interconnected, because we're not talking about, you know, doing this now one time. And like I said, a light switch, things become different. Though the more consistently we build these

new habits in, right, maybe just going back to that earlier, simple example, if I've dropped in and I'm like, oh my gosh, my body's always in fight or flight, the more consistent I get with giving myself those moments of calming, grounding presence of maybe deep belly breathing, bringing my energy down, if I become consistent in doing that, now I can actually change the way my nervous system is operating. And what we're really looking to do is to expand what's called our window of tolerance, really simply our ability to tolerate stress. And so many of us as of adults have a very tiny ability. We're very limited in our ability to tolerate stress.

We're always waiting for the next shoot, a drop. We can't deal with life around us. And the more we learn and teach our body how to experience a little. more and more stress and return back to safety, the more we're going to then expand that window of tolerance, our body's ability to deal with stress. So what that'll look like then in lived action, those things that used to really get under your skin immediately, you might not like them, but you don't feel as irritable. You don't feel as reactive when those things are happening around you. You can tolerate them more or simply remain responsive to what you do next. You don't fly

off the handleball, become reactive and catch yourself in some shame spiral on the other end. That's what we're looking to do when we're retraining our nervous system, which means, again, coming into consciousness, seeing how our body is doing in terms of stress or simply how stress is our body. One of the exercises in the new workbook is actually a stress ladder, where I suggest readers to really get comfortable and connect it with their body stress signals, to learn as they're amping up to that point of no return of explosive reactivity so that they can consciously drop in and teach their body how to regulate, how to return to safety before we get to that point of no, no return. And then again, the more we do that over time, what I get to experience in my lived

world is I don't feel as irritable. I don't feel as out of control. I can have harder and harder days, more difficult experiences, more overwhelming emotions. and I can remain responsive to them instead of, like I said, flying off the reactive handle and typically relying on those old things I used to do in childhood. Mm-hmm. I was talking to somebody in the wellness world recently who is definitely an authority, and we were talking about how we're so cognizant of the water that we drink, but we are not really concerned about the water that we shower in.

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So obviously in your book and the workbook, it walks people through this. So everybody should go out and get that if this is resonating with them. And for me, I feel like, you know, the work that I did in sobriety really laid the groundwork for a lot of this as well. And I was able to learn a lot of this stuff through that and through a lot of introspection and learning how to be present with myself and a lot of writing and inventories. And I'm very familiar with all of that. But if you're willing to share, you mentioned that you were really and you didn't handle stress well. What are some things that you did, aside from the work that you write about and that's in the workbook, that helped you to change those habits and to support your nervous system? For me, that it was really about and continues to be about rebuilding that foundational connection to my body. Because, you know, we spoke a bit about the fight or flight response, right? I'm dealing with. I'm mobilized in action. The final step on our nervous system journey, which I kind of dropped into probably at a very young age. I can't remember at what time it, at what, you know, period of my life that it was. If we've come, if we're living under such

chronic constant stress that we've determined that fighting and fleeing aren't possible. And in childhood, very few of us can leave our environment, right? We need to be in care of someone. Someone has to take care of us. We're dependent. The final step on the journey is to dissociate or become disconnect it. We enter a nervous system state of shutdown that very much mimics, reptiles, animals, the state of playing dead, right? The last stop on the nervous system journey to keep ourselves safe. If I can't overcome the threat, if I can't run from the threat, I'm going to act like I'm no longer a possible threat to whatever is threatening me, I'm to play dead. And so for me, having consistently overwhelming stress in my home for many different factors

and reasons and not having an attuned parent, because again, my mother in particular, who was in the primary care of me, didn't learn how to regulate stress from her own parents, was completely locked in her own shut down, dissociated, disconnected survival mode. So she wasn't able to show up in support or service of me in these stressful moments. I shut down. And then what that looked like for me is a complete feeling of disconnection from myself, my body. I didn't really feel like body, what body? I felt so far away. I described it as living on my spaceship, where it felt like I was going through the motions of life, though not really feeling the emotions of life. And for a very long time, I wondered, well, what is wrong with me? I had this deep desire to be emotionally connected

to the world around me. Yet time and time again, I felt so far away. So, you know, not close to my relationships that I was very much an active part of. And what I came to understand is I was so disconnected in service of safety. So for me, really rebuilding that foundational connection to my body remains integral. And what that looks like is, you know, and on the daily, I keep those daily commitments of finding time to just be connected to my physical presence. Even going back to something I shared earlier, one of my coping mechanisms was to do, endlessly do. And I wake up just like all of you with a cell phone in my hand, with endless work on it. Right. And it's so easy for me to, to forget that I'm living in this human body that's going to have so much of an impact on how I

navigate the world in that day. Because all of that stress and that constriction and that tension was still stored in my body. So for me, I had to drop in and learn how to regulate my body, how to release it, how to move, how to stretch that tension that I was describing that lived in my posture, how to release the stress from my body so that I could give myself the opportunity to have peaceful moments because if my body is constantly telling my mind it's stressed out as it always and had once did for decades of my time, no amount of logic, no amount of my deep desire just be peace. All I want to do is be peace and love and, you know, connect it to the world around me. I'm a hippie at heart. And the reality of it was I couldn't have a peaceful moment because when

I would try to drop into silence, we talked about that a bit earlier, right? Just be connected to you, carve out moments, rediscover who you are by tuning inward. For some of us, that's the least safe place to be, right? For me, that was not safe. I didn't have anyone help me navigate my overwhelming sensations in my body. So I left on my spaceship to create safety. So rebuilding that connection to the body is so incredibly important, releasing that tension so that my body felt safer so that I could disembark from my spaceship and begin to tune into how I was feeling about my experiences around me. that's why I felt so disconnected from them because I was. So again, for me, it's the choice point every day, going to work, doing mood, ignoring the fact that I'm in a physical body, possibly running

the risk of carrying tension and bringing irritability, explosivity, reactionary, you know, tendencies into my whatever experience might be that day. Or do I give myself the opportunity to drop into my body, to check in and see how it's doing, to meet its needs, to release some attention so that when I enter then my day, I'm in a much more regulated, calm, grounded place. I think that's so powerful to hear you say, like, your body is telling your brain that it's stressed. So it does work both ways. I think we think of it in terms of we're stressed mentally, and then that affects our body. But you're kind of overriding all of that if you're just, like, the example that we're using, getting up, getting on your phone, go, go, go. And I think it's so

hard right now, and I've heard you talk about this before. Like we are in this hustle culture, this urgency culture. We're constantly available. It's so hard to have boundaries. And I'm sure everybody listening to this has a lot of responsibilities and kids and work. And it's so hard to carve out that time. But when you hear that, you know, you can do all of the things mentally and you can try to think yourself into being calm. But if you're still on that hamster wheel, you're probably not going to make any progress, right? I mean, think about it like this, right? You're laying on your couch as I often did.

My body's a ball of tension. My heart rate is escalated, right? My muscles are tense. My breath might be quick. And I'm sitting there trying to have a peaceful moment and telling my mind to calm down. And that's not going to work because the message is my body

is going to be sending to my mind is, why the heck, Nicole, are you sitting? There's an active stress. Get the hell up. And I will either feel that agitation of energy and feel like I need to, what I call is, tick around my apartment, right? Endlessly walking. Maybe I'll clean.

Maybe I'll yell at others who haven't cleaned, right? All of this agitated energy coming from this tension in my body. And if I don't decide to discharge it in action, ticking around, probably annoying the environment around me, it might come out in my thoughts where they're racing, where I'm revisiting, you know, the morning stress or I'm looking forward to tomorrow's stress, all trying to make sense of why my body is so stressed. because my mind is always trying to make meaning of what's happening around me. It's how we're making sense of the world. It's how we're navigating the world. And one of the major pieces of information that it's using to make sense of it is what my body is saying, how my body is reacting or responding to the world around me. So before long, my ball of tension on the couch does look like me endlessly ticking around, seeking the thing that's stressing me out, waiting for that next you to drop or doing so in

these endless racing, ruminating thoughts in my mind. So we can, you know, white knuckle it. And and try to be like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I calm down? And maybe loved ones are wondering, what's wrong with you? Why can't you calm down? And it's not so much as mind over matter. We have to teach our body how to calm down, but also teach our body that it's safe to calm down. Because I could imagine there was a time for many of us where it wasn't safe to just sit still, to be in peace, to be in silence. How much of that can be alleviated through doing the opposite or following that instinct to move, going for a walk, working out. How much do these habits hurt or help?

I think that any time we make a choice consciously, we are in an empowered place. And what I mean when I say that is I still have moments of this agitated energy. I, though, can consciously decide. I don't feel like I need to tick around as my only outlet. I don't feel I need to keep myself. And again, this is sometimes where activity and exercise can be counterproductive. I mean, I've worked with, I know people who are, you know, runners who are running every day no matter what, discharging the energy and we think we're so healthy.

But in reality, that's the only way that this individual might be able to deal with stress. So in absence of being able to run or do this, you know, more active-based discharge, not to say that it's a negative thing to do so, but if there are no other choices, what if the opportunity to run and discharge my energy isn't available, right? We want to be able to have other tools at the ready. And I might still choose to go for that run, but I might not do so at the, you know, disservice of my body on the day that my body is absolutely exhausted or maybe I'm sick and my body needs to not run.

What happens then if I don't have any other way to feel safe? Now I either am pushing myself on the run and overstepping my body's boundaries and maybe making myself sick or I'm at home with nothing to do with overwhelming energy and no outlets. So I still, and flash forward in time now, I still have those moments where I feel that internal agitation. I can't just be peaceful, sit still, though I can choose. So I can choose to clean or I can choose not to in that moment. There was a time where my only ability, right, was to keep myself endlessly, endlessly moving. Is the inspiration for how to meet yourself? Is that from your own experience or is it kind of a collective experience of yourself and people that you've worked with? The seed of inspiration actually was planted when I was writing my first book, how to do the work,

which, you know, my hope and anyone who has read it is, you know, my goal for that was to provide a comprehensive roadmap in terms of why we're stuck and to give people some tools at the end of every chapter of how to translate. The concepts of that tool to begin to become unstuck, to begin to discover right, who they really are. And what I was aware of was the need for, you know, a much more comprehensive deep dive because something that I know, know comes up often for all of us as adults is we don't know our blind spots. We can't see for a lot of us the places and the habits just to use this language that are actually keeping us stuck. We are so subjective to our own experiences that in some for some of us, we don't even know that we are habitual beings that are creating these choices and these circumstances around us. So the seed of inspiration really grew out of what I felt was a need for a really comprehensive roadmap of

how to begin that process of conscious observations. Understanding that we're all unique. We come from unique contextual experiences, family experiences. We are unique individuals at our core. So our journey is going to look a bit different. So giving people the areas to begin to explore, not only where we began to talk about

what habits in my body are impacting how I'm showing up in the world, but what are the habits in my mind? And all of those narratives that I created in childhood that now comprise my ego or my shadow or maybe these concepts that some people have heard, all of these older stories really simply that I'm continuing to believe and that are coloring the world around me. So this will give readers journey through all of these deep explorations so that we can begin to the analogy I like to refer back to is peel back the onion. I imagine everyone picking up the workbook entitled How to Meet Yourself, Self being authentic. Self probably as the goal of

meeting their authentic self, though I very intentionally, the section three is authentic self, because it isn't until first we create safety in our bodies so that we can discover, section two, our emotional world, right? What are those stories? How am I coloring myself and my reactions from my earliest experiences that no longer apply, peeling back all of that old conditioning so that then I can have space to tune into who I really am? Well, and we're going to link that in show notes so that everybody can find it really easily. And I like to ask my guests, one thing we should stop doing and one thing we should start doing. We should stop judging ourselves. Again, I think that there's a reason and my hope is to gift or to give people possible explanations for some of the things that they might feel stuck around or some of their habits and patterns that might not working. I do know that we, a lot of us, have that tendency to be really self-critical. and really self-judgmental, learning how to just see ourselves just objectively and maybe even

understand, you know, that a lot of these are remnants of our past, of possibly circumstances that we're out of our control, yet we can begin to control them now. So we can stop judging and we can start being that conscious participant, right? Giving ourselves that space in our current experiences, our current environment now to do some new things. And that only happens, like I was sharing those two steps when we're first conscious because when we're not going back to something and you beautifully said, we wake up our autopilot's at the ready and we're off to the races, whether it's on the phone or doing whatever we habitually do, no opportunity to make a new choice. So when we become less judgmental and when we become more conscious, we can create the opportunity for new choices.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. I think I've said it a few times throughout the episode, but I think it's so empowering because I think we do judge ourselves for a lot of this and what you're teaching us all is that a lot of this is ingrained in us and we just have to learn how to unlearn it in a way. So thank you again for coming on. You're incredible and where can everybody find you? Thank you so much. Ariel for having me. Thank you all for listening. I definitely like to end on that because I know some of these conversations, you know, and information might be new and going back to new, unfamiliar, might not feel, you know, so safe to engage with. So I celebrate everyone who listens to podcasts like this and who listens to new information. And you can find me at this point

across all the social media platforms at The Holistic Psychologist. You can join me on the Instagram account where it all began, gosh, over three years ago now at the dot holistic dot psychologist. I have a website, the holistic psychologist.com for anyone who wants information on my virtual healing membership, global healing membership, the self-healer circle. And I also have a website, How to Meet Yourself.com for all information on the new workbook. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that episode.

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