Natural Anxiety Relief: Healing Anxiety from the Inside Out with Dr. Nicole Cain

Lisa Marie Bobby:

You can heal anxiety, not just manage the symptoms, but truly heal at the deepest levels. Just do it. Just imagine freeing yourself from the grip of fear and anxiety by nurturing your body, your mind, your soul with compassion and care. Well, on today’s episode of love, happiness, and success, I’m joined by anxiety expert, Dr.

Nicole Kane, who is guiding you through these transformative strategies. to heal anxiety from the inside out. Dr. Nicole Kane is a holistic anxiety expert and author of panic proof, which is coming out on October the 8th. Um, so Dr. Nicole, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your wisdom with our community here on love, happiness and success.

And let’s just jump right into this because I know that you have created a specialty in your clinical practice around anxiety and just have such a wealth of information around how anxiety can impact so many dimensions of life. And that’s what your new book, Panic Proof is all about. Can you give us just a, a Summary of where you’ve gone with your work and what your hopes are for it being helpful to people.

Thank you for that question. And before I jump in and answer, I just have to say how grateful I am to be able to be a part of this community with you today. I love your work. I think that what you’re teaching, what you’re doing, this community that you’ve built is so important and so valuable. And so just right off the bat, I’m really honored to be here.

And so thank you. Well, thank you so much for saying that it personally it is a labor of love like like you I’m a therapist but like I I do love happiness and success podcast because we are here to help people on their journey of growth and like There are a lot of people who? Sometimes can’t or do you notice it’s not the right time to get involved one on one with people like us And so this, this podcast is like here to help, um, them like do the work and grow.

And so I’m just, I’m so glad to be able to be speaking to like true authorities like you who are doing such amazing original research for the benefit of people. And also just want you to know straight up that I cannot take the credit for this podcast. I am co creating this with my listeners and our community because like the things I’m talking about on the show are coming from them.

They’re like, Lisa, we do talk about this on this show and that’s why I know so many of them are like, you know, there’s anxiety in the world and this is a serious pain point for people. So I know everybody is like, okay, Lisa, stop talking because we want to hear what Dr. Nicole has to say about anxiety. So take it away.

I’m resonating so much with what you’re saying. You know, me being here is we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. So I learned from incredible trailblazers who were doing all of this work and it was born out of necessity. I started studying anxiety, kind of trying to prove to myself that you could actually heal anxiety.

Because the idea is, well, anxiety is a natural biological process. How could you possibly heal that without shutting down or dismantling that biological process? But the more that we dig into the messages from the mind, the body, the nervous system, your other organ systems, we’ve. I actually through trauma, trauma informed neuroscience found that anxiety isn’t the problem, but rather an indicator telling you what is out of balance, what needs healing.

And we have the opportunity to figure out how. And so for over a decade, I’ve been doing that work, not only in my personal life, but I’ve worked with thousands of patients, thousands of clients all around the world. I’ve had people in Seoul and London and Indonesia and Canada. people who suffer from the same, we’ll say diagnosis from the, the standard medical institution from the same diagnosis, but everybody’s experience is different.

And so what I have been doing and what you see in the book, panic proof. is that all of those years of research, all of that nuance in the story of anxiety and identifying why standard treatments aren’t working, which we know is the case because statistically anxiety levels are record high. They’re through the roof.

And so what is it we’re doing wrong? And in the book, I provide an explanation for how we can do it better and I give cases and stories showing how it can be better. We’re not only, are we free from anxiety, but we’re actually healthier and living more in our potential, in our relationships, in our families, and in our careers.

Amazing. Oh my goodness. I have so many questions, but I, before we crack into this though, I also want to highlight the fact that, so in addition to your career as, as a psychologist, you have a very strong background, neuroscience, but also like a holistic kind of naturopathic healthcare background. If I am understanding that right.

Yeah, I have a master’s in clinical psychology. Okay. And that’s a counseling specialization. So I did counseling for a while and then I went to medical school and I attained a medical degree and I see I got those mixed up. Yeah. Counseling first. Okay. Well, tell us more about this. Yeah. Well, I thought I was going to go to medical school when I was little.

I had, I always tell this story when I was in my family, my role was almost parentified. I was the one who felt responsible for taking care of my parents and managing their moods. And as a child, I’m looking for very concrete ways to do that. And then I look at. Our family pediatrician and my family pediatrician has like band aids and gauze and medicines and things.

And so I created my first panic pack when I was in third grade. No way. I had this like cute little fanny pack and like little Nicole with her bowl cut, literally bowl on the head, scissors around. Yeah. Awful. Very cute. Running around with this like fanny pack and I was like, do you need a band aid? And I was there like, I’ve got you, but then I started developing all sorts of symptoms.

It started with nasal congestion, just chronic nasal congestion. And I got two inhalers for that nasal inhalers. And then I started getting, uh, asthma. I was running around playing outside, I got asthma. So then I got two more inhalers, a steroid and an albuterol. And so now I’m ten years old and I’m on four inhalers.

And then I started getting other symptoms in other places of my body. And I was starting to feel really kind of anxious about it. And so I was given an antidepressant and my heart was racing. So I was from the, uh, allergy pills that I was also taking. So by the time I got to college, I was on six prescriptions and I was no healthier.

I’m still in those patterns of like I have to fix everybody and fix everything, but this medicine thing kind of stinks. It’s not what I thought. I was really disenfranchised, so I was like, I can, I can just be a therapist. I love studying psychology, psychoneuroimmunology. Ooh, that is so fun. So I went to Chicago and I got my master’s and then, Can I tell you the story about how all of that changed?

I would love to hear the story. So I’m working in Northern Chicago at a, at a, a rehab and I was a rehab counselor for adolescents who had addiction, substances. Tough crowd. Tough crowd. I like teens. I liked how teens would just like often say how it is and they’re spicy. And so I was like, I am here for it.

So we’re in group one evening and evening emphasis. It’s like eight o’clock. We’re all in group. We go around the room and we talk about what it is. They would list their drug of choice, the concerns they’d had that week, whether behavioral or emotional or physical or whatever it is. And this one girl, she’s sitting to my right and she’s drinking some sort of a caffeinated something, Red Bull or a Monster, I’m not sure.

So she’s chugging that back. Her drug of choice is cocaine, very stimulating, and her concern for that week was anxiety and insomnia, and so I’m like looking at her and I’m like, well, yeah, girl, and so the problem, the biggest problem for me in that moment is that My license limited my ability to provide feedback that I thought would be valuable and helpful for her.

So we had to refer her to a psychiatrist, who gave her Ambien. And for your audience members who don’t know what Ambien is, it’s a Zolpidem, which is a sedative hypnotic. And it’s a controlled substance, it knocks you out. Um, and so I was like, oh my god, I can’t be, I can’t, Be complicit, even passively complicit in this system for this young person.

There’s so much more that we can do. So I got on Google and just started combining words. And then the Southwest college of naturopathic medicine came up and I observed that it is a federally accredited medical school. Where I would learn everything I wanted to learn back in the day, but from a holistic perspective where we teach that the body is a self healing mechanism and that our job is to support that.

And we often use natural substances and remedies, but not always, not only. So I started school there, had the worst nervous breakdown of my life several years later. Oh, no. That the, the paradigm was the problem, not the tools that we use within that paradigm. So if someone is anxious, I give them a benzo like Xanax.

It isn’t really much better, theoretically, to just give them a whole bunch of natural sedatives, because We’re not addressing. Well, why are you anxious? Right? Why do you need a sedative in the first place? Is that what I have to ask? And I hope this isn’t too personal, but is that what the nervous breakdown was about?

Like feeling this sort of dichotomy between what, how you were functioning as a helper versus like your, your truth about what people really needed and that that was incongruent. You are so wise. I think that is the big pink elephant that was in the middle of the room. Okay. Is not only, and so it was coming out this like, giant existential pink elephant in the middle of the room.

And I also had so much unresolved Childhood trauma. Yeah. And then that was playing out in my relationship. And so I love that you work and talk about relationships because then we were creating these, um, self fulfilling, environmental and social loops. And it’s just, I got to a tipping point and I wouldn’t wish it was awful.

I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. And yet. This took place in Phoenix and I feel like that’s such a beautiful place for a complete burning of everything that you thought you were burning it to ashes and then coming out of that and in that process my entire perspective about what anxiety is changed and I started to really look at the clinical literature from a different perspective and I saw, I saw and that’s what the whole book of Panic Proof is founded on.

Amazing. So, so then take us into that. So I’m, I’m hearing then that the core of the work is really drilling down into the deepest levels, perhaps of like what, what it is that, what is the engine of anxiety as opposed to them trying to just, you know, fix the symptoms from a top down kind of level. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you’ve discovered through your work around where this is coming from?

Anxiety as an engine that it’s like a self perpetuating engine, a self perpetuating mechanism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our body’s signals. And so when we experience anxiety, the body is going through a series of changes. That are very natural and many of the physiological changes that occur in what we perceive or label of anxiety is the same thing as when we’re excited, when we have an orgasm, when we’re about to, like, Follow our dream and we get the green light to go, your body releases adrenaline and you’re like so excited and it sends out cortisol and dopamine and serotonin and you feel restless and your heart is pounding and you, your fingers are tingling and you can’t hold still and all of those sensations in the context of excitement is desirable.

And it’s telling us on a fundamental root cause place that this state is adaptive for that and will help you. So as an example, if you’re about ready to go on stage and you’re going to speak in front of an audience and your heart starts beating faster and you’re. Thoughts start going faster. This is your body gearing you up.

It’s making you excited. Right. But if you’re looking at that from the perspective of powerlessness and feeling divided from the mind and the body or lack of education or confusion or learned patterns of powerlessness and fear when you’re going on stage and your heart is pounding and misperceive that as, Oh, I’m in danger.

Oh my gosh, why is my body doing this? I talked to Brendan Burchard about this on his podcast about how he’s like, what can I have high powered speakers? They’re going on stage. Their bodies are going into autonomic arousal. What can you suggest to make it stop? And I was like, is the autonomic arousal a problem?

It’s a great paradigm shift of what the symptoms are. Yes. Yeah. You’re energized. You’re activated. You’re like on. You have just turned on. Right. Yes. But, but what you’re saying too, is that what is problematic and where anxiety becomes an issue for people is when they are becoming activated or energized in ways that are, um, Well, and I want to be careful here because I was about to say fear based, but also as, as we both know, fear is also legitimate and really healthy.

I mean, there are situations where we need to be paying attention to fear signals and like, yeah, this is probably not a good idea versus an anxiety, which we think of as, as I think of as being, um, Inappropriate activation, like you are interpreting something as dangerous, that it’s maybe not dangerous, but sort of responding in that way, or, and I know that we need to talk about this too, there’s historical trauma or the way that you’re caring for your body that is leading to these anxious symptoms in a way that’s disruptive in the present.

So I want to Fear gets to go on the shelf and we respect it. So we’ll put fear over there. But, um, there are situations where it’s the people are having the experience in ways that feel disruptive or that are disruptive. Yeah. Yeah. So the difference that you’re pointing out, that nuance, I really, really like that and I appreciate that because you’re pointing out how it’s an evolutionarily adaptive experience to get excited.

Right. Yeah. And then we can have excitation that we then mislabel as danger, and then we can have excitation that is occurring while you’re driving down the highway and everything is fine, or you’re going to dinner with your friends. And so then the question is. Am I, I’m at dinner and I feel like I’m going to throw up and my vision is blurring.

Are you telling me I’m mislabeling? This is excited. No. Our job is to figure out what those symptoms are telling us is going on that we need to address. And so is that because you drank too much alcohol or is it because you saw somebody that reminded your past brain of something, or is it because of there’s.

Maybe economic instability and you feel pressure. Like there’s millions of reasons which are all valid but until we get underneath that maybe you’re perimenopausal and Right, so like hormones are shifting and you’re getting hot flashes which make your body feel anxious. So it’s all about I’m curious and the Sherlock Holmes of why am I having a panic attack?

While I’m sitting at dinner with my best friends. Well, let’s find out and then we get to do the real fun work So that getting curious as opposed to having it be a catastrophe is sort of adopting this Um a little bit of psychological distance around like ha that’s interesting. What is this about and and in a gentle way?

Um, like could you share a story perhaps of, um, you know, where this kind of exploration can lead people? Like, is there a client or maybe not, you know, a specific client? We want to be careful with that, but a, uh, an archetype of a client, you know, journey that you can carry us on to help us understand where this can go.

I have in Panic Proof. Journeys that I’m hoping that your audience will each resonate with at least somebody or multiple of the archetypes. And so they’re based on real life people, but they’ve been sort of put together. And so they’re not real people. So they’re like, Oh my goodness, that’s me. She talking about me, right?

Does she know? No, it’s just a coincidence and you’re not alone. But one of the archetypes that comes to mind is as me. And Esme came into my office because she had anxiety and hormone, hormone issues. And so she, she was really sassy and funny and kind of edgy. And so she came into my office and she was like, Dr.

Nicole, my uterus is a sadistic organ that is out to get me. Can we just like cut it out? And I was like, maybe we won’t start there. And, so she had a lot of emotional distress, she had a lot of hormonal symptoms, and in the book, we go through Esme’s journey of figuring out what the heck is going on. She starts in the beginning of the book feeling like her symptoms are all over the place.

She doesn’t know up from down. We went through the nine types of anxiety. She felt like she had composites of all of them. which is really common, but she did have a lot of symptoms that checked the boxes in the type of anxiety called endocrine anxiety, and so I asked her has Anybody done any hormone testing with you and she said no my insurance will cover that and so I said well Let’s see what we can do so she gets her hormone testing back Which has very clinically significant findings and I won’t spoil it so you can go and your audience can go and read and find out what was going on, but now we have information about a biological predisposition to the hormonal changes that were taking place and amplifying her emotional experience, but there was a second piece to Esme’s story.

And it was really severe trauma from childhood. And so what was really interesting, and I walk you through a case, I actually have a script because I, I take ferocious notes when I’m with people because everything they say, the way they say it is very important. And so I have these beautiful notes from cases and I put them together so you can read a script of how this went down.

And You can relate it to parts work, which is a nod to internal family systems. It’s also a nod to EMDR by, which was founded by Francine Shapiro. And then, you know, I kind of Dr. Nicole canified it. And so you get this script and we see when these symptoms in her gut changed, when this stuff all in her gut, the area of her uterus, all of that, when all of that changed and there was a triggering event, it’s And when she went into that triggering event, we did EMDR.

I’m trained in EMDR. We did the EMDR on that event. And then suddenly we saw this beautiful domino effect of she was able to. Get off of supplements that she had been taking forever. She was able to taper down on medications in conjunction with the dietary and lifestyle choices that she made, kind of leveraging and improving that she was also able to get off of prescriptions.

And not only did her physical symptoms get better, but her anxiety went away. And I think that’s really important because When we look at physical symptoms and physical diagnoses is that we have to remember that those are adaptations to either what did happen to us or did not happen to us. And so if we can go in and identify whatever that original adaptive trigger was, and then we can recalibrate it.

We’ve seen with trauma work, we’ve seen in the trauma literature that people can get better, not only emotionally, but physically. And that’s, that was Esme’s story. Yeah. This is really cool. Okay. I want to unpack this a little bit further. And just, and just so, um, and I want to be sensitive to some of our, our, uh, listeners, just to break down some of what you’re, you’re talking about.

So EMDR is, is a evidence based form of trauma treatment where we’re, um, bilateral stimulation of your brain and parts of your brain. theory is, is like taking a look at different aspects of yourself or personality, like you have separate distinct personalities within a whole. And so there’s a component of, um, exposure therapy in here too.

And I just want. our listeners to understand that we’re talking about substantial trauma processing and recovery work. But, but the takeaway of what I hear you saying is that what you’ve seen in your clinical practice is that when trauma is resolved, it is, um, helping with anxiety symptoms, but also health related symptoms, which makes a lot of sense because like if you, I’m thinking right now of, um, Like the ACE questionnaire, Adverse Childhood Experiences, so big data showing that the higher, uh, or the more trauma you’ve sustained in childhood, there’s a very clear correlation with like health problems later in life.

And I’m just so. I’m so fascinated, Dr. Nicole, to hear more about what you’ve seen practicing or seen in your practice related to the relationship between old trauma, resolving that and impact on not just anxiety, but health and what you make of that as a practitioner. I think one of the biggest things to keep in mind in context with this question is that anything that changes is changeable.

And that our bodies are self healing mechanisms, you can fall and scrape your knee and without any of your effort or thought about it, that scrape, your body will start to heal it. And neuroplasticity teaches us that we can do that too. And so when we’re looking at the relationship between the mind and the body and doing the trauma work on the mind, we want to, and I’m so grateful for thought leaders that we get to stand on the shoulders of like Peter Levine and Bruce Perry and Bessel van der Kolk and Francine Shapiro.

All of these other heroes and that we get to expand on their research. And so what we’re seeing in research, for example, is that when we go through something that could be stressful or overwhelming. Our body will make a series of changes all the way from head to toe to make you better suited to withstand being in that stressor.

And these adaptations occur all outside, oftentimes, of the logical and timekeeping parts of your brain. And so I use the metaphor, it’s like you live in the north, you live in, you know, Colorado in the winter, and you have on a big fluffy coat, it’s an adaptation when it’s cold and snowy, to wear a big fluffy coat.

Just like if you have gone through something overwhelming and stressful, it is, evolutionarily favorable for you to adapt. And so that means your gut may adapt, the composition of your gut microbiome may adapt, the production of hormones may adapt, your immune system function may adapt, your nervous system may recalibrate, all sorts of things change.

You put on that coat, but if your body doesn’t get the all clear signal, And it stays stuck in that adaptation, then we may have symptoms. And so it’s like, Colorado summer comes is quite hot. And it’s like keeping that coat on. And now you’re suffering. Or it’s like Esme. She was in this very abusive environment and her body made all sorts of changes to.

make her better suited for that environment. But then as she grew older and individuated and was no longer there, her body just kept on somatically reenacting where she was and that was producing symptoms for her. And so once we went in with the trauma work, gave the body the all clear signal, then we were able to support those complimentary mechanisms.

To get back in the moment. So she did change her diet. She did change some of her lifestyle. We did use supportive things like psychobiotics to heal the gut and herbs to restore balance. So does that kind of, did I go on like a rabbit hole? No, no, no, this is so perfect. And I love the, um, the metaphor that you that you used, because I think it, you know, I think the impact of trauma can be difficult for people to understand.

And also, I think that, um, I don’t know about your experience as a therapist, but in, in mind, sometimes people are left with this mindset or, or way of thinking about themselves, that they have been damaged. They have been broken. There is something that is, has just been destroyed that will never be recovered.

And what you’re saying with this metaphor is like, you’re just, you’re just wearing a coat that you don’t need to wear anymore that through no fault of your own. And that it made a lot of sense at the time to put on this coat and that there are ways of helping your body and mind kind of like, ah, take off the coat.

You’re all right. And then you can move forward without having to carry the, the burden of having a, this, you know, inappropriate adaptation that was very appropriate at a certain time. So I just love how normalizing it is. And also the hope here in this message, because there’s like, It’s not a shameful thing.

You’re not broken. You just might need a little bit of help and taking that coat off and you’re going to be okay. And thank goodness. That’s not the message that people get, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s not the message that people get. And thank goodness we get signs from a coat being on us. I have a, I have a woman I’m working with right now who has been on like five different The past decade and she’s been a zombie her whole life and she feels like I’m not getting healthier.

I’m getting more dissociated and I want to get healthier, but I don’t really feel anything. I’m numbed out and I’m like, all right, girl, I’m here for it. If you are, and we’ll get a good treatment team, make sure that you’re safe. So we tapered her off of the medications. And now we have symptoms we can work with.

So we were able to notice thank goodness for the symptoms of that code on because that code could cause Other problems, having a coat on and overheating is not good. We all know what overheating can be like. And so in that metaphor, thank goodness that she was brave. She was allowing herself to experience symptoms and then leveraging those symptoms towards treatments that actually worked.

Yeah. And that’s what you were saying. If we circle back to the beginning of this conversation, it’s just, you know, To simply acknowledge it from a place of curiosity and gratitude. Oh, how interesting. My heart is pounding. I can’t feel the left side of my face. How fascinating. It’s like that book, which is kind of stroke of insight.

I think she’s like, Oh, I’m having a stroke right now. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, but, but I love it because I think, um, it’s so easy for us to run away from or close ourselves off to these dark emotions and really, I mean, just to validate this, like very unpleasant experiences. I mean, it’s a natural reaction, right?

Um, but to, to start paying attention to them, taking wisdom from them, what is this trying to tell me? You know, like I, I often use the metaphor, if you, you break your arm, there’s a lot of pain, which is because the bone is broken and you need to like do something about that. We need to protect the arm, et cetera, et cetera.

And that a lot of, uh, psychological symptoms and emotions are essentially, uh, showing you what, that there has been an injury or that there’s a problem that we need to pay attention to in a compassionate way. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Oh, that’s, that’s such a great image. It’s, it’s like, Oh, if I didn’t know my bone was broken and I continued lifting things, playing tennis, then you would make it worse.

So I love that. And it’s like, why wouldn’t we look at our emotional symptoms the same way? And I think it’s because anxiety and fear inherently And so I think that’s why this book and this message and your work, thank goodness for it is so important because when we come from a medical system that says, you don’t know about your body, you will rely on authorities to tell you when you’re hungry, when to eat, what to eat, if you’re sick, what to take, and then that system.

It emphasizes palliative care, which is important to I, I love using smart pharmacology. I think it’s wonderful. But when we come from a system that takes away your power, or at least doesn’t encourage you to reclaim it once you become old enough to individuation, we come from a culture that tells you, you don’t know about your body and You can’t choose what to do about it.

We’ve got you. And then, oh, also, anxiety is a natural part of the human condition. It’s never going to go away. Suddenly we have this perfect fertile soil for people when they feel fear. To feel completely disempowered by it. And the cardinal features of anxiety are, I feel out of control, I don’t have power, and I feel afraid.

I have fear of the fear. So it’s this like perpetuating cycle. So if we can just go in and re educate people about, you can actually heal if your anxiety is telling you something needs healing. If you heal that, it’s like a baby’s crying when they’re hungry. If you the baby, they’ll probably stop crying.

Well, I really, really want to talk about some of your insights and your big takeaways about how people can, can do the work of that healing. But before we segue into that, and I hope this is okay. So my background, I’m, I’m a psychologist, but I’m, I’m actually a marriage and family therapist. I, I did that first and then I.

I’m just a curious person. I want to know everything about everything. So that’s one of the reasons why I kept going with school, did the whole psychology thing, but, but truly in my heart, I am an MFT and we talk a lot about matters of the heart here on love, happiness, and success. And so, you know, a lot of our listeners are here to have better relationships.

Um, with partners, with friends and family, but like also relationships with themselves is a big one. Can you speak a little bit to how, um, you know, anxiety that is not being attended to or listened to can manifest and impact people in relationships specifically? Yeah. I love this question and I, you may see my eyes like looking around, I’m kind of smiling because this is Ben.

Yeah. So my husband is also a therapist. And we met in counseling school, and so I feel like we exist in our marriage from this like very meta perspective. And so he and I have both been trained in EMDR, and we know about parts work. And so before that, when we were together, we’ve been together since 2006, it’s been a minute.

Mm hmm. Is if. If I would get really angry at him and have a moment, it would be like, Why are you mad at me? And there would be this, like, battle of identity and values. And then we started to do a lot of work into Trauma and adversity. And I do want to put a pinhole in the word trauma because a lot of the work in this started with, with veterans and PTSD.

But when I use the word trauma, maybe a better word for it would be just adversity. And so. I, I use big T trauma and little T trauma, like there, there’s a difference. Thank you for highlighting. Yes. I love that language. And so it doesn’t matter if, if it’s, if you’ve just had a big T or little T trauma trauma, we adapt to it.

And so the, the goodness is figuring out the mechanisms we adapted with. And so now I’ve learned about my partner Paul and what he went through. And what we see, and you touched on this earlier, it’s like, it’s like you’re psychic and knew where this was going to go, Lisa, is that when we experience a difficulty or adversity, our nervous system will store that.

And I like using the language of a part. And one extreme of this is all the way extreme is if we are so undifferentiated is that we see dissociative identity disorder where somebody has such extreme separate parts that that part can have blood pressure issues, blood sugar instability. They can write with their other hand and then when they immediately switch into a different identity.

Their blood pressure is normal, and their blood sugar is normal, and now they’re right handed, and we see that the brain is totally capable of that. So we want to look at that on a spectrum, a dissociative spectrum, where the, this I described at one end, and then I’m, somewhere on the other end is everybody else, right?

We all dissociate to some degree, and we all have parts of ourselves. Like, part of me right now, after we have this conversation, I’m going to go, and I’m going to have a delicious taco, or maybe, Part of me kind of wants to have a sandwich. I’m not sure, right? We all have different parts. So Paul, my partner, he went through difficult challenges, especially around certain ages that he’s been working on in therapy, and I’ve been doing the same.

And so now if he starts acting out in kind of in a fussy or grumpy way, I can say, hey Paul, Is it possible that you’re maybe feeling activated right now or a little hijacked right now and he’s like, yeah, you know, this reminds me of how I felt when I was 12 and someone said this to me. And then suddenly, I’m able to have compassion for that experience and a strategy to help support him as he works through that experience.

As opposed to, you’re just yelling at me or acting out like, why, why am I married to a man, baby? Or whatever. It may be that his 12 year old. is hijacking him. He’s in that state and doesn’t even realize it. And so suddenly by having these tools in our relationships, we can get to know all the different parts of our partners and support them as they’re working through that process of healing those parts and becoming an integrated person.

Yeah. Oh my God. Well, you are both so lucky to have each other in this journey. But, but so what, what I’m hearing you say is that when we, um, have this unresolved trauma or anxieties that are sort of alive in us, it’s very easy to become activated in relationships and not really being even fully aware sometimes what’s triggering that, but you’re, you’re escalated.

And that may be in those moments. Yeah. You’re coming across in ways to your partner that they may be like, Whoa, back up, buddy. And that without that sort of insight or compassionate mindset that you’re clearly bringing into your relationship, it can be very easy to become defensive or how dare you speak to me this way, or, you know, whatever the things and, and that can really turn into conflict and relationship problems as opposed to, um, taking the approach that you guys are doing, which is having a more compassionate and I think also insightful.

And so we wanted to make sure that we’re giving people understanding of what’s really going on, that this is attached to so that you’re not taking it personally. You’re not getting all like self righteous, um, but, but acknowledging the fact that your partner is having a legitimate moment for good reasons.

Um, and, and, uh, respecting that, but also inviting them to like, also acknowledge. That, um, their, their stuff is kind of spilling over into the relationship space in a way that doesn’t feel good for you either. So, but it’s like working on it together as opposed to it being a conflict or something destructive to the relationship, I guess I should say is, am I understanding it right?

You are so good. It’s like, you’re clearly a therapist. You’re so good at that. ILS. Bite less and summarized. And as you were saying that, I was also thinking about, you know, a big thing that I see with people is anxiety surrounding sexuality. Oh, let’s talk about that. And so anxiety in the bedroom, I know that’s something that, that you had expressed a little bit of interest about.

And so if. This can feel so puzzling and concerning and upsetting and create a lot of stress and relationships where one or both, and it could be male or female can experience this, can be, can feel, I love you so much, but I am terrified of X, Y, and Z. Or, I, I feel so close to you, but I just feel like I can’t connect to you in that way.

Like, there are, there’s areas where we feel like we’re not aligning. And then we’re not experiencing that joyful sexual partnership. And we feel like maybe it’s just that they’re not the right person for me. Or, I’m not the right person for them, or there’s been too much baggage, like you said earlier, maybe I’m just too broken to thrive in a sexual relationship, or to get to enjoy A sexual relationship, and I think that a trauma informed and systematic systemic approach could be really healing for this.

And I don’t feel like this is talked about much, where number one is if you look at whatever feelings or sensations are coming up pertaining to that. Whether it’s before intercourse or sexual activity, during or even after, is if you look at those negative, unpleasant, scary, angry, whatever those feelings, thoughts, and sensations are, is that you can do the work on figuring out where did that come from.

And I teach a three minute hack. I know that there’s so much more to this and there’s wonderful therapists whose entire careers and expertise are in sex therapy, but I do want to teach you if you’re open to it, I call it the three minute hack for when things come up. May I? No, I love it. Yes. Okay. So something is coming up, whatever it is for you.

So this isn’t in pertaining to your relationships or like, I want to be intimate tonight, but I’m feeling really yucky for whatever reason. Right. And so that Symptom is like, Oh, we have a code on where’s this code coming from. Thank you, body. Thank you. Symptoms for telling me. And so set aside some time when it’s convenient for you, when it’s a good time for you and you’re going to spend three minutes.

So the first 60 seconds, set an alarm on your phone. The first 60 seconds, what I want you to do is just to acknowledge and dive in headfirst. into those feelings. I want you to notice the feelings where is in your body, really allow it to just kind of swirl around and grow and be in your body, whatever it needs to be, be mindfully in that space.

Notice the thoughts that come up and notice the emotions that come up. Your alarm will go off and then you’re going to reset it for your second 60 seconds. And then what you’re going to do this time is holding on to that information that you got is I want you to follow it down the timeline to the earliest time you can remember feeling this way, because it’s very likely that whatever you’re feeling now is coming up either because of some process that’s occurring right now that maybe we’re not aware of yet, or it’s because of something that did or did not happen.

To you are in that relationship that’s left you unsettled. So we want to follow the timeline all the way back. And so then during that 2nd, 60 seconds, you’re just going to notice it. You’re going to allow it to share. You’re going to allow whatever thoughts or images then your alarm will go off. And then here’s the 3rd step of the 3 minute hack.

You’re going to set your alarm for the last 60 seconds. And I’ve borrowed some of these from parts work, right? So what you’re going to do is if you feel comfy is I like to cross the midline of the body and to just gently butterfly tap. You can do this the whole time, but I would encourage you for sure this last step.

And pausing. So for our listeners who are listening to the audio version of podcast right now. Dr. Nicole has her arms crossed over her chest and is sort of gently tapping each shoulder one at a time. Yes. So continue please. Gently tapping each shoulder one at a time and you can do it at whatever speed feels kind of relaxing.

It doesn’t have to be too fast. We’re just keeping this with you. I love it. I’m like, let’s do this right now. We’re doing it. So you’re just going to notice. Okay. Thank you, body. Thank you, mind. Thank you, thoughts, for telling me your needs. For telling me your experience, for giving me the opportunity to know how to heal.

And I want you to know that I hear you, I honor you, I acknowledge you and I’m listening. And I want you to know you’re not alone and I’m working on this. And I also want you to know that it is. And then you’ll insert the year as we record. This is 2024. So I’ll use that. So I say, we’re going to timestamp it.

I also want you to know that it’s 2024 and that we’re not back in the past anymore. And you don’t ever have to go back there. And that now I have resources and supports that you didn’t have. And I want to ask you to set down The heavy burden of feeling like you need to take care of us and be responsible for us.

And just allow me to take care of you. And so then often I follow that. So you acknowledge, you thank, you timestamp it with the present, you invite that part to set down its heavy burden. And I even like to visualize taking off a coat or setting down a heavy backpack and then just taking a breath and asking that part to notice what it feels like to no longer have to carry that heavy burden.

And then you make a promise that. That you’re listening, and then maybe give that part a slightly different way of communicating with you. Instead of that fear, because now we’re empowered, now we’re together, right? So as you finish up that 60 seconds, you just simply say, Well, how can we communicate together going forward?

Maybe I have a thought, or maybe my bottom foot feels a little warm, whatever it is. And then when you’re done, I always like to end with a nervous system, recalibration, so you can rest your hands. And then what we’re gonna do is we’re going to end your three minute hack with a salience network. Reset.

Your Salience network are a, I’m ready. A group in the brain that tells you whether or not you’re in danger. And so to do the Saline Network hack, you’re just gonna simply look to the left, rotate your head to the left. So now your eyes and your neck have been rotated, you’re going to breathe in, and then as you breathe out, you’re going to rotate forward, and then all the way to your right, your eyes and your neck are rotating to the right, and you’re going to breathe in, and then you’re going to come, and you’re going to face forward, and you’re going to just allow your eyes to drift to something far away from you, maybe across the room, and And then you can focus back on that, which is before you, and you can just allow yourself to return to normal breathing.

And so that is the three minute hack. We went into the past, we dealt with the feeling and the emotion as it came up in a manageable amount of time, and we recalibrated the nervous system so you can go forward. Oh, my gosh, I feel so much better now, but seriously, like that was, I’m just, I’m so sure. I think this is the first time in the history of the love, happiness and success podcast that we’ve actually had an experiential intervention in real time.

And that was beautiful, by the way, I mean, especially when you were at the end, I mean, And there’s like serious stuff in here that we also are going to talk about, but like, it’s really that inner, inner child work. I mean, you’re mobilizing like an inner parent to comfort and help this, this inner child who’s been, you know, battling to protect everyone, but who really needs a lot of comfort.

I just imagined, just So many people listening to this are like weeping, like hugging and tapping and like doing the work, which was so profound, but really, I mean, this is also a, a way of helping yourself with like a, a mini exposure therapy moment. And we’re doing that tapping, which goes into the, the neuroscience behind EMDR.

Like there, there is a lot of real deal stuff in this very simple intervention. And this is. Beautiful. It’s just beautiful. And I’m just so grateful for you to share it with me. And for us today, I mean, it’s powerful stuff, Dr. Nicole. Thank you. It works so well in the salience network. I really, I don’t know.

Tell me more about that. That is a term that I am not personally familiar with. I would love to hear more. Yeah. I don’t know why people aren’t talking about it. I want to know. What is this? So, okay, so the salience network in the brain is a group of brain structures whose job it is to filter the billions and billions and billions of data that is coming from your environment and from the body.

And it’s all pouring into it. And the salience network’s job is to say, relevant, irrelevant, relevant, irrelevant. Everything that’s relevant gets sent down to your big feeling amygdala, and then the amygdala is like, okay, do we want to send forth an autonomic arousal cascade or are we okay and we can just like chill?

And yeah, is this something I have to react to or like, like that? Yes. And so the body via interoception, which is how we feel. feel the insides, the positions, hunger, gurgles, how we feel our body. And so that’s sending up a lot of signals. And so if we stop to imagine a deer and headlights, so you’re, you’re outside, you see a deer, it sees you.

The first thing it does is it freezes, right? And when it freezes that freeze, that autonomic arousal, freeze sends a signal to the brain. And tells the brain, uh, oh, we’re in danger. So the salience network will pass along that freeze body position to your amygdala, which will set a cascade of danger signals, and then you feel fear.

And so, if we are sitting at our desk, Talking on a zoom call for more than 20 minutes or we’re on our phone for more than 20 minutes or we’re writing and reading and studying and doing spreadsheets for 20 minutes or more is that our bodies we may inadvertently put them in that deer and headlights freeze position.

Our necks aren’t rotating on our shoulders. Oh, that’s so interesting. Interesting. So you’re just I’m doing that to myself like all day long every day and I didn’t even know. I know, right? Thank you for telling me. Right? Sometimes I’m reading and I like look up and I can’t focus my eyes very well afar and I’m like, Oh, that means that I’m probably also stressing out my salience network system.

Yes. So the hack and so this, yeah, that hack we just did can interrupt that circuitry going to the brain to tell you that you’re in danger because it may be just a pure artifact of our modern lifestyles. Is that when Susie was in the forest gathering berries, you know, she’s like grabbing a berry and looking far and grabbing this berry and then a tiger’s over here and she’s like, and then she runs or maybe she’s going to hunt that squirrel.

So she’s got to rotate and jump. Right. So us staring forward for long periods of time is a little bit more of a modern phenomenon that requires body based modern interventions, as opposed to you’re sitting at work and you’re like, why do I feel so stressed? And then turning to the most well intended, but maybe not trauma informed, informed neuroscience trained doctor who’s like, well, just take a Xanax or take Zoloft or take theanine, whatever.

But instead, it may just be a matter of, whoop, I haven’t rotated my head and my eyes a little bit. But I love this, like the, you know, the, you’re, you’re really like, uh, just as an artifact of our modern culture, putting our body physically into postures that are communicating like a hypervigilant stance, right?

That is not really natural for us. And it’s like, stimulating all of these automatic process. Oh my gosh. So much good stuff. You know, I have like 97 more questions for you and some of the other things that I had wanted to crack into you with today are things like, you know, what are some of the easiest things that people can do to, you know, just help, help themselves calm down, manage anxiety on some of these deep physical levels, but I think.

People are just going to have to get your book to learn more about these because I know that we’re, we’re out of time today. So, so maybe you could tell, tell us a little bit more about where to obtain said book and learn more about you and your work and follow you and hopefully get more of these amazing Dr.

Nicole experiences. Oh, you’re so kind. And we must talk again because I feel like I want to learn from you. It’s This is so great. And so as a thank you to your audience and just for just to love on people and get the word out right now, um, probably for like the next three months is anyone that orders my book, pre orders the book, I’m going to give them a month free in my, my wellness collective.

No way. Yeah. Okay. No, wait, wait, wait. So you and I were visiting right now in August. And I believe the book comes out in October, would you like, would you like this to be shared prior then to October for pre ordering? That would be amazing. Yeah. Okay. I’ll ask Ashton. She’s at Forte. She’s my like guru. When would be an optimal time, but anybody that buys the book and then they could forward the book to my team and just say, Hey, I listened to.

Lisa is her podcast and the love, happiness, and success podcast. And I would love a free month for buying the book. And I would, we would totally honor that at any time that your audience does that. But right now for everybody, I’m doing that, uh, for pre orders. Okay. Yeah. And pre order is available now. Yes.

You can get it anywhere. We’ll get this out the door sooner than later. Yes. Oh, that’d be great. Anywhere books are sold. I have panicproof. com so you can learn about it. I’m on Instagram at Dr. Nicole Cain. Yeah. The book will be everywhere books are sold. It’s so exciting. And honestly, pre orders are everything.

The publishers make a lot of big decisions based on pre orders, so I’d be so grateful. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, okay, you guys. So then we need to be good to Dr. Nicole, because I really appreciate, Nicole, how generous you were in sharing your wisdom, but also really, I mean, walking us through that process.

experience was really cool, and I think will help a lot of people. And so people listening, we got to work together to support Dr. Nicole. And, and then also I have a request, just there was so much generosity here. So you certainly don’t need to do anything for me, but forward this podcast, share this podcast to somebody in your life that you know is struggling with anxiety, who is potentially.

over medicated or jacking themselves up with Red Bull and coffee and then like screaming at people. I mean, like, you know, or somebody that, you know, has lived through hard things and has not really found, um, the right path forward of, of healing yet. I, I think that this episode will offer them a lot of hope and direction.

And so on behalf of them, Nicole and I say, thank you for, for paying this forward for what you learned today.