Caring for Your Nervous System (with psychologist Nicole LePera)

28:28So is there something that you like say to that little part of yourself? Well, I appreciate you bringing up parenting, Gwyneth, because parenting, I believe, is not only the greatest role and job, if you will, that any of us that can choose. It is also the most difficult for the exact reason that you're describing, because we have these parts. We have these experiences quite for a lot of us that are filled with a lot of pain and suffering and unmet need. And now we are in care of a fully dependent human. right and that can be very challenging the even the fact that someone now needs us and there isn't any time off or away really for all intents and purposes can trigger or activate the parent who maybe had no one ever show up right so now it's like kind of we're at odds because there's the well-intentioned desire oftentimes to even break the cycle right to be there in full service of a dependent child, yet there's a part inside that's screaming and yelling saying, you didn't have anyone to show up for you, right?

29:37You need this care. You can't be caring for someone else right now. And I'm emphasizing the lived experience that these parts are grounded in, the pain, the suffering. Because when we then think about speaking to, right, or affirming or having a mantra, right? We want to now tell our inner child something different, probably when we begin this practice, so whatever it is. And so for me, there's a lot of kind of mantra work that I do, just reminding myself that I'm safe and secure and present. Because one of the ways that I've coped for so long was to distract myself with an achievement or just to check out entirely.

30:20I used to call it living in my spaceship, where I was in this state of dissociation or disconnection. You couldn't tell because I was still going about the motions of life, but I was doing so from a million miles away. So for me, reminding myself that I'm safe to be present when I began this journey was a great idea in theory, right? But I had this part inside of me that many listeners will probably maybe even have met this part that's like, yeah, no, that's not actually, you're not actually safe because what's living in my body and the reason why I was so disconnected for decades was all of the overwhelming emotions that no one actually helped me process or deal with.

31:01So to simplify it, while I do think that affirmations, that mantras, that talking to ourself is the beginning of what can be created into a belief in the beginning of repeating a mantra, you will probably have the experience as many of the members in my membership do, where we put out a new affirmation every month. They will say, I don't believe it. I'm almost cringing inside. I can't even say it to myself. And what would be an example of one of those? So for this month, we have a mantra that's around, we are talking about complex trauma, which is actually kind of what you and I are talking about right now.

31:37Unmet needs in our relational or our relationships that translate to, you know, lack of a sense of self insecurity. So we have a mantra kind of aimed at, I am safe to show up in my relationships. and a lot of the members who will begin to experiment with that will print it out. We'll try to repeat it. We'll feel even maybe semantically in their bodies. Maybe as I'm even saying it right now, some listeners might feel clenching in their stomach, might feel sick, might roll their eyes, right? And that's that part. That's not saying that that's not true for you. What it is saying to you in that moment is that hasn't been true for you.

32:16Though with the continued practice, of course, not only just repeating the mantra, This goes hand in hand with almost full circle, the somatic work that we're talking about and the reparenting journey. So it's not enough for me to just say, just to continue to use me as an example. It's not enough for me to just walk around all day saying I'm safe. I have to not only tell myself I'm safe and act in the benefit of my own safety, which for me begins in the morning when I take moments to not go into my endless to-do list of achievements that I want to take care of that day, but to take some moments to pause, to connect with my physical body, to move it if I'm feeling an agitation of my energy, to slow it down and stretch if I need to release some energy, right?

33:03So that then belief of safety can't just happen if I'm only telling myself that I'm safe, but I'm not making choices to help my body to feel safe. And this is the conversation that then will apply with whatever we're trying to write, tell our inner child, chances are in the beginning, what you'll feel is the resistance because you don't actually believe that because the choices we've been making or had it once been made for us or the habits that we're repeating are actually for a lot of us giving us the quite opposite feeling. Though when we build both of those practices in and what we're really talking about, right, the affirmation can be a top down, right the powerful mind rewriting a new future and then the bottom up piece are those daily choices to actually learn for some of us learn how to feel safe in our body and when we couple both of those and this is again what holistic work in my opinion means and why it's not only so foundational why it can be so life-changing when we do both of those things we now know verified by science that our mind and body has an incredible ability to change and we can change at any age, right?

34:19Not only by thinking differently as my field once thought was the be all end all, but by making new choices to embody new feelings, then we can become neuroplastic and we can quite literally lay down new neural networks and actually create and live those new outcomes. So when you talk about making choices for your body that are to tell it you're safe? Like what, what are some examples of, of, of that? And again, back to those two steps, the first step being awareness, the first step, and we can even just do a quick check-in together right here, right now might be an awareness of how much stress or how much lack of safety I'm feeling right here, right now.

35:00And we have systems in our body and certain ones that we can become aware of in a given moment, such as our heart rate, such as our musculature, tension, and our breathing. And those three systems shift and change as our body becomes more and more stressed. And I'm equating stress with a lack of safety because things that are uncertain, unknown, stressful, unfamiliar, possibly. And the reason they activate our nervous system is because it activates the possibility of threat. Even if it's not actually present, my body is going to be armed with changes to my breathing, changes to my heart rate, changes to the tension in my muscles to get my body quite literally ready for action to deal with the stress.

35:48If it becomes from a possibility, right to a probability. So within that awareness, and if you even just take a quick scan right now, notice, right? Is there tension? Are you holding tension in your muscles? Do you feel so tight, so clenched maybe in your jaw? Or do you feel so weak? Like you couldn't even get off up off the couch if you wanted to, right? Both of those are signs that our body is in a stress state. An alternate would obviously be, yeah, I feel like my muscles are ready for action. They feel pretty much at ease now. But if I wanted to get up and do something, I feel like I have the energy to do that.

36:29That would be in a calm, grounded state. Now, our breath, is it coming calm and deeply from the belly? Probably not. A lot of us are in a stressed body and we show that because we're holding our breath. Or maybe we're breathing very shallowly. Or maybe we're almost breathing out of our chest, right? We're heaving. We can't catch our breath. All of those are markers that my body is stressed, possibly feeling unsafe. Similarly, right, when our breath begins to shift, our heart rate begins to shift too. Is our heart rate beating out of our chest? Is it elevated? All of these are markers. So we have to know where we're starting and if our body is stressed, because the chances are a lot of us are going to notice that our body is stressed.

37:15So if in that moment, right, we just try to tell ourselves that we're safe without beginning to release to relax some of that tension in our muscles, without beginning to slow and deepen or maybe take a breath if we've been holding it. without then allowing our heart rate to naturally come down into its normal rhythm, then we're never going to actually feel the safety that making those choices would allow. And what about the somatic piece? The somatic piece is, like I said, is so very foundational, right? Somatic simply means body, right? All of these sensations that if you would have asked me about emotions, when I was on my spaceship, right?

37:58I felt, it was a very interesting experience because I felt numb a lot of the time. And then there would be moments where I felt so overwhelmed by emotion, you know, anger, anxiety, sadness. But the large majority of the time, I felt a million miles away. And when I was overwhelmed, it's almost as if I became the emotion And I became then the reaction. So you would have never heard me, even as a licensed clinical psychologist, being able to speak to the reality that emotions are mapped onto physiological sensations that can be felt if we're connected enough to our body. Not only can they be felt, there's important information in their activation, meaning emotions tell us things about how we're experiencing our environment.

38:54They actually tell us very important things. Stress that we were talking about and fear or anxiety that we feel in response to the unknown or something stressful alerts us that there might be something threatening in this unknown, that we might want to be on alert, that something safe might be around that next corner. Anger, a very, for a lot of us, difficult to tolerate emotion is actually very adaptive as an emotion. Because when we're feeling angry, we're usually feeling angry in response to us being actively violated and or our needs not being met, right? So all of the emotion, sadness as well, it indicates when something that was important to us is lost or we are fearing that it could be lost.

39:44So all of these sensations, and of course, anger maps onto different sensations in the body that sadness does, that fear does. But the important takeaway message here is that they live in the somatic experience of the body. So not only do we need to be connected to the body to then be able to do somatic healing or work, right, means being in the body and learning how to release, process, right? Be with these emotions, take the important message and stay calm and grounded so that we can responsibly navigate our environment around us and not become the reaction. So for me, somatics or any sort of body-based work is so foundational and needs to be so foundational in the field of clinical psychology because it is the field of emotions.

40:35And for the large majority of the beginning of my training and of my lived experience, I would have never known that emotions have such a physical representation and experience and are so important. And knowing that is one thing, of course, doing differently and learning how to navigate and be in a body that's having overwhelming emotions, especially if we didn't have the attunement or the sport that we need in childhood is the whole, I think, other half of the reparenting journey that many of us are living in as we try to create what I would call emotional maturity or the ability to be calm and grounded in the face of any emotion that we or others could be experiencing so that we can show up in a calm, grounded state and to express them in collaboration with those around us.

41:21And again, I don't think that few of us of adults, and this isn't me being derogatory in any way, even though I'm using the word maturity, I think a lot of us, myself included, are operating either consistently or in moments of emotional immaturity where we don't have any room or space for anyone else's emotions except ours. We don't tolerate difference in experience. We can't come together to navigate or to negotiate for an outcome that works for the best of everyone involved. and we become sucked into kind of a self-focused, survival-driven, and again, I'm using that language intentionally because it's quite literally driven by the survival of the body where our focus narrows, where we can only worry about ourself and where the by-product of a lot of it and it is seen in our relationships as I write about in the last book, in us being hurtful to others, in us disconnecting from the others around us that we actually want to be connected to.

42:19Not because we're mean, ill-intentioned people, but because in those moments, we are not actually feeling safe enough to be emotionally present, let alone connected or attuned to anyone else.

42:39So what is the process? What do we do to not get overwhelmed? Or I'll say more specifically, you know, you talked about anger. I think especially for women, you know, anger is a really hard emotion. We're not supposed to get angry. We're sort of reviled if we get angry. And anger is a very natural thing, right? You said very eloquently that, you know, sometimes it's a response to somebody violating your boundaries. Like when I feel angry in my life, it's because of that. So I'm angry at them for violating my boundaries and I'm angry at myself for letting them violate them in the first place. And then sometimes there's no letting involved.

43:16Sometimes, you know, people violate. So let's use me for an example. So when I get overcome with anger, right? And I know, and I become anger, which I think is a really good distinction that you just made, because there's a difference between being in your body and wow, I feel anger right now, or being completely subsumed by the emotion and being the emotion. So how do we begin to unwind that? And so the next time I find myself overtaken by anger, which also is an emotion that I don't want to express or show anybody that I'm having, how do I start to unwind it? This is, I think, where I give, I think, probably what for many is a very frustrating answer because it's not going to be what you're going to do in the moment you need it.

44:04the answer I'm going to give is going to be based more on a consistent practice that exists outside the moments where we really need it so that in the moments where we really need it, we can actually make new choices because that autopilot is there. Not only is it just carrying us through our day to day, it is especially strong when we're upset, when we're stressed out, when we're dysregulated. Those are the moments, meaning when we don't have the resources to make a new choice, those are the moments where we're going to be likely to rely on the old habits that don't serve us. So what that means, and if we want to get scientific, when we're talking about the body, what I'm most focused on in the body is the health of our nervous system.

44:51Because our nervous system is pretty much our main computer. I mean, it runs everything from how we respond to stressful moments, like we were just talking about, to how clearly we're able to think, to what you mentioned earlier, Gwyneth, whether we're able to be creative, spontaneous, right? I would make a case that these aren't just childlike, right? Imagination, creativity, spontaneity, wonder, use that word, all. They don't go away. They're, in my opinion, they're aspects and states of our entire human experience. The reason why very few of us adults, as I once, I would have never used words like purpose, like passion.

45:30I would have never called myself a creator. I now embody those words. Why I couldn't for decades was not because I inherently wasn't those things. I believe all humans are. It was because my nervous system was so dysregulated from all of the overwhelming emotions that I didn't have support around, that I was in that survival mode, I'll call it to simplify it. And I wasn't able to be grounded, to be present, to be attentive to what could be wondrous and awe-filled in any given moment, let alone to imagine a future that's different and to create something. So the nervous system is really, I've come to learn at the base of our ability to do all of those things.

46:17So to answer your question, how do I engage with my emotions differently in the moment where I really need it, what we need to first do is pay attention to how consistently we're caring for our nervous system. So if you're wondering, well, what does care for a nervous system look like? It looks like care for a physical body, which if we really want to simplify it, in my opinion, our simplified physical needs that are quite universal, doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, what you look like, we all need nutrients to make our cells function. We all need water. We all need oxygen. We all need moments of movement and moments to rest and sleep to replenish our resources at night.

47:00So that commitment in the morning that I was describing that begins with connection to my body has, right, those you heard me say, I will move. I will stretch. I will rest. Nutrition for me is throughout the day, paying attention to what I'm putting into my body, paying attention to how sleep is at night. Can I fall asleep? Do I stay asleep? Do I wake up feeling rested? So those are the consistent habits. If you're listening and if they aren't your daily habits, those would go a long way because those will help us then manage the overall stress in our body so that then as we go about life, hopefully living consciously, right?

47:41Meaning connected, present, aware of what's going on in my body. As we did that check-in together earlier, as we notice moments of stress, of upset, of that anger, right, coming over us, before we get to that point of no return, as I like to call it, right, now in that present state, oh, I'm becoming angry, right? I'm not yet fully angry and reacting in anger. I can notice as I'm becoming angry, now I can begin to make new choices to deal with that anger more adaptively. And again, I'm intentionally speaking to this because that point of no return is real. The less resources I have, meaning if I'm not eating well, if I'm not sleeping well, right, if my stress throughout the day is higher than my body's ability to deal with it, chances are no amount of podcasts, no amount of affirmations is going to help you in that moment that you need it.

48:34Because when survival mode happens, the language I used earlier, our focus narrows. We quite literally, even if we remember, which most of us want to remember that new thing we want to do, we're not going to be able to do it in that moment, which leaves a lot of us on the other side of explosions or implosions feeling really shameful, which is again, why I give the annoying answer that it's not just, right, the tool I can throw in my back pocket. I'm going to be honest. It's not just five deep belly breaths in a moment when I need it, if I've done nothing else, that won't work. And that's, I think why a lot of us have tried affirmations.

49:11I've tried to breathe deeply or count to 10, we're already past that point of no return. Our body is already under-resourced, under-supported, and we've actually lost the cognitive ability. We've lost our executive functioning. We can't do it, which is why the consistent practice of caring for the nervous system that lives in our physical body, of being really attuned and attentive, learning even, What are our cues of stress? What things activate us? And beginning to notice our body as it escalates, right, up those stress levels, up the anger levels, so that then in those moments we give ourselves an actual opportunity to be with that anger in a new way.

49:55And for some of us, it just means being with our anger because the reality of emotions and the reason why I'm describing them is mapping onto our body's experience. Our body wants to go back to baseline or to homeostasis. It wants to, and I'm simplifying all this, of course, it wants to metabolize all of those hormones, right? That are associated with anger and the adrenaline. It wants to go back to feeling peaceful and calm. And in my first book, How to Do the Work, I talk about a 90-second rule of emotions. Because if we just learn how to be present, oh my God, I'm feeling angry, right? My heart rate's elevated.

50:30I'm feeling heated. Whatever's happening, if we can just allow it to happen without intervening, without squashing it down, without starting to narrate it or replay what caused it, which is only going to keep that emotion alive, the reality is it will naturally, our body will bring us back to that baseline. So I get asked a lot, right? What do I do with emotion? Sometimes we just have to learn how to tolerate the emotion that's happening. We don't actually have to do anything, but learning how to be present is a doing in and of itself. It's a really good point. First of all, I don't think it's an annoying answer at all.

51:10I think it's an excellent point. And you sort of raised in my brain, like what, if my nervous system was a body that I was caring for, like, what would it need? And what would that look like? And, you know, even sometimes some mornings I'm like, I'm too busy to meditate, or I have something like really, you know, and it's just the idea that I ignore my nervous system first thing in the morning, because I have some weird deep desire to go into fight or flight right away. And I think I do have some good practices for my nervous system. I just need to make sure that I do them enough. For example, sometimes I walk with one of my best friends and we'll go for a long, long, long walk and we'll sort of talk about what's going on and we'll just yell on the street.

51:56People think we're insane, but we'll just walk and walk and be like, oh, you know, and it's really helpful. Another thing that I do when I can, if I can, you know, find a patch of grass, like if I lie down on the grass face first, and I just sort of like, sometimes I feel like there's this exchange of energy between me and the earth. And I'm like, I'm going to let this all go into the earth, you know? So, I mean, those are like weird examples, but they really, really help me. So what are your, what are some of the ways that you, like you specifically take care of your nervous system? I love those answers.

52:32And I want to mention too, you mentioned mornings. So our cortisol, the stress hormone naturally spikes in the morning to wake us from sleep. so it is not surprising and i think maybe a lot of listeners if you do notice right oh i can't right my racing thoughts happen or i can't stop thinking about for me the to-do list right because that's part of my where i've historically heard you know habitually channeled right all of that energy and there's a reason again it's because when cortisol is spiking in the morning those are the moments where we're going to likely see the evidence of that and so even more important to hit pause, which is something I remind myself because I am the person who, especially if I have something scheduled for later in the day, right, I'll cancel the morning for whatever reason, right?

53:19Because I want to get into the day sooner. And so for me, a lot of it involves nature, contact with nature, like you're describing, laying face down. Now that I live and I have my own backyard, gratefully, I'm often with my shoes off, walking in the grass, walking in general, hiking when it's not as hot as it is now. Anytime I can be in nature's energy because there is energy that is transferred from the earth, from the trees, from the natural world in which we are a part of, it is quite literally an energy exchange. And for most of us, the natural world around us is giving a peaceful energy. So anytime we can be in physical contact in nature or take our shoes off in a grounding practice, it is quite literally us using the earth as our co-regulatory kind of simply as a, as our ability to calm ourself.

54:09It really, really works for me. That's for me, like the, my number one go-to. Sometimes for me too, it's even just, you know, a walk. Yeah. Sometimes I mean, I spent a lot of my day now I grew up in cities, so I did a lot of walking for decades of my life, but now I very much live like a suburban and I have to get in my car to drive. So for me, it's even just, and I sit for a lot of my day, writing, creating, Everything I do is online. So sometimes it's just moving, getting up and taking a walk, stretching. I can't tell you. It's something that I avoid it forever. I hated the feeling of tense muscles.

54:43I have a lot of tension in my muscles. Stretching literally just hurt me. So I didn't do it. I've gotten now comfortable and I've developed my ability to tolerate the discomfort of muscle stretching. So for me, it even looks like small moments. It doesn't even have to be a commitment to miles of a hike. It could just be walking to get your mail to break up your day. Sometimes even that slight shift of energy or getting on the ground and doing a little bit of stretching. And again, I want to emphasize it doesn't have to be. I am not the person you are never going to see me five hours at the gym, 10 hours meditating.

55:18Like it is small micro moments throughout the day that I have not only gained the most benefit for myself, but I do think that are the most accessible for most of us and create the same, if not more habit change. Because what happens when we try to overdo it, sometimes very naturally thinking like, oh, well, if I just dive right in headfirst now and do everything I need to do to an extreme, I'll just feel better quicker. But again, what we're talking about is venturing into new, even if it's logically healthier habits, what it will do, again, bringing this full circle again, to our nervous system is it will activate it.

55:58It will indicate stress. And again, if we don't have the tools and resources to deal with that newness or that stress that's connected to that newness, this is why so many of us can only white knuckle it for so long before we know it, we fall right back into those old habits. So I could actually make a case that small micro moments are the most beneficial because they're the most accessible and become the most available for us to do the most consistently, which is the goal, not the things that we can do for one day here and not again for another six weeks. Yeah, we don't want to sort of just pick that up and put it into the achievement framework, right?

56:38And I agree with you on disrupting patterns, which is something that I've just started to do recently. And I think because all the kids are out of the house now and they've all gone off to college. And so I had such a strict like migratory pattern around, you know, more broadly, you know, now we're going to this place because they're starting school and now it's vacation. So we're going here and then we're going back. Or even just in the day, like I've got to be home by this time. I was really entrenched in this pattern. And now I'm not. And I'm like, oh, my God, there's a whole world out there.

57:13Like I could do something at, you know, 10 a.m. instead of 8 a.m., you know. And it does make you feel that in and of itself has actually put me in my body in a way that I haven't been in a long time. Just this idea of choice, right? And like breaking up these patterns a little bit. So I really, what you're saying really resonates with me.

57:46Before we go, I do need to ask you this. So you are a huge presence on Instagram. You have a massive following. Is that weird? Is it awesome? Is it cool? Is it a lot of responsibility? Like, tell me about that. Absolutely. Speaking from little Nicole on my neck, it is the scariest shit she's ever done. to be honest. There is a part of me that is desperately that I wanted to be seen right outside of performance and childhood. It's kind of the dichotomy that lives in a lot of us with a conflict, right? That which I want. I want someone just to see me for who I am, what I have to share, my perspective.

58:29Yet at the same time, because that's not the consistent experience that I've had, right? I would only show parts of me in terms of the achievement driven parts. I was very much a people pleaser. I wouldn't tell you what I really thought. I would tell you what I thought you wanted to hear. Because if I what I told you what I really thought it might upset you. And what I learned in childhood is that anger and upset often leads to disconnection or the silent treatment. So for many different reasons, I watered myself down. So as I started to shift the way I was working and see the virtual landscape and saw the benefit and was urged by my partner at the time to maybe begin to tell my story in this new way.

59:07And as I understood that for me, there was value in for me as the individual, Nicole, that is, aside from value that I could give others in terms of talking more holistically that I thought would be valuable to others. there was value in me learning how to share my opinions with others and then more so learning how to deal with whatever others opinions about what I've shared may or may not be. So from the moment I haven't remembered the first picture I put up of myself that wasn't just a meme and how many takes the picture took because even posing for pictures was so uncomfortable for me. And that still remains, obviously I'm several years into it now.

59:52There's still a part of me that, you know, very much fears evaluation, fears judgment, fears saying the wrong thing. Of course, when you have millions of followers now, right, the backlash that you can get near immediately, as you know, right, can be very overwhelming, destabilizing, even traumatizing at times. But what has now shifted over five years for me that I can say, it's an incredible thing having the community that I now have is that I've learned how to tolerate being more public. I've learned how to tolerate the discomfort of even sharing my true thoughts. I've gotten in more alignment, things that I used to water down, I'm able to just directly say now in new ways.

1:00:31And I'm able to tolerate everyone's opinion about me, meaning I'm also able to use boundaries if and when they're necessary. So for me now, I see it as quite honestly a gift. I mean, it has opened up the opportunity to write books, to have a membership, to be on podcasts like this, to go and travel. I mean, I've been in other countries and people have approached me and known me and known my work. So for me, seeing this work and the accessibility of it and the conversation and the community and the tools and the resources, it makes all of the discomfort that I continue to work through worth doing it.

1:01:06But yeah, there's very much a part of my own healing that is challenged, my own inner child reparenting that I have to coach through still to this day with just the visibility and all that comes with doing the work in this way. I can relate. Nicole, thank you so much. This was really spectacular. Thank you so much for being with us today. Oh gosh, Gwenna, thank you for having me. I am just so honored to be here and thank you for the community for being so receptive. Absolutely.

1:01:40Thanks for listening to my conversation with Dr. Nicole Lepera. You can find her on Instagram or learn more at theholisticpsychologist.com. This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studios. I hope you'll listen, follow, rate, and review all of our episodes, which are available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.