Episode Overview

The Science of Mindset and How Your Thoughts Shape Your Physical Health After Breast Cancer

In this episode, we are taking a deeper look at something that is often pushed aside in the healing process, your thoughts.

You already know how important nutrition, movement, and labs are. But what if the way your mind is working is quietly influencing all of it?

This is not just mindset work as a concept. This is physiology.

In this conversation, I walk you through the research behind negativity bias, the nocebo effect, and the placebo effect, and how your expectations and thought patterns can create measurable changes in your body.

You will hear:

• Why your brain is wired to focus on worst case scenarios
• What the nocebo effect is and how it may be showing up in your daily life
• How expectation alone can increase pain, stress hormones, and symptoms
• The science behind placebo and why belief can create real biological change
• How your thoughts create emotional and physical responses in your body
• A simple tool to help you redirect your thinking in a way your brain will actually accept

This episode is not about blame or saying your thoughts caused your diagnosis.

It is about understanding that your thoughts are part of your internal environment and learning how to work with them in a way that supports your body instead of working against it.

If you have ever felt stuck in fear, overwhelmed by “what if” thoughts, or frustrated because you are doing everything right but it still feels hard, this episode will help you understand why.

And more importantly, what you can start doing differently.

You can also walk through this work step by step inside my free workshop.

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey, friends, welcome to episode 458

0:36
of better than before breast cancer. I am your host, Laura Lummer, and today I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most important, most underrated conversations we can have, and that's what happens in your mind, is just as physical as anything happening in your body. And it's not like I haven't talked about this before, right? I've got the research to back it up. And I want to get into this, and I want to give you a little bit of history. Let me tell you a story. So I've been offering some form of membership as a part of my business for the past six years. Now. It started as the Empower membership, and then it became revived, and now it's the better than before, breast cancer membership. So I always have those memberships going on, in addition to other programs I offer. And when I first launched my membership, there was a tool that I used very consistently on all my coaching calls and in the programs that I put out on a monthly and weekly basis, and a tool that I learned during my life coach training at the Life Coach School, which is called the model, is what I was using, and I thought it was really, really well. It is really, really powerful. It's a very powerful thing, and it helps people see their thoughts very clearly. And I'm going to talk about that tool and some changes I made to it in depth a little later in this episode, because it's a big part of what we're going to cover today, but first, I want to tell you something that happened over time, because I think a lot of you are going to recognize this in yourself and your own patterns. So after a couple of years of coaching, I think, Well, anytime things just naturally evolve, and the format of my calls evolved, and my clients who have been with me for years, developed relationships, and so kind of the dynamic of the calls began to change and maybe become a little more familiar, and the prompts that I started using in my weekly and monthly lessons shifted a little more towards self reflection prompts, and somewhere along The way, I just stopped incorporating the model as consistently as I used to, still using some of that, the framework and the way of thinking, but not the tool itself I was in building in the way that I used to. And here's what I started to notice, women who had done so much work really made a tremendous amount of progress and genuinely shifted how they were thinking and showing up, started slipping a little bit, and old thought patterns started creeping back in, old habits started to come back, and I started to notice forward momentum slowing down. And so I had to ask myself, when I saw this, Hmm, what's going on here, if we let the mind run on its own without a consistent practice to redirect it. A simple and effective tool, the mind will go exactly where it's always gone every single time because it's been programmed to work one way much longer than we've reprogrammed it to work the way we want. And if we jump on that train with the mind going on its own like a rogue train. If we follow it into those old, familiar patterns without even realizing we're doing it, our work starts to unravel. And that isn't because we've done something wrong. It isn't because the work that you already did or accomplished wasn't real. Is because the brain works on autopilot, and it's going to default back to those deeply ingrained neural patterns if we're not consciously and intentionally redirecting it. So I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I'm going to say it again. Working on mindset consistently is equally as important as taking your body to the gym. Both have to happen. They have to happen. You wouldn't go to the gym for three months. Get strong and then stop going and expect to stay strong, because it's not going to happen. Your mindset works the same way, and you must, must, must keep showing up for it. You must make it a priority. You must give it time and commit and honor that time. That's how important it is. So I started to see that. I knew I needed to bring the model back, but I thought that I needed to bring it back in a very strong and intentional way. So last. Last week, I did a workshop called lead with love. I did it inside my living well after breast cancer community, that's a free community that's on my website and on my app. Did I mention I have an app now? So you can go to the app store and look for the breast cancer recovery coach app, and easily, easily, easily look at the community and join the free community. So I did the workshop there. The recording lives there. I'll give you more directions to that later in the show, and I'll link to it here in the podcast notes. But in that workshop, I reintroduced the model, and I asked the women in the workshop, and even before joining the workshop, to submit some thoughts ahead of time, some real thoughts that they were actually having, actually struggling with, so that I could work through them with these ladies together in the workshop, and we could see exactly how a thought creates the result you're living with in your life right now. It was a very powerful session, as it always is. This tool is incredible, but there's something else that I wanted to add to it. As I worked with my clients over the past few years, I started to realize that the original model as I learned it in Life Coach School was missing an important shift and an important piece for me and for my clients. And I'm going to tell you what that piece is later in the episode, because it's very significant, I think, for those of us who've been through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, but I actually think it's just significant for women overall, because so many of us have really complicated relationships with our bodies, and that means the way we think about our bodies, the way we talk about our bodies the way we judge them, but especially after everything we go through in a diagnosis and treatment, that relationship gets really strained, and that relationship is the most important relationship in our lives. And the tool that I use now addresses that in a way that I think the original model, the way it was originally designed, didn't really quite reach but before I get into all of that, I want to talk about the science behind why this work matters so much, because this is not just a coaching philosophy. This just isn't my experience from six years of working with women after breast cancer inside my community, because I worked with them in limited group programs before that, meaning, like a 10 week program or something of that nature. But I want to share with you real peer reviewed research that shows us exactly why the direction our thoughts go has a measurable physical impact on our bodies, and I think it's important to continue to reinforce this, because it's so easily dismissed. It is so easily dismissed, especially, I think in people who are trying to get well and heal, that the emotional piece of it, the stress piece of it, the way we think. Piece of it gets pushed to the side all the time. I see it all the time, and I think for two reasons, one, we don't realize the importance of it, the value of it, and the second is, it's hard, and we have a lot of thoughts and beliefs about what will happen if we start digging into our brain. So I want to share this with you, because I think once you hear this information, you will start to look at mindset practice very differently. I hope so at least. So let's start there.

8:32
When you think about everything you do to take care of your health, where does your mind go first? If I was to say to you, hey, what's the next step you want to do to get healthy? Most of us go to the physical realm, right? We think about what we eat, we think about supplements. Maybe we think about our labs, we think about exercise, we think about appointments. I go to the doctor, I go to the acupuncturist, I go to Reiki, I go to chiropractor, right? We think about the protocols we follow, and I completely understand that, because that's a part of my life. It's a big part of my life. And because the physical things feel urgent, because in our mind, we're dealing with a physical thing, and so we have an urgency about it. It feels real, it feels concrete. It feels like something we can touch, we can control, we can measure, and all that does matter, your foods, your labs, your movement, your sleep, your environment, it does count. It's all real, and I'm here for it all. But what I want to offer you today is a very different way of thinking about the piece that most of us put at the bottom of that list, and that's the work we do on our minds. And I think sometimes it isn't necessarily because we don't think that the physical emotional stuff matters, but again, because I think the physical feels so much more pressing that we often look at the mental and emotional as a luxury, like something we'll get to once we've handled the real stuff. Right the real problem, and what I see over and over again, and what research supports is that when we skip the mindset piece the physical work gets harder, not easier. It becomes something we have to force. You can have the cleanest meal plan in the world, but if your mind is stuck in rehearsing worst case scenarios, following through on that plan will become exhausting. I promise you, you can know exactly what your body needs. You can know yourself really, really well. And I hear people say this to me all the time. I know my body, but if fear is running the show from the background, then consistently showing up is feeling like swimming upstream every single day. It feels like so much effort. The mindset work is not the soft, optional add on that we do once we've handled everything else. It's literally the foundation that makes everything else sustainable and easier. And if you listen to this podcast for any amount of time, you know, I love to say, how could this be easier? How could this be more fun? I deal with women all the time who sit in front of me in tears and frustration and tell me about their lives that are full with everything, and they say, This is so hard. And I ask, how could it be easier? How could it be more fun? And I think this is important part of it. So when I ask those questions, and people say to me, Well, I don't know. I want to think differently. I know my thoughts are affecting me, but how do I do it? How do I get to where my brain keeps going, where I want it to go? And that's what we're going to talk about right now. And the science we're going to look at is going to show us why learning how to do this is one of the most important health practices we have available to us today. So let's talk about why we resist this work in the first place. It's not because of laziness. I don't think that women in this community, our community of women after a breast cancer diagnosis, who are working on healing, I don't think because they're not trying hard enough. I think it's something much more interesting, and it's a culture that has historically taught us to trust what we can see and measure right. We love science, and we live in a culture where science is the only thing that's valid if we can't prove it and then repeat it over and over to to prove it consistently, like a blood mark or a tumor size or a supplement, these things feel more real, and science says these are real. These are tangible. We can prove it, and so we give that more validity. Medicine has also taught us that problems are about chemistry, meaning depression must be low serotonin, fatigue, probably a thyroid issue, inflammation, a diet problem. And when the problem is in our chemistry, then we're taught the solution is external. What do I take to make this better? What do I avoid to make this better? Right? What's on the outside that can fix the inside. But what that model does is it really puts us in the role of being a passive recipient of care. We show up, we comply, we follow the protocol, we wait and see what happens. There's nothing wrong with that. It's part of the picture, but it leaves out something very significant. It leaves out thinking, feeling, believing and meaning. It leaves out the version of us that is in a conversation with our body every single moment of every single day, through the way we think, through the way we speak to ourselves. And I cannot tell you how many women, how many clients, have sat in front of me in tears telling me I did all the right things. I did everything they told me to do. So why, then is it so frustrating? Why didn't all the external solutions work? Well, there's also a neurological reason that we resist this work because change itself feels threatening to the brain, and when the brain perceives something new or different, it activates what's called the amygdala, which is the brain's alarm system, and it pulls resources away from our prefrontal cortex, which is where logical thinking and decision making happens. So even when we consciously want to change, the brain works against us at first. It pulls us back to what is familiar. And I've talked about this so many times on the podcast, familiarity equals comfort, and the brain loves it, even if the cost of familiarity is pain. Right, right? Even if staying with what is familiar is to our detriment. The brain wants familiarity. So our existing thought patterns, the ones we've had for years, they are stored in a part of the brain that's called the basal ganglia. They are deeply, deeply wired. Let's think of our brain as the organ that it is and the way that it works. They're deeply wired, they're automatic, and they're energy efficient. This is what our brain also loves. It loves them because it requires almost no effort to do what you've always done, to think the way you've always thought. New ways of thinking require energy. Remember, everything in this body operates off of energy. Every cell needs energy, and there's trillions of cells saying, I want that energy. So our incredibly magical, efficient brain and body says, Where can we leave out? What is extraneous use of energy, right? We don't want to do stuff that we don't have to do. We want to save energy for what we need to survive, because that's all our body wants to do, is survive. So these new ways of thinking can feel very uncomfortable and very clunky, like learning to write your name with your non dominant hand, right? And so it's messy, right? Making changes is messy. It doesn't just automatically flow. I don't go from being right handed to left hand and go, Oh my goodness. Look how beautiful. Who knew, who knew that I could do that so well with my non dominant hand? Right? So when the mindset work feels hard or pointless, like nothing's happening, right? We're not seeing a result. That's the brain doing what it does, resisting the new, protecting the familiar, and that resistance is just the starting point. So let's talk about something I think everyone is going to recognize immediately when you hear it, you're going about your day. Things are actually going really great. And then a thought comes in, what if cancer comes back? Something triggers that thought you get a pain. What does it symptom mean? Oh, my god, is this something? And then we start jumping on the rogue train. Am I running out of time? What if I'm not doing enough? What am I missing? What do I not know? And before you know it, you are in full on worst case scenario mode. Heart rate is up, shoulders are tight, mind is spinning, and the day that was actually fine doesn't feel fine anymore. And what if I told you that that experience was not random, not about you personally. What if we decided to think about it as an ancient survival wiring doing exactly what it is designed to do? And the reason I say that to you is because I have clients say to me all the time. Am I crazy? Is this crazy? Do you hear this from anybody else? Yes, I do. Yes, I do all the time. In 2001 psychologist called Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published a paper called Bad is stronger than good, and it was in the review of general psychology. And that same year, researchers Paul Roisin and Edward roysman published their own paper on negativity bias in the journal Personality and Social Psychology review. Both of those papers arrived at the same conclusion from different directions, and both are now among the most cited papers in all of social science. And what they found was that there is a general bias based on both innate predispositions and experiences in animals and humans, and that bias is to give greater weight to negative events and experiences negative events are stronger than equivalent positive events, and the brain registers them faster. It holds on to them longer, and it weighs on them more heavily. So let me give you an example. Let's go back to having a fine day, or having a fine day. Everything's going along well, and you have to drop off something really quick. You You have to go run this errand. And you're thinking to yourself, you know what? I'm gonna I'm just gonna grab a latte on the way. This actually happened to me the other day. I'm just gonna grab a lot to have, like, 567, minutes here, I can get a latte, and I can take it with me to go run these errands, and I walk in the store to get a latte, and there's this group looks like a family. It's kind of like grandma and her daughters, maybe like a couple of adult sisters, and then maybe the grandkids. And there's like, there were, like, five or six women, and I don't think that they had ever ordered coffees at a coffee shop before. They didn't know what they wanted. They didn't know the difference between an Americano and a latte. They wanted to know all the flavors. They were reading the menu, and it was actually really cute. They were there for a long time, and I was thinking, What have I done? Right? I wanted to run in to grab a coffee, and now I am standing here and thinking, I've made a big mistake, but now I'm committed. I'm here. I don't want to leave. I want my coffee. And. And one of the the women in the group was this little girl, maybe she was 12 years old, and she was so cute and so sweet, and she turned around and she hands me a menu. Shows, would you like to look at a menu while you're waiting? Very cute. But the point being that you can have something like that happen. And then when you get home and some somebody says, like, oh, how was your day? You tend to go to the coffee shop experience, and you're like, Well, I was trying to do this, and I ran into the coffee shop. And you wouldn't believe right? But what about the rest of the day? What happened how beautiful it was outside? What happened to the good news that I got when I was at the doctor's office? What happened to the very relaxing nap I took at acupuncture? What happened to the luxurious facial that I got in the afternoon? Right? Where did all that go? So think about that, and let's take this a little deeper. There was a study by a neuropsychologist named John Cacioppo. I think that's how you say it, Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, and he found that the brain actually produces a greater surge of electrical activity in response to negative images than it does to positive ones. Another neuropsychologist, Rick Hansen, has described how our amygdala, that part of our brain, uses about two thirds of its neurons to detect negativity and then quickly stores them into long term memory, two thirds, two thirds. The majority of your emotion and motivation center is devoted to finding and holding on to the negative wild and from an evolutionary standpoint, makes total sense, because your ancient ancestors standing in open field with 100 good things around her and one potential threat, her survival depended on her brain going right to that threat, being able to detect that threat, the ones who noticed the danger first lived to pass that on in their genes, and here we are, 1000s of years later, with brains that are still scanning for predators, except now the predator is a scan result or strange ache or pain or a conversation that triggered us didn't go the way we hoped, after a breast cancer diagnosis, this wiring can go into overdrive because real threats have happened to you. And when I'm talking to somebody and they start crying because they're saying, they're telling me the story of what happened to them, and they're apology, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm saying Don't be sorry. This is normal. This is good. This is processing. This is letting your body know the threat is passed and that you're safe again. The alarm system was activated and for a good reason. But guess what? It doesn't often switch off automatically. It stays on high alert, scanning and watching for the next threat. So now let's take all of that and let's look at what the data actually shows us about what that does to our body. There is something called the nocebo effect. You've probably heard of the placebo effect, and we're going to get there in a minute, but I want to start here, because most people aren't aware of the nocebo effect, and once you understand it, it really changes the way that you think about the stories you tell yourself every day. And God knows, we tell ourselves a lot of stories. So the word Nocebo comes from Latin, and it means I shall harm. It's the opposite of placebo, which means I shall please. And the no SIBO effect is this, negative expectations produce negative physical outcomes even when there is no physical cause. So your expectation of something bad can produce a very real physical response in your body, without any drug, without any procedure, without any actual physical cause. There was a study done by a neuroscientist named Fabrizio Benedetti and his team at the University of Turin in 2006 published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience at that found that when healthy volunteers were simply told to expect pain, their bodies produced a measurable surge in stress hormones, including cortisol and ACTH, and they actually felt more pain. There was no drug, there was no procedure, just their words and expectation. And the researchers found that anxiety was the key link in that it triggered a neurochemical called cholecystokinin, which actually facilitates pain transmission in the body. It's fascinating. Someone was told this is going to hurt more, and their body responded as if it added. Actually did. So what if we decided to think about what that means for the words we use with ourselves every day? What about telling yourself I'm so tired all the time I'll never feel normal again? My body has betrayed me, so let me down. Something's probably wrong. I don't have enough time right? Those aren't just thoughts, my friends, according to this research, those are instructions to your nervous system. And then to take that even further, there was a study done by researchers at Harvard Medical School in 2022 and they did a systematic review, a meta analysis. So they took multiple studies, and they looked at 12 covid 19 vaccine clinical trials that covered more than 45,000

25:51
patients, great sampling. And what they found was, after the first dose, more than 35% of people who received a placebo injection, right? So it wasn't an actual vaccine, a shot with nothing in it. They took these studies and calculated how much of the reported side effects in the vaccine group were actually due to expectation than the vaccine itself. The number was 76%

26:21
after the first dose, 76%

26:25
of reported side effects were not caused by the vaccine. They were caused by the expectation of a side effect. What the researchers noted that symptoms like headache and fatigue were listed among the most common effects in the Vaccine Information materials, and that simply reading that information likely caused people to notice and attribute normal everyday body sensations to the vaccine, or to become so anxious and alert to their bodies that they experience symptoms. Otherwise they wouldn't have noticed at all, pretty interesting stuff. So we read that something might happen, we expect it to happen, and that happens. Did it happen because of the drug or because of the expectation something to think about? And here's what I want to offer you, if you've ever gone into a scan or an appointment convinced something was going to be wrong and then felt physically terrible that whole day, body tensing, stomach and knots, heart racing, that's the nocebo effect playing out in real time, that right there that's Doing the harm the expectation is creating a real, physical experience. And I'm not saying that in judgment or blame, because I certainly have been there. This isn't about saying our thoughts caused cancer. This isn't about saying our thoughts caused symptoms. It's saying that what the data is showing us is that the direction our thoughts go in and the stories we run on autopilot, have a physical reaction they create in our bodies. So now let's look at the other side. And this is, again, very interesting. The placebo effect is something most of us have heard of, but I think most of us still think of it as something a little soft, like people just thought they were going to get better so they felt better. But the research does tell us a different story. And I always crack up when people say to me, Well, I'm feeling better, but how do I know it's not all in my head? And I stopped for a minute and I think, well, who cares if it's all in your head, if you feel better, whether it was in your head or because of something else you took. Who cares? The fact is, you feel better. So there was a study, and it was done by Henry Beecher at Harvard Medical School, way back in 1955 it was published in the American Medical Association, and it was the first study to really formally quantify the placebo effect. This scientist analyzed 15 trials across different conditions and found that about 35%

29:09
of over 1000 patients experienced meaningful symptom relief from placebo alone. And that paper became one of the most cited in all of medical research, and it really opened the door to everything that followed. And then there was another study that was published in the Journal of Science in 2001 it looked at what happened in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients when they were given a placebo. Now, Parkinson's disease involves a very progressive loss of dopamine producing neurons. So these patients brains literally cannot produce enough dopamine. So using PET scan imaging, researchers found a substantial dopamine release in the brains of these patients in response to a placebo injection the dam. Edge systems, the one the disease was actively destroying, responded to expectation alone and released actual, real measurable dopamine, a brain that physically could not produce enough of a neurochemical did produce it because of expectation. And then there's another study. Okay, I love these studies. I love that we can see this is not hippy dippy stuff. There's science behind this. So I think this is maybe one of the most powerful of all because of what we're talking about today. But in 2010 Ted kabchuk at Harvard Medical School, published in plus one PLO as one. And by the way, all of the links to the research and references will be posted in the show notes for this episode. So he tested what would happen if researchers gave people a placebo and told them exactly what it was. No deception. Patients were told directly, you are taking a sugar pill. You are taking an inert substance, something that will not do anything. And then they were told that sugar pills have been shown in clinical trials to produce improvement in symptoms through mind, body, self healing. They knew. They were told you're taking a sugar pill, and the results shocked even the researchers themselves. The patients who knew they were taking the placebo reported twice as much symptom relief as the patients who received no treatment at all, twice as much, and that response was actually higher than the typical placebo response seen in standard pharmaceutical trials, where patients don't even know what they're getting and they never realize they're taking a placebo. What does that tell us? It tells us this is not about lying to yourself. It isn't about forcing yourself to believe something you don't believe that's called toxic positivity. It isn't about pretending everything is fine when everything isn't, but it's about the direction you practice pointing your nervous system to. Because both directions, the nocebo direction and the placebo direction, have a physical reaction in your body, and the research shows that. So now let's look at this in real life, because this is where it gets practical, and we want this to be practical. If I ask you right now to tell me what you want your life to look like, and your first answer is, I don't know. I want you to really sit with that for a sec, because what the data shows us is that focusing on what we don't want keeps the brain in that same scanning for threat mode. We're still pointed at the no SIBO. We're still rehearsing what we're moving away from rather than what we're moving toward. And there's something else that tends to live underneath. I don't want this, right? So I don't I don't want to be that. I don't want to have that in my life. There's a quiet judgment there that's so subtle of the past version of yourself, as if who you were or how things have been wasn't good enough, and that judgment, that that low, consistent judgment running in your nervous system that's telling you should be further along. Why do you keep going back to old habits? It keeps you anchored right where you are, and it activates the same stress response. It keeps the alarm running. So what if we decided to think about it differently?

33:43
You don't need to have a five year vision. You don't need to have everything mapped out. Can you look just one month ahead, one week ahead, one day ahead, and name one thing you want to be doing, feeling or experiencing instead of avoiding, instead of escaping from something, moving toward something, because that small at that reach toward something instead of away from something, moves you away from fear, and that is your brain beginning to step out of Nocebo and into placebo. That's the beginning of practicing a new direction. This is how we do it. You've heard me talk so many times on this podcast, and I talk about with my clients all the time, what is the future version of you? I have a program called Becoming you two point out, and it asks, What's the future version of you? And if we don't know if we're stuck, if we're practicing the same patterns and the same behaviors over and over again, it asks, How are you benefiting from that? Because we choose what we choose because of a benefit, even if that benefit is just, I know it and it's comfortable.

35:01
Yeah, and so making change, deciding to look at the future version of yourself rather than the past version of yourself. It's uncomfortable at first, because your brain is resisting it. It's resisting what's new. We've talked about that it feels unfamiliar, and that discomfort is a sign you're doing something different. It's not a sign it's not working right. The Parkinson's patients we talked about didn't feel certain the placebo would work. The IBS patients knew they were taking a sugar pill, and the research still showed that real, measurable physical responses happened. So you don't need to be certain, you just need to be willing to practice pointing in a different direction. And here's what I mean by that, willingness versus resisting. When I'm talking to somebody, they're telling me, I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck. I'm asking, What if it were different? What if it were easier? What if it were more fun. And the response is, I've tried that. I know that. I know that, right, we're not willing to accept or receive something different. So let me talk to you a little bit about the model. The tool that I refer to, the tool I learned at The Life Coach School is built on the idea that our circumstances do not create our feelings, our thoughts about our circumstances do, and what I mean by feelings is our emotions. So here's how it works. Every experience starts with a circumstance. A circumstance is a fact. I had a stage four cancer diagnosis, that's a fact. Having a conversation with somebody where you come away and say they were so freaking rude, that's not a fact. They said these words is a fact. What I thought about those words is that it was rude. Okay, so separating those two things is so powerful and so important. It helps you to see you have the ability to choose your thought, because circumstances on their own are neutral. They do not create how we feel. Let me give you my personal example. I got a widespread stage four cancer diagnosis. I was devastated at first, once I processed, I made a decision, I'm going to figure out how to heal. Some people may have gotten the exact same diagnosis as me and said to themselves, that's it. I'm going to die. I'm going to be dead within 12 months. They may have believed that, and the outcomes, I promise you, would have been very different, right? So the circumstance, the words we heard, you have stage four cancer, those are the circumstances. The thought we choose about those circumstance is now going to create a reaction in our body, right? So two people receive the same circumstance facts have a completely different experience of it because they're having completely different thoughts about it. That thought creates a emotion. That emotion creates a sensation in the body. This is what I'm talking about here. When I say these people thought something, it created a chemical reaction. So if I have an emotion like fear, what is fear feel like? And it's really cool to kind of go through the model and think about it, because some people land in different places. Some people are very sensitive people, and so they're feeling their emotion will be the strongest thing, something. People are very cerebral, so their thought is going to be the strongest thing. Some people will notice I feel sick to my stomach, so the sensation is going to be the strongest thing, but all of them are clues as to what you're going through. And so that's what I added to the model. The model used to be circumstance, thought, feeling, and then from the way we feel, we take actions, and then from the actions we take, we create results. But I could tell every time I worked with someone, and even when I worked with myself on releasing emotions, because people ask me, there's a lot, how do I let go of fear? How do I let go of past grudges and past anger? And I would think, you know, that's it's really interesting, because all of those emotions create a sensation. So I decided to take feeling and separate it out and make it emotion, because I think the word itself feeling was confusing. Some people, it's like, I feel sick to my stomach, but I wanted them to get to an emotion. What's the emotion that thought is creating for you? And from that emotion, what is the sensation it's creating in your body? What's the chemical response to me that was so important, because in the cohort I work with in women who have had a breast cancer diagnosis, or maybe are living with cancer, we must begin to understand what our thoughts do to our bodies. We must start to really get to know our bodies and understand. And if I think this way, this is how I feel. This is telling me I'm having a stress response. And these are the things a stress response does. I don't want to think that. So when the brain goes on autopilot, we go through that whole sequence of the thought, the emotion, the sensation, the actions. If I feel fear, maybe I panic, maybe I go eat cake, maybe I have ice cream, maybe I have a couple of martinis, maybe I don't ever get out of bed. And when we can break it down and be very specific, and we can pause, and we can write it down, and we can look at the thoughts we have about circumstance, about just facts, then we can ask ourselves, is this thought true? Is this thought useful? And if not, why am I choosing to think this way? Right? Because we start to understand the thought has power. It has physical power. So we don't want to choose thoughts that we have to force. We don't want to choose thoughts we have to fake. We don't want to choose affirmations that aren't real for us because our brains are smart. They don't believe it, they'll push back, but a thought that is really honest and that is a little more open than where the brain goes automatically, like the next step, the next smallest thought that the brain can handle without resisting. That's where we want to go. So if I get a stage four cancer diagnosis and I say, it's fine, I'm going to be fine, my brain is like,

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I don't know if I'm on board with that, but if I say, You know what, I've read many stories of other people who've healed from this kind of diagnosis, my brain's like, Yeah, that's true. I've read those stories. So then I can work with my brain, and then I can choose thoughts that help my body feel the way I want my body to feel. I may not know where things are going to end up, where they're going to go, what I'm capable of handling, but I just stay here and now, and I just tell my body and my brain the next thing that helps me feel the way I want to feel in the future, right in the next minute. And I'll tell you, our body is such an amazing source of information. And for so many of us, our body has been a source of fear for quite a while, maybe our whole lives, maybe long before breast cancer diagnosis. And so we avoid connecting to our body because we don't like some of those feelings. You know, recently, I had a issue with my shoulder. I have bursitis and tendonitis in my shoulder, and it's been really painful. And there were several days where the pain was so intense that I would have taken anything. I was like, who's got drugs in this house that are going to take this pain away? Right? Because I can't function. I can't think, I can't do anything. And I was talking to my sister, and I said, you know, being in that much physical pain really causes me to think about the way people can get addicted to drugs, especially if you have addictive personality traits, but because emotional pain is also so painful, right? And I never really thought about it that way. I thought our body is a source of information. It's telling us what's going on. But sometimes, when our body hurts so much, like we we want to just shut it off, right? We want to go to sleep. We want to escape it. And I think the same thing with emotions. When we've got really painful emotions stored in our body, or we're going through something really hard, I get it right. It's like, I want to escape it, I don't want to feel it, but if we don't allow ourselves to feel it, have a tool with which we can process it, then we can't really get to the other side. Like, I needed to find out what the heck was going on. Why was I in so much pain? So like, understand how to treat it. I didn't want to just ignore it, and I certainly don't want to live on painkillers, but I need to figure it out, and that happens with our thoughts too. We really do need to understand, acknowledge and face so that we don't try to hide from the pain that then our body starts sending us signals of, hey, you hit it over here, you hit it here. In the kidney, hit it here. You hit it here. And I'm not saying again, it's not direct causation, but it's triggering a reaction in our body, every thought, everything we don't want to deal with. So when we disconnect with our bodies because they've had so many scans, they've been biopsied, they've been surgically altered, they've been treated with medications that change the way we feel and just we get lost in that connection, right? We don't feel safe listening to our bodies. We don't trust our bodies. This is why I added the sensation piece back to the model, not back to the model. I added it to the model, because it's really important that we start to come back to the sensations of our body. Because many times when I'm working with someone, especially someone who says I was super healthy until I got cancer, like me, I said that, but then I started really thinking about sensations and things that were happening for a year, a year and a half prior, that I just didn't pay attention to, because I was trained. Push through, keep going. So if you're willing to come back and have an open mind and be with your body and say, What does this feel like? And I cannot tell you how many people say, Well, I don't really notice that. Like, I'm not really good at that. That's exactly my point. That's what I'm saying. You disconnected from your body, come back to it, start to listen to it, start to learn from it, start to understand its language and how your thoughts impact it. And then you can start practicing new thoughts that you consciously choose things that are more open also true. And check in again and see how even the smallest shift in thinking can make breath come a little easier. As I'm working through a session with a client, and we're working on thoughts, and they're finding a thought that works for them, I can see where it lands, because I can see their energy shift, and I can say, tell me what just happened. And they'll say, I feel a little lighter right now. It's a shift in a thought. It's amazing how it affects our body. That's the placebo effect. And I don't care if it's all in your head, because what's in your head is real, and when you notice that, and you give your brain evidence, not affirmations, that aren't true, that you're trying to force actual lived experience in your own body of things. Shifting this practice becomes more real, and that's how we begin to close the gap between knowing this is in my head, I know it, and doing I talk about this when it comes to food all the time. Who does not know how to eat, right? Who can really, truthfully, stand in front of me and say, I have no idea what is considered to be good, healthy food. Not many people. How many people actually follow the eating plan that they say in their brain? They know.

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Not a lot of people. A lot of people have go the opposite direction, and we'll even be eating something and say, I know I shouldn't be eating this, right? So what's the difference between knowing and doing all the stuff that's in between? That's what we want to look at. And this is how this practice and this tool becomes something that the brain can learn to trust and helps it to shift. So if this conversation is sparking curiosity, if it's resonating with you in any way, you can actually walk through this tool with me in the lead with love workshop. The recording is waiting for you in my free community, living well after breast cancer. So you can just go to my app, the breast cancer recovery coach app. You can sign into it, and you can go to the community, or you can go to my website. You can click the link below for living well after breast cancer, it is a free community that I created to bring women in who want to have discussions about the life, the health, the world, they want to create for themselves. And this is not cancer focused. You know, it's interesting thing. Obviously, I work with people at breast cancer. Obviously, I'm healing from breast cancer, but this is about to me creating what we want, not focusing on cancer. Cancer is a part of our lives, so we focus on the things that help us to heal. If we've gone past cancer. We have bodies that have no evidence of disease. We want lives that are better than before breast cancer, that's where our power lies in reducing our risk of ever having a recurrence. So go and check out the lead with love workshop, and watch me walk through this modified model and see exactly how thoughts create the results you're living in, and they create what we feel in our body, and how choosing a different thought, even if it's an uncomfortable new one, can start to create something different for you. All right, my friends, the references to all the studies are in the show notes. The link to living well after breast cancer is in the show notes. And if you want to work with me one on one, you can go to my website or my app, the breast cancer recovery coach, I keep saying my app, because I'm super excited about it. It's brand new. Just came out, like two days ago. I'm super excited to have it, because it makes accessing my website and everything that I have on it, the podcast, everything so much easier. And if you were listening, I like easy. How can this be easier, right? So check out the links. Come and work with me. You can do private coaching. You can join my better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, where we do incredible, incredible work together. Or also do metabolic health coaching. We really get to know the language of your body. We get to. Look at your labs. We get to look at your nutrition genomics. We get to understand what your body is telling you so that you can start learning how to communicate with a better and build a healthier relationship with your best friend in the world, this body that's carrying you through this life. So before we go, I just want to wrap up with where we started. I want to come back. The practice of showing up for your mind in the same way you show up for your body is one of the most powerful things you can do for your health. So be good to yourself, and I'll talk to you again next week. Take care.

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You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

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Give it all you got no hesitating.

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You've been waiting all your night. This is your

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moment. This is your moment.