Episode Overview

In this episode, we talk about something that is very real but rarely explained in a way that truly makes sense. Why does emotional pain feel so physical? Why can heartbreak feel exhausting in your body, not just your mind?

This conversation was inspired by a season of physical pain that led me to start asking deeper questions. What is actually happening in the body when we hurt? And why does emotional pain sometimes feel even harder to move through than physical pain?

We walk through the science in a simple, grounded way so you can better understand what your body is doing and why your experience makes sense.

You will learn:

• Why emotional and physical pain use the same pathways in the brain
• How inflammation and stress hormones contribute to fatigue
• Why remembering emotional pain can feel like reliving it
• What it actually means to process pain instead of just pushing it away
• How to support your nervous system in a way that feels safe and doable

This episode is not about fixing yourself. It is about understanding yourself so you can respond with more compassion and less judgment.

Because when you understand what your body is doing, you stop asking what is wrong with me and start asking how can I support myself better?

Resources Mentioned:

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

Download the app:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/breast-cancer-recovery-coach/id6720763813

REFERENCES

• Roerink, M.E., van der Schaaf, M.E., et al. (2015). Fatigue in chronic inflammation — a link to pain pathways. Arthritis Research & Therapy, 17(1), 294.
• Research on central sensitization in chronic pain conditions.

On memory, the amygdala, and emotional pain reactivation:

• Hanson, R. Research on negativity bias and memory encoding.
• LeDoux, J.E. Research on the amygdala, fear memory, and emotional reactivation.
• Research on the autobiographical memory system and the persistence of pain (neurocognitive framework for chronic pain).

On naming emotion and nervous system regulation:

• Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

On self-compassion and physiological regulation:

• Neff, K.D. Research on self-compassion, cortisol, and heart rate variability.

On psychological and emotional stress as inflammatory drivers:

• Alschuler, L. Cancer Therapies teachings, Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health.

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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, you are listening to Episode 460 of better than before breast cancer, and I am your host, Laura Lummer, and today we're going to talk about something that affects all of us, and I don't really think that we speak about it in kind of real life terms. You know, a lot of times podcast episodes are great because they're informative and they're updating us on science and and mindset techniques and things like that. And this is some real life stuff. And I think it's important that we sometimes dig into the challenges of life without, you know, getting stuck in them. We don't want to indulge in it, but talk about what's really real. And after a breast cancer diagnosis, after, well, when we age, after menopause, when we're on aromatase inhibitors when we've had surgeries, and just as a part of life, you know, as we get a little bit older, pain becomes a part of life, oftentimes, and that sucks, but I will tell you, over the last several weeks, a little over a month now, I've been dealing with some pretty miserable bursitis, tendonitis. It's affected my sleep. It's been so painful. It's really affected my quality of life. I've been taking a lot of things off the calendar just because I don't feel like I'm in the place where I can show up the way I want to show up, right? And I'm sitting there one day and I'm so bone tired because pain is exhausting, right? And chronic pain is exhausting. And on the one hand, I'm thinking, Okay, I'm about ready to go knocking door to door in the community that I live in, saying, who has got something to stop this pain? I'll go anywhere. I'll do anything. I'll take anything, something that will give me relief. And that's really what inspired this episode, because being in that place got me to thinking about something that is really meaningful. And I started to think about how when physical pain is so intense, there does come a point where I don't care what it is that you could give me, if it will stop the pain for a little while, I'm going to take it. And I also thought about that has got to relate to emotional pain too. You know, I have some family members that are addicts with substances you have substance abuse issues. And of course, we see the stories. We know people. I know many people around me that have had substance abuse issues, and in that moment, it occurred to me. I thought, wow, you know what? This is probably not that different from really deep emotional pain. Because if you're in really deep emotional pain, I think just like physical pain, you just want it to stop, right? You want a moment a break. You even feeling numb would be better than feeling what you're feeling right? We believe that. In fact, it was just this morning. I made an appointment early this morning to go to a cold plunge because I had a really rough night, and all I could think about was, I want to feel numb. I want to be in an ice cold plunge that numbs every nerve in this body just to give me a break. And I think that that happens a lot when we have devastating news, devastating experience, a loss, a betrayal, a divorce, and we just get to that point where we want pain to stop. So I started thinking about why I felt so tired, and I started to go down the AI rabbit hole and wondering, what is it about pain that causes exhaustion, and why does emotional pain sometimes feel like physical pain. Is it really physical pain, or is it just something we say? Is it all in our head? So I started doing some research, and I want to share it with you, because I think this will help you not judge yourself if you're in either emotional or physical or both types of pain, get a better understanding of what the body is going through so that you can support yourself in a better way. And just as I talk about our body and our mind in other lenses, you know, through, how do we support it? How do we have the best possible relationship with this amazing body that our consciousness is existing in? How do we do that? And what I think is the more we can understand it, the better our relationship can be, just like another person in your life, the more you can understand that person, where they're coming from, what their life experiences are, the more empathetic you can be to them, the more you can understand what to offer them and when, and I truly believe that works the same with us. So I want to talk with you today about why what's happening in your body when you're in pain, and the way that your brain treats emotional and physical pain, which I think is a really important piece of why we start to pull away from life when we've been hurt emotionally. And this conversation came up recently with a group of my members in the better than before breast cancer membership, as we were talking about leading with love, what we're really focusing on this quarter is, how do we love ourselves? How do we lead our lives with love, in relationships, in interactions with the world. And we started to discuss, you know, how do we view or how do we stay open? How do we keep our heart open when we've had emotional pain? So we're going to talk about why remembering emotional pain puts you right back in it isn't that fascinating. I've always thought about that. I thought, you know, I could recall probably the worst physical pain I've ever felt, which was childbirth. And I could talk to you about childbirth. I've had four children. I was terrified leading up to the birth of the three, because I didn't know what to expect till I had the first one. And yet, I could talk about it, and it's not going to upset me. But if I were to bring up to you the experience of my brother's death, or what I went through leading up to my brother's death, I could literally make myself feel sick again, heart sick, right? And I wanted to understand why is that happening? Because one of the things I work with my clients on is called the embodied thought model. And that means, why do we feel the sensations? Not the emotions? The emotions too are an important piece of it, but the sensations, what's happening in our body. How do we connect to what's happening where we feel it? What does it really feel like? And how do we continue to reinforce that neurological pattern that helps us remember that thoughts create emotions. Emotions create sensations. Sensations are telling us what's going on in our body, and I call that the embodied thought model. So we're going to talk about an important question that I hear all the time when we talk about processing pain, how do we do it? Because I don't think most of us were ever taught what that really means. I know I wasn't, and so I want to talk about that, because I think it helps us have more control over our mind, over our body, over our life. Let's start talking about physical pain. So when you stub your toe, for instance, your nervous system lights up for a second. It sends a signal, and then it moves on right. But when pain sticks around, like the tendinitis or bursitis, or the aches so many of us deal with after treatment, or it's called phantom pain right after a mastectomy, because we've had neurological damage to our system, or maybe we have lingering neuropathy after chemotherapy. Maybe we have joint pain from aromatase inhibitors, and these are chronic, right? We feel them often, frequently, maybe every day, something starts to happen inside your body. Your system is treating this like an ongoing emergency, and here's what that looks like. There's inflammation in the body. Your immune system releases chemical messengers called cytokines. These messengers do an important job in the short term. So we have short term pain, we need these they signal the body to rest, to heal, to pull resources toward the injury. But then they don't stay at the injury site. They cross. They travel. They cross over into the brain, and once they're there, they start influencing how the brain is functioning. So they may disrupt dopamine, which is your motivation and reward chemical in your brain. They disrupt serotonin, which affects your mood and your sleep. They activate your stress response, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, or the HPA axis, which is what regulates your cortisol, that stress hormone. So when researchers look at chronic inflammatory conditions, they describe this loop, and it's a really important one. When you're in pain, your cortisol goes up. When your cortisol stays up, your sleep gets fragmented. When your sleep gets fragmented, your cortisol stays up even longer. And when your cortisol stays up, your nervous system becomes more sensitive to pain, not less interesting, right? You would think, after I felt this for weeks, I'd kind of start to get numb to it. But no, it's more. More intense. So we get caught in that spiral, the pain feeds exhaustion, and exhaustion feeds pain, and then it goes further. Because when pain becomes chronic, it sticks around longer than a few weeks, your brain actually does start to change, and researchers call this central sensitization your nervous system in its attempt to protect you, which is what is wired to do, turns up the volume even louder on pain signals. So things that normally wouldn't hurt start to hurt, and things that do hurt feel worse, like I said a minute ago, would become more sensitive to pain. So for those of you who are dealing with pain that hasn't gone away, like neuropathy or joint pain, lymphedema, aches, numbness, surgical pain, all of that, your fatigue is very real. Your exhaustion is very real. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do in a situation that's gone on longer than it was built to tolerate and built to handle. So sometimes we think, Gosh, I'm just so tired all the time. And we say it's menopause, and we say it's hormones, and we say I've got to change your diet. And maybe some of those need addressing and play a role, but maybe it's because the pain is contributing and it's taking a toll on the nervous system. So chronic inflammation isn't just about what's happening in that injured tissue at that injured site. It's systemic and it's circulating. And researcher Dr Lisa alschuler tells us through her research that psychological and emotional stress is actually inflammatory. These are inflammatory stressors, and they mean that the emotional load you carry doesn't just live in your mind. So even if someone says it's all in your head, it's going to eventually affect your body. Because we're so connected, what's in our mind shows up in our blood chemistry. It shows up in the cytokines that are contributing to physical pain. So then I started thinking, Well, if the physical pain can exhaust me like this, an emotional pain can feel identical to physical pain. What is the brain actually doing when we're hurting emotionally? Is it running the same circuits? And the answer is yes, almost shockingly so let me tell you some fascinating information that I found out there was a researcher named Matthew Lieberman out of UCLA. He and his colleague, Naomi Eisenberg had been studying this phenomenon for almost 20 years. They were asking the question, when we say something like that, rejection hurt, or my heart is broken, or this grief is crushing me, is that a metaphor, or is something real happening? So what they did is they put people in a functional MRI, an FMRI machine. These are scanners that shows what parts of your brain are actually active, and they had these people play a simple virtual ball tossing game with what the participants thought were two other players. So halfway through, the other players stopped throwing the ball to them. They just left them out. And that's it, this small social rejection in a silly game of tossing a ball around. But what happened? What lit up on their brain scan was the exact same region that lights up when you experience physical pain. It's called the anticular cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, and these are the regions that register that the ouch of pain. Interestingly, though, they're not registering the location. They're registering the emotional weight of the pain that this hurts I want it to stop part the emotional piece. So a few years later, other researchers started to take this investigation further, and they recruited people who had recently been through a devastating breakup, and they had them look at pictures of their ex partners. Well in the fMRI scanner this time, not only did the emotional pain regions light up, but so did the parts of the brain that process the physical sensation of pain, the parts that normally activate when you burn your hand or you break a bone. So heartbreak isn't really just a metaphor. These researchers found that the overlap was specific enough to predict physical pain with up to 88% accuracy. That's wild. So when we say grief feels like a weight on our chest, or loss causes a physical ache, or we felt that fear in our bones, it's really not just being dramatic. Our brain is running those experiences on the same exact hardware. And here's. Another piece that I found really, really astounding, another team of researchers wanted to see if the overlap was so strong that you could treat emotional pain with a physical pain killer. So they took people who had recently experienced social rejection, and they gave half of them regular over the counter Tylenol and half of them a placebo every day for three weeks, and the people taking the Tylenol reported fewer hurt feelings when their brains were scanned at the end of the study, they had less activity in the same pain regions, wild right now, I'm not telling you to go take painkillers whenever you're sad. Please, actually don't do that. But what this study shows, and the fascinating part of it, is how deeply emotional and physical pain circuitry is shared. So the body is not making a clean distinction between the hurt of a sprained ankle and the hurt of being rejected, grieved or scared, and something that I really think we should all sit with and just contemplate. Once you understand that the brain treats emotional pain the same way it treats physical pain, I think things start to make a lot of sense about this body that we're learning to love. We think about how the body responds to physical danger. So if you reach towards a hot stove and you get burned, your brain, your brain files that away. So the next time you get near a hot stove, you feel something, a little flash of caution. You pull back, you don't burn yourself. You don't even have to think about it. Your nervous system is protecting you, which is a great thing, right? That's how we survive. That's how we stop hurting ourselves. But I think this is important, because what we don't realize or connect is that your brain is doing the exact same thing with emotional pain. So if someone you loved said something that hurt you cut you deeply, your brain filed that away. If your heart got broken, if you felt you were betrayed or you were counting on somebody who wasn't there when you needed them, your brain filed that away. And the next time you had an opportunity to get close to something that even looked a little bit like that experience, your nervous system does what it's built to do. It pulled back and it said, no, not again. So after difficult emotional experiences like a cancer diagnosis that qualifies, that's friggin traumatic, we often start to shy away from life without even noticing or realizing what we're doing. We stop making long term plans, because what if we were living our life something pulled the rug out from under us. It was devastating. Wow. What if we start to think everything's okay again and safe again? Will that happen again? That's really scary. So we start to really hesitate to step into life. We got our heartbreak in, and then we hesitate to get close to new people, because what if they leave and we pull back from activities that we used to love, because what if I start doing that and get really into it, and then I get sick, or I need a surgery, or something happens, and then I can't do it? That's what happened to me before. And we start saying no to things that we would have said yes to before, and most of us beat ourselves up about it, because we judge ourselves. We judge our own self worth, and we call ourselves anxious or closed off or boring or stuck, but what's really happening is your nervous system is doing exactly what it does when you reach for a hot stove. It's trying to keep you from getting burned again. And isn't it interesting that we use that language, right? Well, I know I'd really like to go all in on my relationship, but I'm going to stay right here at 70% because I don't want to get burned. So interesting the language that we use. But unlike a hot stove, which you really do need to stay away from emotional pain, isn't something you can protect yourself from by avoiding life. Because the thing about avoiding life, to avoid pain is that you also end up avoiding joy. You end up avoiding love, you end up avoiding connection, you avoid the very things that make life worth living. And then you're in a different kind of pain, a pain of a world that's gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. And so one of the most important reasons to learn how to process pain isn't just to feel better in the moment, is so your nervous system doesn't have to keep protecting you from a life you actually want to be living. Okay? So we see how physical and emotional pain interact. How are they different? So physical pain and emotional pain share so much of the same machinery. Why does emotional pain feel harder? Why, like I told you at the beginning, can I recall physical pain and not get emotionally upset, but if I recall emotional pain, I can feel physically ill. I thought that was a. Fascinating question. And here's what I discovered, when your brain stores a physical pain memory, it stores it mostly as fact. So this happened, this hurt, it's over, right? The memory lives in the part of your brain that handles events, and you could retrieve that event information, that factual information, without re triggering the experience. But emotional pain gets stored differently because your brain registered it as a threat to you, a threat to your safety, a threat to your sense of self, a threat to your place in the world. Because of that, it filed this information right next to the amygdala, your alarm center. And here's the thing about the amygdala, it doesn't have a good sense of time. It doesn't know the difference between now and then. So when you pull up an emotional pain memory, the amygdala fires again, and it fires as if the threat is happening right now. And that is why your body responds, your heart rate, your cortisol, your breathing, all of it changes in real time because of your nervous system genuinely believing you are back in the moment. Now there's a few other reasons. Emotional pain gets reactivated more than physical pain. When your wrist healed, your brain got an all clear signal, your brain said the threat is over, but with emotional pain, there's often no clean, all clear, the person who hurt you is still alive, the diagnosis you got could come back. The loss is still a loss, so the brain keeps the file open and ready. On watch, we don't get the all clear. And how many times have I talked about that on the show? We thought about getting cancer the same way we thought about the flu originally, right? You get the flu, you get better, you move on, but then you get cancer, and you get out of treatment, and you're like, why do I still feel like this because cancer was a real threat to you, a threat to your life. It snuck up on you. It's not part of a normal everyday thing. It's a threat. So every time something reminds us of that emotionally devastating experience, a song, a smell, an anniversary, tone of voice, a doctor, a hospital, it reactivates the whole arm. Emotional pain changes how you see yourself. Physical pain does not so when you break your wrist, you don't think less of yourself. You don't think, God, I'm so dumb. I broke my wrist. Your wrist got hurt, but when somebody betrays you, or you were rejected, or you got a diagnosis that changed your life, you often think, am I lovable? Am I good enough? Am I safe? Am I dumb? Am I going to be okay? Right? So those memories linger. They have something to do with your self worth, and you're rehearsing a threat to who you actually are, not to what happened to you, and your nervous system responds fully every single time with the stress cascade. This is why rumination is exhausting. Worry is exhausting. Every loop through the story isn't just a thought, it's a re experience. Is your body going through the emotional pain all over again, creating physical pain as a result of it, one memory 10 times an hour is 10 stress responses. And that's what makes rumination exhausting, and why learning to move through pain, instead of endlessly circling pain is one of the most important things you can do for your body and your mind. Now, here's an interesting thing about emotional pain. It's harder to locate than physical pain, right? I can point to exactly where my shoulder hurts right now, but emotional pain moves. Sometimes it's in your chest, sometimes it's in your stomach. People tell me they feel it in their skin. People tell me they feel it in their throat. So your brain, again, is using more energy trying to make sense of something that it can't put its finger on. It can't point to the source of emotional pain. So emotional pain often gets suppressed, especially for women, especially for survivors, as we're told, stay positive, be grateful you're alive. Don't bring other people down. Don't worry other people. And a lot of those stories aren't told to us. We tell them to ourselves. We get handed the brave one costume, the super pure, the superhero pink cape, the big pink ribbon, right? You're a warrior, and sometimes we never take that cape off. And research on suppressed emotion is very clear. It does not make pain go away. It drives it deeper. It. Or is it in your body and it keeps costing your body energy? So this is such an interesting thing, and it takes me to a question I hear all the time when I speak with clients about processing emotional pain, how do I do it? What does that even mean? I did move past it. I put it away. Big difference between putting away and processing. Processing pain isn't fixing pain. But do we think that it is right I fixed that

25:34
it's not thinking your way out of it, or finding a silver lining or an affirmation that says, Oh, this is better, right? And I think that's what a lot of us are taught to do with uncomfortable emotions. Just go up into our heads, right? Talk ourselves out of it. But processing means actually something, I think, simpler, but also harder, because it means letting the sensation, the physical, the physical sensation of emotion move through your nervous system without shoving it down on one side or spinning another story, I remember when I said just a few minutes ago, if we don't process an emotional injury, the brain keeps it on file as an active threat, and the active threat shapes our behavior, Even if we don't realize it, because it keeps your nervous system on edge, right on guard, it keeps you contracting away from anything that resembles the thing that hurt you. Like being afraid of food, right? That's very common after cancer. Was it something I ate? You know, what did I do? We have so much fear, and maybe we don't even realize that that's our nervous system saying, maybe that gave you cancer, maybe this gave you cancer. Should you be afraid of everything? And then we start even sometimes, saying we're doing things that are really good for ourselves, but it's motivated by fear. We're still in a stress response. When you actually process pain, not avoid it, but feel it through the nervous system finally gets to file it differently. It gets to move from active threat to past experience, and that is what lets you move forward towards your life again. So let's think about like this. An emotion is a wave, right? It starts small, it builds, it crests, but then it passes, if you let it, most emotions, even the hard ones, move through our body in something like 90 seconds, if we don't interfere with them, what extends them, what makes them last longer, is when we get stuck in the story around them, and we jump into resistance. We start fighting it, because we tell ourselves, I shouldn't feel this way. Why is this happening to me? What if this never stops? I can't handle this, and that's the narrative that keeps the wave coming, instead of letting it move. So processing is different, because it's learning to feel the wave without spinning a story about it, without diving into it, putting more energy into it and causing it to get bigger. So let me give you a little neuroscience behind this, because that's the part that fascinates me. So Matthew Lieberman, the researcher I talked to you about earlier, did another study, and he wanted to understand what happens in the brain when you simply name an emotion. So he had people look at distressing images and either observe them or label them as far as what they were feeling, sad, angry, afraid, grieving, just the word, not explain it, not fix it, just the word of what they were feeling. So when people named the emotion, their amygdala, that alarm system part that we talked about that's here in the front of your brain, it lit up. And Lieberman described it like this. He said, When you put feelings into words, you're hitting the brakes on your emotional response. The naming in itself is the intervention Isn't that fascinating. So he can sit here and say, Oh, dang, I'm scared, or I'm really sad, or I feel abandoned, or even I feel tired of hurting. And I think another one that I see avoidance language come up a lot in is I feel angry. Why is it so hard for us to own being angry? I think a lot of programming conditioning as women that you're not allowed to be angry, right? And be a good girl, be happy, put a smile on. And I think that more often than not, I find it really difficult for women to own and embrace and say I'm angry. But just like besser van der Kolk says, in the Body Keeps the Score, what cannot be named and talked about cannot be healed. That's fascinating, right? When we name an emotion, when we name what we're feeling, it changes what happens in our brain, and it doesn't make the feeling go away, but it does stop us from running the whole show the resistance that comes in the fighting. It is part of the problem. So it's fascinating to think that an emotion lives in the body before it lives in our language. So a lot of what we call processing actually is happening in the sensation. When I sit with a hard feeling, I don't just think about it. I feel it. I notice where it's at. I notice if it's heavy, warm, cold, moving, stuck, and I've talked about it before on the show. When I I've worked, done a lot of work, and continue to do work on anger, on past grudges, on on things I need to let go of. And I'll sit here and I'll feel and I'll think, oh, man, it's hot and red and heavy, and it's in my chest, and it's fascinating, right? I'll look at that, and I'll breathe into it and I'll ask myself, do I want to hold that? Do I want this in my body? Do I want to let it go? And that may sound a little bit woo, woo. But remember, your nervous system is constantly scanning your body for information about whether or not you're safe, so when you locate a feeling and you breathe into it with a slow, long exhale, you're telling your parasympathetic nervous system, it's okay, I'm safe to allow myself to feel like this, right? I don't have to run away from it. I'm safe, and that's really important, because that's our vagus nerve doing its job. That's that nerve that's connecting our gut right to our brain, and we're telling ourselves, I'm showing up for me here in this moment, and I'm safe, and I can allow myself to feel this for as long as I can, right? Like I could say I could feel this for five minutes, maybe I could feel it for three minutes, but I'm going to let myself feel it. It's so cool, right? This is our physiology. When we understand this. Wow, everything is connected, and we don't have to judge ourselves so much we understand how a human body works and it has nothing to do with our self worth. So then we learn how to support it better. So when you process pain through naming it, through feeling in the body, through allowing it to be witnessed, you are not just moving through that. You're teaching your nervous system that it's okay to feel it. You can survive it, right? Hard Things can move on. You don't have to stay alert forever, because maybe a hard thing will come up again, but you'll know you're like, if that comes up again, I know I can get through it. I know I can show up for myself, and that helps you, little by little, like, open back up to life, little bit at a time, not all at once, right? You're not going to go from devastating heartbreak or from a PTSD experience to like, oh my good. It's good. Let's move on, but you start to have awareness and a little bit at a time you learn how to support yourself in the best way. So people ask me all the time, well, you know, thinking about is going to bring it back up. I don't want to get stuck in it again. But there's a difference between feeling pain and focusing on pain, and so we have to really be careful and understanding. We're not pushing pain away. We're not pretending pain isn't there. What we're talking about is the loop that keeps you stuck in pain. So the loop is when your brain just sits there and says, Oh my God. This hurts, this hurts, this hurts. I'm in so much pain. This is horrible. We create a loop of putting energy into the pain, and then the more attention the brain gives to that loop, the louder the pain gets. So think about like when somebody is in pain and we always hear, breathe, breathe, breathe. Why is that important? It's not because inhaling is an analgesic. It's not going to relieve pain, but it's going to distract your brain. If I'm thinking about breathing in for four seconds, holding for four seconds, exhaling for four seconds, leaving my breath out for four seconds, I'm distracting my brain, because my brain can't be thinking, Oh my God, this hurts so bad. This hurts so bad, and be counting my breath at the same time, rumination, the energy and the thought that goes into the pain, that's the thing that turns the volume up and causes the pain to get worse. So why does breath work help? Because it helps you be in this moment. It helps to calm the nervous system down, but it also helps to move the brain away from focusing on the pain. So when I catch myself, or when I've caught myself over the past few weeks

34:01
going, this hurts so bad. What is going on? You know? Why is it? How do I stop it? All of that?

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When I become aware that I'm doing that, I try to shift back to something else, like today. You know, the cold plunge. It was a rough night. I was in a lot of pain. This morning, I thought, I don't want to sit here thinking about the pain in my shoulder. I want to go do something that's going to give me some relief from it, and then cause me also to focus on breath. Because, believe me, when I'm in a 50 degree bathtub of water, I am focusing on my breath. So sometimes we do have to engage in a task, whatever task we might have the capacity to do right depending on the amount of pain you're in. So reading a short walk making tea for me, reading doesn't work because it requires focus. I need to be doing something physical, something that involves breath work, something that involves just distracting my brain like a cold, shocking, cold plunge, right? But sometimes putting on a podcast, like an audible book, will help to distract my attention and help me to think of something else. Yes, and that's not again trying to escape, but because I don't want my brain focusing on the pain signal and making it worse. Okay, so this does work for emotional pain too. When you notice yourself spiraling, right? I can't believe this has happened. What is it comes back? What if I can't handle it? That loop isn't processing. That loop is rumination, and the rumination keeps the inflammatory cytokine circling the pain emotional and physical sensations in the body get worse. So sometimes we need that little bridge, that little gap, to say, distract the brain, so that now I can process in a different way, right? Processing has movement to it. You feel it, you name it. You locate your body and you let it shift. Rumination has no movement. It's the same phrase, unrepeat, the same story, the same volume, over and over and over. So let's put this all together in a little bit of a list, right? What do you do on a day to day basis? First, you name what you're experiencing out loud in your journal to someone you trust, right? And you get very specific. I feel bad is not the same thing as I feel abandoned, I feel invisible, I feel terrified. So being specific really matters, because the brain responds to specifics. When I talked about the embodied thought model, I work with my clients on this all the time. It's about name it specifically. We tend to talk in big generalities, and that's overwhelming for our brain. Name it specifically. The more precise the word, the more regulation you get. Then locate it in the body before you try to solve it. Where is it? Right now, in your throat, in your chest, in your jaw. Name it and then breathe into it, not away from it. Write a slow exhale that's longer than your inhale signals your nervous system that you're safe, and that is a beautiful biochemical shift. Then you're going to catch the loop number four, redirect it gently when you notice your brain is stuck, whether it's hurt, hurt, hurt. Why me? Why me? Give yourself permission to move your attention away to a task, to a breath, to a conversation. I need a break from this, right? Take a break from it, and then finally, find people who can be with you without needing to make you Okay, without needing to fix anything. And that helps us gently stay in life. And this is the piece that's really important when you notice yourself pulling back from something because it might hurt, a friendship, a plan, a trip, right? Fear comes up, hope anything. Ask yourself, is this my nervous system protecting me from real danger, or is it protecting me from the possibility I might get hurt? Two very different things. And the second one is very understandable, but it slowly will shrink your life. So remember that whatever the source of the pain, pain takes less from us when we stop fighting it and we start meeting it, naming it, locating it, breathing into it, sharing it with someone that is safe and supportive, your nervous system is there to protect you, but if we allow it to, that protection can be kind of caged, like a overprotective parent, right? And the way out of that cage isn't to force yourself that to pretend that everything it's fine. It's actually to process what's happening in your nervous system so that it's no longer registering this as an active threat. All right, my friends, if you would like to talk more about that, if you have questions about that, come and find me the breast cancer recovery coach.com you can join my free community living well after breast cancer, right on my website. Or you can join me in the better than before breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, where we work on all this stuff, because everything we do in our mind impacts our body. So if you're focusing on food and exercise and you think, wow, something's still off, something's still missing is the mindset work and it's important and it's challenging, but it's freeing and incredibly powerful at the same time. All right. So check out the website, better than before breast cancer. Download my app, the breast cancer recovery coach app, where you can get into the community even easier, and access my Do It Yourself programs, my coaching programs, get the support that you need. All right, I'll talk to you again next week, until then, be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well.

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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

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no hesitating. You've

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been waiting all your life. This is your

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moment.