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:

• Barrett, L.F. & Simmons, W.K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419-429.
• Hutchinson, J.B. & Barrett, L.F. (2019). The power of predictions: An emerging paradigm for psychological research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(3), 280-291.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.
• Neff, K.D. (2023). Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 193-218.

Resources Mentioned:

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

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kajabi.kajabiapp&hl=en_US

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Read the full transcript:

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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. Hey, friends, thanks for being here. You know, I want to tell you a little something. When I first started, the one goal that I had was to create a space where any woman who had had breast cancer diagnosis could come and get information she needed to help her create a healthier body, a healthier, happier life, and let her know she was not alone out there. But recently, I realized that 63% of the people who watch my videos on this channel have never subscribed to the channel. And what happens when more people subscribe is the audience grows, and it makes it easier for other people who need this information to find it. So when that happens, I can actually get even bigger and better guests to come on the show to give you all the information you need to help build the best life you can possibly live. So if you haven't done so yet, check right now and see if you're subscribed. If you're not, please hit the subscribe button, because you'll be doing a favor to every other woman out there who's ever had a breast cancer diagnosis. Thank you so so much. It's incredible what that means to me and to the world out there. All right, that being said, friends, let's jump in to Episode 463 I want to talk with you about something I get asked about often, and something I have a very strong opinion about. Let me tell you a story. The other day, I was talking with a friend of mine, and she was telling me about a friend of hers who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and she asked me, What do you think is the most important thing you've done to support your healing? And without hesitating, I said, worked on my mindset. And she's Yeah, I get that. But what I mean, what has helped you the most physically? And I said, again, working on my mindset. And I stand by that comment 100% and I know some of you might hear that, and think you know what I deal with really, real stuff in my body, right? Whether it's a cancer diagnosis that you're going through treatment now that you're living with, whether it's after treatment, and you're dealing with hot flashes and you have fatigue, everything feels like an effort. You've got real symptoms in your body you're dealing with a real life and trying to support yourself and prioritize your body and your wellness. So if me telling you to work on your mindset feels like I'm telling you that you can just think your way out of something, or that it's somehow your fault if you're not thinking correctly, that's not what I'm saying at all. So I want to be really clear. I'm not talking about positive thinking. I'm not talking about pretending things are fine when they're not. I'm not talking about affirmations on your bathroom mirror that you don't believe when you say them. What I am talking about is the work of looking honestly at what you believe is possible in your life and your body, and where those beliefs come from, and whether they are actually yours or whether they were handed to you, because I will tell you, after 14 years of managing cancer in my life, I have learned a lot, and after My stage four cancer diagnosis in 2020 the most intense work that I did, right off the bat, was to actually believe I could heal. It wasn't changing my diet, it was believing I could heal. And I spent a lot of time on that. I spent a lot of time noticing if that belief was real for me, or whether every time I would say it, or every time I would write it, I could sense in my body, and I could hear in my brain. I didn't buy into it. I didn't believe it, and I would see the reasons why I didn't believe it, because nobody else believed it, and I believed them because my oncologist didn't believe it, and I felt uncomfortable saying I did believe it, because everybody around me said this is uncurable. All of those reasons were blocks in my mind to getting myself to believe what I wanted to create in my life. I needed to know that every cell in my body was bought into the belief that I could heal. It was very important to me, because when I did that, when I worked through all the blocks, when I realized I believe this, don't think it's possible. I believe. Leave this and I don't have to talk to anybody else. I don't have to get anybody else to believe. I don't have to convince anybody else. I get to believe, regardless of what anybody else says. And when I believed, things got a lot easier, not easy, but easier. And it doesn't matter if what you want to bring into your life is healing your body, or what you want to bring into your life is something else is a healthier lifestyle. Is more of a sense of peace. The question becomes, do you believe it? Do you believe you can do it. Because when you truly believe, then you are solid in yourself. And that is an act of self love. And as I've said so many times, when you love something, when you love someone, you show up for them. You don't second guess it. You might say from time to time, this is hard. This takes a lot of energy, but I'm showing up for you, right? If it's the person you love most in the world, you're going to take care of them, you're going to nurture that relationship. And that works the same for you. So when you believe it's possible, you're willing to do the hard things. You're willing to say this is worth it, because I'm worth it. So the mindset work, the work of seeing your imposter syndrome, at dealing with your beliefs of unworthiness, at allowing yourself to honestly look at the fears that are within you, that is the work that lets you build a loving relationship with yourself and your body, and from that place, feeding yourself well becomes easier. Moving your body regularly becomes easier. You look forward to it. You want it, because it's an act of love, choosing who gets to be in your inner circle, who feeds you, who fills you, who lights you up, it becomes easier because you know you deserve it, and you find ways to let go of the self judgment and a lot of toxic people around you all the time, and all of that then becomes a natural extension of how you feel about yourself and the actions you take to support yourself, so the things before you believe you can do it, and you're just thinking, well, somebody told me I had to. Somebody said, this would be better if I did. You don't believe that you're doing it for yourself and you're doing it for that future version of you that you're going to create. Well, then it's a punishment. But when you decide to do the mind work and you believe in it, then it moves from being a punishment or a chore to something that is an act of love, and it feels totally different, right? So not just me telling you that is my own experience, and that is the experience I have from working with hundreds of women, but there's also science behind it. You know, I love the science. You know, I love to share the science. A neuroscientist at Northeastern University. Her name is Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's done decades of work on how the body actually does work, and what she found is that most people experience themselves as sensing the world and then responding to it, but that's not actually what your brain is doing. Our brains, our human brains, are not reactive machines that respond to objective realities. They're predictive organs that constantly construct our experiences, our emotions and even our sense of self. So your brain is making a prediction all the time about what happens next, about what things mean, about what's possible, about what's not, and it makes those predictions based on what it has seen before, based on your past, based on your environment, based on what you've seen, based on what you've been taught. And here's something that's so impactful, I think the brain merges input and recollections to form your personal understanding of events. For instance, when we're talking about chronic pain, that can actually linger if the brain's predictions are not updated after an illness or an injury. So your brain is constantly running predictions, and if the predictions don't get updated, you keep living inside the old version of what is happening. And this is why mindset work matters so much, because if your brain is predicting that you cannot heal, the Healthy People are other people, then it's filtering everything you experience through that prediction and the small evidence of healing, the winds, the moments of feeling. Better. They don't get logged the same way. The brain is busy confirming what it already believes. And I can tell you, that's something I've been working on for the past couple of months. As I've had some significant pain, I catch myself all the time thinking, going to be dealing with pain again today, and when I catch I'm like, whoa, whoa, don't go there, right? Expect to be pain free. And I've really had to work on my mindset around that. So let me give you an example of how this might work in regular life, this predictive machine. Okay, so I live in Southern California, and Duffy boats are a really popular thing here, and I didn't realize until I hosted my first in person retreat, and I had some clients come to California from other states, from the east coast, where Duffy boats are not common. So if you don't know what a Duffy boat is, is what I call a floating dining room table. It's a small electric boat that seats pretty much up to 12 people. It has a canopy over the top, so it shades you from the sun. It's got benches all around the edges the inside of the boat with a table in the middle. So typically, when you go out on a Duffy boat, you bring snacks, maybe a charcuterie board, maybe some tea, maybe a bottle of wine. Someone drives the boat, which is super simple to do, and you all sit around talking and laughing. It's got, usually a Bluetooth speaker, so you play music, you dance on the boat. It is one of my most favorite things to do. And in fact, when something comes up, like my birthday and just recently, Mother's Day, my husband and my kids know mom's gonna want to go out on a jumpy boat. I just love being on a Duffy boat with the people I love. There's just no feeling like being on the water this slow floating. It's like a lazy river kind of feeling right? Duffy boats are not made for the ocean. They're made for marinas. So you drive around inside a marina, and there's usually some really, really, really beautiful homes on the water, in the canals, in the marina, and so one time, I'm not on the Duffy boat with my husband, and I'm admiring these phenomenal houses, right? They're just gorgeous, and there's boats parked out in front of them. So most of these houses have a boat slip, and some of these boats are bigger than the houses they're parked in front there's certainly many of them are bigger than my house. And on the patios for some of these homes, I start noticing these little tight stores, you know, the kind of big plastic slides the kids sit in the little cars, little tight stores. I see them on these patios, and I see this whole play area set up where the child that's playing there is living in this gorgeous home, looking out on the canal, looking out on these stunning, stunning boats, for the most part. And I said to my husband, that's fascinating. Think about that. That kid lives in this gorgeous house the Marina is their view out their back door. And that is normal to this child. It's just life. It's just a child's reality. It's the way the child, the life the child was born into. And it's a life of wealth and beauty and water nature. And as that child grows, of course, it's going to believe that living this kind of life, and in places like this is possible, because for them, it just is right. That's just how life is, and it's the things that you achieve. No imagine a child of the same age in a very impoverished inner city neighborhood. Maybe they live in Section Eight housing. Maybe they don't have many toys, if any toys. Maybe they don't have enough food. What is that child's reality? That child is going to have to do a lot of work later on in life to be able to believe that the first child's life is even available to them.

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They're

14:01
going to have to work so hard to believe that's possible in their life and in their reality, they're going to work so hard to believe that it's true, and the work for them to get there is going to be so big, because every prediction their brain has been Running for years says this is what life looks like for someone like me, this is the way to live. This is what we do, we struggle, we go hungry. That's what my life looks like. So obviously, it's more complicated than that, and and I'm not saying that a wealthy, wonderful, blessed life is a bad thing. I'm just saying. Think about the comparison, if the brain, the organ itself, is a predictive machine, and from infancy, we're raised in a certain environment, the brain is going to predict that if we live in an environment where we function inside a medical system. That says curable, not curable, horrible, whatever gives a label to something, and we're always taught that. And I say this, you know, when it comes to us recovering from breast cancer, or even someone finding out we have breast cancer, cancer was a death sentence for so long, right? The medicines that were available. I remember in 1993 when my brother was diagnosed with cancer, and he went into chemotherapy, which was a very, very different experience than what it is now. And it was still known that if the cancer doesn't kill him, the chemo probably will right, very different experience from what we have now, but it's a conditioned belief on a societal level, and changing that belief is a big struggle. So cancer diagnosis is still very terrifying. Not that it isn't serious at all, right, but our brains, an individual and even as a social level, are going to be in fear of death because it's a fear based diagnosis. It's a fear based approach to health, right? People don't get a breast cancer diagnosis and then say, That's okay. I believe I can heal. I know this is serious, I know it's a lot of work, but I also know people heal. That is not a common mentality, right? So I'm just using this illustration of different children's lives to bring us back to what our brain is going to predict. Because haven't we been told our whole life horrible things about cancer? I know, I sure have. I could remember, gosh, as a young person watching they had those after school specials. I don't remember who produced them, but I remember one time seeing an after school special on a mom that got breast cancer, and it was terrifying. I can actually picture the scene of her taking off her bandages and seeing herself in front of a mirror, and I just remember thinking, That's horrifying, that's terrible. I'm so scared. And that was the picture I had in my mind. So of course, when I got my first diagnosis, my brain went, Oh, dang, this is terrifying, right? And so mindset work is going to be very important if we don't want to be absorbed in fear, and if we want to be able to have the strength and the confidence to advocate for ourselves in anything in the world, because it's not just a cancer diagnosis that brings up fear, we're taught to fear everything in this world. We've got a brain that's already has a negative bias, and there's a fear based brain. And then we're taught to fear things growing up right, to be afraid of strangers, be afraid of crossing the street. There's so much fear conditioned into us. So the mindset work changes everything. All of us, all of us are one of those children in some way, we're all walking around with a set of predictions our brain has been making, sometimes our whole life, about what's normal, what's possible, what's available to us. And until we look at those predictions and we start updating them, they keep running in the background, like, for instance, the women in my family many of their beliefs about cancer and cancer treatment have been updated because I'm in their life, and I have heard my sister say to me, Well, if I ever get a diagnosis, I know I'm going to be okay because I've seen what you do, and I believe that I'm going to be okay too. So I'm going to start off in a different place, if, God forbid, they ever got that kind of a diagnosis full life from now on, that your body is something that betrayed you, it needs to be managed. And guess what? None of those are facts. All of them are predictions, predictions that were taught to us that can be updated. I was driving somewhere with my husband. This is months ago, and where we were driving, there was a bunch of senior living kind of communities, and the billboards that were advertising them were saying, you know, low cost, and just really reinforcing the mindset of whoever lives here is going To be someone who can't afford to live differently. And I said to my husband, I hate that so much. I hate so much that in our society, we condition people to believe that when they get old, older, right when they're I mean, I'm 62 and I see this all the time, conditioning. They'll show people on videos or movies or commercials, and they'll say over 60, and they show some decrepit old person with a freaking Walker. I'm like, Oh my God. I do not identify with that. I do not identify with this idea that everybody, as we move through life, as we get older, we're going to have to be poor. We're going to. Have to be broke. We're going to have to struggle with finances, but that's what our society conditions us to believe. And if that's not what we want in our future, we have got to do the mindset work to reprogram ourselves. So I feel like I was very lucky even before my stage four cancer diagnosis, because I'd already been working with life coaches and business coaches to help me see what I could not see in myself, to help me see where I was holding limiting beliefs. And there's a finding from behavioral science that I absolutely love, and it says we tend to notice opportunities based on what we already believe is possible. So if your brain has decided that healing isn't available to you, you will literally not see opportunities for it that are right in front of you. And not because something's wrong with you, but it's because that's how your brain works. And I remember talking with my husband about this, looking around and thinking, anything I want has to be possible, because I can see other human beings in the world who have done this, or who have built this, who have accomplished this, and they are just people, and I am also a person. And so if they could do it, I could do it. And just like the child example, it's going to be easier for the one child that was maybe born into an abundant life than it is for someone who wasn't. But it's still out there, and it's still possible. And my husband would say things like, yeah, they had a leg up, or they inherited or they know somebody. And I would say that may be true, but it doesn't matter if you really believe it is possible. So there was a very well known psychologist, Dr Albert Bandura, out of Stanford University. He spent decades studying something called self efficacy, which is just a fancy word for your belief in your own ability to do a specific thing. And what his research showed is that self efficacy beliefs are cognitions thoughts that determine whether health behavior change will be initiated, how much effort will be expended and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and failures. So to say that more clearly, whether you start, how hard you try, how long you stick with it, when things get hard, all of that is shaped by what you believe you're capable of. So if you believe you can't change your eating, you're not going to change your eating. Or you might try, but then you'll quit if you believe you cannot be the kind of woman who moves her body daily, you're not going to be, not because it isn't true that you could be, because the prediction is running and the prediction is shaping your actions, and the way that you update that prediction is not by trying harder. It's by giving your brain small real evidence that something different is possible, one day at a time, one step at a time. So let's say you believe you could never go a day without a croissant. And I have had women come to me with a cancer diagnosis and tell me right up front, right out the bat, as we have a consultation, I am not giving a pasta. I'm not giving up croissants. They're a part of my life. I have one every day, and I can't live without them. Okay, you love your croissant. It's a part of your morning. And you decide you want to do some work on this. That's the key. You have to decide. You have to decide, I'm willing to see this differently, because if you don't, it's not going to change. So you start by just opening the door. You say to yourself, you know what? It's possible that I could go a day without a response, because I know there are people in the world who do that. And then you have six croissants a week instead of seven. And then you say, You know what? I think I could do five croissants a week, and then four. And then, every time you achieve that, every time you reduce it by one, you're showing your brain. It's possible you're updating the prediction, and that's so much easier and so much kinder than just saying, oh my god, I love croissants, but I have to give them up. I'm going to power through that's not going to work, not for very long. And when you think about both of those descriptions, which one sounds like the more loving way to live with yourself, right? This is the work of self compassion. And Dr Kristin Neff at the University of Texas. She's done so much work. She's like the queen of self compassion, and she's done a lot of foundational research on self compassion, and a review she did on the research by. Found that self compassion is associated with health promoting behaviors, and I love the way she puts it very simply, when people care about themselves, they will care for themselves. Write that down. Think about that. Put that on your bathroom mirror. When I care about myself, I will care for myself. That's everything. And the mindset work is what lets you actually care about yourself. And when you actually care about yourself, taking care of yourself stops being a discipline problem and starts being something you do like you would do for someone else that you love. And you know, I hear this from my clients so often. I tell my kids, do this, do that. I tell them, stop eating this, stop eating that. And then I say, okay, great, talk to me about your lifestyle. Well, I mean, if they're going to eat it, I'm going to eat it too, right? It's in the house, so of course, I partake in it. Yeah, that's not going to work, right? If we want other people to change, we have to do that change ourself first. We have to be that example. We have to care about ourselves so much that we take care of ourselves, and that's how we teach other people who we love to do the same thing. So there is so much more to healing and health than food and exercise. I think actually, the most important work we do in healing is connection, learning to express ourselves, learning to love ourselves, learning to be honest and authentic in our relationships, learning to use your voice, meaning to say no when we mean no and yes, when we say yes in a compassionate way, in a caring way, choosing who gets to be in our inner circle. All of that is a huge part of the work that I do with clients. It's a huge part of the work I do with myself. Because just as the example I gave you about a parent setting the example for their children as a coach, I need to know how hard it is to do that for myself before I can help someone else. So I can tell you with 100% certainty that this ease of success in any of these areas of life is not possible without the mindset piece. If you do not believe it, if you do not believe that you have the right to use your voice, you won't if you don't believe that you're worthy of having the things you desire in your life, you will not have them, even if that includes healing, even that includes your dream of whatever perfect health is for you. So whether you are newly diagnosed, whether you've been out of treatment for years, whether you want healing or better relationships or more peace or just a different life. We're always creating our own experience. Right? Life is going to happen? That's not a question. But what we believe about what's happening, what we believe is possible from here, what we choose to build from where we are now, that's ours. We get to decide that. And the work is to look at the predictions your brain is running and ask, Are these still mine? Do they still serve me, or were these handed to me by childhood, by culture, by diagnosis, by doctors, by the Internet, by an influencer? Because you can update those predictions, and the research is very, very clear on that in the smallest piece of new evidence, one day, one choice, one moment of treating yourself, the way you would treat someone you love is how that happens. So what if we decided to believe healing was available to us. What would change? About how you eat today, about how you move today, about who you let take up space in your life. And that's the work, right? That's the real work. So the most important thing I've done as my healing is exactly that work on my mindset. Work on my belief systems. Work on what I believe a person who's healed from metastatic breast cancer does in their life, and what I get to choose to believe I can accomplish what's possible for me. So if this resonates with you, and you want more support, and you want a community that supports you in creating the life you want, the health you want, the mindset you want. Come and join the better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership. This is the work we do. The link is in the show notes, and you can find all the references for the podcast in the show notes as well, which is at the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward, slash, 463, come and check out my website. There's a lot of free resources there that could also help you. The breast cancer recovery coach.com All right, friends, I hope that's helpful, and I will talk to you again next week. Until then, Please be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care