1KHO 702: Sometimes I Have Dirt on My Noodles | Dr. Nicole Cain, Panic Proof

Oh, it's a beautiful world Ain't nothing on the screen It's never gonna beat this view Oh, it's a beautiful world And I just wanna share it with, I just wanna share it with you It's a beautiful world Such a beautiful world Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast, my name is Virginia Erich and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside And I have a wonderful, beautiful author on today who wrote this book about panic and anxiety It's called Panic Proof The New Holistic Solution to End Your Anxiety Forever she's the founder of the Holistic Wellness Collective, Dr. Nicole King, welcome Thank you for having me, I'm excited I'm excited too because I've heard a couple stories that are similar to yours I interviewed this author named Justin Wittman early And the story of not being able to sleep And then that kind of rolling into this unexpected panic And I love the book as you talk about how there's signs along the way But sometimes you're not used to looking for the signs And then we're suffering and we don't really know how to get our way out of it You've got a lot of stories in the book that highlight this for different people But I love to hear your story, you say it began with just a few bad nights of sleep due to stress And expanded into a full-fledged emotional crisis And as the panic climbed your level of functioning plummeted So you're in this spot which I actually think is probably really relatable Nicole that you get done with college and you have a lot of debt Because you know you've got all your college expenses And you're trying to start a business, I mean this is super common right And then all of a sudden it's like, uh oh, am I going to be able to make ends meet and it's so stressful Yes, yes, and we can't escape ourselves I feel like for so many things like a fear flying Is we can largely avoid getting on planes And we have alternatives like driving or taking a boat wherever But when it comes to what's happening in our own bodies That's really really challenging, it's really difficult and sleep Is this paradox where the harder we try to sleep The less sleep we get and so for many people and I've had lots of people coming out of the woodwork That say oh my gosh me too, I have such a problem with sleep And because everything that we're told is how to make a sleep, how to make ourselves lose control in a sense, because sleeping is one of the ultimate acts of losing control And that was the beginning of a whole new story for me, was that that journey So you talk about how you know you feel like you've got to take time off You've got to sort of re-equalibrate your body, but you can't You said couldn't take time off, I was in repayment for over a quarter of a million dollars in student loans I just opened an integrative Medical mental health practice with my business partner and you've got the cost of rent and it's double what you were budgeting and so at night you would fall apart And I loved this stoplight metaphor So I've had just a few times in my life and I don't know Like you don't really know like is this a panic attack But I felt like kind of panicky so I'm going to tell you one of them This is just kind of random and it might be a dumb one But my brother got his Super dumb you might be like that wasn't panic. I don't know But my brother got his wisdom teeth out and I was in college and he might have been in college Or maybe he was like at the end of high school. So my brother's getting his wisdom teeth out and My mom was kind of freaked out about it and so I went with my mom to help out and he I don't know like he came out and like he's just all You know, I think they put him under drugs and he's just whatever and he's got this gauze in his mouth And I was kind of freaked out about it, but then my mom kind of freaked out too And so they were like thinking she was gonna faint and they were like running around trying to help my mom And they asked me like you're gonna need to go get a wheelchair for her and I kind I was freaked out But I thought if I show that I'm freaked out They're not gonna let us leave. We're gonna be stuck here like I have to be the strong one It's just kind of like melting down and I went into the hallway and I almost fainted And I've never had that experience before and I like sat on the floor and I'm like feel like I'm gonna black out And I'm like getting all sweaty and I'm like I got to pull it together I'm gonna have to get the wheelchair because like my mom's and it whatever it was just a it's a very Light you know like not a big deal situation, but I felt like this kind of panic and I Love this stoplight exercise that you talk about in the book because You know everyone talks about box breathing and you know different things that you can do in your basically like Sometimes you might be too far gone Absolutely and the stoplight exercise for those who are hearing about this for the first time that I love that you're referring to It looks at anxiety on a spectrum where this we're in the green light zone We feel calm we feel collected we you may have heard it as a ventral vagal It's when we feel connected to other people were relaxed and then stress is happening around us And if we're like a duck and it just rolls off of us It's not stressful to us then we stay in the green light zone But for almost all human beings right that stress will accumulate and we'll get a little activated And then there's that moment between green and yellow which I called the pay attention zone and it's like oh Something is whispering something is different And oftentimes if we can start to become familiar with that pay attention zone or the canary in the mind And we can start to notice that if we can provide an intervention or a solution In that moment we can often avoid becoming anxious But in those situations where we can't or we didn't know about it or like your situation You were really largely quite powerless in the situation There's a lot of pressure in your shoulders we get into the yellow zone So stress is mounting it's getting bigger and bigger and the body starts to talk and louder And then we shift into the red light zone which is more of a crisis state And that's that I'm sitting on the floor I feel like I'm going to faint and you're getting this kind of vasovagal reaction So being able to walk through that is not only validating for the cycle of stress But also it helps us to grow in on what solutions will work when So for you I'm curious do you remember that first moment when you went from like I'm chill I'm green I'm okay to like oh maybe something that's not quite okay Yeah, yes, I do because I remember because it's when I went into the recovery room And that's kind of like whoa And then my mom was already starting to kind of like you know freak out a little bit And so you talk about I thought this was so interesting It's actually really helpful to know because it's a reminder to try and if you can like head it off at the past right like If you can try not to let it get to the crisis situation But yeah, I feel you say tightness in your chest That's how I felt too like a little bit of like or even in my gut like a little bit of worry You know you get that twinge of worry Yeah, so you had this whoa this like yeah, you're going to the recovery room. Oh my gosh whoa and you're Intuitively emotionally aware of not only what you're seeing occur in front of you But also you're you're getting feedback from your loved ones in your environment Yeah, and so I think that really brings up something that's important too is We love to focus on what I can control what do I need to take the in-eat or do I need to do breath work But I think what your story really points out is an opportunity to be cognizant of what's happening in our environment and how the people around us are affecting us And so I wonder what it might have been like for your younger self you're in college To see your mom just regulating Is that like when you think about that? What comes up for you like that piece of the puzzle is seeing her because that was part of your story is seeing her I think you're just like worried and it's a lot of unknowns and uncertainties and like what's going to happen and And probably in retrospect it was not that big of a deal like if I would have been woozy too They would have just had me lay down and get some crackers like we would have all been just kind of in the recovery room But for whatever reason it felt like a big deal and I felt like you know I have to be the strong one and go get the wheelchair and and do those types of things And I didn't necessarily have skill sets back then like you know You read these strategies in your book And so yeah, it's interesting like you said to be aware of that first like the first twinge of it Yeah, so you notice that whoa you notice that first twinge of it and In that moment in a perfect world you could just sit down put your feet up just like ground your body Have somebody there who would have noticed what you're experiencing and helped you walk through it I'm noticing maybe you're getting a little activated getting a little stressed here something we could do to head it off And in your body's wisdom It's like oh oh There may be danger And this is largely bypassing your prefrontal cortex this process happens instantaneously before your logical brain can cut in And the body is already sending out stress hormone before you even know logically what's going on and so It's just absolutely amazing so that the the reframe that I want your listeners to hear is that your body is trying to protect you From something that's a little stressful. So that whoa moment the body's like we've got this You don't even have to worry about it Jenny like we're gonna we're gonna protect you from this metaphorical tiger that we're encountering in your logical brain when she gets back off online later Like now you're like this wasn't a big deal. What was that? Well, that's your logical brain right That was bypassed at the time, but now what's interesting is that many of us have these kinds of stories in the past and the body's gonna remember that Even if logically We're like looking back at it. We're like oh, yeah, that's that's kind of silly I just needed some crackers and we all needed to take a breath the body's like but I remember the smell of the dentist office I remember the look and the gauze and the body may have its own reaction outside of your logical control so There's a lot in the book about well, how do we help recalibrate the body so it's not keeping the score so that it's not holding on to that and creating a vasovagal response when I'm an adult So interesting it's so interesting and you know, I think for me I just reminded me that I need to pay attention you got to really pay attention because you move through these zones and you talked about that Such good wording so there's the pay attention zone This is like the deer in the headlights right you look up. Oh, that's really good. That's a really good analogy Where I miss you and there's like deer everywhere, you know You're always trying to make sure that you don't hit them when it's dusk and so and they do they look up they hear the noise And so like you have this first you know, first reaction and then you're okay now we're in the yellow light zone We're the body starting to produce these chemical reactions. You say good stress and bad stress same You're gonna produce these chemical reactions. Okay, then there's the wonky zone and your body is gearing up to switch into crisis mode And then you're in the red light zone so the red light zone is panic and rage dissociation could be pain and What you say is this is what I didn't know This what you say people tell me they're trying deep breathing motion herbs other great integrative tools in the red light zone and it's not working Yeah, and you use this analogy of like trying to put out a forest fire with the squirt gun at this point You need crisis resources and those other things may not work. Whereas they may have worked in earlier zones Yeah, exactly So I teach people about creating their own little crisis card and we make panic packs. Yes. I saw that in the book Yeah, and so for those who haven't read the book yet a panic pack is this great little or you could call it a carrying clutch You could call whatever you want calm calm kit and inside of it you're going to put strategies that you've already pre-decided You're gonna use in the pay attention zone And so it's like oh, I'm noticing this experience What are my resources because again when we're bypassing logical brain We're not going to be able to likely think is critically or think is effectively About what do I do about it? So we have to make it accessible. We have to make it a habit And like you said if we're able to use those strategies early on That's going to work really well So put all the goodies in the panic pack And then put a little note card in there that says this is what you do So you just pull it out and you look at it And then that creates a sense of power and personal power is the antidote to panic and anxiety That's the big difference is that sense of I can experience yucky things and know that I'm okay and then I got this What a tool the panic pack This is such a fun announcement to make wool bikes is officially the 2026 bike partner of 1,000 hours outside And if you've been around here long enough, you know that's not a casual partnership We care deeply about the tools that help families reclaim childhood and womb is doing exactly that womb is founded by two dads and a Vienna garage who simply couldn't find a bike that actually fit their kids So they built one and what makes womb different is that they don't start with engineering They start with empathy every part of the bike from the lightweight frame to the brakes size perfectly for small hands Is designed to help kids feel capable and confident in a screen dominated world bikes are more than bikes They are freedom. 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Just you shake it up and then you can apply it So different places that can be helpful is around the eyes of course You want to be really mindful if you've you don't want to burn your eyes do freezer burns So maybe like 20 seconds on a minute off 20 seconds on the chest the back of the head or even Underneath of the ear so underneath the ear the vagus nerve runs up along the neck here I guess for those who are listening you won't see it But I'm gesturing at the neck behind the ear where the earlobe is and applying the cold back there to get it Closer to where the vagus nerve is because that will like you said mammalian dive reflex it'll help get us into pairs of pathetic or calm Yeah out of that fight flight freeze stressed sympathetic I love that you had that in there because I've thought about that a lot like the cold water option is just tricky because It's not always available and in for kids You know if they were able to have that maybe like in their backpack or just as something along for them Like it's just so accessible sometimes like if I work later into the evening Sometimes I feel a little bit stressed like am I gonna get my work done or or that type of thing I think that's relatable and so I'll try and have cold water and and that actually it helps a lot The simple things help more than you would imagine another one that you talk about is in this works well because This is the 1000 hours outside podcast people could go find this right now a rough stone and a smooth stone That's amazing This is the fidget you could go outside and find a beautiful a couple beautiful rocks. You don't need a fidget Fidget are fun. Let's be real But a rough stone and a smooth stone have you ever seen those worry stones you get at the The like the little I'm thinking of like Swag or feel like go to like a little shop or a boutique. I always have those little worry stones And it's just you can like even pick a color that's meaningful to you a type of stone that's meaningful place that's meaningful Yeah, yeah, my midwife had this little store for a while and she would have like one that are like shaped into a heart shape Or you know, it does it just does feel good to touch it So you have that in your panic pack one more I want to talk about because it's so interesting to me a bubble wand Yes Yeah, so When we panic Oftentimes we'll find that our heart rate goes up our respiratory rate goes up This imagine if you're running from the tiger you got to breathe deeper harder and faster And then that will fuel that autonomic arousal so if we're sitting on the interstate or we're You know, we're at home and we have our kids and our kids are stressing us out or we get an email that stressing us out Is we don't want to keep breathing fast because there's no actual danger. We want to slow the breath We're going to slow the exhale slowing the exhale is one of the most powerful things that you can do is anywhere you have your breath you just Slowly exhale you notice that uh-oh this whoa you slowly exhale But sometimes we need that feedback and I love this for kids is especially like adults I have bubble ones everywhere. I love them. I have a bunch in my my waiting room bubble on school But this is so good for those who are like okay, we need to slow down my exhale purse my lips and the bubble bubbles Wow Because you think about that's a thing that four-year-olds do and it's a long exhale Yeah, it's just such a good idea and you can get those little teeny one you're big a pack of a hundred of them You know those little teeny ones these are fantastic ideas you use an acronym called tips Little couple of things and a lot of s's uh, you know and and just that you said making even the smallest changes to your health routine can have a big impact On your overall well-being I love to talk about a couple of those tips one of um Was going outside Yeah, yeah changing the scene. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if that would have helped you a lot when you're thinking about your story with your brother Well, I was thinking about that because you know when I left the room and I went out in the hallway because they were sending me down to get a Wheelchair I Sounded the floor. I mean, I would feel like I was gonna faint. I just and then that's who now I was able to collect myself Yeah, you were able to like remove yourself just had her in interrupt and then you got on the ground So you grounded yourself You probably it probably also helped your blood pressure because you Your knees were up. I managed to get on the ground your knees were more closer to the level of your heart And so that's really important. I love that you emphasize that is if you're stressed and you have the ability like let's say your work and It gets the end of your day and I don't know if you're like this But I find myself like typing faster and faster and more and more and more and more like if I just finished it And like really what would be better is to just be like I'm gonna set my phone for three minutes And I'm gonna walk around the building or I'm gonna walk outside and yeah Look at the sun and walk back inside look at the snow piles Michigan walk back inside Yeah Yes to change the environment so tips tip the temperature Which you can do that a lot of times as nature intense exercises paste breathing paired mucle muscle Relaxation Scene sent sip stimuli and even one other idea was to do things that challenge your brain I loved this idea because I had a friend the other day who like sent me she was doing the sudoku Oh, yeah, she sent me a picture of it and I was like you know They're for sale everywhere like every grocery store you can get that on the way out or But I'm like gosh, we're so I think this embodied and we don't I don't know like I never seen anybody really That's doing us to doku or doing a crash or puzzle that didn't they used to be part of like kind of everyday life It was like the newspaper would come And I had a puzzle in it and it was just kind of like part of what you did I remember I so I I used to have a horrible fear of flying And I would get on the plane and I would be so In my default mode network, which for those who are like wait, what was that is default mode network is when we're in that anxiety state and our parts of our brain are activated that are very self-referential They're very it hyper attuned to our thoughts and our feelings and our sensations So I was like oh, I feel a bump. Oh my heart is beating faster. Oh, oh, oh and all these scary things are happening And so when we look at the neuroscience is emotional brain is on a runaway train to trying to protect us And logical brain is being bypassed and so sudoku or logical puzzles are our way of Bringing our executive logical. I've got this panic proof party or brain back on board So now when I fly I do sudoku So that any time I start feeling a little goofy because the errors especially bumpy I just like all right Let's logical brain. Let's go to an easy sudoku puzzle and start doing some mental math and it works really well It's brilliant Anything that pulls your logic in so you talked about chess you talked about jigsaw puzzles same things like which piece would fit here What color am I looking for strategy board games? That's a huge reminder of if you're if you're kid if your family life is feeling like You know high pressure high stress that they give the different light to family game night doesn't it? Yes, yeah totally I love that and we can totally have fun with it So if your kids are getting really stressed you can teach them There's this activity is called havining or a miktola de amplification and I didn't include this in the book So this will be like a little bonus thing that people will get from your episode is You and your kids all ages could benefit from this is you spend Maybe 10 to 30 seconds noticing the yuck is like make the yuck really big. Let's really notice it Where's the yuck in your body? Where do you feel that stress? Oh, I feel it in my heart or I feel like I'm gonna throw up or I feel like I want to scream Okay, we'll notice that and then you do that for about 10 to 30 seconds and then you do the mental math So now we've activated the emotional brain and then we're gonna do mental math So you're gonna say all right. I want you to say your ABCs out loud. Okay, let's count backwards from 40 to 0 by 2's Let's say all of your favorite Avenger characters Let's say all of the colors of the rainbow So what is happening is we're leveraging neuroplasticity to go from emotional brain to now I have a road to logical So that when that emotion pops up in the future that you've laid down those shortcuts to the actual Antidote so that your executive team your logical brain your coping brain is able to solve the problem for you Wow, I'm so glad that you explain that because it reminds me of when our kids are younger and our kids are older now But they you know like all kids have meltdowns right they're emotionally overstimulated and if we would be like let's race to the car or You know who can you just like it's a It's a change in their brain that's happening. Yeah, all of a sudden there's like oh or I'm gonna do or who can who can clean up the fat Who can get this or can someone but it's and it would help Huh, I just thought it was like distracting, but there's an actual thing going on Yeah, because it because especially the way you just said doing it is that you're incorporating moving the body into it And so then that moves the excess adrenaline and cortisol gives it somewhere to go so that it's just not some recycling That's brilliant So can you explain you have this statement in the book and the book is called panic proof The new holistic solution to end your anxiety forever You say panic is protective So for someone who will be confused by that can you explain why? Yeah, the purpose of panic is to protect you from danger and You're alive today because your ancestors were able to have a panic response into danger and Our health care system I think has an opportunity to catch up with the research and the research shows That the body is giving us symptoms to tell us what needs healing and how Just like a baby cries because baby has something that they need their cold or their hungry or their sad or their tummy hurts The baby doesn't cry Just to make you miserable your body does it produce panic just to be mean It doesn't care about your well-being it cares about your survival And so when you're experiencing panic is What I would love to help people start moving towards is Thank you. I'm listening Thank you body for talking to me. I hear you and What is it you need me to know? And sometimes when we are able to do that kind of work after a panic attack when we're feeling more calm and allow that to Support us. So with the the doctors is it is that you were able after your brother's thing You were able to as an adult to look back on it now. You're like, oh, that's a little bit a little bit silly It's not a big deal But in the moment it felt like a big deal So when we have these big experiences if we could go back into that experience Talk to that experience and allow us to be informed about what was going on Then we can make changes in our lives so that It's no longer a problem and that sort of circles back to my story is My symptoms were telling me that I had created a life that was not sustainable for my well-being And I bitten off more than I could chew and I had a lot of debt and I had a lot of responsibility and a lot of commitments And I didn't have the income and the support team to survive in that so my body was screaming. No, no And my brain was like push push push Until all of the treatments stopped working because my body was really Persistent saying, oh, I'm not going to listen to your holistic treatments. We're going to we get to remove the obstacle to cure And it wasn't until I removed that obstacle and sold my business Did a pattern interrupt moved to Michigan That I actually started the healing process and so I think that that's a real gift that our panic can give us I loved this sentence for many people chronic panic attacks are caused by coping mechanisms That were originally intended to protect them But have now become the very things that are keeping them in a state of anxiety And you say there's always a reason for panic it typically starts small back to the stoplight exercise and trying to notice that Can you talk about the effect of aging and hormonal changes on anxiety and panic? Oh, I that's actually I was just talking to a patient today about that is that this woman will say that she's like 60 years old will say and she is a history of thyroid auto immunity and So they took her thyroid out and So now she's on synthetic thyroid and she also ended up having a varying cancer So then they didn't ufforectomy they took her ovaries out But they didn't want to give her any hormone replacement because it was a Ovarian cancer so she's now in early menopause and she's now in her 60s And so she's been in menopause and it's all that happened and she has a ton of insomnia She's anxiety and insomnia And so we did her hormone testing and the body has no estrogen and no progesterone is but her level is very very low So what happens as a result to that so estrogen is a panic protecting hormone So there's this really interesting study that was done is estrogen gets such a bad rap. I feel like but they had a bunch of Slick sort of a sad story. They had a bunch of women who were victims of DV and so the one of the groups of women when they analyzed the results one of the groups of women They experienced the DV and then they were able to get estrogen emergency contraceptive treatment right afterwards And the other group of women didn't and then they did a meta-analysis and they looked at symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder panic and depression In the two groups of women and they found that the women that received the estrogen treatment had statistically less post-traumatic stress disorder Way less anxiety, way less depression Then the women who didn't receive the estrogen. So then we start exploring. Well, why is that what's going on with the estrogen? And so we know the estrogen can help modify and modulate our neurotransmitters like your serotonin and your gab on your dopamine estrogen talks to your immune system talks to mast cells histamine right estrogen talks to your gut microbiome And so like you were just introducing is that our hormones really matter and this woman's hormones Just we're taking away out of whack. Yeah, though out of whack And so it wasn't till we got those back on track that she started sleeping again and her anxiety got better Wow Yeah, there's a lot there You talk about because You know, I've heard both sides of this that when we use medications It's confusing because you say well, sometimes they help and sometimes they don't help you have these questions Why do antidepressants help some people but not others? Why is it that within 35 minutes of taking an SSR like pros act the levels of serotonin in neuro in neural synapses rapidly increases But it takes upwards of two weeks for someone to feel better So you know, we're always talking about serotonin and you're like well, that's only one part and actually for some people There can be this serotonin syndrome where increasing it can actually make matters worse so for those who are confused Yeah, by the information that is out there What are your thoughts? We should be confused because we decided in the 1960s that a hypothesis was there for their bifactual and so this started The first neuro transmitter that we discovered was in teramine which is this serotonin and they discovered this in the gut And then they started to research it and then they found that oh interestingly in this study when we gave more serotonin to this study participant There was less depression So what if that means that more serotonin is more happy unless serotonin is less happy And then the pharmaceutical companies did more than 20 clinical trials and they came up with pros act And after more than 20 clinical trials if it not being any better than placebo They finally showed that it was helpful for people and so then we're off to the races Where there's this really compelling marketing all this advertising I remember when I was in my master's degree We were getting taken out to lunch by zooloft supplement recommend or medication Farm reps and so everybody was like we found the magic pill for depression and anxiety and it's a SSRI And in 2022 all of this was completely thrown out because there's a meta analysis done where they looked at all of the research and the conclusion of the scientists that did this analysis was there's no correlation between serotonin levels and depression and anxiety so Now we're like all the healthcare situation is we're all either putting on horse blinders And we're like why I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing because this is what we've done since the 60s And the rest of us as you said we're all confused But I think this is a great place to be so because now we get to ask better questions Well, what is this serotonin drug doing? And there's theories one is that it made Decrease inflammation in the brain which I would argue we have better ways to decrease inflammation in the brain with left side effects Another study shows that it can increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor which is one of the Things our brain uses to heal itself for neuroplasticity. We have better ways to do that Another is that it talks to the gut And so then I'm wondering well what's going on in the gut and can we treat the gut with something gut healing instead of A pharmaceutical that is just targeting serotonin. Let's actually heal the gut So now this whole world of root cause and why is open to us in the health care system So there's a lot more to it than just serotonin and the answers I think are really exciting So people can know they can obviously read more about this in your book Which is called panic proof, but you have your own podcast so tell us about that Yeah coming out it's the holistic interbalance and we talk about all things solicit healing in a way that's kind of fun Approachable research back to we have a lot of really fascinating and great guests on and Hadley is my co-host and we often sing songs because Who doesn't want to podcast for the hosts sing songs very badly off key do both sing She's actually a good singer ice sings, but it's more for my benefit nobody else's I went on a tour earlier this year with my friend Emily and neither of us can sing and we sang at it and it was really great That's the best part Even harmonized it was it was fantastic I love that people can check that out the holistic interbalance because these are pretty Extensive and deep topics so talking about hormone balance and talking about SSRIs and talking about benzodiazepines Which I was kind of excited to say that word Because I just said it's a cool sounding word And I've never said it you nailed it you that was like perfect Uh, but you're talking about just panic stopping habits and different things that you can do and the I Movement thing which I don't know anything about but I always hear about it and expressive arts therapy Which I love this I love us. It's just more about being in our bodies If we could just be in our bodies more it would just help I like tell you said There's other ways that we can do these things so expressive art therapies Art singing music dance movement and writing to help people express their emotions process difficult experiences And develop a sense of personal control and mastery. I like have it starred and hearted and you have a website people can go to international expressive arts therapy association Yeah, they're taking the arts out of childhood And it hurts my heart. I had a I had a young girl. I was working with she was 12 And she'd been to so much therapy and It's like a whole story feeling you and I could do a whole podcast about this case this beautiful human and she ended up In the work that we did together doing her own therapy through creative writing And what was so beautiful about it is that if I had had presented to her as many of her other therapists had of We're gonna do EMDR. We're gonna do parts work We're gonna analyze the problem that felt too big and too close and she just threw up walls But she loved creative writing and we ended up Doing the therapy on the characters in her story. Well, what is what is Ursula in your book like what is what's her story with her mom? Well, what is what is coming up for her and so the creative arts Are so powerful for all of us so bring creativity bring our bring dance bring music back into our lives One of my favorite authors his name Sean D. Drick he goes by Sean of the South and Do you know him he's just like heard of him? Yes He's just a wonderful he writes every day He's got a like a 600-ish word thing that goes up every day and he's got a really sad story Whereas dad took his life when Sean was in the seventh grade and then he dropped out of school He didn't go back and you know Just had this rocky road and ended up becoming this writer and he's written all kinds of books like he's written memoirs and And then he also writes fiction So I had an opportunity to interview him about one of his fiction books and I didn't realize in preparing for it What I didn't realize was that this fiction book is like a window into his soul You know the things that the characters say or the the views that they have on the world I was like is that your view too or do you or that I've interviewed this other jet car He's also a fiction writer and like his character doesn't like mayonnaise I was like do you not like man, you know, so you get this little bit of window into their soul So what an amazing tool to use for children To use creative writing and as they sort of write about the characters It helps them to process what they think and feel and it would help someone who's working with them Whether that's a parent or a therapist or a teacher to get better understanding into their inner life Oh, that's so brilliant and vision boards I feel like a really an awesome opportunity is Carl Jung was his famous psychotherapist And he talks about the quadrants So you have somebody draw a picture and you draw different things all over the piece of paper Or you do a vision board and you get images and you stick them all over the board And then you draw that into four quadrants And I don't want to tell people what the quadrants mean We can like do a sneak peek behind the scenes about that later because I don't want to influence what you put there But Carl Jung teaches about okay, well, let's look at this upper left corner from a lens of this What comes up for you? And then what is this quadrant when we say through the lens of that what comes up for you And it's this kind of creative Even location dependent which brings in brain spotting and oh my goodness This location dependent way of accessing what might be underneath the unconscious through creativity and spatial and so Art it's so fun. Yes Yes, expressive arts therapy. Okay. I'm gonna ask you a question about something that like really stuck out to me And I'm not sure if I'm gonna interpret it right or not. You'll have to tell me yeah the other sentence It's two sentences actually just picked it out with like in the kind of toward the middle of the book And you wrote this when you don't move your head for more than a few minutes at a time your brains I have written saline network. I don't know if that's a typo or not salience. Yes salience. It is a typo Missing the sea. I'm like saline. That's like water isn't it? Is it salt water? I don't think the brain has a saline network salience network. Okay. I was missing the seat When you don't move your head for more than a few minutes at a time your brain salience network shifts into high alert This can make you start to feel anxious And that made me think about screens and in particular gaming are they related 100 percent Absolutely earlier you mentioned deer and headlights right? Mm-hmm So are salience network for those who this is this is great neuroscience 101 is I want you to imagine like a colander that you're straining noodles in right? And so you run the water and then all of the dirt all of the whatever's on your noodles. Hopefully not dirt It all runs through I have dirt on my noodles Doesn't have dirt on your noodles That's gonna be the title of this pie Who doesn't have dirt on your noodles And so what happens is all of this information your interoceptive our bodies Internal sensations goes to the filter All of the stimuli and the input from the environment around us goes into this filter And what can happen is it can get very easily overwhelmed because our brains Haven't evolved much beyond what our brains and nervous systems were like when we were cave people And the level of stimuli is just astronomically higher And we haven't evolved to process that so we have somebody who's sitting really still like a deer and headlights in what the body would associate with a danger position I'm really stiff. I'm not rotating my head. I'm in a freeze So that's interoceptively danger and then you have all this stimuli from the environment coming in and you mentioned gaming in particular So there's lights and sounds and flashes and reflexes and all these things So we're frozen and all the stimuli is coming in and so now The saline's network is like I don't know what's going on when in doubt send it forward So it sends it to the amygdala the big emotional processing the big feeling part of the brain Amygdala's flooded the amygdala's like I don't know how to deal with all this when in doubt send it on So amygdala starts a fight flight freeze flot fawn fracture cascade And so now we're stressed Now we can't sleep now we're agitated and we have ADHD and nobody can focus anymore because When you're in danger, you don't want to focus when you're in danger you want to multi everything all around you and go And so what we could do is the salience hack And so quick thing for all of those who have been sitting on their computers all day today Maybe your kids been gaming maybe you've been gaming maybe you've been playing candy crush for the past hour and a half All listening to this podcast and the bodies and a danger zone state is you're just simply going to do it this So you're gonna exhale And then you're gonna take a nice breath in and you're gonna rotate your eyes and your head over your left shoulder and then you're gonna Exhale again as you come to the front and then you're gonna go over the right side rotate your hot your eyes in your head over your right shoulder And then on the exhale you're gonna come back to center and now You're gonna focus your eyes over the device. You're gonna look far away And then you're gonna focus your vision close up and that's a that's a reset So that takes the body out of that circuit loop that snowball that's rolling down the hill to stress and so for those who have computer jobs Dash jobs is trying to do that periodically shoulder shoulder far and close Okay, Nicole that's so interesting when you don't move your head for more than a few minutes at a time Your brain salience networks shifts into high alert This is why because when you're gaming In particular like I think if you're watching TV kids are laying down that you know there You know kids will land on top of each other they move around you might be like upside down on the couch Right you might be on the floor you might be snuggling with the dog this and a hands come talks about kids need to move in vigorous ways She's a pediatric occupational therapist like the head's got to be moving and rotating so they get here If you're watching TV, you know, you're probably gonna be moving around some If you're playing candy crush on your phone you might be looking up or looking around here or there But when you play video games that is a different animal that really is you are sitting up No one's ever really laying down or upside down in the couch you are sitting up And that's when people say like they try and take it away from their kids and the kids become violent Yeah, yeah, absolutely because they've been in that fight flight freeze. It's like building building building Yeah, wow Break that circuit and then their dopamine crashes right because we think about like gaming and that dopamine And so now we have a dopamine withdrawal combine that with fight flight freeze Oh wow It's a recipe for tons of shame in that kid and anger and frustration in that parent Very very difficult So I'm to watch out for when you don't move your head for more than a few minutes at a time so interesting I learned so much the book is called panic proof the new holistic solution to end your anxiety forever at your website Dr. Nicole came dot com which I'll put a link in the show notes you got courses You've got a shop you got your own podcast people can go there to find it so much information And there is a lot of information You know you talk about you were born in 1982 to two very young and isolated parents who recycled how they have been Parenthood and I thought oh that's really good wording Nicole like how often do all of us do that We just recycle and so this is the time to learn new things and to get books like yours And to really understand what's going on in our bodies so that we can help ourselves We can help our kids we always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside Oh my favorite was before he made a panic pack as an adult I made a fanny pack with band-aids and gauze As a third grader and I put that little fanny pack on and we would climb in the woods So I would get a little scrape and I was I have a band-aid So that word Where I went prepared little Nicole came with her little fanny pack and band-aids I love that because really in so many ways you're still doing the same thing Which is you're helping people with their healing You talk about this is a bottom-up approach focusing on regulating the body To heal the mind. So you've been a body healer Since the third grade I love that what an answer What an answer what an honor. Thank you so much for your time and for writing this wonderful book Thank you for having me. This has been awesome The wind Climbs some trees skin your knees feel that grass on your feet again Get out there and take you to Oh Ain't nothing on screen. It's ever gonna be this view Oh Oh And I just want to share with I just want to share with you It's beautiful Such a beautiful