Train Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress with Dr. Elizabeth S

Train Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress with Dr. Elizabeth Stanley [Episode #415]

Welcome to the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder. Our goal is to help you be your most healthy, confident, beautiful and joyful! Our topics focus on health and wellness (physical, emotional/mental and spiritual), holistic nutrition, medicinal plants, natural rhythms and cycles, beauty, meditation, self care and rituals, spirituality and personal empowerment.

Feeling Good means we are healthy, balanced, peaceful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of our perfectly imperfect lives. Feeling Good requires us to tune in and nourish our whole selves, which is made up of the four Solluna Cornerstones: our food, our bodies, our emotional well-being and our spiritual growth. Feeling good naturally leads to also looking good, in a much more powerful way from glowing skin created from within, a beautifully healthy body, radiant energy, and a greater level of overall well-being and personal growth.

Every week, we provide you with interviews with top experts in their field to support you in living your most beautiful, inspired and joyful life, with a focus on physical health, wellness, meditation and spirituality and personal empowerment.

I’m your host, Kimberly Snyder, founder of Solluna, New York Times best-selling author and nutritionist. I’m so grateful and honored we found each other!

I am so excited to have my very special guest, Elizabeth A. Stanley, who is an award-winning author and U.S. Army veteran, an associate professor, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, and a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing. Listen in as Elizabeth shares how her background influenced her philosophy, tips on how the Mind Fitness Training can be applied, and what it means to widen the window. Get ready to start feeling good today!

Elizabeth shares her background as a US army intelligence officer and how this influenced her philosophy…
Why it’s a positive thing to release and talk about our personal issues…
Common stresses and trauma that people have that they may not even identify as stress and trauma…
We share a real world example of trauma and how Elizabeth would apply this in a real world situation…
Details and tips about how long the healing process takes when applying Mind Fitness Training…
What narrowing the window means, and how to do this in our personal lives…
If traumatic patterns are more encrypted in your brain as you age…

About Elizabeth A. Stanley

Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, is an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She is the creator of Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT), taught to thousands in civilian and military high-stress environments.

MMFT research has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, NPR, Time Magazine, and many other media outlets. An award-winning author and U.S. Army veteran, she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. She’s also is a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy.

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<❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK>

Elizabeth A. Stanley’s Interview

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly Snyder: Hi Beauties. Welcome back to our Monday interview podcast. I have an amazing guest for us today. Her name is Dr. Elizabeth Stanley. And she is an award-winning author. Her new book Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma is just out now. And she is a US army veteran, an associate professor, and the creator of mindfulness-based mind fitness training.

Fan Of The Week

So before we get into this very interesting interview, Dr. Stanley has many, many insights to share with us. I just want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week. His or her name is… sometimes it’s hard to tell, Dfarrah17 and he or she writes, “Kimberly is one of the warmest, and most informed wellness players out there. I listened to multiple episodes a day and often repeat some. Not only will you learn so much about food and movement, but also how your body, mind, emotions, feelings, hormones and attitude are connected and affect your health. She’s real, relatable, and feel like you’re hanging out with a close friend. Can’t get enough.”

Kimberly Snyder: Dfarrah17 thank you so much for your beautiful review, sending you a huge virtual hug. I am so grateful for you, beauty. I am so grateful we are on the path together, that we are here supporting each other. So I hope that we get to meet in person as well, one of these days, one of these events, one of these cities. But in the meantime, thank you so much.

Share The Podcast and Leave a Review on Itunes

And beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as the fan of the week, please just take a moment or so out of your day, head over to iTunes and leave us a review. They could literally be a sentence or two, but it’s such a great way to support the podcast, and to help other beauties just like yourself find this information which can really help benefit their lives.

Kimberly Snyder: So again, so much gratitude in advance. Please also be sure to subscribe to our show, that way you don’t miss out on any interviews, any Q&A a podcast Thursdays. And it keeps me tuned in with motivation and inspiration so that we all just keep growing and learning together, and it’s a really great self care practice to do for yourself.

Interview with Elizabeth Stanley

So all that being said, I have Dr. Stanley on the line, and she has told me before interview, she is super chill, super casual. So even though she has a very fancy, very impressive bio, I’m going to be calling her Liz during this interview. Welcome, Liz, to the podcast.

Elizabeth : Thank you so much, Kimberly. I am so happy to be here. Your perspective on this podcast is so aligned with mine, and so I was so excited for this invitation.

Kimberly Snyder: Oh for sure. For sure, Liz. I went in a very different direction with my last book, since my mom had recently passed away within three days of my son turning one, and my life just got turned upside down, and I started to really understand more of the effect of stress and trauma on our bodies, on just our emotional ups and downs, and how much that impacts our wellness. So, this whole topic is of huge interest to me personally as well as well I’m sure to all of our listeners.

Elizabeth : Yes, stress and trauma affect all of us, and we have so many stories we tell ourselves about how we’re not handling it well, that I really wanted to be able to share with readers some of the science behind it because it can be so empowering to understand why our minds and bodies do what they do. I’m sorry to hear about your loss. And-

Kimberly Snyder: Thank you.

Elizabeth : … that’s a real big set of transitions at all at one time, Kimberly.

Elizabeth shares her background as a US army intelligence officer and how this influenced her philosophy

Kimberly Snyder: It really was. But… and thank you for that Liz. There’s been a lot of processing things since then, and I do believe it’s… Ooh, talk about widening, it’s widening my heart. It has deepened my compassion, my empathy. I still feel very connected to my mom. So, thank you for that. And Liz, I am really interested in your background. Before we get there’s so many… Flipping through your gorgeous book here, which so well researched and I like that there’s a really big section of prescriptive to do’s. I want to get that in just a short minute or so moment. But I’m really interested in your background in the army. And here it’s saying you were serving as a US army intelligence officer, you are an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown, which by the way is my Alma Mater. So, tell me about how working in the military has influenced your philosophy.

Elizabeth : It’s a great question. Actually there’s nothing that I write about in this book that I haven’t actually learned from my own mind and body. I started as an army brat. There have been nine generations in my family that have served in the US army.

Kimberly Snyder: Wow!

Elizabeth : It’s a really long lineage, and I’m the first woman of that lineage. But coming from this lineage of warriors, it also has a shadow side. And the shadow side is the intergenerational trauma that results from all of these, up until me, men who were coping with incredibly stressful and traumatic experiences like combat without really the tools that they needed. Because at the times many of them lived society didn’t offer them yet. So, I had a lot of stressful and traumatic experiences really early in my life.

Elizabeth : And then when I served in the military, I had stress and trauma while I was deployed abroad. And I kind of exacerbated all of it through coping habits that I think many of us rely on. I suppressed my emotions, I compartmentalized my pain, I overrode my body’s limits. I just kept pushing it under, and it’s a really common coping habit in our culture. People call it powering through, or suck it up and drive on. I was the queen of that way of being. And at some point my body was just done. It gave out, and I had a whole range of physical illnesses. I had a near death experience when I was in Bosnia. I lost my eyesight even, and all of these things… it’s come back, I mean it was a temporary condition. It’s-

Kimberly Snyder: Wow.

Elizabeth : Found out later on, it was linked to Lyme disease. But underneath all of these different things is something that you talk about a lot on your show, which is one of the reasons I was happy to be here. I was just plagued by chronic inflammation, my microbiome was completely whacked out. I was overriding so much that eventually I developed PTSD, and depression as well. So my mind and body were way out of whack, and in my own healing journey I spent some time in Burma as a nun. I-

Kimberly Snyder: Oh my gosh! That’s not in the bio, I love that little twist there.

Elizabeth : That was not in the bio. It’s in the book, but it’s not in the formal bio because-

Kimberly Snyder: Love that.

Elizabeth : … there were a lot of people that they’d get a little turned off by it. I knew you wouldn’t, and your listeners won’t. But I’m being more open about it now, just like I’m being more open about the fact that I had PTSD. We have so many ways that our society compartmentalizes these things, but we’re whole people.

Kimberly Snyder: For sure.

Elizabeth : It’s important to own all these parts of ourselves.

Kimberly Snyder: So Liz, thank you so much for sharing that so openly from your heart. I do think we hide things because we fear judgment. And I will also say this recent book of mine that came out was in my fifth book, and it’s the first time I even talk about having eating disorders, which I had in high school because I was hiding it, judged myself, didn’t want other people to think that there was something wrong with me, and would think badly of me. But you know what? Now that I can talk about it and not hide things, it just feels so great. It feels like a huge release.

Why it’s a positive thing to release and talk about our personal issues

Elizabeth : Yes, it is a release because when we’re coming from wholeness, we actually can really truly show up all parts of us. And all parts of us are important to what we have to offer. It took me a really long time to understand that my vulnerability was not something that needed to be hidden, but that it actually is deeply informative of what I can offer in the world. And I think it takes courage to share what’s going on, but I think that it lets us be authentic, and we have a lot of power in our authenticity.

Common stresses and trauma that people have that they may not even identify as stress and trauma

Kimberly Snyder: Now, your work is focused on stress and trauma. And already… since we started the podcast, I’ve talked about losing my mom, you’ve talked about experiences in Bosnia and in the army. I mean these are very obvious sorts of stresses and traumas in our lives. But I was also reading, Liz, too about just subtle forms of neglect. For instance, let’s say you didn’t have a parent that was always around, or in touch with their feelings. And so growing up, maybe you felt isolated, or maybe say if you had a boyfriend like that. Can you explain a little bit about… for all our listeners out there who are saying, “Oh, well, I didn’t have somebody die recently, or I’ve not been in the army.” Can you talk about the common stresses and traumas that people have that they may not even identify as stress and trauma?

Elizabeth : Absolutely. I’m so glad for that question. The thing that strikes me the most when I teach mind fitness, both in the military and other high-stress places and also on campus when I’ve taught to doctors, and to people in business, is how much everybody is comparing their own stress and trauma to everyone else. And in the process of doing that, they say things like, “Oh, well, I didn’t lose my eyesight. I wasn’t in Bosnia. I haven’t seen combat, I wasn’t raped, I’m only dealing with garden variety anxiety, or making sure that I’m putting food on the table, or just juggling all of these work deadlines. That’s no big deal.” And the minute that they do that, there’s a part of me that wants to cringe, and it’s part of the reason I wrote this book. It’s because our thinking brains, which are making sense of our lives, and it’s the part of us that is having these comparing and evaluating and judging thoughts. That isn’t what controls whether we have stress or trauma.

Elizabeth : And what controls whether we have stress or trauma is our survival brain. It’s the unconscious part of our brain that is constantly assessing a situation to see if it’s dangerous or threatening to us. And if it, for a variety of reasons, often from our long life conditioning, feels challenged by whatever is happening, even if our thinking brain is writing it off as no big deal, or, “I should be over that, or it’s not nearly as bad as so-and-so has it,” it doesn’t matter that our thinking brain is saying that, our survival brain can still be producing stress arousal. When our thinking brain has this other narrative like, “Oh, well, my situation isn’t really that bad.” It’s overriding, and neglecting, and ignoring what’s actually going on in our survival brain, in our body in that moment.

Elizabeth : And that is one of the reasons why we turn stress on, and then we never recover and turn it off because we are completely overriding the experience of our survival brain in our body. And so I really want listeners to understand that it doesn’t matter what our thinking brain may think about what’s going on, what matters is what emotions we’re having, what physical sensations we’re having. Those are the cues that we get that tell us in our body what’s going on in our survival brain right now. And when we try and kind of reframe it and tell ourselves, “Well, this isn’t really so bad, and I can call on this person to help me, or… ” Those things can be helpful for having agency to problem solve, to figure it out, but those things are not going to resolve the stress. What’s going to resolve the stress is paying attention to what’s going on in our bodies, and helping our survival brain to feel safe.

We share a real world example of trauma and how Elizabeth would apply this in a real world situation

Kimberly Snyder: So, Liz, sorry to interrupt. I love this whole concept. Hearing you talk about it, can I give you a real world example based on what you just said and then you could show our listeners how you would apply this in a real world situation?

Elizabeth : Absolutely.

Kimberly Snyder: Okay. So again, from a personal standpoint, because it’s just me and you having this conversation. Subtle trauma and… everybody’s parents do their best of course, but let’s just say everybody, and I hate to say… I used to feel so guilty when I would say anything like this because I’m like, “Oh, I’m not blaming my parents. I don’t feel angry at them, I think I have amazing parents, I love them both,” but they were busy, they were both working. And so I was a latchkey kid for many years. And I would come home, and then they would come home sometimes and be tired, and I wouldn’t really talk to anybody about my day. And there was some sort of pattern there about not being heard, and it created a lot of sensitivity, and I just felt kind of invisible sometimes. And again, I just feel like I wasn’t really heard or seen.

Kimberly Snyder: So to this day when somebody… in a conversation and it’s usually pretty innocuous, but if I see something and then they kind of… what I perceive as dismissive, or they interrupt, or they just turn it in a different direction, their mind’s on something else, if I feel not heard or seen today, it really triggers me. It makes me angry to your point about physical cues, I’ll feel my heart starts racing. I’ll feel my breath, it gets short, I feel it in my body. So, with your philosophy, and all your different tools in your mind training, what would you say… this is a simple example and of course I just use myself. Everybody listening can insert their own childhood stuff, or whatever comes up for them. What’s the way out of that? Because here I am as an adult and that happened when I was 12.

Elizabeth : I so appreciate this example because it’s

Kimberly Snyder: It’s subtle, yeah.

Elizabeth : It’s very subtle and yet it highlights something that’s super important about our neurobiology, which is that all of our patterns for coping with stress and trauma were initially wired in our close relationships in childhood, especially with our parents. And so it’s not surprising to me that similar situations will trigger that for you, because that’s deep conditioning that gets globalized to all aspects of our life. And most of us don’t think about how our childhoods still affect us today, but they do. And the thing that also strikes me about your story is there’s also a level of… it sounds like, I don’t want to project here, but it sounded like there was a feeling of helplessness-

Kimberly Snyder: Yes, yes.

Elizabeth : … and powerlessness and… You needed something and you weren’t getting it, and couldn’t figure out how to get it in that moment. So whenever we’re feeling powerless or helpless, that is, when our survival brain feels that way, that is what kind of tips the scales from stress into trauma. Trauma happens and then the survival brain feels powerless, helpless, and lacking control. So the best way to work with it today is, as you’re noticing those triggers happening, and then you’re noticing those things in your body, the first thing to do is to just acknowledge with your thinking brain, “Oh, I’m activated right now. I’m angry.” And you can notice all of those different sensations, the racing heart, the butterflies in the stomach, the sweaty palms. And then the next immediate thing to do is to help the survival brain do one round of recovery. And what I mean by that is to help the survival brain, in this moment that you’re noticing that you’re feeling powerless again in light of not being heard today, to help the survival brain realize, “No, right now I actually am safe.”

Elizabeth : So instead of directing your attention to your thoughts about not feeling heard, in that moment it’s almost better to direct your attention to ways that can help your body feel safe and supported. And in the book I teach two exercises, and one of them I have as an audio file that people can download off my website, and we’ll talk about that later. But you can direct your attention very deliberately to feeling the contact of your body with your surroundings, with the chair, with the floor. And as crazy as this sounds to thinking brains, it really is stable and safety for the survival brain.

Kimberly Snyder: Interesting. So if from a physical standpoint, here’s my body here, now I’m safe this person isn’t going to hurt me with words, you’re saying go to the physicality.

Elizabeth : Go to the physicality of your body being supported by its surroundings.

Kimberly Snyder: Wow, that’s interesting.

Elizabeth : Really bring your attention to the feeling of contact, the sensations of it, the pressure, the hardness, the dampness, the softness, whatever it is that you’re noticing. Really direct your attention in that way. And as you do, your survival brain can get out of this feeling of powerlessness, which it had been cued by feeling not heard. And instead it will get to a sensation of, “Oh, I’m grounded,” and that will help it do a micro round of recovery. And then you might notice a variety of sensations associated with recovery that most of us don’t even understand what they are. I have a chapter about that too. You might yawn, you might have some tears, you might feel your body get a little shaky, you might feel a wave of heat. And all of those are ways that your survival brain is saying, “Okay, I’m safe, I’m grounded again.”

Elizabeth : And then in that moment, that’s the moment when you can really begin to think about, “Okay, I wasn’t feeling heard here. What could I do to help myself feel heard?” So, now you’ve taken care of the survival brain. Now you can go to thinking brain strategies like, “Okay, what do I need to say to this person so that they understand that I was hurt? And they understand what still needs to get conveyed.” Sometimes when we’re not feeling heard… This is a different point, but I do think it’s really relevant, sometimes when we’re not feeling heard, it has nothing to do with us actually, and it has to do with wha

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