Is This the Missing Link In Healing Chronic Illness? | Jennifer Mann, Karden Rabin

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Episode Transcript:

Karden Rabin: [00:00:00] Nervous system regulation is not a pile of biohacks. It’s not doing the right breathwork over here, or the cold plunge over here, or taking the chamomile tea to soothe your nervous system. Your brain and body are in continuous conversation, determining safe or unsafe. It’s making those determinations based on emotional experiences, based on relational experiences based on past interpretations. This is a conversation of information past, present, and future.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:34] So have you ever felt like your body was almost working against you? Like no matter what you tried, those nagging physical symptoms or mental roadblocks, they just won’t go away. Maybe you’ve explored all the usual remedies diet, exercise, therapy, but nothing seems to provide lasting relief. What if there was an often overlooked system within you, one largely ignored, that held the keys to unlocking radiant health and a sense of agency and control a system that, when dysregulated, also wreaked havoc on your mind and body, but when balanced, really allowed you to soar. In today’s really fascinating conversation, Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin, co-authors of the book The Secret Language of the Body Regulate Your Nervous system, Heal your body, Free Your Mind. They break down an often overlooked factor driving chronic health issues nervous system dysregulation. So Jennifer is a mind-body practitioner who used trauma informed methods to completely recover from severe, chronic fatigue after being bedridden for over a year. Today, she leads a community of over 100,000, helping others do the same. And Karden is an expert in nervous system medicine who spent 15 years combining bodywork, brain retraining and somatic trauma therapies. He has helped thousands globally heal from chronic pain and illness. Together, they run the chronic fatigue school, sharing their approach for regulating the nervous system to help address chronic conditions. In this conversation, Jennifer and Karden peel back the curtain on the pivotal role your nervous system plays in your health. You’ll learn what nervous system dysregulation really means, why it can be at the root of so many modern ailments, and most importantly, how to start rewiring your physiology using their powerful AIR technique. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:30] The work that you’ve been doing is interesting and very of the moment. You know, it seems like the phrase nervous system has become a popular part of the conversation in a way that exceeds what most of us had sort of left behind. We thought, you know, back in eighth grade or high school when we learned these terms in bio and nervous system dysregulation has been this term that is popping up. I’m talking about it. I’m seeing it all over the place, and I’m sure it’s connected in a lot of different ways to what so many of us are feeling. But take me into sort of like the context when we’re talking about the nervous system in general, what are we talking about? And then when we are talking about nervous system dysregulation, what are we talking about?

Karden Rabin: [00:03:07] Yeah. So with the nervous system and as you say, you’ve been seeing it everywhere. It’s this language has really become part of the lingua franca like really quickly. And what I’ve kind of observed, you know, having done this work with thousands of people is that whereas for 20 years of my career, I’ve been working in the mind-body space, inviting people to be more into their felt body so that they can work with their nervous system, with their health, with their physiology. For some reason, this nervous system language, rather than saying feel your body, which is a lot of what we do when we combine this concept of feeling your body with this theoretical framework, that you have this brain and nervous system that is coordinating the body and what it’s doing. People are grasping their ability to influence their body and feel what’s going on inside like never before. This combination of language, combination of a lot of the theories of how the nervous system is impacting your mental and physical health, and then some of the really awesome therapeutic clinical interventions that we have that like work that people try them and it’s like, whoa, that wasn’t like what I’ve done before. That practice actually made me feel in a way that I haven’t felt before, or that practice actually moved me out of anxiety into calm in a way where it’s like, I’m not unsure about it.

Karden Rabin: [00:04:31] Like I know I feel different. And then I think that that visceral ness, that tangibility of the current wave of nervous system practices and somatics is what’s making this take off at such a velocity. But when we talk about nervous system dysregulation, I’ll talk about what it is. And I think why it’s really landing for people. Our organism’s number one directive evolutionarily is don’t die, right? Like avoid danger, stay safe. And second, only to avoid danger. Don’t die is right is seek pleasure. Seek food. Procreate. That’s all it’s doing. I call it the Prime directive. It’s the zeros and ones. Safe or unsafe? Safe or unsafe? Safe or unsafe. And it’s this beautiful evolutionary piece of machinery for determining that safe or unsafe. But we just so happen that as a result of modernity, culture, stress, childhood developmental wounds and actual traumas, this brain and nervous system that was exquisitely developed to determine safety or a lack of safety, basically for millions of years, it’s not equipped to deal with a lot of the adversity that it’s facing now. And it gets tipped. It gets tipped from a very early age, basically in being a in a pervasive state of non safety and in that pervasive state of Non-safety, which it was never meant to be in all the time it was meant to.

Karden Rabin: [00:05:56] Visit states of stress and survival and return to equanimity, like most animals in nature. Right? Animals in nature live a very harsh life, but they’re not living in a constant state of crisis. They’re going about their day. Something bad happens. They have stress, and then they come back down. It’s not like that for a lot of human beings. And so people’s brain and nervous systems are being put in these states of stress and survival, where all the research shows us that being chronically stuck in these states compromises the brain and nervous system’s ability to maintain healthy functioning, both in terms of thought, personality, and your physical health. And so that’s where this dysregulation comes up. And I think another reason why it’s really landing is that all of a sudden, instead of there being this mysterious set of ailments that people are dealing with, or instead of feeling to blame or at fault for certain thought patterns or depressions or issues that they can’t quote, fix, or that people have said it’s all in your head. It’s like, no, this isn’t all in your head, and this isn’t mysterious. These are the logical outcomes and consequences of your nervous system being trapped and stuck in a state of survival perpetually that it was really never meant to do. And we have a way out.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:08] The pointing to the nervous system, I feel like, is almost a way to address a lot of mental and physical health gaslighting that’s gone on for generations. And and now you’re kind of saying, no, no, it’s actually there’s this thing inside of you that is centrally involved in all these things that you’re saying are you’re struggling with. And it’s not just quote in your head, Jen, I know when we talk about this, this state of dysregulation, also, how do we see this actually showing up in a very lived way in people’s bodies and minds and lives? And I know for you actually, this is personal as well.

Jennifer Mann: [00:07:45] Yeah, I love that question so much. And um, through Karden’s answer, as well. I was just navigating my own memories and my body of when sort of the nervous system concept landed and I was like, oh wow. Finally I feel validated. So to give you some context, I was a professional ballet dancer, and from very early on I trained in Pilates, Feldenkrais, yoga, and then I transitioned after an injury. So my job through various types of movement therapies and massage and body-based therapies, was to help people move better and feel better, but there was always elements that were completely missing. You know, people would come in and and feel better with these, you know, practices that I’d studied from all kinds of backgrounds, and they had a stressful day at work and nothing would help them. So I myself started to experience a lot of symptoms in the body. My body started to Whisper before it screamed in 2019 with a signs of fatigue, exhaustion, and I was sort of in these cycles of burnout, I would have pain in my body. But because of my military dance, perfectionism, high achieving, a star student background, I was like, pain. Pain is nothing. I’m. I’m strong, I’m good. I’m going to keep going. So I actually went back to school to study biomedical sciences and then physiotherapy. And it was in my second year of physiotherapy. One day I woke up and I was in excruciating back pain after a movement I had done in yoga. And then I sort of crashed. So that was the beginning of what would be a longer than a year in bed.

Jennifer Mann: [00:09:36] So my nervous system was experiencing a total shutdown and overwhelm in emotional, physical, Physiological signals of, you know, what Karden was saying, unsafe and threats. And I was just going about my day and sort of going from one doctor to another before I crashed, not getting any answers. This is why when I learned, just like this concept of the nervous system really landed, everything started to come together. So before I crashed, I was, you know, for my physical body, physiotherapy, you know, my injuries, pain that would come and go and then my anxiety, a psychologist, um, various types of of therapy over the years. I also used to have a really bad stutter. I couldn’t even speak for a few years. And so I had a lot of context, but nobody was telling me how these things were connected. And then when I crashed, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome with something that’s called Pots, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So my heart was doing all sorts of things, very scary things, out of what seemed like nowhere. You know, not sleeping, insomnia, pain in my body and just unable to get out of bed. And so in this period of, of all types of doctors sort of telling me, oh, it might have been the Epstein-Barr virus you had when you were 18. Like mono, what we know is mono, it might have been because you grew up in Africa. Maybe you had malaria too many times. It might be, you know, all these things.

Jennifer Mann: [00:11:13] And I just knew in my body, you know, through my studies, but also just a little bit of that intuition that Karden was talking about. I was like, but I sort of have this, you know, ongoing anxiety, unresolved trauma in my childhood that I was trying to resolve, but just not in a way that was affecting my body. And so, you know, my my glass was too full. And anything that would go inside this glass was just overflowing. And so that’s when my body shut down. And, you know, to answer your questions. Those signs came a few years before that. But I don’t think that as human beings, we’re driven enough to solve our problems until we’re very sick, until our life gets interrupted, until we’re stuck in bed, until we lose our job, until we have to change. Then I think that maybe there’s more, you know, like, wow, I think I really have to change some things and learn more about this. So I think that nervous system regulation and dysregulation and just like more of the general holistic understanding of how the mind and body are one and are connected at all times, there’s there’s no being alive without that helps you as a human with your emotions, but also as someone who experiences anxiety, depression, chronic symptoms, to feel validated, to feel like, oh wow, okay, there’s this intelligent system in my body that has come up with various ways to adapt to help keep me safe, but now it’s just too much.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:40] Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because what you’re describing is, I think what so many people have experienced at different parts in their lives, which is, you know, like some cocktail of, quote, nonspecific, you know, like, well, specific symptoms with a nonspecific root cause or at least like the traditional medicine looks at it and says, well, it could have been this, it could have been that, it could be this, it could be that we don’t really know. We can’t zero in there’s no test that will let me clearly identify like what is the thing here so I can give you the right the prescription or do the pill or go to the therapist. And yet so many of us are walking around with our version of that. And sometimes it comes, sometimes it goes, but oftentimes it never completely goes away. And you never get an answer, and it just becomes something that so many people just kind of quote, deal with or live with. And yet, you know, just accepting that, well, you know, maybe I’m getting older. Life’s just stressful. Things are complicated. The world is what it is. Yes, to all of that. And at the same time, Maybe we don’t actually have to just succumb to these things. And what you’re describing is there is actually this system that underlies and touches every single one of these symptoms that if we actually start to understand how it functions and how it sometimes goes off the rails, maybe addressing that actually ripples out to speak to and ameliorate all these different things that seem on the outside to us, to be disconnected. Does that land as being accurate?

Jennifer Mann: [00:14:07] Totally. And Jonathan, I haven’t mentioned the best part, which I’m sure will unravel with, you know, various conversations on here, but I fully recovered and it didn’t take years or months or, you know, even weeks. It took a few days to get me out of bed and then another few days for my system to come back online. And I was walking. I was going back to the supermarket. My pain was gone. And then, you know, it took some time for my entire system to recalibrate and learn the new normal over time. But that’s just, um, just the power of this work. And it’s absolutely incredible.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:47] And it’s almost like you’re describing, like a reboot.

Karden Rabin: [00:14:49] Yeah, it’s a lot like a reboot. And I know a lot of people that we interact with and the folks that we educate on this work, and rightfully so, after being stuck or in pain or suffering for a very long time, hearing a statement like days or weeks to reverse months or years of symptoms can seem really incredulous. But the way I like to contextualize this is that if you’ve been bringing a carpenter in to try to solve a electronics issue in your house, right. They’ve probably tried really hard many, many, many times for a long time to fix your light switch. But they don’t know how wiring works. And so they get that there’s a problem and they’re trying the tools that they have, but they’re just not suitable to it. You get someone who’s trained in the proper, you know, skill you’re looking for, in this case, the electricity. They’re like, oh, dink, dink, flip. It’s back on. Right. And the velocity when you have the right therapeutic and theoretical model to fix, I mean, sorry to address the dysregulated or symptom model, most proper therapies when addressing an appropriate issue where quickly like antibiotics work quickly.

Karden Rabin: [00:16:00] If you are sick with a bacterial infection and then they’re like, oh, it’s a bacterial infection. And they like the ice wasn’t working and the anti-inflammatories wasn’t working, and the X, Y and Z weren’t working. But it’s like, oh, here is this antibiotic. Oh, wow. We’ve gotten this person back from the brink of death in under 48 hours. Moreover, when it comes to the nervous system, the velocity at which with the nervous system can make changes positive or negative is is stunning, right? You can feel perfectly fine, let’s say out to dinner with your friends. But then your psychotic ex-partner walks into the restaurant and you’re concerned they’re going to make a scene and instantaneously your heart is starting to beat fast. Your breath has contracted. You might have flushed in the face, your pupils have dilated, your gut might be starting to feel nauseous. You’ve the speed at which your nervous system will put you into a survival response is remarkable, and similarly, the speed at which you can get health. When you regulate the nervous system out of that place and back into a place of homeostasis, the switches are remarkably fast in the opposite direction.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:08] And I want to get into a lot of sort of like modalities and methodologies too. So a lot of people are walking around with some sort of GI issue that kind of comes and goes. It’s been with them for weeks, months, years sometimes. And they’ve tried this, they’ve tried that. How do you distinguish between something like that where you’ve got this sort of like symptom pattern and you need the proper medication, the proper therapy, the proper intervention for that because there’s some there’s some pathology that you can identify. Maybe it’s a, you know, like a virus, maybe it’s bacteria, maybe it’s a spirochaete, whatever it may be. And there’s like a thing that you can take and resolve it versus is somebody where there’s nearly identical symptoms that they’re dealing with. And the root cause is really much deeper. It’s like this is a nervous system issue. How do you know when you just need the bandaid versus like the bigger reboot?

Karden Rabin: [00:18:03] It is a important question. And it’s also a kind of I’m going to give a yes and sort of answer, meaning whether or not you can find and justify, for example, with a test or some kind of measurement that, you know, you’ve got Sibo, right, you got small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or a pathogen in your belly, whether you can find that or not. One it doesn’t exclude the virtue of doing nervous system work to help treat that problem. I’m just going to say that like right off the bat, right? We know that eating healthy and exercising are really intelligent things to do to, let’s say, support your immune system and help protect you from getting influenza in the winter season. In addition to getting, let’s say, the vaccination or whatever medication you need when you want it. So I simply want to say that the more you’re working on your nervous system, the more you are prophylactically taking care of your health to deal with like a thing that you’re just described there. But the other thing is, what we see so often is an inconsistency in symptom severity from population to population, regardless of like how much of a level of, let’s say, parasitic overgrowth or Sibo they have. So you’ll have you’ll have people who who really have, let’s say a ton. They’ve they’ve been living with parasites for 20 years. They’re symptom-free. And then you have people who have maybe had just a small amount of parasites for a very short amount of time, and they’re presenting very, very aggressively. And from our nervous system point of view, what we see here is a nervous system that’s regulated or dysregulated, which is impacting its capacity to actually heal or not heal, manage or not manage a certain kind of digestion symptom.

Karden Rabin: [00:19:50] Moreover, when it comes to the gut, in particular, the leading cause of inflammation is stress. Nothing causes inflammatory issues more than stress. And so someone will say, ah, I have this infection that’s causing an inflammatory response. But remember the leading cause of inflammation is stress. And so that’s going to be contributing. And moreover there’s all this thing about the enteric nervous system and the gut brain connection. If you are in a state of survival, whether that be what we call active survival, the more sympathetic approach which is governed by anxiety, or if you are in what we call the shutdown or the passive approach to survival, the dorsal vagal pathways, we can get more into that, which is more of the lack of energy. Depression collapse phase. Both of those nervous system states depress and undermine your gut function, because your gut is intimately tied into your nervous system, and most people are trying to improve their gut with food and thereby improve their brain function. And very few people are trying to improve their gut function by regulating their nervous system, which yields wonders. So I’d say it’s a yes, and you can do it while you’re doing it. But often we have people who have failed with functional medicine and other work for a decade, and then the moment the nervous system is addressed, it can do what it’s supposed to do, which is fight off infection, control bacteria and make the gut function again.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:12] Mhm. Jen, what would you add to that?

Jennifer Mann: [00:21:14] I have two main things that I want to share. So one is one of the first things you learn in physio school. And I know also in medical school when you’re looking at, you know, the top causes of death in the world in terms of your health. And there’s cardiovascular diseases like stroke and heart attack. Type two diabetes. And even in the medical system that, you know, has to categorize you in order for you to have a prognosis and a path to recovery or management, even in a system like that. What it boils down to is, well, what exacerbates what causes. You know, genes, environment, sort of load the gun. But stress and trauma pull the trigger. So the root causes and the exacerbation of stroke and cardiovascular diseases in particular heart attack, stroke, type two diabetes are rooted truly rooted in stress like with the main thing is environmental factors and lifestyle factors. And the way that you deal with your emotions can really, in a lot of cases, mitigate a lot of the genes that you’ve inherited and the expression of those genes. So it’s really important. You know, my, my friends and family have like had it up to here with me because you know, anything that. So Jack, what do you think? You know, I have had this migraine now for like, seven years and and this test and this and, you know, often my answer is, it’s so great that you’ve done all the tests to rule everything out.

Jennifer Mann: [00:22:52] That’s very important. But how are your stress levels like. And when we talk about stress because that was a hot topic for many years. And now it’s like nervous system. We’re talking about the same thing. What is nervous system dysregulation. It’s a constant state of stress. So your body is producing a physiology of stress. And imagine talking about those GI symptoms. Imagine, um, you know, a day where you’re really nervous. Maybe you have to talk on stage. Imagine experiencing that level of stress every day. What’s happening in your body every day. You know, you have gut issues. You can’t digest your food, you’re nauseous. You might have. Your bowel is behaving differently. Your mind is behaving differently. So when you look at it at the like longevity of the experience of stress and where most of these, you know, big things are coming from, it really is all about the foundation in our body and what the health of our nervous system is around, you know, the resilience and the expression of that health throughout our whole mind and body.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:00] Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Karden, you brought up a really interesting point as well in that, you know, some sometimes we can actually point to something on a scan or a diagnostic test and say like, oh, like this is outside of the reference range. This is not right. Like I remember reading a study a number of years back that looked at a cross-section of MRIs of the lumbar spine, of folks who are in their 40s and 50s, and something like 30 or 40% of them showed some level of disc bulge or herniation, and yet there was zero correlation with pain. But then if somebody walks in with pain in that region, then you take this, you do the scan, then you’re like, oh, I can point to this thing like the immediate assumption used to be, well, this, this is the cause. If we fix that thing, it’ll go away. And then so many people have actually had back surgeries and interventions of that thing and felt exactly the same. And I think what a lot of the, you know, the medical industry is coming around to believing like, oh, actually, the correlation between identifiable symptomology or identified pathology and symptomology is often not nearly as linear as we think.

Jennifer Mann: [00:25:19] My second point is addressing exactly that. So I had a functional medicine practitioner. And this information was just like your study. And for me, as someone who’s very analytical and critical and also I’m not a black and white person, I can believe X my whole life. And then if you tell me Z, I will be open and say like, oh, tell me more. I have no problem with changing my beliefs. So anyway, my functional medicine practitioner at the beginning of my chronic illness journey, you know, she was, um, sure that the reason of my chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia patterns in pain was because of mold exposure and Epstein-Barr virus, which kept coming up in my blood tests, as you know, very high antibodies. And out of curiosity, I asked my husband if he could do this, the full test, the same everything that I did. So he did the full gut dysbiosis test, which tests the function of your gut in its entirety. And then I got him to do the mold test, and I got him to do the autoimmune and all viral like essentially the capacity of your immune system. And we got the results back and his on all counts except for one which was the mold were worse than mine. His gut dysbiosis was his chart. It’s like a pie chart and it’s red, orange and green. Mine had a little bit of red, a bunch of orange and a bunch of green, and his was like 80% red.

Jennifer Mann: [00:26:50] And my functional medicine practitioner, who I very much admire because she she’s a very open mind. And, you know, she’s not like just supplements. And she was like, this is incredible. Because, you know, I actually never test people who don’t have symptoms. So this is a first for me as well. I have never done a test run. These tests as a practitioner, as a doctor on healthy on, you know, people who don’t have symptoms. So for me, that was such a huge eye-opener. And then I asked her, like, where do we go from here? Because my husband, he doesn’t even know he had mono because he sailed through it, you know. He must have. And yet his Epstein-Barr antibodies were so high, higher than mine. From there, she kind of paused. And, you know, we rerouted and then actually moved away from, from functional medicine. But whenever Karden and I, you know, we have as Karden said, we’ve had thousands of clients now and a lot of people in the chronic illness journey go through functional medicine. So that’s just another example of how you can get fixated on the result of, you know, an MRI or an x-ray or a test, a marker that isn’t actually the cause of your symptoms, of that particular pattern that you’re experiencing.

Karden Rabin: [00:28:10] And I just I just have to jump on it to because that’s exactly right from a functional medicine to bring it back to you. Jonathan. So this is part of the research you’re citing. I keep it really close. And this is from the American Journal of Neuroradiology in 2015. And so what it studied was the prevalence of things like disc degeneration, disc bulge, disc protrusion, annular fissure, facet degeneration, and etc. in asymptomatic patients, meaning folks that are perfectly fine just like Jen’s husband. And it was a sample set of 3300 people. And I hope every listener feels good about this. If you are age 40, the prevalence of disc degeneration in you with no symptoms is 68% of adults 68. So it’s not pathological, folks. The MRI brings it up, but it’s not pathological. It’s normal aging. If you are 40, your likelihood of at least one disc bulge if you’re healthy and have no symptoms is 50%, disc profusion 33% by the time you’re 60, degeneration is 88%, disc bulge 60, and so on. And so it’s not. You used the word linear. Jonathan, Jen and I go up to say, like most people who actually look at the science and the research, the orthopedic explanations for most chronic pain are not even scientifically based. They’re just they’re just wrong. When we’re dealing with acute injury, like you got tackled on the football field and you have a, you know, that’s very different. But that’s another measuring stick that we use here to determine are we dealing with more or less exclusively a biological injury or infection that is going to complete itself? Well, yeah, that’s an acute situation. And the body heals almost any injury including a disc fracture in about four months. And so if you’re still experiencing chronic recurring symptoms of pain or IBS or migraines for more than 3 or 4 months, the likelihood of that having moved purely into being or largely being a result of nervous system dysregulation, as opposed to an implicit physiological problem, is extraordinarily high.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:20] So given all of this, and given that a lot of people sort of like, like joining us right now are going to be feeling stuff, and now they’re probably going to be like raising eyebrows and being like, huh? I’ve tried X, Y, and Z, and maybe it’s worked a little bit here and there, but like, I’m still not feeling the way I want to feel. How do we then step into the world of the nervous system and do that reboot? I know you’ve certainly developed an entire methodology around that, so take me into how we start to think about this.

Karden Rabin: [00:30:49] I’ll keep it simple because we’re on a pod, right? And we don’t have the whole book in front of us, and we don’t have the whole course in front of us. But the first thing I want to say, you said they’ve tried this. They tried that is that nervous system regulation is not a pile of biohacks. It’s not doing the right breathwork over here, or the cold plunge over here, or taking the chamomile tea to soothe your nervous system. Your brain and body are in a continuous conversation determining what we started out talking about. Safe or unsafe. It’s making those determinations based on emotional experiences, based on relational experiences, based on past interpretations of environmental experiences, like, you know, getting called to the principal’s office or having a deadline at work to its internal perception of things. It’s like, oh, the last time I got this virus, I got really sick. I need to mount an insane defense against this. Giving someone a more acute response to that infection than someone else. This is a conversation of information past, present and future. That’s why we call it the secret language of the body and not do this and do that. And so we simplify it into really three crucial steps. And we call it the air approach, which is A-I-R.

Karden Rabin: [00:32:14] The first is awareness and that specifically, although we do deal with the mind and thoughts, it’s honing your awareness to receive the physiological, neurological messages that are actually being transmitted to you from your body. For example, when someone’s experiencing pots, that is a brain and a nervous system oscillating between survival states, ordering the heart to do all sorts of things that are very confused and disorganized, we have to learn to feel either the underlying anxiety, maybe the underlying frozen threat response that goes along with that symptom. So the first step is awareness to really start understanding what’s going on neurologically in terms of survival responses under symptoms. And then we move on to the interruption phase. That’s the I, the brain and the body. What did you love to say? In order for something to change, you have to change something. They resist change. They they like to go with what’s worked in the past. And so you have to start interrupting old patterns. And then finally there’s the R which is redesign, which is introducing and learning new responses to previously threatening stimuli so that the body is operating within what we call the window of tolerance, an optimal zone of being able to be aroused and aroused, of going into sympathetic and parasympathetic without oscillating into survival modes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:36] Jenn, I’d love you to take me deeper into this. You know, um, and you spend a lot of time, you know, in each one of these in the book, it’s really different contexts as well. Like under the like, we start out with that, A awareness. One of the things you talk about early on is this notion of listening, actually listening to the nervous system. Take me deeper into what this is, how we do it and why it’s so critical.

Jennifer Mann: [00:33:58] Jonathan, I’m so happy we can share this with your listeners. Why listening is so important. It is. The awareness will come when you know what you need to interrupt. So it’s not enough to just be like, oh, I think I’m stressed right now. Let me, you know, redirect my energy and do something so the stress goes away. It’s like, no, but how do I know that I’m stressed? And what, because my body will show and tell me stress in, believe it or not, not the same way that your body will, Jonathan. Which is why I had chronic fatigue syndrome and you might have headaches or IBS or other chronic back pain. So what we teach in the book is something called base. And base is just this really nice acronym to help you move through certain elements of, you know, what comes from your body into your mind and ways to interpret these signals that become not so secret when you know what they are. So base stands for breath. And when you start to tune into like, what is my breath doing right now? Is it shallow? Is it moving fast? Is it slow? Is it my holding my breath? How many times? Like right now, Jonathan and all. Anyone who’s listening right now, why don’t you just take a moment to take the deepest breath you’ve taken all day just right now? [pause and breathe for 40-seconds]

Jennifer Mann: [00:35:47] So, Jonathan, what do you feel now?

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:50] I mean, just a touch more settled.

Jennifer Mann: [00:35:52] That’s such great information. So tuning into your breath, whether you, you know, a great point to start for people is, well, I don’t know how I’m breathing it. Just take a deep breath. And so that’s just a nice way to connect you with your body. And then you’re a little bit more settled. And then there’s a for action. What action does your body want to take right now? Does it want to lie down? Is it like right now? The action that my body wants to take is just be open and engaged, and I feel like having an open posture, I feel at ease. Parts of me are a little bit nervous. Like, what if Jonathan asked me something I can’t answer? But generally the actions my body wants to take are to lean in to the conversation. I don’t want to run away or hide. So that tells me my nervous system right now is balanced. It’s regulated. It’s not. It’s not looking for protection, survival. It doesn’t want to fight back or run away and hide or shut down. And then we have s for sensation. What are the sensations that are coming up through my body right now? So, for example, right now I can feel a bit of tingling in my hands. I notice that I was crunching my fingers as I was talking, and as I tuned into the sensations, I was like, oh, holding a bit of tension in my hands. Other sensations could be, um, And, you know, just noticing a slight experience of butterfly in your belly or, um, something that’s coming, like overwhelm or tightness or tension in your head.

Jennifer Mann: [00:37:18] So for people who have migraine or headaches, when you wake up in the morning and you do base the sensations that you’ll experience that are telling you, oh, you might have a headache coming on. Is attention coming up from your neck just moving up. It’s not quite in your head yet, but it’s this experience of tension. And then lastly, I would say probably the most important at this point is emotion. What emotion am I feeling right now? And for some people we know this is not the most tangible experience. Like for example, my husband, when I ask him, how are you feeling right now? His, you know, he’s like, I’m fine. But really I’m like, I can see it all over your body. But with practice, we can lean into. Well, actually, you know, I’m feeling a little bit of, you know, just an emptiness in my chest or a bit of nervousness in my belly. A bit of actually tension and anger in my jaw. And so it just gives us the information of the state that we’re in. So one key thing about awareness, Jonathan, is the state of your nervous system reflects the state of your physiology. So if your physiology is dysregulated and you have immune suppression and you have cardiovascular issues like arrhythmias or Pots, your nervous system is dysregulated. The state of your nervous system is really what it reflects in your whole body. It’s the orchestra director of all systems. The other day on Instagram, I read a post that said, um, you know, it’s not all about the nervous system healing from chronic illness or, you know, unresolved trauma.

Jennifer Mann: [00:38:58] It’s so much more than that. You know, there’s the immune system, there’s your inner child. There’s your attachment style. Then when you go in, like, what is inner child and attachment style? It’s just a way to explain. It’s just a framework to explain an experience of stress that has certain types of presentation. Like your stress might be your shut down and you’re sad, depressed. My stress is that I get anxious and and afraid and hypervigilant. And so these key messages that we can tune into when we become aware of the language of our body are so important. And so when I read this post, you know, it really showed me that in the thousands of people agreeing, like, yeah, it’s not about the nervous system. For me, that’s really insightful because it really shows me, you know, like what Karden was saying, the biohacks. And I think there is still a bit of an understanding that healing your nervous system, regulating your nervous system is about soothing yourself instantly. Like, let’s do a breathwork, let’s do a meditation, let’s throw some cold water on our face. Let’s go for a walk in nature. While these might help, they’re not actually attuned to your needs. Like, what do you actually need right now? Your body is telling you you’re angry. Your breath is shallow. You want to curl up in a ball and the sensations are unpleasant. So the needs that we need right now is not to cold plunge.

Jennifer Mann: [00:40:28] Which is why, you know, often those things don’t work for some people and for others, you know, they do and they’re soothing. And but the long-term relationship of the nervous system, mind and body is through understanding why we work the way we do, through attachment styles, inner child work, the experience of our body, the experience of those traumas that still retrigger us in the present, the illnesses and the chronic experiences of symptoms that we feel now. And it is all the nervous system. It’s like saying, you know, the mind and body are separate, or the nervous system has nothing to do with why you’re triggered. You know, it’s actually at the heart, at the root. And when you look at it like that, just how much is possible? Because at the at the core of our work, Jonathan and Carmen can walk you through the next step of interruption. But at the core of our work is, you know, this, um, the very fundamental science of neuroplasticity and neuroplasticity results in bio plasticity in the body, meaning, you know, you do the work on your brain and you have positive results in the physiology of your body. Um, you know, a lot of systems and parts of your body, their health improves overall. So, um, this work is really amazing. And when you know what to change and you’re aware of the state of your body, you can begin to change the state of your physiology and truly not change just your health, but like your whole life and the relationships in your life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:03] Yeah, I mean, that awareness piece of it, I feel like it’s the piece that we just want to skip over to get to the the thing that we think is like, just give me the fix. Yeah. You know, like, I’ll suffer through whatever, sort of like, like short and sweet awareness thing. It is like, but like, can we just get to the thing that’s going to whereas, you know, it’s so important to tune in to especially those subtle signals and so many of us live from our neck up. Right? We don’t pay attention to all the sensory, somatic signals that come to us. Like we’re just we’re trying to think our way to an answer like, what do I think is happening here? Rather than like, what if I actually, like, use that base methodology, right. What if I actually paid attention to my breath and the other elements there? Because that gives us the information to then move on to that that second piece of the puzzle, which is like if you’re if you’re going to step into some sort of interruption, what are we actually interrupting how and why and where. So take me there.

Karden Rabin: [00:43:01] Oh, no. Jonathan, you’re taking us there. You know, while you were talking, and I thought about how a lot of the life hackers and business people that love this kind of content, they’re obsessed with KPIs, right? Key performance indicators. But they probably also know, at least in the realm of business, that if you’re looking at the wrong KPIs, then you can’t adjust or manage your project appropriately and you’re going to crash it, right? So people love the KPIs of their body of like, I’m looking at my heart rate variability and I’m looking at my weight and I’m looking at blah, blah, blah, you know, and it’s like, or I’m looking at my sleep and it’s like, I’m glad you’re measuring all that. But to me it’s like astounding that you think that someone might think that that’s more important thing to measure than their emotions, because your emotions are the single largest driver of your physiological state at all times. They are that’s they’re the they’re the simplest, broadest instruction that your brain uses to tell your physiology what to do. And so really you know what Jen’s talking about. What we’re talking about with bass is we want you to start being able to actually attune yourself to the data from your body that actually has an impact, like the quality of your breath, like your emotional response, like the action, posture and behaviors that tell you whether you really want to strangle someone or run away. Right. And I want to just put it one more way in context here. Like you say, we want to skip to the thing.

Karden Rabin: [00:44:21] So if someone like realizes they might have anger issues, especially in their relationship, and they’ve been taught like a box, a breathing technique, it’s like the next time your wife gets mad at you, just try this box breathing technique. It’ll help you calm down. They try it, by the way. It doesn’t work, but maybe it helps a little bit. And they’re like, yeah, it doesn’t work. Versus I’ll walk you through me guys. And this model real quick. My wife gets angry. And even if it’s not at me, she’s just angry around me. What happens in my body is that I start to restrict. My heart rate goes up. If I really admit it to myself and let myself feel it, I feel afraid. So I’ve got an emotion of fear. I’ve got a physiology of a muscular physiology of constriction. I have an elevated heart rate and a shallow breath. That’s a stress. That’s. Now I’m going into survival mode. Sorry. Where did this come from? It came from when I was a little boy, and I was around the tempest of a temper from my mother. And I had to learn how to survive that when I was a little kid. Now, what am I going to use to survive it? I’m going to use what evolution evolution gave me. I’m essentially going to fight it. I’m going to run away from it, or I’m going to freeze like a possum. In the face of it, it doesn’t matter how I’m breathing, because my breathing that that breathing technique, right, is a management technique that’s based on the wrong KPIs.

Karden Rabin: [00:45:36] What we’re dealing here with is fundamental experience of fear, lack of safety. And I’m trying to deploy a survival response of either yelling at my wife’s anger to protect me from how I’m feeling or abandoning her. I’m going to get out of here F you. You’re on your own. This isn’t my problem, or I’m just going to get stuck. I’m just going to go into that freeze mode. My neurophysiology is using what it’s used on the savannah to survive. Tigers to survive. My angry wife who’s a reflection of my angry mother. You can’t possibly correct that until you know that. And that’s what awareness does. Now that we have good awareness, which is the beginning of interruption, by the way, now we move on, just like you said, Jonathan. Instead of living above my chin, I’ve just gathered an enormous amount of data from what’s going on from the rest of my body, which is letting me know what’s really happening in this instance. Interruption techniques. There are many kinds. It could be breathwork in that moment. It could be a polyvagal technique which stimulates my vagus nerve to help me move up out of a frozen response or down out of a sympathetic response. We also have these neuro linguistic programming techniques, ones called space, where it’s almost like snapping your fingers to interrupt everything that’s going on and creating a pause in time for you to step out of your own experience. Any one of these interruption techniques is useful, but again, what their purpose is to give you time to interrupt the momentum of the habitualized response, to bring your prefrontal cortex, your cognitive centers, your self-regulatory mechanisms to give them a fighting chance to come back online again, not just to do the breathwork, but to do that, to bring on further capacities of the mind to help regulate the body.

Karden Rabin: [00:47:22] And then in this moment, because I have the right data and I have a powerful mind, and I’ve practiced other techniques, I can I can be like, whoa, I don’t need to deal with my wife right now. I need to deal with my own response and the misapplication of a past survival response to this situation. Just knowing that is very regulating, by the way. Again, polyvagal technique, breath technique, neuro-linguistic technique enough to keep it online. And then I can start co-regulating with myself. I can start being like, we’re okay. Our wife’s anger is not dangerous like it was in the past. And although I don’t know if we’re going to get into a redesign technique in the work, you’ll have practiced a different response in the same way that an athlete practices the kind of a sport they want to play, but they also practice the feeling of fear and adversity, of something going wrong, and how to pivot back into the response that they want to have. Redesign is a lot about teaching your nervous system how to respond effectively, not in kind of a wish. It could be that way sort of way, but how to respond effectively in the midst of adversity in the midst of the trigger.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:30] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Let’s bring it home with the redesign part of it, you know, because you’ve got the awareness to sort of get a beat on what’s really happening here. You’ve got the tools or techniques where in that moment, once you have that beat, you’re like, okay, so now I have a toolbox and I can sort of quickly figure out which one of these makes most sense to interrupt whatever is the dysfunctional state that I’m in right now. And maybe it’s a couple. Maybe you need to run some experiments and really see. But then there’s there’s that final piece of the puzzle, the redesign part. Like how do we create? How do we repattern in a way so that we can actually start to come down out of this repeated cycle that so many of us have been living in, sometimes for years or decades. So maybe, Jenn, take me a little bit more into the notion of the redesigning part of this, the methodology and, and maybe one way that we might think about actually doing this.

Jennifer Mann: [00:49:28] Yeah. So imagine you’ve woken up every day of your life so far with just as far as you can remember, with just a little bit of anxiety about your day and you’re not sure why, you’re not really tuned into it, but you sort of dread mornings. You snooze your alarm, sometimes you, like, rush out the door. You don’t really have a good morning routine. Sometimes the idea of the morning routine, like planning ahead of time, gives you anxiety. And you’ve done this for 3040 years and then you learn the step of awareness. And so one day you start, you wake up and instead of just being anxious and not knowing why and going about your day, you use base and then you only use base. You don’t start interrupting yet. You’re just like, I’m becoming aware. I’m learning what I actually need in these moments. And then the next day you do it again, and the next day you again. After a couple of weeks, you’re like, okay, when I wake up, I feel fear and my body is really tight. And no wonder, for days out of seven I have a little bit of a lower back pain or my, you know, there’s pain in my shoulder blades. And then after two weeks, you know, you learn well, okay, now that you are aware of these patterns, you’re aware, you know, we didn’t get into mind and body, but there’s base M and base B where you go into mind, thoughts, B body. The polyvagal responses that you know that Karden was illustrating earlier the the fight or flight or the freeze or the shutdown. So when you’re aware of that, then you know, well, in this moment, my body is doing something that has helped me adapt all these years. But it’s just I recognize right now, here and now, it’s not helpful anymore. Right? This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. There’s nothing to fix. But as Karden said earlier, if you want change, you need to start changing something, right? So now you’re aware of what needs to change the interruption step. You start using those and you’re right. There’s a bank of them. Some are a little bit more. So let’s say I’ll give you one right now that you know anyone can use. It’s very simple. But when you’re feeling like you’re, you know, overthinking and you’re sort of getting ahead of yourself and you’re a little bit anxious or nervous, all I want you to do is press your palms against each other in prayer as hard as you can, and hold it for about 30s. And what this does is, you know, as as if you were at the gym, you know, you’re doing a push up or you’re doing a squat. What this type of movement for your body does is it’s sending blood to these muscle groups. It’s pivoting your mind from survival mode, emotion mode, amygdala, hypothalamus to let’s organize this somatosensory information coming up into my brain.

Jennifer Mann: [00:52:16] So the brain like pivots and switches. And then it starts to reorganize its priorities. So now it’s prioritizing feeling and this experience. And so finally your prefrontal cortex you’re like oh I really like this one okay. So you start to do that every morning to another two weeks. You wake up, you’ve done base, you’ve done base, you’ve done base. Now it’s been a month and for two weeks you’ve been doing interruption. You’ve done the hands one. You’ve done. And what started to happen from the first day, Jonathan, is you’ve been redesigning your neurophysiology, your nervous system, your brain, your thoughts, and by consequence, the behaviours and actions and emotions and relationships in your life. So redesign is both a couple of techniques that we can talk about. However, they’re, you know, a little bit more personal to someone’s especially childhood experiences, because we know that a lot of our patterns in the present were born at a time where we had access to our brain and body of a four, five, six, seven, eight year old, and we did the best we could. So the people pleasers, the perfectionists, the, you know, high achievers that lead to burnout, the procrastinators, you know, anger issues, control, so on and so forth. There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, there’s a lot of positives to all of these traits and experiences, but they’re born at a time and now you recognize, okay, this thing actually is really stressful.

Jennifer Mann: [00:53:53] And the people pleasing the perfectionism and like having to like, manage my speak for myself as, as a female, I have to manage my husband’s emotions and then get on a call and really please my my coworkers and my colleagues and then is causing me a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress. And and I think that’s why I’m getting headaches and I’m getting stomachaches. So that’s kind of like the overall map. So the redesign happens over time. It’s this neuroplastic redirection in the brain as a consequence in the body, because brain and body are one nervous system. And then a couple of the steps that we share in our book and in our program are around inner child work, true self work. They really work on resourcing the parts of you that are already inside you. Like when someone says, you know. Right now, part of me is really afraid of this meeting. And there’s another part of you that isn’t because the other part of you is prepared, is an adult and knows that there’s nothing to worry about. But there’s the other part of you that’s in the driver’s seat that is driving your experience and is giving you the experience of stress. So the redesign is both what happens over time through awareness and interruption. And then these particular exercises that are not complex, that help you heal the parts of you that are still keeping you stuck.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:19] Now, thank you for that. And I love the dual context there. It’s like actually the minute that you start into the awareness part of it, like the redesign process has already begun and it continues to the interruption. And then you have additional very specific things to dip into when you sort of like hit that final piece and again, to really look back and examine. You know, it is interesting how much of the patterning that we live with on a day-to-day basis, no matter where you are in your life, was sort of encoded at such a young age, and on the one hand has served us well. You know, we’re still here, we’re still alive. We’re still functioning. You know, that’s great. Thank you for that. And on the other hand, it’s also for so many of us, it’s outlasted its usefulness. The circumstance that it got you through when you were younger. It’s not your circumstance now. And I wonder if oftentimes we look to repeat those circumstances because it gives the part a job again. And it cause it leads us back into a place of suffering. So, um, it is interesting how how much of what we live with now was set in place in our psyches so long ago, and we’ve gotten really good at compartmentalizing and functioning and doing all the things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:56:36] And yet over time, it just it finds its way out in the weird little ways. And now, as you’re describing, the broader conversation is like, maybe the things you’re feeling aren’t about what you think they are. Maybe it’s time to explore a little bit further. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well in our conversation, I think. You know, it’s so fascinating as we think about the role of the nervous system, both functional and dysfunctional and and the notion that you both shared earlier of the fact that once we actually understand how to work with it, that sometimes things we’ve been dealing with for years or decades, the solution doesn’t also have to take years or decades. If we reach down into this deeper level and explore the notion of the reboot, rather than the patches and the hacks and all this stuff which keep extending it. I love that whole sort of like that concept. So as we sit here in this container and bring our conversation full circle, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life for each of you, what comes up?

Karden Rabin: [00:57:36] I love that question because I’m. For the last year and a half, I had the most stressful and difficult year and a half of my entire life, and that’s inside of knowing all the things I know and having all the nervous system, deep techniques and regulation and knowing that I have. And now that I’m coming out on the other side of it, I’m pretty vividly clear on what and what the good life means to me. And the good life really is internally. It’s having the space, time and ability to feel comfortable in my own skin and really to maximize the room for pleasure and connection with the things and people I love. And when there isn’t that time, space or awareness and there’s too much survival and too much stress, there is no space in my body for any of that, much less me. And so the good life for me is defined as having that space, time, and capacity to be inside the pleasure and connection that I can feel inside myself, in the things I love to do and with the people I love, like my wife and my children. And I think right now, preserving and protecting those, not only that, those capacities inside myself, but like logistically not letting life for the most part rob me of that because I want the good life.

Jennifer Mann: [00:58:57] Mhm. I love that Karden. Similarly um, emotions are involved in my good life too. And for me I sort of see myself as this being with wings and I just need to fly through life. There are times where my traumas and my stickiness in my childhood and, you know, in my whole life, there were moments where I thought, well, I think this is a life sentence. I don’t know how this is going to go away, but and in those moments, I didn’t feel like I was flying. I felt like my wings were clipped. I’m a passionate person, so I like to like, dive into the juice of everything in life and the open. I grew up in many different cultures. I grew up in Africa and traveled so much, and for me, just learning more about everything that is to life and the color and the emotion is just so important. So the one thing for me is like, the most powerful superpower that I am learning is like, nothing is too important, nothing is too big for me not to let go. And so when I feel like I can let go and not hold on, you know, like, um, ego hurt, anger because we all have that and we are all like, I will not let go of this point. And little or big, it really affects our life and our decisions and our choices and our relationships. And for me, it’s like just letting go and really being bathed in the experience of life, sharing that with my husband and my son and my family. And similar to Karden. Um, and with wings, if that made any sense at all to anyone listening.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:44] Um. It did. Thank you both so much.

Jennifer Mann: [01:00:47] Thank you. Jonathan.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:50] Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode. Safe bet. You’ll also love the conversation we had with Steven Porges about Polyvagal theory. You’ll find a link to Steven’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.