How to Supercharge Your Life to the Best You with Peggy Sealfon

Are you ready to create riches in your work and life? It's time for Shedding the Bitch Radio and TV, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negativity so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches in life you deserve. So let's welcome your ball of fire host, Bernadette Boas.

Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody to another episode of Shedding the Bitch Radio, and we're gonna have a blast of a time today because we're going to talk about ensuring that you're able to supercharge your life so you can be the best you. And so our guest is going to really dive in and provide us a lot of tips and strategies and interrupters— interrupters— as to how we can supercharge our own lives. But before we get into all that, I just have to, uh, thank our new and our ongoing viewers and listeners. Yes, we do broadcast on Shedding the Bitch Radio and Shedding the Bitch TV on YouTube, and it is those of you who have been liking and tweeting, commenting, reviewing, rating, and subscribing, which is a beautiful thing, that has allowed us to get in front of other new listeners around the globe who have found both the TV and radio podcast broadcast. So I so appreciate it, and we're just going to ask you to keep doing it if you would, as well as leaving us comments and suggestions on the topics you want to hear about and the guests or the experts that maybe you've run into that you would love to have us bring to you. And it is you that kind of creates these topics and these experts. So we so appreciate that. So thank you. Thank you very, very much. I also need to thank our sponsors. One is NG Tax Solutions. Debbie Snelling and her team is a full-service financial and tax services organization that services the entire country, and she serves small to corporate size clients and individuals. So if you have any needs that, um, within your business and/or within your life financially or tax-wise, then please give Debbie and her team a call. And you can check them out at ngtaxsolutions.com. Then I'm also honored to have a new sponsor, more local to Atlanta, I'll acknowledge, but he has been a patron of the Shedding the Bitch community for the last 4 or 5 years. And just came up, came to me and said, Bernadette, I love what you're doing and love what you stand for. Can we please sponsor you? And I absolutely was honored. And that is Up Top Roofing in Atlanta. And Al and his team are just fabulous. You, you won't go wrong should you have any type of home roofing needs. And you can check them out at up-toproofingatl.com. Yahoo.com. And again, all of our sponsors and our viewers, you bring us such joy and you make this so much fun to bring you Shedding the Bitch radio and TV each and every week. All right, let's get into this conversation, shall we? We are going to be talking about how to supercharge your life so you can be the best you, and it's all around stress and anxiety and fear and how it undermines your ability to perform and function optimally. So what we want you to be listening for and what we're going to be discussing is how stress and anxiety can affect both mind and body, causing physical ailments such as headaches, indigestion, and disease. And then how mindfulness is— plays a critical role in your life and how to pay attention to your self-talk. Which can sabotage your well-being. And many of us know that for sure. And then lastly, practices that can improve mental outlook, such as gratefulness, meditation, being in nature, and including interrupters to use to change old patterns of behavior and create new, healthier habits. How about that? So let me introduce you to our guest, Peggy Sepplin. I'm sorry, Peggy Siofan guides individuals and groups with care and compassion to improvements in work-life balance, health, relationships, public speaking, communication, and life purpose to supercharge their lives. She is a personal development coach, award-winning author, motivational speaker, podcaster, and internationally recognized as an expert in mental wellness. Through effective practices in reducing stress and anxiety. Her work blends extensive trainings with world masters in Western and Eastern traditions, including functional medicine, nutrition, psychology, EFT, heart math, neurosciences, yoga, integrative relaxation, kwan gong, meditation, mindfulness, and energy medicine. Peggy's bestselling nonfiction book is Escape from Anxiety: Supercharge Your Life with Powerful Strategies from A to Z. Wow. I am so excited to meet you, Peggy, and have our community meet you. How are you?

I am awesome, Bernadette, and I'm so excited to be here and to hear about all your supporters. That is so awesome. We all need to shed the bitch.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. But this is about you. So I am excited to kind of really learn about how we can be supercharging our life and get rid— rid of the stress and anxiety that many of us feel. But before we get into all of that, kind of, if you could give us an idea of who Peggy is and how did you get into this line of work and that kind of thing.

Well, okay, I'm going to share something I don't normally share, but the real way I emerged into this work of wellness was I had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized when I was in my 20s. And I don't usually share that, but I feel like, you know, we need to talk about the things that happen because I really do believe that we grow from adversity. We don't grow from our comfort zone. So I was living in New York City. I was a journalist working for The New York Times. Times and Newsweek International and really had a great career, but I crashed. And I found myself needing to learn strategies and techniques to manage my own life because I didn't want to keep crashing and feeling so horrible. I'd feel these great highs and I'd feel awesome. And then I'd crash and literally and figuratively, I used to ride a motorcycle around New York City. Tell me I wasn't out of my mind. I belong here on The Good Bitch Radio.

Oh wow.

So I, I'd have a motorcycle accident and be laid up for a month, you know, or I'd just get sick. And so I began training, and as I trained, I learned strategies that I could not believe how effective they were. And I literally wanted to scream it from the rooftops and help others because nobody should be suffering, right?

No, I love that. And I, I just absolutely love these stories of how Sadly, sometimes it has to come through pain and tragedy, but then someone like yourself finds their calling, finds their, their purpose in life. That is fantastic. Now, what would you say was your number one lesson or learning that came out of that experience for you?

Well, that there are solutions and that there is help, and it's a lot of looking at oneself and learning about oneself, really developing better coping skills. And sadly, you know, with having gone through the pandemic now and all of these kinds of influences, I see so many people and kids as well who have no coping skills. They don't have the resilience to manage through these challenging times. And that's why I feel even more called to spend even more time sharing what I know and being able to help others. Just move through life with more joy.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. Why do we want to get up every day and go out into the world and not feel, you know, as you're— as we are going to talk about, the best you that you can be?

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Now help us paint the picture as we get into this conversation around literally physically, mentally, emotionally the toll that stress and anxiety has on us that we aren't paying attention to and we're kind of ignoring or pushing aside. Help us understand that.

It's so true. It's funny because so many of the clients I work with say, "Oh, well, stress is just normal. You know, I have to put up with stress." No, you don't have to put up with stress. Yes, some stress is part of life, but we actually have this built-in stress response that's supposed to just be for short periods. And so it releases all of these stress hormones— cortisol, adrenaline— pumps up the heart rate, and it sends all the energy into the extremities. Well, when it does that, it allows you to be stronger, to either run away from the predator, you know, the ferocious tiger. But now it's our ferocious thoughts. It's a lot our self-talk that we react to that cause stress, reacting to situations. So what happens is when those stress responses happen over and over and over again and we're not recovering from them, all of the energies are going to our extremities and it's being taken away from non-essential functions. So it's being taken away from things like digestion. So if you're getting a lot of stomachaches and indigestion and bloating, it could be just the stress. It takes it away from our immune system. So if you're getting sick a lot, that's a real signal Yeah, I have to admit, um, uh, uh, I, I was traveling, going to this—

it's a long story, but I was traveling, going to this, um, like 10-day conference about 5 times a year for about 3 years. And my coach at the time— this is going back to like 2010 and '11— at the time she said, Bernadette, do you recognize that you're— when you get home, you're always— you always get sick? Like the minute you're, you know, you land, you get sick. And she goes, and it's not just kind of the physical toll of 10 days away and the long hours. And she said, have you ever taken a look to see kind of how you were processing all of that activity beyond physical? And, you know, and I did, and I just was stunned. So that realization is so true, Peggy. That, yeah, we just— we're creating, you know, all of our physical, mental, and emotional distress. We're doing it to ourselves.

We do do it to ourselves. Now, there are outside influences, but we can, first of all, mitigate those or minimize them. News, for instance. We shouldn't really be watching the news day in, day out. I have clients who have post-traumatic stress disorder. They watch the news and they're constantly getting triggered. So their homework is do not watch the news. Anything really important that happens, believe me, you'll know about it. You don't have to sit and be bombarded by those triggers. So there's a lot of things that we can do, but it's also a matter of taking charge for ourselves and doing things. You know, we women, we're nurturers, we take care of everyone else, and guess what? We fail to take care of ourselves. And that causes a lot of stress because we end up burned out, we end up just exhausted because we just do too much. You know, when you get on an airplane and you're traveling with a child, they always say if the oxygen comes down, put your oxygen on first and then your child's. You can't be helpful or good to someone else if you're not taking care of yourself. So that's really important.

It is, and I love that analogy because it's so visual and it's so easy to— it's so basic and yet so powerful. I love that. Now Would you say, are there techniques, are there just tips or practices one can use to stay calm in the middle of all their chaos? And maybe not even just, not even chaos, but just the craziness of life.

Absolutely. And it takes some practice because I've studied the neurosciences. We actually create these neural pathways in our brain that when we're triggered by something that's disturbing, we default back to this stressful reaction or anxious reaction. So it's important to just, first of all, be aware, begin to notice how you're reacting to things as your coach suggested to you, you know, look at what's happening. And then really, as you're aware, you can begin to practice certain techniques that are very simple. For instance, just doing some slow, deep breathing calms the nervous system. In fact, just taking a yawn, just going, ah, can help calm the nervous system. So deep breathing. I actually offer a 3 Minute to De-stress audio that's free on my website. And that just takes you into these very deep breaths, just kind of guides you closing your eyes, focusing inward, and just tuning everything out, going inside yourself because inside yourself is where you are powerful and where you are able to really kind of follow your own intuitive impulses. But when you're jarred by all these external things— sorry, I thought I lost you— when you're jarred by all these external things, you, you just tend to sort of react and melt down. And so just stopping and doing the breathing for 2, 3 minutes is a great, what I call, interrupter to interrupt that pattern of stress and anxiety and just bring you back to feeling yourself and feeling that sense of resilience. I work with a lot of clients who have anxiety and have post-traumatic stress disorder. And I'll have a session with them and I'll ask, "Well, how are you feeling?" And they'll say, "Oh, I've really had a bad day." No, no, no. How are you feeling right now in this moment? How do you feel? Notice your breathing. Notice sensations of the air on your face or on your— just be present in this moment. In this moment, are you okay? Yeah, in this moment I feel fine. But what happened before, you know— no, no, no, come back to now.

Right, right. Because we can't do anything about the past. We can do any, you know, something about right now.

Well, and it's also what happens, especially with anxiety and stress, is they become habits. And so you have to break the habit by being now. The stress is from something else. It's not in this moment. And so you can constantly be able to really mitigate it by having that awareness and just reminding yourself. But practicing the 3 Minute to De-Stress really helps train you to get into realizing, wait, I can be calm in the middle of all of this. In fact, it's funny, when I first started training in all these different modalities, I'm a competitive tennis player and I'm very aggressive, you know, come from New York City. And when I started practicing, not that I lost my aggressiveness or the intensity, but my partners would say to me, are you on drugs? You're so much calmer. And I'd say, you know what, they're internal drugs. Yes, I am calmer. And you can perform so much better, so much more creatively. I like to say you can see solutions where before you only saw problems, right?

Well, and I, I know I even used a crutch for a long time that I work better under stress. You know, that was kind of like my crutch for when I was kind of like projecting and acting out, you know, oh, well, I'm, you know, it's stressful, but I work well under stress. And I too had to— and I love this anchoring, I guess is the way I'm visualizing it. Stopping and really recognizing right now. I love that. Um, and yes, 3-minute meditation, um, de-stress meditation, PeggySilfan.com.

See it below.

Um, yeah, no, I absolutely love that. I absolutely love that. Now, since you brought up PTSD, um, I would love for you to, uh, kind of explain it because many people think of PTSD as something from like the military or you know, something that's dramatic. And yet, wouldn't you say that a lot of people are coming out of 2020, 2021 with PTSD?

You know, I was just going to say that because I think that is very true. I think we were all blindsided by the pandemic. It changed our lives dramatically. And that huge mega change is traumatic.

Yes.

So how we all processed it can actually result in post-traumatic stress disorder, where as you go through everyday life experiences, certain things trigger you back to the fears and the panic and the awfulness that you felt during, um, the pandemic. I work with clients who have had a lot of serious traumatic things, you know, terrible abuses in childhood that they're now, you know, much older, but they're still reacting to that. I worked with a young man who was held up at gunpoint in his own restaurant. That was pretty traumatic. But what was great about that experience is his wife immediately reached out to me within 2 months of the incident. And what that allowed to happen is I could interrupt that pattern that he was starting to groove. I mean, he would go into a grocery store with his 2 kids, and he'd have all the groceries lined up on the counter, and he'd see a guy who was wearing the same colored shirt as the guy who held him up at gunpoint, and he'd freak out. He'd just panic, break out in a sweat, and he'd have to leave with his kids, no groceries. They just left. And so because we addressed it so quickly after that experience, we were able to really stop that from becoming a program. You know, we, we live these stories, and along the way we believe them. And they start defining us. And some of the stories come from childhood. You know, a parent who gets annoyed with a child and says, "Oh, you know, you're just never going to amount to anything." Well, guess what? That child, 50 years later, still feels like they're never amounting to anything.

Right.

Even though they're successful, they've accomplished so many things, but deep down, that inner child is still saying, "Ah, no, no, no, I'm not amounting to anything." Wow.

Yeah. And those, you know, I often will talk about the fact that um, I'm one of 12 and I'm like the stepchild. Like, I, I don't know, I don't look like them. I didn't, you know, I didn't look like them. I didn't sound like them. I was the postman's daughter, the milkman's daughter, and I believed it so intensely. And of course my parents just would laugh and be like, of course, why would we like adopt a 12th child?

Um, you're the youngest?

No, no, no, I'm the 8th.

I'm the 8th.

But, uh, but that stayed with me until my mid to late 40s of not fitting in, not belonging, not feeling ever like part of the, the unit. I, you know, I, I— it went so deep within me. And so I love, you know, the fact that if we could pay attention to when those happen and, and like you said, catch them, and you can help them break those— that, that thought pattern.

Uh, exactly. I mean, sometimes you need guidance because sometimes you don't realize for yourself. I was working with one client who I had developed a special meditation for her to really calm her from the anxiety. And I gave her the assignment that she had to practice it every single day. And I would check in with her every couple of days just to make sure she was doing it. And this one particular day I called her, she said, you know, she said, I knew you were going to call, so I did it. She said, but I really didn't feel stressed or anxious today. But after I did it, I felt so much better. So my point is, sometimes we don't realize that we're stressing ourselves And I think the pandemic is a particularly powerful example of how we all were so challenged and pushing through it whatever way we could. In some ways, we're healthier than others. Right, right.

Now, I want to make sure to clarify to you, you, you don't only support those people who might have a recently new pattern developing that you block. You can— you also work with people that have a long history of what is creating that stress and anxiety. For them, correct?

Absolutely. Mostly that's what I find. But it surfaces in the, in the current, you know, moments or situations. It might surface in relationships, in health challenges. It might surface in work. It might surface in just emotional instability, depression, sadness, inability to just kind of get up and be excited every day. I actually, I worked with a client and I was so grateful that it worked so quickly with her. She's in her 70s and she's got a great life, but she felt like she wasn't really enjoying her life. She was just kind of going through the motions. And so we worked for a few weeks together, and the next time I got with her after those few weeks, she said, you know, I have to tell you, last night I was out to dinner with my husband with another couple, and I was laughing so uncontrollably. I was just having such a good time that even my husband said, what's gotten into you?

That's awesome. Well, are there, are there ways that you suggest that, you know, uh, that people can, can take and do in order to, you know, kind of work through what might not be working in their lives? Is— are there things that they could be doing?

You know, there's often a combination of things, and that's why it's, it's hard to just have one shop fits all, you know, because There, there are multiple things. It could be things you're eating are contributing to your stress and anxiety. Sugar is one of the biggest culprits for really destroying our health, well-being, physically, mentally. Sugar is more addictive than cocaine, 8 times more addictive. Yes, it lights up the pleasure center, so you eat sugary stuff and you feel good very temporarily, right? Then you crash, right? You horrible and there's no nutritional value. So food— in fact, I, I'm doing a 14-day food strategy program over the next few months just to help people get onto a better course of behavior and making better, healthier choices. But then it's also about movement. You can't just sit all day, you know. Sitting is the new smoking, right? More seriously, they've done studies and it shows that, you know, from just sitting for hours and hours, look, it stops the energy flow in your body. I have this— I have a new computer which I haven't completely set up yet that I'm working on today, but normally I'm at a standing desk. I rarely sit at interviews, my work, my coaching, everything I do standing, right? And it makes a difference. And when I first started, I thought, oh, I'm going to be so exhausted at the end of the day from standing all day. But you know what? I had more energy because the sitting really does block that energy.

Sure.

And, you know, your legs fall asleep and you slump over and your shoulders are hunched. And, you know, and that's the other thing, just to go back to breathing techniques for a second, is we don't breathe properly. We breathe very shallowly. And especially when we're stressed and anxious, we hardly take a breath. And that oxygen is so important for our cells to function properly. So taking slow, deep breaths not only clears your head, but it helps serve your entire body by allowing you to function better. And, you know, putting the shoulders back and down, that's just another simple technique so your lungs are more open. And again, we're hunching, so we're not getting deep breaths when we're hunched. So it's really important get those shoulders back and down.

Yeah.

And do it throughout the day, you know, like consciously take breaks throughout the day where you kind of just push your shoulders back, you know, push that chest out, you know.

Come on. That's what my dad used to say. Shoulders up or back, chest up, you know, be proud. To the girls especially.

Well, and it feels good, you know, because again, we're on cell phones, we're on computers, you know, and so it's really important to be more upright and to allow the body to function the way it's supposed to.

Yeah, absolutely.

Love it, love it.

Now, you had mentioned it before, and it was also in the introduction, but I love this whole concept of interrupters. So are there other interrupters, um, other than what you had said in regards to, you know, kind of get present, you know, right now? Um, but, you know, what other interrupters should we really be paying attention So I like, besides breathing techniques, I like to use movement.

I like to get people up moving, simple things, jumping jacks, you know, to just kind of get the energy flowing and feeling good. I like to recommend that people just go out for a walk. I know for myself during the pandemic, it was very upsetting. I was very distressed during that time. Fortunately, I live in a beautiful area in Southwest Florida, which is very tropical. Every day I would go out for a 3-mile walk just in my neighborhood.

Yeah.

And taking in the nature and taking in beautiful scenery and temperatures and feeling like, okay, this is real. This is, you know, and so getting out in nature is a really great way to calm down, to get more energized, you know, find a park near you, find a mountain to climb. I've got the beaches here that I love to go walk in the Gulf of Mexico and, and just go earthing, where you take your shoes off and you feel the earth beneath your feet. Ah, nice. And that actually helps fill your energies. You get those earth energies. We're all about energy, right? And a lot of people think, oh, this is so esoteric, but it's very real. And we're learning more and more about different energetic processes that we can do, right?

Yeah, I love that. Now, is there a, um, is there kind of a— I don't want to say constraint— is there a certain amount of time we should be taking in these interrupters? Um, does it matter if it's a minute? Does it matter if it's 10 or 30, you know, to kind of get yourself back to where you need to be?

That's a great question. So I have interrupters that are a minute. I have interrupters that are an hour. One of the things I'm trained in is qigong, which is an ancient Chinese methodology of health and well-being and moving the qi, the vital life force energy, through your body. And it's just simple, slow movements. You know, we could just do it sitting here with our arms just reaching out looking up and reaching up, collecting those heavenly energies, and then bringing it into your heart center. Ah, just doing that for a minute feels really good. Yeah, it does. I mean, and again, it's just giving ourselves the opportunity, giving ourselves permission to do the things that we know feel good. So many people that I work with in the corporate world, oh, I don't have time to do that. You don't have time not to do that because you're robbing yourself of time if you don't take these moments, right, to just breathe and just be present with yourself and move your body.

Yeah, well, I— that what you just said about you just lose so much time, I mean, if we just sat back and looked at kind of how much time were we not present and were we not conscious of being now that all of a sudden, like, you know, a year goes by and you think it's a month, and it's like, no, it happened last year, it didn't happen a month ago, or it happened, you know, 5 years ago, not 2 years ago. And it's just like, where did this— where did this, this train get off the rails? And what you're saying is it's because we're not paying attention to really being present now.

Well, and again, we women, we have this list of tasks that have to get done that we're responsible for, and we're responsible for everyone else. So I was trying to say you really have to give yourself permission to take a timeout. And what I have found, in fact, I used to do lectures on this to big corporate groups, that you can literally manipulate time. You can expand time. And be able to get so much more done with so much less effort by just taking a timeout. And in the neurosciences, we learned that really every 90 minutes is a good time to push back from whatever you're doing, take a timeout, just close your eyes, take some deep breaths, get up and do some jumping jacks, go walk around the block. But every 90 minutes, if you do that, if you just take a minute to go and take a break and then come back to what you're doing, you will feel so much more refreshed, so much more capable, creative, so much more productive. So you can do so much more throughout the day by taking these little mini breaks throughout the day. It really makes a difference.

I love that. Fortunately, like you, I have a beautiful backyard actually, and so— and I have a little pup. So, you know, I would say— I don't know if it's about, um, every 90 minutes though. I'm going to start tracking it and see. But I definitely have her to kind of give me an opportunity to kind of say, okay, let's go outside and I'll throw the ball for you, you know, for about 5 times, and then she gives up. So, you know, and then I come back and I get right back to work. So that is— I love that. I love—

well, and pets are so good for that because, you know, especially dogs, you've got to take them for a walk. Guess what? You're taking a walk, getting out into the air, and you're having to do it. And so especially, you know, with aging and older people, so important because they get more sedentary. So, you know, if you have an older parent that is alone, they need a dog because it'll get them out, it'll get them— and dogs teach us about unconditional love. Well, all pets do. I mean, there's just that connection, and they show us the basic needs to be happy. Yeah, they're not criticizing, uh, you know, are my thighs too big, is my hair getting too shaggy, or, you know, they're just happy if you're paying attention to them, if you're giving them food, if they're getting walked— basic needs. So we need to go back and start with our basic needs and remember to keep nurturing ourselves. Number one, you cannot give to others what is flowing through you. So, right, start with you.

Oh, I love that. Wait, you cannot give— say that again.

You cannot give to others what's not flowing through you. You've got to fill your cup first. You've got to fill yourself up. And you know, in a lot of relationships, I find women tend to look to be filled up from a guy, and, um, that doesn't work if you're empty. You have to fill yourself up.

Right.

So that you can give and receive.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's very much like what you said about the mask, right? You know, you have to put the mask on for yourself first before you can help other people, because you have to be the best you before you can be the best to others.

Absolutely. You know, and it's funny because I think selfishness has gotten a bad rap.

Yes.

And, and actually, we need to be selfish. Yeah, um, you know, especially certain times of year like holidays, and, um, you know, we accept too many invitations and then we're burned out. So it's important that we say no, that we recognize our boundaries and make better choices for ourselves. It's not selfish, it's self-care. It's important.

I love it, love it, love it. All right, so You started talking about being kind of nonjudgmental on ourselves. So we all have self-talk, you know, we all have this little devil in our, in our, you know, in between our two ears that just creates such havoc for us. Where does self-talk come into play with all of this and what do we do about it?

You know, Bernadette, that is such a great question because literally we have over 2,000 thoughts every hour. Cursing through our brains. And so many of them actually just bubble up from our self-consciousness that we're not even aware that we're thinking that. And I'll tell you a quick example of my own experience. I was— I told you I played competitive tennis. I was playing on a night team, and I wasn't playing singles at the time, but they didn't have a singles player, so they threw me out on the singles court. We were playing on red clay, which makes the ball really dirty, so you can't I can't see it well under the lights. I was playing a woman who was 20 years younger than me. She was left-handed. And from my perspective, she was making really bad line calls. So I was melting down. I hate this. I'm no good. I can't play at night. I really haven't been playing singles. Why did I agree to do this? Well, and I was losing terribly. My whole body was shutting down and I was doing terribly. And I suddenly stopped myself and said, wait a minute. Why are you telling yourself all this stuff? Change it. And I changed it. And I started telling myself, I'm a person of great value. I'm an expression of the divine. And I just kept repeating that to myself over and over again. And I cannot tell you, Bernadette, I suddenly felt puffed up. I felt powerful. It literally changed my body, changed my mind, changed the way I was playing. All of my other teammates were done playing and were watching now because the match went 2 and a half hours. And I won.

Wow. And you— so you did this shift, you did this work right there in the middle of it.

Right in the middle. I realized, why am I telling myself this? Right. So it's so important to be aware of what you're telling yourself. That's the hardest part, tuning into that. Yeah. Because we do it so habitually, we're, you know, it— we don't notice it.

Right.

And so start noticing. Yeah. Just, you for 5 minutes, sit and just be aware of your thoughts. And not to suppress your thoughts, right? Be in harmony with your thoughts. But notice what it is you're thinking.

Well, it's funny because what just came up for me is, you know how people will say, you know, you're too much inside your head, you're too much in your head.

Yeah.

Sometimes I think we need to be, we need to kind of be in our head to kind of understand and be aware of what what's happening and what's being said and how we're responding to things. So then we can make a choice to shift them if it's not—

And then let go. And then let go. Again, going back to the tennis example, to get into the zone and play effortlessly, and even outside of sports, it's really about getting out of your mind. A coach will say, wow, he did so great. He was playing out of his mind. And so we need to actually— what I teach is how to integrate mind and body, because that's where we really become authentic. We become resilient, empowered. We have so much capacity, and we actually become more expansive when we're able to integrate mind and body in that way so that we're not just existing in our minds. So in other words, let me give you an example just so you can understand. So let's just do an exercise. So make fists with your hands, take a deep breath in and hold your breath. Make those fists and feel that tension in your arms. Just notice what that feels like and just hold, hold, hold, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Notice how that feels. And now let the breath out, release your arms, and notice how the release feels. So now focus on your arms. Feel the energy moving down your arms into your fingertips and even beyond the boundaries of your body. Just notice how that feels. So that's just a beginning of tuning in mind and body. And what happens to us when we just function in our mind, we get a headache. Oh, I just have a headache, but you push through. No. Headache signals something.

Right.

Pay attention. If you're not sleeping at night, you're not going to function well during the day. Pay attention to that. Take time during the day to take some breaks. Take a power nap if you need to. I actually teach a program called Yoga Nidra, which is a yogic sleep, and in just 20 minutes, it's the equivalent of 3 to 4 hours of deep restorative sleep. And I love that. It is powerful.

It's amazing. So, well, that's, that's a great segue because I do want to— I really do want our listeners and viewers to understand the power of sleep to our sanity, to our sanity, Peggy, to our sanity.

No, it's true. You know, again, the anxiety and the stress sometimes keep us from sleeping at night or the thoughts just take over. We're worrying too much. And look, there are a lot of uncertainties. But without adequate sleep— and the average adult needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night, really quality sleep— or what happens is you cannot function well during the daytime hours. You're foggy-brained. You can't make very good decisions. The other thing that we especially want to pay attention to is you crave a lot of carbohydrates, so you gain weight. Ah, yes. And, and it's very unhealthy. So now without sleep, it can lead to diseases. Lymphomas and other kinds of problems really come out of that lack of sleep. And so it's really important to have a good pre-sleep routine so that you wind down at the end of the day and really get yourself ready to go to sleep. You know, you can't run around all day stay on all your digital devices, which tend to activate even more of that daylight consciousness. So it's harder to go to sleep and then jump into bed and think, okay, I'm going to go to sleep now. That's right. That's the rare person who's able to do that.

Right.

So really important to have the right setup in your bedroom as well. It should be dark and cool and good blankets and covers and sheets and, you know, all those good things that are nurturing. That allow you to really get into that mode of sleep. And one of my biggest, uh, bugaboos is, uh, having a TV in the bedroom. No, no, no, no, that should not be in the bedroom. The bedroom should be used for sex and sleep.

Absolutely.

Period.

I agree with you. Amen to that. Amen. I've never had one in my bedroom, and, you know, and I'll have I'm single, so I'll have some company. And, uh, they'll always be like, so where's the television? I'm like, in the living room, like, feel free.

Yeah, exactly. So I had a client who literally, um, had perfect life. Everything was great, but she would wake up every morning terribly anxious, and she could not understand why she was so anxious. She had a great husband, her work was wonderful, she had a beautiful home. Everything was great. We realized that they had a TV in the bedroom. And while she was sleeping, her husband would watch these shoot 'em up, bang 'em up, screeching brakes shows. And she said, but I would be asleep. Yeah, but your ears don't shut off. And guess what? This little amygdala in the brain kept getting activated. That fight or flight reaction was occurring all night long while he was watching. And as soon as they moved the TV out of the bedroom, within a couple of weeks, She was fun.

Yep. Wow. I hope everyone is listening and, and really taking in, um, all this information because it's so powerful as to how you can be shifting and supercharging, uh, your life so you live the best you. Um, so I'd like to understand before we close out, what are some of your, um, what are some of your self-care practices, and what's like one or two last tips that you would provide our viewers and listeners?

So I love to just walk in nature. That's one of my biggest things. But I also really love just soaking in a warm tub with Epsom salts and a little bit of essential oils, sometimes lavender, sometimes orange, depending what my mood is, or geranium. Um, and that is really relaxing. Also a great thing to do before bedtime because it quiets you down.

Right.

I do. I love yoga. I teach yoga and I like to do it myself. And one of the things that I love to do at night before I go to bed, especially when I've been playing tennis, is I put my legs up against a wall at like a 45-degree angle, lay flat on my back and just have my legs up and just do some slow, deep breathing. And that actually helps digestion. It helps your circulation, calm the nervous system. It's great. For 10 minutes, I just do that.

It helps menstrual cramps.

Yes, it does.

I used to do it all through my teens and early 20s. The minute I would get, you know, that time of month, my period, that's what I would do to relieve the cramps. That's awesome. I haven't thought about that in a long time, Peggy.

So simple. And that's the thing, I love to share things that are built into us. You know, we don't need any special equipment. We don't have to go anywhere. There are things that we can do, but we have to remember to do them.

Yeah.

You know, so we need to make like a list. Okay, when I'm feeling anxious, here's 5 things I can do to change that feeling, right? And because when you do kind of get into those moments, your brain doesn't work right, and it's hard to think about, well, what's going to make me feel better? And you don't want to go have that, you know, chocolate milkshake because that's just going to be the sugar thing.

Right, right. Absolutely. Oh, I love this. I love it, love it, love it. I love your energy and I, and I just love this topic of conversation. So thank you so much for sharing everything that you have. And I want to remind everyone to go to PeggySilfen.com and check out everything that's, you know, that she's about, including her books, which I'm going to ask her about in just a second. But also her special gift, the 3-minute meditation. Go to 3minutes2destress.com and grab that. Why not, right? Um, you can start like de-stressing today.

Um, well, and I recommend you download it onto your phone and have it with you.

So, oh, great idea.

You can use it.

Great idea. I'm gonna do that as soon as we're done here. I am, I am doing it. Now do share with us, um, in regards to your two books that you have out?

So, um, Escape from Anxiety, Supercharge Your Life, uh, is on Amazon and Barnes Noble and has over 100 strategies, the interrupters, for really stopping anxiety, stress, fears, worries. And it's very simple. It's little bite-sized pieces of information, so it's very easy to use. Embodying the Power of the Zero Stress The Last Zone is actually the teachings of my yogi master, world master, Yogi Desai, Amrit Desai, and he's known as Shri Amritji. And that took 10 years to do, but it's a great read about reality of life, our biology, spirituality. It's just everything. And then I actually just wrote my first work of fiction called Awakening, a novel.

And that actually came out of the pandemic I broke my arm.

I had nerve damage. I was in agony. I was using all my techniques. And all of a sudden, this story downloaded, literally downloaded. I just would go to my computer every morning and I was off in this fantasy world with these amazing characters traveling all over the world.

Oh my goodness.

And I just won 3 National Book Awards.

Holy mackerel!

That's awesome. Yeah. Pretty excited.

Well, we're going to incorporate both of those. Um, all three of them, I guess. Uh, we'll, we'll get them incorporated, um, into all the, you know, into this broadcast, as well as, uh, share the links out, uh, to ensure everyone's aware of them. Absolutely, absolutely. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being part of it.

Oh, it's a joy for me, Bernadette. I love sharing and helping people supercharge their lives and just really know that there's opportunities, there's So many choices. So begin to explore them and try what works for you.

Yeah. Oh, exactly. Try what works for you, everybody. And if you have to go back and watch or listen to this and take notes, then do so. Thank you so much, Peggy, for being part of the program. I so appreciate it.

Thank you, Bernadette Boas. It's my pleasure.

And for everyone, thank you so much for being here and participating in today's broadcast. And keep in mind, we can always accept your subscriptions, your likes, your tweets, your ratings, and to get more eyes and ears onto Shedding the Bitch across all the platforms. But on blogtalkradio.com, Shedding the Bitch TV on YouTube, and anywhere you get your podcast streaming services, we would love for you to join the community and leave us comments and questions and suggestions as to what you want to hear about and whom you'd like to, uh, have us showcase on one of our interviews. But until next week, everybody have a rich and prosperous week. I'm so grateful and humbled by you being here and look forward to having you right back here next Tuesday at noon Eastern time. Thanks everybody, bye!

Thank you for taking part in Shedding the Bitch Radio and TV with Bernadette Boas. We would love to know what your biggest takeaway was. Go to Shedding the Bitch on Facebook or YouTube and leave a comment. You can also subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast and YouTube so you don't miss a single episode of the show. And with your input, we can help other powerhouse women just like you find the show and decide if it's right for them. Learn more about Bernadette at balloffirecoaching.com. See you next week.