#301 Resolving Anxiety: From Rock Bottom to Personal Power with Dr. Nicole Cain

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal. Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson and in this episode, I'm really excited to introduce you to Dr. Nicole Kane. She is a naturopathic medical doctor in Arizona and naturopathic physician and she is also the author of a book called Panic Proof, which is helping people to understand anxiety and panic. And really it's about helping to understand emotional wellness and all the different tools we have available to help with that beyond what you might be hearing in the standard mental health clinics. And so I'm so proud and excited to have you here with us today, Nicole. Thank you for joining.

It's really great to hang out with you. I just adore our friendship and getting to support the community in this conversation is a dream. Thank you.

Well, and thank you for your work and putting all of this into your book and all of the awareness that you do online to really reach an audience of people who need this help. There's way too little awareness about all the different healings and supportive options around mental health issues and even still awareness about the mind body connection. And so I really believe in the work that you're doing and I'm so grateful. Maybe you can share. To start off, what is it that drew you in to talk more about this and open up this area and helping people?

You know, when I hit my rock bottom moment, I feel like so many of us, we have these rock bottom moments where it's sort of this question that we ask ourselves is, is this my story? Is this, this is where it ends? This is the fork in the road. This is my kind of come to Jesus, if you will. Like, this is the moment. And I remember being there in this rock bottom moment was just continual trauma and panic and anxiety and so somatically based my body, it was like burning in my chest and restlessness and involuntary muscle spasms in my arms and I wasn't sleeping and I lost so much weight. I stopped having my period. It was this really awful rock bottom moment and I had to decide, is this my story or is it going to be something different? And thank goodness I was able to remove obstacles, to cure and change a whole bunch of stuff. And my story started to change, and I started to change my habits, change my life. I removed some big problems and that were getting in the way of healing, and so much transformed in the years that followed. I found myself just so excited to share that with my patients. So my patients started getting better results, and I started sharing it with my community. I work with other counselors and doctors, and they started getting better results. And then I started to look at the research, and it was supporting these discoveries that we were making. And so I'm on fire for helping people who are in those rock bottom moments where you feel like it's kind of a do or die, where it feels like I've tried everything, and I feel so hopeless and despairing. For those who are there or who have been there or feel like that's the end of their conversation is, listen to this episode. There is hope. There are great helpers like Dr. Donnie that are out there to support you and provide you with resources. And I hope that in this conversation today that you'll walk away with some renewed excitement for your health.

Because anxiety, I mean, we're kind of mentioning several different words that get used around that. Right? There's anxiety, But a lot of times people might not relate to that. Like, you know, you don't necessarily always walk in and say, I have anxiety. Right. People might say, I worry a lot, or I feel anxious or like, some of those symptoms you're talking about, like, or. Or maybe it gets to the point where they have a panic attack. And that's when it's like, oh, geez, this is like some. This is. I have to stop and pay attention now. What do you find? What is it that. How do people talk about this? And. And. And what gets them to finally say, hey, this is a priority for me to figure out.

Yeah, we get to that threshold, that red light zone, that crisis zone where the body may have been whispering and we didn't hear it or we didn't understand the whispers. And then if whatever those root cause variables are, if they're not being addressed, those whispers will turn into shouts. And those are, as you said, those moments when it's like, oh, dang, I have to pay attention. Something's not okay. And that I feel like was my story is I grew up in the Midwest, in Iowa, and in the culture that I grew up in is that we don't talk about our feelings. My family's also very Dutch, and so it's kind of like lots of decorum and don't have big expressions and, you know, kind of thing. So we didn't really pay attention to our feelings. If we had symptoms, we kind of pulled our bootstraps up and dealt with it. If that wasn't working, then we would go to a doctor who would help us figure out a way to make those feelings or those symptoms less noticeable. You have a headache, take a ibuprofen. If you have anxiety, take a Benadryl or an antidepressant or a benzo, that kind of pill for an ill model. And so for those who are listening to this conversation and you're not in that crisis mode and you're like, I don't even know if I have anxiety. I'm listening to this podcast because I, like Dr. Donnie, I don't even know is that I would suggest that every living mammal on this earth has a little bit of anxiety. And it can be on a continuum because anxiety is a part of our natural human being biology. It's that activation, that arousal symptom, and that was valuable for your ancestors. There's, you're gathering berries in the woods and a tiger comes. If you can't mount a fear response, you're probably not going to survive the tiger. As opposed to, if you can have a fear response, you could fight it or flee it or whatever your ancestor did. So that's part of our, our normal biology. A fear response helps you not act rectal, act reckless. The fear response is protective. Our brain doesn't care about our well being. It cares about our safety. The question is, is what is it like for you uniquely, and what is your sense of personal power? And I think that is kind of the rate limiting step when it comes to am I just activated or am I anxious?

Amit, thank you for breaking that down. And it's so important to recognize, right, that this is, we have, I say we have a built in stress response. We're built with, we come with that innately, right? And it's a good thing. If we didn't have our stress response, we probably wouldn't have survived to this point. We need it to help us when we're under stress. And so that's not the issue. It's not like we want to have zero stress and it's not that we want to have a zero stress response or zero. Even zero fear or zero anxiety. That's not the goal. The goal is how do we, how do we understand it, how do we work with it, how do we, how do we. And, and not just in the mind. Right. Maybe you can speak to that a little bit. Because we, in, in sort of the way that mental health has been in the United States and other countries for the past whatever, 40 or 50 decades, has been very much of like separating the mind and body. And I just want to point out that you and I are going to talk about it much more of like, hey, this is not a separate, this is the anxiety may not be all in your head, in this brain. It's where is it? Where is the anxiety located?

Oh, that's such a powerful conversation. So I was just at the 2025 Integrative Medicine for Mental Health conference and this is an international conference. I had the honor of being a speaker speaker there. And so much of the conversation that's happening right now, the cutting edge conversations are exactly what you just said is that healthcare has been very siloed for the past 50, 60 plus years. The psychologists and the counselors are very, in your analysis, in your mind, in your thoughts and trying to regulate your thoughts and then regulate your body with your thoughts. And then you have the neurologists that are like, well, is there something going on with the nervous system? You have, the gastroenterologist are like, well, let's look at what's going on in the gut. And you have, you know, the cardiologists are like, well, you're not having a heart attack. This, whatever is going on. It's not that. But what you're wisely pointing out, Dr. Donnie, is that it's all a part of one system. It's like if you're making a soup and you add peppers, all of the soup is going to taste different. It's not like you're going to only taste the pepper. When you eat the pepper, we can't.

You can't separate it. And by that you can't separate it. You would have to start the soup over again.

You would have to start it over again. So what's beautiful about the conversations that you're having is you're very cutting edge in that you're asking the question of what is the whole person process that's taking place that's holding me or putting me in a state, state of adaptation that looks like anxiety. And so let's break that down. So the research shows that anxiety, autonomic arousal, which could be anger or fear or headaches, whatever that shows up as that, that is an adaptation, a coping skill to something that did or did not happen. And we could totally explore the dead or did not happen. So Those are what we would call nature pad medicine. Those are the root causes. Right. So we look at it from an adaptive information processing model. So something did or did not happen, and our whole body and our thoughts and our mind are adapting to that to try to keep us alive. But the problem is, is when we don't continue to adapt even though our circumstances are changing, and then we get symptoms. So for those who are listening that really do well with metaphors is the metaphor of the coat. I live half the year in Michigan. It's very cold there. I adapt to the cold by putting on a warm coat that helps me survive. Just like if you were raised in a family where if somebody came home and you smelled alcohol, that might mean that something scary or unsafe is going to happen. You start to notice and adapt to that. But then I moved to Arizona, and if I keep that coat on when I go to Arizona, I'll suffer. And if we have that same hypervigilance and you want to go and go to a restaurant with your friends and you smell a whiff of wine, but you still have that reaction, that adaptation that you needed as a child may create symptoms and problems for you as an adult. So the question is, is where are those adaptations happening? And how can I continue to reprogram and recalibrate them so that they're in real time and not stuck in the past?

And it's. And it's so beautiful because the way you're describing it is really from a place of acceptance and curiosity. And I find that so much of the time, though, when someone's experiencing anxiety or panic, it's often there in a battle of, why does this have to be happening to me? Even getting angry at the self and feeling like the anxiety is happening to them, you know, and in a, like, you know, in a judgmental way. Right. And it's. And to be able to sort of separate from that and realize you're not the anxiety, you're not the ruminating thoughts. You're not. That's not you. That's. That's something that's happening, as you're saying, as an adaptation from the past, but you are separate, and you can now start to become aware and notice and be curious. Right. So it even takes a step. It takes a step to be able to get to that point.

Ooh, you're. You're getting into the beautiful, wonderful world of internal family systems. Right. And so what have. Have you and I, I know we've talked a bit. Have. Have we talked about the lupus case I have this, like, story that I love to tell.

Please share, please share. For the, for the episode.

This is so important. So what this is in reference to that you had said, is that I am not anxiety, and I would even take that a step further, is I am not adhd. I am not depression. I am not headaches. Whatever it is, there's a difference between I am experiencing in this moment versus identifying with. And the story is this lupus story. So my mentor, Stephen Messer, you probably are familiar with him. He told us this story when I was in medical school where he was in private practice in Oregon, and he was working with chronic autoimmunity. And so he had two women that came into his practice around the same time. They were not related to each other at all. They didn't know each other, but they both had the same diagnosis of lupus and they had similar lab values and similar symptoms. And so he was thinking to himself, oh, I'll treat them the way that I treat, and we'll see how they do. It'll be an interesting case study. And one of the women is getting better and better and better. Her objective measures are improving. Her symptoms are improving. She's thrilled. He's thrilled. Everything is awesome. The other woman is not progressing. Her symptoms aren't improving. Her labs aren't improving. And he's like, racking his brain and he's like, what am I missing? What is getting in the way of, of her getting results. And any time that you find yourself in this situation as, as a human being trying to heal something is if you're not improving, if you're not getting results, it often means that there's missing information. So we always ask why? Why? Why? So he's, oh, my goodness. Like, if you get nothing else out of this conversation, just always ask why be the toddler. Ask why. So he was asking why in his head, and then one day he discovered it. He discovered the answer. So he walks her to the door. They finished. She's his last patient. He walks her to the door, he's locking up, watching her go to her car. She gets in the car, she backs out of the parking spot. And you'll never guess what he sees on her license. Oh, my gosh, you are so spot on. Yes, yes, yes. So on her license plate, it says lupus me.

She's identifying with it.

She's identifying with it. And so then the proof is in the pudding. It wasn't until she started working on exactly the way you said her identifying that I am lupus, that when she started to work on that sense of identity, that's when she started to heal. That was her obstacle to cure. And so I love that you brought up this really important point is what are my symptoms? How do I relate to them? Can I look at them as a part of my experience? Experience with curiosity and compassion as opposed to, this is me, I am broken, or this symptom picture is bad and out to get me, and I'm at war with.

Gives me goosebumps because it's. It really changes things. It really shifts things and it really opens up the possibility for healing because as long as we're in that battle with ourselves, it's just going to keep circling round and round. And no matter what medication. Right. Like, tell it. I would love to have a little bit of conversation about, you know, this standard approach in psychiatry the past decades of just being like, okay, talk about pill for nil, here comes this medication. Is that allowing. Is it allowing the space for this kind of opening? What do you find?

Yeah, I think when we think we know the answers, we start asking questions, we stop asking questions. Right. And so the first neurotransmitter that was discovered, it was called enteramine, and it was in the gut, and that's serotonin. And so this, I think, was in. Don't quote me on this, but I think it was in the 1930s. It was quite early on.

Sounds about right.

Yeah. So that's a long time ago. There aren't many people still living from the 1930s. And then we started to modify, and we're like, what if we manipulate levels of serotonin? And they found that some study subjects, when we increased levels of serotonin, that stress markers went down. And so then they were like, what if a hypothesis. What if more serotonin is less depression, less anxiety, less stress, more happy? And then on the opposite end, less serotonin means like, I'm worse. Right. So serotonin good, not serotonin bad. So then we developed, after 20 trials, or more than 23 trials, a drug that can increase serotonin, and that was Prozac. So now the pharmaceutical companies are like, let's go. They're giving pens and squishy stress balls and erasers and fun dinners. I sell the Lexa pro pen. So there was this huge pharmaceutical push that we had, this drug that can finally help people with anxiety and depression. And the doctors like, woohoo. So this was the 1960s, and we've been doing largely the same thing since then. We have the counselors that are trying to talk you out of it. Logic. I have my master's in and talk therapy and in cognitive behavioral therapy, it is great for thought anxiety and thought depression. And then we have the biomechanical intervention. We got these drugs but the problem is, is that they don't work for everybody. And so then people are labeled as medication resistant, treatment resistant, there's something wrong with you. The drugs that work don't work for you. And then we have this shame. I just talked to a woman earlier today and that was her story. So then 2022 rolls around and researchers did this giant meta analysis and they looked at all the research studies that, that were supposedly linking serotonin to depression and anxiety and they found that there was no correlation at all. More serotonin is not better, less serotonin is not worse. And suddenly the hypothesis that we've been leaning on for decades.

Poof.

Is wrong is poof. Which I love. Dr. Donney, because now we get to ask more fun questions like well, why did some people feel better? Some antidepressants are anti inflammatory, but then I'm thinking we can do better anti inflammatory wise.

Yes.

And then some antidepressants increase brain derived neurotrophic factor. And I'm like, well, we have better things for brain derived neurotrophic factor. So now we get to ask, well, why, why did this person feel better on serotonin and why didn't that person feel better on serotonin? What are the root causes? What's underneath of it? Why? Why?

Totally. And I, I love that you're, thank you for describing that historical perspective because I feel like that needs to be common knowledge, people. That's the only way we're going to be able to get some light, shine some light on this and shift it. Because it has become so ingrained not just in medicine, but even culturally. And when we even diagnose a person as treatment resistant, that can become an identity. Speaking of identities and like you said, then people are interpreting and internalizing that diagnosis of being treatment resistant. And really what we should be saying is that treatment didn't, it doesn't work for everybody, which is what the research is now showing. The treatment doesn't work for everyone. We have, it's not a one size fits all. And it's not that there's a problem with the person, it's that there's a problem with the treatment. We just have to shift our language. I think we have to really be careful with the words we're choosing. And I love too As a nature. This is the fun part about being naturopathic doctors to get talking together, right, Is we get to be like, oh, my gosh, in naturopathic medicine, there's so many more ways we can help. And I don't know if you know this. I was researching anxiety and depression, and way back when this was. I think, I don't know, it was even probably 2005. Ish, 2006, 7. And I was. I published an article called Anxiety and Depression. It all starts with stress. And that was the beginning of me starting to write and speak into this topic of it. It's the. It's the tip of the iceberg. Right. Like you were saying, this is just the adaptation. This is just what we call it, what we do, our insurance billing around. But that doesn't mean that that's the whole story. We need to look deeper and say what's really going on under the surface and the ways, if we can really address those root causes now, the anxiety disappears because there's no reason for it anymore.

Oh, my goodness. You were trauma informed before trauma informed was even a part of the conversation. Is you're looking at what is the stress on the system. You're looking at mind, body, nervous system, spirit. You're looking at the root of the root of the root. And I so admire your work for that very reason, because I would even say that a lot of naturopathic doctors, although very beautiful, brilliant and skilled and well intended, may not be quite getting that, because what we see in practice is that some people still, even holistic doctors, still see the symptom as the problem. And so there's the pill for an ill, there's the supplement for a symptom. And. And so we have a lot of doctors, especially in the forums that are like, hey, I have a patient who has depression. What are some antidepressant herbs? And sure, like, we could do Melissa, which is lemon balm, or we could do Leonoris, or we could do saffron.

Like St. John's wort.

St. John's wort. We could do pharmaceutical, which is probably less expensive, and do Zoloft or citalopram, whatever. But. But the question that you're really a trailblazer in, doc, is what is the stressor? What is this an adaptation to? How is this state protective and honoring and being curious about that state and then going in and reverse engineering what that root cause is? Or maybe there's several root causes. And what's interesting to me is that sometimes those root causes don't even belong to us, that these root causes could be generational. And we saw this with the Dutch famine, where people like in Audrey Hepburn's timeframe went through a famine, and then that changed our genetic expression such that people, generations and generations later struggle with weight gain or they're gaining weight because they're holding on to everything. And it may not be that you're eating the wrong food or doing the wrong thing or not exercising enough. It could literally be an inherited stress that your body adapted to through generational information. So I love, love, love, and, like, behind you, your beautiful book cover is there. Master your stress, reset your health. And so when in doubt, that may be the most important question that we can ask.

And let's go into that a little more for anyone listening who's like, what do you mean by trauma? What do we mean by generational trauma? If you start to get curious and you start to go, oh, you mean there's more to this story? And how do I even know that that might be my case? Because a lot of people, even though I would say most all of us, have some trauma, some degree of trauma. And it's not about comparing, right? It's not. We don't ever say, oh, well, I don't, because it tends to. Right? People will tend to be like, why? I know other people have more trauma than me, but that's a way of dismissing yourself. And so we want to just be clear to say, it's not about comparing your trauma to someone else's trauma. It's about accepting and saying, hey, I'm human. Likely, I have been through some stressful stuff that might qualify as trauma. Let me start to be acknowledging that and. And curious right back to that curiosity. And now. Now that we can acknowledge it, that's when we can start healing it so, so good.

And I think the conversation around trauma has been a little bit. A little bit bogarted in that it. Originally, that language was used when researchers like Bessel van der Kolk were looking at veterans, like Vietnam veterans, was where he really did a lot of wrong.

Like a clear, obvious trauma. Right?

Big T traumas. And then subsequent research, especially out of Francine Shapiro's research, he was the founder of a type of therapy called emdr, where what we're actually finding is that a trauma is anything that changes the way you see yourself, others, and the world.

And that's a great. Say that again. That definition. Because I think then people can start to let that sink in. Like, say that again for us, Nicole.

What did or did not Happen that changed the way that you see yourself, others in the world. And I call these adaptive events. And that comes from the AIP model, the adaptive information processing model. So we're kind of changing the language a little bit to feel more accessible to people. Is if you look at your symptoms right now, and this is, this is an exercise that I call it the three minute hack is if you look at something that, that you get activated by in your present moment. So like I got interrupted and I noticed that feeling in my body and I noticed the thoughts that come with it, the irritability that comes with it, the feeling like it's always in my chest, it's a little bit of tightness in my chest. And that activation has become an adaptation. And so what did that come from? When was the earliest moment that I could remember feeling that way? That moment where the way that I felt or the way that I saw myself, others of the world where that had to change just a little bit. And oftentimes, if we can follow that timeline to the earliest moments, that's like going to the roots of the weeds. It's going to. The very main thing of the main thing, and we're doing a better job with this in trauma informed therapy. But where I feel like nature paths and holistic healers have an opportunity to really fill a gap is that yes, our thoughts and our emotions change, but our body jumps on board. For example, our gut microbiome changes. It will change with every single bite that we eat in our gut. And our brain are constant communication, it's bidirectional. So we have a change in our experience. If somebody there's a loud backfiring of a car and it sounds scary to me, like little Albert. There's a whole step study about loud noises paired with benign things. The gut microbiome will change in response to that so that it's better equipped to change the way our neurotransmitters fire in our brain. So now my gut's changed and when my gut changes, it changes my immune system. And when my immune system changes, it changes my hormones. And so now suddenly I have the whole person going back to the silos we were talking about earlier is now my gastroenterologist needs to talk to my neurologist who needs to talk to my immunologist because my whole body is like, oh, this thing did or did not happen. And we're protecting Dr. Donnie, we're protecting Dr. Nicole so that we're ready in case it happens again. And that's, I think, where we could really fill in the gaps.

Having optimal cortisol and adrenaline levels is essential for health and longevity. And yet the stress in the present and in the past can affect our cortisol and adrenaline levels, causing them to be too high or too low. The thing is that we're not all affected by stress in the same way. So over the past two decades, I've been researching and discovering how to help my patients recover from stress. And I've identified the five stress types, types, which are the five common patterns of disruption in cortisol and adrenaline levels. The reason why this is so important is because the treatment is different when cortisol is too high. We use different herbs, nutrients and other modalities to bring levels back to optimal than if the levels are too low. So that's why I, through research, developed the stress type quiz, which allows you in under two minutes to discover what likely your cortisol and adrenaline levels are. So then you can make decisions about which herbs, nutrients and other healing activities to choose to help optimize your cortisol adrenaline again and improve your health now and into the future. Just go to stresstypequiz.com where you can take the quiz and take it from there. It's, that's the psychoneuro immuno endocrinology, which is, which is a sort of a big long word to try to describe what it is that we do, you know, because it's, we do need to honor the interconnectivity. And I love that you're drawing this connection even to the microbiome, right, to realize, wow, like, what we're exposed to or even if you think I made me start thinking back to a child, right? This child's environment, if they are exposed, what they were, what we're exposed to in childhood can really shape our microbiome that might then affect us later in life. And, and there's such opportunity to heal then, right? Because that's the thing is you and I are always going to look for, where's the opportunity for healing in here? And so to be able for anyone listening to be, to realize even if you experienced a trauma, even if it was loud noises in your childhood, and it may have impacted your whole system, your whole biology, your whole nervous system, and it's still affecting you today, you know, could be 30 years later, could be 70 years later, and there's still opportunity for change. You know that. That's the exciting part to me. What, what do you, what do you find with that? Do you, do you agree with me, Dr. Nicole, is that what you're seeing, too, is like, wow, that means that trauma doesn't mean that it's set in stone and you're stuck with it forever.

Yeah, we can change it quickly. The gut microbiome can change with every single bite you take. And so you can. And that's such a gift to be able to. Genetically, we don't change very quickly as humans, but our epigenetics, the way that our genes behave and are expressed, can change with every single bite that we take. And so perhaps you've learned all of the things and you're like, where do I start? Like, I'm going to listen to this podcast. I learned a bunch of stuff, but oh, my goodness, where do I start? It could literally be with your next bite. And so the good news is the research shows again and again and again that the body is continuously able to grow and adapt and change. The words that you may hear out in the narrative is neuroplasticity. You can reprogram your brain, you can help regulate your gut, you can help heal your hormones. There are so many wonderful things. I think that the. The main thing is what you teach about is, what is that original stressor? What is that coat that you put on? What were you adapting to? And starting with that? And then oftentimes what's so cool about the body is that your body is designed to heal itself. You fall, scrape your knee, you could be sleeping, and the body is going to work on healing that. The same process can happen with our brains and with our minds. And so sometimes it's a little bit of the more targeted, strategic approach, as opposed to having to spend thousands of dollars on all of the things. It could be just as simple as my next bite and the bite after that and my next breath and the breath after that.

I love that. And it's so true. It's just choosing into it little by little because these little tweaks, these little shifts add up. They add up. And. And I now believe that that's our human journey, is learning to understand ourselves and how to support ourselves through that. That process, that process of discovery that allows our body to do the healing work. And I was going to say that it's. It's. You know, it's so interesting to. You've mentioned a few different possible therapeutics out there, and, and when it comes to, like, therapy and trauma healing models, you've mentioned internal family systems or parts work, as well as somatic therapy and emdr, which I'm always experimenting on myself by the way because I definitely at some point figured out the reason I'm so interested in stress and trauma is because I experienced a lot of stress and trauma. And of course it was through the process of healing myself that I've gotten to understand these models. And for example, emdr, I really love it has helped me a lot, but so has many other systems of healing from trauma. So I'm, I'm wanting to just see if we can, for anyone who's hearing these for the first time, maybe kind of say, you know, like, what are these different approaches? Because what I find is, because when people say where do I begin? If I was going to start with therapy, well, therapy would I, what type would I start with? And I, I really think it can be an individual choice. It's not like you're going to do four or five different kinds of therapy all at once. It's a matter of starting somewhere. Like you're saying, start maybe with some diet changes and some mindfulness techniques and you can then start to see, hey, where am I curing? What do I resonate with? And, and where might I want to begin in this and see how I respond to it? And then maybe I'm going to move on to another form. But if you don't mind kind of just breaking down, what are some of these most successful models of trauma healing that we're aware of, at least at this point in time.

I loved personally doing EMDR and internal family systems. I think that when in doubt, that's amazing. And insurance covers that in most places. So you could get on Psychology Today and type in your zip code and your insurance provider nemdr and oftentimes there are some really great clinicians on there. So that's lovely. And it's shouldn't be cost prohibitive for most of us. The to try to make this a little bit easier for us to do as our own self healers. I actually pulled out the types of anxiety to try to help us be the Sherlock Holmes of our body's symptoms. And so I would love to share those nine types.

Yes. From your book.

Yes.

And let's do it.

That I think would be really good. So the first type is thought anxiety. So for those who, who feel like I can't focus, I experience ADHD, or my thoughts are racing, or my mind goes blank and I feel like I just can't think of words or I get brain fog, if the symptoms are really presenting in the thoughts, then thought based interventions may work better for you. And so this may be thought based counseling it may be mindfulness type activities or maybe it's herbs or supplements that are good for. We've seen them studied for helping with thinking, like clarity of thoughts, like phosphatidylserine or ginkgo biloba. So starting with the thoughts as the main voice of the body may be a good starting place. There's also chest anxiety, and this is when it shows up in your heart is pounding, or maybe your heart skits, pounds, beats, or perhaps it's hard for you to get a good breath of air, you get air hunger. I had a patient who used to have a horrible fear of flying, but she had to fly for work. And her doctor was like, well, anxiety, bad flying, necessary, take a Xanax. But then she felt like a zombie, so her heart wasn't really pounding as much anymore, but she couldn't work. And so then she asked the doctor for a beta blocker, which is a blood pressure medication that can stop the heart from beating so hard. And so when he tailored the intervention to the part of the body that was barking the loudest, she got better results. But I think that if we start looking at, well, what is the heart, we can ask more interesting questions as nature paths. Where did this begin? What is the stress? What is your heart saying? Are there unmet needs? Maybe we can even get into fun stuff like energy medicine, the heart chakra, acupuncture. Right. We could explore that. And ooh, heart focused herbs like hawthorne or tilia or theanine is a wonderful amino acid that can help with heart palpitations. Doing mindfulness exercise where we breathe into the heart or we imagine the heart is thought based exercises probably aren't going to work as well when we have chest anxiety unless we have a good mind body connection process already created. And then there's gut anxiety. If you have gut anxiety, then we got to do gut based interventions. Maybe that's when you do invest in a stool analysis or you go to a gastroenterologist or maybe that's when you really focus on do I need a probiotic or do I need to do a gut detox or some sort of other gut brace. Intervention is focus on the gut when the gut is talking to you. And then there's nervous system anxiety. And that can be really scary for people, is why do I lose feeling in my fingers? Or why do I get headaches or why are my muscles always so sore? Is number one is you're probably not having a stroke if you've been examined and your doctor says you're safe so that can help def. Fear of the fear. But also what is the nervous system adapting to? What's going on with it? Do you, is it talking to you because you have a magnesium deficiency or do you need vitamin D? Or is there something else? Maybe your neck is out of alignment, maybe there's inflammation and so it allows you to kind of zero in. And then we have endocrine anxiety. So what's going on with your thyroid? I've had so many people, I don't know if you've experienced this yourself, doc, who have anxiety that's actually due to thyroid or estrogen and then they're given as antidepressant but it's hormone based. Or maybe your perimenopausal listeners, have you been told it's all in your head and really your hormones are just, it needs some tlc. So endocrine anxiety and then there's immune system anxiety. We're seeing so much of this. We're recording this episode in January 2026 and right now we are seeing such a surge of inflammatory based symptoms, people who have long haul Covid who have mast cell issues. And what some of us aren't aware of yet is that histamine is one of our immune system cells that could cause itchy eyes, watery nose, eczema. It's as stimulating to the nervous system as adrenaline. So that same allergy chemical could be causing your insomnia and your panic attacks. And if you take an antidepressant or try to talk about it with rational talk therapists, you're probably not going to get well because there's an obstacle to cure. And then we have depressive anxiety, which is anxiety with depression. And then we have anger anxiety, which is so, so fun to talk about because that's the fight part of Fight, Flight, Freeze. Where in Ayurveda, which I love to teach about too is that's pitta, that's excess heat in the system. So I have all these wonderful people who are like I'm trying to bring down inflammation and do all the dietary stuff but I'm so frustrated and irritated and I'm like, well you're doing a bunch of warming stuff. In Ayurveda you got to cool your system. And so then switching to peppermints or cooling herbs. So the, the conversations about the types of anxiety can help you zero in on where you might start when trying to identify where's the stressor and where's the root cause. And I have that quiz in the book and panic proof and it's Also on my website, there's a free quiz on there.

That's awesome. It makes so much sense to. To break it down and say, anxiety is not one thing for everyone. It's not one size fits all. And. And by understanding how it's showing up for you, that can help you to know the path to go down, or at least to start with, with your healing. And I, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking that there's probably times when people are more than one of these types.

Ooh, can we talk about that? Because that's the number one response, that's the number one question that I get, is, when you're thinking about activation, is it kind of circles back to what we were talking about earlier, is not everyone identifies with experiencing panic or anxiety. And so it's activation, it's arousal. It's a response to get up and go or to. To you need that energy. It could be very positive. It could be, I'm going to go to work, or it could be that I need to take care of my family, whatever it is, and think about it in a stoplight on a continuum. So the green light is when you have enough arousal that you feel pretty good, you have clear thoughts, your body's energized, but not too energized. You feel pretty calm, connected, you have a good libido. Everything is green. It's great. And then that activation, if it continues and it gets a little bit too high, we start to notice, ooh, I'm not really feeling calm anymore. I'm feeling. Feeling a little bit maybe stressed. And if we can notice what that is, what our canary is, and address what that's in response to, then we're golden. Right? So where's the stress? Maybe it's that I'm being interrupted, but I haven't had a break to have lunch. And so I'm getting irritated because I'm hungry and the body and my symptoms are telling me that. So when we address that by eating something, and then we go back into the grain, but if that stressor continues to accumulate, we. We switch straight into the yellow, and that's I'm activated, I'm feeling annoyed, I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling worried, I'm feeling irritable, whatever it is, feeling depressed, I have a headache. And then if that continues to accumulate, we'll go into the red zone, and that's crisis. That's when people have more symptoms. So maybe my canary was a little bit of anger, anxiety, but. But my panic attack Is all the symptoms I was telling you about in the beginning with the muscles and the burning and all of that. So you might notice more of those types of anxiety as the body is like, hey, hey, we need support. And it starts shouting.

So identifying like where was the core? Where did. What was the beginning of this?

Yes, exactly.

And I love though, how you break this down in panic proof about, hey, here's, here's how to identify some tools to start with. Because what I find with especially working with patients who, with anxiety is oftentimes it's about getting some traction and momentum. How can you, how can we. Because sometimes when, when someone's been experiencing anxiety or a lot of fear, it even can be anxiety about things that might help. And sometimes. So then it can be, you know, it's almost like, I think of it like a laser game or something where you know, if you, if you, if you, if you do too much of something new, it's going to hit that laser, the trigger and the anxiety is going to go. So then you just, you. Sometimes people feel so caught in this. Like their window of tolerance, which you were just referring to, is so tight they can't even move without hitting that laser and the anxiety triggers. And so how do we find just the minimum, most little gentle baby step where we can still stay under the radar and start to create a little change so that the person can start to feel that it's okay to create change and they start to expand that window of tolerance so that we can create healing. Right. Do you find that too?

I did an interview once with an anxiety influencer and I remember she said, Dr. Nicole, I don't get anxiety anymore. I'm like, good. And I said, I don't think, I don't know if that's actually good. That means that you're not coming up to your window of tolerance or outside of your window of tolerance. And in those moments we could feel boxed in. That's when our world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And I see this a lot with people who suffer from obsessive compulsive symptoms.

Yes.

Is I have to avoid the activating trigger for me, and that means I'm not going to do the thing. But then that, that window of tolerance gets smaller and smaller. And so what I love about what you're saying is taking small steps and pushing the envelope just a little more every time and practicing expanding it. So I teach about this. It's a four step process to really mindfully expand that window of tolerance so that anxiety isn't holding you back, because the antidote to anxiety is personal power, and that's what these four steps do. And may I really quickly share those?

Please tell us. Yeah.

So I would practice this every day. And for those who are like, okay, well, are we. How would we talk in here? I'm thinking, like, five minutes a day. And put it in your alarm clock. Maybe when you're, like, brushing your teeth at the end of your day, whatever would make sense for you. You is number one. Step number one. There's four. So step number one is practice getting into your body. And the reason for this is, is many of us, we don't pay attention to our body. We haven't been trained to notice our body. We're very much just in default mode network, which is the brain network state, where we're kind of in autopilot. We're not really aware, right? So practice getting into your body. So you're brushing your teeth. Notice your teeth, Notice the mint, notice the bristles, notice the saliva, and then maybe even notice other parts of your body. I would even say, go. Go for the gold and do a body scan. While you're brushing your teeth, notice the bottom of your feet. What do your feet feel like? The key is to not change it or react to it. So we just practice noticing it. Like, oh, I have some soreness in my neck right now. But try not to react to that. Just observe it, accept it, allow it, notice it. So that's step one. It's just practicing noticing the body, getting into the body. If you're finding that it's hard to get into the body, then we want to use tools to get into the body. So this is temperature. So maybe drink ice water or put a cold pack on your face or a hot pack on your shoulders. You might try taste the mint of the toothpaste, maybe a sour candy or a lemon drop. You might try doing scents, and so that might be smelling your favorite perfume or oils. You might try texture, feeling three different things in your proximity that you can touch. So I have this desk here. I have a warm cup of tea, and I have this fuzzy chair, right? So practicing exercises to get back in your body. This comes from DBT dialectical behavioral therapy. So that's step number one. Step number two is now that we're back in the body, if I was to put you under a functional MRI scan, I would see. See that we have more of your cortex available for using. I would see more prefrontal cortex, right? So now that we've woken up, the ability to use that more rational, more logical, more problem solving part of the brain is we're going to lean into that. We can access it now. So we're going to lean into it. So you're going to practice doing a little bit of mental math. And so that may be counting backwards from 40 to 0 by twos. 40, 38, 40, 36, 34. It may be pulling out your sudoku puzzle. It may be doing a brain exercise on your phone. It may be picking your top 10 things you get at Costco if you had a free money, right? Anything that requires thinking. So that's step two. Now we've, now we've gotten our brain on board, right? The step three is to practice in tarot ception. So that's kind of going back to the body scale scan. Okay. So now that I'm aware of my body, I'm going to notice what I feel inside. I'm going to notice what I feel in my gut. I'm going to notice what I feel in my chest. Now this is the last step. This is the most important step. This is getting to that window of tolerance, is every day we want to practice going into activation and bringing ourselves out. Because the antidote to panic is personal power. So this may be getting in your shower and turning the water really, really, really cold for 15 seconds. You're gonna go into activation. You're gonna be like, what the heck? Why did Cain tell me to do this? And you're gonna breathe and you're gonna hold that. You're gonna notice that. And then you're gonna rescue yourself. Because with anxiety, oftentimes this comes from a feeling of, I have to adapt. I can't rescue myself. I have to figure this out on my own. And if you do cold plunges or high ropes courses or high intensity interval training or climbing a rock wall, something where you can get activated, and then pull yourself out. When you choose from your own power and agency that when stress strikes, you could say, I've seen this thousand times. I practice this every day. I've got this. I know what to do. So those are the four steps.

Ah, that's beautiful. Thank you so much. And those are definitely things. What I've been. I'm always very interested in routines. In fact, in the master your stress reset, your health book, I, I talk a lot about creating a self care routine. Care as an acronym for clean eating, adequate sleep, recovery activities, and exercise. And, and I do this with myself all the time. I find that this is such a. It's just become such A practice where like when I hear something like what you just described, I go, okay, let me try that. Let me. If it's going to be first thing when I wake up and, or right before I go to bed and try different things like this even like you're saying like could, could be done in probably three to five minutes. But it's something we can, we can use, use our brain to be able to do these things. And it's, and it's a practice that then like you're saying allows us to create a sense of safety. Because now we know, hey, if some other stress or trigger comes out, comes up when I'm out in my usual day to day life which is going to happen, then I'm, I'm feeling confident and I have my toolbox right these, you're giving us things for our toolbox so that when it, when it, when it's not. If it happens it, when it happens we have our tools. I love these concepts of neuroregulation and creating safety in the nervous system. And I know that's you're speaking to that some, but maybe you can speak to that a little bit more. You know is, is. Is what you just described some of the ways you would encourage people to do that or is there anything else? And what is that? You know, is. Do you feel like that's a useful tool is to you know, to. Our goal is to get to neuroregulation and sense of safety.

I love that question. Neuroregulation. I think when in doubt, that's the name of the game. And so for those who are listening, it's our nervous system. And even food reactivity could be nervous system based. Some people, every time that my husband's in this camp is he went through a really stressful time in, in I think it was 2016 where he was like going through a lot of work stress and he was eating, he was cope eating baguettes every day. He was like Han Bianco in Phoenix. Here's like hammering baguettes. And then he started noticing that whenever he would eat bread that he was having horrible sneezing attacks and tons of mucus and his stomach was upset. Oh yeah, like did I develop a gluten intolerance? But then he would go and he would get tested and he doesn't have a gluten intolerance. But his lived experience is that when he eats it he has reactions. And so this is a pairing of stimuli with the body. And now he's mounting an autonomic Nervous system response. And so you're talking about neuroregulation. And I would argue that neuro. Neuroregulation has been studied especially in the EMDR community to be useful for all sorts of adaptations, whether it's hormones or the immune system or your behaviors and feelings. And so then the question is, is well, what are the kinds of neuro adaptations that I could try that might work for me. And so this, this includes mindfulness based stress reduction activities, transcendental dental meditation, yoga. But there is one that I love, that I would love to share with your audience that every single person can do. It's free, it doesn't have to take a long time and it's the direction that EMDR is going in. This is like stuff that people in the EMDR community are like, oh wait, this is cool, we need this. And so then they created EMDR2 based on this thing. Can I share it?

Yes, absolutely.

So have you heard of havening?

Yes, love it.

You, you know all the things. Okay, so for the, for those listeners who aren't familiar with it is they used to call it amygdala de amplification. And so think of your amygdala as Amy with big feelings. Amy. The amygdala gets really activated. We have all of the big feelings. And when your amygdala is really activated, we can't think logically. We are in autopilot. We're in fight flight. Freeze. Right. And so what this intervention does is it reprograms. It helps us re neuroregulate renewal pattern so that when that stressor happens that we created roads in our brain to logical brain to be able to cope with that. So that when somebody says to you oh, calm down. And you're like, I literally can't calm down. That you'll find that you can with these certain things. So it's done in two steps. Step number one is noticing the yuck. And then step number two is activating logical brain while doing grounding touch. So we notice the yuck. And so I would tell your listeners is we would just maybe close our eyes, notice a specific moment when you felt a little activated. And it could be someone interrupted you, you were in your car and you felt stressed in the car. It could be when you were a kid and someone undermined you. It could be that you feel lonely at 4 o' clock when the sun starts going down. Right. Whatever it is, notice the yuck. And I would set your phone alarm for 30 to 60 seconds. You just honor it. Acknowledge it notice it. Then you breathe through it and you notice it. And then when that alarm goes off, then we would go into the second step is that step is touch. And there are three ways that I find works really well with the touch. One is that we can dust our hands off. So for those who are listening to the audio, I'm just imagining like wiping my palms. And so we just go left and right. We just wipe our palms. And during the entire second step, we're just going to do this. You may find that you like to dust your shoulders off better, and so you might wipe down your shoulders and down your arms. You just repeat this gesture. There's the most research on the face. When we take our fingertips, we start in our forehead, and then we just pull them down your cheeks into your chin. I don't like to do that because I have bangs and I like to have pretty bangs. And it screws them up. So we just fix them. So during step two, you're gonna. After you've noticed the yuck, your alarm went off, we go to step two, and now we're gonna activate logical brain while doing the gentle touch. And so you might count backwards from 40 to zero. 40, 38, 36, we go to zero. You might say your ABCs out loud. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And we do that. You might name all of the sports teams in football. And you do that for about four minutes. And then after the four minutes passes, maybe you set your alarm for four minutes. After you do that, you kind of relax your hands back in your lap and you go back to the yuck. You take a breath and you notice what's different, how's it changed? What's it feel, feel like in my body? What's the image that comes to mind? What are the emotions? You notice it and then you repeat that process back and forth. And what people tend to notice over time, and it's an amount of time will vary by person, vary by yuck, is that they'll notice they're a little bit less activated, a little bit less stressed. And then they might even notice at the end is a little bit of a positive feeling like, oh, I can be calm when I'm interrupted. So then you might. When you do the touch part, when you do part two, you might say, I am calm, I am safe, I am happy. Whatever it is you want to replace it with. So that later in life when that stressor comes up that your brain has literally, literally been neuro reprogrammed to go down that pathway that you just created. So that's something that you could do every single day, is pick a yuck and spend three to five minutes working through that yuck. And I promise that you will see changes. And it takes, like, the research shows that one of these exercises can make a big difference, but for the brain to create a new habit is 60 to 90 days. So try it every day. Do a challenge.

Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that. And it's. And to just.

For.

For everyone to just know that there's these tools, and it's a constant discovery process. Now, this is what I'm seeing, and I think you are too. In. In psychology and all different practitioner types is this new opening of saying, hey, okay, we see that the nervous system can heal. We see these things are working, and now we get to discover what else can help humans heal from. From stress and trauma and. And. And. And create such amazing changes in their lives. Maybe you can share briefly the people that you've worked with, your patients and your readers of Panic Proof. What are they reporting back to you? What. What kind of changes are they experiencing in their lives?

Oh, this is, like, my favorite question. I'll actually share what worked for me, and then I could share another example, too, too is for me, I was the expert at doing all of the things to stop anxiety. And I was like, we're gonna beat anxiety. We're gonna stop anxiety, and you're gonna take these supplements. You're gonna do these tests. And so I was like, the person in my community that was doing that. I did the curriculum at Sonoran University. Like, I was, like, rocking and rolling. And I got to the place where my anxiety was like, we're not gonna stop. We have something to tell you, and we're not giving up on you. And I was like, stop it. And anxiety's like, no, we. We're not gonna stop. And so we got. That was that rock bottom moment where trying to fight my anxiety wasn't working, thank goodness, because my anxiety had something important to tell me. And what ended up working for me was, was I had an obstacle to cure. I had learned from early childhood development to say yes to everybody else and to deny myself. And I identify with the three on the Enneagram. For those who are familiar with Enneagram, I identify that my value came from achieving, and I had to achieve. And in fact, when I was working at Sonora and I had a. And one of the professors was like, you know, Dr. Kane, I. You know what I love about you? And I was like, oh, I need to be loved. What is it? And they were like, you never say no, you always say yes. And I was like, oh, that's not actually good. And so I had to sell my half of my company and I ended up having to move. And that's when I moved to Michigan. And I. Not everybody has the ability to make that kind of a big change. And I'm very fortunate. I was. I removed myself from a job that was creating problems in my life, and I had to start from zero. What do I want? How do I want to feel? What is my sense of value? Who do I want to have in my life? And what are small changes that I can now make now that that obstacle to cure is removed to start to reneworegulate. So I started doing these practices, practices with that obstacle to cure removed. And then suddenly all my other naturopathic goodies were working because I wasn't fighting my symptoms anymore. I was partnering with them. And so that's what changed my life is. Is addressing the obstacle to cure. And I think we love to say, well, what can I do and what can I add? As opposed to what. What do I need to remove? And so that was. The obstacle to cure has been my biggest thing. And so many wonderful people have written me, and I have some screenshots saved on my computer. One of my favorite ones is this. He is a military veteran, and he was ready to unalive. He was feeling despairing, hopeless, so riddled with trauma and ptsd. When he read Panic Proof, his biggest thing was, I'm not broken. There's not something wrong with me. The experiences that I am living through right now are an adaptation to what I went through. And then when he started to lovingly acknowledge and accept what was ex. What his experience was, he was then able to begin to use the tools that the book gave him. And I. I heard from somebody recently that he's now married, which is amazing. He's got a job, he's like running around. He's like, very, very happy, and he's doing really well. And the tools he was using are great. So I feel like those are the biggest messages, is that you're not broken. You can heal. There's nothing wrong with you. Your symptoms are your saving grace. And by being compassionate and curious and looking at the stress at the root, you really can heal. It's just different for everyone. It's not a one size fits all.

So good. Such brilliance and so important for people to hear and to know. And thank you so much for coming and thank you so much for your work, for your book for Panic Proof and, and we'll definitely have a link down below so you all can go check out Dr. Nicole Kane's book, Panic Proof and, and, and then connect with you as well through your website. Is that a good place place to find you?

Yes. Dr. Nicolecane.com the nine types of anxiety quiz is there. And so if, if you're like I want the quiz right now, you can definitely go and take it there for free. But please get the book if it's cost prohibitive for you. It's also at the library. My publisher wants me to try to get you to like, please get the book but like for those who it's just not an option. Go get it. It's free. The library.

Yeah. Yep. And to, to really see that it's, it's not one size fits all and that that's what I think is so beautiful about your book. And to, to see that it's, that healing is possible as you said, and that this can be the journey that the, the, the lo and behold, this anxiety that we might have been fighting against could be our biggest messenger, our biggest gift to show us what we couldn't see before but we needed to know in order to find our way to our, our passion, our purpose, our life, our joy.

That's just like that, that little part of me that she's like holding on to, like I'm going to tell you if we get stressed, she just like feels so seen and heard for you saying that. So thank you for the work that you do too. I'm really grateful for you.

A thank you. And, and I'm, I'm so glad for us to connect here and to share this with everyone listening. And so thanks everyone for joining us today at How Humans Heal. And if you don't already haven't already subscribed or to the How Humans Heal podcast or to my newsletter, then I'll put those links down below as well so you don't miss, miss the next episode. And thanks again Dr. Nkole for joining us today. Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review and for more resources, visit drdani.com.