STAT Stress Relief with Combat Veteran and ER Physician, Leslie Koenig, M.D.

So, and then when someone's shooting at you, that's a pretty red zone scenario.

Yes. Yeah, I would say.

Yep. Oh yeah, yeah. The rational neocortex brain thinking is just gone. You're way down in reptilian primitive brain at that point. So you need to keep it very, very simple. So it's just breathe in to the count of 4. So 1, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Breathe out, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. And then you repeat.

Welcome to RxChill Pill, the podcast that strengthens your resilient mind every time you listen to the extraordinary stories, expert tips, and meditations to elicit your relaxation response, the antidote to your stress response. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a physician and mom specializing in mind-body and lifestyle medicine. Find out more about me, my personalized online courses on procrastination and mindset coaching for kids, teens, and adults at mindbodyspace.com. Today I'm so excited to sit down with Dr. Leslie Koenig, author of Stress Relief Survival Guide: Fast, Easy, Totally Natural Techniques and Real-Life Tips from a Combat Veteran, Juna Bobby MD, ER doctor. We talk about why she, a naval officer, mom of two kids, and an ER physician, turned to meditation and stress relief techniques for her own personal life, as well as for her patients' lives. She goes through a few techniques with us at the end, so stick around. This one is full of practical tips you can use right away to relieve your own stress. The RxChill Pill podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, so please consult with a physician or other professional healthcare provider for health-related issues, mental or physical. Hi, Leslie. Hi. How are you? Thank you so much for coming.

I am doing wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I couldn't be more excited.

I'm so excited to have you here. You have your day off, you said?

Yes, I do.

Yeah. Emergency docs, like you guys are on 12, off 12? Is that how it goes now?

Yeah, yeah. I do either 10-hour shifts or 12— or 10-hour shifts, and I tend to do a string of those in a row because I work all nights. So I try to—

You work only nights?

Yeah, yeah, I do.

I would go insane.

I trialed it at first, and then I realized just how much more freedom it gave me, more time with my family, and I worked out more, and it was just more of a reliable schedule.

Wow. So, you only work at night? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Leslie, you are an emergency medicine physician in Omaha, Nebraska? Yep, that's right. How long have you been an attending physician?

Oh, oh gosh. Let's see, I graduated residency in 2012. So, about, you know, since then. I've been in Omaha now for 4 years.

Oh, where are you from originally?

Well, originally I'm from Iowa.

Okay.

And but then when I joined the Navy, I moved around a bit. So.

Right. The Navy.

Right.

I was going to ask you about that. So Leslie Koenig, MD, is an emergency room physician. And she— prior to that, you were deployed in Afghanistan. I was Navy.

I was. Yeah, that was in 2013.

Wow. So that was after medical school or you did medical school for the Navy?

Yeah. So they paid for my medical school, so I did college like normal. I took a year off to work in a microbiology lab. And then when I applied to medical school, there was a scholarship called the Health Professions Scholarship Program, and it's kind of like a Medical ROTC, where you are a reservist when you're in school. They pay for your school. They, you know, but, but instead of doing weekends, I did kind of like a once a year. I would kind of push all my time together and do some active duty time during my time off in medical school. So they paid for everything.

So while everybody was just vegging out, like you, you were doing your, you're doing your Navy training.

Part, yeah, part-time, you know, some of the time.

Still, I mean, I I can't imagine that that's a vacation, really.

Well, you know, it's, it is what it is, you know. Um, let's say year 1, I had to go to officer indoctrination school. So that was after my first year of medical school.

So are you an officer, uh, automatically when you're an MD, right?

Right. Yeah, because I already had my, my college degree, which typically, um, an officer will have their college degree. Uh, so when I went to medical school Yeah. Then I did the Officer Indoctrination School my first summer, which was learn to wear the uniform, take a bunch of leadership classes, do a lot of physical training, the whole wake up at 4 in the morning and they're yelling at you. That was what it was like. But for officers. Wow. Yeah. And then second year, they—

Same for officers too, the yelling.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah, first year was the Officer Indoctrination School, or OIS. They've changed the name since then. Second year, they basically just said, you know, they understood we had to take Step 1, so they kind of waived it and said, just as long as you study for Step 1, that counts as your active duty time. And then third and fourth.

Awesome.

Yeah, that was such a relief.

So did you decide to go to medical school first or the Navy first? Which one came first?

Medical school. And then when I got accepted to medical school, I had always wanted to join the military and it was kind of the last opportunity I think I saw to join. I had always thought about it. And then when I got my acceptance letter, I think at the same time I got some recruitment information for the military and I thought, you know, I've always wanted to do it and I don't ever want to have any regrets. So I went ahead and joined. I talked to my neighbors at the time, were, they had been active duty Army. So I talked to them and I talked to some other people that I knew in the military and I opted to go with the Navy. So, and I'm really, really glad I did.

Well, I have to thank you on behalf of the country and as a citizen that you did all this and served our country.

Oh, thank you. It was my really big pleasure.

You're really a hero. And you're female. Yeah. Yeah, I love it.

Yeah, it was great.

I mean, how many women are in the Navy, like, percentage-wise?

It's not a lot. And then even among officers, it's not a lot. Gosh, I think officers are like something like the top 10% of the Navy, and then women is only like 3% of that, I believe.

Wow. So like, if you're in a room, you're like one out of How many?

It's not a lot.

Men?

It's not a lot. Yeah. There's definitely a male predominance in the military. Yes.

And were you okay with that? Like, what attracted you to serve in the first place?

It was an accumulation of things. The very first time I think I ever thought of it was way back in elementary school, studying just, you know, government and American history. And I was just so impressed with what the nation that we had. Um, my mother was from Chile and I had been to Chile a few times. And so I got a taste of what other countries might be like.

Mm.

And, uh, and then also learning about other countries and what freedoms they did not have. And I just felt this very big, you know, sense of like, what an amazing country we have. And then I thought, well, how can I give back to it? Um, more than just pay taxes, more than just, you know, something more personal, something very volunteer. I really got into volunteer work in high school. And so the military was an opportunity to combine my love for volunteer work with this amazing country that I know America is and really put my name out there and represent America to the rest of the world by wearing the uniform. So.

And you got deployed?

Yes, I did.

Afghanistan.

Yeah.

How was that?

I mean, well, I requested it.

What was that like?

Yeah, I request— you requested it?

Were you trying to run away from something?

No, not at all.

I'm just joking.

Not at all. No, I had an amazing boyfriend at the time who's now my husband.

And, uh, was he in the Navy?

He was in the Marines.

Oh wow. Okay. Yeah.

Uh, so with, um, let's see, grad— well, going through residency, that was when I did my active duty time. So I met so many amazing people and heard so many amazing stories, and I really wanted to be a doctor on the front lines, especially since I love emergency medicine where it's trauma, resuscitation, being really in the thick of it. And many of us actually feel the same way in the military emergency medicine world. We really want to be out there and doing the emergency thing. And so at that time, a lot of the people had already been through, you know, Fallujah, Iraq at that time. And so I heard all these stories about the amazing things they got to do. And a lot of us, we were volunteering, you know, I want to go to the sandbox, pick me, please. Wow. Yeah.

So did you— were you in active, like, war zones?

Not really. As an officer, they protect you very well. I was first in a very small location in southern Helmand Province called FOB Payne or Forward Operating Base Payne. And we were there to support operations near the Pakistani border. And that was a lot of drilling every day. So we would, um, I was there with a small, uh, platoon of people and we, it was like me, another ER doctor, general surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, um, anesthesiologist, corpsman. Basically it was called a shock trauma platoon slash forward resuscitative surgical suite. So STP, FRSS.

And, and they love acronyms.

I know they do.

It's just like medical school, right? Yeah.

So my role was in the shock trauma platoon. We would drill all morning and prepare for any incoming mass casualties or incoming patients. We had Army Dustoff was there, so we would do drills with them. So loading people on the helicopter and they would go get sent back to the larger bases such as Leatherneck, Camp Leatherneck. So I spent 3 months at FOB Payne and only one time was that I was there, we had a mass casualty. Other than that, it was mostly seeing your run-of-the-mill, you know, clinic-type things. I did see a STEMI heart attack, and I saw cauda equina while I was there, even though it was a small base.

Um, do you want to explain for the listeners what cauda equina is? Oh, sure, sure.

Uh, so cauda equina is a, uh, back issue that requires emergency back surgery by a either a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic spine surgeon, because the risk is that you could be paralyzed from the waist down. So I saw that in—

and cauda equina being the, the nerves that come out off the bottom of our spinal cord.

Right, right. And those had too much pressure on them. And a patient came to me with the symptoms of it. And so I sent him out. And then I had a patient with a massive heart attack that was going on who I had to then send out. Usually those kinds of people would go straight to the cath lab with a cardiologist. But in Afghanistan, that was not what we had at our disposal. So we had to make do with what we had.

And the mass casualty that you had was that— I assume that was stressful.

Well, yes.

Did you feel well prepared? I did. Or was it— is it just something that you can't be prepared for?

You prepare as much as you can and then you improvise when the chaos hits because it's going to hit. I had another bigger mass casualty when I was at Camp Leatherneck. But the very first one was relatively small, but it was big for us in our, with our minimal resources. Um, cause we only had 4 beds in our trauma resuscitation bay and 1 bed in the OR, but we had something like 6 people all come at once. And that was a case of the, um, the ANA, the Afghan National Army. They had, uh, an IED go off on their convoy and they came in and my patient ended up being the most critical. Um, but you know, again, this was something that we trained for every single day. We were basically training our corpsman, uh, you know, the lowest person with the least training, you know, your 18-year-old person to be qualified in ATLS. That was our goal was that everybody would be ATLS level because everybody had to be on their game in this scenario. So I really had faith in my team because we had trained every single day, just going through scenarios and drilling and teaching as much as possible. And then when everything hit, you know, it was just— we fall back on our training and worked as a team and got everything done.

Mm-hmm. I mean, it's interesting because I have a guest coming on. She's a neuro— she's a neuroscientist and she has identified a physiologic correlate that's measurable for PTSD.

Oh, really?

And so she and I are going to discuss, and we started having a conversation about, can you prepare yourself for PTSD? But I mean, her conclusion was that you cannot, because the reason you get PTSD is because it is so unexpected and so unlike anything that you've prepared for, even if you tried mentally. Just doesn't, you know, guard you from getting PTSD. So.

Oh, that's—

I was just wondering what it was like in the real, you know, front lines.

I think.

Well, you weren't in the front lines.

No, no. It's funny though, because one of, one of my, the Marines I was with, I found out years later he had PTSD. Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess. I mean, there were times where we'd be in Iraq Lido sleeping, when the alarms would go off and we'd have to get all our kit, you know, get our Kevlar, get our weapons, and at 3 in the morning go stand in a bunker. And we wouldn't know what's going on, just all the alarms are going off and it's, you know, no one knows what's going on and no one wants to tell you because they don't want to spread panic. So there were definitely times that that happened, but I don't know for— I don't know if that was like being in battle because there apparently were This was at Leatherneck, though, when we first got in country. And I think that was probably the closest to wondering what was going on because you don't know, are the missiles coming this way? Are there RPGs going over the fence?

What's an RPG?

A rocket-propelled grenade. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Thank you.

And then not only that, but let's see, in September, so a few months before we got in country, there was the Battle of Bastion where some Taliban infiltrated the base and they blew up a bunch of Harrier jets on the other side of the base that we were on. So everyone was still very much on high alert and there were small skirmishes kind of where they were attacking the base that we were on. So I wouldn't say that I was ever really in battle, but that stuff is definitely in the back of your mind. One time I was at Leather— sorry, this would be at FOB Payne. We found out that some of the locals were trying to get under the concertina wire. We didn't know what they were doing. Are they setting bombs? Are they— what are they doing? Um, what else?

What's a concertina wire?

That surrounds your base. So, oh yeah, so the smaller the base, typically the less fortified they are. So the defense—

is it like barbed wire?

It's like barbed wire, just like in the big roll. So, uh-huh.

Wow, you are, uh, You are somebody I'd like to be with if I was out in, in the wild.

Well, I was—

I'm calling you Leslie. Plus you have that gorgeous bullet. What, what are those things called? The little trailer that you have?

Oh, the Airstream.

Airstream. Why do I call it a bullet?

It looks like it's aluminum. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Which you made so beautiful.

Thank you.

I'm sure that they didn't have all those pastels in, in the military.

No, very much. No, no.

But as being a woman, you were single at the time, right?

I was then secretly married. Oh, wow. I, I eloped with my then-boyfriend just before deploying.

Congratulations.

So, yeah, we got married and 5 days later I left for Afghanistan.

Oh, my gosh. Well, so how, how is that like being a woman in the Navy, which I'm sure— I think there's less women in the Navy than in the Army, right? Oh, gosh. I don't know. So, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. How is it with all the men? Like, are they respectful? Like, was it easy? Was it hard? Do you not want to talk about it?

Well, gosh, I loved my time in the Navy, but yes, it was very male-dominated.

Uh-huh.

I wouldn't call it stressful. Mm-hmm. Well, actually, it probably was. It just— it made me feel as a woman that My concerns were just a little different than the men sometimes. There were, there were definitely times where I felt singled out as a woman. I wouldn't get invited to, say, go golfing on the weekends. I think they just assumed I wouldn't want to go or something. So, you know, all the resident men would go golfing with the attending men. And I was like, what? Okay, how did that happen?

Because these are all physicians.

Yes.

Okay. Okay.

So little things like that would happen here and there. I had a lot of trouble finding a female mentor just because there weren't many women who would stay in the military for very long. And it was just tough to connect with, with another woman mentor.

So, I mean, I have to assume that there, there are times when it was stressful. First of all, medical school is stressful.

Yeah.

And then, and then to be in the Navy is stressful. It is. It is. And I, so what did you fall back on like for your support or what did you do for your stress relief?

Oh gosh, I had so many good friends.

Mm-hmm.

That I met in the Navy. So, okay. So men and women. Oh gosh.

Yes. Uh-huh.

Yeah. A lot of women in the Navy. Um, just my, so I, uh, I showed up as an intern and made friends with a bunch of people.

Uh-huh.

And then after that year, you know, some go into general surgery, some go into internal medicine. And I maintain friends with all of them. And so it was a really great group where we all kind of just all got onto active duty at the same time. And it was this great cohort of people who are my friends to this day.

Nice. And they're all over the country then?

All over the world.

All over the world. Wow. That's, that's pretty cool. And it's not— so basically, as an officer, as a physician, you're hanging out with other officers or physicians. Yes. So that, that's a lot in common right there, right? Yep. Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. So after being an ER doctor, I mean after being in the Navy and being an ER doctor in a clinic or a hospital? Hospital. Now you're a mom of two little girls.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

How old are they?

Uh, 5 and 3.

Oh my gosh. So cute. And I, I've seen their pictures. They're adorable.

Yeah.

So, and Were they the ones who prompted you to write the stress relief book? So Leslie, Dr. Koenig, just wrote a self-published book, right?

Right.

And it's called the stress—

wait, can you say it? Stress Relief Survival Guide.

Yes. And it's on Amazon. It is, right?

Yep.

And you can get your copy there. And so were they the reason you wrote that or—

No.

Or was it being an ER doc?

No, they're probably the reason that I really started to dig into my own stress.

Yes.

That's where I think that journey started. So I do owe the book to them. Yeah, I think, you know, being a doctor. Yeah, you're just such a high achiever and you're always putting other people first in a way. You're always, gosh, trying to get the grades, trying to get the hours in. You're trying to get the procedures in, zero mistakes. Be on top of all the literature at all the time. You know, sometimes you're teaching at work too, depending on your situation, but you're always just— and then, gosh, in the Navy there's this thing called a fit rep where every year you're graded. So in the Navy, for example, you are trying to do collateral duties, so you're going to more meetings and doing a lot of administration work.

Um, oh, when you said fit, did you call it fit?

A fit rep, uh, a fitness report.

Oh, I thought you meant fitness like your physical fitness.

Well, that, that goes— that does play into it. You are—

I was going to say they should have that for all doctors, right?

I mean, it is a motivating tool to be better every year. It is. It really is.

And are you still in the Navy then?

No, I've been out now for 4 years.

They basically put you through medical school and then once you serve, Did you have to do duty in any particular hospital for a while or they let you choose?

Oh gosh, they, they, they— you can put in your request, but you don't really choose. It's really the needs of the Navy come first.

Okay.

But so I— they paid for 4 years of medical school and then for that I owed 4 years of active duty time. However, I then did a residency with the Navy, which accrued additional time.

Mm-hmm.

So in the end I did 8 years of active duty.

I see. Okay, awesome. Thank you again for serving.

Oh, sure.

So you write this stress relief book because you're, you know, once we have kids, we start to see ourselves, right? Interacting with our kids. And then we see maybe parts of ourselves that we don't love, or at least the parts that we don't wish, um, we're so reactive, right? Because kids bring out so much in us. Whether it's worry or, you know, love. I mean, it's love, but it's also stress because you worry about them constantly. And you're also trying to deal with these little people who you're trying to raise to be good people. Absolutely. So I think sometimes it brings out the worst in us. It can. Yeah. And absolutely the best in us.

Yeah, that's so true. I was— yeah. My kids really made me take a look in the mirror and say, what do I want out of life?

Okay.

For them, for me, who do I have to be to be the best for them? And also realize how fast they grow and that every day that goes by is a day that's gone. And to appreciate the moment and be grateful for all of it.

Well, wow. They're lucky 'cause you're realizing this when they're so young. That didn't come from nowhere though, right? I mean, you had some difficulties in your childhood that led you to want to change and want to be a different parent. That's very true. Yes. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? Whatever you're comfortable with talking about.

Oh, sure, sure. Um, my father was not a very good father. Uh, he, um, I'm trying to say how I can put this. Well, he was abusive verbally and physically. And— I'm so sorry. Yeah, well, my mother recognized what she needed to do when I was about, I think, 4 or 5 and kind of whisked us away. But then there was the court battle that ensued with that, and we got visitation rights with him. Which was not pleasant for us by any stretch.

He was still abusive.

He was still abusive. Yes. And he just doesn't have the capacity to understand that what he did was wrong at any point. Mm-hmm. And it's been just a lifelong processing of, of that. So it really generated that kind of fighter mentality for me and the— because I had a little brother and so I felt the need to protect him from this. So I would take the blame, I would get in the middle. And that was just how I saw myself as, as trying to fix it. So, but then my mother was a bit bitter for years after that, but then she married my stepdad, who was an amazing person. So So that story—

So you had some stability in your life as an adult. Yeah, yeah.

It took some time though.

It was traumatic, right?

Yes.

Growing up with your father.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. And, um, yeah. So how did you go from that to when you take all of that stress and, um, how did you process that stress as an adult when you decided to go to the Navy or medical school? Because those are two of some of the most stressful things you can do. So having grown up in this abusive home and then not processing it, because I know you didn't have help, right? You didn't have psychotherapy, you didn't have any help from anybody. Did any of the adults know this was happening other than your mom or?

Uh, no, my mom was the one who knew. And then And then ultimately my dad just stopped wanting to see us.

Oh, which is also traumatic, I'm sure.

I don't know if I really cared at that point because it'd been so much.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I just don't remember missing him. I did at first, I think, you know, when I didn't understand what was going on. And in time, I just kind of— it just was. It just was. You know, and it wasn't like I missed seeing him, right? So I didn't really care, I guess.

I don't know. It's rough. I mean, especially when you're in that kind of situation, then you're kind of numb, right?

Oh yeah. And I was numb for a long time. And, and that was what carried into adulthood was this kind of— it was an adaptive thing that I had at the time. It was what I needed was to be very thick-skinned, put my walls up and don't show.

And to be a fighter.

Right. Yes. Yeah.

Like go into the Navy.

Yes. Yes.

Even.

Right. So that's the thing about looking back on it now, you know, however many years later is I'm trying to work through it and see, yes, this turned me into who I am and I am proud of who I am today. So looking back on it, for the longest time I was extremely angry and that's— I'm still angry about a lot of it, but I'm trying to process that because I don't want to have that negativity in my life. And it's really the way I look at it in my mindset to, to, to look at it. But the fact is, is that it did make me who I am. It did propel me to do these things that I'm very thankful for and very proud of. And it led me to the life that I'm living, which I wouldn't change for anything. So to change any of my past would be to change who I am now, and I wouldn't want that.

And the anger basically gave you the strength at the time. It was useful for you.

It was, yes.

To propel you forward in all of these professions that you pursued.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then anytime I face adversity, it would be that feeling of, I can do this. I've been through the pain. I have suffered. I know that I can do this. I know I'm strong enough. And even when, as a kid, I was really shy. And so I didn't have a lot of friends as a as a kid that I could talk to about it. And then even when I tried to open up to someone, it was like, ew, icky, that's too yucky, mushy. And so I just learned, don't talk about this stuff because people don't want to hear it. They look at you funny. So I held it in for the longest time, and I just continued with my adaptive behaviors that in time, once I had kids, I think really the kids put that mirror up to my face of like the anger and the dealing with it and just, you know, gritting my teeth through difficult things. Maybe there was a diff— different way to approach it instead of rage and anger.

So, uh-huh. And you mean by the adaptive behaviors, you mean the angry behaviors?

Yeah, the angry, the, the lack of vulnerability, showing any emotion ever. Admitting weakness. As a kid, that wasn't really met with anything positive. To admit weakness or to, to be vulnerable. I felt like as a child, when I did do that, I would just suffer. So I learned, okay, don't, don't show emotion, don't be vulnerable, don't ask for help because you're not going to get it and they're not going to care and you're not going to get love. So I—

And again, you went into the two professions where you can't show vulnerability. It's not, you know, I guess you were well fit for it.

Yeah.

Yeah. But then maybe not so much for two little girls.

Right. And I would see these other people through my course of my life who did what I was doing, but they did it with such compassion. You know, people who were in the Navy, but they would rely on their friends for help. They did have their walls down and their vulnerabilities open to the world. And they were amazing people and I almost envied it, but I also just couldn't understand for the longest time. So, yeah, you know, even people in the military, they'll be vulnerable with each other. They will be open up and share. And then, you know, same thing with, you know, doctors. I had people who told me that they would hug their patients and I thought, what? You hug your patients? And I just could not understand that. I did not.

I didn't see much of that in New York training either.

Yeah, it depends on the culture you're in, I guess. But I at least saw other people doing it with such compassion and it made me feel like, oh, there is another way to live this life with, with more happiness and with more peace, really, instead of always fighting and always fighting. And I felt like I got to a point where the always fighting adversity just got to be more stressful than helpful. So that's where some of this stress relief searching to fix myself really started.

Or to help yourself, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Oh yeah.

So I saw this meme the other day, which was pretty funny in one of the mom— I think it was a physician mom group. Mm-hmm. And it, it was like, did you ever realize the windows were open when you were yelling at your kids? But yeah, definitely as a mom you start to realize, is this the kind of mom I wanna be? Right? Oh yeah. Do you, so when was, did you have like a moment where you said, I'm really gonna start working on myself?

Or I think I've, Oh gosh, I don't know. It's hard to say that because I've always tried to work on myself somehow, uh, you know, either—

but on the softer— on the softening yourself. Yeah, softening myself, because I feel like that's what you're doing now. Like, you're softening your walls. I think trying to help other people too.

That's true. Yeah, yeah. I, I'd say it probably did start Well, the second I saw my daughter, because I never believed in love at first sight until my daughter was born. And the minute I pulled her up, I knew instantly this life that I've had before is gone and a whole new one is blossoming in front of me.

Mm.

And I need to be the love I feel right now, I want to keep this going. And I, I still have to force myself sometimes to not deny love to my kids because I've been so used to bottling up that emotion. Hmm.

And can you explain that a little more? That's interesting.

Like when my kids want a hug, sometimes I'll say, no, no, no, I'm busy. And as much as I can, I try to continue. I try to accept their love because I know there's gonna be a day when they won't be this open. And I don't ever wanna start closing off the possibility of showing that love. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So, but you physically have that habitual sort of no, no, not right now kind of thing.

It's in my mental memory. Yes. Because I can sometimes start thinking of myself and my to-do list and my planner mind. And I need to go accomplish this thing.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So with my kids, I just always want them to know 100% of the time that I love them 100% of the time. There were times in my life where I did not feel love at all from my parents, and I want to give my kids everything I have.

So I know you found your first meditation technique during hypnobirthing. Yeah. Yes. Tell us about that. Your doula, you had a doula?

I had a doula. Um, a friend of mine said you should get one because they help your husband. And I thought that was great because it's like, well, that this kind of makes sense. You know, the everyone's there to help me and my husband's there to help me, but he's never been through this before either. Wait, is he a physician?

Did you tell me?

No, he's not. He's definitely not a physician. Cybersecurity.

Uh-huh.

So he has no idea with the medical side of things. When I asked my OB for recommendations and she told me one doula, and that doula advised that on base there was this free class for hypnobirthing, which I thought, you know, Lamaze, the breathing techniques. But she said the hypnobirthing was that plus more visualization. Yeah. And so one of the tactics was— or sorry, the techniques was visualization. There were different meditations and mantras, and it was nothing I had ever done before. I think at that point I tried meditation once and found it super boring. I just thought, this is not for me. I'm a very Type A person. Meditation cannot help me at all.

So this— all this meditation that they're doing for like Army and Navy, it's not reaching you guys?

It did. It never reached me when I was active duty. Yeah, it never got to me. Um, no, not until— well, the thing is, I was active duty when I did the hypnobirthing that was offered on the base that I was at. Um, so I took it and we had to go with our spouses to the class on base, and they would do some visualizations during the class. And there was one that I thought was super stupid because I was very just like, no, I'm not getting into any of this like crunchy granola patchouli hippie stuff, but I'll try it just And what convinced me honestly was my doula said that, um, a helicopter pilot that she had trained did it. And she said this helicopter pilot was able to give birth with zero medication.

Ooh.

And so for me that was like, okay, sign me up.

That sounds very unpleasant to me.

Well, it was just for me, it was that competitive, like, well, if she did it, if a helicopter pilot can do it, then I'm gonna go out and do it too. So that's what convinced me. That's just, that's how to get me going.

So, so you had no medications?

Well, I got induced, which is the most painful thing I've ever endured in my life. Thank God for epidurals.

Uh-huh.

So same here. Same thing. Yep. Yeah.

You loved hypnobirthing. So even though you got an epidural, it helps you a lot.

Some.

Some.

Okay.

Yeah. But you realize that there's this whole, like, mental faculty that maybe you could use more of the visualizations and the relaxation. Relaxation.

Yeah, yeah. My biggest issue was always falling asleep. My brain is just always racing, especially at night. Yeah, I used to have to do so many different methods with sleep hygiene and tactics that just weren't working for me very much, and I didn't want to be on medication, so I was trying to find any natural thing I could to sleep, and I found that this technique helped me sleep. So that was really what got me hooked to trying these.

Awesome. So which technique? The visualization?

The visualization technique.

And did you use an audio or did you have your own?

I did an audio. It came with the HypnoBirthing package, so I did the audio and then it worked awesome for about a year and a half.

The same exact audio?

The same audio.

Over and over.

Over and over.

How long was it?

I think it was like 10, 10 to 15 minutes.

And it was a woman's voice. Mm-hmm. Yes. And it just, it just put you to sleep for a year and a half.

Uh, yeah. Yeah.

That's better than like this sleep medication because you would've gotten, um, you would've had to increase your dose by then.

Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's what I loved about it is, and I could also do it if even if I couldn't listen to it, uh-huh, I could again run through it in my mind cuz it was, um, this concept of you're, you're going through a rainbow. So you're surrounded by purple and then you're surrounded by blue. When you breathe in the blue and you're surrounded.

Would you lead us through it?

I do not remember it at this point.

Oh, you don't? I don't remember. So I would love for you to do a couple of stress management tactics with me right now. Sure.

Sure. I can do something.

I could use it just as much as anyone else.

Yeah, of course.

Oh, so in your book, you separate it out very cleverly into very stat and like, I guess, medium stress and then low-level chronic kind of stress that kills you one day. So being an emergency room physician, so what would you do for somebody who's like in the ER in that moment, like surreal, you know, when you feel like it's surreal and you can't believe it's happening? Yeah. That kind of moment, what would you do for them?

So that sounds like kind of a red zone area, which is the— Yeah, yeah. The higher levels.

You separated into colors, right?

I did, yeah. Orange, yeah, yeah, sorry, yellow, orange, and red. Red being the most critical.

Uh-huh.

So usually when people are in red, I have 3 different techniques, but my absolute favorite hands down is the one called paced breathing.

Can you lead me through it? Is this like the box breathing, like the Marines?

It is.

I love that one. Yeah, my daughter and I just did it this morning, but please lead me through it.

Oh, you did?

Okay.

Sure, sure. So what you do is usually when people are very highly stressed, they're breathing too quickly and they don't even notice it. And this leads to things like panic attacks or hyperventilation, and that can lead to some of that dizziness, lightheadedness, hands cramping scenarios. So what you need to do is control the breathing.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, I actually have a, uh, a friend named Jason Gardner. He was a Navy SEAL who was telling me how he did it under fire one time.

Wow.

He was a sniper and was getting attacked.

So that is very powerful.

Oh yeah.

He said this. Very powerful.

Yep. And he was doing his job as a sniper when someone is shooting at him.

Oh.

And he was unable to hold the, the weapon because he was breathing too fast.

Mm-hmm.

And so he recognized immediately, my breathing is the problem here, and if I don't control my breathing, I will die. Literally. So he used the same technique of controlling his breathing.

And do they teach them to do that in the Navy SEALs? They do.

Yeah, they do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they do all kinds of training. I mean, I don't, I don't know if they're privileged to say all of it, but, you know, what he told me is that his breathing as a sniper is very critical. And so he had to learn to control it.

Mm-hmm.

So, and then when someone's shooting at you, that's a pretty red zone scenario.

Yes. Yeah, I would say.

Yep. So it's really easy to do.

Okay, so pretend that I'm the person. And so honestly, if somebody's in the red zone, you're not going to be like, okay, stop stressing. Right. You're not going to talk to them with words. Right. Okay. So pretend that I'm like way out there.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. The rational neocortex brain thinking is just gone. You're way down in reptilian primitive brain at that point.

Yes.

So you need to keep it very, very simple. So it's just breathe in to the count of 4. So 1, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4, breathe out, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4. And then you repeat: in, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4.

Nice.

And then as your breathing slows more and more, what you can actually do is lengthen the exhalation time. So you would count out 6.

Let's try one of those.

Ready? Okay, sure. Okay, so breathe in, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4, breathe out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, hold, 2, 3, 4, in, 2, 3, 4, etc.

Very nice. And can you just keep lengthening it up to 8?

You can. Yep. Yep. You want it? Yes. Well, what that does is it slows the heart rate down. So— or sorry, the breathing rate down. And that really calms down that vagal response in the body. So it's in that whole parasympathetic part of the nervous system with breathing is one of the quickest ways to really calm it down, to calm down the heart rate, to calm down is to calm down the breathing rate.

Mm-hmm.

So because that's—

Andrew Weil has that 4-7-8 breath where you inhale for 4, hold for 7, and exhale through pursed lips for 8. Do you care if you exhale through your lips? Or your nose. I always say nose just because if you're like in public, you start breathing out through your mouth and like whistling, people are going to be kind of annoyed with you. Yeah.

I mean, it's best.

And it also slows it down. I'm sorry.

Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah. I mean, the nose is an organ almost entirely just for respiration, right? A mouth is an organ that breathes also. However, it's also involved with eating and other things. And, and you tend to breathe through your mouth when you're doing things of high stress. So like if you're running, a lot of people will breathe through their mouth. So, um, I have heard that breathing through the nose, there's different receptors in there that send to the brain like, okay, we're using this part of the body, which is a signal to the brain itself that this is a calming scenario, calming environment, because the nose is being utilized as opposed to the mouth.

So, okay, so that was a nice one. Uh, what else is your favorite in Red Zone. Give us maybe one or two more, just because people are in the red right now, you know? There's so much red going on.

Yeah, uh, let's see, in the—

what's your favorite for yourself?

That's my favorite for myself in the Red Zone. There's only the three that I have in the Red Zone.

Oh, okay.

Um, well, the other one is if you're having a panic attack and you cannot control your breathing at all, there's always a brown paper bag.

That's a good one.

And that's like if the breathing is much too intense.

So breathe into the bag so that you don't hyperventilate. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there is, there is. I did get into it in this book, but there is the whole— there's something called polyvagal theory where there is something even beyond fight or flight, and that's freeze, which I didn't get into in my book because it's kind of beyond the scope of that. But in that case, people freeze. And they don't do anything. They almost go like comatose, just, uh, body stops moving, almost paralyzed, can't move. And in that case, what I found is a technique called noting, where you're still aware of everything going on and you're not exercising any particular technique and not so much breathing, but you're holding on to reality by anything that's entering your perception. You just make a mental note of it. So sitting here, for example, I could say laptop, window, pressure, heat, cold, breath in, talking. Just kind of mentally note and just— so you can kind of hold on to something that's in a very neutral way.

And kind of stimulating your cognitive cortex. And I think the therapists call that like anchoring. So you can start to anchor yourself in the reality of the moment.

Yes.

Whether it's visual or smell, any of your senses, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yep.

And anchoring is a great tool for just about any place that you're at. But I found that it really works well when you're in the freeze part, like you've gone past fight or flight, you are so far gone, you are frozen.

Okay. So, and what's your favorite orange?

Let's see, my favorite orange one, I would say in the book I call it Mirror Meditation, and that's kind of a two-part one. Uh, that is where you can start by looking in the mirror and you just notice what's going on. You look in your own eyes. It's, it's kind of, it's literally a self-reflection tool. Sometimes it's hard, like for me, it's sometimes hard to read my emotions because I've denied them for so long. So by looking at yourself, sometimes you see the emotions on the face and you can then almost start to laugh, which is good because it really releases that. And there's no tension. It's tension with yourself. It's so crazy how much you think like you shouldn't have tension with yourself, but we often do when we look in the mirror. So to look in the mirror and just notice that. And then whether with the mirror or not, just start sending these phrases of compassion. Which is, "May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be free from suffering. May you live with ease." And you can either send these to yourself in the kind of third person, "May you," or you could say it, "May I." And then I actually have to do that practice quite a bit. I found that it helps a lot with my anger. And with my job, I get a lot of burnout, compassion fatigue.

Right. Right.

So I found that I started, whenever I wash my hands at work, I say those phrases. So there's not a lot of mirrors. I can go all shift without seeing a mirror. So I just do the compassion technique or the compassion meditation.

And that's that Buddhist prayer with giving compassion to the whole world. Yeah.

And you can do that too.

Yes. So may you be well, all living things, right? Yes.

Yes. And you expand it. Yeah. So you can do yourself to somebody you love. To a neutral person, to someone you dislike, and to the whole world.

Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. And all living things.

And all living things.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess.

Yeah.

So one of my teachers told me even to your desk, like even inanimate objects. I have not gotten there yet. I got very, very close one day when I was doing laundry and I did feel grateful towards my clothes. And if you know me at all, I used to cry when I had piles of laundry in front of me as if the world was ending. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was a pretty big breakthrough.

I think that's awesome. I mean, really, like, I got into minimalism maybe a year or two ago.

Me too.

Yeah. Well, you just—

I've been— yeah.

You just start to notice the utility of things. And gosh, there are certain things where it's like, man, this is a great tool or this is a great thing. And you just—

something that's been so well thought out and just beautifully functional.

Right, right.

Yeah.

It's funny because when I deployed, I had knife that had my name on it. Oh, and it is something that—

like a Swiss Army knife?

Uh, no, it's kind of a pocket knife. It kind of flips out.

Okay.

But we used it all the time because we lived in tents, and when I was at Phob Payne, and like, um, gosh, I used it all the time really because you have to cut— we have to like string up, uh, blankets between rooms because it was a bunch of us girls in a room. So you have to, you have to, uh, string things up and tie knots And then when the big storms, you know, the big dust storms would come and knock down our tents, so we'd have to pick them up.

Wow.

So you'd have to cut old, you know, paracord and then put up the tent again and then restring everything together. So, so I have this knife from my deployment that is one of those things that every time I see it, I'm so grateful and so appreciative for the service it gave me, you know?

Yeah, exactly. And all the people who made it. All the people who invented steel or whatever it's made of. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's, it's just sometimes things like that, you notice the utility of it when you're, when you go more minimal, you know, your clothes, the good pair of shoes, just how much they cradle you and support you in this life. It's wonderful.

Yeah. So orange. So we just did orange, which is, can you give an example to the listener? Like what would be orange?

Uh, oh, oh, so like, like a feeling of how to be an orange, you mean?

Yeah, like let's say somebody triggers you. I guess like if your kid is making a mess, okay, you might go into orange.

Oh yeah, yeah, you're just kind of like, oh my God, everything about this day is just crashing down, everything's against me right now. Um, things like—

so you're making a mountain out of more, right? Yeah, maybe you catch yourself calling people names or yourself names or Yep.

Yeah.

You're sort of black and white thinking.

You're like, I'm about to lose it, but I'm not losing it just yet. But I am so almost there.

I'm gonna.

Yeah, I am about to. I'm on my last nerve. Yeah.

Because this is when you send yourself to timeout. Yeah.

Yeah. This is when you're like, I'm about to throw a tantrum that's worth to my child's.

So. So then go in front of a mirror. You know, that reminds me of something that I used to do with my kids, which they didn't appreciate, but, huh? But when they would have like a, you know, like be very unreasonable or be reacting or, or actually they turned it around on me a couple of times too. So it was fair both ways. But I would put the iPhone in front of their face and show them what they were looking like when they were doing this.

Yeah.

And it would, it would stop you in your tracks. And they've done it to me too. So it's fair. It's both ways. But yeah, that's the, that's the recognizing how you look. When you're in that moment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just don't have that ability to have the rational introspection at that time because the stress is so paralyzing the thought processes.

But you also brought up like compassion. Uh-huh. Do you feel like that is one of the most important things to work on as far as anger? I think for me and for almost anyone. What do you think?

For me, 100%. Yeah. I, yeah, I, I, it's hard to say that someone's too compassionate. Um, I mean, I, I haven't heard anyone say, being accused of that, like, oh, they were too compassionate. Well, how terrible is that?

You know, but it brings us relief, right?

It does. It's funny how much when you, when you're generous with your compassion, how much better you feel in general. It's really surprising to me how at peace I feel on a general baseline level. It's almost like doing 20 minutes of this practice a day. I feel it for 24 hours. Wow. If not more. And there's some research to back up this practice.

So. But also, I love how you said to all living things, you know, it's not to just my family or just people who look like me or just people who studied medicine. Yeah, it's to everyone, right? So I just, I love that part.

Yeah, and I've heard of people who do this practice but 100% for people they do not like.

Uh, what do you mean? Oh, oh, oh yeah, that's the advanced version when you have to, right, send compassion to people you do not like, right?

Yeah, it's really eye-opening though when you do that. You start— people you don't like seem like villains. You know, and then when you start to send them that kind of, uh, compassion, you see them as more of a human version, and it decreases the stress level in you when you think of them. So there's a saying, something about like, anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It's kind of like when there's some famous person that you really hold Uh, you really don't like them, but you can't get away from the news media or whatever.

And we won't mention any particular names or anything like that.

It seems like everybody has one. I— yeah, I would say start with the self and, and then try to give that person who just drives you up the wall— send them compassion. And do it for maybe a week. I know that may sound like a long time, but even with one practice Even with one 20-minute session, you may notice a shift in your stress levels.

Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes that person is the same person.

Yes.

The person that you love the most and the person who irritates you the most. Often.

Yep.

Okay. So then yellow zone. What's your favorite yellow zone? Which would be just kind of chronic stress, like road rage or something, or— well, road rage can be rageful, so I guess—

Road rage can go into red zone.

Yeah. Yes.

Oh gosh. I would say if you're having some road rage, do some pacing. Breathing. Yes. But the, the favorite, my favorite one in yellow is one that I came up with and okay. It's something that I did my, I have done myself my whole life, but I never formalized it until I started writing this and thinking about it. It popped in my head one day and I call it the battery technique. And I've done it with patients who found some great techniques or some great relief. That's what I love about all these techniques is that you can do them very quickly with little training, if not at all.

So pretend and just show me as if I'm that person. Okay. Okay.

Well, it's good to do just in general, I think, but it works in the yellow zone.

I got my pen.

So, so, yep, you take your pen and you write a negative on your left hand.

Mm-hmm.

And then you take the pen and write a positive on your right hand.

I'm using both sides of my brain.

Yep, there you go. All right, so negative, positive. So what you do is you hold the pen between the two, and you call this the battery technique. This is the battery because you're charging your battery right now. You're connecting positive and negative. Okay, so right now you're charging your battery, positive and negative. Um, so what you're doing now when you're charging is to look at your thoughts and assess the environment of the mind and get a sense of what is the general thoughts. Are they positive, negative, or neutral? Okay. So right now, for example, it's my day off and we're having a great conversation, so I'm going to put the pen in the positive hand. I'm really happy about that. I'm having so much fun talking to you and this is great. So I put the pen in the right hand.

Yeah.

So, um, are you breathing or you're just—

Noticing your—

okay, you're just noticing your thoughts.

That's all you're doing.

So this is kind of my— my brain is kind of in a pleasant state. So this is great to be in the pleasant, positive state. Now the thing about this is it's good, but some people just live here all the time and they never notice it. They never sit here and contemplate, I'm having a good day. They just sit here in positivity. So this is someplace where, for example, my, my 3-year-old with an ice cream cone she's happy as a clam, but she never really like sits in the moment and savors and appreciates it. So you're happy and you know it. You know, you won't want to be judging your mind. It's not like you want to say, oh, I'm so negative, what a terrible person I am. That's not the goal at all. The goal is to be reflecting on it. So you want— you could be negative as long as you're aware you're negative. I think some people are negative and they don't know it They just sit here and stew and stew and stew and they never like think about, oh, my mindset is really negative right now. There's a possibility of putting it over here.

So after a while you have to say to yourself, how could I put it in my right hand? Is there anything that I could put it? And that's your choice. Okay.

Yep. And that's your choice.

You prompt yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, I have a friend whose dad just died. You know, she's a person who is 100% positive all the time. But right now she's in the negative.

Mm-hmm.

But that's not a bad thing. It's perfectly reasonable. And you want to honor that as well.

So it's just like an awareness exercise.

It's an awareness exercise. And that's why it's more about being the battery and charging.

Mm-hmm.

So you can be positive, you can be negative. What's important is that you have the awareness of it and that you're looking at your thoughts so that way you can better understand and see it clearly.

Mm-hmm. So you have more clarity. And then eventually you may wanna say, is there a way to go more positive or something like that? Sure. Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Okay, awesome. Great exercise. I love it. And I know you're a big proponent of tapping, right?

Oh yes.

Part of tapping. It's the Emotional Freedom Technique, right?

Yes.

Yeah. I, I tend to think of it as something I, I, you know, I tried it a couple of times. Um, I think somebody in my doctor's office had a group where we did it. Uh, it feels to me like you're going to acupressure points and you're basically, um, maybe stimulating the cortical brain where you're having that motor sensory input. Right. And so you kind of distract away from whatever that distressing thought is cuz you're physically tapping yourself. You're, you're innervating all these neurons. Mm-hmm. And you're activating parts of your brain.

Yeah, I'm told that it sends a calming signal to the, like, the amygdala and the limbic system, uh, is, is how that actually sends that calming tech— it sends calming to that area so that instead of that kind of amygdala midbrain firing and really acting up with the thoughts, you can then use that kind of more prefrontal cortex and rational brain thinking to, to think through any problem and to see that clearly as well.

Which of course, for people who don't know the amygdala, which I think a lot of people who are listening probably do, but that's where your fear center is and that's where your overreaction is. And it could save your life, but sometimes it's just overreacting with stress. So do you want to lead us through like 1 minute of tapping?

Yeah, yeah. My coach, my, my coach, my teacher, Jill, Dr. Jill Weiner, she is the one I go to and she does my, my coaching. So I will do a an homage to her, I'll say.

Oh, nice. Okay.

By doing this. So what do you want?

Maybe she'll come on our podcast.

Oh, she's fantastic.

Okay.

She taught me Vedic meditation or conscious life meditation.

I do that too, also.

Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh, wonderful.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's very powerful.

Yes, yes. Vedic meditation is basically a mantra meditation.

Well, I started with mindfulness meditation first.

Yeah, I love mindfulness. I love Jon Kabat-Zinn. I hope he comes on my podcast at one point. His voice got me through some of the toughest times in my life.

Oh yeah.

But even now, like, he had this free lunchtime meditation when COVID just started up, and it was so calming for me to just to listen to his voice. Yeah, he's so practical. He just speaks what you're thinking.

Yeah.

Oh, mindfulness. I love—

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

So, okay, so tapping. Yeah. Start with But you start this, this is the karate chop point.

And we're tapping the side of our hand, the fleshy part beneath our pinky.

So with tapping, you basically hit different spots. You start with the karate chop point. You're, in my case, I'm taking my right to my left side of my left hand to the pinky, which is my fingertips.

Mm-hmm.

And with this, you say something like, even though I'm really stressed out right now.

Even though I'm really stressed out right now.

I love and accept myself. I love and I accept myself even though there's a lot of stress in my life right now.

Even though there's a lot of stress in my life right now, I love it because I love— And I accept myself.

Things are really stressful for me right now.

Things are really stressful for me right now, and I love and accept myself. I love when I accept myself.

And then from here you go to the top of the head and you start tapping.

And it doesn't matter which hand you're starting to tap with?

Yep, you can do both.

Oh, you can do both?

You can do just one.

So you don't want to do this in public, really. You kind of want to go to the bathroom.

It looks a little funny.

So you're tapping the top of your head.

Yep. When I first did this, I was like, what are you having me do here? This is craziness.

Tap the top of your head, and then you say, I'm stressed. I'm stressed.

I'm really stressed.

I'm really stressed.

And then you go to the next spot, which is like the inside of your eyebrow. And then you tap there. I use that, my middle two fingers.

That feels good.

So yeah, I say, I'm so stressed right now.

I'm so stressed right now.

And then you move pretty quickly to the outside of your eyebrow. Things are stressful right now.

These are stressful right now.

And then you move quickly to the under the eye, like just on the cheek, kind of just under the eye there. Things are stressful right now.

Stressful right now. It's true.

Yeah, and then under the nose, just above the lip. Mm-hmm, arthrophrenulum. Say, uh, I'm really stressed. And then you go to the chin, just below the lip. I'm stressed out.

I'm stressed out.

And then you go to the chest, kind of like it's, it's just to the left of the sternum, um, kind of, uh, just shy of the maneuvering. Okay, so you just kind of like Tap it with like your knuckles and then say, I am super stressed right now. COVID is super stressful. Yeah, I am so stressed.

I am so stressed right now.

And then you go to kind of the side here, um, and it's kind of easier just to kind of bang it with like a fist, um, kind of in the front, like your interaxillary line, right down the middle of your armpit, right? Yeah. And then say, things are super stressful.

Things are super stressful right now. And I feel funny. You can go back in. Yep. Okay, and then back to the head?

And then you just kind of go back up to the top.

Yep.

And say, I'm stressed out about getting sick.

I'm so stressed about getting sick.

I'm stressed about what's going on in this country right now.

And tap the eyebrow. I'm so stressed about what's going on in this country right now and in the world.

On the outer eyebrow. I'm stressed about what might happen to the economy.

I'm stressed about the economy.

Under the eye, I'm stressed about the fact it's having on my family.

I'm stressed about the effects on my family.

And then under the nose, I'm stressed about every time I leave the house, about do I have my mask?

I'm stressed about leaving the house and COVID.

And then under the thing here, I'm stressed about when will all this be over?

Tapping on my chin, I'm stressed about when will this be over? Yeah.

And then over, and then over on my collarbone. I'm stressed.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of under your collarbone. Just.

Yep.

And then I'm just stressed about so many things and it feels overwhelming.

I feel overwhelmed about all the uncertainty.

And then Saed, I'm just crazy overwhelmed.

I'm crazy overwhelmed.

And I'm super stressed.

I'm super stressed.

Okay, and then you go take a breath in, and then you reassess how you feel.

So that's interesting that you really keep reminding yourself how stressed you are, but, but as you're tapping it.

Well, the thing is, as you're tapping, what you're bringing out is what exactly are you stressed about, because sometimes it's hard to label it and it's hard to put it into words. And that's what tapping helps you do, is it sends a calming signal to those fear areas of the brain so that you can better see clearly, oh, I'm stressed about the economy, I'm stressed about my family, I'm stressed about XYZ. But as you think about them, you're not stressed stating them. So you can say them, but with less cortisol levels rising.

I see. So you're training yourself to be able to withstand all those negative thoughts and worries and not have that physiological response as high.

Exactly. Yep.

Yeah. Okay.

So just to recap, so you do karate chop, head, body, and then back to head.

Okay. So karate chop, head, inside of the eyebrow, outside of the eyebrow, under the eye, under your nose, your chin, under your collarbone, and then the side of your body. Mm-hmm. And then back to the head. Okay, great. And you know what?

Mm-hmm.

Maybe we can have a little PDF that they can download. Okay. Oh yeah.

Well, it's in my book. It's in my book.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Your book.

Uh, Stress Relief Survival Guide. And you guys can buy it on Amazon and, and then I also have a digital course.

Oh, okay. So awesome.

Awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. So Leslie, what books and resources inspire you? Do you have any favorites that you can tell us about?

I have so many books that inspired me and resources. Yeah. I'm always reading books. I'm always listening to podcasts. I'd say the top podcast I love to listen to on a regular basis right now. Oh. Is the RxChill Pill podcast, which is wonderful.

Yay!

Of course. Of course. It's a great podcast.

I love you, Leslie.

And I listen to 10% Happier podcast with Dan Harris. I listen to The Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo. Those are some of the top ones I've been listening— oh, On Purpose with Jay Shetty. That's another one I really love.

Awesome.

Oh, books.

Let's see.

Favorite books. I am currently reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg.

Nice.

What else am I reading? I just finished Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Oh, and a big shout out to— I just gave this book to my husband— is You Are Worth It by Kyle Carpenter. He was a Medal of Honor recipient who jumped on a grenade, and his story is very inspiring. Wow. Yeah, I really—

Well, you're inspiring.

Well, I just get what I can from other people. I just, I find inspiration through so many different avenues and just everywhere I go.

I just try to find it. I can feel your compassion towards all other people. And I see on your posts and you try to help people so much, so deeply. So I'm really grateful to you as a fellow physician also, because I recognize especially during this crisis, the pandemic, how amazing doctors are. Like, most doctors that I know— and, you know, sometimes we get a bad rap because, yeah, we're rushed or whatever. Um, yeah, but all the doctors I know want to help. Of course. Really. I mean, like, I know there's— there could be a couple of bad eggs out there. I'm not talking about that, but just in general, like, 99.99% of doctors just want to give advice and help people. Oh gosh, yeah, it's just an amazing community, you know.

And it is, yeah. And, and, you know, in my line of work, I often want to spend as much time as I can with the patients, but, um, I get interrupted all the time. I have a phone call to go to, or a critical patient is coming in, and someone's telling me their life story, and I have to say, sorry, I, I can't listen anymore, I have another patient that's apparently not breathing. I know. So I have to step out, and I know that's cutting that patient short, but, um, I think every physician would love to have more time. But we're— that's one of the things that's so stressful being a doctor is we're squeezed for time, and we're being told, right, we're being told, raise your relative value units, you know, RVUs, right? If you don't get good patient satisfaction scores, you're not going to get, you know, your bonus this year.

And it's ridiculous. My, my friend who's the most amazing doctor got a decreased rating because somebody was complaining about the parking lot. Right. Yes. And it feeds into the doctor's review. I was so shocked.

Right. But it's things like that that really burn us out of this career and this profession that we love and we work so hard to get. But somehow these completely unrelated things are causing us so much burnout and stress.

Yeah. And, but I mean, most doctors are amazing, helpful.

Oh yeah.

Mm-hmm. Super smart. Yeah.

Yeah.

What's your go-to right now? Like when you fly off the handle right now, like what would you do? Give us a little glimpse into how you would manage.

Well, I've spent a lot of time meditating on my intense emotions. I think that to know what to do in the moment, you need to do a lot of personal introspection on the off time. Like, it's kind of like in the moment is not the time to learn. It's kind of like, you know, you don't want to learn to fly the minute you get thrust in the, in the cockpit. You know, you want to study before you step into the cockpit. And the same thing is true with intense emotions. So since I've done that work, in the moment, what I do is for me, I recognize my anger and I feel it physically. And that's how I know what stress zone I'm in. And so I recognize I'm getting stressed. I can feel my heart rate rising, my skin is flushing. I want my voice to rise and yell. I can feel the tension in my neck. So I recognize the physical signs of my stress going from, you know, yellow to orange to red. And so those are the physical signs. And then what I do often is if I recognize I'm in red, I'll do the breathing first and then I'll kind of slow down into— there's another technique in the Orange where I'll say something like, in the here, in the here, in the now, in the now, and just kind of think that to myself. And that gives you that moment of pause to really be present in the situation. And usually by then, and then I can think back to the battery technique. Okay, I— this is— and by now I'm like noticing my thoughts even more, and I think, okay, how can I do something good with this? So I kind of run through all the techniques really quickly, and that's good circuit training. It is, yeah. So, and then, and then by then I recognize— but the thing is, some of the emotions are still there. Like, my anger may be at a level 10, and what I do is I mentally visualize putting that anger in a suitcase and setting it aside. Mm. So it's not like my— I thought you were going to say set it in flames. Setting it in flames.

Yeah, that would be exploding it with a— what did you call it?

The grenade? Oh, the RPG.

Yeah, RPG.

And what about when you do lose it?

What do you do? You just— you know that you can come back faster?

Oh, yeah. It's funny because when COVID happened and I— that's really what triggered me to write the book. Was I, I saw the need, um, and I, I— that was the first time I realized that I had done all these things for so long and helped other people with them.

Yeah.

And I got quarantined, uh, because I got exposed to a patient. So I, I recognized everybody in the world is stressed out right now. I can't be the only one. So I started writing it all down, and then it just wrote itself.

Wow. Yeah.

Um, so that's when I I don't know, I kind of just always did these things and I recognized after I went back to work that everyone was still extremely stressed.

Mm-hmm.

And I recognized that pretty quickly I was more my more laid back self while everyone was still coming into work pissed off, angry, scared, and then scared through their whole shifts. And I was like, I'm, I'm over this. You're still worried, you know? And it wasn't like I'm better than you.

It was more like I recognized that the techniques had been doing me good, like, and so every day do you sit down for 20 minutes and do the Vedic meditation? What do you do? What's your routine?

Uh, yeah, well, as much as I can, I try to wake up and do the meditation as soon as I wake up. Um, and then at work sometimes I'll find a lull here or there since I do work nights. There's sometimes like at 4 in the morning I'll be able to do it. If not, I'll try to do it in my car before I leave work.

And also just do those short little mini ones, right? Like the box breath, the 4-count breath. Mm-hmm.

Yep, yep. Um, whenever I wash my hands at work, I do the "May you be happy, may you be healthy" towards the patient I just saw.

I love that. Yeah, the washing the hands with that. That's great.

And so I'll say that twice, and I'll be thinking about the patient I just saw, you know, the patient in room 10 who's here for chest pain. May you be happy, may you be healthy.

Okay, I love it.

Yeah, so I, I do that while washing my hands.

And now what would you tell your your younger self, if you could tell your teenage self, what would you tell her so that she could enjoy life more and worry less?

Yeah, I told him to do that meditation with the compassion. Like, really?

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm laughing because, yeah, yeah, it seems like, it seems like a superpower, but it is. It's so simple, but it's so powerful, right?

Yeah, I don't think my teenage self would have ever understood that the power of these techniques.

So how would you explain to that teenage self who would never understand it? How would you explain it to her so you can convince her?

Well, I was always into science.

Uh-huh.

And one thing that I really love is this, this explanation I heard recently about systole versus diastole, where the heart is literally the organ that keeps us alive every second of every day. You know, the heart stops and then everything else quits. I mean, the brain as well, but the heart kind of is constantly working the whole thing. And, uh, but the heart rests two-thirds of the time. So 66% of the time the heart is resting. So it's funny that the heart has figured this out, but I didn't until lately.

So you need to rest, let yourself—

you need you need to pay attention. You need to fill yourself up. That's what the heart does when it's resting is it's filling up.

And you said systole, diastole. So systole is when your heart's squeezing all the blood out and it's contracted. And diastole is when the muscles relax and it fills back up with blood.

Right.

So what Leslie is talking about is that diastole where the heart relaxes and allows itself to fill back up.

Right.

And that's 66%.

66% of the time. Is it 66%?

I didn't know that.

Yeah, it's two-thirds of the cardiac cycle.

Yeah.

So I mean, it shortens when you get more tachycardic, but then you get bad filling. So you can—

that's a great— that's a great analogy. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the faster you go, the less you fill. Um, and then, but you know, if you have just chronic tachycardia, the heart gets overwhelmed, and that leads to chronic states that are not good. So I think with my younger self, I felt the need to like, well, if I want to be a doctor and if I want to be pre-med, I have to go, go, go, go all the time, and I have to have to achieve everything all the time.

Yes.

And it got me to a point where I was pushing myself so hard that I did burn out here and there, and I did have times where I just wasn't happy. And it doesn't have to be that way if you just remember, like, the literal heart has figured this out. The literal heart that works 24/7, even then it rests 66% of the time. So in any given day, try to give yourself as much time to fill as you can.

I love that one. Mm-hmm. It's interesting, I teach a procrastination course for teens where I incorporate all the mindfulness and the meditation and all of the science. And I talk about the good procrastination, which is basically what they call diffuse mode of thinking and learning, where you actually have to relax in order for your brain to make connections between things that are not usually connected. Like maybe you make a connection between art and science. You know, so that creativity. And then also to deepen that, that learning, you need this diffuse mode. And that is that exactly what you're talking about, the relaxation.

I love that.

Yeah. So there is a good procrastination.

Oh, good to know, because that's one of my flaws is procrastination.

Oh, no. Yeah, we all do it. All right. So what about for your girls? What do you wish for them if you could wish for them, anything as far as mental agility and resilience, what would you give them? What tools would you give them? Obviously all the tools in your book, right?

Yes. Yes. I would give them that. I would also give them the confidence to, to put themselves first and, and to chase happiness. I would hope that throughout their lives they become very— they become masters of themselves. And have that grit, that self-reliance, to the point that they're happy with themselves and they don't seek validation from other people, that they know their own worth in and of themselves.

How do you define confidence? How would you exercise confidence? I've been thinking a lot about confidence. That's why I'm asking you.

That's a really great question. How do you exercise confidence?

Meaning, how do you strengthen your ability? Because I think confidence is also a skill. You know, and confidence comes with basically repetition. So you're never going to feel confident when you first fly a plane or drive a— what did you drive? A boat in the Navy? No, I didn't drive a boat. Really? I would think you'd have to drive a boat if you're in the Navy.

I was with the Marines more than anything else, actually. I know more about the Marine Corps than I do about the Navy.

Oh, interesting. So, okay.

Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, to get confident at anything, you have to practice first and get over all of that sort of beginner's—

Yeah, I think, I think learning to fail is a big part of that.

Mm-hmm.

And, and learning the lessons in that failure, but picking yourself up again. I think that is where confidence really becomes strengthened.

Mm-hmm. So, and not, and not thinking of failure as something negative.

Oh gosh, no.

Yeah.

Yeah, I recently heard something about celebrate failure every day. And I love that because it means you're getting out of your comfort zone. It means you're striving and stretching yourself and becoming more than what you are now. Because if you're never failing, you're only in your comfort zone and you're not growing.

Yeah, I mean, literally you're not learning something new because when you're learning something new, you fail. That's what happens. You know, you don't do it immediately. Yeah.

Yeah. And that feeling of insecurity, you know, I mean, I put together this digital course and I didn't know what I was doing at any stage of the game. There were definitely times where I felt like overwhelmed and I, I did something that didn't work and it was failing and failing. And finally I figured it out and it was a tough lesson, but I learned it. Uh, it's, it's just, it's my passion, uh, to just constantly be better and Now I'm just trying to do what I can to serve others through what I've learned. And that's just kind of what I'm trying to do with, with a book, with a digital course is to, you know, I, I learned all these lessons the hard way and I hope that other people don't have to.

I feel like your kids are lucky because you're gonna give them all these things and maybe they're not, they might not seem like they're listening sometimes, but just remember they are. They are.

It's funny when they suddenly start meditating. And I'm like, "Oh, you watched Mommy do that, okay." Thank you so much for everything you're doing, Leslie.

I really appreciate you in this time of division, and I love that I can talk to you and connect with you in this way, and you're all the way out in Nebraska, where I would love to visit sometime.

Oh, you're welcome anytime, and I'm so happy to connect with you. I mean, it's just wonderful with the work that you're doing, and I mean, You, what you do is so amazing with kids and with your podcast and just with your work. It's so inspiring. And I, I'm just honored to be talking to you and to connect with you.

I have my pen in my right hand. Oh, I feel positive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love all the positivity.

Big hugs, Leslie. Thank you again for your amazing presence. That was fun. Loved every minute.

Oh, thank you so much. No, me too. It was such a pleasure.

That was Dr. Leslie Koenig, author of Stress Relief Survival Guide. You can find it on Amazon, and you can find out more about Leslie and her digital courses on stressreliefsurvivalguide.com. For additional resources and tips you can download from this episode, check the show notes on my website, mindbodyspace.com. Just a reminder that stress management Positive psychology and meditations are all absolutely helpful and really important part of becoming resilient for long-term goals. However, it is definitely not the standard treatment of choice in acute situations. It should always be used in conjunction with mental health professionals and physicians so that the whole person can be taken care of. Thank you so much for listening. As always, you can email me at podcast@mindfulmama.com.

Mindbodyspace.com.

Until next time, this is Dr. Juna signing off, wishing you and your loved ones wellness.