645: How to Become Panic Proof with Dr. Nicole Cain

Stress, anxiety and overwhelm are issues many of us face daily. But the real challenge is knowing what to do. When you're wired but tired. When worries keep you from being productive, when worst of all, you can't be fully present in your own life. Raising awareness about mental health, it's a great first step, but what comes next? How do you take control over your story? Where do you turn for help? How do you conduct self help? My guest on today's show, Dr. Nicole Kane, is a psychologist and the author of Panic Proof. She's here to share her insights and strategies. Welcome to Age Less and Live More with Lucas Rockwood. I'm a yoga teacher and trainer. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm the father of three kids, but firstly a student of Health Span. I use this podcast to research and explore topics around living your best life, specifically in the second half of life. To support the show, here's what you do. Scroll down in whatever app you're listening on and leave a rating and review. If you have questions for me and would like to be featured on the show, email me podcastogabody.com Lastly, I have a health span focused program called YogaBody Daily. You can learn more about that@yogabody.com we do strength and stretch and steps every day. Welcome everyone. It's Lucas here. Today's show is called Panic Proof and I am joined here with Dr. Nicole Kane. Dr. Kane is a naturopath and a clinical psychologist. She specializes in integrative approaches for anxiety and panic disorders. She has a book, it's called Panic Proof. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it on her website, which is panicproof.com. nicole, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

I always like to start with definitions. There's popular definitions and then people use things in the vernacular. But when you speak about anxiety and from a psychologist perspective, how do you define it?

I talk about anxiety as a feeling of being out of control in response to autonomic arousal in the body and in the brain. Yeah, we could definitely dissect that some more.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe we could. Adaptive benefits of anxiety and the maladaptive, which of course are what people struggle with.

I love that you just jumped straight into the language that I use that sometimes is we always have to start with the basics with a lot of people. And I love that you just jumped straight into that. Is anxiety is an adaptation to what did or did not happen to you. And this adaptation is like putting on a winter coat. So you and I were just talking about how I'm here in Michigan in the US and the pumpkins are coming out and it's getting cold. And so to adapt to that, I'm going to get out my spi whack, which is this like giant military grade winter jacket, and I'm, I'm going to wear that around. Plus my Ororo, I have this heated vest. It's given me so much joy. Just adapt to the changing environment by putting on those coats. And similarly our bodies, our minds, our nervous systems and our other adaptive systems, which is a really exciting part of the conversation that I don't see talked about very often yet. But, but adaptive systems that help maintain your ability to be in that coat, like gut, microbiome, vagus nerve, hormones, immune system. So all of that will adapt to whatever did or did not happen to you, just like you put on a coat in Michigan in the winter and then that will help you better withstand whatever it is that you're going through. But it becomes maladaptive when I go and visit Barcelona and I keep that winter coat on and it's warm and I'm sitting at the beach and it's sunny. And suddenly those adaptations, that coat, that warming Ororo Row heated vest, they create suffering. And so that's the birthing place of anxiety, is that adaptive mechanisms get stuck and you don't continue to adapt or you don't adapt properly. And we have to start to correct that. Otherwise that which was helping us is now causing suffering.

So much of the mental health discourse right now revolves around media, social media, screen time, online use, and I just don't really know what to do with it. I spend all my time online. I have my entire adult life since I first got on the Internet. I can't get off. There's good things and bad things about it, but there's definitely some things that are worrisome, especially recently. So to give a specific example, since we're talking geography, all summer, clients and listeners of this podcast have been emailing me, worried about my safety in Barcelona because apparently tourists are getting attacked by locals. None of this is happening. I live in the center of the city, very much in the center of the city. It just happened a couple of times on social media. Some protesters put on a show spraying protests, spraying tourists who are eating paella with, I don't know, red paint or something like this. But like a really mass hysteria ensues and I'm using hopefully a non triggering example because we could reference any political international conflict and People would immediately be spun out for the rest of the afternoon, doom scrolling and trying to figure out how they're going to resolve a conflict in a country they've never been for people they don't know. And I guess what I'm saying is there's so much of our life that is truly worrisome, you know, the health of our aging parents, the financial outcome of our tenuous career. There's stuff that we need to worry about, really. And yet most of us are really caught up in again, war zones for countries we've never been to, never plan to go to, tourist conflicts that don't even really exist, in cities that we went to 20 years ago. This kind of stuff. How do you help people even begin to filter this? Because there are things that matter. It seems really difficult, I must be doing this too. But it seems really difficult for us to figure out what to care about, what not to care about. And then even once you decide there, how do you even attempt to put a filter on these things?

I validated everything you're saying. Our bodies, our brains, we have not evolved to be able to deal with all of the salient input into our minds, our bodies. Right. And so back in the days of probably your grandparents, my grandparents and on is they got the Sunday paper and it was mostly local news. And the rest of the time they got their information from what the people in their proximal environment were sharing and talking about. And we see that nowadays somebody can be laying in bed, they're getting their morning cortisol sp spike and then they open their phones, they have 56 unread emails, they have clickbait of the most scary, terrible, awful things from all of the extremes of news. And we hear about natural disaster and we hear about climate and all these scary, terrible things. And that's a drastic pivot that you're identifying here. And we think about the causes of anxieties. There's internal causes, but there's also environmental and external causes. And we've been studying this in the neuroscience. So we have a group of areas in the brain that collectively we call the Salience Network. And the Salience Network, its job is to filter out all of the data that we have coming in and all of the interoceptive data coming from the body to the brain. And, and this network's job is to figure out what is salient or relevant. And if it is salient and relevant, it's going to pass it on to the amygdala, the emotional processing part of the brain, which is then going to create an appropriate domino effect. But the brain is Getting on average 11 billion data points a moment, and we can only process about 50 of those. And so we think evolutionarily. Even when I was in elementary school, like I'm outside, we didn't have social media, cell phones. I don't know if you did. I think we're approximately the same age. And now that bombardment is happening. And so we're noticing, we're observing that people's salience networks, their brains are becoming overloaded, overwhelmed, overstimulated. And then what happens is the salience network breaks. Overwhelmed by all this information gets leaky. So it's like, I don't, I can't process all of this. It could be dangerous. So I'm just going to send it on to the amygdala. I don't know what to do. The amygdala is now getting flooded. It's like, it's like opening a fire hydrant and spraying you in the face with information. And so the amygdala is getting all of this feedback and it's overwhelmed. And so when in doubt, it's going to send you into fight flight. Freeze. And so now we are gearing up as though we're running from a bear or a tiger. And it could be from things that we're cognitively aware of, or it could be from something that we don't even know that just slipped through. And so the question that you're asking is, what do we do about that? And I have a four step process for handling that. And, and one of them begins with getting us back in the body. Because when we get that amygdala hijack and that amygdala overload, Our logical, analytical, prefrontal cortex is offline. And so the question that you're asking so wisely, Lucas, is, well, we need to do an audit. Is this relevant for me right now? Is there something I could do to take power or agency over this? Is there a calling to alchemize this into something that can help my loved ones, help the community at large? All those questions, those action, those empowering questions that anxiety is trying to drive us to do in those moments when our salience network is flooding our amygdala and then we're getting flooded with fight flight fear. That analytical problem solving part of the brain isn't even available for you. So the first step is we have to onboard that. And so I'd love to share that first step with you, but before I dive into that, do you have any. Like, you have so many wonderful thoughts. Anything you want to add?

So, yeah, my what this brings to mind is I've. I've been toying around with this idea of the lost art of forgetting. Meaning what a wonderful thing to be able to forget sometimes things that happened not because we want to avoid the past or run away from it, but some things just need to be put to bed. I was watching an interview with Bob Dylan recently and they were asking him about some iconic concert he was doing singing some iconic song, and he just couldn't be bothered to even dig into the recesses of his memory. And he just wanted to talk about something new. And he's really notorious for playing new music and his new music is very bad. And he doesn't care. He just like, doesn't care. He's like, let's talk about something new. And it's kind of infuriating for fans, of course, but I thought, huh, what an interesting perspective. How many times can he rehash the story of going electric? How many times can you rehash the story of this or that person covering his song? It's just at some point it becomes the opposite of a mindful practice. It's a mindless practice. It's just a regurgitation, ruminating, whatever. In any case, one of the strategies that I've had to embrace this lost art of forgetting is just unfollowing people and so on social media, just constantly purging. I had 5,000 friends once on Facebook. I purged them all, Got rid of all people on my social media, except like, I think I fellow 15 people, three of which are related to me. Even most of the people related to me, I don't follow. Just so I can have some fresh conversations and be surprised when I learn what their kids are up to or whatever it might be. But that still doesn't feel like a very sophisticated strategy. It feels like a pretty blunt approach, just a slash and burn approach. I'm curious, you know, for people listening who feel themselves overwhelmed with the conflict in Ukraine or Sudan, or maybe they're going as deep as paying attention to a country like Yemen, which most people are completely ignoring, or they're neck deep in political elections of countries they never visit, no plan to visit, no connections to whatever it might be, at least one of those things I've resonate, I've mentioned now are going to resonate with most people and they're going to be pull down a thing. And I don't know if the answer is just unsubscribe block, or unfollow. But I'm curious if you can help people think about how they might show up more in their own life when we show up in random other people's lives, in many cases, a lot more than our own. Yeah.

A really good question to ask yourself is, how is this current behavior an adaptation? And let me give you a concrete example about that. So, years ago, I worked with a man, and he went through a lot of family strife, a lot of family turmoil. His role in the family was to try to negotiate with conflict with his parents. And so he's a little guy, and he's got to be really aware of dad's mood so that he could predict if dad's gonna get angry and be really aware of mom's moods, because she's gonna come home one day and be really violent. And so his hypervigilance and his emotional attunement to other people and his ability to regulate that was an absolutely necessary survival mechanism. And so his body was programmed, his behaviors were programmed to notice everything going on around him. And so it wasn't necessarily advantageous for him to pay a lot of attention to his internal experience and his activators and impulses. That was irrelevant so long as he could just survive. And so when he presented to work with me many years later in his adulthood, and he's a high performer, and he's like, but I get so much stress and anxiety, and he would have panic attacks, especially before going on stage. And we identified that for him. This adaptation that enabled him to survive his childhood was resulting in him being so hypersensitive, so emotionally attached to everything going on in his environment, and then his behaviors were filling that. So we can go down to the end of the river, and we can pull people out of the river. And I kind of think about that as, yeah, stop people from drowning. Like, take, you know, put good boundaries around your habits. Put good boundaries around your behaviors. Don't go to bed with your phone next to you and look at it first thing. When you wake up in the morning, work on your habits. Pull yourself out of the river. But the art of what you do in your work, Lucas, the art of yoga, the art of mindfulness, the art of intentionally reproachful reprogramming and reprocessing begs that we look at those adaptive mechanisms at their roots. So that means that if you're looking at all of the news, reading all the news, having all the conversations, you're worried about Yemen, you're worried about these terrible things. Happening in Barcelona and the typhoons and all of these things. There's an adaptation. There's a reason that your brain and body are programmed to go that way and to adapt to that. And so you want to go back and start reprogramming that. You want to do that root cause work, which is the fourth, third, and fourth step of the four step process.

Root cause, figuring out where this comes from. Right. Not coming from external, but coming from internal. Yeah, it's, you know, I. I often find myself doing things to avoid the thing. That's not a very articulate statement. So let me clarify. I've spent most of my adult life now outside of the US and every time I go back, I'm kind of shocked by certain things. Like the airports, for example. Like, you land in New York and it's like, these airports are really rough. And it's like, why aren't politicians talking about that? Why they talk about this crazy stuff? Oh, they don't want to talk about this because it's so obvious. You know, they're distracting from the fact that like, there's some real infrastructure problems in the US like some really major cities have terrible roads and bridges and like the airports, lax, I mean, jfk, these are, these are, these feel like bus stations in a lot of developing countries. And it's easy for me to criticize from the outside, but then I think, okay, in my life, where is my distraction? You know, what kind of global issue am I pretending to care about so that I don't face the fact that, like, I'm emotionally unavailable for my child, for example, or I not showing up at my work, or I'm making excuses for not connecting with family members who are estranged or, you know, whatever it might be. And I guess the first step, of course, is recognizing which I'm doing a very small job at. But then the second step is still how do you avoid the trap? Because it's so easy to fall into. And it seems like part of the time we live in right now is there's almost this reward for externalizing our locus of control, our locus of focus. It seems like the people and the companies who get the most social validation do that to the nth degree. You know, you don't see a whole bunch of centered, grounded people getting a lot of attention. It's a lot of just external spewing plates spinning, you know, Starlink 8000 satellites in the sky and crazy posts on X. It seems like the social cues are driving outward instead of inward. I don't know. I'm just rambling. Any thoughts on how people might potentially do something besides me, which is just block apps and unfriend people.

I honor what you're saying, and I think that there's a lot of social reward in conjunction with a lot of economic disparity. And so we have all these people that are struggling economically and they're trying to figure out how to be relevant and safe and big. And many of us have these dreams of making a huge impact in the world. And so then we go through the education system, which in the United States is largely performance based. And so we're breeding this culture of people that are poised for sensationalism in conjunction with the fact that when we combine that with a history of trauma or adversity on each end of the spectrum, it could be little micro adversities all the way up to ginormous huge traumas that we find that the brain, the body and the nervous system will do what's called somatic reenactment. And so what that means is that when we go through something really difficult, and I'm using the gesture of. I'm kind of looking at how you start a car engine and you see the acceleration goes up, right? So you're trying to turn over the car engine, everything is revving. But when we're little, we don't always have the personal agency to completely resolve that. And so oftentimes we're left feeling we're hanging. We feel disempowered. And so then we go through our lives trying to recreate and resolve, recreate and resolve. And so then we look at our current foundation, we look at the stress, we look at the autonomic arousal that's occurring from that. And then we look at this culture that rewards sensationalism. And then you have all these people running around. The world's their stage, and all the characters are the actors in their life that they're trying to reprogram. And so then people are going for the familiar. And then we're wondering why my life continues to be so chaotic and so difficult. And so I validate and honor everything you were saying, because that's what we're seeing in the research. So the question is, is, is how do we reprogram that? So we've been being programmed since we came into this world. We've been being programmed by our parents, our environment, by our nutrition, our gut, microbiome we inherited from our biological mother. That's creating your therapy. Thoughts and your feelings and your emotions is guiding the way that your brain Develops your hormones. Our hormones affect how we're feeling, our immune system, and then our habits are maintaining that. And so, yes, go and pull people out of the river, unfollow people that are posting things that are overwhelming and you have no personal power over and do a real audit of your social media use, your news use, be really intentional about that. But then in conjunction with that, we got to get you back into the body so that your emotional brain starts to become more resilient from all of that salience input, all of that overwhelming spewing that's making you feel scared, so that then you have access to your logical resources. And so step two is when you have access to your logical resources, you can really start to say, like, is this valuable for me? What are my habits? Who do I need to do an audit of? Are there people in my life who are protagonists or antagonists? Where did this come from? Doing the trauma work? And so that would be the beginning is the present and then the past.

Yeah, when people go online and they start searching anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, they end up on Reddit forums, end up on TikTok videos, and there's sort of this pervasive smile or die good vibes only thing that gets circulated. The idea that happiness is a choice and it's all about mindset. And it's like a really wonderful naive sentiment. But like, you know, fully grown people are aware of tragedy and loss and pain and, you know, they're fully anchored in the fact that like, some of their concerns not only might come true, they will come true. You know, people will die, things will fall apart, businesses will fail, people will ghost you. I mean all, all of it will happen. The messiness of life. How do people reconcile this kind of. Reconcile this kind of pop culture smile or die with the, the risk, which is on the other side, which is just the nihilistic everything's going to hell, which it seems like people polarize into one of those two, unfortunately.

Yeah, we pendulum swing, don't we? From. From complete dissociation and denial and toxic positivity all the way to the other of everything is awful. It's all going to end in a fiery explosion. And so I give up. Yeah, yeah, I wrote about this in my book, actually. I talk about Charlotte, who used to be very good vibes only. And in her process of transformation, she embraced the all vibes only welcome. And that's really important to me, that message, because what we deny will amplify and what we resist will persist. And so if we go through our Lives, which many of us do. I come from a very Midwestern, Dutch militaristic family. So we lock that down. We don't talk about anything. Feelings. I'm very weird to them. They're like, who's this feeling person? We don't get it. Where'd you come from? But if we. If we suppress and we don't acknowledge and we don't notice and we don't stretch ourselves out of our window of tolerance, we don't allow ourselves to experience hard, yucky, painful things, then the body, the mind, the nervous system is just going to get louder and louder and more intrusive. And we see this in obsessive compulsive disorder as an example, is when individuals who suffer with that try to suppress the thoughts, they just get worse. And so we want to find a balance between acknowledging and dealing with whatever's coming up, because that's very valid. And if we don't listen to the tears cried by the mind and the soul, the body is going to say something. So practically speaking, because I'm talking to you, I love the idea of doing a regular yoga practice where when you go into yoga, you put your body into these positions. The body keeps the score, right? So the body is going to say things, you're going to feel emotions come up, you're going to have judgments about yourself. You're going to. Sometimes people cry in yoga, sometimes people laugh, scream. The body is going to be releasing things and you're going to be challenging yourself, depending on the kind of practice that you're doing. As you know better than most people, right? Is you're holding a pose, maybe you're in a warrior pose, and you're like, I can't do this, I can't do it. And the teacher's like, just one more breath. You can do anything for one more breath. And then when you do that for one more breath, you just accept. Expanded your window of tolerance. You were in your body, you acknowledged the emotions that were coming up. So that's an example of the work you're doing that creates a tangible way that people can start to access that mind, body. Yeah.

Right now there's a destigmatization of mental health, which is really positive. The truth is, my entire life, there was never any stigma. People talk about the stigma to talk about the stigma to. I mean, I was a teenager in the 90s, and every single one of my friends, we all went to therapists, and it was the Prozac generation. And still people say there's stigma around It, I don't see the stigma. I think the stigma is around the stigma. It's like a loop. But the beautiful thing about the breaking down of the stigma is people are open to conversations like this. They're open to buying books and trying apps and going to a yoga class or going to something. The challenge is that the refrain that people hear all the time is if you're in trouble, get help. If you need help, reach out. The challenge is like where do you go? And as someone who has explored this in multiple countries, in multiple modalities myself, in couples with kids, all, all of it. Like I'm, I'm all up for, I've done group therapy, I've done all the above. It's a really, really hard thing to find. Maybe the most challenging health professional to find of all would be a mental health professional. It's a wild west out there in terms of what you're gonna discover. And I haven't seen it gotten better. I've just seen there be more. So there's these apps and on demand stuff and I've tried all these and it's really hit or miss. I'm not saying there's not good stuff out there with on demand and email therapy and stuff, but there's really bad stuff too. How do you help people think about, you know, the at home stuff is great but there is a time when people need support, they need a witness and they need a guide and they need. Do you have any thoughts on how this might be improved? Because right now it's overwhelming, it's expensive, it's really intimidating and you know, at least four out of five times it, it's not going to work out. And that, that, that's just the nature of the industry right now.

Yeah. And we also have a healthcare industry which fosters dependence on the healthcare practitioners.

Sure, sure.

So I, I, that was my story is I remember adults told me what to eat, when to eat, how to eat if I got sick, what to take, you know. And so the, the, my pediatrician was like the holy amazing angel on high who knew how to fix my broken messed up mind and body. And so I went through life, I even be, I went and got my master's in clinical psychology. I obtained my medical degree and I became the authority. That was then. People were coming to and asking for solutions which worked until it didn't. When I had my own absolute anxiety crisis. I wasn't sleeping. Panic, physiological rock bottom symptoms. I lost so much weight, I stopped having my period. It was just physically taking Me down emotionally, mentally, mentally taking me down. And I went to all of the experts. I saw therapists who talked about themselves the entire time. I saw chiropractors, I saw people who sold me thousands of dollars worth of functional testing and supplements. I had an Ayurveda practitioner pour oil on my third eye. I got massages. I did all of the things except go into asking myself, what was this an adaptation to. And so, yes, interesting. We want to find good, trusted clinicians. And that could be hard. It's not impossible. That could be hard. But really what I want to urge your audience to do is to really take ownership like this is mine. Nobody knows you like you know you. Nobody knows your body. Nobody knows your origin story like you do. So own it. Get empowered. Look, listening to podcasts like this, I have an online membership where I teach all of this. There are some great trauma, informed clinicians, great books, yes, all of that. I can give you practical, tangible resources, but really you need to own your part of it. And then when you go to the doctor, go to the doctor as an equal. They're not the authority. You are the authority. They know the medicine, they know the habits, they know, they know the medications, if that's necessary. But you know, you, you know your story. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is just tangibly is for every 50 good counselors there are out there, there's going to be 50 more that are just total ding dongs. Not to disparage the counseling profession, but the training is, you know, we have opportunities for growth and improvement. And so if you're looking for, for therapy or counseling, I always recommend people emphasize finding people who are EMDR trained. Is that a modality you're familiar with? Is emdr?

I've done it, yeah, I'm familiar with it, yeah.

So for those who are listening, this is the number one form of therapy. It's been studied for all the extremes of combat veterans who have terrible war trauma all the way to the worried, well, physical symptoms, emotional symptoms, in between. In the US it's usually covered by insurance. And individuals who obtain this training have way more hours of clinical practice and supervision. So by default they're just more experienced and they have a really good tool that's regulated under their belt. So that's the first thing is for the, for the emdr. And oftentimes that, that almost like domino effect, you just set up a whole bunch of dominoes throughout her life. If you could just take out that root domino, then oftentimes the rest of the body and the mind will recalibrate around that. But if you're looking for a doctor, you want to look for doctors that are willing to admit when they're wrong, that are willing to be curious and that have integrative training and not just one end or the other. Because if you have somebody that's coming in and all they've got is a hammer, and if your problem isn't nails, then you're going to be wasting your time. So you want somebody who's had integrative training. So those are my two sort of more practical tips.

Yeah, it's really great. It's really great insight. As you were speaking, I was thinking, yeah, it's like, you know, you're you, me. When I go searching, I'm looking for help with a problem I can't define well. Right. So it's manifesting as anxiety. And I'm saying help with my anxiety. But let's say the root cause is financial insecurity. Let's say the root cause is meaning and connection. Let's say the root cause is childhood abandonment. Whatever. You know, pick your complex or trauma. If I can't articulate and define that well, that's a huge ask of me to go wandering around the city trying to find somebody who can suddenly read my brain. So that idea of taking ownership for figuring out at least directionally, the root cause, the prospect of finding some solutions or at least getting you on the right path is a lot higher. I hadn't thought about that before. That's really great insight.

Yeah, I walk you through some.

Nicole, tell people about your book, and.

You just read my mind. I was just gonna say I walk through a lot of that. How to think differently in the book. And so there's a big paradigm shift, shifting from anxiety as the problem to be solved. We shift that paradigm as anxiety as data about what needs healing and how. And so by shifting the question that we're asking, we have the opportunity to get answers that the previous question wasn't bringing us to. And so in the book Panic Proof, I start to teach you how to think, how to think from a vitalistic perspective. And on my Instagram and on my membership, I have all sorts of great colleagues that I've trained that know how to think like this and know how to do this. But I would start with the book, just start to really get clear on what your symptoms are. There's worksheets, exercises, and then do the timeline exercise so you can figure out where you came from. Because where we came from affects where we are and then that will inform us of what to do next without spray and pray testing and feeling dependent on everybody else, which could be expensive and time consuming.

Great conversation. Nicole. I appreciate you coming on the show and I look forward to sharing your work with our audience.

I really appreciate it. Lucas, thanks for having me. I love your work.

When I first started teaching yoga, all of my students were interested in interested in yoga, meaning they wanted to learn yoga for yoga's sake. They wanted to stand on their head and do a bridge pose and maybe even learn to stand on their hands. These days, the vast majority of my students are interested in the benefits of yoga more so than yoga. And that's okay. Many people are interested in regaining mobility, specifically meaning many people that I work with, they're not yogis, they're not yoga students. They're runners or hikers or climbers or crossfitters. But they're interested in using yoga as a means to an end to open up their body. Regain lost range of motion. In Yoga Body Land, we refer to this as B R O M. Basic range of motion. Being able to squat with your bum on your heels. Being able to interlace your hands behind your back with your arms straight. Being able to fold forward and palm the floor in a forward fold. All of these are very reasonable and very attainable goals for anybody, anybody at any age. Nothing contortion, nothing extreme. Basic range of motion. To that end, I've put together a program now that has been really popular for over 15 years. In fact, there is nothing I've done that has had more impact than this particular program called the science of stretching. 15 minutes per day. Hips, hamstrings, shoulders, wrists, twists and ankles. We move through all the different areas of the body to increase your range of material motion systematically. 15 minutes per day. All you do is press, play and follow along. There are modifications for all levels. And if you're interested in stretching exercises that actually work, this program is for you. Check out yogabody.com for details. Edward has a nutritional question. This week Edward emailed in asking about protein powders. Edward says, lucas, one of my favorite protein powders has guar gum in it. I'm really struggling with digestive health issues. I'm wondering if this might be the culprit. I'm open to changing, but this is the only one that I seem to eat consistently. Is this really a concern? Edward's talking about guar gum, which is used in some processed foods, including some protein powders. There are lots of different food additives that Keep things from clumping that create a smooth, silky like, consistency. In things like soy milk, there's emulsifiers and other additives. People like to make sweeping claims about them, but the reality is it's very individual. What that means is one person might have zero response to an emulsifier, something in a almond milk or soy milk, for example, whereas another person might get gas and bloating and almost an allergic like reaction. Edward, I would trust your instincts here. If you feel like it's that protein powder, whether it's the guar gum or another additive or maybe even the source of the protein itself, I would swap it out. Some of the biggest offenders in terms of gastrointestinal distress in people's diets are processed stuff, especially supplemental stuff, sometimes even medications and vitamins. Not because they're necessarily bad, but they might be bad for your gut. Protein powders are notorious for causing GI upset. It's one of the top reasons people stop taking them. Most people end up down the path of whey protection protein or P protein with nothing added to them simply to avoid the GI upset. If you'd like extensive anecdotal research on this, talk to any bodybuilder. They often cycle through every possible protein source, from egg to casein to soda to whey and everything in between. And most people will land on whey or pea protein simply because they're less prone to digestive distress, but still can be a culprit. Listener India emailed in with a question about shin splints. India says Lucas, I'm a runner and I've got terrible shin splints. This has never happened to me before. Please help. Do you have any stretches that I could do that will make them heal faster? For those of you who don't know, shin splints are incredibly common. The medical name is sometimes referred to as medial tibial stress syndrome. So essentially medial, meaning the inside inside of your tibia, your shin bone, that's your medial tibial area. And usually what this is caused by is essentially a tendonitis. So where the muscles on the front of your lower leg attach to the bone, those are tendons. It could also simply be muscle strain. The the suggestion by many people is they wonder if maybe they have micro fractures. While that does happen, it's very, very rare. And it tends to happen in people doing crazy endurance crazy pounding like ultra runners and things like this. For most of us, when we get shin splints, we're getting a muscle or usually a tendonitis, an inflammation at the tendon on the front of our shin. This usually happens because India something changed. Like what? Increase in physical activity, change of surface. If you go to a harder surface or an uneven surface, lots of climbing, lots of or descent or a change from climbing or descent changing in speed. So if you start doing sprint work, that can sometimes happen. Change in footwear. One thing that can happen that people are not that aware of India is shoes go flat. Especially these modern shoes. Running shoes are having a moment right now. Everything from Hokas to Ultra to on air. All these brands and and these, all these super expensive, really interesting high tech shoes. They go flat really quickly, like 300, 400 miles and they will look just fine, they will feel just fine, but they are flat and they will change the way your foot hits the ground and reduce the amount of impact that can potentially cause it overuse inclination, all those things. I usually invite people, this is similar with plantar fasciitis, to try to do a little investigation. What changed? What changed? Be real honest with yourself. If you use Strava or some other Garmin or tracking app, go back and look at your mileage. See if you didn't accidentally bump up your mileage by 10%. See your shoes, when did you last change them? Do some investigative work here. The solution is not to stop, but the solution is to back off and modify. The good news is shin splints tend to pass pretty quickly despite the discomfort. The risk is that you take 500 milligrams of ibuprofen and just keep going at the same mileage. I would encourage you to cut your mileage in half. Cut your pace down to like a forever pace. So just above a walk and give yourself a two week period and see what happens. Hope that helps. Thanks for listening to the show. To support my work, I would love it if you shared this episode with a friend. I have a program called YogaBody Daily focused on Healthspan. You can find that@yogabody.com and I have a breathing worksheet you might find helpful@yogabody.com Sign me up. When you sign up for my weekly newsletter, you'll get access to the worksheet right there. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.