A Mental Health Doctor offers Powerful Tools: Break Free from Anxiety, Depression, & Trauma | Ep. 1

Welcome to my podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole Cain, integrative mental health.

Doctor, consultant, author, founder of the ACT.

Method and expert in integrative approaches to anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and trauma. You are going to learn about wisdom of vitalistic and traditional medicine and we are going to deconstruct the latest in alternative and complementary research. Together we will explore the terrain of the human psyche as it relates to the complex interweaving that impact your mental health. I'm going to teach you how to design your life and we will explore techniques for cultivation of emotional agility.

If you're ready to turn the page.

To the next chapter in your life, then let's get started.

Are you ready to be free from anxiety, depression and trauma? Today, we're going to talk about the first steps towards getting your life back. I will introduce you to the ACT Method and teach you three powerful tools to start you on the journey of true transformation. Stick around because at the end I'd like to share with you some of the cool stuff we're up to and give you an exclusive invitation to something pretty awesome. When you look at your life, what story have you been writing? Has it been calm and steady? Or is it a drama with plot twists, antagonists and unsung hero? What moments stick out to you as particularly profound when you think about your story? Was there ever a moment when everything changed? Perhaps you're in that moment now. Alexander Shia, theologian, spiritual director and psychologist, tells about his experiences taking people on an epic journey along a vast mountain hike called El Camino. El camino spans a 500 mile journey that takes the traveler through trees and providences, mountains, existential transformation, deconstruction, new birth, and so much more. He shares how there are many books and blogs and resources on how to prepare for this life altering journey, and again, even more resources on how to be on El Camino itself. But there's very little information about what to do after you return. Did you know that the way you exist amidst turmoil will directly impact how your brain will respond to that event years later? So what do you do amidst an ongoing struggle? And what do you do after everything has changed? In this podcast, we will explore life as it is during and after profound awakening, awakening to your story, awakening to your anxiety, awakening to your grief, and equally important, awakening to your next act. As an integrated physician with over a decade working with clients from around the world, my mission is to help you get your life back. What would that look like for you? I'm going to share strategies that I have used for years in helping people transform. With respect to the latest in alternative and complementary research and with the wisdom of vitalistic and traditional medicine, we will explore the terrain of the human psyche as it relates to the complex interweavings that make up anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and trauma. You're going to learn tools for deconstructing your own personal Camino or getting to the root cause of why you feel the way you feel. And we're going to talk about what do you do with that. I'm going to teach you how to design your life. And we will explore techniques for cultivation of emotional agility. Have you heard about that? Emotional agility is all about how we navigate our world, including our thoughts, choices, perspectives and behaviors. Those who are more emotionally agile are able to embrace change, get unstuck, and tell a self story of life and resiliency as opposed to a story of fear, shame and self doubt. Let me share with you a story. We're going to call her Mary. Mary's Camino took her through a tumultuous terrain embodied growing up in a household with an alcoholic father and an emotionally traumatized mother. Survival for her was contingent upon the ability to be fearful and hypervigilant. Anxiety warned Mary when it was time to hide, and anxiety helped her be ready for the next plot twist. Her hypervigilance carried her through hills and forests, and finally she arrived in the desert 23 years later. And this is where we began our work together. Mary had left home and was beginning a new chapter, but her anxiety was suffocating. She spent her days locked in the closet with debilitating panic. The hypervigilance that had fueled her survival was now destroying her life. The anxiety that had protected her from the unpredictable mood swings of her parents was now crushing her desire to live. She was exceptionally good at one thing, and that was her ability to watch for potential threats. But she had no emotional agility. Her emotions were stuck in a record groove of fight, flight and freeze. She was unable to pivot her plotline and throw a stick in that bicycle spoke While Mary was a master dribbler, she couldn't pass the ball, make a free throw or change directions. Mary's Camino had brought her to my office, and she was desperate to get her life back. Have you ever felt that way? Her relationships were failing, she couldn't maintain a job, and her health was slipping. She was afraid she'd never get better. She was afraid she wouldn't be able to get married or pursue a career where she could contribute in a way that she felt that she was put on this earth too. Mary had dreams that fueled her conviction to persevere. She wanted to build her own life, to travel the world and to build something for herself that she was proud of. And she did all of this. Mary's tenacity helped her survive her childhood, and it was the same engine that drove her into her next act. And in this podcast, I'm going to share with you exactly what we did to help Mary get her life back. For today, I'd like to introduce you to a four step process that will begin the process of changing your brain and transforming your anxieties, just to get you started. And so bear with me as we go through these steps together. And then each podcast, I'm going to expand on this and we're going to layer, layer upon layer upon layer. And if you practice these things every day, you're going to get results. The research does show that it takes the brain on average 90 to 120 days to really, truly start to rewire itself and change. We see this coming out of the substance treatment research. So give yourself time, be patient with yourself. Don't be discouraged. Slow and steady wins the race. But babe, this stuff works. So let's get into step one. Step one is we have to directly respond to anxiety as it comes up. Stress, grief, whatever it is emerging, avoiding it and suppressing it will cause a build up of emotions that will ultimately make you feel worse. You need to speak directly to the mind and say, my body's a little revved right now. This is no big deal. I am okay. The human body was designed to experience anxiety. I do not need to worry about the feelings of anxiety. Anxiety and panic cannot hurt me. I think that one's really important. Anxiety and panic cannot hurt you. Tell yourself, there are characters in my life story that mean well, but are overbearing in their need to protect me. Tell yourself, my brain has been wired to produce anxiety and I am working on changing that. This feeling will pass. My body hit the gas pedal a little bit too strongly just now, or maybe I just need to wait for that pedal to come back up. Tell yourself, I am not my anxious thoughts or I am not my depressed thoughts. I am not my thoughts. They're just a part. They're just a thought. Anxious thoughts are just an anxious brain's attempt to create rigidity from a feeling of chaos. So that's all they are. They're just an anxious brain's attempt to create rigidity from the feeling of chaos, say, to the anxiety or the stress or the grief. Hey, I got your message. Thank you. You delivered your lines well. Now head backstage. I got this. Save your energy for the drama scenes when I'll need your high intensity performance. So start to speak to the anxiety, start to speak to the grief. Start to speak to the stress. Start to directly respond to the negative emotions as it comes up. Don't avoid it, don't suppress it. Again, that causes a buildup. You need to speak directly to it. You need to face it head on and then give it some counter. Suggestion number two is to change up the scene. So we've turned, we've directly addressed it and now we're going to change up the scene. If you're inside and you can go outside. If you're outside, maybe go inside. If you're sitting still, move your body. Or if you're in a meeting, take a bathroom break. When the needle is starting at the top in a panicky groove, we gotta get its attention by working with the body and shifting it down. The first step is to get away from the scene that is triggering. You interrupt it. Stick a stick in the bicycle spoke. Don't allow it to continue spiraling. Interrupted immediately. Step three. Your left nostril has the power to stop panic. Who knew, right? But if you're noticing anxiety kicking up, you've addressed it, you've relocated, you've changed the scene. Step three is all about using your left nostril. What I want you to do is breathe exclusively through the left nostril and. Interesting. The research has shown that that can reduce a body's fight flight and freeze response in clinical trials. To supercharge your nostrils. Anxiety, crushing power. Try the four count left nostril breathing. And it goes like this. You're going to inhale through the left nostril for four counts. So let's do it together. 1, 2, 3, 4. And then hold at the top for four counts. 1, 2, 3, four. And then exhale through the left nostril for four counts. 1, 2,. 3, 4. And then hold at the exhale for four counts. 1, 2', 3, 4. And then repeat again. It's four in four, hold at the top. Four, exhale, four, hold at the bottom. And then imagine yourself kind of drawing a square as you do that breathing. Doing this five times is something that you can do while you're driving. You can do it privately in a meeting and other people may not notice. And you can do it when you're on a walk or out in public. It's a great option. That's Very subtle, but has non subtle and quite powerful results. So we've talked about step one, which is talking directly to the anxiety. We've talked about step two, changing up the scene, going outside or inside, going to the bathroom, getting away from where you are. We talked about step three, the powerful nostril. And then step four is working with your body. And I developed a process called the 4S model. And we talk about that quite a bit bit in the ACT method, and I wanted to share it with you today. The 4S model stands for Scene, Scent, Sip and Stimuli. The scene. We talked about this. This is wherever you are, change it up, change the scene. This could be relocating like we talked about, but it also may mean changing the art on the walls, changing your bedspread, using a different diffuser. Smell in the house, it's something that involves changing the stimuli going into your nervous system and into your brain. What would be helpful for you? Think about where you are when you normally get triggered. Is it in the car? Is it in your home, is it in your office? Is it with other people? Is there something about that environment that you can change? Maybe it's what you're wearing, if you're going places, maybe wearing different clothing or using a different perfume or essential oil. A lot of people are reluctant to use essential oils because they don't want to overpower others with the smell or they're worried about other people noticing the smell. And here's a little trick for you. It's to put the essential oil on your feet, on the soles of your feet. I really like for anxiety to use the vetiver and you just put it on your toes, you put on your socks and shoes and you can go about your day and your body will absorb it and nobody knows the better. So we talked about seeing in the 4S model from the ACT method. And the next is scent, which we just got into a little bit. And we know that scent triggers the brainstem. Scents can bring back memories in a flash. They can distract the brain from a repetitive group. And some scents in and of themselves are actually therapeutically beneficial, like the vetiver. Are there other scents that you can think of that you like? Like lavender? I love ylang ylang, maybe some citrus. Lately I've been all about the clove and tangerine mix. I think it's great. The next one is sip. The brainstem loves tastes and textures. And if you're really anxious or really stressed, sometimes chewing on ice, although that's not the best for your teeth or chewing gum or licking A lollipop or sipping on a tea or something cold can be really great. But giving that stimuli to the brain in the form of sipping can be really nice. And then the last One of the 4S model is stimuli where you stimulate your body in a way that's louder than the anxiety or stress or emotion itself. This could be something as basic as noticing the feel of your fe in your shoes, or something more extreme like sticking your face in a bowl of ice water. Yeah, I did say a bowl of ice water. Let me tell you a little bit more about that. The ice water tactic comes from dialectical behavioral therapy, or dbt. And we find that when this part of the face, particularly the area around below the eyes, gets stimulated with cold water, that it evokes something called a dive reflex. And in the dive reflex, we see a slowing of the heart rate, a dropping of the blood pressure, and a reduction of that sympathetic kind of fight or flight response. And it quickly and effectively works. If Your emotions are 10 out of 10 in extreme and you're not able to get them to be calm and you need something quick and fast, instead of reaching for the Xanax, try to reach for the ice bucket of water first and see how you do. And it's just as simple as filling a bucket or a bowl with water, throwing in some ice. Hold your breath and then place your face in that ice water for 15 to 30 seconds. And then just notice the calming sensation in your body. And if you need to go through these other steps where you interrupt, you use the 4S model, you breathe through your nostril, you change the scene and definitely proceed forward and interrupt that whole process. So, love that is a four step quick fix for when anxiety tries to stick. Steal the show. Remember earlier when I asked you to stick around for the end of today's podcast? Can you believe we've already arrived? I'm trying to keep these nice and short, and so I hope that you'll love them and that they'll be really beneficial. And then depending on feedback, we might get in even more detail and they may get a little longer. But I just want to give you some quick tips as we're getting going and seeing how people feel about all this. But earlier I was talking to you about something awesome that I have, and I want to share it with you. And so I'm so glad that you're still here and you're listening, and I want to offer that if any of this is resonating with you, I actually have a free private Facebook group for people who are rewiring their story of anxiety and stress and I'd love to invite you to join. Community is profoundly important and love, you're not alone. In addition to joining a safe community of warriors, when you join the group, I'll also give you free access to my Anxiety Freedom one Week Challenge and I'm gonna tell you right away that this is amazing. People are loving it and I think it's gonna make a huge difference for you and it's totally free. I'm just passionate about getting this word out and helping you get your life back. So there's no risk, no obligation. Just go check it out. I'll provide you the link in the show notes. I'd love it if you click the subscribe button to get notified when the next podcast comes out. I have so much content and I'm ready to share it with you and all questions and comments and suggestions are warmly welcomed. If, after giving this a listen, you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it and stay in the conversation with me about writing the next chapter of your life the way you want it. I'll see you next time. Here's to your next chapter.

Hi everyone.

Thanks for listening.

This has been Dr. Nicole Cain. If you want more free information on how to get your life back, check out my website@www.Dr.nicolecane.com. you can send me questions, learn about consulting with me directly, and even preview my online courses.

And now for the disclaimer.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, Naturopathic Doctor and while these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling, education, medical training and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on the subject. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological care or any other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911-OR call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you are in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a local counselor in your area. I am so passionate about people getting their life to back. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with me about writing the next chapter of your life the way you want it. I'll see you next time. Here's to your next chapter.