Why Your Nervous System Controls Your Success with Rachel Pfeiffer

Did you know that your nervous system controls your success? Well, today I had an incredible psychotherapist on the show, Rachel Pfeiffer, and we're gonna show you how that happens and what you can do about it. There's a lot that you can control. Rachel, a huge welcome to the Habits of High Performers podcast. How are you doing?

I am so excited to be here. We just had a little chat before we hit record, and I'm already feeling energized. By this conversation. So I'm ready.

Yeah, me too. I mean, I'm super excited to be sitting down with you. And I guess just to the starting point for the listener, I want them to know that you're a psychotherapist. So are you able to explain to them what a psychotherapist is, what you do?

It's funny. Whenever I tell anyone I'm a psychotherapist, the response I often get is, oh, that's cool. What's that? I think we know what psychologists are. We know what psychiatrists are. Psychotherapy isn't really as clear. So I like to think of psychotherapy psychotherapy kind of like the cousin to psychology. So if we think psychiatry, psychiatry, they're doctors, they study medicine, and it's really looking at the mind and the brain through a medical model. Psychology, I think of kind of like the science of being human. And how I see psychotherapy is much more of a holistic, almost spiritual approach to being human. We look not just through this kind of scientific medical lens of behavior, we're looking at, we're kind of zooming out and looking at what it means to be a part of this big human experience.

That's amazing. I love it. And it's interesting, in the last probably 5 to 10 years of my life, I've probably become a lot more spiritual. In the younger years, like teens, 20s, early 30s, it was all about just going hard, hustling, winning. Whereas this last decade, it's more so like, hey, what's this all about? What's the purpose of this? Why am I here? So I'm really glad that we're having this chat. Something came up a while ago and I was following some of your content. I want to read it out and then I'd love to explore it. So you can only have the life your nervous system has the capacity to hold. Tell me more about that, please.

I wanna dive into it, but I first wanna know what about that hooked into you?

So I guess I've always been like a, journaled for years. I've always had vision boards and I would visualize things I wanted, you know, so when being a world champion or making money or buying the house. So I was very visual and I achieved some things and not others, but, getting into my 30s, my body started to like speak to me and, you know, like pains and aches and kind of no answers for those aches and pains. And is this something really serious or is it not? And so I feel like often when I've been driven, it's been at the expense of my nervous system. And in the last few years, I've been doing a lot of work trying to understand the vagus nerve and how we stimulate that, tap into that, reading great books like The Body Keeps the Score and Nicole LePera had another one. I can't remember the name of it, but it was a really good book that got me interested in terms of what does the nervous system play a role in our lives and in goals and success.

When I hear you speak, I hear such a common story, which is particularly in the West, we place such an emphasis on the mind, on rationality, on cognition, on being intellectual. And that is a very worthy pursuit. And I can see that it clearly got you so far in life, you know, that you were able to kind of drive that car and it got you somewhere really successful. And then you hit a point where you kept putting your foot on the accelerator and it wasn't working the same way. You know, I'm trying to almost like squeeze the lemon of the visualization or the cognition, but something is now impeding me, which is my body, which is these sensations. And I think a lot of us, again, particularly in the West, haven't been taught how to include our body into the conversation. Because what I see, and particularly I work with a lot of extremely intelligent and self-aware people, you know, they can sit down first session and tell me how, you know, when their boss said this certain thing and activated this childhood wound that goes back to this moment, and this is what they needed. And they have this really beautiful, well-constructed, intellectual explanation about what's happening to them, and yet it feels somewhat incomplete. It's correct, but nothing shifts. And I think that that is a really exciting place to be because we say, okay, I have kind of squeezed the lemon of using my mind as a tool to get me where I want to be in life, and now there's nothing left. And so now we're going to invite the body into the conversation. And I think that is what I mean by you can only have the life that your nervous system has the capacity to hold, because our nervous system fundamentally is not something that happens in our mind or in our psyche. It is something that happens in our body. And the thing is that the nervous system often exists in the unconscious realm. Right? So my mind might be very consciously driven and motivated and ambitious and aspirational, but my nervous system, which I mightn't have much of a connection to, might be terrified of being seen, afraid of failing. And so as long as it sits in the unconscious, as long as it sits outside of awareness, my mind and my body will start to work in opposition and then we get stuck. And so that's why I get really excited about this work because I'm like, Sometimes in my therapy sessions, I will quite literally pull out a third chair and I'll say, "There's a new person in this room now. We're bringing in a new part of you. Let's get to know them. Let's get them on the team." Hey, James here.

I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Caroline@jjloughlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes. That's so powerful. I love that. It's interesting. Probably 3 years ago, I found like a lump on my pec. I was like, okay, let's get this checked out. Where's this come from? And we ruled out cancer and all these things. And they said, James, you've got gynecomastia. I was like, what's that? And like, well, it's extra tissue. And I was like, but why? Oh, just, it can happen. I was like, well, there's bound to be something driving that. And so we started looking at what I do. So I speak on stages, probably 60 to 100 times a year and I really love it. I enjoy it. I look forward to it. But after I get off stage and I'm sitting in the taxi on the way to the airport, like, whoa, like, I am exhausted and I've got sore pains in my stomach and like, what's going on? Like, I don't think I'm nervous. Like, I love speaking. But the more I looked at it, my cortisol was spiking. I certainly felt quite stressed afterwards. But I didn't connect it with the speaking, but it clearly was getting on stage. My, I think my nervous system was going, you're under threat, you're very vulnerable. And cognitively or consciously, I'm going, you're fine, you know what you're going to say, you can answer the questions thrown at you. But what I'm hearing you say is like, James, your nervous system is in a totally different lane almost. And so you could say one thing to your mind, but your nervous system might not be in the same gear.

I mean, they're completely different parts of the brain. We think when we look at the brain evolutionarily, we can see how it develops in layers. So obviously we started as a single-cell organism and that was kind of the beginning of a nervous system. I mean, you think about a lizard, right? Lizards aren't sitting around thinking about Shakespeare or poetry or how to fly planes. They are purely about survival. The fly buzzes in front of them, they shoot their tongue out, they pull it in. It's all about survival and it's all about reaction. There's very little kind of metacognition or meta-awareness. And so our nervous system is the oldest part of our body, of our brain. And then as we evolved, we started to develop what we call the limbic system. And you can see this a lot in chimps that they have the ability to feel emotion. They have the ability to bond, to connect, to do planning, to kind of groom one monkey. And as they're grooming, they're planning to take over, you know, to take over this monkey over here. And so they have another more sophisticated layer of connecting and moving through the world. But then we think about humans who have the next layer, which is the neocortex, which is a lot of the prefrontal cortex. And this is a really kind of evolved, almost abstract way of living in the world. We have an awareness that we exist. I can look in the mirror and I can go, "Oh, that's Rachel." And I can think about what Rachel wants in the future. I can think about how that's been influenced by the past. I can think of things that haven't yet existed and then bring that into kind of— I can make it material through visualization, kind of like you were talking about before. We have this really kind of sophisticated part of our brain, but these two aren't often in conversation. And in fact, they speak different languages. And this is why oftentimes when people try to tell themselves to calm down, whether they're saying it out loud verbally or through thought, it actually doesn't translate. It's quite literally the equivalent of looking at a lizard and saying, "Hey, don't be hungry, dinner's at 7." Does absolutely nothing because the lizard, or the— this part of our body, the nervous system, speaks a completely different language, which is the language of somatics. It doesn't talk to us through through thought, or it doesn't speak in like this verbal language. It speaks to us through sensations. It speaks to us through symptomology. It speaks to us from like a weird pain in our neck. And a part of this work is actually learning to speak that language. Just as you would learn to speak French, you have to learn how to go to your body, speak the language so that you can listen to it and be in dialogue with it.

This is powerful. So I'm imagining every single listener right now is going, I want to learn how to speak this language. Like, where do we start? Because yeah, I think particularly with a lot of the men that I work with, I see this kind of reluctance to do the soft stuff. For them, this emotional stuff and somatic, it's very soft. And actually, I think it's the hard stuff. It's so challenging. But it's also the most important stuff. So can you please step us into where we would start to actually understand the language.

Absolutely. Before we start with how to start listening, I wanna go and I wanna touch on why we stop listening. Because the truth is we come into this world listening. Think about a 2-year-old. If they feel a feeling, you know it immediately and they are fully consumed by it. It kind of hijacks them and it is fully expressed. So we come into this world, with a connection to our body and we lose it. So it's not something that you need to go and find. Like if you've never spoken French and you're learning how to speak French, you're actually reconnecting to it. So I think it's important to look at, okay, well, why did you lose it? And there's many different reasons. The first is cultural, right? I grew up in a kind of like Anglo-Australian, she'll be right, you're all good, you know, don't think too hard, don't stress too much kind of attitude, which really subtly disconnects me from my body. You know, I'm having a bad day, I might be crying, and someone slaps you on the back and say, "You'll be okay," right? It looks validating in one sense, but in a way, it actually, it doesn't invite any curiosity, it doesn't invite any conversation. No one really says like, "What's happening for you? What's going on? What's this about?" And particularly, I'm really glad you named it, this is very gendered. You know, I probably got a light version of that. And as I grew up, I do— I most certainly have women who say, oh my gosh, tell me what's going on, and might even cry with me. Whereas for men, um, it is seen as a weakness. You know, it is seen as something that you need to overcome. You need to push through. You know, one tear might get out, you quickly wipe it, and you say, oh, you know, anyways, don't want to be too soft, you know, and you move on very quickly. And, you know, I dare say that that is at the heart, one of many reasons, but a large contributing factor to this loneliness epidemic that we see amongst men, that they are not given permission to feel their feelings, to be in relationship to their body. Um, another reason why we might not be in our body is due to trauma. And that can kind of take us one of two ways. Now we've got big T trauma. So it's those big things like, you know, natural disasters or assaults or, um, uh, you know, losing our job. And we've got little t trauma. The kind of, that, you know, Mark Epstein calls it the trauma of everyday life. You know, life is unavoidably painfully hard and heartbreaking, and there is the kind of the everyday traumas of disappointment, of needing something from someone, particularly a parent, and not getting it. And when we are traumatized, our body will, in its infinite intelligence and wisdom and love for us, it will find what we call these creative adaptations that help us to survive those And for some of us, the way that we survived a traumatic experience is through disconnecting from our body, right? If I grew up in an environment where my emotions or my feelings posed a further threat to this, that is not, um, that's not safe. And so I learned to disconnect from it. I learned to shut that down. I learned to actively suppress it or it gets repressed for me. And so at one point in my life, it may have actually been advantageous for me to disconnect from my body. The problem is that, you know, those times pass, those environments change, and our body doesn't yet know that it's safe to let go of that response. And the last one is that sometimes it's the opposite, where sometimes people are traumatized and they are so in their body, they are so hypervigilant of every little thing that they feel. They feel their feelings with excruciating intensity that it floods and overwhelms them. That they are overwhelmed with rage or with sadness, and it turns into a collapse. And so every time I go into my body, it's not an empowering, you know, expedition to go and get some information. It, it drowns me. And so I think it's really important to check in, okay, if I am disconnected from my body, why? What happened in your life and in your psyche that made it necessary for you to disconnect from your body? Because the work is going to be different. If I am working with someone who is flooded versus someone who is completely numb and disconnected, they're going to be different approaches.

That's so interesting. So I think selfishly, and I hope all the listeners are thinking selfishly right now as well, but my own existence and upbringing. So I grew up in Northern Ireland and there was kind of trouble constantly all around, bombings, shootings, killings. It was everywhere. And it was just normalizing, "Hey, get on with it, you're fine, go to school." Mom and dad going through divorce, probably not the prettiest separation. Then emigrating was exciting but scary as hell. The Christchurch earthquake, which killed many, again, scary as hell. For about 5, 6 years, couldn't really sleep, always on edge. And then of course, tons of little t things where I've failed and flattened my face. So I guess for me, like, I probably am known as someone who's like, you're always focusing on the positive. And, you know, I don't want to say toxically positive because I guess when things are real bad, I can acknowledge it. But it's in my nature to feel like, oh, this should be, as you say, she'll be right. Let's keep going. Let's keep moving. But I think I'm paying a price for that. Like, I can feel it in my body. Like, at this stage, I just turned 40 and I'm starting to go, well, things don't feel like don't feel right. And I think I am suppressing is probably the word that you used a moment ago. It feels maybe a bit like that. So where would I start?

I want to just touch on something you said because I find this to be like the epitome of the culture of suppression. The fact that what happened in Ireland is called the Troubles is hilarious. It's so British, right? To reduce, you know, to reduce such enormous political, cultural suffering down to troubles. I mean, that is the— that is— that's it right there.

Very stoic.

We're having a bad time, but it's not that bad. It's just a bit troubling, as opposed to, you know, terrorism at times, you know. Yes. Um, so I just wanted to name that part. Um, and for you, there's a What I'm noting about what you're saying is the kind of the compounding of the trauma, right? It was growing up in Ireland at that time, the divorce of your parents, the trauma of immigration. Even if it is a beautiful thing, there is a loss, there is a grief, there is a death. Obviously with the earthquake, I mean, natural disasters are its own form of trauma because we are so powerless to Mother Nature. And so when you say, where would you start? I mean, I'm curious where you feel comfortable with me taking this. I certainly don't want to psychoanalyze you online. That's not something you feel comfortable with. But when you say, where would I start? Where are you right now? What are you finding? I know you mentioned that there was, there's some suppression, but what does that actually look like in your life?

Yeah, I think for me, I look over even just the last, just 10-year period, I feel like I'm very goal-driven and very focused on what's next and creating things and Hey folks, James Laughlin here. Just going to jump in, say for about the next 30 minutes I went through an incredible psychotherapy session. I'm going to spare you that experience. I don't think you need to sit here for 30 minutes and go through that. It was quite incredible, something I've never done before and definitely will do it again and would highly recommend that you consider perhaps doing it as well if you're curious about it. But certainly it was transformational. I've never done anything like it. But it made me appreciate that there's such this connection between mind and body. And I kind of knew that consciously, but never really embodied it. So awesome experience. But hey, for now, let's go back to the show.

I want you to just take a moment to thank, thank your gut, thank your head, thank your body. Just thank all these parts of you for letting themselves be known, letting themselves be seen, and Being willing to speak. You might even let them know that anytime they want to pull on your sleeve, you'll turn towards them. Mm-hmm. And then whenever you're ready, you can open your eyes and come back.

Wow. That felt totally incredible.

Mm-hmm.

And so new and almost foreign. You know, and I've meditated and I've had therapy, but like, that felt incredible. Thank you for taking me there and doing that in this setting.

Thank you for letting me. I am, you know, this is the thing about going into your body and connecting to your emotions. I think we have so many false and unhelpful ideas about what that means and what it will do. We, you know, ever since the Enlightenment, we kind of created this false dichotomy between the body and the mind and that the mind and rationality reigns supreme and that the body is kind of this primal form of knowing that is inferior. And what you just experienced was actually the deep wisdom of the body. Because there's a big difference between looking at our life from the intellect. I kind of think of it like we're snorkeling, right? We're in the water. I'm looking at my life, but I'm on the surface and I'm looking down. Whereas when we go into the body like you just did, it's like we're scuba diving. Like I'm down and I can touch the coral reef. Not that we should, but I can see the colors up nice and close. There's so much more information in the body because the body contains what the philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin says. It has the felt sense. And the felt sense is kind of the culmination and the integration of all the information about a subject in totality. So what that means is, you know, you might have an argument with your mom and your mind might go, well, that was frustrating. But your body is thinking, yep, that conversation was frustrating. And I also remember how disappointed I was with her when I was 9 years old. And I always hated the way that she spoke in a different tone to my brother than she did to me. And I know that she also has her own stuff with her family that's completely unresolved. And so she has this, you know, this deep anxiety that's not really about me. And I mean, we could go on and on and on and on. It can hold the entire context and the whole picture. And that's not always accessible to us consciously, but we experience in the body. And when we do the kind of question asking that we did, we can start to extract it. A little bit more. And so I think, you know, that's why I get so excited about this body-based work because I'm like, oh my gosh, there is a whole realm. There is a whole new world inside of you that sometimes we don't ever go in and explore. Yeah.

And that's what I feel like. I feel very head heavy and intellectual about things and reading things. And it actually gets me so excited. Like after that experience, like, whoa. This is super exciting. Like, this is a whole other realm that I can actually get curious about and explore. And I imagine is going to really help me thrive.

And this is the thing, I think for a lot of high performers, there is a real narrowing of the lens of what emotions are acceptable and not acceptable. I want to feel motivated. I want to feel enthusiastic. I want to feel optimistic. I want to feel happy. I want to feel joyous. But I do not want to feel doubt and fear and insecurity and anxiety. And so we kind of split. We say, these parts of me are acceptable, these parts of me are unacceptable. Now, first things first, we can never really truly suppress things. If we could, I would be out of a job. The parts of ourselves that we don't like, we cannot make them disappear. They just go underground into what Carl Jung would call the unconscious or the shadow, right? And they leak out in other ways, i.e., a persistent, you know, feeling of tightness in the chest or a weight in the gut that is pulling us down. It just goes elsewhere. And so the work is to go in and to kind of retrieve those parts of them and integrate them. Because I think this is the other important part is there is so much rich material in quote unquote negative emotions. I mean, just talk to an artist. Artists are— gosh, they are sometimes masters of the underworld. They know how to take grief and transmute it into beauty, you know. Or most people have experienced enormous suffering, and whilst we, you know, lament that season in our life, it is often that exact season that kind of birthed these parts of us that we now love. I often say I love feeling envious. It's hands down my favorite feeling to feel. And I love it because when I look at someone and like something in my butt— my butt, Jesus— something in my gut— probably that's not where I feel my envy.

That's fantastic.

When something in my gut with a G gurgles and I feel like that red-hot envy, sure, I can collapse into like the narrative of like, I'll never be as good as them. They, you know, they get something that I don't want. Or I could say, oh, okay, what's being activated in me right now? What do they have that I don't? Why don't I have it? Do I not give myself permission to have it? Do I, um, or that do they have, you know, whatever it is. But I can extract so much information about myself from these quote-unquote negative experiences. And so that's why I am such a fierce advocate for feeling the stuff that no one wants to feel. I feel your anger. My gosh, I could go on about the sacredness and intelligence of anger. Feel your fear, feel your doubt. You are going to meet these really insightful parts of yourself that can actually be some of your greatest allies.

Yes, I think that's stuff that many high performers, including myself, do not make space or time for. And I feel deeply curious about it now after our conversation. For someone that's listening who maybe experienced what you and I just went through, where can they start? What does that journey look like for them?

Sure. So really, practically speaking, one of the first things I would do— so if you lean more towards the kind of like, I'm disconnected from my body side, yoga nidra is one of the greatest ways to get into your body. I don't know if you've spoken about this or you know much about it. It's pretty much just a guided body scan. Now—

So also known as NSDR?

Exactly. Yep.

Yes, I love it.

Yep. Word of warning, you will probably fall asleep. But what it does is it helps you to train awareness of your body. It's what we call interoception, the ability to be able to know what is going on in your body at any time. Now, I'm also really biased. I'm a yoga teacher. I have been for about a decade, and I love the practice. Yoga is a phenomenal way to get into your body. Right? Um, I learned this mostly from my husband. My husband is a brutal yoga teacher. He, he's got a little bit of a, um, a reputation in the career of like, you, you have a love-hate relationship. Like, he's not a love and light yogi. He's a like, we're gonna stay in Warrior 3 for, you know, 2 minutes kind of thing. But he has this way of cueing that changed my life. You know, I'll be in a certain shape, you know, like say, okay, you're going to lengthen your tailbone towards your heels, you know, lift your pubic bone up towards your belly button, as you draw your shoulder blades down your back, lift your chin level with the, you know, with the floor. And as I'm doing all of that, I am starting to train a very, very specific granular awareness in my body, right? It's not just like feel your body, it's like, can you lengthen your tailbone towards your heels and feel your pelvic floor lift? It's so specific, right? Yeah. And that is how you start to build the relationship. So when you were able to say like, huh, there's this kind of sensation, it's about 5 to 6 centimeters, it's a bit jagged. That's what you've got. You've already got quite a granular level of interoception. A lot of people don't, you know. Sometimes I work with people and I say, can you feel your feet on the floor? And they're being sincere when they say, no, I actually can't feel that. They're very numb. So yoga, um, NSDR are phenomenal. Um, for people who feel flooded, what is most important is that they start to feel safe in their body. And so they're actually going to go the other way around. I want them to go and feel pleasure in their body, and that's what they're going to be aware of, right? So my, my, um, homework for them would be like, go and sit in the sun and feel the sun on your skin. I want you to have an experience of being in your body and for it to feel good and safe. Go and get a massage and really, you know, just as you would watch your breath in meditation, watch the way this person is stroking your muscles. So build up the ability to be able to sense into your body Um, and then, you know, I think— I mean, again, I'm biased here— therapy is also a great way to do this. But you want to work with certain therapeutic modalities. So not all therapists are trained to do this kind of work. So you're going to look at people who do somatic therapy, um, things like, um, somatic experiencing, focusing therapy, sensory motor therapy. And what we did a little bit of— it was kind of an integrated approach— is I worked with something called internal family systems with you just then. Right. So I was like, okay, there's a bunch of different parts of you. You know, you've got a little distinct persona up in your head, a little distinct persona down in your belly. We're going to do some couples therapy with them. Right. So looking for a therapist that works within those modalities is a really great way because I think a lot of us need to be guided into our body. Right. We need someone who can kind of, you know, they have the map and they can say, okay, we're going to open this door and this is what we're looking for. And then we're going to come out. And then eventually, like anything else, you can go in and do that for yourself. But I think having a guide at the beginning can be really helpful.

100%. I would definitely need that myself. So for the people that are listening or watching, I'm going to put all of your details also in the show notes so they can come and connect with you. I find just your Instagram alone, what you share on there, to be incredibly helpful and so on point. So if people want to just kind of start kind of passively kind of connecting and learning from a distance, I know that they'll get a lot from your socials. If they want to go a step further than your socials, what else can you support them with?

Sure. So I just created something that, that I'm, I'm so passionate about, and it's called the Somatic Toolkit. And it is— so it is essentially a little bit of what we did. So we spoke about the NSDR. So I teach the tool of somatic tracking, right? So I kind of guide people through what it's like to be in their body. I teach them a few of the kind of important principles, like pendulation and titration. And then I have created different practices for different emotions because, you know, the way that we meet different emotions needs different responses. And this is kind of based on polyvagal theory, that the way I might connect to my anger is going to look to the way I connect to my anxiety. And so there's these guided practices for people to be able to say, oh my gosh, I'm feeling so angry, and I can kind of walk them through step by step how to meet that in their body, how to move it, and then how to integrate it. I also own a psychotherapy practice with my husband who's trained in a very similar way to me. I am currently full, but I mean, I've always got a waitlist and people are constantly moving in and out. So there's opportunities for people to work with me or my husband one-on-one, and you can find us at theembodiedmind.com.au.

Awesome. I'll definitely put that in the show notes as well. And do you do remote? So if someone's listening from South Africa or US right now, they could work with you.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Amazing. Rachel, I just want to say a huge thank you and I want to honor your time. But if you're open to it, I would love to have you back on the show again.

Done.

There's so many things I'd love to go deep and talk about on, but I'm going to get the— that somatic toolkit. I'm going to get it today. And I think it'll be very valuable for me and for Caroline. And we'll make sure and put that in the show notes as well. But I want to say a huge thanks for the work that you do. And for the way that you were able to guide me through the experience today.

I mean, I want to extend that gratitude back. I think there is something so brave and important about people who are willing to lead from their own experience. And I think that that's what makes the best leaders. You know, I think of them often like Sherpas. You know, they are, they can take people through that journey because they have walked it numerous times themselves. And so I want to extend gratitude to, you know, your willingness to go inward, your willingness to reach the hand back and help people out. I mean, it's such a, I mean, not to get all woo-woo, but it's such a beautiful incarnation that you've taken. So thank you right back.

Much appreciated. Well, enjoy the rest of your beautiful day and the weekend. I look forward to chatting again soon.

Thank you.

Thank you.