[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to remind my listeners that I offer a free eight-week email course titled Highly Sensitive People. My email course provides weekly tools that help you feel more whole in a world isn’t exactly made for us and I show you how your sensitivity can be seen as a unique gift and how many others are just like you. To find out more about my email course, please go to my website, amiokpodcast.com. . If you’ve been following along on my podcast, this last month, you would’ve heard the many self-care tools that I have guided my audience through with meditations and guided imagery to help HSPs manage their emotional responses as highly sensitive persons or what is called sensory processing sensitivity. We can easily get overwhelmed and over stimulated as HSPs and need to shut our minds down to recharge. So what if we were to learn more about what is happening in our nervous system to regulate over stimulation and overwhelm? Well, today’s guest is going to talk to us about emotional intelligence, emotional power, and what does your brain really need to manage tough emotions? I can sure use that. Today’s guest is Dr. Julia Digangi. She is a neuropsychologist who shows you how to expand the power of your nervous system to hold more emotional voltage. As a brain scientist. Dr. Julia knows that your nervous system is your portal to power. She will show you how to take the pain in your life, your stress, your struggle, and your suffering, and transform that energy into your power. Dr. Julia brings tremendous expertise and decades of applied experience serving leaders at the highest levels of power, including The White House, top leadership at global companies and special forces. Having worked with leaders who’ve endured some of the highest stakes, highest stress situations on the planet. Dr. Julia will show you what it takes to unlock new dimensions of your emotional power as you face defining challenges in your own life. She is currently working and writing a book for Harvard Business Review in which she’ll guide the world’s pre-eminent business audience on the neuroscience of leading and painful times. She’s warm, direct, and neuroscience based. Welcome to the show Dr. Julia. [DR. JULIA DIGANGI] I’m so excited to be here, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited for this conversation. [LISA] Just reading your bio, I was like, wow, I have so many questions I like to ask you about all your experiences you’ve worked on and been through. I was like, woo, that sounds pretty intense. [DR. JULIA] I always say like wherever we start, we’re going to end up in the same place. So I think my experience have been very, very fortunate by my career, but everything is really underpinned by, I talk so much about this idea of human pain and human power. So I really have rooted my work in this idea of suffering because being a human being is hard and in the most mundane senses all the way up to the most traumatic. So how do we think about our experiences of emotional pain and how do we call back our power? And by emotional power, I simply mean how do we get our life to feel the way we want our life to feel? So how do we access our resilience? How do we access connection? How do we access joy? How do we access peace? I know it sounds scattered, White House over here, academia over here, special forces, but the truth is nothing in our life has any meaning until it hits our emotional system. So I really think that human emotion is the universal language. [LISA] Yes. Let’s get into that. So human emotion is an emotional language. Do I have that right? [DR. JULIA] Yes. I always say the native language of human beings is a language of emotion. So let me actually take a step back here and say, so I’m a neuropsychologist, which means I’m a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain. Your brain is quite literally an electrical machine. In fact, I would make the case that it’s the most exquisite machine on the planet. So were all kind walking around with this three-pound blob of jelly that, oh, by the way, just happens to double as the most exquisite machine on the planet. The next question I think is alright, if my brain is a machine, what is the energy that powers my machine? Like we all have cell phones. The cell phone doesn’t work if I don’t have a power current. So the energy that powers the machinery of our brain is the energy of emotion. I talk so much about emotional energetics and I think, I’m so thrilled to talk to you today about being a highly sensitive person. What does this mean when the nervous system feels like it’s having too much voltage and we can easily feel overwhelmed? But if we think about our emotional experiences, our experiences of pleasure, our experiences of joy, our experiences of peace, they drive themselves. It’s when things are going good, it’s easy to allow things to go good. I think we really tap into deeper levels of power in our life when we understand how to work with the electricity or the energy of painful emotions. You can call that painful emotion exhaustion. You can call it anxiety. You can call it irritation. You can call it fear. I mean, I don’t care what we name it with our words, but parts of your brain that are giving rise to negative sensations in your nervous system are always the same parts of your brain that are giving rise to negative sensations and your nervous system. So is this making sense on explaining this idea of emotional energetics and how energy moves through our life? [LISA] Yes, it is. I guess my question is with highly sensitive persons and just only being 1.6 billion of them in the world, or just 20% of like the population that it feels that emotions we feel are like 10 times greater than the average person. There’s four common traits that HSPs have, which the work of Dr. Elaine Aaron has defined as depth of processing, like we’d like to go deep when we have conversations, over stimulation, overwhelm, like we were just talking about and our emotional responsiveness, our reactivity to situations, which can be very intense and that leads to that feeling of overstimulation. That’s just our empathetic gift that way we carry. Also just the sensitivity to subtleties that surround us in just using our five senses; site, hearing, touch, taste, smell. So I’m wondering how can we tune it down so it doesn’t feel so big and intense and still have that experience, but not overriding our nervous system if that’s possible, I don’t know? [DR. JULIA] One thing that I think is, so for me and for my work and for the people that I am fortunate enough to serve, one of the things I think is really powerful, that I’m able to offer is this idea. So pain is so interesting. Even when you’re talking about like overstimulation, emotional reactivity, feeling like things are too big, like those create sensations that I’m in this conversation going to call emotional pain. Does that make sense? In other words, like the state of my nervous system does not feel good to me. I’m going to use the label emotional pain. So the thing about human beings and I have worked very, very extensively with trauma, so most fundamentally, I’m a trauma clinician and I’m a trauma researcher, so I have walked with people who have been in the throes of horrific despair. I’ve worked with parents, who’ve lost children. I’ve worked with combat veterans. I’ve worked with child soldiers. I have worked with torture survivors, just people who’ve really experienced for most of terrible multiple things. What I’ve really learned from this is that there’s things happen that there is absolutely no justification for. In other words, for whatever reason, pain is part of the human experience, suffering is part of the human experience. I think we can all relate to this in certain ways. Like things happen to us, things happen around us that we don’t know why, it’s certainly not fair, but there it is. So your brain has this curious reaction with emotional pain and physical pain. Let me make this really, your brain has two tracks. The first is this really reactive survival brain. Everyone’s probably heard people talk about the lizard brain a million times. There really is a huge, huge, huge distinction between my brain is just keeping me alive, in other words, I’m surviving versus I’m thriving. At the most basic level. Your brain really would much rather have you be alive and miserable than happy and dead. So what does this actually mean in terms of our emotional lives? It means that a lot of times we say, I don’t want to do anything that’s going to cause me emotional pain. Now this is not conscious, but we avoid conversations that are uncomfortable. We avoid people that push our boundaries in good ways. I mean, expand us. We avoid these situations because in our nervous system, they feel too intense, they feel too painful. But what we’re unconsciously doing is we’re looking for the perfect solution. We’re saying, I’ll have this conversation when the moment feels right. I’ll be able to hold this new boundary when the situation feels right. But the problem is it never really feels. So if we go around trying to live our lives in a way where we’re looking for again, I get that it’s unconscious, but we’re energetically moving, like I’ll do this work when there’s a perfect solution. It never works. So the shift I want to offer people is this idea of how can I pick a more powerful pain in my life? How can I pick a wiser pain? So if you go back to this idea of emotional reactivity or and maybe even like, we can talk through an example, so let me come up for air here and let me see what are you thinking. Maybe we can, because I want this to be as useful for your listeners as possible. So what do you think? [LISA] Well, as you’re explaining it I’m like, well, I don’t even know what that would look like to have less emotional pain or what that but yes, only what that looks like. I guess what was coming up for me, an example is like two people that meet and if one is like an HSP and is very emotional and feels everything and they meet another person who is maybe the average person that doesn’t really feel as much, but suppresses and represses bad memories because they don’t want to feel them. I wonder if the two neutralize the playing field between them or in their life together. [DR. JULIA] In other words, let me sort of approach it from this angle and then you can come back and ask me additional questions. So let’s say the HSP wants to have different types of conversation, wants to have different types of engagement, in other words, the interaction between what you’re calling the HSP person and the average person doesn’t feel good at the HSP. Let’s start there. Is that okay? So for HSPs and for a lot of people who’ve who experienced pain in their life, there’s plenty of pain that happens externally to us that makes us feel bad. We get in situations that causes stress and struggle and they don’t feel bad. They don’t feel good. While that is absolutely true. A tremendous amount of our own pain comes when we divide ourselves from ourselves. In other words, a tremendous amount of our pain comes when we self-abandon. So let’s say I’m an HSP and I really want to say, no, I really want to say, no, I’m getting overwhelmed. I’m not feeling good. I’m feeling overstimulated but I say, yes. I don’t feel comfortable saying I don’t want to have this conversation anymore in whatever. In other words, there’s a part of my emotional life, a part of my emotional energy that’s saying to me, Julia, say no right now and I say, yes. Or you could imagine I’ll give you several examples so you can understand what I’m talking about when I really say a tremendous amount of pain comes from our self-division or self-abandonment. I want to say no, but I say, yes. I want to rest. My body really needs to restore. My spirit really needs to restore. What do I do? I over, I overwork, I over give, I over accommodate and in that moment I have again, abandoned the emotional truth of my life. Here’s another example. I really want to tell you something, something’s on my heart. Something’s on my soul. I really want to tell you, what do I do? I know that we’re all going to relate to this. I keep my mouth shut [LISA] Because if I keep my mouth shut, then what? [DR. JULIA] Well, we think that we avoid the difficult conversation. For some reason I’m feeling anxious about, so Lisa I want to tell you something that’s anxiety provoking. I want to have a tough conversation with you, but I’m too anxious. I’m too anxious to talk to you. So do you see how there’s pain on either side? In other words, if I open my mouth to talk to you, I’m going to feel anxiety or fear or stress. But if I don’t open my mouth to talk to you, I’m going to feel like self-betrayal. I’m going to feel like I can’t really trust myself. I’m going to feel like I can’t really defend myself. Do you see how there’s pain on both sides of those equations? So the answer cannot be, how do I end up in a scenario in which there’s no pain? Because I swear to God, that’s like trying to be like, I just need to be in a room where there is no gravity. It just doesn’t work that way. Then the question becomes, and I have found this to be very, very true in my work is of all the people we do not want to betray the most important has to be ourself. If I am an HSP, if I am someone who is in the minority, and I feel like I’m in a lot of systems where the way I am, the way I show up, the way I move in my own energy, it’s not like everybody else to put it bluntly then there’s probably been a lot of time where I have unconsciously left myself. Like it’s not safe for me to really say this. I’m acting like I’m too much. I know that I’m overreacting on some level, but every time we self-abandon, we divide ourselves from ourselves and every time we divide ourselves from ourselves, we learn that the dangerous person in the room is me. [LISA] I hear that and I like to work, it’s just like holistically, like the body, mind, spirit approach and how they’re all connected and just like working in those parts. So if we’re a whole pile, like working with clients, I think most people in therapy is just to feel whole, again, just really whole, like a whole piece of a pie. There’s all these different parts or pieces of pie that are scattered outside of the pie are not even close nearby and just trying to like put those pieces back in the puzzle. [DR. JULIA] I, a hundred percent agree with that. In fact, I agree with it so much I just got chills when you were talking. I’m writing a book right now and I’m writing a book on the neuroscience of how do we lead in our lives in moments of pain. So my definition of emotional pain is the one that I just gave to you, that it’s when I divide myself from myself, that’s the greatest pain in my life. Well then, I think that emotional pain and emotional power are two sides of the exact same energetic coin. In other words, I’m only as powerful as the weakest point of my resistance. This makes perfect sense in a physical health context. If my power, if I can only lift a 30-pound dumbbell, well, I’m going to have to go through the pain if I want to expand my physical power so I can lift a 35 pound dumbbell. That energy, that dynamic is exactly true in emotional power. So emotional pain and emotional power are two sides of the same exact energetic coin. If I’m saying emotional pain is when I divide myself from myself, the most powerful definition I can give you for emotional power is my end of visibility. In other words, my wholeness. I become so much more powerful exactly to your point when I call it all back. And the pieces I really got to call back are not the pieces that already look good, that are already really socially acceptable, that are, I mean, we just, because we just keep, we’re like a OneNote song. We just keep playing those notes over and over and over again and the parts of me that are too messy, that are too frustrating that I myself think are too ugly, those are the pieces that are lurking in the back and until I call that back, I really cannot access my wholeness. I could not agree with you more that the thing people want in a therapeutic process is they want all of their energy back. [LISA] Yes. We have all of our back, then it’s like, wow, like I can live a fulfilling life, whatever that looks like. How do you bring all those parts back? [DR. JULIA] Gosh, that’s such a good question. I want to hear what you think too on this. So as a brain person I really, the brain is certainly the helm of the system, but I think of human beings and brain, I think of them in body and I think of them in spirit. Now the part of our brain that governs so much of our conscious life is, people love to talk about the prefrontal cortex and the parts that think, and the parts that read all the information and read the articles and make all the lists and weigh all the pros and cons. That part is glorious but it’s like, again, if I can make a physical health analogy, it’s like, I want to go to the gym to get healthy and the only thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to work out my bicep. For 80 hours a week I’m just going to lift weights on my bicep. It’d be like, that would make my body pretty dysregulated. That wouldn’t be good. So I think when we go through our lives, we put such an emphasis on the thinking, the cognitive system of the brain. This is why people talk like I’m overthinking everything, I’m overthinking, I’m ruminating. So I think a big part of the healing work is to start to work on the emotional system. So start to say, and or specifically start to work in the resistance and the emotional system. Again, I don’t need, when I’m happy, I don’t need helping happy, the energy can move itself. But when I’m starting to feel anxious, when I’m starting to feel inadequate, when I’m starting to feel judged, when I’m starting to feel afraid, that’s when I call it the emotional shake. That’s when I really start to wobble. It’s in that moment, if I can bring my thinking brains conscious awareness to say, okay, sweetheart, I see you right now. I can tell that you’re really afraid right now, or I can tell that you’re really exhausted right now. You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to take a nap. Because 9 times out of 10, if I’m being honest about my own life, when I’m overtired what I say to myself, I say, toughen up, double down, work harder, hustle more. It’s only in my own processes and my own doing of this work that I’m like, you have to listen to the, I always say that pain is a holy messenger. If I put my hand on a hot stove and my hand is in excruciating pain, thank God, my pain is saying, hey, Julia, get your hand off that hot stove. So when I start to feel the anxiety in my life, the loneliness in my life, or the inadequacy in my life, or the desperation in my life or the isolation in my life, can I listen to that message? But can I listen to it in a very tender, almost like, we talk about the good enough parent, can we really parent that part of ourself and say, hey, you look really tired right now. Let’s lay down and take a nap. Can we really take a walk? Can we move our body? So it becomes this idea, I think of two things of like getting people back into the body and out of that one tiny sliver of the brain, which is really just the parts that think consciously. It’s quite small if you think about the whole biology of the human being. So can I get myself back into my body and can I start to see my pain, not as a harbinger of doom, but as a holy messenger, that really is trying to set me free? If I’m in a relationship and it doesn’t feel good to me, doesn’t feel good to me, doesn’t feel good to me, doesn’t feel good to me, my energetic system is trying to communicate something to me. I can choose to ignore it but if the pain hasn’t gone away by the 15th time the pain shows up, like warning, warning, warning, warning, I think the hope of all of us is okay, lucky number 16, the problem will magically disappear. But that’s not, I don’t think how it goes for most of us in our lives. Would you agree? [LISA] I would agree. I would agree too, that the brain as powerful as it is, can override what the body is trying to communicate to us and then the brain becomes, the messages and the brain become louder than what the messages in the body are trying to tell us. If we can quiet the brain and just listen to the body and that is not so easy, I think, especially in this culture, we have learned at a very early age to not listen to our intuition and our gut and really focus on the power of the brain. But again, to quiet the brain, to allow ourselves to go into our body and feel what we’re feeling, even if it’s uncomfortable. Like you said, that’s the way out. I like to think of it sometimes it can feel like you’re walking through a ring of fire and this is where support comes in handy, especially professional help, professional help can help guide you through. They can hold your hand. They can be your witness of this so you don’t feel alone because probably this happened at a really early age where you had to go through this alone and it’s not being able to trust, let alone yourself, but anyone else to help you get through something really hard. [DR. JULIA] Absolutely. You made this really interesting point that we have lost our intuition. Why do you think that that is? [LISA] That’s a good question. That could be another podcast episode. I think it becomes about not being able to express yourself fully or honestly maybe not to hurt other people or to expose other people or uncomfortable feelings or situations that may hurt other people. What do you feel it is? [DR. JULIA] We could talk about, we could have like a whole series on this, so let me just like riff for a minute because I don’t think there’s like one answer, but this is one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about. I have little kids, so it’s interesting obviously, to be a mother, it’s interesting to be a mother who’s also a neuropsychologist or sort of think about brain development and how these emotional energies move in. So I said at the beginning of our conversation, Lisa, that the native language of the human being is a language of emotion. Even more fundamentally like when my kids came into the world, they were not right off the bat. Right when the doctor was like, here you go, my children were not like smiling, wide eyed, very calm. This is a lovely place. This is a fresh new environment. They were red faced, terrifying and shrinking, like all babies come into the world. So it’s not lost on me that our native language is a language of difficult emotion. Well, difficult painful emotions are difficult and painful for other people to deal with. So if you really take like a human development lens, things start to happen and this is why sometimes I think the human experience is, I mean, it sounds like I have a drag line to God or whatever, but it seems to me that it’s like engineered to be complex. Like there’s always going to be this pain around. In any case, our parents will often tell us things like stop crying, stop yelling, don’t complain. It’s not because they’re trying to hurt us at all. I think overwhelmingly most parents, even parents who are really challenged are still trying to do the best they could for their kids, but uncomfortable emotion, difficult emotion makes people feel difficult. When you are the mother and you feel like, oh my God, I had this profound responsibility and this child is in distress, I think we start to give our kids a lot of mixed messages. Have you ever heard this? Go over there and tell her you’re sorry. But I’m not sorry. Sit down, but I don’t want to sit down, go out there and play with those girls. I want to actually stay in my house and color. I’ll even tell you, so I obviously, as a psychologist, I think a lot about social, emotional development and I think every parent just like wants their child to be accepted. So one of my children is much more reserved. She’s very artistic, be a gorgeous day outside and all the little kids are playing in the street and she’ll be coloring in the house. If I’m honest with you, which I will be, it’s like, it’s hard for me because I start to have all these stories in my own, the talk track starts going in my mama mind where I start to say, okay, sweetie, you need to get out there. You need to play with them. Put the crayons away, come on. So I have to be able to stop myself and trust my little girl. She’s a little girl. I got to trust my girl and her power. Well, the reason I think it’s really hard for us as parents to trust our children and their power, on other words, she has an innate, knowing that this coloring in the house, even though it’s a sunny day, is bringing her joy. Who am I to say, I know better? Does that mean I don’t have a perspective and I don’t think it’s important to come up with pro-social opportunities for her to engage with others? Absolutely but part of the reason, I think it’s hard for us as parents to trust the power of our children is because we don’t trust our own power. How am I when I can’t even hold boundaries in my own life? How am I when I can’t even give my body the rest it requires? How am I when I’m busy saying yes when I really want to say no? I can’t even trust my own power and then it gets tangled. Part of the reason it gets tangled is because it’s spectacular what happens to the brain zero through five. So in the earliest chapters of our life, other people, both rightly and probably wrongly were telling us how to be, how much to eat, where to sit, who to talk to. So then we grow up and it’s like, I think that intuition gets tangled. [LISA] That was well said. I have to say, I also see it as a parent myself projecting my own insecurities onto my children. And, of course, children are like sponges and they just soak it up and hold that inside themselves and they think it becomes themselves. Then that’s where all the work is and you have to start untangling all that. [DR. JULIA] It’s so much. It’s like, okay, I know you’re going to be, have your own therapeutic process when you grow up. That’s what I mean. They say, again, I think that parents have really good intentions, but if you just think about the complexity of the human being like different energies, different preferences, different genetics, different experiences, you can’t possibly, and I think this is where we get tangled in our relationships, absolutely in our parenting relationships. But I think it happens in romantic relations. I think it happens in, I do a lot of work with leaders. It’s like, we’re actually genuinely invested in making other people happy. People really, 90 times out of a hundred people really are caring about other people. So I’m trying to fix it for you, but the problem with me fixing it for you is like, it always cracks me up as when people say oh, I know what he’s thinking. I know what they’re thinking. I’m like, you don’t even know what you are thinking. We’re confused in our own life about our own life, about our own experience, about our own, like how in the world do you think what’s in somebody else’s mind? You don’t know. So when we try to fix, it’s like we have one millimeter of like a million acre forest, and we think we know. Well, I think what people really want more than anything else and the longer I do this work, the more I’m convinced I become of it is people want to be reminded of their power. [LISA] I love that. [DR. JULIA] There’s two, I’d say there’s two drives of the brain that alone explain every single interpersonal problem on the planet. On one hand, you have the drive for connection. So we now know a lot about interpersonal neurobiology. Obviously we learned a ton from infancy. So the infant’s nervous system is regulated by the caregiver. The caregiver is rocking. The caregiver is nursing. The caregiver is bouncing and saying sh sh sh, okay. So we now know that that interpersonal neurobiology, that link doesn’t end there. We know that our romantic partners for better and for worse regulate us and dysregulate us. Now, they’re starting to be fascinating stuff in the workplace where coworkers affect heart rate, skin conductance, cortisol levels of each other. So what does this tell us? It tells us that the brain is wired for connection the same way your lungs are wired for air and your heart’s wired to pump one. On the other hand, you have the competing and equally strong drive of the brain for choice. Now you can call choice, independence, you can call it autonomy, you can call it freedom. They’re all synonyms. You have kids and I’m sure you can relate to this, hell has no fury, when you give the two-year-old, the orange cup, but the two year old really wanted the red cup. So very early in our development, we start expressing strong preferences and we can come up with a million reasons for why but I actually think the most honest thing to say is like, we’re just on this planet to express and have preferences. Why? I don’t know what we just do. So what ends up happening in relationships is we stay again, not often consciously, but we say, I really want to be connected to you dear friend, dear lover, dear child, dear coworker and the only requirement for my connection is that you do it my way. You have the conversations I want to have, you look at the world, if you say it consciously, you already can start to argue for the intellectual limitation. You can obviously see the flaw in it. I I do a lot of work with couples and I have my own marriage. [LISA] Do you feel like this is part of, I’m hearing control, because I want control? [DR. JULIA] I think yes. I think it’s like the brain is most fundamentally a pattern detection machine. What happens is that the scariest thing for the brain is actually a violation to the pattern. In other words, if I think that we’re supposed to be like this, if this is what a happy couple does, then if there’s a violation to that pattern, even if it’s actually an okay alternative, it’s going to take a while for my brain to get over its anxiety. So I think you’re exactly right. It’s that when the pattern starts to be violated, wait a second, this is how love is supposed to look. Wait a second, this is how connection is supposed to feel. Wait a second, this is, so just to even talk about my own marriage, I do, I mean, why would someone be called to the field of mental health and psychology, I do like to have very, very deep conversations about emotions. Well, isn’t it interesting that I picked a man who does not like to have very, very deep conversations about emotions? The reason I picked him is because part of me likes that about him. I like the fact that not every conversation has to be like a bearing of my soul, but simultaneously it creates this, my pattern detector, it’s like eh-eh-eh, danger because, oh my God, are we not having, are we not having deep enough conversations? Are we really connected? We’ve been married for years now and so now I’ve come to understand that there’s no inherently right or wrong thing. So if I can create more power inside of myself, more intellectual spaciousness to say there are other ways to connect to people and still be safe, then I can let go of that death grip of control that you mentioned. [LISA] I agree with you and I feel that gripping and I feel the nervous system kicking in and wanting that control because if I’m in control, then I feel safe. If I’m safe, then I’m going to circle. So my question is how do we relax that? I’m thinking like relax the brain so the nervous system can relax and then we can take it all in and we’re not going to be in danger and nothing’s going to happen to us. It’s going to be okay. [DR. JULIA] Great question. I really think there’s two, I mean, there’s tons of trajectories for this, but let talk about, I’ll mention three, actually. The first trajectory is, I think that we have to start working with the nervous system in a way when the nervous system is not being challenged. So this means like really doing, so the breath is the portal to the nervous system, so doing really advanced breath work. By advanced breath work I just simply mean starting a breathing practice. That is a phenomenal way to bring so much expansion to the nervous system. The reason I actually think people resist it is it almost seems too good to be true. [LISA] Too easy [DR. JULIA] Yes. Like what do you mean? I breathe all day long. What does this woman talk about? But if you can look at the scientific studies, there’s lots of amazing YouTube channels. I do a lot of this work with clients. It’s like, how do we start to change the biology of our system through the breath? It’s a very, very real thing. The second thing is, and again, I’m going to start with the physical analogy, because it lands so much easier for all of us, If I want to be stronger, I would never go to the gym, not a single day and say, I can already lift five pounds so what I’m going to do today is I’m going to lift one. It wouldn’t occur to me. I’d be like, I want to get stronger, if my true goal is to get stronger, be more powerful, I’m going to have to lift seven. I’m going to have to lift 10. What’s the emotional analog? The emotional analog is I need to start thinking about situations in my life in making a hierarchy. All right, this is what I want, I want to be able to, maybe my goal is to be more self-expressed, we can pick whatever goal we want, but I’ll just, sometimes I think the examples can be clarifying. How do I want to be more self-expressed? I want to tell my partner something that is really difficult. I want to have a really difficult conversation with my partner. What’s another way? I’m going to start a podcast. I think I have a lot of great ideas. I’m going to start having a podcast. What’s another idea? I’m going to start having a different conversation. I’m going to start a business. I’m going to start a business, I feel like that’s I have a great idea, I want to sell widgets and I’m going to this, then I would start to rank those things, like on a scale one through 10. So I would say having the conversation with my partner feels like a 7 stressful, having the starting the business feels like an 8 stressful and public speaking feels like a 9 stressful, like starting a podcast feels like a 9 stressful. Then you know how when you go to the gym and you lift more weight, your muscles start to shake? It is the shaking that is evidence of your increasing strength. I call this the emotional shake. I have to, and this is the part where we lose it. We can talk until we’re blue in the face, but until the somatic system, in other words, until the body understands, I could hold the shake. It’s like thinking about lifting 20 pounds. You can think about it until you’re dead, but until you actually lift 20 pounds, it doesn’t change. So then I have to start showing up. I have to start, I have to launch the podcast and I have to say God, that podcast, it’s okay to actually go. In fact, this becomes more powerful. Let’s say my first podcast episode is a disaster. The brain is an evidence-based machine. I could talk to you about the color red until the day you die you have no idea what I’m talking about. I show you the color red you instantly know. I think there’s an intruder in my closet. I think there’s an intruder in my closet. I think there’s an intruder in my closet. The only way for me to, because my brain’s going to be locked in there until I open the door and now, I know I’m safe. So if I’m able to do something and even if it’s not a slam dunk in a way that becomes a more powerful opportunity for my emotional expansion, because the very thing I thought I was afraid of, my biology, my brain and my body learn, okay, I thought that was going to be devastating and it wasn’t. I cannot tell you, Lisa, how many times I work with clients, I work with leaders, I work with couples and they’re like, I can’t tell my partner, that I can’t tell my boss, that I can’t tell my friends. I can’t do it. I can’t show up on social media like this. They do it, they come back and they’re like, I cannot believe I wasted so much time afraid of that thing. It was like not a big thing at all. So I just want to, like, you can probably hear the like excitement going on, I just like want to scream from the rooftops. It’s kind crazy to think about it like this, but the thing that is keeping you prisoner and your life is just your brain going zing, zing, zoo, zoo, zap, zap, zon, zon. We interpret zing zing, zing, zoo, zoo, zap, zap, zon, zon, is, oh my God. Don’t do it. but when you really start to meditate, breathe, have conversations like you and I are having like, oh my God, it’s not, my house actually isn’t on fire. It’s just, for some reason when my brain goes zing, zing, zing, zing, zab, zab, zub, zub, I label that doom. If I could, when I go to the gym and my body shakes, I don’t immediately call 911. I don’t run to the doctor and go, oh my God, something horrible happened. My body was shaking. I’m proud of it. I’m like, oh, that was a good workout today. Why don’t do, why aren’t we generous with ourselves emotionally? Get out there. Now, similarly, I’m not saying you should go to the gym and shake all day long. If you told me that you went to the gym for X number of straight days, and all you were doing was shaking, okay, now it’s time for a break. I’m not saying our life has to feel like it’s just utter work. What I’m saying is actually the opposite is that if we don’t do the work to hold our emotional power differently, we will continue to be exhausted and it’s not a static thing. People get, as I’m sure from your work, people get more anxious. People feel worse. People get more depressed with time. [LISA] That was well said. I hear, too, take it one step at a time. We always want to, we want to be way over there. Because I know if I’m way over there, everything, my life is going to be perfect. Well, there might be a big space between where you are now and that end goal. So I think people get overwhelmed by that and then they just give up and they don’t want to try it. But it is like, if you just take it just one step at a time and it’s each step that you take will get you to where you want to go. Sometimes it’s three steps ahead, one step back or three steps ahead, two steps back. You just keep picking yourself up again, pick yourself up and you keep moving forward. [DR. JULIA] I could not agree more. I think that’s when the power of community you were sort of talking about that earlier, I think that’s where it really comes in because it’s like when we get hit with the emotional tidal wave. And sometimes I think we can feel, it wasn’t even something major but we feel we’re off kilter that day. Then the momentum, the bad momentum builds, like what’s wrong with me and nothing’s working out. So I think in these moments I think this is why people are talking more and more about like authenticity and vulnerability. It’s like, how can I show these things? Because obviously they’re universal. Again, like we are both, we are meant, I always talk about the paradox of life. Joy comes with sorrow, night comes with day, up comes because there is down. So it’s like, yes, I’m supposed to be an individual, but no one is supposed to go it alone. So how can I have these connections that restore me to go back to our earlier word that restore me to my wholeness. [LISA] Yes, we are just about out of time. So what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? I know this may, there’s so much more we can dive into and go in many different directions, but just what would you like listeners to take away from our time today, Dr. Julia? [DR. JULIA] That’s such a good question. I would say the most hopeful redeeming powerful thing I could possibly say is that I know how exhausting, defeating and hopeless pain can make you feel. I know what it feels like to be afraid, I know what it feels like to be anxious, I know what it feels like to be depleted and stressed, but if you are chronically experiencing these things, like everywhere I go, there I am everywhere I go there, I am, I want you to consider this shift. What if my pain is not here to torment me? What if my pain was here to set me free? If I come into my pain and with radical bravery, because I certainly understand that’s a little bit of a counterintuitive posture, what is the holy message that my pain is trying to give to me? I think you’re going to see, it’s going to be stuff about radical self-companionship. What are the boundaries I really want to have in my life? What are the relationships I really want to have in my life? What is the relationship I want to have with my own body in my life? What is the relationship I want to have with work? It’s here that we all find the redemption that we are all seeking. [LISA] That’s beautiful. I feel so empowered right now. I’m like, yes, I’m going to take on everything that I’m going through right now in my life. Bring it on. I’m ready. [DR. JULIA] That’s awesome. That’s a good thing. I’m so glad. That’s my goal for people. [LISA] Where can listeners get in touch with you? [DR. JULIA] Great question. So I hang out like most people these days on social media. You can find me at Dr. Julia Digangi at Instagram, Dr. Julia Digangi on Facebook and Dr. Julia Digangi on LinkedIn. The other piece I’ll say is that I am currently writing a book right now for Harvard Business Review and it’s really on the energy of self-leadership. In other words, how do we think about the energetics of our brain, our body and our spirit so that we can live the most powerful life, particularly when things in our life are complicated, things in our life are painful. So if that is interesting to you, and one of the things I always try to do is be very practical, so like really give people tips for where the rubber hits the road. Feel free to find me on social media. I’m going to be dropping a lot of content from that. [LISA] Great. All right, all of that will be in the show notes too. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming on this show today, Dr. Julia. [DR. JULIA] Thank you so much for having me, Lisa. That was an awesome conversation and you’re an amazing interviewer. I know that’s not easy, but you made me feel very comfortable, so thank you for that too. [LISA] Well, you’re welcome. You’re an easy interviewee, so thank you for that too. Thank you, my listeners for tuning in today. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. . In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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