Ep 11b. Understanding the Mind-Body Connection: How Thoughts & Emotions Affect Physical Health & Vice Versa (Part 2 of 2)

Welcome to Part Two! Today, we’re diving deeper into the fascinating topic of the mindbody connection.
 
 In this episode, we explore how the mindbody connection contributes to symptoms and what cutting-edge fMRI technology reveals about how the brain processes acute (short-term) versus chronic (long-term) pain. Discover a third classification of pain, known as nociplastic or neuroplastic pain, which opens new pathways for addressing symptoms that lack a clear biomedical explanation. These include chronic conditions like migraines, fibromyalgia, back pain, IBS, and even long-COVID.
 
 We’ll also examine the roles stress, repressed emotions, and personality traits play in these conditions—and how addressing these factors can help break the pain cycle. Join us to uncover the transformative potential of mindbody healing and take a step toward improving your quality of life.
 
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 00:00   Introduction to the Mindbody Connection
 00:59   Understanding Mindbody Symptoms and Chronic Pain
 05:08   Exploring Neuroplastic Pain
 06:46   Examples of Neuroplastic Symptoms
 19:35   The Emotional and Psychological Impact
 23:03   Breaking the Pain Cycle
 23:41   What fMRI Technology shows us as pain becomes chronic
 31:06   Personal Story and Conclusion
 
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 RESOURCES mentioned:
 - ATNS (Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms) - www.symptomatic.me
 - Long-COVID: Dr. Becca Kennedy's work - https://resilience-healthcare.com
 - Back Pain: Dr. John Sarno's Book "Healing Back Pain", the work of Dr. David Handscom, term: Failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS), Alan Gordon's Book "The Way Out" & the Boulder Back Pain Study (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2784694)  & Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) = https://www.painreprocessingtherapy.com/
 - fMRI technology, founded by Dr Sergei Ogawa

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Education and techniques discussed in this Podcast originate from many sources, countless hours of research, training, and self-healing unless otherwise noted.

Music credit: MomotMusic, Kyrylo Momot
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Disclaimer: Information provided by Migraine Oasis & Karen Ash is for general informational & educational purposes only & is not a substitute for medical advice, psychotherapy, or counselling. Utilizing any of the education, strategies, or techniques in the podcast is done at your own risk. Consult with a physician before engaging in any suggested movements. If in immediate danger, call a local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room.

Transcript

0:51

Welcome to part two of the mind body connection. If you haven't listened to part one, I'd highly recommend you do that just to get a basis of what the definition is, how it's showing up in your day to day life, what to do about this data you can collect from the symptoms and the signs that are showing up in your mind and body. In the second part, we're going to talk about how the mind body connection shows up as symptoms and we'll go over what those symptoms are. We'll touch on fMRI technology and how that's made a difference of how we understand chronic pain, how to use the mind body connection to our advantage to decrease these symptoms that are not so pleasant. We're going a bit deeper than we did in the first part. We talked about how you blush when you're embarrassed or you get a stomach ache when you get nervous. These things are quite natural and happen from time to time. But what we're going to talk about is when it becomes a problematic situation for you. So you're getting symptoms. They may be chronic and it's affecting your day to day life. It's affecting your health. It's something that you're concerned about maybe, you're not exactly sure what's going on in your body, Doctors are not able to explain it of what the root cause is, and this is where we'll talk about how the latest in neuroscience and a third classification of pain is is responsible for some of this, or could be in your case. As I'm going through some of these symptoms, you don't have to be 100 percent convinced that this is a mind body connection in action. It's okay. I just want to plant the seeds for you to get curious that if your symptoms are not going away through traditional medicines and traditional approaches that maybe a mind body component has something to do with it. If this resonates with you, just something simply to explore and see if it could work for you because it is working for hundreds of thousands of people at this point, including myself with being able to cure myself from chronic migraine. So this is why I'm super passionate about sharing this. You're currently not thinking of these things as a mind body connection and that's okay. It's just not a part of our mainstream dialogue right now. We are taught from a young age that something physical that hurts is something physically wrong with our body. So this is a new approach that I hope becomes more mainstream because it's helping so many people. These are typically symptoms that are lingering, they're maybe becoming chronic, which is three plus months. And there is no disease or underlying structural issue, no autoimmune disease, no nerve or hormonal or organ damage to be a cause of it. There's no tumors, no infection, no current fractures of a bone, that kind of thing. All those things are ruled out by your physician, and yet symptoms are still present. In these cases, a lot of times doctors cannot tell you exactly 100 percent sure why this is happening. And this is super frustrating for you as the patient, because you want clarity. But there is no clarity and this is the problem. They're unclear. Migraine, as an example, fibromyalgia, all these different things. There's a bunch of symptoms that are similar and we get lumped into a diagnosis. A lot of times that's for insurance purposes or to give us clarity. And sometimes that helps. It helps to get the diagnosis that, okay, there's a name for this. I've been struggling with all these random symptoms and people can't understand what's happening with me or people are acting like it's in my head and not understanding the severity of this. So now I have a name to it, at least, it allows you to settle into, okay, there is a reason for this. A lot of times it's this vague categorization that you get placed in this box. And the problem is like with migraine, with my case, it was an incurable disease box that I got put into at 17 years of age. There was no cure. It was hereditary, and this is why it was happening to me. All I was meant to do for the rest of my life was look for pain management. And I believed that for 34 years. That's all my life was, is looking for a better pain management. Until I found this work and was able to look at it from a different lens and actually cure myself of chronic migraine, I mean, that's unbelievable. It's important to know that when you get that diagnosis and label, it sometimes is this vicious cycle because then you're in this box that you're broken. You're something's wrong with you. Physically, something is not right. And so that leaves us to not explore other options. We take this diagnosis, the doctor typically knows what's going on, we think, and it's this life sentence essentially that we get stuck in. I'm also making this video to push us out of our comfort zone, push us out of the norm of thinking and looking at it from a different lens of something that potentially could help you. A lot of doctors don't know about this third category of pain and symptom, which is called nociplastic or neuroplastic pain and symptoms. And what that is, it's a third type of pain that has come only in since about 2016, they started labeling this as nociplastic and in 2019, that came into the IASP, international Association for the Study of Pain, and that's what they categorized it. Now it's evolved from that into being called neuroplastic pain and symptoms. But essentially what it is is the third type of pain. It's not associated with structural damage in the body. It's not associated with nerve damage. And so it's this third category of what do we do with this? People are still in pain. There's nothing physically, structurally wrong with the body. A lot of doctors are still not aware of. It's the latest in neuroscience. It's the latest in pain management. It's cutting edge and studies now have been done on this. There's a lot of research being done and there's an uptick of people understanding it, but it's still at infancy that people need to become aware of in order to help advocate for themselves to their doctors to make sure that they're being, asked about, could it be neuroplastic in nature? And most doctors will not even know what that means. And so there's the ATNS, Association for the Treatment for Neuroplastic Symptoms. Symptomatic. me. is the website, and you could use that as a good resource as well, tells a lot about it and it's trying to help train doctors of what this neuroplastic symptoms are and how to treat it. So that's a little bit of a side note. Let's get into some examples of what these neuroplastic symptoms are. I'm saying neuroplastic, you can substitute that with mind body connection symptoms. These symptoms that come about due to typically stressors, stress is a lot of things. Stress is the current stress that you're under. It's the past stress that you've gone through. So adverse childhood events. It's, the divorce that you had 10 years ago. It's that hurt feeling that you had when somebody broke up with you or ghosted you and it upset you but you moved on and didn't manage those emotions, so all these repressed emotions and emotions that we just didn't deal with at the time of the hurt or trauma. It's personality traits that put a tension or a pressure on yourself. So perfectionism, people pleasing, lack of boundaries, this harsh inner critic that we, most of us have, lack of self compassion, there's all kinds of things within the personality that could be triggering or causing stress and tension in the body. Or the thoughts are mindset, there's so many different ways that stress is involved. I always heard with my migraines. Oh, it's stress related. Okay, but what does that actually mean? Yes, I'm under stress, but I didn't feel like I could do anything about that stress. There was always stress and in life there is going to be. Part of the cure of this is trying to find ways to manage the stress and the emotions and the different personality types and the things that's causing this tension and the brain essentially to feel unsafe is the bottom line. This within this mind body connection, the mind is creating both consciously and subconsciously. We have to remember that there's this whole component of our brain. 95 percent of our thoughts and our emotions and our habits and the memories are in this subconscious part. So that's an part that we don't have access to typically, we can bring it into consciousness, but our conscious mind is only operating 5 percent of the brain. What does that mean? You're being triggered by stuff out of the subconscious. All these stressors are still in there. They're still all these traumas and emotional hurts are still in the body causing the tension. So as I mentioned in part one, all this mind body connection and how our thoughts create sensations in the body, the body, and these repressed emotions and this tension that I'm talking about now creates a mind that is stressed, that is overwhelmed, that is anxious, that is on edge, that has a lot of tension and the brain feels the danger of that, feels the threat. This is part of what is causing the symptom that comes out. That's a whole other video that we'll go into on a much deeper level. I'm going to go over about five different symptoms that are mind body related or can be, they have a component of it. It's something that I would highly recommend that you look at if you have these symptoms. Migraine, obviously is one of my passions because this is what I suffered from and was able to cure myself from. If it's a primary headache or migraine, and that means that the pain is the symptom, secondary headache or migraine means that it's coming from something else. It's coming from a sinus infection, a disease of some kind, from a brain tumor or some something else. It's a secondary cause of something else. When it's a primary headache or migraine, it is typically neuroplastic in nature. And what this means is there's this mind body component that has to do with it. With migraine, there is no consensus of why that is caused. If you look on the Mayo Clinic website, it says it may be caused by da, da, da, da, da, it could be blah, blah, blah. There's no consensus still on what causes a migraine. Another one is IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. And this is not the case where it would be after an acute gastrointestinal infection, something like that. But when it's just coming on its own, there is a mind body connection that could be a component of this. And think about that where the gut brain access, I don't know if you've heard of this, but the gut is a second brain, they call it because there's so many messages going between the gut and the brain. When your mind is upset and has stress, and there's a lot of tension between the mind and the body, it's going to cause problems. We talked about in the first part of when you get worried and you get a stomach ache, then it could cause diarrhea. Well, IBS is sort of like a heightened sense of that. Like an extreme example of that, if you will. Fibromyalgia is another one, this widespread muscle pain and comes with sometimes fatigue and other symptoms. There's currently no good evidence that this is caused by a structural or biochemical disorder within the body. So when an autoimmune disorder or a nerve or hormonal type of disorder is ruled out, this is a good place to start looking. Is it a mind body connection? Is it this neuroplastic type of symptom? Two maybe a little bit more controversial or harder to explain is long COVID. And new research has shown that a mind body connection and approach can be a good place to start looking. A physician that I know of Dr. Becca Kennedy, who's done a lot of research on this. She used to run the long covid center at Kaiser Permanente, and now she's in private practice. She saw thousands of patients and they were able to be cured from their symptoms when they started taking this mind body approach and looking at it as a neuroplastic symptom. I was at a conference for the ATNS, the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, in Boulder, Colorado, September 2024. And I met actually one of Dr. Kennedy's patients and he was talking about how he was cured from all these long covid symptoms and he was there had flown out there and wanted to be talking to all these practitioners and people in the rooms. There were physicians that were doing this type of work and coaches like myself or therapist and also some patients that were there to learn the latest science and the latest research on how to cure from these things. So he was there and an example that was given as somebody that has cured from long COVID. I also met this woman who was spectacular and she was actually bedridden from long COVID and here she was. Got on a flight, came out with her friend. They're both now changing their careers to be able to help other people with long COVID. So this is something that I think will be coming more and more into the forefront, I hope. This is something that could help with the symptoms. And the other one is back pain. Now, this is a little bit of a tricky one because people think, Oh, but there is something structurally wrong. I got an MRI that has a disc degeneration, herniation or a bulging disc, so there is something structural. But what the research has found is that some people are in pain, some people are not with the same MRI findings. There's been studies with 50 year olds that have, I think it was 64 percent were asymptomatic. They had bulging discs, the same whatever, and did not have the pain. This goes back to Dr. John Sarno's work. And if you have back pain, I highly recommend reading his book, Healing Back Pain. You can look at the work of Dr. David Hanscom. And I'll have all this in the show notes, these names, so you don't have to worry about writing them down. He's somebody who was a back surgeon and quit his job to educate people on this mind body component of it. And that a lot of the surgeries are no better than placebo. If the surgery is better than people who didn't get the operation, obviously those people still are in pain and they think it's related to the disc problem. You need to go into what the placebo versus the operation was. And there you'll see that there is no major difference between operation and placebo, which is very, very telling. There's even a name for it, failed back pain syndrome, because there's so many operations that don't cure the pain, unfortunately, because it's not getting at the root problem. I can do an entire episode on just back pain. There's so much data now on this. Alan Gordon's book, The Way Out, how he cured himself of back pain and how they did a Boulder Back Pain Study, which you should for sure look at if you are looking at an invasive procedure for your back, and how that Pain Reprocessing Therapies helped 98 percent of the people and 66 percent were pain free or almost pain free at the end of eight sessions. It's unbelievable. I'm a little bit biased to this just as a disclaimer that I have been trained in Pain Reprocessing Therapy through Alan Gordon's group. So, this is something that I'm passionate about. This is somatic tracking and all these different things that you may have heard about to heal any pain, to be honest, any chronic pain. So that's just a few of the symptoms. On my website, MigraineOasis. com, you can find a more full list. It's not a complete list, but at least it gives you a little bit more of an idea. If you have a different symptom than what I've listed, you can go there and see if maybe yours is something that has been known to be helped by this treatment mind body approach to healing. One of the issues is that when we go to the doctors they're not aware of this third component of pain. Physicians in the U. S. are trained 11 hours in medical school on pain management, which is quite shocking when you think about the chronic pain epidemic that we're in. Think about the opioid crisis that we just had in the U. S., there's just so many people in pain, and it's unbelievable that only that amount of time is dedicated to that. When I went back to my physicians and talked about, why weren't you talking to me about this mind body component? You told me I was stressed out and I needed to manage my stress, but you didn't go into why. And I was answered with, you know, I have 15 minutes with you, Karen. I'm looking at you trying to get rid of your symptoms. You're in agony. So I'm trying to focus on that. Their entire career is based on trying to help people. They're looking for the root cause, but in so many of these symptoms, like I mentioned before, there just is no clear reason why this is happening. And they're not trained to look for this mind body component or if they know about it, which my neurologist was aware of it. When I went back and discussed it, and told him, I'm healing. I no longer have chronic pain. What is happening here? Can we discuss this? Why aren't you telling your patients about this? He acknowledge it's very difficult to have these conversations with patients because it's got this psychological component. It's got this brain component of, your worries, your stress, your personality, all these things that I mentioned before that doctors aren't equipped to talk about, or they don't have time to talk about, or it's not in their wheelhouse. As I mentioned in part one, we separated out psychological stuff from the body and we're really ingrained in thinking that the body is where the pain is coming from. If there's a physical pain, it must be a physical problem, which now that's been proven over and over again is not the case. It's coming from the brain. All pain, all symptoms is a trigger from the brain. This is still a factor most doctors are not comfortable in talking about. And when I say psychological, I'm not saying it's all in your head that there's a psychological problem. Absolutely not. It's the component of how our thoughts and our stress is, like I said in part one, is creating tension within the body. These type of symptoms have a stress or an emotional mindset component to them that are driving this physical manifestation within the body. It's this tension creating a problem within the nervous system. It's dysregulating it. It's causing messages then to go up to the brain that we're in danger, and it's triggering pain and symptoms as a result of this. But there's a way to overcome this, and this is the good news of it. Labeling any pain or symptom as just purely physical would really ignore a key component that allows our mind and body to heal. We currently think of a migraine as a physical problem. We think of back pain as a physical problem, anxiety, depression as a mental health issue instead of both. It is very much both. Let's go into those two specifically because there is a high percentage of people with migraine that have depression and anxiety that come along with it because of the mental challenges of the physical pain. Depression, yes, it's very much a mental health challenge with the negative thought spirals and the concentration issues and the irritability that can come, this excessive rumination and this really low mood that you're in. But it's so much more than a mental challenge, it greatly affects our body. It affects energy, very low energy, feeling very, very fatigued. It affects sleep. Difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much. You could go either way. Sometimes there's weight loss. Sometimes there's weight gain. Sometimes there's a sluggish feeling. Sometimes there's a jittery feeling. There's all kinds of things that are going on in the body. So it's both. Anxiety is the same thing. You've got these anxious thoughts, and yes, it's a mental health challenge, but there's also heart palpitations that come with it. There's so much going on in the body that is felt in an anxiety attack. Tightness in the chest, difficulty breathing, sweating or clammy hands, muscle tension in the shoulders, neck, and jaw area. Digestive issues, nausea, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fatigue from the constant high stress alert state, and also restlessness. So again, I don't want us to think about symptoms as being one or the other. It's both. It's all connected. This mind body connection. Also with chronic pain. You have the physical pain, but it also has a huge mental toll on people. It's depressive. I mentioned before that anxiety and depression come along with migraine and also with chronic pain it's very normal for this to happen. It can cause brain fog, and difficulty in concentration. It can cause feelings of stress and fear. Obviously, there's a lot of fear based thinking when it comes to chronic pain because you're afraid of the symptom and when it's coming and when it's there, there's so much just fear around all that. There's such an emotional toll. An emotional exhaustion that comes with it. There's sleep disturbances sometimes because you're uncomfortable due to the pain. There's hopelessness or this feeling of being stuck in this issue. A lot of times there's social withdrawal and just distancing yourself from people. Sometimes a heightened sensitivity to emotions and external stressors. So there's so many different things that are again happening in the mind and body, even when it's chronic pain, physical in the body. Stress alone has been proven to do so many things within the body. Stress, this mental component has been shown to raise the cortisol levels, this hormone within the body. It's been shown to increase inflammation in some cases, and it can negatively affect immune system. When you're very stressed, a lot of times, you're getting more sick. You're getting colds. You're getting other things because your immune system is compromised. Chronic stress can just wreak such havoc on the body because your nervous system is in such heightened state in this fight or flight and it's just not meant to stay there for so long. Stress and this tension that it creates within the body and the nervous system dysregulation are really at the core at the root cause of a lot of these symptoms. And the good news is with stress management, with knowing this information, we can go back and reverse engineer that, which is what we'll talk about next. What we want to do is ultimately break this cycle. We have the pain or the symptom. It causes us stress, worry, all these other mental things that I've been talking about. Then that exacerbates the pain and the symptom. It just is this vicious cycle that keeps going. Or another way to say it is we've got all this stress and emotional, angst and tension in the body and that causes a symptom. Then that symptom causes more stress, different type of stress, because now we're stressed over the symptom and that is this vicious cycle. So breaking the cycle is the key to overcoming. Before I get into how to break this cycle, I want to tell you one thing about this fMRI technology that's come out only since the 1990s and it was a Japanese scientist by the name of Sergei Ogawa, I hope I say that right, and his team. His work had a profound impact on neuroscience. What it does measures brain activity by measuring the blood flow in the brain. It shows different areas of the brain that become active when in response to a stimuli or during a certain task. And this is helping researchers understand brain function in real time. What they have shown now is that Pain over time shifts where it's being registered within the brain. And as it goes into more chronic state, it goes into a more emotional processing area of the brain. When there is an acute pain episode, the part of the brain that lights up is this somatosensory cortex, that's the center which is responsible for processing physical sensation. So whether that's touch or temperature or pain. When it goes to chronic, it's gone on past the three months and it's an ongoing issue, it shifts to the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which is responsible for emotional processing and memory and the learning centers of the brain. So it highlights the fact that chronic pain is no longer just this physical experience. It has a huge emotional component to it too that we need to address when we're in chronic pain to help soothe the brain, start working on those aspects so that it becomes less of a trigger for us. If we go into this emotional area, which we don't really think of when we're in pain, of working on the emotions. We're still looking at this physical aspect. We think of a physical problem in the body as a physical cause, but it is not, it is brain generated. And so when we go into the brain and we start looking at the neuroscience and we start looking at mine is chronic now and it's being processed in this emotional area of my brain. Let me try to go in and soothe that part and try to break the cycle. Let me address the emotions, make the nervous system come back into a regulated state and to stop firing the symptoms. How do we heal from chronic pain and symptoms? It goes to the root of what are the stressors that are causing the tension, causing the dysregulation of the nervous system, causing the brain to feel unsafe for it to trigger some sort of reaction. A brain that feels safe does not trigger pain or symptoms. If we're in chronic pain or symptoms, there's something dysregulated within this system. When we're talking about these neuroplastic type symptoms, the ones that are unexplainable. They don't come from some disease or structural problem within the body. We have to look at what's causing it in the first place. We know the mind and body are very connected. We know it goes both ways from the mind to the body and the body to the mind. That's super clear hopefully after this video. What we're wanting to do is reverse engineer this. Let's start with the mind. We need to figure out what is the stress that is causing tension to come up in the body. I gave you a few different categories of what that could be. It could either be your day to day stress, stress that's happened in the past. Number two ,the emotion side, that is again, past and present, the current emotional things that are going on with you right now. A lot of times it is past things deep back into the brain that you're not even thinking about, that you've forgotten long ago, So things from back in childhood, adverse childhood events, past hurts that you've had that you didn't really process. this divorce that happened 10 years ago. It's still in the body as stored trauma. Emotion is energy in motion. It needs to come up and out of you. If that hasn't been able to happen, which for many reason, it doesn't happen. And for valid reason, the brain is trying to protect you by keeping it repressed because it was too hurtful. You didn't have the tools to manage it. It was too overwhelming at the time it happened. There's many reasons. In my case, I had a breakup and death of two dogs. And I just sunk myself into work. I just physically could not manage those emotions at the time. I became even more of a workaholic to avoid all those feelings because I just wasn't capable to feel it all. It was just like a 1, 2, 3 punch. And I just couldn't and so, in hindsight, this is part of my issue of why it was becoming more and more chronic is because it just was so much of an emotional toll that just got shoved back that I didn't really process at all. Number three would be the personality side. What in the personality is creating tension? Are you a perfectionist? Are you a control freak like I was? Trying to just do everything right, have everything in control because this is how you feel safe. These are the defense mechanisms, the coping mechanisms that we've created since childhood. Looking at these and trying to figure out if some can be worked upon to cause you less of a nervous system dysregulation. And this is a whole other topic that I'll have a lot of videos on nervous system regulation, how to feel your emotions, all these different things. This is just a high level what they could be so that if you want to go off on your own and say, Oh yeah, this is really resonating with me. I had this and this happened and I never really processed it. And I think this is coming up now as a trigger and maybe this is part of the reason why I'm in pain. It's just to give you a little bit of the information to start going off of and keep looking in this space for further resources in the future. These are the things that can help start to reverse it. Once you start working on this, calming the nervous system back down, regulating everything back out, then things will stop triggering because the brain will feel more safe. It'll feel like you're not in danger anymore. Number four would be the mindset and how fear based you're thinking over these symptoms that you have. How intense you're looking for a cure, because this is, again, creating tension within the body and again, affecting this mind body connection. The next part would be the body. We just talked about how you can reverse this in the mind. In the body, if you can become more aware of sensations that are going on. When you feel the little tinge in the knee, or you feel the headache coming on, maybe you feel the tension in your neck or your shoulders and you start looking at, what's going on right now? What are the emotions? What is the stress that I have? Is there a situation that's triggering me? What are the thoughts that I'm having right now? This is the second way to reverse this. To become aware of it so that you can stop the progression of it becoming a symptom. Once you recognize that, being kind and gentle to yourself to reduce the fear based thinking. Try to feel into your body more instead of analyzing everything in your mind and to becoming more in tune with your body. Create some self compassion, some self soothing aspects, and to create safety within the body the same way you're trying to do in the mind. One quick story about how I was able to do this is back pain. So I had cured myself of the chronic migraine. I was feeling really good. And it came a point where I was going to go to Florida to visit my parents. And for different reasons, I didn't want to go do that. I didn't want to take the physical trip because it's just a long trip. It's a long day. I fly with my little dog. I'm always stressed about her needs. On the other side of it is a dynamic that stresses me. I have a mother who has dementia. Will she remember me? The family dynamic, there's a lot of things that is present when I actually touchdown in the States and during this trip. The first time I was going, the migraines were down. I was like, okay, wow, this is really working. And I got excruciating back pain for 10 days I was in bed, could barely move. It was nothing like I've ever had before. It was on a heating pad, could barely go to the bathroom. Couldn't stand to cook. It was just so, so bad. I kept thinking, isn't this ironic that it's right before this trip? I was starting to think, can this have something to do with the mind body? I am probably freaking my brain out because I'm sending messages that I don't want to do this. I'm scared to fly I don't want to do it. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about that and all these things were stressing me. And I thought yeah I think this might have a component of this. So I tried to soothe myself I tried to do a little bit of that work, but it just did not function in that case I had to postpone my trip plan it for another time. As soon as I cancelled my flight, and knew the trip was postponed, my back eased up. Very interesting, right!? By the second time I went to the States, maybe six months, eight months later, the same thing happened, but I was really aware of it. Every time I would have a little thought of, Oh, I don't want to go do this. I worked with my mind and my body and what I was sensing. And I tried to reverse this and keep myself calm and the brain feeling super safe. I guess you could say it worked 50 percent because I ended up with back pain for about four or five days. It didn't affect the trip, but it really was this eye opener of, huh, that's interesting. I was aware of it this time. I did a lot of pre work to soothe myself before it. It still was a factor, but it wasn't as bad. And by the third trip, there was no problem. On the fourth trip, no problem. It's really interesting to me how it was always right before the trip, this symptom was coming. It was a symptom that was for sure having a mind body component. Now this isn't chronic. It was just an acute symptom of what happened in the moment. But it's something that tells you or gives you a little feel of once you are able to get good at spotting what's going on and understanding the mind component, understanding the body component and this interconnection and doing the work to soothe both the mind and the body, it can actually have impact, a positive impact on symptoms. I believe that this worked also for my migraine, taking them from chronic down to me being off all medication and having just every once in a while, a migraine or a dull headache. It's completely changed my relationship with pain. And not getting same type of pain that I did and radically changing things. I hope that leaves you with a little positive note of how this can work. I hope this helps in some way to open your mind to another way of thinking about things. If you're still interested in this topic, there's plenty of more information over on Instagram. Look for series one on MindBodyConnection. Hopefully it's super easy to find out in this teal color. I really hope that you have more pain free days and if you have any of these symptoms that I've mentioned to really explore this because it's helping tens of thousands of people. I think it's going to be the wave of the future and I hope it becomes more mainstream. So I will see you in the next video and thanks for listening.