The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Joy Gandell: The Power of Self-Regulation in Overcoming Sugar Addiction
Have you ever wondered if your struggles with sugar might be linked to something deeper, like your nervous system? Join us today as we dive into an inspiring and eye-opening conversation with Joy Gandell, a fellow Canadian with a unique journey through sugar addiction and self-regulation. Discover how she connected the dots between her chronic acid reflux, emotional dysregulation, and sugar consumption, leading to a profound transformation in her health and well-being.
With an impressive background that includes a BA in Psychology, an MSc in Administration, life coaching certifications, and more, Joy brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. She shares her personal story of battling acid reflux during the pandemic, her restrictive diet journey, and the unexpected benefits of deep self-regulation practices that helped her regain control over her digestion and life.
Learn about the tools and strategies Joy used to heal her nervous system and how she now helps others on their journey to reduce or eliminate sugar, improve their lifestyle, and achieve a state of calm and balance. Tune in to hear about the three critical aspects of self-regulation: self-control, balancing the nervous system, and energy management.
This episode is packed with valuable insights, practical tips, and a heartfelt story that will leave you inspired to take control of your own health journey. Don't miss it!
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welcome, welcome everybody to an interview today with joy gandell, who's a fellow canadian who has a sugar story of her own, actually, that she will share with us, and and with a really interesting twist and how she's navigating sugar in her life.
FLORENCE:She's been um, connecting the dots and figured out what's gonna what what for her. She's also professionally employed helping people in this space Well across the full spectrum. Here let me tell you some of her credentials she has a BA in psychology. She has a master's of science and administration it's a business degree. She is a certified life coach. She's almost about to become EFT certified as a therapist there. She has two certificates in self-regulation from the Merit Center and she's just launched on getting her diploma in psychology and counseling, specifically in psychotherapy. So today what we're going to be talking about is about sugar and the nervous system, and how to regulate the nervous system and what tools and understandings can help us be more effective in our efforts to up-level our lifestyle, in particular, to eat less sugar or to entirely eliminate sugar so that we feel better. Welcome, joy.
JOY:Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you, Florence.
FLORENCE:Well, let's start with your sugar story. Where would you like to start?
JOY:So I didn't think I had a sugar issue at all up until I can't even tell you what year it was, but it was at one point early on in the pandemic and I had uncontrollable acid reflux and I was in constant pain, to the point where I couldn't even eat, and the meds that I was on weren't really making any dent in the pain and the discomfort. And I took it upon myself to look for new and different avenues to help myself, because I knew the way I was living and experiencing pain just couldn't go on, and I fell upon a book written by I believe they're ENT doctors. I believe they're ENT doctors and they talk about acid reflux and where the problems really are if meds don't work. So apparently there's a subset of the population that acid reflux pills don't work, and they basically explain that there are proteins in your esophagus that get lodged there and any interaction with acid will trigger the pain, and so the only way to get rid of these proteins that are now lodged in my esophagus is by going on a very restrictive diet, and one of the things that they say trigger the acid are sugars, and so I had to essentially eliminate all sugars from my diet, along with a whole host of things, and I was on a very restrictive diet and I said okay, I'm going to do this for a year, because somewhere I read if you do it for a year you'll be fine.
JOY:So a year comes and goes, goes, and I try experimenting with certain foods and immediately I'm in pain and I complained to my doctor. I said when is this going to be over? This diet, I just can't get off it. I know it's a lifestyle, but it's very restrictive. And she said well, if it's the only thing that's working, then continue and keep taking the pills. And so at the same time I was already on my self-regulation journey and, coincidentally, took my self-regulation to a whole other level. And the unintended positive consequence was that my digestive system started kicking in and I didn't realize that it had been halted for so many years. And the more I practiced it, the better I felt. And then I started experimenting with adding a bit of forbidden foods and I noticed that I didn't have pain. And so slowly, over a six-month period, I weaned myself off all the drugs and I've been able to come back to a regular diet.
JOY:And then I noticed that I hit perimenopause and my symptoms started going haywire menopause and my symptoms started going haywire and I learned of this doctor in the States who specializes in peri and menopausal women, and she advocates a diet that is reduced in sugar. And so when I looked at her diet I'm like, well, this is easy. This is more sugar than I had when I was on the acid reflux diet, and so it's been an easy adoption for me and I feel light years better, and so right now I'm on a restricted sugar diet. I do cheat. I was away this past weekend, as I was telling you before we started recording, and I cheated and I'm okay with it. And Monday came back and just got right back on the bandwagon and I know I'm going away Christmas and I will likely cheat there too, and that's okay. I have to enjoy some parts of my life knowing that I am very restricted, most like, I would say, 85%. I'm going for 85% a deer.
FLORENCE:Awesome. That's my sugar story, that's your sugar story, and it's so interesting because it's two pieces. One you notice this very clear connection between the consumption of sugar and acid reflux, and you also noticed, however, that when you started to do self-regulation, when you took that to the next level, your digestion itself was starting to shift. So, because of my background in polyvagal and self-regulation and trauma therapy and all that stuff, my ears are saying, ah, she was probably moving out of the freeze response, out of a crash dorsal collapse, and moving into the, spending more time in the parasympathetic, the rest and digest, and your digestion was starting to correct again and you're literally at the nervous system level. You're doing deep healing. So I'm fascinated by that journey. So talk to us more about what. When you say you took your self regulation practice to the next level, what does that mean?
JOY:Okay, well, great question, thank you. So I specialize. I have a specialty as a credentialed life coach in the ADHD community and what I noticed in my clients, in myself and in some family members with ADHD and I didn't know I was ADHD at the time, I only found out last year was huge dysregulation issues huge, and we know it as emotional dysregulation. And whereas I didn't know I was ADHD, I did recognize that I was, that my emotional regulation was completely off the rails. I was like a light switch the slightest thing and I would be yelling at people. I had no patience and basically, my life, I was going about my life, everything was, I guess, fine, it was livable. But looking back now, I was certainly not living my life in a healthy way and in where I was really happy. And so, in searching for solutions for my clients, I came up upon Dr Stuart Shanker's work he happens to be in Ontario and his model for self-reg, and I heard about him and I'm like wow, that's fascinating. And I read he has a parenting book. I read the parenting book and I decided to use myself as a guinea pig and I applied everything to myself and within months I noticed a massive difference in my emotional regulation, how I felt, just things that I was able to do that I couldn't do before. I had patience. My relationship with my kids improved like really crazy things, and so I'm like, oh yes, I got this. This is great.
JOY:And then what happened was I came face to face with some of my demons, let's say so. You mentioned trauma. I read a book, so part of my life story is that my daughter, at the end of 2016, was diagnosed with cancer and we went through a year of treatment. She went through a year of treatment. I was right there by her side, and so was my husband and my son. I was looking at ways to help her move through her trauma, her cancer trauma. I picked up an amazing life-changing book, the Body Keeps the Score, by Dr Basil van der Kolk. I'm sure you know of it. It's the trauma Bible.
JOY:That's when I came face-to-face with my demons from my past, face to face with my demons from my past, and I started really understanding what was going on, and one of the things that one part of he devotes a whole section of his book to how do you heal, and he outlined several different methods of healing, and so I decided that one of the things I was already doing. I wanted to experiment with everything else, so I first started experimenting with dynamic neurofeedback and somatic experiencing and I happened to do both at the same time and one of the things that I noticed while I was doing the neurofeedback sessions and when I was with my somatic experiencing therapist was that my digestion started kicking in and the self-reg that I'd learned with Dr Shanker was so focused on the limbic system. I never really understood how the limbic system is really part of the whole nervous system and it was only when I really started diving deeper into the trauma physiology and what was going on and how it changed that I started really learning about not just the limbic system but I really started understanding the nervous system and really all the signs and symptoms of nervous system dysregulation, which is basically being stuck in sympathetic nervous system mode and your stress response being stuck on on, and that when you bring on your parasympathetic system, you're able to turn off the stress response and you're able to bring functionality to your whole body and not just be in survival mode. And when I started experimenting not just with dynamic neurofeedback and somatic experiencing but with emotional freedom technique and then also yoga nidra. I started spending more time in parasympathetic mode and I started really enjoying it, to the point where I got addicted to being calm.
JOY:And when I got addicted to being calm, it was so easy to detect when I start feeling changes in my digestion. Ah, that's the first sign I need to take action. And I need to take it a step further, because life is full of surprises and changes and it's not always like this. And so I know how my body's reacting, based on my digestion. Now and that's my first sign and I do certain things every day to regulate my nervous system and do as much to stay in parasympathetic mode safe and social, calm, rest and digest, whatever you want to call it I'm constantly reflecting on where am I and what do I have to do to bring myself back into that mode. And so that's for me how self-regulation got to a whole other level when I was able to integrate the limbic system with the rest of the nervous system.
FLORENCE:That's absolutely fascinating and your journey parallels mine and I think it parallels a lot of people who are sort of walking the sugar addiction recovery path. Because as long as we continue to have food and sugar to sort of take the edge off the sympathetic stress response, we can keep going. It's fast energy, it sort of takes the edge off things, it sort of allows us to stay in motion and doing and being dysregulated it's, it perpetuates, it's an enabler of a dysregulated nervous system. Correct and it blocks our recovery. And it's interesting because you know, I often say there's three stages of addiction recovery, it seems to me, versus getting sugar free, that's hard enough, and then staying sugar free, that's really hard too, but thriving sugar free. And so getting sugar free creates the vacuum, it creates the motivation we have to do something different. I can't stay in this place of suffering because I haven't got my drug of choice now to make it bearable. It's not bearable anymore, right, and so many of us, if we've got sugar out, we're doing really well.
FLORENCE:The minute we have a pretty intense stretch of stress and we're suffering, we have the choice, three choices right, we can slip, we can relapse, we can go back to the sugar, we can continue to suffer or, god forbid, we can commit suicide. So obviously, for most of us, going back to the sugar is a very reasonable decision, obviously. But the beautiful thing about those moments of suffering is that we have the motivation to start to bring in the genuine self-care, be in the parasympathetic and that peaceful, present, people-oriented place. And the sugar is like, oh no, thank you, I know you're going to dysregulate me, right, so the nervous system becomes your ally and no, no, I'm not going back there. And so that piece of the journey is where you're coming in. It's that later stage when we're like, okay, I've kind of got off the sugar, but now what? I'm miserable, or I'm stressed, or I feel raw or over-emotional, or so tell us what you do every day, tell us about self-regulation and what and what you do and what you teach.
JOY:So so I teach it. It's really. So I teach it's really. I compare it to a cell phone. I have a cell phone analogy. I have a whole self-reg presentation, but at the end of the day, I don't know what cell phone you have. But there are so many cell phones on the market and just like there's diversity in cell phones, there's diversity in all of us and what charges each phone is different. In cell phones, there's diversity in all of us and what charges each phone is different, and so what my self-regulation practice is can be entirely different from what your self-regulation practice is.
JOY:That being said, you have to find what works for you and you have to understand what are the choices that are parasympathetic friendly and what are those that are not, and so sugar is one of them that is not parasympathetic friendly, and I, honestly, would never have identified myself as an emotional eater ever. It didn't even occur to me during my daughter's cancer treatments. I was really, really good and I didn't gain weight, and then, all of a sudden, at the end of her treatments like two months left in her treatments she had a severe reaction to one of the treatments, reaction to one of the treatments, and it lasted till the end, and that's when I exploded in my weight and I didn't even. It wasn't even conscious for me that I was eating through my emotions to regulate and keep it together for her. That never occurred to me. I just knew I gained weight and I thought it's because I was sitting all day in the hospital and not exercising. I thought it was as simple as that cardio three days a week and yoga two days a week. I've now flipped it, because when I started my self-regulation journey I was not in perimenopause. Now I most definitely am. I apologize for all the male listeners, but we have to get used to it. Women's issues are everybody's issues and so so was this. So I now do more strength training than I do cardio. So I do strength training for women 40 plus Monday, wednesday, friday and I do my cardio Tuesday and Thursday morning.
JOY:So I wake up and the first thing I do is I need to get a certain number of lux so light into my eyes and my alarm goes off. And because we live in Canada, we don't live in California. Winters are dark. I said how am I going to get all this light in before 9am when I have a busy morning schedule like any parent. And so I decided to buy the therapy lights and use it, not for depression, but just use it to help regulate my hormones better. So my alarm goes off at six. I watch, I look at the light for 10 minutes so I get cause my. My light has 12,000, 12,000 lux, so I get 120,000 lux into my eyes in the first 10 minutes of waking up.
JOY:I then go and I either get on my bike for a half hour or strength train. So I start off with a bit of yoga and then go into weight training free weights for half hour, get up, get dressed, dress, shower and I will end my shower with cold water and from that I then walk my dog for 45 minutes. And so now I'm out and by then the sun has risen and I'm getting more natural light into my eyes and I'm walking. So I'm getting a little bit more cardio, not a lot because it is walking, but I'm doing that for 45 minutes. I come home and I work, and then at lunch I do another walk outside for 20 minutes, and even so, when it's minus 40 outside I don't walk for 20 minutes, but I will. I pretty much walk in the rain like I'll do a lot of walking just to get myself out, moving, change of scenery and not get stuck. So I'm very happy to have my dog, because if I didn't have him I would be stuck in hyper-focus and just eat at my computer every day.
JOY:And so then, oh, and I forgot I'm fasting in the morning. I do a 16-8, so 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating. I fast, with the exception of one smoothie in the morning. So my smoothie has supplemental greens, supplemental collagen. It's oat, milk, bananas and mango. No sugar Other than what's naturally occurring. There's no sugar and I have an omega-3 pill supplement.
JOY:So lunch is when I'm really going to start eating for the first time, and it's generally a salad. I start off with vegetables, a salad. I start off with vegetables, carbs and protein. Carbs is the last thing I'll put in and I'll do that. I have a lot of vegetables and fruit for lunch. I'll have Greek yogurt, not cow's milk, goat's milk, yogurt with frozen blueberries to get the antioxidants from the blueberries, and the liquid that they give is the just the sugar that I add, because I eat sugar-free yogurt, um, with a lot of protein, and then I add hemp seeds and chia seeds to that. So I'm constantly adding fiber, magnesium, all of these different nutrients.
JOY:And so you might think, well, how's that self-regulatory? It's what's needed for our bodies. Our bodies need this and it helps. And so, from there, I do my afternoon and then at night I will always do some tapping, will always do some tapping and yoga nidra before I go to sleep. I will not go to sleep with an activated stress response. I make a conscious effort to turn off my stress response before going to bed and I target seven to eight hours of sleep. I'm quite religious about that. I used to sleep procrastinate and now it's just become part of my self-regulation routine.
JOY:And then so for a long time, for over a year, I was in somatic experiencing therapy. I then moved into emotional freedom technique therapy emotional freedom technique therapy and now I maintain a monthly session with my EFT practitioner because I think it's important to maintain. So, whereas I maintain in between anything that comes up in the month, I then clear from my system. I feel it's very important. Then, clear from my system, I feel it's very important. I recognize when my emotions are heightened and, more specifically, when my stress response has been triggered, and so I'll take action almost immediately if I feel it. This morning I felt it and so I did an additional self-compassion meditation and I'm just constantly.
JOY:I have tools at my disposal, I have playlists that I could just access readily and easily when I feel the need. Breathing is huge. I also changed the way I breathe. I know it sounds crazy. I used to be a mouth breather, both at night and periodically during the day. Aside from breathing when I'm talking, I am breathing almost uniquely through my nose. I've actually helped my asthma because of the way I changed my breathing, and so I have a whole bunch of breathing techniques also to help me relax in the moment when I need it and I can't set aside 10 minutes, and so all of that really is my daily practice.
FLORENCE:Amazing and I cannot believe what parallels there are there as well. Yeah, yoga, I do the workouts, I do the walks in nature almost every day. Rare exceptions there. I mean it has to be even in the minus 40, right, you just bundle up, yeah, that nature and walking and yoga.
JOY:And without technology, like I've learned that squirrels make the most annoying noise I can detect when there's woodpeckers. Like I'm really paying attention to my surroundings and to the different sounds of nature when I'm walking, and so, yeah, nature is ridiculously healing for our nervous systems.
FLORENCE:Very, very regulating and healing. Yes, and in the somatic experiencing world which you and I both come from, it's called orienting right. And it's just fascinating how I can be walking along the trail and I can be in my head, I can be in my body, or I can be tuned along the trail and I can be in my head. I can be in my body or I can be tuned into the environment and how I feel is so different. In my head there might be pleasant oh, we're thinking about things or. But when I'm in my body it can be pleasant as well. I'm enjoying the walk, the sunshine, the birds, whatever. But if there's any distress in there, I will spend my whole walk in tune with this tension or stress or worries or fears or whatever it is in there that's needing my attention, that I'm getting locked into. But when I start to orient, I look at the different kinds of green and I'm just noticing the sounds and the oh. I can hear the river just a little right. My whole world opens up and I am no longer in distress. I get this little beautiful taste of the parasympathetic, the paradise of the parasympathetic, and so it's these subtle, small little things that we do that, we think, oh, who cares if I'm noticing what's happening around me? But that regulates our nervous system and it's so healing.
FLORENCE:And when we're regulated, and when we're regulated, we don't need or want the food. We're working upstream. Now, when the food thoughts and food cravings are happening, we're working upstream of those right, that's, it's too late. You're in parasympathetic sorry, you're in the dorsal collapse freeze or you're in sympathetic. Food thoughts are really sort of bugging you. So good to know that you haven't been doing what you need to do to stay present. And in the parasympathetic that's such a funny little word, but basically it means you're in that calm present in the moment, in the flow, in the flow of life. That's amazing, um, that's amazing. So you, you told me earlier about how there's these three parts of self regulation.
JOY:Do you want to tell me more about that? So for me it's. I come to self regulation and I see the world differently, because I now, from Dr Stuart Shanker to Lisa Feldman, barrett to Huberman all of these scientists and Dawson Church, I've basically learned that we cannot exercise conscious control self-control as our society loves to judge people on. Where's your self-control? And something is wrong with you if you can't exert that, that you cannot exercise that control unless you've achieved a certain level of self-regulation, unless you've achieved a certain level of self-regulation. And not having that self-control is a sign of your dysregulation. And so when I suddenly have a craving or I notice that I've gone somewhere, I question I'm like what's going on right now? I don't say, oh, I'm a bad person because I can't control myself. I really reflect and say, okay, something's going on and I need to attend to it. It's a sign. And so that's the first thing. The second thing for me, self-regulation is really, how are you balancing your nervous system is really, how are you balancing your nervous system? How are you balancing your sympathetic stress response cycle, your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system, and are you able to consciously shut it down and bring your parasympathetic nervous system online, are you able to come into safe and social, and can you do that consciously, and how often? And so for me it's how are you balancing those two things? I part of my self-regulation practices. I've cut out a ton of TV watching because it's just too triggering. I don't watch the news, I read it. I have more control just by reading the headline. Is this going to put me into sympathetic nervous system mode? And so news is almost entirely consumed reading. Now I don't watch half of the TV shows out there because they are just there to get us hyped up. I will choose happy, relaxing, like. I'll watch documentaries, whatever, but I'm not going to watch the crazy action flicks or the horror or whatever is out there, the psychodramas, because they are triggering and I want to reduce the number of times my nervous system, my sympathetic nervous system, is triggered, because the more often it's triggered, the easier it becomes to trigger. So I'm very conscious of that balance.
JOY:Then, thirdly, energy. How am I replenishing my energy stores? It is not simply by sleeping at the end of the day that I'm going to recharge my battery and I think of this I told you, like a cell phone. We all look at our cell phones, we are all running that battery down, but during the day or not. But, and during the day we recharge that phone.
JOY:If I'm going in the car, I plug it into a charger. If I'm in front of my computer, I've got my phone plugged in. At night, I plug it, so it's not just at night that I'm recharging my phone. I've got external battery packs that go with me. Certain places we have to do the same thing. We have to learn that it's no longer able. We're no longer modern. Society has made it impossible for our charge to last the full day and that we must recharge throughout the day. And then, what are my other practices that I'm doing, not just in the moment to charge up, but how can I preemptively charge? What are the things that I'm doing? How am I approaching my day? And so those are really the three levels with which I look at self-regulation.
FLORENCE:Now, that's so clear and so brilliant, so, so brilliant Joy. So the first one. If you were to summarize it as a word or a little short sentence, what would you say?
JOY:So self-regulation before self-control.
FLORENCE:Self-regulation before self-control. Self-regulation before self-control, the second one.
JOY:Would be balancing the nervous system constantly consciously turning off the stress response cycle.
FLORENCE:Okay, and being aware of what's activating it, and then playing with the different sort of ways that we can switch off that stress response and get back into that flow, that calm, present, resourceful place. And then the third one is energy Energy, right.
JOY:Energy management.
FLORENCE:Energy management right. And so the second one's really about noticing what's stressing you out, like, what's draining that battery. I used to have a fairly new iPhone and about two years in, the battery was constantly dying on me, like midday midday, and it was so frustrating I thought, oh, probably needs a new battery, and I did some research and I was going to order one on Amazon and replace it myself and I thought, oh gosh, knowing me, this is going to go badly. I'm just going to drive into Calgary. This is going to go badly. I'm just going to drive into Calgary, which was a, you know, it was an hour out of my, my, my way to go visit the what did they call it? The genius bar. And I said, my bad, I think I need a new battery. Would you mind helping me? I'm happy to pay you for your time and service and cause my, my, my, my cell phone keeps dying on me. And he's like no, your battery's great. Did some tests? No, your battery's great.
FLORENCE:He said you got all this stuff going on in the background and I said, okay, well, can you fix it? He goes no, I'll show you how to do it. I said, oh, no, no, no, I want you to just fix it, because you're going to overwhelm me and I'll be here all day. And he said, okay, blah. And about 20 minutes later this thing literally joy lasts me all day. But your point isn't lost that we do need to. We do need to replenish ourselves throughout the day, but it's unbelievable. I'll be at like 70% at you know, by the time it's bedtime. So that second pillar, that second piece, is like what's draining you? What is draining you?
JOY:what's draining you. What is draining you and this is where, sorry, I'm cutting you off Go in. So this is where I felt Dr Shanker's work was pivotal. No one else talks about what he talks about when he shares what our hidden stressors are. So we all know what our regular stress our job, moving, relationship, big things it's the hidden stressors that are going on. It's funny because Andrew Huberman alluded to it, Lisa Feldman Barrett alludes to it, I believe, and I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my very next books to read. Gabor Maté has a book on hidden stress, and so they're all talking about it.
JOY:Dr Shanker put it in a beautiful. He talks about five categories of stressors and the majority of them are hidden categories of stressors and the majority of them are hidden Things that you would never know are stressors, and they blew me away and that's why I know I need to watch what I watch on TV, because that's a stressor. So the first category for him is the bio domain, the biological domain. And so what is the bio domain? That's all of the things that we are that our bodies register as stressors. So it could be sensory, it could be temperature when it's too hot, we're focused on cooling our bodies down when it's too cold. We're just so focused on the cold, we can't focus on something else, and sugar, sugar is one of those things in the bio domain. Sugar, salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, drugs, alcohol all of the like major things that we are literally putting into our bodies cause our digestive and our nervous system to process it. It's the processing, the energy our bodies are expending to process. All this stuff is how we're becoming dysregulated. To process all this stuff is how we're becoming dysregulated, and so sugar would fit in the bio domain. So what else?
JOY:So he then talks about emotions and the emotion domain. So emotions and what I've discovered with Lisa Feldman Barrett are emotions are constructs that we've created. Emotions are constructs that we've created. That being said, when you think about, like extreme emotions, when you're angry, when you're frustrated, when you feel ashamed, embarrassed, anxious, all of these emotions, if you look at it physiologically, is your stress response being turned on? At the physiological level, it's all the same thing. And when I listened I used to listen for a very long time to Dr Lori Santos's podcast, the Happiness Lab, and she had one psychologist after another, psychologist after another that she'd interviewed throughout all the episodes that I heard and they're like oh so you mean the fight flight or freeze response, and Brene Brown talks about the fight flight. So if you realize just all of the emotion stuff, all of your emotions that are triggering the stress response, so that's another domain triggering the stress response, so that's another domain.
JOY:The third domain is the he said was the cognitive domain. So what is the cognitive domain? It's your thinking. So Huberman talks about how 70% like really absorb that number.
JOY:70% of your energy expenditure in today's modern society is thinking throughout the day. And there's some. I read it on ESPN when Queen's Gambit was big, they talked about how Grandmaster chess champions in a chess tournament not just one match over a tournament will expend 6,000 calories. But so they're not, they're just sitting there playing chess. But you're really burning 6,000 calories playing chess? Yes, because the majority of your energy expenditure is on thinking. So if you are neurodivergent in any way, meaning you're autistic or you're like me ADHD, nonverbal learning, disability again like me or there's any thinking challenge that you struggle with, you're going to expend even more energy in that domain. So it's not just in flow, because there's a lovely neuroscientist, Stephen Kotler, out in California who talks about flow, and we all want that flow. When you feel one with your work and it's a great feeling, and flow is something you should definitely seek to engage with. And it's expensive. It's expensive on the energy side, and so you have to recover. And so he talks about recovering from flow, and so people don't even realize how they're all talking about self-regulation and how it's so important on the energy side. So now we've talked about three categories the last two. The first one is the social domain. So for many people, interacting with others can be stressful. If you go to a foreign country, you have culture shock. That is a social domain stressor.
JOY:When we were all in isolation during COVID, mental health issues skyrocketed. Why? Because isolation. You know polyvagal theory. We need to connect. We are social beings, Even if we are what's the word I'm looking for An extrovert, an introvert. Even if we're introverted, we still need social connection. We just don't need a group of 10. We are good with one-on-one, but we still need that social connection.
JOY:And when you take it away, it's a stressor. We don't think about it and it is. Then we have pro-social domain and the way I learned it is that's where empathy lies. It's any time we suffer when we're watching another person suffer. That's why I stopped watching the news. The news is all about watching other people suffer. Think about how we all felt watching the videos of the George Floyd murder. And we show these things all the time. Now it's important to know about them.
JOY:I'm not saying bury your head in the sand, because but we need to take action because that is a stressor. To see suffering A parent, to see their child suffering, is a massive stressor on their system and in order to cope, we need to either expel it, as Dr Bessel van der Kolk says, it gets lodged in your body. It's not just at the brain level, it's in your body Somatic, experiencing emotional freedom technique. We need to do things. We need to learn all of the different modalities that help us, and we can't do that until we understand what category is our stress coming from. So think about moving, for instance. I love this example because this example shows how all these stressors impact each other on why moving is so stressful for people.
JOY:Okay, let's see, Physically, you're now working all day and now you have another job of packing at night, so you're likely not getting enough sleep. Bio domain, and you're working muscles because you're packing and lifting boxes that bio domain. And you're working muscles because you're packing and lifting boxes. That you haven't done in a while. So another bio domain. Okay, Emotion how do you feel about the move?
JOY:Are you sad because you're leaving your childhood home and you have all of these emotions? Are you happy because you're living in a real disgusting place and you're going to another location? You're living in a real disgusting place and you're going to another location. Are you suffering? Pro-social, because you see your children are unhappy with the move, they're possibly leaving friends. So different categories.
JOY:And then let's think of the thinking Okay, what executive functions do we need to move, we need to plan, we need to prioritize. Cognitively, we are being asked to do more than we normally do, and so when we look at something like moving and we break it down into those different categories of stressors, we could see why moving is so taxing and then we can take action. How can we offset, how can we do something proactively to build more energy? How do we rest and restore after? Because if we just move and say, oh, the stress is over, I move on without consciously bringing your body back to a calm state, your nervous system now has a new threshold of where your stress is at which you're going to need energy and you're going to go to sugar, for that was wow I have to bring it back to sugar.
FLORENCE:Totally, you darn right. You know those are the times you're going to go back and go, I don't care, I'm just grabbing this chocolate bar. Yeah yeah, jory, this was brilliant. This was a brilliant interview. I just love how you connected this all together and really it can seem overwhelming.
FLORENCE:I imagine if people are listening to this and they're thinking about their nervous system and about their sources of stresses and about up-leveling their self-care, to up-level their capacity to self-regulate, before they even try and fight with the food, or even simultaneously fight with the food, because fighting with the food and getting some traction helps in the bio domain. Right, it's clear that when we get more whole foods we get in, the more energy we have, the more calmer nervous system, the less inflammation all that is. It's all tied together but really it's simple. It sounds complicated but it's simple. Are you getting out for a walk in nature? Are you getting to bed? Are you eating whole foods? Are you noticing when your nervous systems you're starting to get activated and you're stressed? And are you willing to swap out sugar for the addiction of the parasympathetic?
FLORENCE:Like Joy was saying, I got addicted to feeling calm. That's the greatest addiction because there is no side effect on that one, and it truly does. It does feel addictive. You just think I want to be here forever. This is the happy place. We're genuine happy. You can't feel. You can feel high in the sympathetic, you can feel almost manic, you can feel excited and elated and blissful in this sort of higher sympathetic energy and adventurous, but you can't stay there, you're going to crash right. But the middle ground the parasympathetic, the calm, the rest digest, et cetera is where we can feel happy. And then, of course, in the phrase response, we're miserable. We're miserable, it's joyless, it's overwhelming, it's despairing, it's dark. And when we spend too much time in the parasympathetic sorry, in the sympathetic it's a matter of time before you're going to wind up in the freeze. So I hope that the wisdom that Joy shared today inspires you to uplevel your self-care and Joy. How can people find you if they would like to work with you or get more information?
JOY:So very easily. You could go to my website, setacoachingcom, so S-E-T-A coachingcom. You can also follow along. I post tons of nervous system regulation stuff, so it's not my stuff. I'm reposting from a lot of people at Gandell Joy on Instagram. I have a YouTube channel with some playlists I'm just getting up and running. I'll have some EFT videos shortly and running. I'll have some EFT videos shortly. The diploma that I've started is a lot of work with my clients, so things are moving slowly for me on the social media front. That being said, if you want to reach out, my website is definitely the best place where you could find resources and also contact me.
FLORENCE:Wonderful. Thank you again. What does SETA stand for? S-e-t-a.
JOY:It's actually so. I want to thank my brother for the name. It's the first two letters of each of my children's first names, so S-E is for my son and T T A is for my daughter. So that's where it comes from.
FLORENCE:Got it Okay. I was thinking somatic experiencing Beautiful. Thanks again, Joy. Thanks everybody for tuning in today.
JOY:Thank you so much, Florence. I really appreciate the opportunity and thank you all for listening as well. Good luck on your journeys.
