Strategies for Healing Rushing Woman’s Syndrome – With Dr. Libby Weaver

Dr. Mindy
So let’s start with this, I do have to tell you the funny story of how I got introduced to your book. So as I was going through my menopausal experience, a good friend of mine who’s a natural path in Canada, said to me, you know, Monday, you really need to read Russian woman syndrome. And my first thought was, I don’t have time to read that I don’t have time to read books. And that the sheer title of the book, I was like, Oh, my God, listen to yourself, Mindy, what are you saying, you don’t have enough time to read a book called rushing woman syndrome, maybe you need to read that book. And so sure enough, I didn’t read it. And this lovely Fred, who’s a real dear friend of mine came back to me and said, You need to read it, you need to read it. So I finally succumbed. And I took it on vacation with me. And I and I wept when I read it. And I just, I just can’t thank you enough, because the way you wrote it, it spoke to me because you spoke in the language of chemistry. And I could see for the first time that just because I was capable to accomplish everything that I want to accomplish in my life, that my biochemistry was maybe not built for all that I was doing. So I want to start off by thanking you and I and I want to bring our audience into, please help us understand why women are not made to be rushing around.

Dr. Libby
No, Mindy, I’ve got goose bumps all over me with you, with you saying that, because the essence of what I want women to understand, and I wrote rushing woman syndrome in 2011, and you you captured it beautifully, then we are so incredibly capable we if you really pause to think about it, we would blow our own minds is a phrase I sometimes use if you if you knew who you truly are, you would be an aura of yourself where we’re so incredibly capable. But what I want women to understand is that never ever before in the entirety of human history, have we asked our bodies out, I often call it an earth suit. We’ve never asked our bodies to actually live like this. And so our bodies are giving us symptoms, our bodies are giving us feedback about our choices. And some of those symptoms are coming through as we can’t sleep. digestive system upsets real challenges with our sex hormone balance. So what might be the menstrual cycle gets starts to get disrupted, or the periods become very heavy, and they start flooding. Or you might start to bleed for three weeks instead of just a couple of days or one week, or it might be a very difficult transition through menopause. And so because every everything inside of our body is connected, and so much of it begins with the hypothalamus, this in the center of our brain, the region of our brain that is forever asking, Am I safe? And when the hypothalamus looks into our blood, asking that question, Am I safe, and it sees huge amounts of adrenaline constantly circulating? With which historically, the only time we made adrenaline was when our life was literally in danger. Whereas now we make adrenaline because everyone needs to block there is right now we make it we get adrenaline in our blood when we consume caffeine. Sorry, everyone.

Dr. Mindy
Right? Well, this is where people decide if they like you or not exactly, yeah.

Dr. Libby
I’ll try and redeem myself later. To the caffeine or sorry, the adrenaline will be there because of caffeine or because of perceptions of pressure and urgency, because we might be subconsciously worrying about what someone else thinks of us. There’s, there’s lots of reasons but essentially, it’s psychological stress. It’s not a physical threat. But when that hypothalamus looks into the blood, sees the adrenaline and says, Am I safe? The answer’s no, because adrenaline has always meant danger. So then it communicates to the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, we’re not safe, and she’s the one who then says to the adrenal glands to the thyroid gland, to the ovaries, were not safe, you guys need to now make the appropriate hormones for danger. And the trouble is, if we did well, if we if we only did that for say, three hours a week would handle it. But the way we now live is that for most women, they have constantly circulating elevated levels of adrenaline. It’s constant it’s all the time. So we are our bodies are always getting the message that our life is in danger. And that’s a big part of what I want women to understand. We’re so capable, but we have to learn ways to communicate to our body the truth, which is that we are thankfully relatively safe.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, and and that it was so well said by the way, and I hope our listeners just grabbed that because I will tell you that when I moved into my early 40s I was doing the classic like raising two little kids working all the time working out all the time, you know, doing being really rigid with my diet. I my days were very packed. And I all of a sudden saw exactly what you said. I started not sleeping Well, anxiety, depression, things kicked in, that I’d never experienced in my life before. And never once until I read your book did I stop to realize that just because I was capable of doing all these incredible things that were on my schedule throughout a day that my body was asking me to slow down, my body was asking me to do something different. And it I think it’s probably the hardest thing for women to realize, because we live in a society that is so programmed to teach us to keep going to do it all. And to know that biochemically, we are not meant to keep that pace up, is really hard for the brain to overcome. Am I the only one that says that?

Unknown Speaker
No.

Dr. Libby
But I want to do it all. I want to experience this. Yeah. I don’t want to miss out. I have a lot to contribute.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah. Thank you. So So help. So I’ve thought about this a lot. And I love your TED Talks great, too, because you talk about the cave woman versus what do you call it, the juggling woman. And I share that with my community a lot that if we go back to the cave woman days, we walked out of the cave, and we were like, Okay, what are we going to do today? You know, maybe I had to go find some food, maybe like, sit and hang out with other women around the cave and talk. We didn’t get up, grab a cup of coffee, get on the phone, go drive the kids to carpool like so. But the modern world is so different right now. How are we going to help women thrive in this world? Because it’s it’s like a pace that just takes over if you’re not careful?

Dr. Libby
Yes. So it’s, I feel like we’ve got to take a step back. And we need to pause and think, okay, there’s very, no, it’s really important, actually, that I acknowledge this at the moment, with everything going on in the world, there is very real and genuine stress going on in the world right now and in people’s lives. However, there is also a huge amount of stress we create for ourselves, because of how we think. And that’s how we can change. So that’s what I’m interested in. That’s what we what we can’t change, okay, we leave that it’s, it’s about addressing what we can change. So and what we what we forget is that we’re sorry, we think that our stress comes from everything outside of us, we think it’s because of the to do list or that person or that colleague, or that particular situation. And what I think we’ve really lost sight of is that it’s actually our response to the to do list the person in the situation, we forget that and we forget that we get to choose how we see all of that. Now, I’ll give you some examples. So we feel like we get to a point when we feel like everything is urgent and the to do list is massive, and we’ve got our schedule is back to back. We’re going to be here than there. We can’t be late for that we’re going to drop this person there. Before we drop that person there. We’ve got to prepare these four things. It’s it can feel so relentless. Now I was the guest speaker at a conference and it was for the hereditary breast and ovarian cancer society. So that room was filled with women who had either been told they had the gene for breast and or ovarian cancer. Well, they had one of those cancers, or they were cancer thrivers that once had one of those cancers, and they were now free of it. And I was at the conference for the whole day. And across the day, people individually came up to ask me questions about different things. And I often still I often have questions of my own. It’s one of the ways I continue to learn. So if you can imagine that, as these women approached me and shared their stories, they would share things like I have an unknown prognosis, or I have a very poor prognosis. I can’t work because I’m suffering so much with my treatment. So there was financial challenges. My marriage is broken down. I’ve got teenage children, they’re a nightmare. So I was getting stories like that, where these women were facing all of life’s truly biggest toughest things all at once, including a question mark around their own mortality. And when I asked them, if they felt like they were living with a world full of stress and pressure and urgency, all of them said no. And the essence of what they communicated back to me that day was that they just felt so privileged to be alive. So you don’t want it to be some kind of health crisis that gets us back in touch with, although it’s challenging at times, it’s also magnificent. And a little distinction I made that day was it’s not that we have to do that, then that then that it’s that we get to we get to do this stuff, or we get our turn on Earth. So we get to be here on Earth, and run around and do all of this stuff. And it’s a ridiculous privilege. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not busy. And that doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot on our plates. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have responsibility. We have all of that. So so much I think of starting to make this shift away from that rushing Woman syndrome type scenario is the way we examine it. So to do that we as women, I think it’s I’m really tired of the conversation around. I’m so stressed, how do I manage that, that we need that conversation, but we’ve got to take it further. Now, we’ve got to start to examine what stress really is for us as individuals. So let’s start to break that down. What leads your body to produce adrenaline and cortisol are two main stress hormones. Well, unfortunately, we talked about caffeine, so a lot. But in all honesty, a lot of women have got to get really honest with themselves about how much they’re having, they need to cut back, some women would do very, they’d feel much better if they took a big break from it. So we’ve got to look at caffeine. The next thing is we’ve got to look at our perceptions of pressure and urgency, like I just described, because we forget that we get to choose how we see and approach each day. Now, I’m not denying for a second, there aren’t things that aren’t urgent. Of course there are if you get a phone call from school and your child’s been injured at urgent, you want to get there as quickly as you can. But we’ve made what we do each day full of stress and pressure and urgency. I’ll give you another example. When I say to women, tell me what stresses you out, I often hear it running late. Now. running late doesn’t worry everyone, some people will be half an hour late and don’t don’t care. So that’s how I know it’s not a real stress. It’s a perception. Now, there’s no there’s no judgment here, there’s no right or wrong. It’s just some people get stressed about running late. Now, sometimes they don’t want to run late, because they’re worried about missing out on a meeting starting or learning something at a conference, they don’t want to be late. But when it’s not that, it’s usually because it’s not the running late itself that stresses us out. If you pull the curtain back on that what we see is that we’re actually worried about what the person who will be on the receiving end of our running late is going to think of us. And they’ll think that we are inefficient or not hard working, or we don’t care. Some it’s some sort of disapproval. We’re worried that but we don’t see it like that in the moment. It’s just we’re sitting in the traffic all stressed because we’re running late. And when we just sit there going, I’m so stressed, I’m so stressed, we go blind to any kind of insight that our stress could actually teach us. And it’s that oh, well, I can really see. I’m actually not worried about what my boss thinks of me. Because I’m running late for this work meeting. It’s this other colleague. Wow, that’s fascinating. I’m worried what that colleague thinks of me. Oh, yeah, I can see that. She thinks I worry that she thinks that I’m not a hard worker. And so there’s an exercise I have, that I that I do with women around women’s health weekends, and things like that. And there’s an exercise I do, where I call it our foreign words. And it’s so what traits Do you need other people to see in you? So it’s as if we’ve got these words written across our forehead? So how do you need other people to see you, and it’s a great thing to do if you just take pen and paper and take 10 minutes and ask yourself, How do I need others to see me, and common things that come out of the mouths of the most beautiful hearted women who are the rushing women, they’ll say, I need people to see me as kind, thoughtful, selfless, hardworking, deeply caring, or it might be independent, intelligent, creative, hilarious, perfect. Or the biggest ray of sunshine that ever walked into a room. So it doesn’t matter what they are, you just want to know how you need other people to see you. And so then the next time you’re stressed, you pause and you think, okay, am I perceiving that someone is seeing me in the opposite way to one of my forehead words? Because most of the time the answer will be yes. So so much of the beauty of our caring that comes from the rushing woman syndrome, which is not a medical condition, I might add, it was just the name of my book.

Unknown Speaker
Well titled Well,

Dr. Libby
it’s that we’re worried about, essentially, that they think we’re a good person. And it comes because where most women are raised to be good girls were raised to put the needs of others ahead of ourselves. We’re raised to check in on everybody and make sure they’re all like that everyone’s okay. So we have these inbuilt mechanisms that were set up to ensure that we are loved and approved of when we are little humans, which I can dive into more if we want to do that at some point down the track. But it’s another big story. So yeah, just take pause here and say it’s very helpful to when we feel caught in that rushing woman syndrome instead of just thinking I’m so stressed. And that’s just how life is now we want to pause and start to work out what stress really is for us.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, I love that. That is a better conversation because I do feel like when somebody says you just need to not stress that’s actually stressful. Do it yourself. Like, I don’t know, I personally don’t know what that means I have tools that I can move stress through me. But when somebody says stop stressing, I’m like, I don’t know what that means. So that’s, that’s incredible. So okay, well, let’s go back to the you’re driving to work, you’re running late. You’ve got your for your forehead words. And you’re like, yeah, I’m worried they’re gonna think that I’m a slacker. And I’m now late, and maybe I’ve been late a couple of times, so they’re probably going to think I’m a slacker, that’s probably what’s going to happen? Well, what do you do in that scenario, if you really truly believe what your brain is telling you,

Dr. Libby
so because you can see that it’s essentially coming from your desire to be approved of it changes the conversation. So then when you get there, and you’re late, instead of bursting in all stressed, you know, sort of bit dramatic and an apologetic, of course, we still apologize for being late. But whoever you can see that you’re worried that they think you’re a slacker, after the meeting, you might decide I’m going to go and have a conversation with them and actually speak about this and bring this to life. Because otherwise it just sits in my head and I ruminate on it. And I worry, and I have probably made all of it up. It’s probably just a great big story I’ve created. However, if I go and have the conversation with my boss or with with my colleague, and say, Look, I’m I know I’ve run late a couple of times for meetings this year, it really worries me, you think I’m a slacker, it’s incredibly important to me that, you know, I’m a really hard worker, I care very much about my job, I value my job. So you speak your truth to the person. And most people on the receiving end of that are going to go well, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me that you care so much about your job, I was a little bit worried about you being late for these couple of meetings, but I can see, you know, you’ve just had a couple of things go wrong, you’ve had, you know, children have needed your attention, or there’s whatever, it’s whatever has occurred. And so you just bring it all out in the open. And it gives the other person an opportunity to say, Well, I do find it, you know, if they really are if there’s truth in your perception that they think you’re a slacker, or you’ve opened up a dialog that allows them to say, Well, I have actually been concerned about your work ethic. So thank you for bringing this up. And let’s continue to talk about it, you need to tell me where you’re struggling. And so it just opens up a conversation rather than it’s all just sitting here in our mind, either consciously or unconsciously worrying about all of this stuff, but in most of most of it we make up

Dr. Mindy
now. Yeah, of course. Yeah, for sure. So if I’m sitting in traffic, maybe I could go into the solution. If I could acknowledge what the I’m worried I’m stressed right now. Because I think they’re gonna, they’re worried they’re gonna think I’m a slacker, well, what am I going to do to solve that after the meeting, I’m gonna have a talk. Now you’re bringing cortisol down, you’re still in traffic, you’re still rushing to the event, but your cortisol reaction is different. That’s exactly

Dr. Libby
right. Because the minute you’ve got a solution, the minute you realize this is not going to be permanent. The minute you can see a way through this, where you can come back to a place of equilibrium where you think, oh, it’ll either clean the air, or they’ll still approve of me again, if there is a risk that they’re disapproving of you. And so with that, instantly, your stress hormone levels start to come down because it it’s like a degree of safety comes back into your chemistry.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah. Oh, that’s brilliant. I love that. So now what I’m thinking actually, and I’m gonna go back to my friend who recommended your book is I’m thinking if you’re going from event to event throughout the day, and you love it, and you’re happy, is that it doesn’t matter. You could be you could have a very full day of a lot of fun things. That would not be what is rushing woman rushing woman really has a stress component to it, where she’s going from thing to thing to thing, feeling exhausted and stressed out.

Dr. Libby
And it’s when Yes, and because she’s coming from a place of she may not see it on the surface, but we’re doing too much out of obligation. And when we do it out, when we do things out of a sense of duty, it’s very depleting. When we do think from a sense of love, or our true authentic contribution, as in it’s arisen from your heart. That’s a reason from your soul that you really want to do this. It’s very energizing. That when we do when we do another duty, it’s very depleting. And when we do things out of duty again, sorry to sound like a broken record, but we are so often doing it out of duty. I don’t mean just once or twice, but when we live our lives like this, it’s because we want people to see us in a particular way. I can’t I can’t see it any other way.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, no, it makes it makes perfect sense. I actually had a I interviewed Bruce Lipton last week on my podcast. And he talked Yeah, he did. And this might be interesting to kind of understand some of the programming, maybe we got around being a Russian woman, because his belief system is that your subconscious programming becomes fully formed from zero to seven, that you are living in a state of more of a, of a hypnotic theta wave state. So the messages that get implanted from zero to seven will determine your behaviors for the rest of your life is the same with rushing do we watch the rushing people around us when we’re younger, and then make a decision of how we’re going to approach life and stress.

Dr. Libby
The way I see it is that as little babies, we can’t survive on our own other animals can, whereas humans need adults to provide them with food, clothing, and shelter so that we can literally survive. And when we’re little babies, and we’re hungry, and someone gives us food and alleviates that it’s like a return to equilibrium, it’s a return to safety. If we’re cold, and someone gives us a blanket, we’re warm. Again, it’s the same thing. So we start to link the provision of those physical things, food, clothing shelter, we start to link the provision of those things to us feeling safe, warm, satisfied, essentially, in balancing our chemistry. And so then as we get a little bit older, we start to work out that when we rely on, we can’t do that ourselves. And we rely on those adults to do that for us. So we must maintain their favor, we must have them approve of us enough to continue to provide that otherwise, we will literally die because without food, clothing and shelter, a little baby dies. Now, eventually, I think what happens is that we start to link the provision of those things and the attention of those people, we start to link that to what adults we probably call love. I still I don’t often use the word love, because I think a lot of people misinterpret it to be intimate love, and I’m, it can be part of it. But I’m more about, I’m talking more about the approval of others, including the approval of the people who raised us. So we start to learn, we try things on as little as little children not in manipulative ways. We’re just doing what we’re doing to try to get our needs met. And we start to work out that if we behave if we help. For example, if we help with the adult, they smile, if we do, if we notice our mother is she cleans up a lot. And so we start to clean up a lot she that makes her smile. So there’s approval there. Sometimes it’s conscious, but mostly it’s not conscious, you might have done a finger painting. And then you notice your dad is smiling and laughing and he looks really jovial. You don’t understand that that’s smiling and laughing and jovial because of whatever he’s thinking about or whatever has just gone on in his life. You link it to what you’ve just done, because when we’re tiny humans from an emotional maturation perspective, were egocentric. Some people never change sadly. But when we’re little, we’re egocentric, and we’re supposed to be egocentric. And all that means is that we, we believe that everyone in our world is the way they are because of us. So when they’re happy, it’s because of what we’ve just done like the finger painting. But unfortunately, the same thing is true when the adults in our world are not in a good place. So they might be loud and aggressive. They might be very quiet and withdrawn. And then that’s a behavior change away from the way they consistently are. So when they don’t behave in a consistent way, we don’t have any ability to see that the adults in our world are behaving like that quiet and withdrawn or loud and aggressive because of what they’re perceiving because of their pain and their joys up until that point in time when you’re four years old. And let’s say normally dad gets home from work and the first thing he does is he picks you up and plays with you and tickles you and he’s always done it and you love it. And then one day he doesn’t any spec comes through the door and very sternly and intensely. He says Go to your room. And so you do what you’re told, and you can hear your parents in the kitchen. They’re arguing they’re yelling, there’s fists being bashed on tables, you can’t see when you’re for that that’s going on because he was just made redundant and he doesn’t know how on earth he’s going to pay for your education, for example. All you know is that it feels confusing, uncertain, might be a little bit scary for you to be ostracized from this person who normally plays with you at this time of the day and is loud voices and that’s in congruent to the human you know, in this case your dad today. So I’m not because we’re egocentric the way, the way our nervous system is constructed that at that point in our life. We can’t see that they’re behaving the way they are because of them. The only thing you can do do is turn it on yourself and work out who you must be to have them behave like that. So because you’re egocentric, so you create a belief in your own deficiency, so you start to believe there’s something wrong with you. So the way I take it is that before the age of seven, we have created a belief or many beliefs that we are not enough in some way, we’re not good enough in some way, not tall enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not loud enough, not quiet enough, just not enough, not good enough the way that we are. And then as soon as the belief form, we don’t sit there and we don’t sit there when before and go, Oh, that belief will be fantastically dysfunctional. When I’m 52, I’ll pick that belief. We don’t do that. We we absorb the belief trying to understand our environment, no matter how calm or chaotic it was when we were growing up. And then we don’t realize that we’ve taken that on as a belief and what your brain does, we have a part of the brain called the reticular activating system, it goes looking for evidence of what we believe. But because you don’t know you have that belief, you don’t know that you’re now finding evidence of all the ways you’re not good enough. And then we just stack it up. And then that’s our experience, across our across our whole life. It’s as if we, between the age of zero and seven, we put a set of glasses on and we look out upon the world, through these lenses that are filled with all the beliefs we’ve absorbed about ourselves. And we do the same with the what with what we hear, we don’t hear what people say, we hear what we think someone meant. When a colleague rings us and says, where’s that work, I needed it yesterday, we hear their requests for work. But usually what we do is we make up some kind of story, or they think I’m lazy, or they think I’m not a hard worker. So we but they didn’t say that. But we make and that’s what makes the request for the work stressful. And all of that I think gets created when we’re very young in the way Bruce talks about, essentially all it becomes it lands in our subconscious, all these beliefs about ourselves. And then we just find evidence of it and create all these stories when we’re adults about how things are. And it’s not it’s our perception, what we don’t realize it’s our perception.

Dr. Mindy
Wow, that was so beautifully said. So we will continue to make ourselves right. And I’m also thinking when things like anxiety kick in, which is a very common symptom we’re seeing more and more at younger and younger ages. Is that because you are your brain is continually looking for the evidence that you’re not enough, and it just keeps finding it finding it finding it.

Dr. Libby
Yeah, 100% I wish it’s 100%. I think that’s a huge part of it. I also think out. So I think psychologically, it’s very much along those lines, we look for evidence of all the ways we’re not enough. We we don’t realize we have borrowed words, and we don’t realize that we are worrying about what other people think of us until you bring shine light on that you we don’t usually realize that’s what we’re doing. And then so that’s the, I guess, part of the psychology of it all part of part of the emotional side of it all. But then I really think that what is not acknowledged enough when we talk about anxiety is the biochemistry of it. So adrenaline is the main hormone behind anxious feelings. So we have to look at what leads that person to have all of that adrenaline circulating. Is it the caffeine? Is it their perceptions of urgency? Is it that they are so worried about what other people think of them? Do? You know, I wrote a book a couple of 232 years ago now called the invisible load. And I did some focus groups out as part of my research for writing that book. And one of the things I did focus groups with women aged between 18 and 25. And ask them, what were the things that stressed them out the most. And the top two things that stress that age group out most with their body image and social media. And when I share that with older groups, they often laugh and I can see the judgment that they pass on the younger people. And I’ll and I will giggle at them. And so hang on. Because when I interviewed women that 35 to 45 year old age group, when they sit the things that stress them out the most were things like making sure everyone was happy, how many tasks they had in a day, things like running late. And when you peel all of it back, this is where you get to see that it’s all the same stuff. So our stress can be the most magnificent teacher to ask if we allow it to be because it is. It’s where you get to see the ways you allow or where you allow others to judge you essentially. So when someone says to me something like Instagram stresses them out. It’s because they are using Instagram as a way to gain popularity to see what people think of them how many likes they get The comments they get. Whereas when I say that to all the groups, they’ll say, how could Instagram stress anyone out, I, you know, I get inspired by it or I am entertained by it, I watch Funny Dog videos or whatever. So that’s what I mean that it’s not the thing that stresses us out. It’s our response to it. And so it’s the stress can show us we can learn so much from it about these perceptions that are really quite hidden, and they’re really quite slippery. Our our beliefs, I think, are very slippery to identify, because they’re all tied up in our language. And we can’t hear that it’s a belief because we think it’s real. Like the Way Bruce Lipton says we say these things, because we perceive it how it is. But it’s, it’s but it’s perception.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah. So how do we do this? We’ve got, I mean, for women, we’ve got a world of infertility is on the rise. pcls is the number one most common hormonal imbalance. I mean, when I spoke out on public platforms to talk about menopause, I can’t tell you the number of women that were like, Can we talk about this, like, all we’re taught is to Medicaid ourselves through menopause, and I don’t want to do that, what else can I do? And so we’ve got these hormonal imbalances. And then as I’m listening to you talk, I’m thinking, okay, but then we have these beliefs we’re carrying from childhood that are perpetuating the hormonal imbalances. How do we change those beliefs? acknowledging them is a great start. And there’s got to be a gap between what people are hearing you say right now, and these massive hormonal imbalances, how do we start to address this so we can bring those imbalances down?

Dr. Libby
Great question. Because along those lines, Mindy, the other thing other than adrenaline that can lead us into anxiety is very low. progesterone, as I’m sure you and your listeners are very aware of. progesterone is a powerful anti anxiety agent. And we only produce it in large amounts after we ovulate. And so when someone has polycystic ovarian syndrome, or when they’re moving into perimenopause, and they stop ovulating every month, and then of course, post menopause, Lee, there’s no more ovulation, we’re obviously still going to make a small amount of progesterone from a couple of the adrenal glands mostly. But that progesterone is incredibly protective against feeling overwhelmed and and too many anxious feelings. And again, that something I think that it’s just not talked about enough. Yet, and also for women, when you when they use the birth control pill, like what a lot of women don’t understand that that stops the reason it’s so good at preventing pregnancies, it stops you ovulating. So it stops you having that lovely big surge of progesterone. So there’s, that’s another whole can of worms. But anyway, so

let it come back to. So with the hormonal imbalances, a big focus obviously, is making sure so that we feel good, a big part of it obviously is making sure there is enough progesterone. There while ever menstruation is occurring, but then postmenopausal as you say, we’re just going to get the beliefs that can influence so much and make us feel like almost that our life is threatened every single day. And so yes, awareness is the first step. But then what we want to do is we want to I call it catching ourselves in the act. And we can’t always do that, because life does move pretty quickly. But the way I will often describe it is it’s as if, and this is what I this is how we can start to shift the actions we take. And the way that we think is if we understand that there are at this point in human evolution, there are two thought systems. So the first thoughts is I often call it the old brain, the first thought system, it’s been there for the entirety of human history. And then our there’s another thought system, which is coming later in our evolution as a species. And it is I just call it the new brain. So in any given moment, at the moment, our old brain works at warp speed, it works faster than you can click your fingers. It’s automatic, but it’s unconscious. We don’t know that it has generated that it’s run itself. And we don’t know that it has created. It creates a feeling. And it’s very, very helpful. If you’re, let’s say you’re you’ve been out for dinner, and you don’t live far from wherever you’ve been out for dinner that everyone can go out for dinner at the moment, but you’ve been out in the wonderful world, but we could go out for dinner. And you think, Oh, it’s it’s midnight, but doesn’t matter. I just want to walk home. It’s a beautiful evening. And then you realize that you read recently that crime statistics have escalated. And so you’re walking home and you start thinking, oh, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to walk home and Can I hear footsteps behind me and I read those steps not that long ago and it was not good idea. Maybe this wasn’t very sensible. And then Suddenly, you’re old. If you do hear footsteps behind you, your old brain will just make you run away from that. And that’s what is there to do. It’s brilliant. You don’t want to, you actually don’t want to use your new brain, which is very conscious and logical and analytical. You don’t want that in that moment, you want old brain to just make you run. But other than those sorts of life and death situations, our old brain can cause a bit, it can cause us a few challenges now. So I’ll give you a modern day scenario. You’re in the supermarket, and you’ve got a trolley, and there’s a lady walking towards you. Her name is Mrs. Smith. You know her not that well. But you know, her enough to say hello to. And what you describe to me happens is Mrs. Smith puts her head down and she marches straight past me. So in that moment, your old brain usually go it’ll, it’ll run one of the patterns, you are one of the beliefs you absorbed as a little human. So your old brain without you knowing because it’s unconscious will go. Mrs. Smith doesn’t like me, I’ve let Mrs. Smith down. Our kids are at school together, they probably had a fight. She thinks I’m the world’s worst parent, Mrs. some form of Mrs. Smith is disapproving of me. But you don’t stand there in the supermarket and consciously think that you just noticed that when you leave the supermarket, you’re irritated, or you’re really sad, or your energy is through the floor. So when you know and this is what I mean about catching yourself in the act. So then you when you notice a shift in your state. You want to bring curiosity to that and think okay, I feel really flapped, what could have led to that is my blood sugar through the floor, and it’s actually time for lunch and I need to eat because that will make someone feel flat. Or is it emotional? Oh, yes. That’s right. I passed Mr. Smith in the supermarket and she didn’t speak to me. Oh, that’s hurt my feelings. All that’s made me worried that I’ve upsetting her in some way. So now you bring in your new thought system, you’re bringing the new brain into analyze that. Okay, well, I haven’t seen Mrs. Smith for three weeks, so I can’t see how upset are but maybe I should bake her a cake and nutritious cake or chocolate beetroot mug cake or something nutritious bakery cake. And I’ll go around and see Mrs. Smith and checking on her cuz she really actually looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. And then when you go around and say Mrs. Smith, she said, Oh, so embarrassed to see anyone I knew I hadn’t had a shower that day or I had a big pimple on my face, or I didn’t have makeup on or whatever her value system is. It’s got nothing to do with you. But that’s what I’m also mean when we often still live our lives as if we are a bit egocentric. We think that

because of our friend, Mr. Smith wine have spoken to us, you know, 99 times out of 100 because of what’s going on for her. So we can start to shift it when we catch our thoughts systems in the act. Because in that moment in the supermarket, we can either run the pathway of the old brain going over let Mrs. Smith down. Mrs. Smith doesn’t like me, she thinks I’m a dreadful person. Or we can go Okay, Mrs. Smith looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, I need to go and check in on her. And now whatever you do in that moment, if it’s all Brian, that you run with, or if you remember that you have this new brain thought system to apply. Whatever you do in that moment, I don’t so much mind what I do. But what I want people to really understand is what happens when you let the old brain live as if that’s the truth. Because what if you create a meaning for Mrs. Smith not talking to you in the supermarket, if you create a meaning that you’re not enough, you’re not good enough, she doesn’t like you, you’ve let her down. She thinks you’re the world’s worst parent. So some form of disapproval. If you do that, from someone not speaking to you, I will guarantee you you’ve done it 20 times previously that morning, and you’ll do it 20 more times that afternoon. And when we stack experiences when we stack meanings and stories of all the ways that we’re not good enough when we scratch the itch of our not enoughness 40 or 100 times a day. Good luck at resisting whatever your poison is at the end of the day. So you’ll go home if you love, we call them biscuits. If you love cookies, you’ll eat a whole packet. If you love ice cream you like the whole tub. If you think I’m just going to have one glass of wine before you know it, you’ve had the whole bottle. So I think this is one massive reason why it’s easier to make nutritious choices at the start of the day than it is at the end of the day. Because at the end of the day, we have all these experiences that we don’t even realize what our brain has done and all the stories and all the meanings we’ve made up about. He said that means that we don’t even realize we’ve done that. So if you live in that supermarket, if you let old brain do its thing because you and you aren’t aware that it’s done. It’s thing other than that you feel sad or irritated when you’re leaving the supermarket? It will, it will lead you to make poor quality choices. Because, you know, for the next day for the next week, or for the next 10 years, it will run your life until you shine light on it. Whereas if you if you let your old brain run at story for five minutes before you think, Oh, hang on. No, actually Mrs. Smith did look like she had a lot of things on her mind, I need to go around and check in on her, you’ve immediately shifted your focus to the care for someone else, you no longer putting yourself down, you’re no longer thinking about all the ways you’re not enough and all the ways she’s disapproving of you. And so your stress response is alleviated. Because now you’re caring. And we can’t do anything care and gratitude. At the same time that we do stress, stress hormones, that it’s it’s not possible for your nervous system to do both those things at the same time. So it’s it’s awareness. But it’s all that we do this and that these beliefs are there, but it’s catching ourselves in the act. And a shift in our mood, I think is one of the biggest clues we get. And we don’t always have the time in that moment to dive into it. But it’s very helpful towards the end of the day, if you can pause and think okay, what really went on there?

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, and it’s just repetition. So it’s, it’s listening to yourself, not and just catching that moment. And if you do that over and over and over again, eventually you create a new brain. Yeah. And you go ahead. No, you go. Each time you stop that. So if I’m running the tape of Mrs. Smith, cortisol is going through my body. And I’m and I’m in maybe I call it the rabbit hole. Where do you go? Well, if this is going to go on, then this is going to go out. And then this is going to go on and you start down like 10 thought patterns that have nothing to do with whatever happened in the situation. So as long as you’re running, running that old brain and you’re in that old stress pattern, you’ve got cortisol going up, and when cortisol is going up, progesterone is going down. And so now if you want to stop cortisol immediately, you can stop it by asking a different question and evaluating where that initial thought came from. Is that correct?

Dr. Libby
100%? Yeah.

Dr. Mindy
Oh, amazing. Okay. And it’s not it’s breathtaking.

Dr. Libby
When when you do it, you when you do it enough, you then start to laugh at yourself, because your brain will still do it. But you see the truth very quickly. It’s how long we let the old brain run its pattern, you want the truth to you want to say the truth as quickly as you can.

Dr. Mindy
Amazing. So okay, let’s talk about progesterone for a second, because that was the other aha that I got from your book, you know, as I was reading it, I was, I think, at the time, I must have been about 45 years old. And I had never really given progesterone, a single thought. And I was like laughing to myself. I’m like, Oh, my God, this hormone. It’s shown up for me every month, and I didn’t even acknowledge it. And now it’s going away. And I really like it back. Like, what did I do? And so I really dove into looking at a net that at the time I was having a regular cycle and I started looking at, okay, when does estrogen come in in a 30 day cycle or a 28 day cycle for a woman estrogens coming in, in the first part, and then at oscillation, we’ve got estrogen and testosterone, a little bit of progesterone. But it’s really as we go into the week before our periods that we’ve got maximum progesterone. So would it be? Is there a lifestyle that should shift as our hormones shift? Like, I started looking at my marathon running? Maybe I’m not supposed to marathon run the week before my cycle? Maybe I’m not. Maybe I need a little extra sleep like I started obsessing on progesterone and going where what are all the habits I can do to be able to project protect progesterone? Do you think that we can analyze our lifestyle from looking at our cycle and and figuring out where we may want to slow down and when it would be okay to rush a little

Dr. Libby
more? Absolutely. so beautifully articulated? Mindy? Yes. 100%. And we find that usually a lot of women will find that. In the first half of this cycle. Everything’s more robust. Because estrogen is dominant. She’s laying the lining of the uterus down, we make a small amount of progesterone from the adrenals in that first half of the cycle, as you described. And then once ovulation kicks in, yes, you’ll get all the beautiful protective effects of progesterone. If you’re a good if you are good at producing it. I’ll do I’ll be like, women are these days, really? And, but then in the week before the period, obviously, Eastridge is progesterone. progesterone is supposed to be the dominant hormone leading into the cycle. And estrogen is less than that from a ratio perspective. And obviously we start to menstruate once the progesterone is low enough. But the in that lead up for so many women, they are estrogen dominant, there’s too much estrogen compared to progesterone, particularly in that week leading into the menstrual cycle up quite often for women. And that’s one of the hormonal basis is for pm tea, or do you call it PMS? Oh, PMS is what we miss. So that’s one of the hormonal basis for that. And we start to notice that we just don’t have the strength that we normally do, we don’t have the endurance we normally do in an earlier part of the month. So I think it’s a brilliant thing to if you are still menstruating, I think it’s a brilliant thing to observe that and your body is your most magnificent barometer. So your cycle, I think it’s great feedback about your choices. It gives you insight into if your body wants you to make some different choices in the way that you eat, or drink, or move or think or breathe, or believe or perceive. So it’s all feedback in any or a number of those areas. And, and we we usually notice that almost women notice they’re far more robust and can get more done that the rushing is less intrusive on their chemistry, for the first two weeks of the cycle is the feedback I’ve had.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
yeah. And that was as I was moving through menopause, the interesting part is around 4546, I started getting some spotting. And then it would be like a week after I started getting spotted, and then my cycle would start and I started to unpack that. And I was like, okay, that’s low progesterone. Okay, what do I need to start to mind progesterone. So I changed my workouts, I changed the way I ate, I started saying no to things a little bit more, I took a little more downtime. For the first time in my life, I was tracking my cycle. Here I was in my late 40s, like track, you know, I had the clue app on my phone. And you know what happened, my cycle came back, and it came back calm and easy. Here I met 51. There’s no sign of menopause. I’m like, you know, and I am from what I’ve understood. 52 to 55 is a very natural time to go through menopause. If we go through it earlier, it could be due to environmental stressors. But it was this one hormone progesterone. That changed everything. When I minded that

Dr. Libby
I have I run a nine week online course for women and some of them will have got they’ve been told that they are postmenopausal, they might be 48, or 49 years old. And after nine weeks of doing looking after their lifestyle, their food, what they’re thinking, after eight or nine weeks of that they get their period back, and it comes back. And it stays cyclical. And that’s it shows you the wisdom of the body, it shows you that when the body gets what it needs, it can do what it wants to do for usually for a lot longer, you know, in a really healthy state.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah. Oh, it’s amazing, in fact, in my book, and I’ll send you a copy because again, I quote you in it, and you’re instrumental in this concept around progesterone. But I I started to really identify the title I put for progesterone, as I said, do your progesterone, I’m sorry, I took you for granted. Because I was just like, that’s how I felt like I just wanted to have a conversation with the production, progesterone production and just go, gosh, I just didn’t honor what my body needed. And I just pushed on through. And now I’m really regretting it because I’d like a little progesterone back. You know, the cycle is one thing, but the calmness that progesterone gives you is incredible. And I think we don’t as women, and I’m curious your thoughts on this. I don’t think we know our hormones. Well. They’re running us and we have no idea what hormones do what and when they come or go.

Dr. Libby
And the we need to know obviously and the young we need to know it really young ages. It’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to me that an X set an excess of estrogen has a very depressant action on the body. And most women don’t know that. So it’s, it’s the first thing I would look for when I would go and look at Eastern excess of estrogen and low progesterone because it’s such a powerful anti anxiety agent and an anti depressant, I’m going to go looking into menstruating women for elevate excess estrogen and low progesterone to see if that’s what and try to address that to see if that changes what’s happening with her mood. And that’s not talked about enough. So the younger the younger and younger we can teach women, young girls, even the role that these hormones play I think, the better the healthier society will be because we’re going to understand it’s not a deficiency of a particular medication that has led me to this state. My progesterone is dropped away because I’ve been so stressed I need to address the stress in my body will naturally start Produce progesterone. Better again.

Dr. Mindy
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned that in your TED talk how the mission you’re on to get this message out to women and I, I couldn’t agree more with you and I, I probably have sent hundreds of 1000s of women to your book, because I’m like, we need to wake up. And then we also need to come together as women. If you look at the power of oxytocin on all our hormones, it when we are in community, and we’re connecting, and we’re in love, and we’re in gratitude, we are bursting oxytocin into every cell, and there is no better hormonal balance than getting yourself a bunch of oxytocin. So, right.

Dr. Libby
Absolutely, yes.

Dr. Mindy
It’s like the Queen hormone. I tell everybody, when you’re stressed, just go pet your dog, and you’ll be good. So that’s awesome. Let me finish up with this, I could talk to you forever. And I just time just really have a lot of appreciation for your heart and your mind and the way you explain things and just the impact you’re having on women’s health. And I want to bring this information to more women be and especially that I resonate with what you say about the younger generation, I just, I feel like I want to take every teenager and sit her down and explain these hormones and teach her how our lifestyle is going to affect these hormones and how the hormones are going to affect her mood, like we could change women’s health, just from the knowledge of hormones alone, don’t you think?

Dr. Libby
Yes. And then we’ve got to throw in the not enough nurse and addressing that in younger people, because it’s when you grow up thinking that there’s something wrong with you, when you grow up thinking that you’re not okay the way that you are. It’s like a perm a very deep stress that never really fully goes away. So I feel that that has to be brought to light as well. And we’ve got to change those perceptions, if that’s possible, because I then get into the, I try to delve into everything and get right to it center. And I think, Okay, well, if all of us grow up, you know, no matter how calm or how chaotic It is, in our home environments, when we’re growing up, if we all develop this belief that we’re not enough in some way, then it must serve us. And I think our voids, I think, end up creating our values. And so I think quite often when the billet when the wound is there, and the belief forms, we do sometimes do really good things in the world. Yes, because we’re trying to alleviate the suffering of others. So I can also see the good that comes from

Dr. Mindy
a heart, we could look at it like a hormetic stress, it’s like, it’s like enough to just motivate you a little bit. So that’s awesome. Okay, I have five questions for you. These are my rapid fire questions. And so let me start with this good one. Let me start with my first one. Okay, if you could go and chat with your 25 year old self and give her advice. I and we I chose 25. Because that’s usually about the age that you’re starting your career in your life. What would you tell your 25 year old self about how to live life?

Dr. Libby
It’s all for you, that life happens for you. It’s not happening to you. So even the big tough stuff that can unfold all of it for you.

Dr. Mindy
Love that. Okay, and what what do you personally do to stop the rushing so when you have when you’re doing back to back podcast interviews, and you’re, you’ve got a week that’s full, do you have strategies that you personally take on that stops the rushing,

Dr. Libby
I see the privilege in it, I see that I have, I’ve got the ridiculous privilege of getting an education and all of this sort of information is wasted if it’s not shared. So I’m forever, I forever address my thinking and, and see that I’ve chosen this and that I am insanely grateful for the life that I have, and to be able to do this work in the world. If I can’t overcome it with with that sort of thinking, I know there’s more to it. And I know that there’s something I’m about to learn from, you know, it might be one particular thing I’ve got happening later in the day, and it’s that that I’m really worried about and I can see that there’s not an authentic connection with the person I’ve got to have a meeting with or maybe I’ve got to be really courageous and say something that I’m going to find really hard to say because it might mean that they don’t think that I’m a kind person or something like that. So I if I can overcome it with saying that it’s a gift and that I’ve chosen it and the privilege in it. I think okay, well there’s something I’ve got to learn here with whatever it is that I can say is still stressing me out. The other thing I will say is I have I love the mornings I get up very early and I go outside and I look at everything. I look at the light I look They might be cobwebs that the you know what a Jew has settled in overnight, I look at the patterns and I look at the sky and the trees. And so I’m very much have space in the morning to. And I feel that doesn’t change what I do in a day, but it will change how I can show up for it with a bigger sense of spaciousness that helps massively.

Dr. Mindy
You know, that was one of the real tricks I used when my kids were little as I started to see that there was no time for me. And so I thought, well, I’m going to make time for me. And it’s going to be in the morning before everybody gets up. And it really is profound when you start the day the way you want to start. It isn’t it really changes everything, because you don’t just get up and do everybody else’s agenda. Exactly. Yeah. It’s amazing. Do you have a sign that you know, like a physiological sign that you’re like, Okay, I gotta put the brakes on life right now. I’ve been doing too much. I need to sort of reground myself, do you have any physical signs in your own body that you notice? Like, it’s you’ve gone off into more of a rushing world?

Dr. Libby
Yeah, my heart will race. And I don’t know what it’s about. So it might only be for 10 seconds, but I can feel an escalation in my heart rate. Just momentarily, and then it goes away. And like, no, I got it, I noticed. And so I’ll try and change, you know, might go to bed earlier. I might need to write, I write I love writing. So I might need to just write in my journal and get a few things off my chest too. So I can see the truth of something or, yeah, so it’s my heart will race. That’s my physical time. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy
that’s beautiful. Okay, what book do you think outside of yours? Because when people ask me this question, I always say your book, what book do you think every woman needs to read? Or that would be incredibly impactful for women to read to help her understand herself better?

Dr. Libby
Read Hutton, Holly by Sarah beak. And it is, I don’t want to give the sacred This doesn’t give the sacred two way. But at the end of it, she asks a series of questions. And because of the journey, she’s taken you on, I you can hear or feel your soul speak? No, it was it had a profound impact on my life. And it’s as if you can’t, we can create all sorts of stories in our mind about is that the right job for me? Well, not really. But I need the money to pay the mortgage? Or is that the right relationship? For me? Well, there’s all these beautiful things about that person. And then there’s all this other stuff that’s really challenging, and it really is not doesn’t really match with my value system. So we have all the that’s what we do in our head. But then at the end of this book, it’s like she has a way to ask your soul. And it’s the clarity, when she poses the questions. And it’s like, it’s that it’s that it’s that there’s no hesitation, you just know, and it showed me or reminded me that we all of us have a true knowing inside of us of who we are. And in the answers to those questions. We know, we just it gets blurred, because we might want to please people, or it gets blurred by all these stories we tell ourselves. So I found that book profound.

Dr. Mindy
I’ve never heard of that one. So I will be ordering it after this podcast. So that’s, um, and I love how you didn’t even doubt. I mean, you were like you had that right there as awesome. Okay, last question. If you had one message, you can get into every person’s brain and really help them see clearly on a daily basis, what would that message be,

Dr. Libby
to live life in touch with how precious it is to live life in touch with how precious they are, and to treat themselves accordingly. Because if you were truly in touch with how precious you are, you would never do half the things you do. So if we could leave more of our life, in touch with Yeah, how precious life is and how precious we are, and then trade ourselves accordingly, the ripple effect of that in the world would be extraordinary.

Dr. Mindy
I’d love that, you know, there we we put out a lot of content on our platform. I have a YouTube channel, I’ve written four books. And one of the things that I’ve acknowledged about putting content out is that sometimes it’s not the words that people are saying, but the energy and the heart space behind those words that people resonate with. And I just, again, want to thank you because as I’m talking to you, I’m like, this is why I love the book, because the author behind the words has such a huge mission and such a huge heart. So again, I just, it was a game changer for me. So at a time when I really needed to hear what you said. And you said In a language that my intellectual brain could hear, so I just, I can’t thank you enough for writing it and letting me pick your brain today.

Dr. Libby
Mindy, it’s such an honor. And honestly, you’ve really touched my heart. I’ve had water. I have water in my eyes right now. From your words, and thank you. Yeah, it’s Yeah, it’s really very,

Dr. Mindy
thank you. And I want you to know that I hear your mission, and I’m amplifying it. I’m there with you trying to get this information out to women. So we’re more powerful. The more women we gather and shout this from the rooftops, the more powerful we are. So thank

Dr. Libby
you for how much you care and for sharing.

Dr. Mindy
Thank you. And how do people find you because I hope that they’re going to not only rush out and get your book, but I’m going to go order the other twelves or other 11 How do people find you so they can interact with you more? You’re lovely. My

Dr. Libby
website is Dr. Libby calm. So Dr. Li big y.com. I’m on Instagram at Dr. Libby and Facebook is Dr. Libby live? I have a run online courses. I will I will run in person events again one day. And I’ve written books and I have a plant based supplement company called bio blend. So yeah, I feel very beautiful to do the education I do in the world. So yeah. Thank you.