Listen up! In this episode I share why this collective experiment with managing the symptoms of the vaccine are the same exact tools I teach around changing the experience of pain.

Be your own scientist in this great mind/body laboratory!

I share some client stories about their vaccine prep and navigating unpleasant sensations, including #barfclub and other incidents with nausea!

And as always you're invited to chat with me and learn more about how you can learn about pain and how to change your embodied experience of physical and emotional pain and overwhelm by training your mind.

http://debmalkin.com/
http://debmalkin.com/8-week-pain-recovery-program/

Transcript

Ep7

Welcome to Move With Deb. I'm Deb your friendly neuroplastician. And this is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind from a health at every size, judgment, free perspective. I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity, self friendship and simple neuro-plasticity techniques can rewire your bodymind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich full life that you want to live. Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.

[00:00:50] Hi everyone. It's Deb with Move With Deb, the podcast, and we are doing episode number seven. We're going to talk about the vaccine for COVID and how you can use this vaccination experience as a mini mind body lab. And I'm saying this because having a collective experience of managing our fear and anxiety in ways that we normally do on our own, but we're kind of doing collectively. It's so fascinating to watch people manage their physiological symptoms that are arising from getting a shot and usually people are getting one shot and then a second shot. We're all sharing and talking about what you could expect to be happening in your body. And then I'm watching people use that information and then applying that knowledge and literally changing their own physiological experiences based on the thoughts that they're putting into their mind and then the feelings that they are managing about what is happening in their bodies.

[00:02:16]And this is amazing because it is a microcosm of actually what we do all of the time, around fear, around pain and around various experiences in our bodies. But those, we don't have a collective experience that helps us tell how we should think and feel about them in a way that is positive, showing us that our bodies are normal, that they are healing, that they are operating as designed that there is nothing wrong, that these sensations are temporary and will abate in a short time. And even if you are feeling something that feels negative, that also doesn't mean there's something permanently wrong with you or that needs fixing.

[00:03:10]So this vaccine micro moment is kind of an amazing laboratory. I want to invite you to think about whether you've gotten the vaccine already. What thoughts and feelings were you having about what you were going to experience after being vaccinated? What were the activities that then you chose to do with that knowledge? And then what were the results of your experience?

[00:03:43] I watched lots of people talk about having fevers, aches, and pains in their bodies, headaches, nausea, vomiting. Very unpleasant experiences, but they were also relaxed. Some people were even excited, because they could match their physiological experience with this idea, this thought in their mind, that this is my immune system working as designed because that is the desired outcome from receiving this vaccine, even sore arms, you know, and sometimes you get an experience that is less than what you were expecting. Yay. We get to celebrate that's a party and sometimes you get an experience, that is different than what you were expecting. But I'm watching people on the internet talk about their experience and not catastrophizing.

[00:04:43]Not having the fear that these sensations mean that there's something wrong with them or that they're going to last forever. Those are often things I hear people talk about when they discuss pain and the fear that they are experiencing around pain and anxiety.

[00:05:03] I'm going to, share with you some, thoughts that I heard people talking about. And one person that I know I had coached them about getting the vaccine. And we were talking about how to manage your mind and your body around whatever may occur. So some of the thoughts that they brought into their experience was this is my immune system working. Oh, okay we thought this might happen, this is what it feels like to be inoculated against a deadly disease. And then they described, remember to sit with themselves and being self-loving when they were having some very intense experiences. I think they were having a fever and a lot of aches and pains. So they said to me, "I remember to sit with myself and be self-loving. And it was kind of a big deflating poof of relaxation, where I just melted into the sensations and let it happen."

[00:06:04] So what we're talking about is the lowering of the reactivity, the lowering of the resistance, changing the physiological experience. So I was talking to another client, not about the vaccine, but about a moment of nausea they experienced. And they met is nausea experience with a lot of curious awareness about the sensations. And then they told me this story about how they met these sensations. They could feel this kind of wave of nausea come on. And they were like, huh, let me see, let me apply these tools, this curious awareness tool and just narrate what they were feeling in their body.

[00:06:47] And they kept telling their mind that they were safe. That they were okay no matter what happened. And so they would just name the sensations as they arose with kind of a lightheartedness. They were like, oh, this is an interesting sensation in my throat. Now my mouth is beginning to fill up with some extra saliva. Oh, how curious. I'm going to walk over to the bathroom because the sink is where I would spit out extra saliva. So they, they narrated that they walked over to the sink in a very relaxed manner that they were not concerned, but they were also like, okay, well, if I'm over near a sink, if I am going to throw up, this will be a good place to do it, but they didn't go to the toilet.

[00:07:28] They chose to stay over to the sink because they were just meeting their sensations as they arose. They were like, well , my stomach is making some sounds. My mouth is filling with fluid. They went on to describe with relaxed curiosity, a few more sensations, and then it all settled down and went away. They spit out the extra saliva. That sense of, wow, this just went away. That the mind did not create any fear, the practicing of this neutral, relaxed, curious, even lighthearted, slightly humorous awareness changed the body's experience of what was happening.

[00:08:13] We do this in my coaching community a lot. There's this concept called barf club. And it cracks me up all the time, because we talk about when you meet something that makes you scared, it's this idea that you're on the right path. So oftentimes people will post hashtag barf club with lots of excitement, lots of emojis, lots of exclamation marks because yes, that sensation of doing something out of your comfort zone is now the indicator that you're on the right path. That, whatever it is that you're doing, that you're afraid of, whether it's making a video, whether it's making the offer to work with people, whether it's producing a podcast like this one, which often makes me feel like I'm in barf club.

[00:09:06] I sometimes feel like I'm the president of barf club, even though I didn't make up that term. But even for me, the approach to doing things that make me feel nervous, or give me thoughts about perfectionism or how I'm doing something wrong, which then I feel in my body with particular sensations, none of that is a problem. If I don't think it's a problem. And it's so easy to reframe that sensation from being unpleasant to being desired.

[00:09:45] Same thing when we are on coaching calls, my coach Kara often explains. "Yeah. It's okay. When you are getting coached on zoom, you are going to have a deer in the headlights experience. Your brain might go offline a little bit. You're not going to remember this so I definitely recommend reviewing our coaching call and it's okay." And every person who gets coached, we all watch everybody go through it.

[00:10:15] This is why watching other people get coached is often amazing because your brain is not the one going offline. So you can be present and be aware, but when you're getting coached, sometimes you just get that deer in the headlights experience. But now that we're told that this is normal, that this is to be expected, that this is like a part of the ride that we want to be taking, then it's not a problem. And that led me to, wow, okay. So other people have this experience where their brain goes offline. Maybe that's not a problem. I definitely feel like my brain goes offline a lot. And I used to think, wow, that must be that there's something wrong with me. But what I'm understanding is like, no, that's just a part of my brain. That's a part of my physiological experience. When I experience a certain amount of overwhelm. My brain just takes a little bit of a vacation, not entirely. And the less I freak out about it, the softer the experience is, the more I can be present, the more I can come back and be aware. I think I'll talk more about that in a future podcast, because I think that deserves its own conversation.

[00:11:36]Here's some more things from my friend who was talking about managing their mind while post vaccine. So they said "I'm still feeling a bit tired and physically sensitive today trying to allow those sensations to just be", they said, "my brain's go to can sometimes be quote, this will never get better quote, but I tell it that yes, brain, it will. It has every time so far." And they said that they have a tendency to be mean to themselves when they don't feel well. And we talked about how interesting it was that being self-loving made a deflating poof of relaxation happen.

[00:12:21]So there was the brain's tendency to think a thought about a sensation. When you think the thought this will never get better, you're going to have a physiological experience of that thought. When they had the thought to sit with themselves and be self-loving they experienced that sense of relaxation, the deflating poof of relaxation, as they described it, where they just melted into the sensations and let them happen.

[00:12:54] That is the physiological experience of being self-loving, of meeting themselves with tenderness, and self-love and allowance of the experiences that they were having in that moment. So they met the physiological experience with self-love and compassion and relaxation happened in their body. Interesting.

[00:13:20] Then we talked about, yes. Oftentimes, we create a conditioned response of having a sensation we don't want. Then we have a serious of thoughts. They are used to thinking mean thoughts about themselves when they don't feel well. They are used to thinking this will never get better. And repeating that thought creates an experience in their body.

[00:13:44] And it was interesting because they talked about, well, I just have this tendency to be mean to myself when I'm not feeling well. And I hear this from a lot of people and I'm certainly had it myself. And in some ways I think being mean to ourselves must serve some kind of function since so many of us do it.

[00:14:02] And it's certainly a concept that gets reinforced by wellness culture by healthism by capitalism. But also maybe there is some biological function, maybe the don't stand out safety feature misfiring, maybe there is some ways, some kind of a collectivist need to work together to be unified. So if we think of this as the don't stand out safety feature of our nervous system, we can think about maybe that safety feature as misfiring.

[00:14:40] It's important to not judge ourselves for what's an adaptive behavior. And for me, it's a very useful thought to think of this as an automated brain habit. That brains are just going to brain, helps keep me out of the intensity of shame, the intensity of continuing to blame myself for my brain operating under it's conditioned responses.

[00:15:07] And it also helps me realize the ease with which I can rewire my brain and create a new condition response. It might take effort, but a conditioned response is just a thought repeated. It's just a thought and a sensation repeated over time. So it helps me to be able to see and understand changes and why learning and rewiring the brain are the same. It releases me from the story that I'm broken and unfixable in any kind of way. Cause that story makes me feel depressed, hopeless, or pissed off. So this worldview helps me feel like I am okay, and that I can change it if I want. And then I can learn how to interpret the sensations that are happening in my body in ways that are valuable to me.

[00:16:01] So using this vaccine mini moment as kind of a mind body laboratory for being able to practice changing our physiological responses to the sensations that arise in our body. Because our thoughts about our immune experience in getting a vaccine, you can have a variety of different thoughts about it.

[00:16:27] What I'm watching is people think thoughts on purpose about receiving the vaccine that are changing their physiological experiences that they're having around what's happening in their bodies, headaches, nausea, fevers, body aches, mild joint pain, all kinds of physiological experiences that are arising in the moment are also passing through.

[00:16:56] Nobody is repeating the message. Something's wrong with me. This is going to last forever. What is happening in my body? This is a mystery. I don't understand what's going on. There must be something wrong. I can't live like this. No. This vaccine mini moment is like, bring it on. This is my immune system working. I know that I'm not going to feel well and that's okay. How can I prepare for this moment of not feeling well, knowing that it is temporary and it will pass? How can I be prepared to have the human experience in which there are times where I don't feel well. There are times when I have a headache. There are times when the sensation of wanting to vomit shows up in my body.

[00:17:45] Just like my client's story, about meeting the sensation with light-hearted curiosity and watching it change. Our bodies are going to feel things they're full of sensors. We are one gigantic sensory system, but how we relate to the sensations that arise in our body, which include our thoughts and our feelings, that is up to us in a lot of ways. We are the ones who have the ability to turn up the fear volume, or to turn down the fear volume.

[00:18:19] This vaccine moment can be a really beautiful experience with which to practice. Cause we have a lot of collective knowledge about what it is that you're going to feel, and then your beliefs and expectations about what is happening in your body. And we can even extend that idea to what happens when you're feeling unwell and you Google your experience.

[00:18:48]Does Googling help you feel calm, relaxed? Like these sensations that you're experiencing in your body are temporary. Does it wake up curiosity and lightheartedness with which you greet the sensations in your body and welcome and allow them to be there as a part of the human experience? Where do you feel fear, panic, worry? Does research lead you to more research, lead you to more research, lead you to catastrophizing, lead you down the road to fear and a lot of future casting about what this might mean for you. Not only now, but in the future. And they say this just to remind you that your thoughts and feelings are part of that volume control, play a large part in the interpretation of the sensations that we're experiencing in our bodies.

[00:19:46]I would like to invite you to use this moment about the vaccine to begin to explore with curiosity and friendliness your experience in your body, because what you experience with turning up or turning down your reactivity to these experiences in your body and receiving the vaccine are the identical tools that I teach my clients to do in my pain recovery program. And then I have learned from the work of Dr. Sarno on the work of the curable app, the work with Dr. Schubiner and Charlie Merrill. These are all the same tools that I use with my clients. I help them map their, cognitive and somatic experiences, and we figure out what are our sneaky thoughts? We create our lazy detective to help us witness and create awareness with neutrality and a sense of self loving and sense of self compassion. What my friend described as meeting themselves with self compassion, invited a sensation of relaxation into their body.

[00:20:55] So as we learn to drive this cognitive somatic embodied experience, we can create change very quickly. That's the gift of learning how all of this interplays and how fear and our thoughts are part of the amplification process of our sensory experience. That's how we rewire pain. That's how we reprogram ourselves out of overwhelm, out of the sensations of anxiety, it's all the same work. So if you can create that shift and change in your own body, through getting a vaccine and holding your own hand through having an immune response. You can do this work at any point with mind body pain, with neuroplastic pain, with various diseases or illnesses like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, all different types of mind, body stress illnesses, migraines , IBS. There's a long list of Mind body related illnesses on the PPDA website. And I will make sure to link to that in the podcast notes. And the PPDA is the psychophysiological disorders association. And so that's my podcast for this week. I hope at you bring some curiosity and self-love and always self friendship to your mind body experience.

[00:22:31] And if you ever want to work with me or get on a curiosity call, if this is work that sounds interesting to you, but you're not quite sure how to take yourself through it, I'm here to help. You can go on my website, debmalkin.com and there'll be a link to book a call and then we'll have a chat and I'll tell you about what it is that we could do together.

[00:22:56] Thanks a lot.