Sensitive With An Edge
Episode 9 Transcript
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Welcome to Sensitive with an edge for highly sensitive people who embrace their intensity, uniqueness and value in this world. Join us on the exploration of relationships, complex trauma recovery, non-conventional mindsets, neurodiversity and themes that involve healing, growth and empowerment.
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I'm Chris Lyon and welcome to sensitive with an edge, the podcast that helps you rewire with intention. I'm glad you're here. This is part two of my interview with neuroscientist, educator, author, and TEDx talk speaker Doctor Sarah McKee. She'll share information that can be helpful to women, those who are sensitive, those who have complex trauma.
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All of that. You should find this incredibly helpful. Her passion as a brain expert is apparent as she continues to help us learn more about how our magnificent brains work. She'll be sharing eye opening points on estrogen in the body, and how depression and anxiety can be caused by perimenopause and menopause. What we can do about this as well, and how to approach aging in a healthy way.
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We're really excited about it. Thanks for listening in. And here we go.
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There is some data looking at women who have been long term oral contraceptive pill users so that estrogen levels synthetic estrogen, but it's acting the same way at quite high. And those women do appear to score slightly higher on some tests of cognition. And that's hard surprise, because we know that estrogen is a cognitive enhancer, broadly speaking. Overall,
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the impact on mood is variable.
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And there does appear to be like a subset of women who are more vulnerable not to the presence of estrogen, but kind of dips or fluctuations of estrogen. So it's some women who have very, very severe PMS symptoms, what we would call Pmdd or premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, dysphoria disorder, sorry, whereby they,
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suffer very serious depression or dips in mood.
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And those
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days awake before the period when the estrogen levels have kind of dropped and the pedestrian levels have dropped?
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that's not the case for everyone. And then we've got behaviors. And that's interesting because the research on that's reasonably new, we kind of understand what happens in
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lab animals or other kind of mammalian mothers because they've got more stereotyped, predictable behaviors.
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but we've got some evidence from pregnancy that pregnancy, particularly third trimester levels of estrogen, which is super, super, super high reward, organized parts of the brain involved with social cognition.
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theory of mind empathy, which is how other people think and how other people feel.
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primarily, of course, to train your
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newborn maternal mind into the social cues.
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Unknown
What's the baby thinking? What's the baby feeling? and so that's kind of enabling or making it easy to learn those maternal behaviors and respond appropriately to to the baby. And we see that in other mammals, and we're just sort of starting to learn about that a little bit. And, human women as well have recently given birth.
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Unknown
That's fascinating. Now, I hear a lot about anxiety. Many women who are, let's say they get into perimenopause, they complain of high anxiety, and they list all the medications they are given for it.
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Unknown
it changes their experiences in life. It affects our families. Can you provide more clarity on what's going on and what they can do about that?
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Unknown
from my kind of take
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Unknown
looking at the literature on this,
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Unknown
as I said, you know, we've got these critical periods of,
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opportunity or plasticity.
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We've got puberty and we can think of these kind of reproductive transitions, puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause as
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They're also big transitions neurologically. They're also big transitions. Psychological and socially and spiritually and kind of in every way, really.
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Unknown
And by the time you 50, it's what we're saying. Or the date is sort of the signal and the data is it's women who have had prior experiences of anxiety or depression are more likely to then be triggered off again at that point in the life span, rather than it being sort of the first time they've ever experienced it.
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Unknown
That doesn't mean that it's not going to be an individual situation where someone can experience anxiety or depression for the first time here, but overall it's not. Menopause is causing this. Rather the reduction or the sort of the rollercoaster of hormones that this kind of unpredictably, hormonally chaotic time makes you more vulnerable to experience that again. So I think it's wise for women who have a prior history of mood disorders, anxiety, depression at any point in their lifespan to kind of go, oh, okay, this is a time in life in which I should sort of take a little bit more care of all aspects of my health.
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Unknown
And, you know, from a brain perspective, take care of your bottom up biology, kind of think about how is the outside world coming in. If I got good, strong social support networks around me, am I, you know, living in an area that enables me to have great well-being? I
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Unknown
you know, you live where you live, but how can I tap into an environment which facilitates wellbeing?
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Unknown
And what are the sort of the stressors which are making their way into my life? Am I enabling them to come in through this thing?
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Unknown
sorry, I'm holding my phone up here.
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how can I manage and buffer all of that? And how can I kind of approach this point and my lifespan?
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with the right type of kind of mindset and perspective and psychological tools and I think we have this tendency, particularly
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with girls and women at these kind of junctures, these reproductive junctures to one, it's always there's always a deficit focus.
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And two, that's always let's blame the hormones when things go wrong.
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and when I was writing my first book, The Women's Brain Book, I had a I had a separate chapter, The Mood Disorders for Anxiety and Depression
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because I wrote that book looking at all these different points in a life span, I thought, I don't want puberty to include
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six on anxiety and depression.
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Unknown
I didn't want parent pregnancy and parenthood to also be about anxiety and depression. I didn't want midlife and menopause to also be about anxiety and depression. I didn't want that to be seen as an inevitable outcome of
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phase of life.
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wanted to, like, put it in its own box. And also then that meant I could look at the strengths and the upsides of these transitions in life.
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Unknown
And I think
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we fed so much messaging around what can go wrong and the deficits. We failed to then
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look at the upsides. So my advice to women approaching or in the midst of this phase of life as I myself am,
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is to kind of take this holistic perspective around your health, not just your mental health.
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Unknown
and, you know, it's kind of midlife, you know, it doesn't have to be a crisis.
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Unknown
It's an opportunity to set yourself up. Good to reframe. Yeah. You biology, the world around you and your mindset. And how am I going to approach aging with in a healthy way?
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Unknown
you know, you can't stop it.
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Unknown
So what can you do to manage it and a really positive way, and look for some strengths and upsides and good points. Makes a lot of sense now, you did mention, childhood stuff coming up or having some anxiety in the earlier in life.
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Unknown
in your neuroscience academy and Brain Coach bootcamp,
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in one of your modules, I believe it's. Com
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Unknown
there's information about the adverse Childhood Experiences study. Many people don't realize that they have developmental trauma. Can you speak on how toxic stress in childhood plays out in brain health later in life, in a way that maybe can enlighten us and help us out a little bit later?
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Unknown
Yeah.
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Unknown
I'm glad you brought that up.
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Unknown
I do deal with it. I talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences as a phenomenon in a couple of different parts of the, of the program. What I wanted to do, particularly when we're talking about because this word stress, again, is this like massive umbrella where there's lots of sort of things which can sit under that.
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Unknown
And I think it was really important to separate out. We can have like good positive stress and life hitting off to school, going to a new job. It's stressful, but it's good. Positive stress, resilience and gives us opportunities.
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Unknown
but there's something different that can go on
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when you experience particularly chaotic, disruptive, traumatic, stressful experiences, particularly sort of during infancy, early childhood.
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Unknown
And, and I believe this adverse childhood experiences term, now called Aces, refers to these adversities which can be experienced under the age of 18. Now it's kind of expanded over time. But I think there's there's a couple of ways we can look at the specifics of what some of these adverse childhood experiences might be.
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Unknown
there could be things like physical neglect or abuse, whether that be physical or sexual or emotional, perhaps as chaos in your family, you know, there's divorce or violence or someone's in jail.
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Unknown
There's a lot of things that can kind of fit under that umbrella. But one way that neuroscience has tried to consider and related fields have tried to consider just kind of call these this kind of toxic stress, whereby this is extreme stress from multiple different types of potential causes and which the child isn't protected from. So we could have a particular stressful event, you know, you could have say, heaven forbid your dad ended up and was abusing drugs and ended up in jail.
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Unknown
Now that could be particularly traumatic. It could be a source of toxic stress. If as a five year old, you know, you weren't scooped up by your grandparents and your mom and kind of protected from the reality of that and nurtured and kept safe through that, we would then call that nontoxic stress. It could be very disruptive stress within the world around you, but you are nurtured and protected through that.
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Unknown
we can have a particular event happen,
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Unknown
it depends how much the child is exposed or nurtured or protected from that. So toxic stress often happens when the parents or caregivers aren't there to kind of regulate that child and buffer that stressful situation from them.
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Unknown
and the parents may be have that psychological tools to manage their own emotional response. So the child doesn't experience toxic stress. But you could then have another family where they weren't the tools and place
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Unknown
the adults were scared for no fault of their own. And so that child experienced more toxic stress.
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Unknown
so I think we have to be very, very careful to just make the assumption that from an individual perspective, if there was abuse or neglect or dysfunction,
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that that automatically equals
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Unknown
toxic stress. Okay. And it's also about the child's individual experience, right. The entire report we do understand is that if you looked at a large population, look at like 10,000 people.
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Unknown
And then we can then get people to add up, like how many adverse childhood experiences did you have? And I'm not speaking from experience because my I scored zero. I'm incredibly fortunate. but we would say there would be tendencies within large populations of people, so there would be poor health outcomes later in life. So perhaps,
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Unknown
you might say,
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physical health problems like diabetes or depression or,
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heart disease or cancer or stroke etc..
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Unknown
and then you might see people,
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having
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poor social outcomes, perhaps they leave school really young, they smoke, they're not,
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Unknown
employed, etc. so you can see lots of kind of chaos emerging in people's lives when they've had chaotic early childhoods. Yes. And there's more likely that that will happen. The more risk factors that you have or the more aces you have.
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Unknown
But it's not an inevitable outcome. And I think that's it's most of what we see in a population of people, not necessarily in an individual case.
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Unknown
you do address resilience a lot too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we've got ISIS but then we've also got Pacers which are like protective
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Unknown
childhood experiences. So you could as I said, you could have an earthquake.
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Unknown
But you've got these psychologically solid, dependable adults around that kids who can kind of cope with the stress. And then that child has the same experience as the kid next door. Both houses were falling down. But those two kids have different outcomes because of the protective
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Unknown
childhood experiences and the reason we talk about childhood experiences when they type in during infancy and child is because that is when the brain is going through these sensitive periods of development.
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Unknown
So broadly speaking, this child and their little brain, again, this is kind of world I live in. I live in a world where I need to be hyper vigilant. I live in a world where I'm always scared. I live in a world where I'm always threatened, and that's how the world is. So I need to behave in a way throughout my life where I keep myself safe or I keep myself protected, where I'm scared of things that are going to happen.
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Unknown
And that's sometimes how we say,
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Unknown
that's kind of a way we can kind of explain how someone with a traumatic childhood, even if I don't necessarily remember the explicit details, then behave in a way later in life, and which they are always kind of scared, or their social interactions with people are perhaps not as ideal as they necessarily would be, because the little brain.
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Unknown
So I live in the scary, scary world. I must keep myself safe. Connections aren't so safe. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And then the physical health outcomes, we think, come about by,
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Unknown
how the stress response system, which also, you know, your stress response system also goes through, you know, these sensitive periods of development,
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Unknown
and you know, you've got overly,
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stimulated stress responses, perhaps that interacts with your immune system.
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Unknown
So you get kind of, you know, different levels of inflammation or immune response,
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Unknown
and then that affects like kind of your metabolism as you're growing up. So we have all of these different and interconnected physiological systems within our body, which then may make a person more or less resilient to illness or poor health as they age, as well.
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Unknown
what I've seen is that people
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Unknown
can be very resilient if they decide to be. And I think the self-care is a big thing, too,
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Unknown
I really like to transition into something you've mentioned. It's very important.
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people have had
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mental health problems from not getting enough quality sleep and all kinds of other stuff that's gone wrong.
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Unknown
And I've heard you talk about sleep enough.
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Unknown
it's also significant element in aging and since you put such a great
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emphasis on that,
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and people are just learning the importance of this in the last few years.
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Unknown
I would really appreciate you talking about why that should be such high priority for us. Quality sleep.
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Unknown
Yeah, I think it should be almost our highest priority when I talk about, you know, bottom up outside and top down, people go, what should I you know, what's what's the
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Unknown
what's the most important thing to focus on? I said, well, if you have to kind of choose 1 or 2, well one will be sleep and two will be your social support networks, the relationships you have around you.
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Unknown
that's like the strongest predictor of health outcomes,
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Unknown
at all, often falls under the umbrella of sort of socioeconomic status. So, you know,
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Unknown
well, healthy people typically have strong social networks, but they also typically have the the ability and the financial means and resources to enable that good health to. So,
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Unknown
put that aside. If we're looking at kind of like from a very personal level, not a societal kind of structural level, then sleep I think
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if you can get that sorted, you can that's the foundation on which you can build all these other aspects of good health and well-being.
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Unknown
And we all know and I'm
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a very, very good sleeper. it's kind of my, my, my superpower.
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Unknown
but I'll tell you a little story in a moment.
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I know how terrible I feel if I have one night of disrupted sleep or multiple nights of disrupted sleep, and we all do.
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when you've got disrupted sleep for days or weeks or months or years on end, it's that much harder to then do all of the things that you must do for your overall health and wellbeing.
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Unknown
know, eating well,
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mood regulation,
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to exercise, etc., etc.. Yeah. and that's because when we go to sleep at night,
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there's a whole lot of processes that take place.
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We used to think all that was when everything kind of dog down and rested and but we now know the brain is very, very active. We know the body goes through it's kind of rest and,
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repair and restoration and the and the brain and the body can't do all the things it needs to do to kind of turn everything over and clean everything out and, and repair and restore itself.
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Unknown
Every aspect of our physiology does that. When we are asleep, when we are awake, it can't do that.
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Unknown
so that's kind of why it needs to be that fundamental base. And I think we can think clearer and we can regulate our emotions in a better way, which is an incredibly important,
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skill to learn to function as a whole human in the world.
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when we are under slept.
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Unknown
now, as I said, I've always been in a kind of like an Olympic level sleeper. Not only do I sleep well at night, but I also regularly nap during the day. I take a short afternoon nap if I feel like it, because I know that that's a way for me to reset, and it helps me be more emotionally regulated, particularly when my boys were little.
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Unknown
That was really useful and important, and now I often find I'll get a bit kind of fatigued cognitively,
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Unknown
it means I'm not feeling sleepy because we get this rising sleep drive during the day, and you can kind of knock a bit of that sleep drive off with caffeine. But the best way is with sleep.
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Unknown
So short afternoon nap, 20 minute afternoon nap makes me feel sleepy, so I don't feel like I'm kind of feeling tired. I'm like, oh, I'll sleep. So then I don't feel sleepy. It's just kind of a little hack. I do know not everyone can do it. I mean, if you're a teacher or a a bus driver or a dental, so you can't do that, but I can, so I do.
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Unknown
Yes, it's very helpful. What about sleep? Any hacks for better or more deep sleep? Yeah. Well, I think particularly midlife women and lots and lots and lots of women, I when I say look, I sleep really well there a lot. I sleep terribly in the more you know, you kind of talk about it most
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Unknown
women. I'm nearly 50, most women my age so that I don't sleep very well.
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Unknown
And I was on the oral contraceptive pill for a really, really long time. I loved it completely. You know, Susan, so you should be very, very well. And then my GP said to me earlier in the year, every time I think you getting a little bit old, you know what? Let's just go off and see what happens. And I was kind of fun for about ten days and I said, oh, I'm impervious to hormones.
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Unknown
I'm, I'm, I'm doing fine here. And then boom, they're hot flashes. And the night sweats started and my sleep went from being,
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Unknown
solid nine hours. My husband draw, I draw my husband crazy. Got to sleep at nine, wake up at six. Wouldn't have known what happened overnight as did to the world that whole time I went to like being woken up for five six times a night was a thought and the covers would come off.
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Unknown
It called, and I was getting these rushes of adrenaline, like I would wake up and my like, legs and feet felt like I'd just been given a big fright. So like, I should have been like someone had gone boo! And I'd been scared. And I was like, so this is what they talk about when I talk and when we're not sleeping, I'm coming home.
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Unknown
What's up with this? So after two weeks my husband said what are you waiting for. Go back to the doctor. And she had said to me if you're having any issues come back and we can give you some hormone replacements. So I was like less than one month later I was back in her office and I said it was not gone so well,
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Unknown
and she said, okay, hold out her sort of spreadsheet and said, here's what we can do.
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Unknown
Let's
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Unknown
this, give you some estrogen back. You've had these sky high levels of synthetic estrogen all these years. Let's put them back with some hormone replacement therapy. And I was like, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me. I'll do whatever I have to do. I will jump through hoops. I went and got my mammogram.
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Unknown
I did all of the things.
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Unknown
took about ten days to kind of reverse. It was sort of interesting.
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Unknown
to now I'm back to sleeping
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Unknown
brilliantly again.
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Unknown
and this is just my personal experience, but also because I've always been a good sleeper, I've never really had to deal with mood disorders.
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Unknown
I've never dealt with brain fog. My sleep has always been so solid that it's been very easy for me to put all these other pieces of the puzzle together well, mean why I had these kind of 3 or 4 weeks of horrendous sleep. I was like, no wonder everyone is anxious, depressed, foggy, miserable. I was like, I don't know how anyone is kind of navigating through this midlife world without some hormones.
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Unknown
They're not for everyone. You do you. But then I said to my GP, I said, because she she said, oh, well, you know, coming up to 17, she said, oh, I went through this at the time when we thought we couldn't take the hormones for menopause.
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Unknown
And I said, so how long did you have this hot flash thermoregulation issue at night.
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Unknown
She said, seven years and I. What, are you kidding? I sort of barely did seven days.
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Unknown
So my heart was like, out to her and every other woman who hasn't had the opportunity and the education that I've had. So I think as soon as my sleep I might. And all of a sudden one day I was like, I don't even think I should drive the car.
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Unknown
I don't care about driving a car. I just tired,
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Unknown
and all over the place.
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Unknown
Everything else will fall apart with that sleep.
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Unknown
so I'm not here advocating for everyone to go on hormone therapy by any stretch of the imagination. Only that when I went through a phase of sleep disruption that had a physiological cause, I thought, I can see how
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Unknown
everything can just fall apart from there.
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Unknown
Yes. so my primary goal was to protect my sleep no matter what. And I said, I will do whatever I need to do to be able to sleep deeply again.
00;21;54;18 - 00;22;06;21
Unknown
I think the thing is, if you've had disrupted sleep for days or weeks or months, you don't have a strong positive psychological association with sleep either. And that's when insomnia starts to come into play.
00;22;06;23 - 00;22;21;22
Unknown
And it's this way you get afraid to go to sleep, right? Because people are scared to go to sleep because then they'll wake up, whereas otherwise, like give me a slight given. Yeah, bring it on head and like, my husband's like nothing gets between you and your pillow and I'm like, you just stay there, I'm sleeping,
00;22;21;22 - 00;22;24;21
Unknown
I could get into the biology of it all. But essentially, when you
00;22;24;21 - 00;22;30;19
Unknown
withdraw estrogen from your brain, the hypothalamus thermostat becomes very, very narrow.
00;22;30;19 - 00;22;38;01
Unknown
So you only need a tiny increase in internal body temperature for your brain to go into panic stations thinking that you're super overheated.
00;22;38;01 - 00;22;50;00
Unknown
that's why you sweat. And when you're asleep, you start sweating and your brain is like, we need a behavior here, not just a physiological response. We better wipe this chick up. She's asleep.
00;22;50;02 - 00;22;52;27
Unknown
Got to wake her up. How are we going to wake her up?
00;22;52;27 - 00;23;00;02
Unknown
we're going to put a shot of adrenaline through her body. So she wakes up in a panic, and then she knows something's really, really wrong.
00;23;00;02 - 00;23;05;16
Unknown
oh my God. And you throw the covers off because your brain wanted you to wake up, to behave in a way, to cool yourself down.
00;23;05;22 - 00;23;18;20
Unknown
And the only way it can do that is to jolt you awake with adrenaline. Wow. Same as what happens in someone with sleep apnea. Amazing. Amazing. That leads to heart issues. So, you know, it's all interconnected.
00;23;18;20 - 00;23;31;11
Unknown
What have you found about resilience of the brain that you think everybody should know that resilience comes from the people around you, that loudest voice in the crowd and your
00;23;31;11 - 00;23;34;12
Unknown
body and then your brain and then your mind as, as other people.
00;23;34;18 - 00;23;36;26
Unknown
And I think that's where the vulnerabilities lie. If
00;23;36;26 - 00;23;37;26
Unknown
you're social,
00;23;37;26 - 00;23;40;17
Unknown
support networks and belongingness,
00;23;40;17 - 00;23;43;27
Unknown
aren't there. So there's vulnerabilities, but it's where the opportunities lie.
00;23;43;27 - 00;23;52;11
Unknown
and we have very, very clear evidence that shows that the greatest risk factors for health and wellbeing, mood disorders, health and disease,
00;23;52;11 - 00;23;53;18
Unknown
as social.
00;23;53;18 - 00;23;55;18
Unknown
so that's where resilience comes in.
00;23;55;18 - 00;23;59;01
Unknown
I often think, you know, there's this world of self optimization
00;23;59;01 - 00;24;15;23
Unknown
out there, particularly outside the science browse, you know, so get out of your ice pods and hang out with some others. you know, it's about it's about social cohesion and networks and collectivism. That's what is the greatest builder of resilience.
00;24;15;23 - 00;24;23;06
Unknown
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you here. It's been a great honor. We really appreciate you. I appreciate you, too.
00;24;23;15 - 00;24;44;02
Unknown
Thank you so much for listening. Remember, we release a new episode every other Friday. So join us again. And remember to subscribe, rate and share this so we can continue to get sensitive with an edge out to more people. Check out Doctor Mkhize's links here. And also, if it's time for you to take care of yourself, get unstuck.
00;24;44;07 - 00;24;49;24
Unknown
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