303: Mindset matters and… it isn’t everything.

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host, Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, thank you for being here. I know there’s a lot of spaces and places you could be. And so the fact that you showed up here, I do not take that lightly. And I always think back on the days when we were I think we got like 40 downloads a month in our first month of podcasting. And now to see that we’re getting 10s of 1000s of downloads a month is pretty amazing. And you’re a part of that, and I appreciate you oh so much.

Courtney Townley 0:57
Now today, I want to talk a little bit about the connection between our chemistry and our emotions. Because I feel like this is a topic that is time and time again being way over simplified. And it’s not helpful to make it overly simplistic. And I think that you’ll have a better understanding of what I mean by that, at the end of the show today. What I do know is that it is human nature to want to put things in tiny little boxes with labels, we like to put things in boxes of understanding.

Courtney Townley 1:38
And even more specifically, I think we really like the idea that there is one solution to a problem. And truth be told, that is rarely, if ever the case with health and well being for so many reasons. I mean, let’s just think about this for a minute. If we think about conditioning the human body, I know that there are people who claim that they are runners, there are people who claim that they are dancers, or Olympic lifters, Pilates students, and all those modalities absolutely have immense power to condition the human body in some way. But we can’t say that one modality conditions the human body, because it’s simply not true. Right.

Courtney Townley 2:29
So, if we’re doing something like running all the time, but we’re not taking time to strengthen our body, or work on flexibility, our body is going to have limitations. If we’re always lifting heavy weights, but we’re not taking time to work on coordination and fluidity of movement and build our cardiac capacity. Again, the condition of the human body will be less, right, we’re not going to necessarily be conditioning the whole system through one modality.

Courtney Townley 3:06
And it’s kind of like trying to condition the human body by just training one muscle group, right, you could do bicep curls all day long. And you’re never going to actually improve the conditioning of anything outside that bicep muscle. So there are many things to consider when it comes to conditioning the human body. I also think of metabolism. Metabolism is so complex, like first, let me just remind you that metabolism is purely the efficiency at which your cells do all of their jobs. And we are sold this idea that just the way we eat, or the way we move will radically change our metabolism forevermore. But the truth is, the things that influence metabolism are wide and varied. There are so many things that affect metabolic function. Some of those things being your age, your activity level, your stress levels, your genetic influences, the ability that your body has to absorb nutrients, to create energy, to eliminate toxins. And all of these things are different in every human. So giving one blanket solution obviously can be problematic. I also think, just health in general.

Courtney Townley 4:41
Those of you who’ve been around this Podcast for a while have heard me many times say that health is very multi dimensional. It is not just physical. There’s a lot of other things we need to consider. When we are trying to help improve the well being of a human. We have to come said are emotional health, mental health, relationship health, the environment in which somebody lives in and how those environmental factors might be impacting their, what their health and well being so many things to consider. So my point is that there’s a lot of things that influence the well being of a human.

Courtney Townley 5:22
But again, we tend to look for one solution. And I know that would be lovely. I mean, in the land of rainbows and unicorns, that would be awesome. Because it’s simple. It doesn’t require as much work, it’s very straightforward to just have one solution. And I don’t even think it’s that we necessarily, by choice, believe that it’s what we’re sold, right? We’re sold this one form of exercise is going to improve your health forevermore, we’re sold this idea that if you just eat this way, for the rest of your life, you will be a healthy human. If you just take this one supplement, all of your health woes will disappear. I mean, I say that a little bit in jest, but also not. Because I do think that is largely how so many things are sold in the wellness industry. So why am I stressing this? Why am I stressing the multi dimensional nature of problems and solutions when it comes to health and well being? Well, the other day, I was scrolling on Instagram. And I came across a post by a coach that I actually really respected admire. And what she was sort of conveying in this post was that anxiety is purely a result of the way that you think.

Courtney Townley 6:54
And it ruffled my feathers a little bit. Because absolutely, I believe and teach that mindset is a very big player in how we feel emotionally. It’s absolutely an influencer of emotion. But it’s overly simplistic to say that it is the only thing that influences our emotional landscape. And I happen to know that this particular coach is also primarily targeting middle aged women whose hormones are starting to shift in pretty dramatic ways. Because they’re either entering perimenopause, they’re in the throes of it or they’re on the other side of menopause, right in terms of menopause being like one day, and we’re on the other side of of that.

Courtney Townley 7:55
It’s really important that we acknowledge that hormones, which essentially the government of your body can also massively influence your emotional landscape. And I tell you, that to help you sort of reclaim your power around emotional landscape, and I’m gonna give you some really strategic steps for doing that here by the end of the episode. But we don’t empower people by only telling them one part of the solution. We empower people by acknowledging the reality of all the things that are likely influencing this one challenge.

Courtney Townley 8:40
So, I want you to think of some of the hormones that you often hear referenced. When it comes to emotions. We talk a lot about cortisol. If you ask someone on the street, what cortisol was, I think most people would probably have some awareness, that it it has a role in the levels of stress that we feel. So definitely cortisol, that being really elevated, or really depressed, can suit can absolutely influence our hormonal landscape and powerful ways. We also hear about hormones like serotonin, right? Serotonin helps us to balance our mood. It promotes feelings of well being and reward.

Courtney Townley 9:32
And interestingly, a lot of serotonin is produced in our gut. So if we have gut challenges, serotonin might not be as available in our system as we would like it to be. And you could manage your thoughts all day long. But the absence of serotonin or the low availability of it is absolute. loosely going to influence how you feel in your life and about your life. We hear a lot about dopamine. Right? Dopamine, a lot of people call it the pleasure hormone. But really more accurately, it’s the motivation hormone. So it helps us to seek and draw and create drive for things that offer us pleasure. And there’s lots of other hormones and lots of other chemistry that can affect dopamine in our body. Oxytocin, endorphins. These are all Biochemistry. These are hormones that influence the way we feel emotionally. And the thing I want to just highlight here today is that hormones are a lot like dominoes. When one gets out of whack, it kind of upsets the entire applecart of hormones. So, if we, if serotonin is disrupted, it doesn’t just affect serotonin, it can affect a lot of other hormones in the body. When estrogen is elevated, when progesterone is low, it doesn’t just affect those hormones, it affects a lot of other hormones. So it makes sense, that when hormones like estrogen and progesterone start to shift, as they do in midlife, the hormones that allow us to experience emotion also get disrupted. And there’s a large swath of research that points to the link between females in the midlife transition.

Courtney Townley 11:51
And sort of the correlation between the sort of rates of depression, and even the experience of things like anxiety. And that’s not because all of a sudden, a midlife woman is starting to think differently about her life. It’s because her hormones are influencing how she is feeling on an emotional level. And estrogen and progesterone, I’m just using these as examples. They are just two of hundreds of hormones in the human body. But estrogen and progesterone, help us to manage cortisol, which I just said is another hormone in the human body that helps us to manage stress, and progesterone, more specifically, it can really help us to keep anxiety at bay, it’s kind of a calmer downer. And progesterone helps us with feelings of calmness, feelings of control. And I say control in relationship to calmness. So when progesterone is on the way out the door, it’s declining because of the midlife transition. Absolutely.

Courtney Townley 13:10
We can experience things like elevated anxiety. And with estrogen leaving the party and progesterone for that matter. Our ability to manage cortisol in our system, in a way that we once did, is not as robust. This is why stress management becomes such a big deal in midlife, not only are you dealing with all you know the most stress you’ve probably ever dealt with in your life at midlife, but you also have less of the hormones that can help you on a chemical level to manage the cortisol in your system. Now, I am not an endocrinologist by any stretch of the imagination, obviously. But I have worked with a tremendous number of women of various ages and stages of life over two decades. So I’ve worked with a lot of women over a lot of years. And my experience has taught me that biochemistry and mindset are big influencers in the emotional landscape of a human. But we aren’t doing ourselves any favors by just making it one thing.

Courtney Townley 14:39
I do think it’s really important for anyone who works in the wellness space to recognize that wild mindset work is immensely powerful and so important to be talking about. It is not the solution to everything and And when your biochemistry is disrupted, your capacity to manage your mind to do mindset work diminishes significantly. I mean, think about this, when you don’t get a good night’s sleep, or you only get like two to three hours of sleep, I’m sure that’s happened to everyone listening at least one night of their life. How did you feel the next day? Not just on a physical level? But how did you feel emotionally? I know for me, when I’m short on sleep, which by the way, does not take much, I’m a really big sleeper. And if I’m just shy on an hour or two, everything in my life becomes more dramatic. I am much more reactive to my life. I don’t have the resources available for what it takes for me to manage my brain in a way that is useful to me. And I know I’m not alone in that.

Courtney Townley 16:14
Another example of our chemistry, influencing our emotions is ladies think about how you feel emotionally, just prior to your period, you’re still having a period. And even if you aren’t, go back in your brain to the days that you were experiencing a few premenstrual symptoms, all of us can relate probably to at least once, if not much more frequently, feeling more agitated, feeling a bit more anxious. Right, feeling a bit more volatile.

Courtney Townley 16:55
And think about what hormones are doing at that time, right? Estrogen and progesterone are dropping dramatically before you start bleeding. I also think of just something as simple as not moving your body. So limiting your body from movement. For a lot of people, I would say most humans, it creates a state of agitation. And it’s not just humans. There’s been a lot of studies done on animals in captivity, think of like all the sort of the the sea life at aquariums and animals in zoos. And they seem fine for long periods of time. And then all of a sudden, there’s some huge emotional disruption. And they attack their trainer or something goes really haywire, they kill another animal. Because they aren’t moving in ways that they would normally move in the natural world. And again, that’s just one influence probably that’s playing into that. But it is an influence.

Courtney Townley 18:05
I also mentioned kind of gut dysbiosis earlier, having any kind of disruption in your gut health is absolutely going to influence how you feel on an emotional level. So I do not believe that your mindset is the only thing that impacts how you feel emotionally. And it feels a little bit dismissive and irresponsible for for anyone to be suggesting that I think. And that’s not a that’s not a, a judgement, as much as it’s it’s just a strong belief that I have that we have to be coming at these topics, from so many angles, not just one in order to be really helpful. And so in my own work, I didn’t use to do this. I mean, years ago, dear lord was I naive about the way I approached behavior change. But through a lot of education and a lot of experience, I’ve had gotten to a place where I really approach behavior change from four different areas from four different gateways.

Courtney Townley 19:09
And a lot of you have heard me talk about this before on the Podcast, but those gateways, our chemistry, biochemistry, taking care of our chemistry on the levels that we can, in order to make other things easier, like managing our thoughts. I talk a lot about strategy. I’ve done a lot of podcasts about that. Of course, we talk about mindset, thought management work. And then we talk a lot about emotional agility, the capacity to feel emotion. Now, I don’t want to get into how all of this is connected in today’s today’s episode because I mean, this is the body of work. I can’t possibly cover that in a 30 minute episode. But I do want to help you explore the link between biochemistry and your capacity to manage your brain to manage your thing. trying to control your mindset.

Courtney Townley 20:03
So, I just sort of said this earlier, but chemistry influences your capacity to manage your thoughts. And vice versa. Managing your thoughts influences your chemistry. So I already gave you a few examples of how your chemistry influences your ability to manage your thoughts. But so let’s let me give you a few examples of how thinking influences your chemistry. So this happened a few months ago, but for some reason, this just kind of stuck out in my brain today as an example. A few months ago, I went to the mailbox to get the mail. And there was a letter from our accountant, show, you know, telling us what we owed in taxes this year, and it was way more than I thought we would do. And then my thinking, my brain started having thoughts like, oh, my gosh, how are we going to pay for this? This is a problem. We can’t pay for this, this is too much. And that thinking, what did it do to my my chemistry, it raised cortisol. Right, it put my body in that fight or flight response, my nervous system started to get really activated.

Courtney Townley 21:24
But another example, is that the other day, at the end of the day, I had kind of a just a really full day, and I was feeling a little jacked up at the end of the day. And I walked out into the living room, and my dog was laying on the floor in front of the fire. So I lay down with him. And I just spent a few minutes petting him and talking to him. And I could just feel my entire system decompressing because, inevitably, I was probably spiking some dopamine in my system. Right. And I was, I was definitely spiking some oxytocin, which is your cuddle hormone. It’s the hormone of connection. And those two hormones helped me to temper my stress my cortisol.

Courtney Townley 22:13
And I was thinking as I’m laying with my dog, right, how much I love him, and how great the fire feels, and how nice it feels to be laying on the floor. I was thinking in a way that helped me to feel better. So I was helping myself on a chemical level. And I was also thinking in a way that helped me to feel better. So again, I just want to offer it’s not either, or, it’s not just about mindset, it’s not just about doing what you can to manage your chemistry. It’s both. So what do we do about this truth? Like, how do we actually put it into action. And that’s, of course, what I want you to walk away with today.

Courtney Townley 22:52
So, my first suggestion is number one, and this is going to sound just so simple, but simple is not easy, especially in a very busy world. The first step is you have to start paying attention to how you’re feeling, then that sounds crazy, because a lot of women are like, of course, I know how I’m feeling. But do you? Like do you often check in with yourself during the day two question how you’re feeling, not just emotionally, but on a physical level as well. And to be quite honest, a lot of women I work with are very disconnected from how they feel in their body. They have trouble naming emotions, because they don’t often check in with emotions. So as simple as this step sounds, it’s actually a big obstacle for a lot of women, just this first step. So just a couple of tips for you on doing this number one, you know, you don’t have to be in any kind of special environment to do this. You could be driving in the car, you could be cooking dinner, you could be sitting at your desk working, and you with intention, take a few seconds to just check in.

Courtney Townley 24:04
And there’s two levels based on this conversation that I would really encourage you to check in on number one, what am I physically feeling? What are the physical sensations I am aware of in this moment. Now a physical sensation is something like feeling tired, feeling hungry, having some kind of physical pain or discomfort somewhere. So a physical sensation is really something that starts in the body and then travels to the brain to inform you on something that needs to be done. You need to eat, you need to go take a nap. You need to get to bed earlier tonight. You need to scratch that itch on your shoulder. Those are physical sensations. Check in with those.

Courtney Townley 24:54
What are you feeling on that level? And then the second thing is what are you feeling On an emotional level. Now emotions, your a lot of your emotional landscape is is triggered by your brain, not just by your thoughts, but definitely by neuro chemistry. So there are messages that travel from the brain to the body. And these are things that we label as literally emotions. So you could Google a list of emotions, to see just how many emotions are available to you, as a human, there’s a lot of them. But these are things like frustration, calm, excited, nervous, anxious, happy, and the list goes on and on. So check in with yourself during the day, multiple times a day would be awesome to ask yourself what you’re feeling physically, and what you’re feeling emotionally. Because once you have that Intel, you get to do part two, which is you get to become the detective, you get to become the person who starts interpreting the messages, right.

Courtney Townley 26:14
So you’re kind of a detective and an interpreter at the same time, this is step two. And what I mean by this is, once you gather some intel about what’s truly going on internally, you can ask yourself some good questions. And one great question that I would encourage you to start with is how might my current emotions be influenced by my chemistry? So how is what I am feeling right now? And you could do this both emotionally and physically? How is that being influenced by my chemistry? As I go to, first of all, I go to basic self care. Am I feeling agitated right now? Because I didn’t sleep well last night? Because I haven’t eaten in eight hours. Because I actually haven’t moved my body really intentionally in three days. What is that coming from? Right? Where might my chemistry need a little bit of attention? Where are the gaps and use your physical sensation as guideposts. So if you have more aches and pains today than you usually do, why might that be? Did you eat something yesterday that might have influenced the way that you’re feeling physically? Did you sleep in a weird position? Do you have more stress than usual?

Courtney Townley 27:43
There’s usually five categories I asked people to check in on right we do this, we kind of do an integrity check with our self care. And in case you’ve never heard those before, because you’re new to this Podcast, they’re really simple. What’s the quality of your rest? Right now? Like how well are you sleeping? Are you given yourself enough sleep? What’s the quality of your diet? What’s the quality of your movement profile? What’s the quality of your thinking? And are you making time to connect with your with your community, with your family and friends? Those are the five areas I want you checking in on, when you feel like there is something physically going on with you that’s a little off kilter. And that can also help you as a byproduct. When you address those gaps, you might emotionally start feeling better, that often happens.

Courtney Townley 28:39
Use your physical sensations as guideposts to some of the work that might need to be done to help you feel better on an emotional level. So I know for me, again, I use the example of sleep a lot because it’s such a powerful thing for me. When I don’t sleep well. My body definitely hurts like I just feel more achy and my joints I feel really heavy in my body. I get very pessimistic. I get very sarcastic. And knowing that those are signals to me of misalignment. I can certainly easily you know, go back to Okay, Courtney, you know that this is how you feel when you’re not getting enough rest. I addressed that gap. And not only does my body start getting out of physical pain, but I also start emotionally feeling better. But the other thing that we need to do is ask ourselves the question of how might I be contributing to unnecessary suffering here, right?

Courtney Townley 29:45
Sometimes you have physical pain because you’re literally injured or you’re dealing with some kind of chronic physical problem. But the way we’re thinking about that can cause us to unnecessarily so refer. I also want to offer you this, the way we think about our emotions can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. So when I have anxiety, which by the way, I’m in perimenopause, like I am deep in the throes of perimenopause, and I have more anxiety than I’ve ever had in my life, I don’t have it necessarily every day by any stretch. But I never really experienced anxiety on a, you know, any kind of consistent basis previously in my life. And when anxiety comes, I have the opportunity to make it so much worse than it needs to be, because of how I’m choosing to think about it. So I literally can get myself in a position where I have anxiety about my anxiety. Because I’m thinking I shouldn’t feel this way. This is a problem. There’s something wrong here. Right? Like, something’s wrong with me, that kind of thinking, all it produces is more anxiety. So when I noticed difficult emotions in my midst, like anxiety, or a little bit of irritability, or anger,

Courtney Townley 31:13
I want to think about it in ways that are more useful to me, like, what is this telling me? Is it that I’m sort of skimping on my self care somewhere? And this is a byproduct of that? Or am I thinking about my life right now, or a situation right now, in a way that’s producing this emotion? It could be either, right? Again, we said this earlier, it’s not either, or it can be both. And so what am I making this mean? And is what I’m making it mean actually useful to me right now. And then I want to just wrap this up with this final piece, which is, once you’ve started paying attention to what’s going on physically and emotionally, once you have started to interpret some of those messages, and started to do some detective work about where you could take more responsibility for helping yourself out in those areas, you really are in such a great position to become your own hero.

Courtney Townley 32:12
What I mean by becoming your own hero, is that you can use the messages of both physical sensations and emotions, as filters are guideposts for where you need to start up leveling your self care, right. And when you are up leveling your self care in the ways that you know you can, but you still feel emotionally off, it’s time to reach out and ask for some help. So becoming your own hero does not mean you have to go it alone. It means you take the initiative to get more information. And that might mean going to a physician and getting some blood panels or hormone panels done. Right getting some tests to see what’s going on chemically that might be influencing how you’re feeling. I think coaching is great for this, right? Like it just to help you figure out where the self-care gaps might be, and how to better manage your thinking. This coaching can certainly be useful for that. And absolutely things like therapy, right? There are definitely topics and things that coaches really probably shouldn’t be wrestling with, with their student with their with their clients. And there are levels of, of stress and even trauma certainly, that a therapist would be in a much better position to work with.

Courtney Townley 33:51
Once we have a little bit more information. And once we feel like we are taking responsibility for what we can to control our emotions, often you’re going to find that there’s a little bit more help that’s needed. And it’s your job to ask for it. So the big takeaway here is that you are a multi dimensional being and just start treating yourself like one, even on the emotional front. Parent your brain and take responsibility for your chemistry for how you’re eating, how much you’re sleeping, acknowledging that you might have some hormonal dysregulation, for reasons outside of your control. Ladies in midlife, I am specifically speaking to you. Because when we honor that emotions are affected by more than one thing, we are in such a better position to do deep healing on an emotional level. So I think it’s just it’s really helpful to your brain and ultimately your life, to look at emotions through the lens of both biochemistry and mindset management.

Courtney Townley 35:20
All right, my friends, I know that was a lot. There’s a lot baked into that conversation, but hopefully I just got the wheels turning a little bit. And if you’re a person who’s just been, oh, it’s just all my thoughts. I just want to reassure you, it’s not all your thoughts, there are other things that could be going on and addressing chemistry is a really big deal. Alright, I will see you again next week. Have a lovely day, and take excellent care of yourselves.

Courtney Townley 35:51
Thank you for listening to the Grace & Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.