Did you know we can train our brains to respond to stress and trauma differently and even create more resiliency in our nervous systems?
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In this episode, you’ll learn the trick I’ve used to hack into my nervous system that has improved my physical health, strengthened my mental health, and helped me face the uncomfortable feelings of healing trauma.Show Notes
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In this episode of the podcast, I…- share my mantra “I am comfortable being uncomfortable”
- talk about how I’ve “hacked” into my nervous system to turn on neuroplasticity, re-wire my brain, and increase my physical, emotional, and mental resiliency and ability to handle stress
- explain how neuroplasticity can re-wire our brains in healthy ways that serve us AND unhealthy ways that produce trauma loops
- share how cold plunges and exercising in the cold produced quick and noticeable benefits for me mentally, physically, and emotionally
- discuss the benefits of intentionally putting our bodies in physical stress to build resiliency to stress and the ability to sit with the discomfort of the trauma-healing process
- talk about how we can teach our bodies to be in uncomfortable situations or feel hard feelings and consciously override the fight/flight/freeze instincts
Links
- Episode 2 of The Goop Lab on Netflix
- The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential by Wim Hof
- The Way of the Ice Man: How Wim Hof Creates Radiant, Long-term Health — Using the Science & Secrets of Breath Control, Cold Training, & Commitment by Wim Hof
- What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, & Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney
- Untamed by Glennon Doyle
- Follow me on Instagram
Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC] This is episode three of the Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast.Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In this episode, I’m going to share my mantra with you: I am comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m going to talk about how I developed this mantra for myself, the practical, real life tools that I have used to cement this mantra in my body, mind, and spirit, and how this mantra and the techniques that I’ve used have enabled me to create more resiliency in my nervous system, in my body, and in my mind. I am now more able to endure stressful situations than I have ever been before. And this mantra is also helping me to holistically heal trauma. So again, my mantra is I am comfortable being uncomfortable. Early in the summer of 2020, my husband and I were scrolling through Netflix, looking for something new to watch. And in our recommendations, there was a series called The Goop Lab. And we were particularly interested in this series because we saw that there was an episode about psychedelics, which both of us are, um, intrigued by. And we started this series from the beginning. And I believe it was the second episode of season one. I may be wrong about that, but I think it was the second episode of season one where they studied cold plunges. There were a lot of interviews with various people. Who’ve tried cold plunges and the most interesting interviews were with the Ice Man also known as a Wim Hof. Wim Hof has developed trainings, breathing exercises, physical exercises. He has a facility in Poland. He now has an online course and a membership where he teaches his breathing methods and his exercise methods, and then incorporates it all with cold plunges. To fully disclose, I have not read the book, The Ice Man, which is Wim Hof’s book. But I have read Scott Carney’s book, What Doesn’t Kill Us, which is super, super fascinating. If you’ve ever doubted that cold plunges or exercise in the cold is good for your health, read What Doesn’t Kill Us by Scott Carney, and you will change your mind. I have never loved being in the cold and after experiencing the cold for myself and also knowing the mental, physical, and emotional health benefits of being in the cold, I absolutely love being in the cold now. I kind of crave it. So in July of 2020, after watching this Goop Lab episode about cold plunges, I decided to give myself a challenge. I decided to do a cold plunge challenge to plunge in cold water every day for 30 days. And conveniently, I live like five minutes away from Lake Superior, a notoriously cold body of water. It’s cold all year round, even in the hottest part of the summer. I chronicled my cold plunge challenge in my Instagram stories, and my account is @iamlindseylockett, if you want to go watch those. I did save them as a highlight. Anyway, the cold plunge challenge that I did was an intensely healing experience for me. And it was healing that didn’t really take a long time. It was pretty fast. I started noticing changes in both my physical body and in my resiliency towards stress. Which call that your emotions or your mind or your spirit — it’s all of it. It’s all connected. talked about that in earlier episodes, how we can’t really separate our physical body from our emotional, mental, spiritual, and ancestral bodies. It’s, it’s all connected. So it didn’t take long doing the cold plunges before I started almost immediately noticing more resiliency in myself. About a week into the cold plunges, my husband and I thought it would be fun for me to have a thermometer, to take into the water with me and measure the water temperature to see just how cold this water was that I was plunging into. And to give you an idea of how cold Lake Superior is, on the warmest day in July of 2020, the warmest temperature that I was able to record with my thermometer was 63 degrees. And on the coldest day it was 45 degrees. At the beginning of July was like the 63 degree time, and then mid-July was like 45 degrees. And then the rest of July, the average was like 55 to 58 degrees. So, really big temperature difference for such a small amount of time, but Lake Superior is like an inland ocean. It’s the world’s largest, fresh body of water. And it behaves more like an ocean than it does a Lake. It definitely has its own personality. Anyway, I did the cold plunges every day in July, and as I said, I haven’t read Wim Hof’s book and I haven’t done any of his courses or his membership, but I basically just took what I saw from some YouTube videos and what I saw on The Goop Lab. And I adapted it to my own thing. I didn’t want to invest a ton of time into this process because I was still working during the day and we have a big garden in the summertime. My kids are home all day. And so I really didn’t need something that took hours and hours. I just wanted it to be kind of fast. So, when I first started, I sat on the edge of the water and I would do about 60 to 90 seconds of really deep breathing, like to the point of forced hyperventilation. My breathing was very fast, but also very deep. So I would inhale as much air as I possibly could in the shortest amount of time, and then push that air out in the shortest amount of time that I could. So it was very much like. Breathing like this, especially at first, because I wasn’t used to it, really made me feel dizzy and a little bit tingly all over and sort of hot. Wim Hof assures people that all of these feelings and sensations are completely normal with forced hyperventilation, but people have actually passed out from forcing themselves to breathe this way. I never passed out, but I just want to put that out there. Please do forced hyperventilation and cold plunges at your own risk. Anyway, I would do this breathing for 60 to 90 seconds, and then I would go straight into the water as fast as I could. I learned later after a few attempts of this cold plunging that going into really, really cold water that has a rocky bottom, like Lake Superior, is difficult with bare feet. And when you get your bare feet on really cold rocks like that in really cold water, your feet start to go numb and they can hurt very badly. So I got some really good water shoes. And after that, I was able to go in much faster and more easily and get out much more easily because getting out of a Lake that’s 55 degrees-ish average when your feet are nearly numb from cold and having to walk across rocks to get out of that water is insanely painful and difficult. So there’s some tips. If you are going to do the cold plunges in natural bodies of water, pick a good pair of water shoes. Um, my intention with the cold plunges was to stress my body out. I knew that going into cold water, would be a stressor to my body. Cold is stressful to the body. Just like heat is stressful to the body. And some people are really intolerant of cold and/or heat. And so that’s a sign –intolerance to cold or intolerance to heat — is actually a sign of impairment in the functioning of your autonomic nervous system. So cold water shocks your autonomic nervous system, and your body is forced to conserve energy by pulling blood away from your fingers and toes and arms and legs and pull it towards the internal organs to keep them warm and prevent hypothermia. Your body slows down whenever you get in the cold. The cold also reduces inflammation because the body stops paying attention to pain and inflammation inside of it, and it pays more attention to the cold outside because that’s a survival situation. And the daily pain and inflammation that we experience are not life and death like hypothermia is. So, within about a week of starting the cold plunges, I saw noticeable differences in both my physical wellbeing and in my mental and emotional health. It’s that resiliency that I talked about earlier. These cold plunges, we’re making me more resilient. And physically, I felt like the cold was very healing to my body. One concrete example I have is bug bites. So I’m extremely reactive to black fly bites. And in the last part of June, all of July in Northern Minnesota is prime time for the black flies. I’m so very reactive to these bites that the bite site will get very hot and red and swollen and the skin over the bite site gets very tight. It’s extremely painful to get these black fly bites. And then after, you know, a week or so they start oozing puss out. And it’s just really ugly and uncomfortable. So the first week that I was doing the cold plunges, I already had some black fly bites. And I noticed how quickly the cold water reduced the inflammation in those bites. So if the bites were really hurting or really red and inflamed, before I got into the water,whenever I would get out of the water, the bite site was noticeably reduced in swelling, much less red and pretty much pain-free. So that’s one concrete example that was proof to me that something about this cold is healing because it is providing, even though it was temporary, it was still providing relief from these really painful black fly bites. Back to my mantra, I am comfortable being uncomfortable. I wanted to intentionally stress my body out in a controlled way. When I go into the water, I know I have a choice and I know I have a choice when I want to come out. And so while I’m in it, even though it’s stressful the entire time, I know that I have a choice and I can control when I get in and when I get out and that it’s going to be okay. But I chose to try to stay in for as long as I could, because I wanted to prove to my mind and my body, “You can be in a stressful environment or in a stressful situation. And you can be okay.” And so I’d sit on the edge of the water. I would do the deep breathing, the forced hyperventilation, and then I would walk into the water and plunge myself in as fast as I could. And before I would go under the water, I would intentionally hold my breath so that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t gasp for air. Because my lungs were already full of air going in. And gasping is one of those instinctive reflexes that we have whenever we encounter a shock. So when somebody comes up from behind you and scares you, what do you do? When you get into cold water, what do you do? We gasp. That is an instinctive fight or flight response from our nervous systems so that whatever it is we’re about to go through, our bodies make sure that they have plenty of oxygen to go through that. I wanted to take conscious control over a subconscious, instinctive response that my body has. So I would inhale a deep gulp of air before I would go into the water. Then I would go under the water. And then whenever I came out, because my lungs were already full and I couldn’t gasp, I would release the air. And then I would start breathing. Very slow and intentional breathing, even though everything inside of me instinctively wanted to breathe quickly and shallowly like: That’s what we do whenever we’re in a fight or flight mode. And especially whenever we’re in that sympathetic dominant nervous system state, or experiencing anxiety, we take these really quick, shallow breaths. But because I was aware that that was the response that my body wanted to have, I was able to consciously override that response and instead submerge myself in cold water and breathe deeply instead of quickly and shallowly. So while I was breathing in this very cold water, sometimes out loud and sometimes just inside my mind, I was saying, “I am comfortable being uncomfortable. I am comfortable being uncomfortable”. The cold water was really uncomfortable. Nothing about it was fun or comfortable. I was intentionally shocking and stressing my body, but I was taking advantage of the neuroplasticity in my brain, which is our brain’s capability to rewire neuronal pathways. And it can rewire pathways in response to stress and trauma. So knowing that intentionally stressing my body out, gave me a window of time of neuroplasticity in my brain, I wanted to take advantage of that. So I took advantage of the cold as an intentional stressor to my body to prove to my body: you can do hard things. You can be in an uncomfortable, stressful situation. You can stay calm. You do not have to gasp or flail about or go crazy. You don’t have to scream. You can just be here. And within about a week of starting the cold plunges, I saw noticeable differences — more than just the bug bites — in my physical well-being and in my mental and emotional health. And I could tell that these cold plunges really were making me more resilient to stress. And I don’t just mean physically. I mean, I was able to emotionally and mentally deal with more stress than I typically have been able to deal with in the past. After about a week, I remember getting into the water one day and I know it was a warmer day, so I want to be completely transparent about that. But I got into the water this day and the wind was just slightly blowing. And so, you do really careful on Lake superior because the wind can pick up and you can have three to six foot swells in no time. And it makes it very difficult. There is undertows and it can be hard to get out of the water and, it can be a dangerous Lake. So I’m always really aware of what the Lake is doing. But this day there was a sort of gentle breeze and there weren’t big swells. Um, it was sort of like, if I had been on a boat, it just would have been as gentle rocking in the water. And I found a large rock to stand on so that I didn’t have to swim or tread water, and I just planted my feet on this rock, and I closed my eyes, and my body began to just move and sway with the water. And it really felt like I became one with the water. Whatever the water did, I let my body move with the water and I let go of trying to stand still. I let go of the need to tread water or keep myself floating or keep my head above water. And I just closed my eyes and I really did have this beautiful experience of becoming one with the water. The water was still very cold, but I wasn’t paying attention to the cold. I was paying attention to this deep peace. It wasn’t like I was out of the stressful situation. I was still in the water, but I became at peace while I was in a stressful situation. And I think that day I stayed in this cold water for probably 15 or 20 minutes. And even though it was one of the warmer days. It just the peace that came over me in the midst of being in a stressful situation was incredible. I was breathing. I maintained my deep calm breath. I knew that I was okay. Even though I sort of felt a little bit numb in my fingers and toes, I still knew that overall I was okay. I was maintaining calm with my breath and with my mantra in my head. And I literally became comfortable with being uncomfortable. And after that day, I was like really addicted to cold plunges. Like every day I couldn’t wait until it was time for me to jump in the car and head to the Lake and go jump in the water and breathe and say to myself, “I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable”. And if you feel like you have a non resilient or , I don’t know what the right word is, but if you feel like your nervous system, isn’t very resilient. And if you’ve experienced complex trauma, especially from childhood, then it’s very likely that your nervous system lacks resiliency. Then I challenge you. Put yourself in a physically stressful situation of cold water, a cold shower, a hot sauna, exercising, trail running, whatever it is. And begin saying that mantra to yourself, even if you’re only able to do the activity for two minutes or five minutes, the whole time you’re doing it, just say I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. I am comfortable being uncomfortable. And then just watch how it translates to other situations in your life that are perhaps not physically stressful, but mentally and/or emotionally stressful. I think that using physical stress is a great way to build resiliency in our bodies and minds. Because the physically stressful situations are the ones that we do have some degree of control over when it begins and when it ends. I’m talking about the intentional cold shower, the intentional ice bath, or stepping into a cold Lake or a hot sauna or something like that. I can intentionally decide, “I’m getting in the water now”. And then if I become too uncomfortable or too cold, then I can intentionally exit the water and take the steps necessary to warm myself. It’s the same thing with exercise. You can choose when you’re going to start exercising and you choose, “Okay, I’m tired. It’s enough. I’m too stressed out. I’m choosing to stop.” So these are physical stressors that we have some control over that we intentionally use to build mental and emotional fortitude and resiliency because if we can stand and breathe calmly in 60 degree water for 10 or 15 minutes. That’s not an easy mental task. That takes mental fortitude. And it’s not always easy at first. Don’t expect that the first time you jump in 50 degree water, that you’re going to be able to hang out and swim in there for an extended period of time. It takes time to build up your body’s resiliency against the cold. Just like it takes time to build up your body’s and your mind’s resiliency to stress. But we can practice. And the more we practice, the stronger we get, the more resilient we become. Another reason I have the mantra I am comfortable being uncomfortable is something that I mentioned earlier, which is neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to rewire neuronal connections. So the reason why we don’t have to think about how we brush our teeth or how we get up and do our morning routine or how we drive to work is because by doing those things over and over and over, we cement the neural pathways in our brains that make those things become habitual and second nature. We don’t have to think about them and it’s our brain’s very efficient way of saving time and effort. However, neuroplasticity happens whenever we are in extreme stress or whenever we endure trauma. And so when we are in a stressful or traumatic situation and our brains are lit up with rewiring of neurons, then we can start having those connections wired in a way that doesn’t actually serve our highest good. So it’s efficient for our brains and our neurons to have pathways that get us to drive to work without having to remember the route every single day. But it’s not efficient for our brains to wire in such a way that every time we’re presented with conflict, we have a fight or flight or freeze response. Because then we’re not actually dealing with the conflict in a healthy way. The cold plunges for me and the mantra, I am comfortable being uncomfortable, is an intentional way to make my brain neuroplastic because the stress of the cold induces the brain to be open to change. And I want to take the former responses that I have had to emotional and mental stress and hack into my brain and into my autonomic nervous system by using cold or exercise to start the rewiring to get that neuroplasticity. In the past, as traumatized individuals, our trauma has taught us that being in a stressful situation is insanely uncomfortable and our nervous systems, our fight or flight responses, do everything that they can to get us to avoid hard, stressful, uncomfortable things. Just a very practical example is whenever you jump in your hot car that’s been sitting in a parking lot for five hours and it’s 150 degrees inside of your car, you immediately start your car and you turn on your air conditioner. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable and you have a way to modify your environment to make yourself more comfortable. But again, stress is stress. Trauma is trauma. Our brains and bodies don’t know the difference between the stress of getting in a hot car and wanting to cool off and the stress of being abused by our stepfathers. They just don’t know the difference. But what they do know is, “Oh, I can modify my environment and avoid the stress”, which is when we get those unhealthy coping mechanisms. You know, a lot of people resort to drugs and alcohol, screens, gambling, porn, things like that because their brains tell them, “Oh, I can avoid the stressful situation in my life or the feelings that I’m not feeling and I’m not dealing with in my life if I go to one of these things over here. Alcohol makes me feel better. Porn makes me feel better”. So it’s a maladapted survival response and the more our brains and bodies maladapt to stress and trauma, the more we get stuck in what I call trauma loops, and our trauma loops tell us, “This is hard. I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I want out of this. Get the hell out.” That’s an instinctive response. But by having the mantra, I am comfortable being uncomfortable, and by intentionally, strategically putting ourselves in stressful situations like cold water or hot saunas or exercising in the cold, we can begin to override those responses and force ourselves to stay in those stressful situations to prove to our brains and bodies: “look, you don’t have to freak out. You don’t have to go crazy and try to control this situation or make it stop or do everything in your power to get the hell out of here because it’s too uncomfortable. You can actually sit here in this cold water and be okay. You can actually sit here in this hot sauna and be okay.” Learning this was huge for me. And it didn’t start out as the most natural thing in the world. It started out with me intentionally focusing hard on my breath and the sensations in my body and becoming the observer of my thoughts, my physical body and the physical sensations that I was experiencing, and also the observer of watching how my brain and body wanted to modify my environment to make me more comfortable. I mean, it was in a matter of microseconds of getting into cold water that my instinctive response was to immediately turn around and get out. I did not want to be there. But I got out of my mind and I went into my higher self and I just sort of became this. I mean, I call it my spirit. My higher self is my spirit. And I like looked at myself like a bird’s-eye view. I was looking down on myself, telling myself, “You can do this. It’s okay. You can do hard things. I’m going to protect you. I’m not going to let you get too cold. This is not going to kill you. This is making you stronger.” This was huge for me and our trauma teaches us that our egos, our subconscious, our nervous systems, we can’t handle hard things. We want to do the exact opposite of the hard thing, which is to make ourselves comfortable, to get the hell out. We can’t handle confrontation. We can’t handle uncomfortable feelings. We don’t want to feel our feelings. And so we repress them. We don’t think about our feelings. We use drugs or alcohol or shopping or gambling or porn or whatever to check out of feeling, our feelings. And all of these are trauma responses. And so what trauma has created in us is resistance to anything hard because it perceives anything hard as this is too stressful. I can’t handle this. But we have the amazing ability to override that. And that’s what the cold plunges were for me with the mantra, I am comfortable being uncomfortable, because in that stressful situation, my brain is lit up with neuroplasticity and I can begin telling it, “That old pathway that you’ve been going down of avoiding uncomfortable situations? We are now overriding and we are creating a new pathway and you can be uncomfortable in a stressful situation.” Then outside of the cold water that has translated into more resiliency and strength in my mental and emotional health. So that the trauma responses that I have always had for my whole life, from childhood, of avoiding hard and uncomfortable emotional situations, avoiding conflict, fighting back, freezing, fawning, those types of responses. I’m now able to be in my higher self and look down on myself with compassion and gentleness and say, “Okay, this is a hard situation.” This, for example, I parent 2 teenagers. I have a 16 and a half year old son and a 15 year old daughter. And let me tell ya, parenting teenagers is not a cakewalk. Especially when those teenagers start exhibiting behaviors that push your buttons of childhood triggers, triggers that you thought you had dealt with in counseling or in therapy years ago. It’s amazing how those little teenagers will start saying things and acting in ways that trigger those old things. The cold and my mantra of I’m comfortable being uncomfortable has actually directly translated into how I parent my kids. Because it’s not easy and it’s not comfortable, but I am more able to deal with the conflicts that I have with my children because while we’re in the midst of conflict, if I remain aware and in my higher self, I am able to say, “This sucks in this moment, but I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. I can choose to respond with love and gentleness towards my kids. I can choose to respect my own boundaries and stick to my boundaries and not change because I want to avoid this conflict. I can also choose if I don’t want to be in this situation, I can consciously say, Hey, let’s take a break from this conversation and check back in and an hour after we’ve all taken a break.” So this has been transformational for me, and I really believe that if we’re going on a trauma healing journey, we have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because healing trauma requires us to face all kinds of discomfort. Healing trauma absolutely requires us to feel feelings that we have suppressed, repressed, lie to ourselves about, distracted ourselves from, lied to others about, and not allowed ourselves to feel. We have to begin to feel those feelings so that we can release them in order to heal. Holistic Trauma Healing requires us to confront really uncomfortable things and our ancestral lineage. Um, we all have family skeletons in the closet. And for a lot of us, those family skeletons are passed down generation after generation. I mean, think about just for an example, addiction and alcoholism. Those are diseases that run in families. Have you ever wondered why? Is it because I’m an alcoholic because I had an alcoholic father and he had an alcoholic father before him and his father before him was an alcoholic? I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think it’s, we have to ask ourselves what traumas were in these people’s lives that the only coping mechanism they knew was to grab alcohol and drink. And then their children learned, Oh, that’s a coping skill that dad or mom uses. That’s what I’m going to use. And so the traumas repeat themselves, but then the behaviors and the coping skills also repeat themselves, whether they’re healthy or unhealthy. I believe that we can pass down healthy coping skills to our children just as we can pass down unhealthy coping skills to our children. So we have to face uncomfortable things in our ancestral lineage. That’s part of holistic trauma healing. We have to face uncomfortable inner beliefs and mindsets that we have about ourselves. Um, one example is body image issues. If we’re going to heal trauma, we have to face the hate that we feel about our bodies when we look in the mirror and we criticize, “Oh, I’m fat, look at the cellulite, look at the wrinkles. Look at this. Look at that.” We have to confront those things and face them and heal them. And that’s not going to be comfortable at all. We have to confront relationships. If we have relationships in our lives, that we are a codependent in or they trigger our fight or flight response, we all have those relationships and it becomes very uncomfortable to have to face those things, but you can do it when you’ve trained your nervous system, that it can be comfortable with being uncomfortable. It can go through a hard conversation with a spouse or a parent. It can go through the hard journey of uncovering the skeletons and the family closet and dealing with those. It can do hard things and you teach it that it can do hard things by intentionally hacking in to your physiology by creating a stressful situation, forcing yourself to endure it, breathing through it. I cannot emphasize enough how important the breath work is in all of this. I challenge you the next time you’re in an emotionally or mentally stressful situation. Just check in with yourself in that moment. How are you breathing? I can almost guarantee that you are taking short, shallow breaths. And simply changing the way you’re breathing and breathing more deeply and into your diaphragm rather than into your chest can change your entire aura. I mean, really it will change your entire energy just by checking in with yourself, with how you’re breathing. So another thing that I do that I’m not ashamed to admit, is I talk to myself a lot. Sometimes it’s internal. Sometimes it’s out loud, but I talk to myself a lot and I tell my body a lot: “you can do this. You’re a bad-ass. You are comfortable being uncomfortable.” I pat myself on the back, I sort of act like my own coach, like my higher self or my spirit is the coach of my physical body and my mind and my emotions. So I like pat myself on the ass and send myself into the game, cheering myself on. And my next challenge to you is to pick something that makes you really, really uncomfortable.And maybe you don’t even know what makes you uncomfortable. Maybe you have repressed and suppressed feelings so much that you don’t actually even know what being uncomfortable is because you’ve never allowed yourself to be uncomfortable. Because the traumatized you, your inner child, your ego, your shadow, self, whatever you call it has created so much fear and resistance in you against any feelings of discomfort that you’re always sort of in a safe bubble. But really hint, hint, your safe bubble is also what keeps you stuck. And so my challenge for you is to pick something that intentionally puts you in a stressful situation. You choose whatever you want. But my challenge to you is to pick something physical because that’s something that you have a choice for whenever it begins and whenever it ends. So stay in that cold shower a little bit longer, stay in that hot sauna a little bit longer. Stay in that cold water a little bit longer. And just see if you can extend the amount of time that you’re intentionally allowing yourself to be in a stressful or uncomfortable situation. And watch, how does that translate into the rest of your life? Watch, if it creates more resiliency in your mind and in your emotions to be able to handle stressful situations outside of the physical stressor. I can guarantee you it’s creating more resiliency and strength in your nervous system and in your mental and emotional health. This is an incredible hack that anyone can do anywhere. You don’t have to have access to the largest inland body of water to do this. You can do this in your shower with the water turned all the way down to cold. You can put ice in your bath water and soak in a bathtub full of ice. Anybody can do this. Pick something. Start hacking into yourself. Use the mantra. I am comfortable being uncomfortable. I can do hard things. If you haven’t read Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed, that quote, “I can do hard things”? Man. That is a powerful one to grab a hold of, and you can add that into your mantra of I’m comfortable being uncomfortable, because really, if we are going to heal trauma, the first step is knowing that healing is uncomfortable. Healing is hard work. It’s not easy. It’s not a cakewalk. But when we train our physical bodies, to endure stress and trauma, we can also train our mental and emotional bodies to endure stress and trauma in a way that doesn’t have long-term damage and consequences for us. So, if you choose to take up my challenge, please let me know what you decide. You can find me on Instagram @iamlindseylockett, and you can subscribe to all future episodes of this podcast lindseylockett.com/podcast. I’ll see you next time. [OUTRO MUSIC]