`I am counting down the days until the 2022 Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) Food Allergy Summit officially begins! This year the summit will be taking place in Orlando, Florida. 
I am both thrilled and honored to be co-leading a mental health presentation with Catherine Walker, who recently began studying as a freshman at Tufts University. Catherine has not let her food allergies define who she is and her story is so inspiring. You can read more about Catherine and her story here. 

I am also delighted to be leading an adults only workshop where will be discussing mental health and practical tips on how we can support overall mental well-being for adults and everyone in the family. 

You can learn more about FARE and the 2022 Summit by clicking here. 

Your Nervous System
The most important thing to recognize about your nervous system is that it does not ask your permission or your opinion before it does its job to protect you. This is essential in keeping you alive. How so? If your nervous system perceives your repressed emotional world as a greater predator than your physical anxiety, symptom, pain, and so forth, it will lock into protective mode and cause the symptom - trigger the symptom - to divert you from thinking about your repressed emotional world that you have no control over.

Your Gut
Deep in your brain, the hippocampus checks every sensory input it receives and compares it against our memories and experiences. If something is not right, the amygdala which is our alert system right next door to the hippocampus is activated. The amygdala communicates through sensations that you feel in your body and does so by sending a channel of information into your gut and other organs via the vagus nerve. 

The gut feeling you have should not be confused with emotions. Rather, it can help you process emotions both present and past. For example: imagine you feel like there is a lump in your throat when you feel upset. If it feels safe to do so, go into your body and ask: what is this lump sensation in my throat? Does it want to move or expand? What does it need from me in order to do so? 

A professional athlete who was once my patient had massive anxiety when younger players were drafted and/or traded to play on his team. He did a very brave thing: he went and got to know them and helped his amygdala learn that it was safe and friendly. How so? He learned to how to shuffle between all levels of the brain including: reasoning and logic, feeling and emotion, and wisdom of the body. By doing so, he was able to feel more integrated, less in conflict with himself, and feeling much more connected to his teammates.

Do you ever have a gut feeling that you know you need to listen to? Our bodies are part of our minds and they speak to us every day. And when you pay attention, it can improve your life. 

Sometimes your body knows what is right for you. It sends you signals. When your feelings are in a spin, the message from your body becomes very clear. However, the message or messages can become difficult to interpret when our mental health is in poor shape. 

Anxiety and inner conflict arise if our inner compass is cloudy and if our mind is at odds with itself in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. In my practice, I both encourage and educate my patients to learn how to listen to their own insides and actively tune into the sensations they experience in their bodies. By doing so, we can identify what is right for us and and feel empowered to take the small, safe steps towards healing. 

This type of somatic awareness can help us to become aligned in our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The gut feelings we experience are not just for emergency "fight or flight" situations, they are present all the time. Just as you are reading this blog post, if you focus your attention on the heart and gut regions of your body, you will begin to notice a response to my words. Just notice if any part of you feels my words to be true, or perhaps you feel "no that can't be true". Perhaps you notice your attention going elsewhere? Like reading ahead to see how much longer this post is? Just notice how quickly or slowly your body is able to take a complex situation and summarize it quickly, or moment by moment. 

There is to come on this topic, so stay tuned! 

​On the topic of self-awareness, are you aware that self-awareness makes you impenetrable to judgment?

Say your name is John and I walk up to you and call you banana. You would most likely give me a strange look and know that I am wrong because you know your name is John. So me calling you banana is almost funny in a way because it is just not true. 

This same way of thinking can be applied to judgment and self-awareness because when you take the time to get to know who you truly are and begin to understand WHY you are the way you are, when someone else judges you, it becomes the John to the banana situation. You just know that what someone else is saying is not true.

So instead of thinking "does this person know something about me that I don't?" You think "this person just does not know me so I am not going to waste my time giving them my energy". 

​Get to know yourself so that you can be the one that holds the power over judgments that simply do not belong to you. 

You are not responsible for your first thought. You are, however, responsible for your second thought and your first action. 

What does this mean? 

In other words, do not get mad at yourself for having disordered thoughts. Do not think that you are a failure or that you will never succeed. Instead, focus on your second thought: what can I do differently? What is the alternative and positive outcome of the situation? And then your first action: I am going to choose fear as a messenger that is trying to tell me what I need to do because I can get through it, instead of telling me what I shouldn't be doing because I fear that I can't. 

The first thought we have is often the thought or negative belief (or negative cognition) that is linked to an earlier memory. You have the power to tell it to get lost.

1. Identify the thought 
2. Using curiosity, ask yourself these questions: "What is this trying to tell me?", "Is there a feeling that is influencing what I am thinking?" 
3. Identify a counter-argument for the initial thought 
4. Make a decision 

As a mental health expert specializing in working with elite and professional athletes, playing a sport won't "solve" or "cure" issues related to mental health.
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What I generally observe is a disconnect occurring between the mind and body, affecting performance, and ultimately affecting emotional safety and health. This cycle circulates in one big loop, or what I love to phrase as a "pattern". 

At the same time, it is also important to recognize that an athlete is still a human being under the helmet or uniform he or she wears.
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Just because a person can compartmentalize and carry pain well does not mean it is not heavy for that person. 

With Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy becoming popularized as a mental health treatment, I would like to spend some time with you today talking about the various mechanisms of trauma and how it affects our brain and its functioning.

A primary question I often receive centers on the question of "what is dissociation" and "will I dissociate during EMDR?". Dissociation is a survival oriented process. Dissociation is the way the brain has the ability to take something that is so overwhelming when a patient cannot escape a stressful event and/or is caught in the freeze response.

So for example, there might be a child being hurt by a caregiver. Children are often too small to run away or fight back. They are the victim of the grown up. What the brain does during this type of scenario is that it allows the child to be there and not be there at the same time. In other words, the dissociative process of the brain is protecting the child so they can survive the experience.

EMDR therapy helps patients move through the dissociative process, which is inherent in any kind of trauma. EMDR helps the patient move through the experience with a much reduced rate of emotional arousal.

For the previous thirty years when trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were added to the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), it only categorized trauma as specifically large or “Big T” events. However, adverse life experiences or “little traumas” can also have a major impact on social, emotional, psychological, and physiological functioning.

I personally choose not to define trauma by “little” or “big” events. What is significant to me in my professional opinion is how the smaller, more repetitive patterns of events become recorded in the nervous system and because of its repetition, these experiences gradually accumulate in the brain.

Where in the brain does this all get stored? Please allow me to introduce to you, if you have not already learned about the amygdala. The amygdala is within the right hemisphere of the brain, known for responding to a heightened sense of arousal. The amygdala translates information that it receives from the other parts of the brain into an emotional response. This type of response can manifest in a variety of ways within the body (e.g. heightened blood pressure, more rapid breathing, blood moving from the central part of the body to the peripheral, and the release of adrenaline). ​

In my next post, I will continue to discuss two key symptom behaviors that are congruent with trauma: avoidance and rumination. Stay tuned! 

I am so excited to share the news of this freshly released podcast episode with you! 
I recently sat down for a conversation with Jacksonville local, Kacie Main, who is both the author of her book "I Gave Up Men for Lent" and host of "The Better You" podcast. 
Kacie beams with joy and she is clearly passionate about learning and inspiring others. During our conversation, Kacie (with permission of course) picked my brain about my most favorite topics in mental health, including EMDR therapy, the neurobiology of trauma, and mindfulness! 
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Click here for the link to Episode 7 of my conversation with Kacie for Apple 
Click here for the link for Episode 7 of my conversation with Kacie for Stitcher

This community continues to surprise me in the most incredible ways and I am so thrilled to be here in Ponte Vedra Beach knowing people like Kacie are here shaping the world into a better place. I know I for sure look forward to hearing more from Kacie. Something leads me to believe she is on to something special with the work she is doing. 
If you have not done so yet, please give a follow to the incredible Kacie Main Instagram account @kaciemain_writes and of course, tune into and give a follow to the podcast @thebetteryoupodcast. 
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Read that one more time: YOUR BRAIN IS NOT WIRED TO MAKE YOU HAPPY. YOUR BRAIN IS WIRED TO SURVIVE.

Generally speaking, we are taught and conditioned from a very young age that being happy all the time is "normal" and represents a standard of "good health". What I am about to share with you right now may cause some cognitive dissonance, but please try to keep in an open mind: there is no survival value in being happy. You aren't more likely to be successful. From my experience and observation as a mental health professional, I notice fear and anxiety steering the wheel for my clients, driving him her to get things done. Having fear and anxiety driving the vehicle towards completing tasks and obligations is actually pretty normal and healthy. And really, it is not all that bad if we are looking at these motivating behaviors through an evolutionary lens. Why? Your brain is programmed to get things done under the assumption he or she may have to confront an unknown perceived danger or threat.

So you might be asking, how does this have to do with happiness and survival? As our human ancestors evolved over time, they began colonizing into groups, forming communities of hunters and gatherers. Humans who would have most likely hesitated when they saw something in the woods or came across unfamiliar terrain on a hunt, were more likely to survive. Over time, this specific trait began appearing more frequently in the genetic material passed down to future generations.

Over time, the need for a higher volume of food supplies, weaponry, shelter, and children increased as a result of our human ancestors focusing more on safety and its positive impacts such surpluses would provide, ultimately ensuring the continuation of passing on the strongest genetic material to future populations. The more successful these early humans were, the stronger the genetic material would be, ensuring the continuation of a species that would evolve and continue to evolve over time to survive and adapt to changing environments and climates.

Here we are today in the modern world. Being careful often hurt us, and "threats" are not typically life threatening. This is where anxiety tends to show up in our lives. Our brains are programmed with the unique ability to process information so that we can survive. Survival includes connection, communication, and community. Your unique genetic material does not have the data to compute beating yourself up emotionally for not being a happy person.

In the experiment of life, survival is the Independent Variable (IV). Happiness is the Dependent Variable (DV). The DV is assumed to be affected by the IV, hence the term 'dependent' (its value depends on the state of the IV).