EP #77- Using Precision Neuroscience to Develop Personalized Stress Management Techniques with Dr. Katherine Grill, Founder of Neolth

[MUSIC] So I think of kind of endorphins and cortisol on this balancing scale where, you know, for able to kind of increase the level of endorphins we have going on, do things that are good for us like exercise or balancing out or mood. We can start to decrease or burn off in what my teachers would call it, burn off our cortisol level. Welcome back to another episode of Everyday Endorphins. This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Catherine Grill. Dr. Grill is a behavioral neuroscientist, Forbes 30 under 30 recipient, and founder of Neoth, which is a technology company that provides stress management and mental health support to students by delivering on-demand personalized care through a self-guided platform. In this episode, Dr. Grill discusses her background in art therapy and then how she eventually got her PhD in neuroscience and then developed her own technology company. We also talk about the field of precision neuroscience and the importance of developing personalized care for mental health issues. We also discuss the different types of trauma-informed therapy and ways we can regulate our stress response and how endorphins can play a vital role in doing that. This week's interview is super informative and not only sheds light into the importance of personalized care, but why it's essential that we start bringing these concepts into the educational system. Before we get into it, make sure to like, rate, and review this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. Hi, Catherine. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I'm really thrilled to have you here today and I'd love to start off with you sharing a little bit about your background. If you could share a little bit about how you got to this point in your career. I know your behavioral neuroscientist and now that you started your own company around mental health and personalized wellness specifically in the education system. How did you land on that? Yeah, absolutely. The company we're talking about is called Neo for a technology company. We provide stress and mental health support within the school system. So really focused on students ages 11 plus and how I got there was a bit of a journey. I think something just growing up mental health was something that was always present in my life. Whether it was friends or family members who were struggling and I started to see how stigma and lack of access to care and financial resources could really be devastating. So it became interested in mental health from a young age. I ended up getting my bachelor's degree in art therapy and had done some clinical work. So working in psychiatric care directly with patients and really loved that. But became frustrated pretty early on because it was very evident who had access to care who didn't. And it was much though based on insurance and money and could you afford this. And I just felt like that was a problem. So I went back to school. I ended up getting my doctorate in neuroscience. I was really interested in how could we make care more accessible, more equitable and more personalized kind of looking at the brain to drive those personalized insights. So I got my PhD in neuroscience. I worked for a while in clinical research. So that's research working with people mostly with teens and young adults in mental health care. And absolutely loved it. I learned how to create health programs, how to do research, how to validate those programs. But the piece for me that was missing was the impact at scale. You know research you often do a smaller study, maybe a couple hundred or a couple thousand people. But I wanted to start training things on the societal level and impacting millions of lives. So I guess long story short, that's how I ended up in technology. I really saw that as a vehicle for making care more accessible and move out to Silicon Valley. It's going on five years now. I can't believe it. And ended up founding my own company. I love how you see technology as the vehicle to create a larger impact. Because I think that's where the good comes from technology. Like it having the power to impact a lot of people's lives, you know, at a large scale. Then of course there are, you know, as we know the detrimental effects that technology has on our mental well-being and our mental health specifically social media. But it's really inspiring to see how, you know, you're transforming the power of technology for more social good. Specifically with Nealith, you know, with the company that you founded, can you talk a little bit more about the programs and like how they actually speak to, you know, your neuroscience background and incorporate neuroscience principles in developing like stress management tools for young adults? Yeah, well high level the way the program works. So it's technology-based. So at-base there's also a no download needed browser version, but it's all self-guided. So you're not, you know, interacting with doctors or therapists, but it was made by doctors and therapists. So you have this self-guided app so you download it on your phone. And the first thing that people interact with is what we call our personalization survey. And this is where the neuroscience comes in. We like to learn about people a little bit so then we can personalize the content for them. So that information, it's fully confidential, but it really just helps our program and our algorithm, which is based on neuroscience, choose content that's relevant for that person. As we know health and wellness, it's not one size fits all. And the type of content that people want to interact with, the mental health symptoms that they're maybe struggling with or the stress that they have, it just varies person to person. So if we can start to pinpoint, you know, what are you struggling with? What do you want to help with? Then we can connect them right away with the best resources for them, which is really important, especially if you're thinking about, you know, when are people maybe downloading this type of application in a point of feeling overwhelmed, feeling a lot of stress, not having that capacity to sort through a bunch of content. So I think it's really a different approach than other applications where you download it and they have these kind of massive content libraries for you to sort through, but it's really just distilling the best media, whether it's audio, you know, relaxation practices or videos made by your peers, talking about their experiences, whatever it is, just distilling that media and then serving it up to people. It could feel probably very overwhelming if you're given this like incredibly large library of content to sort through, whereas when things are more personalized to you, I think there's more confidence in that, you know, it will be effective because the algorithm, you know, the programs are tailoring to your specific needs. And I know that offline, we talked a little bit about how neuroscience can inform, you know, the ways in which we engage with our mental health struggles or, you know, how we seek out certain types of therapeutic practices. So for example, like depending on the chemicals in your brain and how our chemicals are showing up in our bodies and our brains, we may feel more inclined to meditate versus go for a run. Like there are different types of stress management techniques. So it's not, you know, obviously you can't get every user like in a brain scan to kind of see their actual, you know, composition, what's going on in their brains at a chemical and a cellular level. So, you know, how can you, you know, translate what you could do, maybe let's say in an MRI scan or, you know, a brain scan, like how could you translate those findings through the algorithm, like through the questions that you ask, like how does that technology actually help to personalize the content and help users feel like they're, you know, getting the right resources for them to manage their stress and their emotional health. Yeah, that's a great point. And obviously neuroscience, brain science, a lot of it is based on imaging studies and imaging and an asthma virus really developed in the early 90s. So it's relatively recent when we think about that compared to the field of psychology, but gosh, we've learned so much from it. So, you know, obviously it's not reasonable or possible to get everybody into a brain scan machine and and do that sort of test on them. But you can absolutely do, you know, research beforehand, there's a wealth of a neuro imaging research out there that's actually free and accessible to the public, which is really cool. And you can learn about what's going on in the brain when somebody has a certain health condition like stress, anxiety or depression. And then on the flip side, you can learn about what's going on in the brain when they start to do different treatments. So it becomes kind of like a game of I think in matching a little game kids play with the cards, but can you match kind of the area of the brain that is struggling when somebody has a health condition with a treatment that's going to kind of target that area of the brain. And maybe a little bit more of a kind of down to earth example. I think a lot of people think of depression, right? And you think, okay, well depression is one diagnosis per the DSN, the diagnostic and statistical manual, which is what clinicians use to diagnose people. So if it's just one diagnosis, then everybody should have the same treatment, right? And we know that's not true. And people will start to know that it's not true because you can think of how many people that you've talked to so many people have maybe had depression and have responded to different treatments. Like some people respond to medications and antidepressants and other people don't. And people always ask kind of why, you know, why is that working for somebody else, but not me and I have the same diagnosis. Well, it really boils down to what's going on in the brain. So there's very cool research that's going on across the world. out here in California, Sanford's probably one of the most prominent places, but the field is called precision mental health care or precision neuroscience. I've seen it called as well. And what you can do is you can take a group of people with the same diagnosis like depression. I've seen it with an anxiety, PTSD, my work is with chronic stress, and you can start to do brain imaging and really develop different subtypes. So even though they have the same condition, they have kind of differences in their brain, subtle differences in the brain, where you can then predict which treatment they'll best respond to. So for something like depression, I mean, this is key because it takes 11 years from the start of symptoms, people actually getting treatment that works for them, which is so problematic. So to be able to kind of from the beginning figure out what's going on with them and connect them with the right treatment, that's life saving, right? I didn't know 11 years. That's so long. It's wild. It's really, really long. And then just think about in that time period too, like all the stress, the trauma, the quality of life that people might be having or decrease quality of life, the potential suicide attempts, right? It's really problematic. So kind of to go back and answer your question. So now we understand the brain can be different. Even if we have the same condition, you need to be able to match people with the right treatment. What you can do is you can use brain imaging is if you've had enough brain imaging research on both the symptoms side and the treatment side, you can build up AI components and matching to look at what we call behavioral phenotypes or you can think of it like subtypes, right? Subtype A, subtype B, based on different behaviors that people have. And then you can start to kind of get a sense of why I think based on these questions that these people are answering that they fit into this subtype, this is what's going on with their brain. And I know that these treatments will work for them. So that's the type of the precision neuroscience approach that we use on the O. Yeah, I've heard of Stanford also doing a lot of really interesting research specifically in like the neuroscience department. I'm sure you're familiar with Dr. Andrew Huberman. I love his podcast Huberman Lab. He's great and he's able to kind of like really talk about these complex neuroscience concepts in a very digestible way and also speak to a lot of the research that's being done at Stanford. So I'm really glad that you brought that up. But going off of your point around the different types of treatments that are available depending on let's say your behavioral phenotype, I think we're all very familiar with endorphins being a good way to kind of help reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety like going for a run like exercise is actually I believe one of the best lifestyle choices that you can make to help with symptoms of depression and anxiety. So as far as you know the the types of treatment that you offer so you know provide on on your platform, how do they differ depending on your behavioral phenotype and you know what can users expect to kind of see from you know after taking maybe that diagnostic you know what those treatment options could look like for them. I guess I shouldn't also be clear too that NEOF is really more for general wellness and stress management so we're not treating any specific health condition like depression but we do you know work with people who have things like depression or anxiety as what's called an adjunct to care so really kind of complimentary between whatever work they may be doing with their doctor. As far as the technique that we have on NEOF we have a range of in neuroscience what we call bottom up and top down techniques so bottom up is really around kind of creating use sensation in your body so you think about things that have to do with movement, things that have to do with touch like maybe art techniques breathing is a great one and then more of a kind of top down techniques so you could think about things like changing your patterns of thinking, CVT, mindfulness and meditation, guided imagery so it's a combination of those and then we can kind of work with people across the spectrum giving them you know whether it's all one type or whether it's some sort of combination of the different techniques that we offer. My generation I feel like is kind of experiencing this mental health epidemic in particular and we're also starting to recognize that chronic stress can lead to physical ailment like dealing with mental health issues can directly impact our physical well-being in our quality of life. Recently like burnout was coined as you know an actual definition like an actual terminology and I think young people especially are experiencing high levels of burnout either in a school environment or in a working environment and you know I'm curious you know how have you seen you know the students on your platform kind of combat issues related to burnout and and dealing with high levels of stress you know I think there's definitely a need and that age group but how have you seen their well-being improve and also why in particular you know do you find it necessary to target like the younger generation. Yeah I guess a couple questions how do we see changes and then why the younger generation so how some of the changes that we've seen some of the research we've done we typically do survey based research so looking at things like the PSS that's perceived stress scale so changes in stress over time decreases in stress things like the HADS hospital anxiety and depression scale so decreases in anxiety and depression so those three things anxiety depression and then stress obviously really common across anyone but I think especially the younger generation also increases in things like self efficacy so how confident are they to kind of navigate the stressors in their life that's a really important part of it and then we've also seen decreases in stigma and it's little as three weeks which I think is fantastic because stigma is such a huge barrier you know to getting care and I think that probably goes back into your other question why the younger generation we have a youth mental health crisis it's getting worse and worse it was bad before COVID COVID does mean things much worse but it's not going to change if we keep some people have described you this kind of trying to put a bandaid over a fire hydrant that's like spewing all this water by saying well let's do some more crisis care intervention don't get me wrong crisis care is critical it saves lives but why would you ever wait until somebody's at the point of crisis it overwhelm or thinking about taking their life to intervene like that just increases dramatically the risk of crisis so if you can go in as young as possible you can kind of flip this healthcare model on its head and not wait until people are sick or overwhelmed but go in as young as possible and to me that's young people that's the schools you can kind of attack this youth mental health crisis from the preventative lens so that's doing things like skill building learning about emotions to recognize emotions how to regulate emotions learning about mental health learning about stigma decreasing stigma getting them comfortable reaching out for help so if anything does happen in the future they won't keep it to themselves will actually be more willing to access any healthcare that is offered to them yeah I think that's like it's an important point you know how can we be proactive instead of reactive around these issues you know we wouldn't why wait until you know the point of crisis when we can kind of tackle it head on first before things could escalate to that kind of issue I'm really curious to hear how you envision you know the future of educating the younger generation about stress management and mental health like how do you see that become more integrated with the education system and you know what do you hope for that to look like in the future I think the more that we can integrate health curriculum so health you know we talk about mental and physical health I'm an integrative specialist I believe it's all just health but I do see they need sometimes to separate things into mental and physical health to be more clear but the more we can integrate health and mental health curriculum can into the schools we can normalize it you know think about math science all these other classes that you were taking from day one and you were always you know talking about it with friends with teachers with parents now imagine from a very young age you're talking about mental health on a regular basis before you're at a point where you're not feeling well with your friends with your teachers with your parents it becomes something that's so normal and so natural that of course if something starts to go wrong you're gonna talk about it you're gonna have the language to talk about it you're not gonna feel that stigma you're going to have the understanding of who you can reach out to for help so my my real hope is to integrate this in a very real way into schools across you know the age span so it's something that we're just interacting with on a daily basis and I think that just makes things much more equitable and more more accessible to young people that's a really great point that you bring up like having the language I feel like it's really difficult to conceptualize what you're going through if you can't if you don't have it in your vocabulary to talk about it you know how do you translate what's going on in your head or you know how you may feel like in your body like those sensations that you might be feeling that are probably directly related to symptoms of anxiety or depression like if you can't verbalize that and vocalize it and share it with others then I can imagine it's even more difficult to just have that conversation yeah absolutely I mean how would you know that something is stress or how do you know that a stomach ache or headache or even just not feeling well. I think a big question that we get a lot of times from young people are that I've seen as a clinician is, I don't enjoy things anymore, right? I think that I really used to like, I don't enjoy. And that's a potential symptom right of depression. But how would you know that if you weren't first taught that? So I think even just educating around the signs and symptoms of stress and depression, things like that, it really helps these young people learn to notice red flags in themselves or in their friends. And then also to know what those channels are, who they can reach out to for help. - I wanna talk a little bit more about some of the neuroscience behind happiness and also what's kind of going on in our bodies and in our brains when we talk about the body-mind connection. So I know there's a few different happiness hormones. Obviously we have endorphins, we have serotonin, we have dopamine, but could you give a little overview on like the distinction between those different happiness hormones and how they play roles in our body? - Yeah, I will give a bit of a distinction and on a disclaimer, very high level. So you mentioned serotonin, for example, a lot of people think about that as far as elevating mood. That's kind of the main chemical and we think of as SSRIs, right? The main class of antidepressants. So increasing serotonin to help elevate mood, whether it's something that's happening naturally in the body or something that's actually coming from medication. Dopamine we think about as kind of pleasure and reward, it can be associated with things like addiction. So you think of things like eating, eating rich foods, things like sex, things like gambling, alcohol can be associated with those. But there also is a kind of a natural amount of dopamine that you want to feel rewarding in your body. It also has to do with movement too. So kind of disclaimer, I'm talking about some of these chemicals in a kind of one faceted way, but they actually have kind of multiple implications in the brain in the body and depending on which part of the brain they're active in. Oxytocin I think of as well, which has a lot to do with kind of social situations and bonding. People can think of it as kind of bonding between them typically, like people would talk about the birth mother and child and breastfeeding, but you can also think of it with partners or friends or other people that you're involved in. So there is this kind of complex, I guess, array of chemicals that are going on. But I actually, it probably depends, who you talk to. I think some people are really interested in the chemicals. I'm really interested in the integration of the brain. So looking at things like the trion brain, the different levels of the brain kind of from the evolutionary perspective, and then what is that kind of integration and how different impulses are kind of external stimuli, how they're consciously or unconsciously processed, and then what are kind of regulation responses, our ability to self-regulate or to kind of understand those external stimuli. That's something that I think is really interesting to me, I think is getting a lot of a lot of study and a lot of attention in neuroscience. And I think that has a lot to do with both happiness and then also the way that we regulate stress is when we really start to look at the connections between different areas of the brain. You can think of kind of the neurochemicals as cars and the connections as roads and neurochemicals kind of need those, this is a very simplified metaphor, but need those roads to be able to travel. So I think of the integration as an important piece as well. - Our environment really can shape our reality, who we surround ourselves with location-wise, where we're physically located, what's directly in our environment, who we choose to bring into our space can directly impact our wellbeing and our mood, and maybe we can observe this from a more psychological level, but also what I hear you saying is that our environment can also kind of affect us on this neuroscience level as well, from our brain chemistry, kind of where you were just talking about the integration of these hormones in our bodies and in our brains. And so I think especially the younger generation or kids who are maybe in middle school or high school, you're at an age where you're not necessarily cognizant around being intentional with your environment, also a lot of the time we can't necessarily like choose what environment we're placed into in our childhood. So what are some insights you can share around just developing a greater awareness around like how our environment can affect our mood, our wellbeing and our brain chemistry, like that integration piece. - Yeah, I think that's a big point. It's a tough point that you bring up, especially when we're talking about children, because to what extent do they really control their environment? I would say it's very limited. And that I think can really lead to things like developing a chronic stress response, trauma, behavioral and emotional difficulties down the road. So I do think that that is part of the reason why it's really important for integrating these types of social emotional learning, stress management, techniques early on, because you can start to teach the children different techniques to kind of deal with things in their environment, or to at least have that language to start to understand when something's going on in the environment, that's problematic, that they might have more of that language to be able to share with somebody. Having some of the skills is going to be important, and then the community resources and support as well, especially for young people. I think it's, you know, some part that they do independently on their own, but a large part, it's based on the support systems in the communities who are surrounding them and how adults can intervene when needed. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a really hard question to answer. And I think it's also, you know, kind of like the golden question to, like, you know, kids in particular, don't really have control over their environment. So what are some steps that they can do to feel empowered, take care of themselves when a lot isn't in their control necessarily? I want to kind of go back a little bit to some of those chemicals we were talking about. You gave a definition around like dopamine versus serotonin. But what about endorphins? Can we talk a little bit about like the role that endorphins play in our brains and in our bodies as well? I think people most often associate endorphins with elevated mood, with things like exercise. And sometimes I think about them as like, if you think that one of those skills, like those balancing skills. And again, this is a simplistic explanation. But thinking about it as kind of balancing out cortisol. So cortisol being one of the stress hormones, right? That has a really negative impact on the brain and the body when it's in overdrive. So obviously it's there for a reason. It's adaptive. We have cortisol in the body for a purpose. But when we're in this chronic stress phase, it can start to really impact the body. So I think of kind of endorphins in cortisol on this balancing scale where, you know, if we're able to kind of increase the level of endorphins, we have going on, do things that are good for us, like exercise or balancing out or mood. We can start to decrease or burn off. It's what my teachers would call it burn off, our cortisol level. So I think that that's one way that many people think about it and that can be kind of helpful as if you can kind of get more of the endorphins and help yourself lower some of the cortisol or some of that stress hormone. Yeah, that's a great way to think about it. I feel like the more that you try to incorporate things in your life that bring you that sense of joy and happiness and fulfillment, you start to gain more confidence in your ability to take care of yourself. And I think, you know, psychologically, it does something to you where you feel like, "Oh, I'm able to do this. I feel good in my body and I feel good in myself and I feel like I can take care of myself." And so that produces positive emotion. And then it's like this ripple effect. Like once you have that sense of self, that sense of positivity, then it's easier to kind of do the things that are good for your health when you feel like grounded in that. And so what I love about your program is that you're equipping students with actionable skills and steps that they can do to kind of build that emotional toolkit and strengthen those tools like resilience and grit. I think grit is really fascinating in particular also like looking at the neuroscience of grit and resilience as well in our brains. But giving students the ability to have these tools to come back to in times of hardship because we're always going to face stress in our lives. And like you mentioned, stress has an evolutionary purpose. It's good to actually have small amounts of stress in our lives. It can kind of drive us to do things. But the problem again is like when it's an overdrive. So how do we kind of regulate that and make sure it doesn't kick into overdrive? So I think about the stress response. I think about three different hormones to people typically think of cortisol as a stress hormone. And then I also think about like epinephrine and neuroepinephrine. So the hormones that are being released into our body kind of circulating in our bloodstream, they typically land on a target organ. and they'll have some sort of a fact like. for example, making your heart be really, really quickly. And again, this stuff is adaptive because you need to have that kind of fight or fight response to get away from danger. You need to have this stress response going on in your body for a certain time. So when it becomes problematic, it's not that these hormones are bad, but when they are elevated in the blood in the body for a long periods of time, that's when it becomes problematic. And that's when you start to see problems like physical health problems, mental health problems as well burn out, chronic stress. I think what you said before was really interesting about kind of having that self-efficacy or that feeling of agency and control. And that's why I love behavioral medicine because it is very much so on learn skill, putting a tool in your toolbox. It's interesting. A lot of students will actually describe it like that. This is a tool I'm putting in my toolbox. This is something I learned on the app that I remember to do later on, even though I didn't have my phone on me, but in a real world situation that I could do. So I love that because it's all about building these skills and then using them in real world situations as they're growing up. But definitely having that kind of sense of control or mastery, I think that really helps a lot of people with knowing like, I know how to handle this situation. And I think from a neuroscience informed perspective, different things you can do, at least the way I like to categorize it, I can really think of it as this kind of bottom up and top down what I mentioned before. And that really has to do with the categorize it by kind of the type of processing, whether it's effort and or effort processing. So is the stimulus coming from the body, for example, am I breathing or moving? Am I manipulating my body? Am I brain is registering that? So the stimulus is coming from the body to the brain. We call that kind of bottom up or is it top down? Is it something like a CVT where I'm restructuring? I'm changing my thoughts. And that's having an effect on my body, for example, coming down my breathing, coming down my heart rate. I really like personally, like the bottom up, I think people do start to have a preference. Bottom up techniques are really great for when you're in that moment of panic, when you're in that moment of overwhelm. This is much more aligned with trauma-informed care when you do it correctly. So you can think of things like breathing exercises, somatic experiencing, which should be done with the therapist. That's a really interesting one for trauma. Dance therapy, music therapy, things like that can be really fantastic. And the way that they work at so immediate, there's the vagus nerve, right? It connects from your brain and it goes right into your lung, right into your heart. So if you can do this deep breathing, especially prolonging that exhale, what you're doing, I kind of think of it like that game telephone. We have me or kids with the cups on the string. It's automatically your lungs are doing this deep breathing and it's communicating with your brain. It's like, hey, you can chill out. It's fine. You're in a safe place. So you can very quickly turn off that stress response or turn off that panic. So I think any sort of breathing exercise is a great thing for people to have in their toolkit. But then some people also really like those kind of cognitive restructuring, CVT techniques or mindfulness techniques. They have all of these things on your mouth. The one thing that I would kind of caveat that I would say is I really think when you're in that moment of kind of panic or overwhelm, you need to be doing the grounding techniques, the bottom up techniques. It's really hard to try to do a cognitive restructuring or top down technique when you're not feeling calm. You need to be kind of in that calm mindset. So I almost think that those is more advanced techniques or when you're feeling like a more kind of stable emotional state. But either one, I think, can work really well as far as feeling that sense of mastery. And when we're recognizing stress in our environment, how do we start to manage that? Yeah, I love this distinction between top down and bottom up. I think it's a really nice way to kind of differentiate the two different buckets, let's say, of stress management techniques. And something that I was reminded of as you were talking about that, specifically with trauma-informed stress response techniques around like finding things to ground you. I love body scan meditations. And I find those to be so powerful because you're forced to ground yourself with the sensations in your body as you focus on each particular body part kind of scanning from the crown of your head to your feet or your feet up to your head. And so I think when you can really kind of be intentional and focus on specific areas of the body and the sensations that you're feeling at that point in time, it forces you to be in the present because your body is in the present. Our mind exists in the future and in the past. And if we're not with our body in the present, then we're suffering the consequences of anxiety and ruminating and depression and feeling sad or lost. And I think that's why the body is such a powerful anchor to come back to and specifically the breath as well because you described how it can kind of bring us that feeling of safety and comfort and immediately decrease our heart rate. I mean, the breath is the most direct access that we have to regulating our heart rate. Yeah, absolutely. And I think kind of going back to that too, thinking about the body I used to teach in the somatic department, a really fun class. It was neuroscience for people who were becoming therapists. So we're thinking about it from a really body and form perspective. But as you're thinking about these techniques and what you want to do yourself or what you want to do in the classroom with your students, I think that trauma and form perspective is really great and just kind of disclaimer, this might be a bit of a trigger warning for some people. But thinking about the body, especially for people who have been abused physically or sexually, it can be really scary. Or just have had trauma or other strong emotions because they live in the body, like think about when you felt very sad or upset, like the physical sensations in your body. So sometimes what happens is when we're doing these exercises, we're bringing awareness to the body, like a body scan, there can be this bubbling up or overwhelmed emotions. I've had a lot of teachers talk to me about this, like I was doing mindfulness or something in the classroom and some of my students have had this very negative response. And they're kind of surprised why would that happen? So typically, those are our students who might have experienced some sort of trauma. And what I think what's happening is when you experience trauma and this is kind of a neuroscience thing, you cut off from the body. And what I mean by that is there's less cortical integration and processing. So there's less in areas like the insula and the ACC, there's actually, you can see on brain scans, less processing in those areas that have to do with body awareness. So people are trying to shut off their emotions and emotions live in the body. So what's happening is they're shutting off their emotions and their body awareness. And when you jump into some of these things like body scan, you're kind of jumping back and like, it's like turning on the floodgates. So there's a way to do it in a way that can help people kind of self-regulate. And that can be movement or awareness of the body that's safe. So rather than jumping right into I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do a body scan, what's going on now, it can be in the classroom turning on music and doing some dance. And then, okay, we're going to do, we're going to not just jump into the sensation that's kind of scary in your body, but we're going to create a new safe sensation, some fun dance, some fun movement. And then we're going to become aware of our body then. So I think that can be really important to know too, like that body awareness. It's key because that's emotional awareness. And you first need to be aware of your emotions to manage and regulate them. But doing so in a kind of trauma-informed lens in a way that feels comfortable is also really important. And it can be really tricky. It kind of reminds me of trauma-informed yoga, which I feel like is another really great example of incorporating movement into the healing process. Yoga in itself is just a very therapeutic practice to do. And I'm not very familiar actually between the difference of between a regular, maybe let's say, in the NASA class versus doing maybe more of a restorative practice that is more focused on trauma. But I can imagine that there are a lot of similarities because one of the things that I find to be most beautiful about the yoga practice is how it really allows you to develop that intuition with your body, especially because you're focusing on bringing breath to movement and mapping breath to movement. And so when you're focusing on your breath and moving in a certain position, you're grounded in the present and you're feeling those sensations in your body. And like you mentioned earlier, the emotions are in our bodies. So we also talk a lot about in yoga how emotions are very much stored in our hips. And so when you're doing poses like pigeon pose, it's quite often that you can experience the emotional sensations. And without even putting active thought towards it, it can kind of just surface. Is this kind of what you've experienced or seen in things like dance therapy or maybe even art therapy when you were doing that earlier in your career? Yeah, definitely. I think again, it will depend on the individual. It will depend on their background. People who are listening will probably have a really clear preference. It sounds like a gut reaction of like, this sounds great. I'm interested in these expressive arts or I really prefer top therapy. And for me, top therapy, I think I always had kind of a visceral reaction. People are kind of surprised as if-- therapist when I say that, that did not feel safe to me. That did not feel comfortable for me for a lot of reasons. But the expressive arts did. And it was just more trauma-informed. Art therapy, yeah, it's really, really interesting. I think a lot comes out of the subconscious. So when you think about working with children, with young people, people who've experienced trauma, even older people, if you think about like all timers or dementia, people who are struggling to verbalize. These techniques can be really great, because with talk therapy, it's all about verbalization. And again, I keep going back to this integration of the brain. But that's so key towards health and healing. And what happens in trauma and stress, you can think of it like three different levels of the brain, you have what people call kind of reptilian brain, the brain stem, heart rate, breathing, that type of thing. You have what people call the emotional brain, which is your amygdala area, things like the stress response, and then you have the cortex and things like the higher order of thinking, kind of reasoning, being able to shut off that stress response, right? So the integration of the brain is the three of them talking. Something is happening, and rather than my emotional brain just saying, I'm going to react. Like I'm going to have this big reaction, being able to take a step back. Breathe, respond, and have your kind of cortex do this top down regulation of, actually, this is the best way to respond. Not what I wanted to do in this moment, but here is the most appropriate way to respond. So I think in order to kind of really engage, sometimes in these things like talk therapy, you need to be in a place where you can verbalize what was going on, and you need to be relatively calm because as we start to get more and more stressed, what happens is we lose that integration, and we shut down the top part of our brain and it has to do with verbalization. So it can be very difficult for somebody who's in that heightened state of stress to kind of talk things through. Versus something that's more movement oriented, that's more expressive oriented, especially when there's that trauma response, people are starting to work through it, but they're working through it in a way that's nonverbal, and that makes them where they are if they're not fully integrated and using those more verbal areas of their brain. Also really important, actually, when people experience trauma, there's less activity in Broke as area, which has to do with verbalization, and also in the campus and parts that have to do with memory. So we have impaired memory and impaired verbal memory, so it's really hard to talk about or remember these things, but when you kind of express it through the body, that can be really healing, and people can kind of start to put the pieces together. So I think it's very important to understand these techniques. I loved as a neuroscientist working with different therapists who one was like, I do somatics and I do art, I do CBT and kind of bring them all together in a room to talk about their different techniques and then start to see, well, here's actually the best kind of implication or case study for when you should be using your technique based on the neuroscience, 'cause I think a lot of times we think about therapy as like, well, who's in that work, who can be a forward, who's close to us, and then doesn't matter what's going on, but if you start to think about it from this neuroscience lens, you can see, oh, based on what's going on with me, one technique might be really more appropriate. So understanding, I think some of the nuances there, and that's what precision meant to health care is, and that's why it's so exciting. - I think it also speaks to this point that you raised earlier around health not being a one size fits all, and also recognizing that there are less traditional modes of therapy, that doesn't have to just be like, going to a therapist that's like in network and you're, you know, your provider. There's different ways you can access therapeutic benefits from different activities, and I think especially also having an open mind is so critical to recognizing that there are, different ways that you can heal and different ways that you can take care of yourself. And you know, something that I'm also interested in hearing is as someone who is very knowledgeable about our brains and our bodies and our psychology and our neuroscience, do you find that, you know, having this wealth of knowledge helps empower you to manage your stress better, or does it sometimes feel like you have maybe too heightened of an awareness if that makes any sense? Like you're too aware, and you know, you understand the facts, maybe too, to a fault sometimes or it can be difficult to actually make those changes in your life. - That's such an interesting question. No one has ever asked me that. I think that it's really helpful. I think as somebody coming from a background with some difficulties, with like a higher ACEs score, to ACEs as adverse childhood experiences, right? There was a lot of stress. There was a lot for me stress manifests physically, so a lot of physical health issues that I didn't fully understand. And I could not advocate for myself and explain to the doctors what was going on because I didn't know. So I think coming to this place of understanding both from the psychological and then the biological perspective, I really understand myself better. It's been helpful in my own kind of personal journey when I've been able to have that education and that kind of background to be able to talk to doctors and explain again, having that language to explain what was going on. I think it's helpful though for anybody to be able to recognize. It's kind of recognizing the trigger. You can think of it like a glass of water and when it starts filling up and filling up and at some point it starts pouring over. I think most of us recognize stress once it starts pouring over. Where like this is something happened, I'm overwhelmed, this is too much. But really we should be recognizing it much earlier. So whether it's me, somebody like me wanting to learn this through their degrees and their professional experience or I think the majority of us were just wanting to learn through skill building and activities and things on NEOs and other programs. Either way, I think it's critical. There can be this kind of heightened anxiety and stress response when you start getting into it, especially if there's trauma. So that's important to understand that's when it might be important to loop in and doctor a therapist. But either way, I always advocate for building up that foundation of awareness because I just think knowledge is power. I love your answer. And the reason I wanted to ask is because my studies in college were a combination of philosophy and neuroscience and psychology. So as you were going through the different areas of the brain, I was getting flashbacks to cognitive neuroscience or principles of the nervous system. And I think because I've had these just natural inclinations towards finding these topics interesting, I've kind of used myself as a case studies when I'm feeling stressed or overwhelmed or anxious, I think deeply about it. And so I feel like I'm flexing those self-awareness skills and muscles, but then sometimes it can feel like it's to a fault where I can overthink things or I'm like too prescriptive about what's going on in my life for why I'm behaving a certain way or why I'm thinking a certain way. So it's interesting to hear your perspective because I would agree that at the end of the day, knowledge is power. And it's helpful to be informed by what's actually going on in your brain and in your body to better understand and to have the vocabulary to talk about it, to express it. Another question that I have, and actually, I'd love to land on this one because it's something that I think kind of ties directly into what we were just talking about. What is something that brings you a bit of endorphins, enjoy in your day-to-day life? I've always been someone, as we talked about, that it was more kind of physical and gravitated towards using my body in the expressive arts. I actually have a degree in art. So I was like a painting student long before I went to neuroscience. So I love art and art therapy. I did that myself personally. Exercise, I'm big kind of swimming. So I do that almost every day in California with lucky tags on shine. And then also just spending time in nature, spending time with animals. So yeah, it's interesting for me. I think a lot of it has to do with the body. It has to do with nature. It has to do with animals and less spending time with people. But that's just me personally. Obviously, exercise brings endorphins, creativity brings endorphins. I've heard a lot of similar answers to those as well. So lovely to get to hear your response to. Katherine, it's been such a pleasure having used a guest on the podcast. Where can my listeners find you? Where can they connect with you? Where can they learn more about everything that you're doing with Nealith and beyond? Yeah, absolutely. Probably the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. Katherine, the K Grill, GRIL, L. You should be able to find me. Send me a note that you heard about me through the podcast. People can also check out Nealith. It's on the app store, Nealith, N-E-O-L-T-H.com is our website. And there's interviews I do or other people in the field are doing that you can learn about more. So I would say either from LinkedIn, my personal LinkedIn, or from our website at Nealith. Thank you again so much. It's been such a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for listening and remember to like, and review this podcast on whichever listing platform you prefer. Don't forget to keep spreading endorphins and find things that bring you endorphins every day. See you next time.