Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:07):
Welcome to the AIP Summit Podcast, your go- to resource for taking control of your autoimmune health presented by AIP Certified Coaches. Hi, I'm Marie-Noelle Marquis.
Jaime Hartman (00:17):
And I'm Jaime Hartman, and we're here to equip you with the tools, knowledge, and support you need to effectively use the autoimmune protocol.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (00:25):
And today we are going deep into one of the best tools you already have, your mindset.
Jaime Hartman (00:36):
In this episode, we are sharing the audio from a presentation that was delivered in January of this year at the Seventh Annual AIP Summit. The presentation was called The Evidence for Mindset and Health Outcomes and Physical Healing. The speaker is Heba Saleh. She's a culinary nutrition educator, yoga teacher, personal trainer, and of course, an AIP Certified Coach. Heba came to this work through her own journey with Hashimoto's and postpartum depression. You'll hear her talk about that in her presentation. Her presentation draws on some fascinating research to make the case that our beliefs, thoughts, and daily practices can directly influence our immune function, inflammation levels, and our capacity to heal.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (01:20):
Hello's presentation was actually one of my personal highlights of the annual AIP Summit. So I'm really, really glad that we are sharing it with the podcast audience. It was personal, it was grounded in science, which I always appreciate and genuinely also was hopeful. So whether you're deep in a healing journey or just starting to explore what AIP can do for you, I think you'll find a lot in here to be inspired by.
Jaime Hartman (01:43):
Yeah, absolutely. Now the full experience of Heba's presentation at the annual Summit included slides and a beautiful video she shared as part of the presentation. If you missed attending it in January, I have some really good news for you. It will be rebroadcast in its entirety during our free summer Encore, which is coming up June 17th through the 21st, along with all of the other sessions that were presented by AIP Certified Coaches this year. Now, if you are listening to this episode before June 21st, when that Encore wraps up, you could go to our website, you'll find the full agenda of that ongoing Encore. If you are listening after June 21st, you can go to that website and find information about when the next Encore or live Summit will be so you can plan ahead. If you desire more flexibility, you want to go even deeper, consider becoming a member of the AIP Summit community, which will give you full access to the entire archives.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (02:41):
Awesome. So we should also mention that we shared another session from this year's annual summit back in episode 38. That one was on the gut immune connection and how you can decode your flare. So if you appreciate this kind of content, you might want to go back and listen to that one as well if you have not already.
Jaime Hartman (03:00):
Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. I will be sure to put links in the show notes for all of that. But now let's get started. Here's Heba.
Heba Saleh (03:12):
Thank you so much, Jaime. I appreciate it. My name is Heba Saleh, and I'm going to start sharing my screen now so you could see what I am seeing here on my end. All right. Well, thank you and welcome to the second to last talk, I think, in this AIP Summit. I can't believe how quickly it flew by. Thank you so much to Jaime and the other hosts and everybody who participated in it and thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm very happy to ... This is my first time presenting in the AIP Summit and I'm very excited to be here. So let me go through and share a little bit of introduction first before I delve into the meat of what I'm going to share today. So before I get started, just quickly letting you know that everything here presented in this session is for your informational purposes only and it's not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
(04:06):
So always take the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider and ask them any questions that you may have regarding a medical condition. So the title of my presentation is The Evidence for Mindset and Health Outcomes and Physical Healing. And this is me taken this year, it's a recent picture, but I'm about to share. I like pictures, so I'm going to share a whole bunch of pictures of my story so you can get a good idea of where I'm coming from and how I came to be where I am today. So this is, yes, about mindset, how your thoughts, your beliefs, and your daily practices can influence your physiology, your cells, your biology. It is not hardwired. Things can change. And so before we delve into all the science, I want to share why this topic actually matters so much to me. My journey with mindset is not something that ... And healing didn't start in a classroom or in a research lab.
(05:02):
I actually started my own life in moments where I myself felt very overwhelmed, exhausted, unsure if I would ever feel like myself again. So years ago, I was building a business. As you can tell, I've been into food and health for a very long time. This is me and Joel Salton from Polly Face Farms, you might recognize him. Maybe back in 2013, a long time ago I was doing meal kits businesses before the craze of Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, and all those new businesses that came up at the time. I was doing farm to table meal kits. So it was a pilot that I tried. It was a lot of work. I was doing that in my parents' basement, kind of like one of those stories, but it was too much work to handle all the moving parts. And so I shifted to making clarified butter, which you may be familiar with.
(05:49):
I was selling it under the brand name Eat Love. So it was a lot though, because I put a lot of pressure on myself. I had some friends help me. You can see some of them here on the screen. Other ones are not represented, but it was a lot of pressure that I put on myself growing up to just continue to perform and do a good job and help a lot of people. I come from a family of physicians. I'm actually the only non-physician in my immediate family, which is a little crazy, but I really come from a place of wanting to help people, but I put a lot of pressure on myself in the process. So that started and then I got a car accident. This was 2015 actually, this car accident. I was rear-ended on the highway after I had a blown tire and it was very traumatic, but nothing happened to me.
(06:38):
It was almost miraculous how nothing happened to me. I blacked out for a few seconds maybe, maybe a minute, but nothing else happened to me. The car was totaled. But at that point it was in the middle. I was actually transporting butter for my eat love business and it was in the trunk and I had prior to the accident been out of the car on the shoulder on the highway, getting the butter for some reason out of the trunk and putting it in the inside of the car in the backseat. And I was hit after that and didn't even know I was hit because I blacked out. But that was a very pivotal point in my life because it just was like, "What are you doing? Why are you doing something you don't want to do? " I was doing this business because I loved educating people.
(07:17):
I loved providing a healthy product for them. I loved showing them that farm vegetables should not be cooked in canola oil. They should be using clarified butter, healthy fats. And the education piece I really loved, but the organization of the supply chain and the logistics of it was a lot more than I wanted to do and working commercial kitchen spaces and all of that. So that was a pivotal point and I decided to, "Hey, let's move. Let's get a little house. Let's start having kids." I got married really young. And so at that point I was in my 30s and I wanted to have a child. And so I was blessed with a beautiful child who was born in 2017. But at that point I didn't know ... I mean, I had prepared myself in all the ways I thought I was supposed to be preparing myself, but then it didn't pan out exactly how I anticipated everything in life ever does.
(08:12):
So my sweet daughter had a severe skin infection that landed her in the hospital at three months and coming from a place as you saw on the previous slide, everything organic as much as possible, going to the farms for the food, buying an organic mattress for her, looking into all the ingredients, making sure it's as toxic free as possible. She was then in the hospital at three months, even after having a non-medicated birth, she was pumped with the highest level of antibiotics. She had to get steroids on her skin. She had severe eczema and broken skin and it was a nightmare come true for me. And I was completely shattered. I did not know what to do. I lost so much sleep. I was exclusively breastfeeding her on demand and then overnight while she was in the hospital for five ... She was there for I think five days and I didn't sleep all of those days.
(09:03):
I slept maybe a couple of hours. And so at that point something started breaking and I couldn't function at all. So you can see some of the pictures here. I just show you pictures because I want to show you that first of all, healing is possible getting better is possible. Support is there. Hope is always there. I just want to show you these pictures so that you can see that I'm not always put together with makeup on and ready to go. There have been really hard times in my life and that time was just a very dark, dark time in my life and I felt very hopeless and the insomnia led to anxiety, led to more anxiety, led to depression, one thing led to another. And I was basically non-functional for about a year and a half of my life. So severe postpartum depression, anxiety, insomnia, like I said, I couldn't breastfeed anymore.
(09:52):
I started having to depend on substances to help me sleep and I had come to believe after a certain amount of time that I would never be off of these. So that's a belief that I held onto and it kind of delayed things. And as you will see later on in my presentation, how that affected me. So I was living in a constant threat mode, right?
(10:16):
I was always on and stressed and not knowing how to help myself relax. I thought I was doing all the right things. I thought I did all the right things for her to be healthy and well, and this is what ended up happening. So that basically was a light bulb moment and I said, "What am I missing? What is happening inside me that I cannot see?" And I discovered over time, so it was a few different things that helped me. So you can see on this slide here, my husband was very helpful and my parents, my brother who's not on the slide here, my friends, my other family members, so many people were supportive and in the process of discussing the mindset, we have to loop in the importance of community and support and the fact that we are social beings primarily and that we need each other and nobody can live in isolation or heal in isolation.
(11:11):
So this was a very big part of my healing and I want to just credit those people and thank them from the bottom of my heart. I also have a faith in God and I believe that God allowed for this to happen to show me that everything depends on me and that I need these people in my life. And so yeah, this is basically how it transitioned bit by bit and it was not an overnight shift. I wish it were because some of those days were pure hell when I couldn't sleep for hours and sleep was like, it came to a point where I was so obsessed with, "Am I going to sleep tonight? Is this going to happen?" And I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was a looped thought that basically destroyed my life for the year and a half. But through a few things that helped me, most notably my family, my support system also I went to a doctor, I had been going to different doctors who some of them did not help me.
(12:06):
And I will talk about this again further in a bit about how your medical provider can be a big instrument in helping or hindering your healing process because some of the doctors that I've went to would say things like, "You can live with having antidepressants for as long as..." There's tons of people that are on it, like, "Just accept that this is your fate.This is the way it is. " And they didn't give the impression that there was a way out. Whereas the last person that I worked with, I was very fortunate to work with her, she said, "Hey, is this what you want to do? Do you want to get off of some of these medications? Do you not want to depend on these substances to be able to sleep? I can help you. We can check your blood work. We can see what's going on.
(12:53):
" And there was a discovery that I had Hashimoto's, had developed Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition as a result of all the stressors that I went through during that time. And so that was identified. We identified some nutritional deficiencies and that was targeted, they gave targeted supplements to help with that. And so through that and through the belief of this doctor that I had who said that you can get well if you want to, I was able to wean off all of those things and I don't take a single thing right now to sleep and I sleep fine and so much has changed in such a small amount of time and I'm so thankful for everything that I've learned in the proces. So this is me now this year since 2017 until this year, so much has changed. I went from being at the brink of hell to now I would say that every day comes with its challenge, but I'm thriving overall.
(14:01):
So what I believed about my healing directly influenced when and how I healed. So the healing only started when I began to believe that I'm at the helm of that healing, not in a perfect way but not all at once, but with small consistent shifts that basically changed everything and that's why I'm here today. So the mind is not a barrier, it's a resource, okay It's a resource. And the minute you decide to think about it as a partner in your healing and when you learn to work with it instead of fighting against it, then you can unlock a level of clarity, resilience, and possibility that basically changes your entire experience of health. So my goal today is simple. I just wanted to give you a good background of where I'm coming from, who I am. I've earned a few different certifications in the past couple of years.
(14:57):
I got my culinary nutrition certification. I've gotten recently the AIP Certified Coach certification and I've done yoga teacher training during the pandemic actually and I teach yoga, I teach fitness classes and then most recently I'm starting to finish my NASAM, which is the personal training certification. So I'm trying to help people in all of these different ways, but at the end of the day, I can only provide tools and direction and inspiration and hope, but I want to inspire every single person to know that they need to take control of their health. They need to be at the helm of their own health and all of these are just guides, but we have that intuition. Each person has their own intuition. I'll share a little bit more about that in a second. All right, this is about why mindset matters in healing. Okay? So mindset is not an abstract thing.
(15:55):
It sounds like it, but it's not. It's actually biological. Our thoughts influence our brain and the brain influences the body, right? Stress and safety signals help shape our immune system and our immune function and the mindset that we have affects the choices that we make and then how consistent we are on those choices basically affects how resilient we become. So it's all kind of a cycle and it starts with one thing and kind of leads to the other. So healing is not just mental, it's not just emotional, it's not just relational, it's not just physical, it's all of them. So I will be referencing a doctor throughout this presentation that I fell in love with this book. So I have here a QR code to her book, not to my book, to her book so that you can go and get it because I actually, I have no connection to this person besides that I love her book and her work.
(16:46):
It's called Mind Over Medicine and the doctor's name is Lisa Rankin and she wrote the book about how our beliefs and our minds can influence the outcome on a physical level, which is exactly what this presentation is about. So basically she shows that many people remain unwell even though they're doing everything right. She shows a lot of examples in the book of people that are supposed to be health gurus or health seekers and they do all the right things. They're eating a clean diet, they're taking care of their bodies, they're going out for runs at 50 AM, or maybe that's not the right thing to do, but they're doing all the right things, but then their bodies are getting sicker and sicker and she basically kind of goes backwards and says to them after a lot of research that she's done, she goes back and says to them, "What is stopping you from healing?
(17:45):
What is the thing that is stopping your healing process from your perspective? How do you feel about what is stopping your healing process?" And at the beginning she thought maybe like they would say, "Hey, I'm not having all my supplements all the time or I sleep too late or something." But it turns out most of them end up saying, "I had a really rough childhood and I just can't get over X, Y, Z that happened to me. " Or, "My job is killing me. Yes, I'm doing all these other right things, but my job is so soul sucking and I hate it. " Or, "I'm in a toxic relationship that is ruining my self-esteem." So all of these other emotional and mental components and relational components to their health that traditional doctors never think to ask you about are really were at the helm of their health and what was helping or hindering their health process.
(18:39):
So she studied and read about and looked into and researched so many different examples also of what is called spontaneous remissions, which are basically when somebody has a cancer, it's established, they've looked into it, they've done studies, whatever, and then the person decides, "I'm not going to have cancer anymore. I'm getting better. I'm taking care of my health and I'm getting better. I'm deciding that this is getting better." And they test it out, they do the scans and then they don't see the cancer anymore. And this is not just one or two or three examples. This is thousands of examples and not just cancer. I'm talking about cancer, autoimmune conditions, mental health conditions, different conditions that sometimes are deemed incurable by their providers from a scientific perspective. They don't have the reason to why the cancer shrunk so quickly or different things happen. It's more that their expectation of how things will pan out influences their biology, their bodies respond to their thoughts.
(19:43):
And so it sounds kind of kooky or out there to somebody who is not like from the outside, it sounds that way. And even I'm a skeptic. I like to look into things. I don't take stuff of face value, but once I read about, I read this book, I went and delved into the research, I learned a lot about how that this is actually possible. So this is a quote from her book, "The body knows how to heal itself. Our job is to create the conditions for it to do so. " So I really recommend reading this to get more information about it. All right, some mechanisms that activate or inhibit self repair of the body. So the body is designed to repair. We sleep, it repairs while we sleep, we give it the right food and nutrition, it repairs, we give it the right circumstances.
(20:32):
We go out in nature, it repairs, it regulates our nervous systems. So different things can help our body and I didn't mention by talking last slide, but that's called the placebo effect, right? It's been studied for over like 50 years. The placebo effect is an established thing that helps see the connection between what you think is going to help you and ends up actually helping you so that it's in your mind, what do you think is going to help you. And then the opposite of that is actually the nocebo effect, which is what you think as negative, like a negative expectation. They've done studies to say, "Hey, this medication that you're going to take, and it's a sugar pill or whatever." They say, "This medication that you're going to take gives you a side effect that severe nausea, you're going to be so tired and sluggish, but try to tough it out.
(21:22):
You'll be okay." And then the person ends up taking it, it's not really a medication and they feel all those side effects. They're throwing up, they can't move because they prime themselves to feel that way, the body responded to make that effect on it. So the amygdala in the brain activates these stress pathways in response to psychological threats and health is built from multiple domains. So not just diet, exercise, we know that already, but the idea of reducing chronic stress that stays for a long time, stress is okay for a short time. In fact, actually this is an interesting study that is something by Dr. Elia Crum, I think. And she is through Stanford and she talked about stress as enhancing, which in certain situations you need stress in order to propel you forward. And if you think of a stressful situation as it helping you perform better, say for example, in this talk, maybe I'm a little bit stressed, it's helping me perform better because it's helping me kind of zero in on information that I want to share with you.
(22:32):
So that kind of mindset triggers me to do a good job sharing that information. If you're in another stressful situation and you are trying to escape a danger, that stress is helping because you are escaping the situation that's dangerous. So it has a benefit. Stress is not a bad thing, except if it's all the time and unrelenting. In that case, it is a very bad thing. So chronic stress is what is going to deteriorate the body over time and reducing chronic stress basically requires belief shifts, support, intuition, and root cause clarity. This is a very important piece. So root cause is what Dr. Lisa Rankin talks about as what the person believes is causing the most misery in their life. And that person needs to be really honest with themselves about what it is that is destroying them. Nobody can tell you this for you.
(23:37):
And I tell people this all the time in the exercise classes that I teach, nobody can exercise for you. People can tell you to exercise, they can encourage you, they can go with you. All of this is great, but the moment you decide to exercise and go and actually show up and do it is the moment things get changed. Same thing for understanding your root cause. So feeling supported, feeling believed, knowing that you're believed, especially by somebody you trust, including your medical provider, signals safety to the amygdala, allowing the body's self-repair mechanisms to activate. So she talks a lot about this thing called the healthcare, which is basically the stones that are kind of piled up on top of each other. Sometimes you see them in meditation type of videos and stuff. So the health includes a lot of different aspects of health and I'm very passionate about that too.
(24:30):
Seeing the person as a whole body, not just your physical, not just your mental, not just your spiritual, all of these things and more there's we have aspects of us including the environment, relationships, our life purpose, our work, how we feel. Are we invested in these things and something she calls the inner pilot light, which is basically our intuition. So let's see what the research ends up showing us. Okay. Mindset influences inflammation, pain, and immune markers. Belief and expectation can change physiological outcomes kind of like we talked about and hope agency and emotional safety support healing. One of actually the clearest and coolest examples of this idea of a mindset affecting the body is a Harvard Hotel MAID study. So this one I actually learned about from an author that I went to his talk recently called Brett Eaton and he has this newsletter and he shared about the study and it was amazing.
(25:29):
Basically what happened is the researchers told hotel room attendants that their daily work counted as exercise. And so they split the group. Some of them, they told this that what you do every day like changing sheets, cleaning whatever you're doing is actually counts as exercise and it's going to really help your body. And the other set of people, they didn't tell them anything. They just did the same things, but they just didn't know that this will help them. So they didn't change anything that they did, but within four weeks they showed improvements in the side that were told that this would help them. They showed improvements in their weight, blood pressure, body fat, and waist to hip ratio. Think about how crazy that is. These people are doing the same exact things in two separate groups. One group knows that this is actually helping them and one group doesn't think anything about it.
(26:18):
They're just doing their work. The group that was told this was helping them change their physical body and their health markers, including their weight. How is their weight changing if all they think is that this is exercise, they're only thinking that this is exercise. It blew my mind when I read that study and I thought it's amazing. More people need to know about this. So our beliefs become biology. It is not just like hearsay. It is actually proven through science. So the brain body connection, we just talked about some of how that happens, but in more detail, your thoughts influence brain signals, which then influence your hormone production and neurotransmitters and all of these signals influence your inflammation and your immune activity. So your body responds according to your thoughts. Okay. There's another study that I would like to share about actually my husband told me, I think about the study a while ago or a similar one and it was related to, it was from the Journal of Neurophysiology.
(27:28):
And so participants had their arms immobilized in casts for four weeks. So half of them practiced mental imagery imagining themselves flexing their immobilized wrist. When the cast came off, the imagery group lost only 25% of their strength compared to 45% in the group that did noth. So even though they were immobilized, they still did not lose as much of their strength because they were imagining themselves flexing their arm. So they didn't actually move a muscle. It's just their brains kept what the neural pathways alive. So imagery activates the same parts of the brain that are actually doing the task. So that's extremely powerful. Imagining yourself healing, imagining yourself getting better, imagining yourself doing a good job. All of these things are not just fluff. They are literally directly influencing your healing and outcomes. So on one side, chronic stress can rewire the brain towards hypervigilance and being stressed and not noticing things around you, not having mindfulness, not being self-aware.
(28:41):
That's what chronic stress does. And then it's a cascade of inflammation and disease. And then imagery, visualization, connection, nature, health inputs, all of these things work together to preserve health. So it's all kind of working together and on cannot be separated from the other. Okay. Let's go into stress, perception and the immune system. So a stressful mindset or the stress mindset shapes physiological stress response. So perceived stress, I actually mentioned this earlier, but I'll touch on it quickly again. Perceived stress can be as impactful as actual stress because the brain doesn't really know how to decipher the difference between something you are thinking and something that is happening. So sometimes something that you were thinking, if it's a damaging thought, it's having the same negative effect on your body as if it were actually happening. So you're not helping yourself by thinking all the bad stuff that's going to happen, okay?
(29:37):
All right, the power of belief and expectation. Belief influences physiology, placebo, placebo effects. We already talked about that. Hope on the other hand activates the body's repair mechanisms. So fear and fear and hopelessness, on the other hand, suppress immune function. So the body cannot fight illnesses. The body Body cannot stop cancer cells from growing when you are fearful and hopeless. It makes the immune system kind of just wait because there's more important things to take care of. There's the danger. There's the stuff that's chronically stressing you out. So you're constantly on that fight or flight and not taking care of business of all the things that need to be repaired and need to be kept at bay.
(30:26):
All right. Let's get into a little bit more about the growth mindset. So back a long time ago before I got sick, my husband Sharif told me about this great book called Mindset by Carol Dweck. And I greatly highly recommend that book. I should have put a QR code here for it too, but you could just look it up. Mindset by Carol Dweck. So she's a Stanford psychologist and she learned through her research that people tend to hold one of two beliefs. So either they have a fixed mindset, which is, I am the way I am, that's just how I was born and these are my limitations or a growth mindset, which is I can learn, adapt and grow. And she studied time and time again that people with a growth mindset show more resilience, more persistence and better outcomes when facing challenges. And that goes for health challenges as well actually.
(31:17):
So they interpret setbacks or challenges as feedback. So I'm sure you might have heard of you win or you learn instead of you win or you lose. Every challenge, every setback is just an opportunity to get more information to pivot to figure out how to do it better the next time. And this also applies directly to healing. So neuroplasticity means the brain can learn new patterns at any age and that's through Dr. Danielle Amen's research and other people's research as well. We know that the brain is adaptable. It's not set in stone and it goes hand in hand with this idea of the growth mindset. So Carol Dweck said something that I really like. She said, "Becoming is better than being." Okay. So you're constantly becoming, constantly learning and that actually leads into my next. My next little slide here is a video that I put together the script, but my good friend Taylor Cohen put together the animation and she did a great job.
(32:18):
If you have any animation needs, then I'm happy to refer you to her. So let me play this. It's about two and a half minutes, okay? So let me ... Oopsies. All right.
(32:33):
I'm not sure.
Narrator (32:35):
Becoming a butterfly's journey. Once upon a time in a quiet corner of the forest lived a caterpillar who believed she was broken. She would watch butterflies flutter above her, their wings glowing in the sunlight. She envied their wings, their freedom, their beauty. She thought that could never be me. I wasn't born with what they had. I missed my chance. She carried stories of lack of not enough and no matter how many times she heard, "One day you'll fly too," she rolled her eyes and crawled away. But one day everything changed. Something stirred, a whisper in the wind. What if she thought, "I'm not done becoming." So she did something brave. She stepped away into stillness, into silence, into herself. In the quiet, she met her pain. She met her past. She met her power. And when she emerged, she was unrecognizable, not because she had wings, but because she believed she could use them.
(33:41):
She took flight awkwardly at first, then with growing confidence. She set a new goal to be the most diverse flower pollinator in the forest, not to prove anything but because she could. Then one day she saw someone who reminded her of, "Her. Are you okay?" She asked. The injured butterfly responded. I was flying and then I wasn't. A frog chased me. I panicked. I clipped my wing. I don't think I'll ever fly again. I used to think I'd never fly either, but I changed my mind and my mind changed me. Together they imagined healing. They practiced patience. They showed up for each other. Every single day. They held each other accountable. They reminded each other, "You're not alone. You're not stuck. You are still becoming. The world didn't change, but they did and that changed everything. If you're in the mud right now, don't give up.
(34:41):
You're not broken. You're just not done becoming. The mind is powerful and with love, time and truth, even wings can mend. Dedicated to everyone still in the cocoon, we see you. Keep becoming.
Heba Saleh (35:04):
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Taylor did an amazing job and it relayed all the things that I wanted to share and encapsulated. The idea of the growth mindset, the fixed mindset, accountability, support, healing, the power of the body and the mind connection. So what part of the butterfly's journey felt familiar to you? And you don't have to answer this question out loud or you could put it in the chat if you wanted to, but what is something that it's stirred in you? That's something that maybe would be a clue as to where you need to look for healing or where you need to take a step in a direction to address something that one of these topics. So thank you for watching that with me. So let's get into some of the common mindset myths. So some of these, these are just myths, right?
(35:53):
They're not true. That's why they're called myths. So on is my thoughts don't really affect my body. This is a very, very common thought. It's not really maybe a conscious thought for a lot of people. Maybe it's a subconscious thought. That is really hindering people's progress. So this is how you think or any of these others, if I don't feel motivated, something is wrong with me. Nobody's motivated all the time. People are motivated actually kind of rarely. It takes a lot to feel motivated. And a lot of times, I'm sure you've seen it before, you will notice that anybody who is successful prioritizes action over motivation. They just proceed in the right direction, start taking active steps towards something and then the motivation shows up through the consistency and through things becoming a habit. Things in the beginning are always hard for everybody, especially somebody who's sick, especially somebody who's having challenges mentally, physically.
(36:47):
All of these, the body is not primed to act when in those stances. So it's good to know that you don't have to wait for that kind of motivation. Another one, if I can't stay consistent, I must not be disciplined. Again, if you say these things to yourself, then you are getting in the way of your own consistency. So in order to be disciplined, you say," I don't need to prove anything to anyone or anything. I will feel good once I continue to do these things every day. "So try to do habit stacking or add a little habit that you want to do to something that already exists that you already do. I always give this example, but I wanted a few years ago to start tongue scraping. I know it sounds weird, but it's crazy that I want a gunk that sits on your tongue.
(37:36):
So I put a tongue scraper right next to my toothbrush and every time I brush my teeth, it's right there, just habit stacking. I would just get my toothbrush, brush my teeth and then do the tongue with the tongue scraper and that's that. And it's become a habit from day two because it just was right there.
(37:54):
And the last one here, healing should be linear. If I regress, I've failed. This is one of the worst myths because it's, I'm sorry to anybody who's heard this from their health provider because this is one of the things that keeps people stuck where they are or even makes people regress further because they think that they should be getting better and they expect that according to what so- and-so said," It should be better or I shouldn't be feeling this way. "And they don't acknowledge where they're at right now and that keeps them stuck and they feel that kind of fear keeps them from advancing and getting better. So having the understanding that it's not a linear process is very important. All right. Why is consistency hard? And just FYI, it's not your fault. Consistency is not actually a character issue. It is a nervous system issue.
(38:53):
So chronic stress ends up shifting the brain into survival mode as we talked about earlier. And survival mode makes long-term habits feel impossible. When you're in survival mode, you're only thinking about a present situation that you're dealing with and fight or flight. Now you're not thinking about a long-term strategy for your improving your health or being happy or choosing a good job or a good person to partner with. You don't have any of those thoughts when you're in survival mode. What ends up happening is that fear, fatigue, pain, overwhelm, all of these emotions are at the helm of that and then they drain your decision making capacity. So you are not broken. Your brain is protecting you. So the way to think about it is that you need to take care of your mind so your mind can take care of your body, not the other way around.
(39:46):
A lot of people, when they go to a doctor, they ask them about all these physical things that are happening to them. They don't address some of the things that are deep within them, the root cause of sometimes why they're not feeling well or some of their root beliefs about what they think will happen to them based on their family health history, for example. "Oh, hey, you have diabetes that runs in your family or cancer or your mom." And then so they come from that angle. They talk about, they give them information that may actually lead them to develop certain things when they don't know that it's mindset and your thinking affects how your body feels. And that's what Lisa Rankin also says. You start off with how your mind is doing and then it will affect your choices and that will affect your body and how you're feeling and again, how your mind is feeling.
(40:43):
And it's kind of a cycle, right? And speaking of cycles, this is the mindset cycle. So our thoughts shape our emotions, emotions drive behaviors and behaviors create outcomes and then finally outcomes reinforce beliefs and it kind of goes in a cycle. And this reinforcing loop can be a protective thing or it can be a limiting thing and it's our job to press pause or hit pause and then go ahead and cognitive behavioral therapy starts with this idea that you are going to answer your own thoughts. Start with the thoughts and change your thought so that it can lead to a different shift in your whole biology.
(41:27):
So the healing pathway begins with awareness. Anything that's kind of what I've learned over time too. If you are not aware of why you're feeling what you're feeling then and noticing where you are without judgment, then you're not going to be able to take the next step and your healing will be stalled. So the choice that you have, so first awareness, then you have a choice. You identify one small next step. If you add too many next steps, which tends to be something that I fall into all the time because I want to do all the things all the time, but I try to backtrack and say, what's one pivotal small next step that I can take that will make a measurable difference in my progress? And then what falls after is action, right? You take that step even imperfectly, even if it's not, if it's like a half step, you still take it and then you analyze, "Hey, how did that go?
(42:22):
What can I learn from this experience?" And then you celebrate the shift, however small it is and you keep reinforcing and doing the same thing. So you might have heard before the quote small hinges swing big doors. So when you do small changes over time, you're even going to be able to see a cumulative effect of that.
(42:42):
Accountability is a healing tool. So until then we haven't talked too much about accountability and community, but I'll spend the next few minutes talking about that before I get into some of the more specific tools that I can share with you. So accountability increases follow through and consistency. We already know that because of a lot of studies that show that if you have somebody to be accountable to, especially somebody that you trust, you go from a 10% likelihood that you're going to achieve a goal to 95% likelihood just by having that person to connect with or group, a support group, someone to report back to basically. If we don't have that, then it relies again on the motivation, self motivation and so many things get in the way of big life goals. So it's very important to have some person or some group for shared goals and accountability.
(43:37):
Another thing too is community. So community is an age old healing tool. So people used to live in community much more than we do today. Today we celebrate, unfortunately, individualized societies where everybody's staying in their house trying to slave over what things that they think they need to get done. We are wired to live in communities and the more we plug ourselves into communities that are healing, helpful, encouraging, healthy, all the different things that you ... If you look at most successful people, they usually, and this is a well known thing, the statistic, they try to surround themselves with the five people that they want to be more like or the five people or they're the sum of people. That's what it is. You're the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with. So you want to be in communities that are conducive to your healing.
(44:28):
Connection also on a biological level reduces inflammation and improves your immune function. So you're adding on to your arsenal of things that will help you when you're in that community. Feeling supported lowers your stress hormones. Make sure that your health providers are supportive individuals who have good bedside manner, who care about you truly or you feel they care about you. This will influence and affect your healing. You pay them a lot of money, so you might as well make sure that they are people that are encouraging to you and will help you heal and improve. Shared experience is another thing that reduces shame and isolation. So support groups is extremely important. Healing accelerates when we feel we belong. Some tools that support healing. So I'll share some more specific tools, but this is kind of like a framework that I've come up with. It's called a values-based decision matrix or decision framework.
(45:22):
And you may have seen before the Eisenhower Matrix that helps you kind of decide which tasks are important versus urgent and it has like a quadrant, kind of a similar thing. So this is a different way to think about the same idea basically, but at the center is your core values. So you cannot know how to take the next step without clarity, self-awareness and clarity of what matters the most to you right now. So what are your core values? What are your non-negotiables? What are the things that whatever happens you are not going to change. You are not going to compromise is the better word. So that is a very important thing to spend some time in reflection seeking. So number one, get clarity on your core values. Then figure out what you are trying to honor the most in your life right now. Which of your core values will be honoring if you spend your time doing those different activities.
(46:22):
It could be activities to support your health. If we're talking about health or activities to support your professional work, this can be applied to anything and that's how this is a very malleable kind of framework that you can use for any different way. Nurture, which things will you want to keep that to help sustain you? What helps sustain your growth in the long term? So this quadrant is usually the important but not urgent quadrant in the Eisenhower matrix. So these are things that you ideally want to work on in your life, but if there's stuff that's urgent that comes up, like it gets shoved out of the way. Well, we want to nurture this piece as much as possible. So small steps repeated over time can help nurture whatever things you think will sustain your healing or sustain your growth and in any capacity that you like.
(47:11):
And then accountability is extremely important. You have to have support that keeps you engaged. So that will also help you in that nurture box. Simplifying is another thing that you need to take care of. Ease and efficiency, removing anything that is clunky and gets in the way of your healing, knowing how to delegate different tasks, knowing when to say no, knowing to have some certain boundaries around your core values especially or anything that protects your peace and then finally releasing anything that doesn't align with what you want to do for yourself to help you and definitely releasing anything that doesn't align with your core values. So compassion, making sure to treat yourself like someone worth caring for. That is an underlying principle. The way you treat yourself is the way you encourage others to treat you. So I'll get into some more things that I can offer you now.
(48:06):
I shared a lot about mindset, some examples. You can delve deeper into Dr. Lisa Rankin's work or Dr. Daniel Amen's work or the Stanford study with Dr. Alia Crum, all of these different people or mindset, Carol Dweck, go back and listen to these different people and get ideas from them. But I have some more specific things that I've worked on that I would love to share with you. So I've in the past, 2024 actually is the year that I've published a mindset journal and I have it with me right here. It's called Eight Moments and it's for growth, daily joy and healing. And so the way it's set up is it has a future section, a present section, and a past section. And the present section is the bulk of the book, right? So the present section is split up into the different seasons with each season focusing on two traits that you want to grow in that season.
(49:01):
So it's aligned with the season and now we're in the winner. So they are resilience and simplicity. And I'll let you look on the site for all the other seasons because I just don't want to take too much time talking about it. So this journal is a guided journal, but it has guidance on these different traits and they're all based on the growth mindset. So you can grow all these different traits throughout the year through prompts that you can use to write about. But the prompts are at the beginning of the season. There's also a plan to season section and reflect on the season section. And then this is a sample page of the journal. You have your top three tasks up here, things that you're grateful for, which is meant to rewire your brain to things that you're happy about and grateful for. You can just write about whatever you like here.
(49:47):
And then on the bottom, there's a health tracker with different metrics that you can keep track of, like your water intake, energy, nutritional goals, social life, sleep, productivity, mood, activity. So there's eight of them. I like the number eight because flipped upside and like to the side, it's an infinity sign. And also it takes eight minutes for the sun's light to reach earth. I always say that statistic. I didn't know that. So it takes time for the body to, for the mind to get clarity, right? So journaling is one very good way to regulate your nervous system, to get clarity on your core values, to keep track of your measurable progress over time. And it's just one of the best tools that's been studied to help people actively work on this process of shifting their mindset. And like I said, it's all workable to shift it and to grow it.
(50:35):
So it supports the healing pathway. And if you want more ongoing support, I launched in 2025 something called Growth Mindset Groups, which is basically a research backed accountability and community that has support on a regular basis. So we meet live virtually through Zoom every other week and we work on a goal of anybody's choice for eight weeks straight. So you work on a micro goal and it could be related to different things, whether it's professional or personal. And we do habit stacking, we do journaling, this is part of it and we measure our progress and we keep each other accountable through the process and people have ... I've had numerous participants find that it's really helped them achieve and exceed even the goals that they set for themselves. So small shifts bit by bit lead to big momentum. And if you have interest in this, you can reach out to me and let me know.
(51:32):
And then last but not least, I have another project that is more specific to health that I'm launching in 2026. It's called Health Starter and it's a guided practical starting point for healing. So the growth mindset groups are geared towards people that want to work on different goals but not necessarily specific to health, although I've had people work on different health goals in it too, but this is going to be more of a program to help people jumpstart their health and not just that. It gives them the tools, but it helps them utilize their mindset and know all the ways in which to be at the helm of their health. I don't want to be the person telling people what to do. I want people to know what to do and to actually do it in their lives because that is actually teaching the person how to fish, right?
(52:21):
Not necessarily just giving them a fish all the time. I want them to learn that. And so this is going to be a place for people to do that. If you are interested, I invite you to scan the QR code here and to go to ... It's just a simple landing page. It has this video here, just me talking about what it is and then you could fill out a little form that has some information about our launch. So it is going to help direct the way we deliver the program. So what can you start on today? So I just have a few more minutes and I'll open it up for questions, but I wanted to share some more specific tidbits of what you can actually do. Remember we talked about small active steps. So notice one thought that increases stress and soften it and kind of start to fade it out in the background.
(53:08):
Let it fly away. What is one thought that keeps coming into your mind that notice that increases your stress? And that could be a clue too of what is at the root cause of your illness or of keeping you from thriving. Choose one small action that supports your healing. One small action it could be for me in the beginning of pandemic, I decided I don't want my phone upstairs because I live in a townhouse. So I said, "I don't want my phone upstairs while I'm sleeping." I keep checking at random times. I'm just going to keep it at the middle level. And since then, I've always just kept it in the middle of a while I'm sleeping at night and I never check it. So this is like one small thing that I decided to do that helps me kind of give my mental health a break and keeps me healthy.
(53:53):
Ask for support instead of doing it alone. So if you're very individually motivated and driven, that's great, but you still will need support and especially if you are going through a challenging time, you will need support. And so start working towards nourishing those relationships. Don't ignore your relationships for something else like achieving other goals that ... Goals are great and I'm all about them and I start so many projects and I love it, but if you don't nourish your relationships, then there's going to be a massive thing missing. So keep asking for support and nourishing your relationships and then practice some grounding moments. Choose your eight moments. It could be 10 minutes, it could be five minutes, it could be two minutes, doesn't matter. Ideally at the beginning of the day, ideally with the eight moments journal, but with any journal, anything, you can spend some time in reflection, in meditation, in prayer if you have that in your life That is all shown by research to impact and improve your outlook and your brain health.
(54:54):
And then when you do do something good, celebrate it. Do something like to say like, "Hey, I did it. " Go celebrate yourself, do something fun and healthy for you. Plan a date with someone that you love, celebrate even the smallest little shifts and it's going to compound. And before you know it, you'll have reached big milestones. Last slide I have for here before questions, you are not broken. Say that to yourself. I am not broken. I am healing. Your body is not the enemy and all your symptoms are just communication. It's just your body trying to say ... Sometimes it starts by whispering. It says like, "Hey, this is not great. Let's not keep staying up until 1:00 AM doing work." Don't do that. It starts by whispering by being tired the next day for a few months and then it starts to scream if you don't listen to it.
(55:41):
So the symptoms are communication. It's not your body failing you, okay? Healing is possible at any stage. You are capable, resilient, worthy of care, and you can take the helm on small step at a time. I'm encouraged by everybody who is listening to this because I know that hopefully this has made an impact in your life by telling you and teaching you that mindset is changeable. You can have a growth mindset and you are at the helm of your health.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (56:11):
That was Heba Sella. I hope that session gave you something meaningful to think about.
Jaime Hartman (56:16):
If you want to explore Heba's work further, you can find links to all of her offerings via her profile in the AIP Certified Coach Directory, which will link in the show notes.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (56:25):
And don't forget the free encore of the Seventh Annual AIP Summit is happening June 17th through the 21st. If this episode of the podcast sparked your interest, the Encore provides a great opportunity to hear more from Heba and other presenters. So head to aipsummit.com to get the full agenda.
Jaime Hartman (56:44):
Again, we remind you that AIP is more than a diet. It's a protocol with multiple branches and multiple ways to approach it. Through this podcast, AIP Certified Coaches aim to bring you resources so that you can feel confident about doing AIP on your own, but with the knowledge that you aren't doing it alone.
Marie-Noelle Marquis (57:02):
We'll be back with another episode in two weeks. You can find the AIP Summit Podcast and your favorite podcast player, so be sure to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Jaime Hartman (57:12):
And if you would like to leave us a rating and a review, it will help others find this podcast where we are committed to helping go use the power of the autoimmune protocol to elevate your wellness journey to new heights. The AIP Summit Podcast is a Gutsy By Nature production. Content presented is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
