Anxiety, Panic, Complex Trauma, Ayurveda & a functional perspective with Dr. Nicole Cain

This week, I’m joined by Dr. Nicole Cain for a conversation about anxiety, panic, stress, and what our symptoms might be trying to tell us. We talk about the difference between fear, anxiety, and panic, why anxiety may be more of a signal than a problem, and how chronic stress can quietly build beneath the surface long before we recognize it. Dr. Nicole shares her perspective on complex trauma, nervous system regulation, and the ways modern life constantly pulls us into reactivity without us even realizing it. We also explore why awareness is often the first step toward healing, how nature can help bring us back into balance, and why anxiety isn’t necessarily something you have to live with forever.

Check out Dr. Nicole's Free Gifts here: https://drnicolecain.com/free-gifts/

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

•  Anxiety may be a signal rather than the problem itself 
•  Panic often builds long before it feels like it comes out of nowhere 
•  Chronic stress can become invisible when it feels normal 
•  Complex trauma develops through repeated experiences over time 
•  Nature and nervous system regulation can support healing

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ABOUT GUEST:
Dr. Nicole Cain is a naturopathic physician, EMDR-trained clinician, author, and expert in trauma-informed mental health care, holistic anxiety treatment, and panic recovery. Holding a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, she combines evidence-based psychology with integrative and functional medicine to help people address the root causes of anxiety and chronic stress. She is the author of Panic Proof (Rodale, 2024) and host of the Holistic Inner Balance: Natural Mental Health Podcast, where she shares research-backed strategies for emotional well-being. Dr. Nicole is also a regular contributor to Psychology Today and has been featured in numerous national health and wellness publications.

WHERE TO FIND GUEST:
Website: https://drnicolecain.com/
Book Website: https://www.panicproof.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drnicolecain/

SPONSOR:
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WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
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Protocols: https://www.christabiegler.com/protocolshop

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Dr. Nicole Cain: anxiety is not something that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

We wanna have fear if there's true danger, but anxiety, that's something that we can heal. 

[00:00:09] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common, that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high-performing, health-savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want, so let's see what's out there together.

Today on the Less Stressed Life, I am joined by Dr. Nicole Cain, who is an expert in the field of trauma-informed clinical psychology and holistic anxiety and panic treatment. She is the author of the book that came out in October of 2024 called Panic Proof. Dr. Nicole has a great deal of expertise, as she practices as a naturopathic physician in Arizona, is EMDR trained, and possesses a clinical psychology master's degree.

She also has a podcast, which is Holistic Inner Balance, the natural mental health podcast which equips listeners with research-based integrative methods for living a well- a life of wellbeing. Welcome to the show, Dr. Cain. 

[00:01:32] Dr. Nicole Cain: Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Okay, so I was just telling you air that I thought that this professional degree stack was pretty interesting.

What came first? The naturopathic degree or the master's in psychology? 

[00:01:49] Dr. Nicole Cain: The master's in psychology came first 

[00:01:51] Christa Biegler, RD: I assumed. I assumed. Yeah but why were you motivated to go on to naturopathic school? What was going on had you started to see patients in clinical practice, or what happened there?

[00:02:02] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah. There's a exact moment, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I was working in Forest Chicago, so it's just a north suburb in Chicago, and I was a group therapy practitioner. And we were doing group therapy, it was like 8:00 at night, and I have adolescents that I'm doing group therapy with, and their goals are to recover from substance abuse- and addiction and misuse. And so there was this girl who was sitting next to me. Her drug of choice is cocaine. She's drinking a gigantic caffeinated Red Bull, Monster something. 

And she's expressing how she has horrible insomnia, and she's really anxious, and- ... so then that drives her misuse behaviors and whatever.

And so as a counselor, we are in scope to talk about the behaviors and the feelings- ... and to support them in collaborating with their other treatment team members, and we had to send her back to her psychiatrist to help with the insomnia and the anxiety that wasn't going away. And I'm looking at her, and I'm like, "She's chugging so much caffeine.

If I was-" ... "chugging caffeine, I wouldn't be able to sleep either." 

And so she goes to the doctor, and she comes back to group with a new prescription for Ambien. And for those who haven't heard about Ambien, is it's a controlled substance. It's a hypnotic, and it has really high abuse potential, and it can be quite habit-forming.

And so I'm looking at this person, and she's on poly substances. She has this developing brain and nervous system, and instead of having a conversation about what she could swap in group therapy in the evening for Monster, maybe something else, she was given a pharmaceutical. And I felt in that moment that I cannot be in this system.

This system is so broken. It's so screwed up, and I'm complicit. And I had my own anxiety, and I had my own patterns that I was working through, and I grew up in the Midwest, and we didn't really have a lot of conversations back at that time- ... about holistic integrative medicine, so I didn't even know to think about it, but I knew the basics.

Caffeine equals insomnia for a lot of us. 

And so that night after group therapy ended- Feeling all this frustration, feeling indignant and s- just all of the things. It was... I was, like, rage googling, and I found naturopathic medicine. And I was like, "What is this magic?" And SC&M, which is now Sonoran University, was describing how in Arizona we have a full scope of care.

We learn what an MD and a DO learns, and we learn about nutrition and herbalism and acupuncture, and all of these wonderful modalities that actually help us get to the root of why we feel the way we feel, and help people pursue healing. And within three months, I'd applied, got accepted, and moved to Phoenix, went to medical school.

[00:05:22] Christa Biegler, RD: That is... I was just telling you offline, I love a good story of pivot or reinvention. And I also, as you were sitting here describing this, I'm like, "Are we all the same?" Do we all get into our careers and realize this is not enough? Because it's actually funny, mine happened in reverse. I was doing...

I went to school for traditional dietetics, and then ended up in functional and integrative nutrition. And then you get into it and people feel better, but certain things aren't shifting, and it's because of some of the stuff we're about to talk about. It's what is triggering the stress physiology starts in the brain generally.

There's gut-brain connection and all these other pieces, and there's certainly as we get into more depth. And a couple things came to mind. I have had Dr. James Greenblatt I think on the show just once. Do you know him? He's a clinical psychiatrist and he does- Yeah. He's pretty...

I really wanted to have him because I feel like who knows how many more years we would have him in the first place, and he's an interesting person. I think he's a psychiatrist. But he, as he describes the things he was doing to help his very severe clientele with schizophrenia, et cetera, the types of nutrients that he would put them on and see improvements.

I was like, "Oh, how did you even access that?" He said, "Oh, I was just in charge of the department. I got to do whatever I want," right? And he's talking of scope of practice. And so as a psychiatrist he had more- A ability, right? To diagnose or prescribe or whatnot. And a lot of times this can be a little bit of a gray area for the client or the patient.

They may not see it as a whole thing, but a lot of times it's interesting as you were describing this story, it reminded me of another colleague of mine who we were just talking about, whose episode comes out this week, that she had a little bit of that too where she was realizing, like, all of the things she was treating in this one silo in her specialty of medicine were all related to the whole system.

And so she was so frustrated by scope of practice and what she was able to say, et cetera, et cetera. So even as a, in group therapy, did you feel like you could not say have you considered reducing your caffeine intake for your sleep?" Was that out of your scope? 

[00:07:27] Dr. Nicole Cain: I felt that at that time it was out of my scope, and maybe had I been a more experienced clinician, 'cause this was during my preceptorship- 

And so I was still learning. But we also were trained to be very by the book. 

[00:07:42] Christa Biegler, RD: And I- Of course. Yeah. We all were. 

[00:07:44] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah. And so I didn't feel... And then I sought supervision, and we just, "No, you gotta refer her to her doctor. The doctor's the one talking about those things where you gotta stay in your lane."

And that felt very frustrating. But you know what? Even in naturopathic medicine, I think that we are easily at risk of swapping a pharmaceutical intervention- 

... 

[00:08:09] Dr. Nicole Cain: For a natural intervention, and we're still not asking the right questions. Which you actually just touched on, which is so fun and refreshing, is the why that's underneath of it.

What's the root of that? And then it, if we go even deeper, at the root of the root, and the root of the root, right? 

And so I wanna point out that nuance for your audience, and I think Dr. Greenblatt does this really well, is why are the neurotransmitters not behaving the way we expected?

Is it because there's too much of something, whether it's like organophosphates or metals- ... or stress, or is it a deficiency of something else, like lithium? His big thing is lithium orotate, right? Did he talk about that at all? 

[00:08:49] Christa Biegler, RD: He did talk about lithium. That's why I can't remember if it was one episode or two, 'cause I feel like we talked a lot about- Yeah

zinc and a little bit about lithium. Probably the only guy who's ever come on to talk about lithium. 

[00:08:58] Dr. Nicole Cain: Oh, totally. Yeah. It's... He wrote this book called The Cinderella Story about lithium. 

[00:09:03] Christa Biegler, RD: And 

[00:09:04] Dr. Nicole Cain: it's this- I've not read ... like magnum opus about lithium orotate. 

[00:09:08] Christa Biegler, RD: I appreciate people like that. I can think of a couple others where they figure out a few things and practi- And they learned that through...

I was actually thinking about that as I was unloading my groceries today, is- Yeah ... the amount of time and energy spent with client to learn what I needed to learn. And now it's could I give this away somehow? I would hate for, someone to not have some of this

[00:09:29] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah ... 

[00:09:29] Christa Biegler, RD: because of whatever reason, right?

'Cause depending on what we're working on treating, and I'm talking specifically about skin things as I move into more stress chemistry work because I feel like, some of that pivotal moment where it's oh, people feel better when we support these depletions.

And in order to help them to not be depleted, we need to crack it open a little bit more. Anyway, Love it ... let's talk about anxiety 'cause we could talk about this all day, but it all totally intertwines and interjects- Yeah ... with each other. So tell me a little bit about why you wrote the book in the first place, Panic Proof.

What was the kind of reason that you decided to take on that baby of birthing a book? 

[00:10:09] Dr. Nicole Cain: It was my baby. I birthed a book baby. I desperately needed that book when, especially in 2015 when everything fell apart. It was like my own sort of phoenix rising from the ashes story. And so I wrote the book that I needed because I feel like humans, that we are worthy of, we deserve- healing.

And it shouldn't just be reserved for people who are in the 1% that can afford to go see somebody like Dr. Greenblatt or somebody who can go see a naturopathic doctor and not have to rely- ... on insurance. I think you and I were talking offline about that. It's- ... for many people, if the doctor isn't covered by insurance they just can't go see them.

And so I wanted that book to be available to everybody, so I wrote it, and now you can get it at the library, and it's free. And you can buy it anywhere books are sold. And it's so rewarding because now I have people translating it, and I think it's in five languages now. So all around the world, all these people are sending me messages, and they're like, "I had no idea that this- could be impacting my emotional wellbeing, and I tried it, and it worked." And then I'm over here, and I'm, like, sitting with my dogs on the couch, and I'm, like, drinking a cup of tea, and someone's healing themselves. And I got- Yeah ... to be a part of it. 

[00:11:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:11:33] Dr. Nicole Cain: that's pretty cool. So that's why I wrote the book.

[00:11:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, that's really beautiful. Okay, so you talked about when you were helping with group therapy when you were a young clinician, you were also going through your own anxiety healing process. And so I think let's start, I don't know what terms we wanna use, but I'd love to crack open. We use anxiety.

It's becoming a more common term I feel like now. People- Yeah ... just throw it in there. ADHD is next, right? That's a different interview. Yeah. But so anxiety is there and then the book is called Panic Proof, but let's talk about anxiety. What is it specifically? Is it rising? Is it being diagnosed?

Is it really a set of symptoms, and how would you classify it? What's maybe the official classification or maybe what's Dr. Kean's classification of anxiety? 

[00:12:21] Dr. Nicole Cain: The official classification is when we have worry or foreboding or nervousness that gets in the way of daily living. It's this kind of constant annoying symptom that we experience.

And so the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, it's a very generalized sort of bucket term. But when we look at, if we were to go to a city center and interview everybody that we come across, is when you feel nervous or anxious or fearful or stressed or activated, what does that look like for you?

And people describe it really differently. 

For example, somebody when they get really nervous, they may feel butterflies in their stomach. 

When I get really nervous, the first thing I notice is my body heats up and I get red. 

Some people, their thoughts, like you said, ADHD. That's a common symptom of anxiety, and some people are being diagnosed as ADHD when really it's just anxiety.

And it isn't evolutionarily favorable to focus in on one thing when you're in danger, and you have to be aware of all of the things all of the time so you- ... can be hypervigilant, right? 

And so a new definition of anxiety is we wanna compare that with fear and panic. And so the Dr. Cain definition is when we have true fear is this autonomic activation, this nervous system activation that occurs with true danger.

There's a tiger in the woods, someone's cutting you off in traffic, whatever. Something is truly dangerous, and our body mounts a response that will cause fight, flight, and- freeze, flop, fawn, or fracture. 

And then anxiety is when we have that same kind of activation, but it's in the absence of actual true danger.

So you're taking your kids to school and you're having a panic attack behind the wheel of the car. Or you're gonna do a presentation or you're getting on a podcast interview and your brain goes blank or you feel like you're gonna throw up or your heart is pounding out of your chest. And then panic is the gradation of fear.

In the DSM, in what the standard American Medical Association would say is that panic comes out of the blue. But really the research suggests that it's on a spectrum- ... and the body will start with a whisper, like maybe a little bit of a butterfly, before it escalates into a scream- ... which would be more panic.

And so I think of it as a stoplight where green light is when you're good and calm and grounded and relaxed. And then as the stress mounts, you may have this moment where you're like, "Ooh, I'm feeling a little stressed. I'm not feeling very grounded anymore." And if the stress keeps mounting and accumulating, that yellow will start to shift into red, and that's crisis for us.

That's panic, rage, pain. And so by zeroing in on what actually is going on, by asking the more interesting questions, we can reverse engineer why, and then we can start to treat that. 

[00:15:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that happen or why that doesn't happen, is one, time- Yeah

is a lo- a huge reason, right? Because our medical model is set up to have as many clients as possible because it's related to money, obviously. Everything is. It's a business. And I'm not saying ... It's just neutral. It's just like to me it's very factual to say it that way. And the other thing that you said earlier, you were talking about getting, asking those deeper questions, which I think a natural sense of curiosity and a desire to want to get to this essential achievement or climax or result or to help this person, obviously, right in front of you.

I think there's a lot of really good clinicians where it's like curiosity is really the driver there. I think the challenge is, and this is something I've had to come to terms with- Over the years is, you know how when you get excited about something at some point in life, sometimes you wanna share it with somebody, right?

You're just so excited, you wanna share it with them, right? For me, it was recently bird watching, and my husband is like, "What is this?" But a lot of times people do this with health. I see it with health a lot, right? And so then they wanna share it. But what I've figured out after being in this area of professional whatnot for over, 15 years at this point, is that you cannot make someone be interested in something that they're not interested in, right?

We're usually motivated... we're motivated by inspiration or desperation. So you were just talking about how the body will whisper before it screams, and we use that, we use that all the time when we're talking in integrative functional medicine from other physical symptoms as well. And so isn't it interesting that it's that's a common theme, right?

The body will whisper before it screams. And so I think the conversation is, how do we become more attuned to those whispers before the screams? And I wonder how much people live in the yellow. And you didn't use this as a example in the yellow, but to me it looks like it's quite simple. It's if I wake up reacting to things or reacting to others in the day, I will be hanging out in the yellow until I stop and become aware of it.

And one of the symptoms is checking my phone a lot, right? Or y- like- 

[00:17:42] Dr. Nicole Cain: Ooh, yeah ... 

[00:17:43] Christa Biegler, RD: looking at that a lot. And and it's like a whole loop. You have to catch yourself. Today, yesterday kinda ended up as a dumpster fire as some days do. And so today I was like, "I'm gonna get up early and have my space and my time."

And while I didn't want to when the alarm went off, oh, it was so lovely, right? And I'm not saying that's the answer for everyone. But I know for me, if I can have one minute to myself, or if I don't have to wake up and start reacting to people, I can probably, I can maybe stay out of this yellow space a little bit, right?

If possible. And I wanna talk about how this sort of presents and also, actually, before we talk about the whispers. When I think about panic, and you described the DSM criteria was that it comes out of the blue. What I've heard from my clients has been different as well, which not surprisingly, a lot of these things present in different ways.

And I remember this client showing up to a session one time, a group session. And she was just so viscerally different that day. I hadn't seen her in maybe three weeks. Maybe a month. And I said, "What is going on with you?" And she said I used to try to use these tools when I was having a panic attack, and then I decided," and it- they weren't very helpful, right?

'Cause it's like- Yeah ... trying to throw a little bottle of water on a fire probably. And she said- Yeah ... "I started doing some kinda neuroplasticity exercises for a few weeks, and I just, I'm like a totally different now," right? She's totally brought down. And so the thing is is it really coming out of the blue, or is it that you're at the very top of the yellow on the stoplight before red?

Something I've been chewing on for years, and so I'm really curious about your opinion about this, is I think the only problem we have, and I say this as someone who looked at it in myself, is when we are unconscious of our stress, and we're unconscious of the way we're feeling in our body.

And so what might you say to support consciousness or to support people's awareness around... 'Cause so often it's a couple of things that are hopeless statements that are, "I can't do anything about yes, but I can't do anything about this," or two, "I don't think I'm stressed," right? Even though on the outside, everyone's "How is that?"

I'm not sure. I can see what's happening in your life, and it is crazy, right? And so I think you talk about window of tolerance. And I think- Yeah ... very often the higher the stress the wider that window maybe becomes. But you're the expert on that. I'd like to hear what you think about those couple of perspectives, and then maybe share about the window of tolerance, if you will.

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[00:21:19] Dr. Nicole Cain: I think about how right now with information and technology, it is so disproportionate to the amount of time that human beings have had- ... to evolve and adapt to that. 

And so you were talking about how you'll pick up your phone, and that's one of your signs for yourself. Oh, I'm in the yellow for sure.

And one of the biggest myths about stress and anxiety is that we don't feel stress and anxiety, and it's because we mostly live in our default mode network, which is a series of parts of the brain that are involved in interoceptive, self-ruminative, dissociative autopilot states, right? So we don't have the meta awareness to know that we're dissociated.

Like for example, this happens to me, so for... If it happens to you, no judgment, 'cause you're human. Is have you ever driven somewhere and you get there and you're like, "I don't remember that drive at all?" 

[00:22:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. How doesn't everyone know that have this experience, 

[00:22:19] Dr. Nicole Cain: right? Yeah. That's default mode network.

So the brain is "I kn- I've done this 1,000 times. I don't have to use energy on doing this drive." 

And we get there safely, but we're largely dissociated, right?

[00:22:31] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:22:33] Dr. Nicole Cain: And so what happens is that we get all of this incoming data. You start your day, you're already responding to people.

You're interacting with people. That's stressful. We get ping notifications on our phone. We get tasks things. We get meetings. We're getting the news from- All over the world, all the time. It's being pushed to my email. I have advertisements on my home screen on my phone. I have to constantly, every time I update it, I have to take the news off of it.

And it is so much stimuli, especially as compared to our grandparents and their parents, where their news was the Sunday paper. And they went home and maybe they watched Alfred Hitchcock or whatever was on television, but it was very different. They weren't carrying around these little computers, these phones.

And so then what happens is the insular cortex, the insula, it's a filter. So think of it like a colander, which you put your pasta in and you rinse it, and the water goes through. So the insula's filtering all of this input from the body. Where do I feel a soreness, or I feel like my heart is pounding, or I feel a little bit hungry.

Whatever it is. It's filtering that, and it's filtering all of this data from our environment. But it's too much. 

We haven't evolved to deal with this data. And what happens when it's overwhelmed, the insula's when in doubt, send it on," 'cause I don't want to miss something that could be lethal for us.

So it drops it down to the amygdala, the emotional processing part of the brain. And the amygdala's "This is a fire hose to the face. I don't know. When in doubt, send it on." So then it activates the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which is that fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn, fracture. So we're sitting here and we're not doing anything except for maybe checking our email or doing a podcast or whatever it is.

And we're stressed, and our body is stressed, and we don't even realize it 'cause we're in default mode, right? 

So all of that to say is what can we do about it? I can't- 

... 

[00:24:37] Dr. Nicole Cain: N- not drive. I can't not check my emails. Is think about the amount of stimuli that's hitting you in the beginning of your day, throughout your day, and figure out where you can eliminate some of that.

And for me, it's literally what you just said. For me, it's this habitual picking up my phone, and I have no self-control. So I have to just put my phone in the other room. And reduce that blue light, all of those notifications. I have 5,000 unread emails because I mark them as unread when I need to respond thoughtfully to them.

So if that's something you can do is set your phone down, turn the lights down, try to use natural light, open the windows, and turn off the artificial lights. Start to strategize how you can reduce the level of stimulatory input. I'm curious what helps you the most. 

[00:25:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, I was actually just considering people that have a really turned up stimuli input, right?

That wanna be multitasking or have the TV on in the background or the radio and- ... what that means in general. I would like to answer your question too, but that's where I was, like- ... just settling on. I guess we call that sensory. There's a name for everything technically, right? But it- 

[00:25:56] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah

[00:25:57] Christa Biegler, RD: We're almost interested in what to do. On the same vein as what you just said in response to your question is if I find myself in a habitual state of checking and reactivity- 

[00:26:12] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah ... 

[00:26:13] Christa Biegler, RD: I like to do, I like to just stop and remove myself from it in general. And something, when I was less conscious of things, something that was really interesting and dramatic was going out of phone service for a period of time into the woods and then coming back out and being like, "Oh, I broke that habit," right?

I disrupted the constant neural pathways. And that was a very interesting thing that I noticed I don't know how many years ago. I'd go into the woods, and I'd come out, and I'd be like, "Oh, yeah, that's, this is one of the reasons that is so nice," aside from nature as a stimulus. I do love relying on nature especially.

And the other thing I like is, and I think we can all be guilty of this in some way, is especially as doers and achievers, is that we can really fill our weekend with lots of things. Yeah. And it can be so lovely to not really have a plan and to have a couple of days, and there's a reason that we have it that way.

And if I have not allowed myself any downtime away from some of the other work, then it's pretty hard to get back into the work, right? And it's very easy to resent. So I guess the short answer is always taking breaks. It's really ... I heard on I heard someone say today something like, "Until we stop, we cannot become aware," because we're just in this spin.

And I was like, "Ooh, that is profound," and it's very true. And so the problem is am I willing to stop to become aware of the thing that's gonna take me to the next level and- quit me spinning around in a tornado in a drain, right? 

[00:27:47] Dr. Nicole Cain: Ayurveda talks a little bit about this- 

... 

[00:27:50] Dr. Nicole Cain: In that description of the spinning around, like all that mental chaos and how we find ourselves leaning into the chaos because- it's more familiar maybe, more comfortable than leaning out of the chaos. So offline, again, you and I were talking about going to the beach in West Michigan. And so I was at- ... Oval Beach yesterday, and I had no cellphone signal, so my phone said SOS. 

And it was like an SOS.

I was like, "Ah, what if I need something? What if I want-" I know. Paul, it was so uncomfortable at first, and then by the time I left the beach, having been in the sun, on the earth, no phones, I was, like, feeling pretty good. 

And so- So good, right? So Ayurveda. And so Ayurveda, just for those who are listening that aren't familiar with it, it talks about how we can go out of balance.

And by the way, this is older than traditional Chinese medicine. This is from India. Thousands and thousands of years of wisdom that science just keeps validating. 

And it talks about how we can go out of balance in three primary ways, and they call them vata, pitta, kapha. 

Vata is that busy, ungrounded, ADHD, dissociative, flying through the air.

It's- ... ether and air. 

And when we're in a vata state of imbalance as a result of overstimulation or as a result of our diet, if we're eating really dry, airy foods, like you're eating a bunch of chips and popcorn, and then you got on an airplane and you flew 30,000 feet above the ground, and you're gassy and you're burping and your stomach's bloated, this is all vata.

And when we're in a state of vata, we tend to do things that make the vata worse. My husband is super vata, and then he always wants to go to music shows that are like, ah, flashing lights, loud music. And then it just makes him more vata, and I'm like, "You need to do the opposite. You need to slow.

You need to ground. You need to be quiet. You need to eat something that's nourishing and maybe rooted vegetables, like something that's in the earth." Versus pitta is that fire. 

So these are the people that it's like road rage in Arizona in the summer, right? It's like hot, too much, too fast, and then you're craving peppers and spicy margaritas and things that just aggravate you more, but it's what your body is craving 'cause it- 

[00:30:13] Christa Biegler, RD: Heartburn.

[00:30:14] Dr. Nicole Cain: Heartburn, yeah. Red skin rashes, right? So you and I were talking about skin. And I have eczema and psoriasis, and it's hot, and I'm having these... A bug bites me, and I get a huge, itchy scratch- ... from a bug bite. Very pitta. And so what will help the mood but will also help the body getting out of the silo is to cool yourself off.

Go and swim in the water, eat cooling cucumbers, take things that have mint with them, right? And then the last one is kapha, which is like spring. It's muddy. It's lethargic. It's heavy. It's like chronic fatigue. It's I can't get out of bed, I can't do anything, I'm so tired, and we just wanna eat ice cream, and that's wet and cold, and it just makes us worse, when really we need something warm and dry like cinnamon.

So I love kinda looking at the traditional modalities, these old ancient wisdoms that teach us how the mind and the body all work together, and how one out of balance may affect the other, and vice versa. 

[00:31:21] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm so glad you brought that up. You brought me back to this time when I was so interested in Ayurvedic interventions and therapies, and there was a dermatologist that I interviewed who's an Indian integrative dermatologist.

It was probably early 2020, late 2019. And so we talked a little bit about... there was... He had given me a little bit of a crash course at one time. But I appreciate all Eastern Asian medicine. I think there's just so much value, right? They did their research somewhat similar to us, right?

They collected a lot of data over a lot of... And you just see patterns, right? Yeah. So that's what this is patterns that they saw over- Yeah ... how many thousands of people overall. So fun. I was going to say that a couple other things I like to do when I'm out of control and spinning is I like to stop and coach myself.

I must, right? And I think that's a huge piece of those anxious spiraling thoughts is learning how to step out and say question yourself. Is this true, or is this this... 'Cause what it ends up, I think spiral or this drain is what it really amounts to, is it becomes a spiral of what if this, and then what if this, and then what if this?"

It's because our brain has negativity bias and is always looking to support the negativity bias related to protecting us from being eaten by the tiger, it goes out and looks for all of these negative possibilities. And before you know it, we're just like a spiral of thoughts no matter what. So a lot of self-coaching, and then any kind of somatic.

So one, being in nature is great, but that's not always possible in the upper Midwest. And so one, taking care of my breath and rate of speech. I talk about that sometimes. And I was just telling, I mentioned it earlier literally getting into birdwatching two weeks ago has been a hilarious nervous system experiment because I go outside and I hit the record button on the Merlin app- Yeah And I'm like, what is this new world in the backyard that I could not see before?

So I've been in the same home since 2011 or something, right? We're in 2026, and And I'm seeing things I haven't seen before in the backyard, and it's oh, life is funny like this, right? We're like such small people. But it's really incredible for the nervous system to tune into these sounds and these bird songs.

And it's this is bonkers how awesome it is. And it's fun because so often some of these... I can almost hear the like, naysaying as I talk about some of these things, wake up and not be reactive. That's easy to say for someone whose kids are older than babies. And there's a different thing for a different season.

But I would say that as your kid's at any age that is something I'm really treasuring doing with my son, who's a bird lover, is like trying- And he's becoming this goofy little preteen boy, and so it's how I wanna bring him down and calm him is can we look at birds together, right?

And so it makes it, it's not like a one or the other. It's like, how can we actually do this and ground together a little bit? So just funny. 

[00:34:16] Dr. Nicole Cain: I love that. Do you have a favorite bird, by the way? I 

[00:34:18] Christa Biegler, RD: have a few. I don't yet. I am more just intrigued by the new ones, and what I'm specifically just enchanted by is that there are different birds in the backyard versus the front yard.

It's interesting, 'cause there's a slightly different ecosystem. There's trees in the backyard, and in the front about... It's a long ways in the front, but it can get low grounds that are almost like- marshy, but that's not really. It's like a dry wetland, which is an oxymoron. Yeah. Yeah. So you get different things.

Sandpipers. Do you have a favorite bird? This week it was just kingbirds. It was like, what's the difference between an eastern kingbird and a western kingbird- Yeah ... was what I was noting. And you? Am I talking- 

[00:34:56] Dr. Nicole Cain: I do ... 

[00:34:57] Christa Biegler, RD: something totally 

[00:34:58] Dr. Nicole Cain: different? I love this. I'm thinking about this in a couple of different ways, because we've seen in the research, 'cause I always wanna bring it back to the research- for the naysayers that are like, "Prove it to me," instead of- ... this being a cute, fun little side, is that the trees respond to the bird calls, and that's how the leaves open. And so certain bird calls will create changes in the plants that survive- Oh, I did not know this ... thrive, and grow. So the frequencies, and we're also seeing in the research that there's this incredibly interesting dynamic between the vestibular ocular reflex- 

And post-traumatic stress disorder and sound. And so there's really cool emerging stuff. Adam Petty is a therapist in Arizona, and he's really trailblazing a lot of this research, looking at what is sound and music and frequencies, what is this doing to the brain and the nervous system and why. And then there's also the trauma-informed way of looking at it.

For me, it's a chickadee, where I had a very stressful childhood, and my happiest, safest place was going in the woods in, not far from my home, and there was always this chickadee, and it was like too-too." And it creates this sense of a greater belonging- Not being alone and th- this reconnection with Earth.

And so for me, even outside of all of the cool science-y stuff of how our bodies and our minds and our nervous systems are responding, but what is... How can you make meaning? And so maybe when your little guy is older, some of these birds that he's been hearing with you as a child making memories with his mom, maybe when he's 30 years old- hearing that bird call will mean something even more to him. 

[00:36:51] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, I had never thought about this. What an interesting- Yeah ... perspective, and so heartwarming, so thank you for that. 

[00:36:57] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah. 

[00:36:58] Christa Biegler, RD: So we're starting to wane down on our time together, and there's a couple of different directions we could go. You brought up, you said something a moment ago about your childhood being I don't know if you said it was traumatic but I would... A couple of different directions we could go would be there's another word I hear when following therapists online. I don't know if I'll get it right, but complex trauma, essentially. That versus types of anxiety. And I can go either way, but I'm a little inclined to talk about this concept of complex trauma and maybe have you unpack it a little bit.

Just help us understand what this is. 

[00:37:38] Dr. Nicole Cain: The research in trauma w- was looking originally at more big T traumas- ... like veterans, like Vietnam veterans. And- ... Francine Shapiro did a lot of work. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, did a lot of work. And they were looking at big T traumas.

And so this is a huge event, something really big that overwhelmed our ability to cope with it. And complex trauma is different. It shows up differently in the nervous system. The scope of treatment is different. And we call those little T traumas, not because they're smaller, but because complex trauma tends to occur again and again- over time. So this could be being undermined, bullied, disrespected, neglected. It could be all sorts of things. Maybe you had a chronic illness as a child, and you were constantly getting scary news and going to the doctor's. Whatever it is, those are more complex. They're more integrated throughout y- the construction of your brain and your body and your experience over time.

And so when we think about anxiety is... The other biggest myth, the first myth is that we don't have anxiety, 'cause most of us, if we're awake, we're anxious, 'cause this is a very stressful world we live in. The second biggest myth is that anxiety is a problem, whereas the research shows that anxiety is our body's attempts at telling us what needs healing and how.

Just like- ... your mom, right? When your baby would cry, it's not because he's a jerk. It's because he needed something. He was hungry or scared or his diaper needed changed. He was trying to communicate. And your job as a mom was to figure out what is it that he needs, and how can I solve his problem?

By feeding him or changing his diaper or cuddling him or whatever," right? 

And so when it comes to the roots of the roots of anxiety, it's an adaptation. Anxiety is an adaptation to something that did happen to you or is happening to you or something that did not happen to you or is not happening to you.

And when we adapt, it's our body's way of trying to help us be better able to survive with response to that. And those adaptations can get stuck. They can become maladaptive. They can get twisted. An example of that is you live in Alaska. South Dakota south Dakota. Michigan. It's winter.

It's cold. You adapt by putting on a coat. But then we go to Cancun, it's 100 degrees and sunny, and we're laying out on the beach, and that very coat that saved our lives and protected us- ... and was necessary is now suffocating us. It's hot. It's gonna create heat exhaustion if we don't take that off.

And that's how I think about anxiety is- ... it's there to protect you. It's there to help you, but it needs a little bit of recalibration from your hormones to your immune system to your relationships to the stimuli that's coming in. And when we put all those pieces together, anxiety can heal. And that's the third most common myth that we wanna bust is that anxiety is not something that you have to live with for the rest of your life.

We wanna have fear if there's true danger, but anxiety, that's something that we can heal. 

[00:41:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I love that you brought those three myths up. I am a kind of a natural questioner, so I tend to think- I always question things in general "Oh, do we really need to have this diagnosis?" And you know that clinically we're typically taught once a diagnosis is there, it's rarely reversed, right?

I remember that- Yeah ... so specifically working in a specific internship about diabetes. So once you have diabetes, you would never reverse it. And I don't know if people would say that 100% now. Some people might disagree w- with that. But similarly with anxiety. Yeah. And of course, different things.

I'm glad you defined complex trauma because so often something can have a name, and we as- a stereotype, and I don't really know if I had a stereotype, but that was just a clear, quick definition, right? It's like the things that happen over and over. And as you talked about these myths related to anxiety and just anxiety as a whole and these little things that happen again and again, I don't know, is anyone really immune to this?

Isn't this just sort of an opportunity for all of us to heal? 'Cause when I hear you talk about this, I'm like, how is anyone outside of this window, right? 

[00:42:22] Dr. Nicole Cain: We're all inside, yeah. And what I really appreciate about what you just said is that if we truly aren't feeling anxious or stressed, then we're probably not expanding our window of tolerance.

A- as I interviewed this anxiety expert this human is the anxiety guru, and they're like, "Dr. Kane, I never feel anxious." I was like, "I don't think that's a flex." 

I think that might be an opportunity for you to push yourself just a little bit. 

And then you're gonna get some feedback.

You're gonna get a little feedback that this is a little bit hard, but that's how we grow. And so we can work with anxiety. We can work alongside and collaboratively with the feedback from our minds and bodies, and really allow ourselves to do bigger and to get stronger and to be braver and to be more who we were brought into this world to be.

[00:43:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. You just mentioned window of tolerance. I don't think we officially gave definition to it, but when I think about- Yeah ... window of tolerance, I think about that kind of old expression of- the things that we encounter make us stronger. They widen that window. So if you wanna describe it at all or- 

[00:43:34] Dr. Nicole Cain: Yeah

[00:43:34] Christa Biegler, RD: contest what I said. 

[00:43:37] Dr. Nicole Cain: I really love that, and I'll s- give a high five to Scott Miller. He has talked about the window of tolerance as the zone of reliable performance. So your window of tolerance is I know what to expect, I'm really comfy, this is my comfort zone, I don't grow here. And then when we go outside of the window of tolerance- he calls that the zone of proximal development. 

And so this is where we grow. This is where we develop. If we never climbed out of our comfort zones, we wouldn't know how to walk. We would've- ... just sat there and stayed in our comfort zone. We wouldn't have fallen over. And so I- Yeah

really appreciate Scott Miller's leaning on proximal development. It's how we develop and grow. 

[00:44:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. It's such a fancy clinical way of saying that evolution requires discomfort, right? Is like we only grow- Ooh ... through discomfort, right? I feel like that's the conversation I'm having with my colleagues all the time.

And I know that in a couple of hours when I have my next interview, that's gonna come up, that growth happens through discomfort. But you gave us the really nerdy scientific version, which I- ... so appreciate. It is very well received on this particular show. 

[00:44:44] Dr. Nicole Cain: Thank 

[00:44:44] Christa Biegler, RD: you. Yeah. Dr. Nicole, we've covered quite a lot today.

We talked about the few myths of anxiety. We just talked about, a little bit about complex trauma. You even- Shared with us some research about the birds and the trees, not the birds and the bees. We talked a little bit about the Ayurvedic doshas, I believe they are called, right? And then I really appreciated the answer you gave me for unconscious stress and how, we're trying to filter so much.

There's a very viral Instagram reel that gets redone a lot when people say, "Sorry I didn't get back to you. I was never meant to be available 24/7," or have this many stimuli or whatnot, and that's what that reminded me of. So i've asked that question a lot, and I've never quite gotten the beautiful scientific, and you presented it different than I've really had anyone present it before, so it was really fun to hear that. And then of course the stoplights as well, right? What is panic and where are things? I think this is a such a helpful, and I'm glad I'm ending with this one, because I think it's such a very helpful tool for us.

I always find that assessment and awareness is our very first step before we can shift or change anything. And so if we ask ourselves "Where am I on a stoplight?" right? "And what tools do I have to maybe shift myself in that state?" Is a really beautiful place to start. So on that note, is there anything that you would love to leave the listener with as a last thought on if they heard this and they feel very inspired or encouraged by this?

And then where can people find you online as well? 

[00:46:16] Dr. Nicole Cain: I think that when in doubt, remember that the farther you are from nature, the farther you are from health. And the closer you are to nature, the closer you are to health. So when in doubt, go out in nature in whatever way you can. And I'd love to meet you.

I'd love to get to know you. You could find me @drnicolecain, C-A-I-N, on Instagram. That's my YouTube as well as my website. 

[00:46:41] Christa Biegler, RD: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:46:43] Dr. Nicole Cain: This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate getting to share.