by Dana James
As one of my clients, Kelly, a recovering out-of-balance Wonder Woman, said, “I just can’t believe how much energy I was wasting on feeling guilty, thinking I was impoverished, being pissed at everything . . . the list just goes on. I’ve realized how powerful my thoughts are—the good as well as the ugly. I now find myself listening to music, going on longer runs, watching and listening to my daughter play pretend with her dolls, and enjoying warm hugs and kisses from my husband. I can finally take in all the glory of being a mother, wife, and friend. But it has even more far-reaching repercussions. My daughter is picking up on my vibe, too, and she’s becoming a more loving and conscious role model. I started this journey for myself but realize it is much larger than me. It’s breaking the feeling of entrapment and unworthiness passed down through my family’s mother/daughter relationships for generations.”
CHAPTER 15
Restore Your Brain
Next to diet, stress is one of the main reasons we put on—or struggle to lose—weight. If you read the chapter on Wonder Woman, you saw how this connection shows up physically when the body produces too much cortisol and directs the storage of fat to the belly. But stress also heightens our emotional response, which can impede our ability to make good decisions, including how we eat and respond to events. That’s why the first of the Six Rs is to restore your mind so it is better prepared to process stressful situations, emotions, and thoughts. This is critical, not only so you can handle everyday stresses but also so you can manage the challenging process of examining your childhood experiences and reclaiming your self-worth.
We have already covered one critical way to restore your mind through the meal plans and food recommendations I provided in Parts I and II. By following these guidelines, you will give your brain the nutrients it needs to thrive and will be rewarded with improved focus, mood, and energy. But food is only one solution. Sleep, meditation, movement, and sound currents are also powerful catalysts toward bringing the mind back into balance.
To understand how these tools work, it’s important to understand the role that stress plays in your life. The stress hormones—cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline—are often perceived as harmful. I’m frequently asked, “Aren’t they why I feel stressed?” Not exactly. It’s your perception of the stressors that makes you feel stressed. The stress hormones activate physical changes in the body to keep you from crumbling into an emotional mess. For instance, if you’re bitten by a dog, stress hormones will send blood to your arms and legs so you can quickly escape and make it to the emergency room. They also activate mental acuity so you can explain to the nurse what happened and get treatment quickly. Without these stress hormones, your response would be lackluster, and any small perturbation, like someone accidentally knocking into you on the street, would cause inconsolable weeping.
The catch is, you need just the right amount of stress hormones. Too much and you’ll feel anxious and start to gain weight on your belly, as Wonder Women often do; too little and you’ll feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and despondent, unable to navigate life’s up and downs with any sense of ease and vitality. Because stress hormones help turn body fat into energy, having too few leads to slow weight loss; you’ll feel like nothing is budging even though you’re doing everything right!
There are five different types of stress. Some of these are triggered by external factors over which we have little or no control. In these moments, our stress response is extremely helpful because it allows us to respond to these events with urgency. Others, however, come from within and, with the right mental tools at our disposal, we can learn to limit their effects.
Sudden emergencies such as rushing your child to the emergency room, your house being burglarized, or a truck swerving into your lane;
Major life stressors such as a death in the family, a health or financial crisis, or a divorce;
Trivial irritations like a traffic jam, your partner not making the bed, or an incompetent customer service rep;
False interpretations such as perception of self, feeling trapped, being overwhelmed; and lastly,
Unresolved psychological traumas from your childhood or secrets from your past.
While you want your adrenal glands to respond quickly in an emergency, you don’t need them firing off copious amounts of stress hormones when you are dealing with trivial irritations, false interpretations, and unresolved traumas. The more negative your view of these internal stressors, the more rapidly you’ll deplete your reserves of cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline, leaving you even less prepared to handle actual stressors like emergencies or major life events should they arise.
The stealthiest stressors are unresolved psychological traumas. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, which discovered connections between childhood traumas and health and interpersonal problems in adulthood, it’s the day-to-day minor traumas you experience as a child—not a one-off traumatic event—that predict chronic disease later in life.1 It’s feeling ignored by a parent, excluded from the girl gang, not feeling pretty enough, or being humiliated in front of the class.
When something threatens your sense of self-worth even years afterward, you will become triggered, whether you realize it or not, because the event subconsciously reminds you of adverse experiences from your childhood. The stress we feel in these situations elicits an emotional response that can alter your behavior, often in unproductive ways. Your stress hormones will be supercharged. We see this in the Nurturer who comfort-eats when she senses she has disappointed someone. Or the Wonder Woman who crumbles after receiving criticism on her work and needs a Xanax (or glass of wine) to calm down. Or the Femme Fatale who feels like the fattest person in the room at a gallery opening—and then goes home and binge-eats. Or the Ethereal who is dismissed for being “spacey” and then retreats into isolation, becoming even more disconnected from those around her.
By restoring your physical brain to its optimal health, through diet and the practices below, you give it the energy and clarity it needs to help you on your journey toward becoming a more peaceful and resilient version of you.
SLEEP
Quality sleep is critical to restoring both the body and the mind. Researchers have found that insufficient sleep increases hunger, food intake, and inflammation—all factors that can contribute to weight gain. In one study, women who got between four and seven hours of sleep for four consecutive nights ate 400 more calories per day than they did on days where they got eight hours of sleep.2 This is partially due to how the brain responds to foods when we are tired. Researchers have noticed more activity in the reward and hedonic areas of the brain and less activity in that rational processing part of the brain when sleep was shortened.3 Insufficient sleep can set you up for overeating . . . and it won’t be for broccoli! To make matters worse, lack of sleep destabilizes the way you regulate your glucose levels; if you grab a gluten-free muffin on the way to work because you overslept, that carb-loaded breakfast will cause your body to release even more insulin—thus blocking the fat-burning process—than it would if you had gotten more rest.
In another study, lack of sleep caused the hunger hormone, ghrelin, to increase by 28 percent and the appetite-suppressing hormone, leptin, to drop by 18 percent.4 Not enough sleep makes you hungrier because two appetite-regulating hormones go out of balance. Adding to that, shortened sleep increases inflammatory mediators such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα), interleukin-1 (IL-1), and interleukin-6 (IL-6).5 This kind of chronic inflammation makes it even harder to lose weight.
Cortisol is even higher the evening following partial sleep deprivation.6 A Wonder Woman is the most prone to skipping sleep, unconsciously fearing that if she doesn’t respond to those emails immediately, she’ll feel the wrath of a boss who expected more from her. What’s worse, she’s read countless articles in which extremely successful people boast of sleeping six hours or less a night and she as
sumes she must do the same if she wants to achieve on their level. Just to be clear: financial or professional success doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. The brain functions exponentially faster after a good night’s sleep.
It’s not just the amount of sleep you get; the type and depth of sleep also matters. Your mental agility and cognitive processing are much quicker if you get a deeper level of sleep, allowing you to make smarter and clearer decisions.
What’s more, you make mental connections and process emotional experiences from the day during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, also known as dream sleep. When REM sleep is disrupted, these memories can remain unprocessed and filter in and out of your subconscious during your waking hours, subtly influencing your behavior. You’ll know when your REM sleep was disrupted because you’ll be irritable, excessively focused on the negative, and distrustful of others the next day. This occurs because the anterior cingulate (which mediates empathy, intuition, and social awareness) is most active during the REM sleep cycle, and if REM is reduced, so, too, is the ability to regulate your emotions and maintain a positive outlook on life. If you take a sleeping aid that inhibits the REM cycle, it’s going to be harder for you to process experiences from the day objectively and investigate the behavioral patterns that make you feel stuck and despondent (and are probably part of the cause of the insomnia). Fortunately, there are some very easy and simple tricks to help you capture more sleep, and specifically REM sleep.
When a good night’s sleep is simply not possible—your kids were up all night, you were anxious, you finished that report at three a.m.—don’t get stressed about it (that just makes it worse!). Be aware that your brain is functioning below capacity and stay vigilant about cutting carbs and skipping sweets, since your body can’t regulate its glucose levels well on such diminished sleep reserves. Yes, it will be difficult since you’ll be up against appetite and brain changes, but your mind is more powerful than any biochemical process. If the voice in your head says, “I’m so tired; I need that muffin,” simply acknowledge that you’re tired and what you really need is sleep. Get to bed earlier that night and you’ll wake up the next day with a brighter outlook, grateful that you didn’t overindulge in carbs because you were tired.
SLEEP SOLUTIONS FOR EVERY ARCHETYPE
Getting a good night’s sleep—at least 7.5 hours—is essential for weight loss and fighting fatigue, but what if you can’t sleep or wake up frequently throughout the night? Certain nutrients and breath practices can help. Start with these six tips:
Before bed, take 300 mg of magnesium glycinate to help calm the mind.
Before bed, take 50 mg of 5-HTP, which is the precursor to serotonin and melatonin. If you are taking an SSRI, this should only be taken under your physician’s guidance.
Wear a silk eye mask to block out any light, as light switches off melatonin.
Engage in a five-minute calming breath series. Lie on your bed on your on stomach with the right side of your face on the pillow. Set your alarm for five minutes. Close your eyes. Hold your right nostril so you breathe through your left nostril. Breathing through the left nostril is calming, while breathing through the right is stimulating. Breathe in and out through the left nostril for five minutes and allow your mind to relax and drift off.
Use a sleep meditation app such as aSleep, Simply Being, and Sleepmaker Rain.
Check your vitamin D levels. Low vitamin D has been associated with shortened REM sleep. Take 2,000 IU of vitamin D daily until your levels are restored.
MEDITATION
Meditation is just as important as the food you put into your mouth. It enables you to become more intuitive, more compassionate, and to fear less, ruminate less, and be more emotionally resilient. Meditation has the ability to change the physiology of the brain, allowing you to release past traumas and dysfunctional emotions. Consistent meditation stimulates the growth of new neurons and increases blood flow to the anterior cingulate, which acts as a conduit between the prefrontal cortex (your rational mind) and the amygdala (the emotional center of the brain). When you’re angry or upset, the activity in the prefrontal cortex becomes reduced, so you might not realize that you are acting irrationally. The activity in the amygdala becomes exaggerated, making it nearly impossible for you to listen to another person, let alone feel compassion or empathy. Meditation changes the direction of this activity—away from the amygdala toward the prefrontal cortex—so your mind becomes more expansive and illuminated and you can stop responding from a primitive program of fear.
Chronically elevated cortisol levels physically shrink the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus (where memory is stored and accessed). Yet a twenty-minute meditation has repeatedly been shown to lower cortisol, even in new meditators, thereby restoring the brain’s functionality.7 Meditation also activates six hundred genes that regulate the stress response and this is, no doubt, why consistent meditators recover more quickly from stressful situations and can easily “switch off” stress.8 In another study, daily meditation for eight weeks changed the brain regions associated with memory, empathy, sense of self, and stress.9 Meditation is a powerful catalyst in changing the physiology of your brain, thereby directing you to live physically healthier and with joy and love.
Not surprisingly, food and meditation work in concert. A clean diet makes you want to meditate. A poor diet makes you resistant to meditation. Meditation also helps to reduce addictive patterns (food, relationships, and negative thoughts). When one of my binge-eating clients meditated in the morning, she could say no to her nighttime online ordering, but when she skipped a day, she’d find herself hijacked by the call of ice cream and cookies at midnight. Research also supports this. When a group of obese women meditated for twenty minutes every day for six weeks, their binge eating decreased by a whopping 60 percent!10
Meditation isn’t a “nice to-do,” nor is it something you do when you can “fit it in.” You need to prioritize meditating as you do brushing your teeth. I recommend making meditation the first thing you do upon waking and before you check social media and emails. This is when your mind is most receptive since the brain waves are still at a lower frequency following hours of sleep. Start with a ten-minute meditation and increase to twenty minutes when your schedule allows.
The benefits of meditation are cumulative. While you’ll feel serene as you emerge from your meditation, the more consistent your practice, the more you’ll find your day-to-day emotional responses becoming less reactive because you’ve changed where the brain responds from under stress. You’ll respond in a calm, centered, and graceful way. You’ll have clarity on the situation. You’ll see the truth.
How to Meditate
Meditation is not a religion. It is a practice designed to settle and restore your mind. Unless you’re practicing Zen meditation, the goal of meditation isn’t to have zero thoughts; it’s to decrease the excitation of the brain waves. Emily Fletcher, meditation teacher and founder of The M-word, explains that you can’t stop your thoughts just as you can’t stop your heart from beating. What you can control, though, is the frequency of the brain waves, moving them from a high, active learning state to a receptive low-wave theta state. All you need to do is stop judging yourself for having thoughts during your meditation practice or telling yourself you “can’t” meditate. Just as you can breathe in and out, your mind can focus and expand. Expansion will happen naturally as long you don’t attempt to control it.
When I first started meditating, my mind was very reluctant to submit to the “nothingness” of meditation. I would squirm in my seat, wondering how I could possibly make it through the next twenty minutes. Subconsciously, part of me feared that meditation might make me more passive and blunt my innate sharpness (Wonder Woman!). I soon discovered that meditation actually opened me up to a dynamic “nothingness,” a profound stillness that revealed truth and clarity
within myself and others. My mind became razor sharp at slicing through false beliefs, and I found myself stripping away delusional thoughts like peeling back the layers of an onion. I now relish those twenty minutes of tranquility and consider it my time to reconnect to the magnificence of life.
If you’re scared to try meditation because you don’t think you’ll be good at it or you’ve tried it but given up because your mind wouldn’t settle, you may need a little help. I highly recommend you use sound currents, such as music, mantras, or the harmonics of a gong, to help facilitate the relaxation response. Guided meditations and mantra-based meditations all use intentional sound currents that can help change the frequency of your brain waves. Just as there are different types of exercise, there are different types of meditation, and I encourage you to try out different forms to see which one is the most effective for you. Biet Simkin, a dear friend and esteemed meditation teacher, has kindly created a ten-minute guided meditation for you. This can be found at my website, danajames.com.
MOVEMENT
Movement has been shown to increase a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which tells the brain to produce new brain cells. Only when new brain cells are created can you break habits. Exercise is not just for reshaping the body, it’s for reshaping the brain. The exercise recommendations provided in your archetype’s chapter will not only help you burn fat and tone your muscles; they’ll also help you sharpen your mind.