750: The Greatest Biohack Is Feeling Your Feelings (& How to Do It) With Raj Jana

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The Greatest Biohack is Feeling Your Feelings (& How to Do it) with Raj Jana
Wellness Mama » Episode » 750: The Greatest Biohack Is Feeling Your Feelings (& How to Do It) With Raj Jana
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750: The Greatest Biohack Is Feeling Your Feelings (& How to Do It) With Raj Jana
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Today, I’m talking with my friend Raj Jana about emotional health. This is something I’ve had a lot of questions about since sharing my own story of trauma healing and emotional recovery. Raj shares his story about working through his own feelings and triggers, and how he now helps others do the same. He shares that the greatest biohack of emotional health is to feel your feelings. We go deep on what that means and how to do it.

Raj Jana is a former engineer, a 40 under 40 entrepreneur, and a media host. He built a coffee company, and then several years ago, sold a large part of his shares and went on his own personal journey of transformation that led to his current project, Liber8, which helps people use emotional analytics to improve mental health outcomes.

We talk about what triggers are, how to become aware of your emotional triggers, how he helps people with quantifiable data around their triggers, and how to then use that data to your advantage to rewrite some of your internal stories and scripts.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Episode Highlights With Raj Jana

  • What led him to do the work he does now after running successful companies
  • How he learned he didn’t really know how to love himself
  • What happened when he tried hypnotherapy, and what it led to
  • The nervous system is like the soil of the body from where everything else grows
  • Understanding nervous system health and how to improve it
  • How to learn to develop a healthy relationship with your emotions
  • What emotional triggers are and how to turn them into treasures 
  • How to use emotional lab reports to find the tools that will work best for you
  • Tools for regulating the nervous system
  • How to build a healthy relationship with your emotions and your thoughts
  • What parts work is and how to use it 

Resources We Mention

More From Wellness Mama

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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode goes into the mental and emotional health side with the topic of the greatest biohack is feeling your feelings and how to actually do that. And I’m here with a friend of mine, Raj Jana, who is a former engineer, a 40 under 40 entrepreneur, media host. He built a coffee company, and then several years ago, sold a large part of his shares and went on his own personal journey of transformation that led to his current project, which is called Liber8, which is L-I-B-E-R and the number eight, which is a transformation company that helps people use precision emotional analytics to improve mental health outcomes. And we talk about that today. But we also really talk about the nervous system side and how to become aware of emotional triggers, the quantifiable data that he’s helping people have around that, and how to then use that data to your advantage to rewrite some of your internal stories and scripts. And since sharing my story with trauma healing and emotional recovery, I get this question a lot. So I’ve been trying to find actionable and practical and quantifiable tools that can reliably help people hopefully have a shorter journey on that path than I did. And I feel like we learned a lot of great tips and tools from Raj today. So let’s join him now. Raj, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Raj: It’s so great to see you, Katie. Thank you so much for having me.

Katie: Well, it’s always exciting when I get to have a podcast conversation with a real-life friend, and especially one who is doing amazing work that’s super relevant, I feel like, to the listeners and dovetails with my own story of, as people know, doing all of the physical health things literally by spreadsheets and working with every doctor. And it wasn’t until I addressed the inner side that all of those things became effective, and I was able to actually heal. And since sharing that part of my journey, I’ve gotten so many questions from people who want to be able to find their own answers in that way. And I know that what I did directly is not going to work in the exact same way, in the exact same order for them. And I know that the framework of that and that the being willing to go inside is an important piece for essentially everyone. So for a little bit of background context, I know you have done many things to help the world in many ways and that you now are doing some incredible work in this space. So what led you here from all the previous things that you’ve done?

Raj: Well, my first business was a successful coffee company. And a few years ago, I sold a big portion of that. And I started going down a spiritual awakening path, if you would, just because I realized that I didn’t really know how to love myself. Let’s just put it clearly. I was working really hard, overworking. I was in a nine-year relationship. And I really wasn’t present in the relationship. I was, I had a lot of attachment wounding. We were getting into a lot of fights and triggers, and I was just in like this really stressed, chaotic state. And as I started kind of going down this path of mental and emotional well-being, I got to a place in our in my last relationship where like things were just breaking. Like we would start to we would try to be intimate, and we were starting to have intimacy challenges. Like there was just so much going on that my body, my body was physically, literally responding to all of the stress that I was carrying. And all of the trauma that I was carrying underneath, my under in my mind, my body, and my psyche.

And at that point, I remembered on my podcast, I actually invited out a hypnotherapist to sort of talk to me about, you know, what is happening in my mind? What is happening in my body? Why do I feel so much stress? Why do I feel so insecure? Why do I feel all of these beliefs around not feeling worthy? Like, where are these coming from? And as we started working together, it became very abundantly clear that there was just a lot underneath the hood. There was so many beliefs that were getting in the way of me really experiencing healthy intimacy. There were so many childhood traumas around, you know, my worth and my self-worth that was getting in the way of me being able to connect deeply with my with my former partner. And all of those awarenesses then kind of opened up a whole Pandora’s box of like, oh, my God. OK. Like, there’s a lot of Raj work that I need to do.

So I got out of that relationship, and then I went on this deep path of doing all the therapies, the hypnotherapies, the different types of modalities, the different types of cognitive behavioral therapy. I was working with coaches, and I was just going down a very crazy route. And I think maybe we were talking earlier, like you had a very similar route. You were trying all the things, and you had a very it was your path. And I was kind of just going down that path, and I realized how confusing that was. Like, how do I know what tools are best for me? How do I know what modalities are best for me? How do I know what’s actually at the root of all of the triggers that I’m experiencing? And how do I know what approaches are going to be best for me? There was no way for me to find that.

And that’s when my partners and I came together, and we started working on our emotional lab reports and started putting together programs that taught people how to sort of navigate this very confusing world of mental and emotional well-being and how to be your own co-pilot on the journey and bring back the level of awareness to what’s going on with my thoughts, feelings, and emotions and really learn how to be human. Because I think these skill sets of learning to regulate your nervous system, learning to know what tools are best for you, like, these are things we can learn. And I wish I would have learned this as a kid. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. And so, I had to learn it as an adult. And so now that’s why we do what we do. We want others to, you know, just learn these basic skills of how to do the inner work and how to go within. Because it’s, to me, one of the greatest biohacks that exist.

Katie: Yeah, well, like you, I wish I had learned these things as a kid. And we’ll get to do a whole follow-up episode on the parenting angle of this, which I think is equally or more important. But before we jump into that, I love that because I often ask in prep for these interviews, if you had to give a TED Talk in a week, what would it be on and why? And your answer was how the greatest biohack is feeling your feelings. And I think this is pivotal important. I’ve seen this play out in my own life. And like you, I had quite the journey of thinking I was completely fine and had dealt with all of my traumas and feelings and was, of course, always operating from a completely rational perspective until I unraveled some of that and realized that there were deeper layers. But I feel like this piece is absolutely key, even from a physical health perspective. And I feel like you really capture that by saying the greatest biohack is to feel your feelings. But can you elaborate on that and what that means and maybe where to even begin? Because I can imagine from having been there before, that seems overwhelming and also maybe at times impossible for someone who’s not currently in that place.

Raj: Yeah, so in my eyes, you can’t grow healthy food or food that’s extremely nutritious in soil that’s not, right? So I like to think of our nervous systems as this like giant, so it’s like the soil of our body. It’s like everything is connected from the nervous system. Right. Our immune systems, our digestion, our everything. And so when I when I think of nervous system health, it’s bigger than mental health. You know, mental health is very like, okay, like it’s my thoughts, it’s everything up here. But then, you can’t just think of that as like everything, because if you just think of mental health, you’re forgetting your emotional health. And if you forget your emotional health, that means you’re, but that’s not complete either because then there’s your relational health. And there’s all these different aspects of health that create I think the soil, which allows for healthy functioning to exist.

And when I look at the biohacking space, like, you know, there’s all these amazing tools and gadgets and all these different supplements and all these different things that we can do to improve our health. But if the soil is bound, if there’s a lot of energy that’s just coiled up in our bodies, whether it’s from current life stressors or from past life stressors that never actually got dealt with, if they’re just stored in the body, it’s going to be very hard for any of the other therapies to actually work. And so, one of the fastest ways that we have found in our communities and just from my own journey and from talking to experts and people in the field to release some of this energy is to develop a healthy relationship with our emotions. And building that healthy relationship with our emotions is beyond just feeling our feelings, right? So feeling your feelings is one element of that. But before you can feel your feelings, you have to sort of, understand your feelings and know, and know what they are. Like when you have anger, instead of being like, I’m an angry person, learning to create space between you and the anger and say, no, I’m experiencing anger right now.

And then there’s learning the skills to actually sit with that anger without needing to do anything with it, which can be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. But this is where now we’re building this lesson, these skill sets of emotional intelligence, emotional awareness. And as you build those skill sets, you eventually get to a place where feeling your feelings ends up being the greatest releasing tool that you can have. Right. Like because one of my biggest fears, I used to hate feeling my feelings, literally hated it because I thought that feeling my feelings meant that I would get stuck in them. Like if I was crying, I did not like to cry because I was afraid that by going into my sadness, I would just get stuck in my sadness and I’d never be able to get out. And over time, what I started learning was as I allowed myself to cry, and I gave myself the space. Now, this is where this could probably be a, I guess it is an entire podcast episode in some ways, like how to feel your feelings as a whole, another kind of body of conversations that we can have. But to me, as you get into that zone of one, paying attention to your emotions and then giving yourself the permission to express them however they need to be expressed. So if it’s sadness, like expressing them with a good cry or maybe moving the energy with like dancing or music, whatever tool that you or maybe any of the tools, whether it’s hypnotherapy or mindfulness or breathwork, there’s a lot of tools that can actually unlock your emotional body.

But ultimately, it is actually just coming down to giving yourself the permission to feel and giving yourself the permission to be messy if you need to be messy and giving yourself the space and finding community and humans to kind of hold you as you’re learning to do that. That was kind of my journey. But to me, as you do that over time, I have found personally that a good cry beats any biohack I could possibly find because you’re truly releasing the bound energy. And that’s how I like to think of it. It’s like this energy that lives in our system, this stress, lives in the body, and the body’s way of releasing it is through our feelings and through our emotions. And as we physically release it through crying, through screaming, we then create a healthy relationship with the body, just kind of purging things that are not meant to be in the body. So that’s something new can take its place, like joy or peace or gratitude, more of these other positive states. So I’ll pause there because I said a lot.

Katie: Yeah, I think you touched on several really important things that we’re going to get to elaborate on. I think that piece about learning to sort of audit that inner speak and ask better questions internally, become aware slowly of our nervous system’s reaction to things. For me, like you learning, I’m not my emotions. Those are an experience I’m having. So even just changing my inner language around them and with my kids now, we’re very careful around using the words, anything comes after the words I am, we choose very carefully because we talk about that. Like when you say I am sad, the message you’re giving to your body is that the entirety of you, your existence is sad. And that’s not a true statement, but we say those things without really thinking of them.

And you also really touched on sort of that idea that when we resist the emotions, they actually build like we resist them because we don’t want to feel them. But that actually sort of gives them space to grow and keep getting bigger rather than just addressing them and feeling them. I remember one of the first people I worked with when I started this journey was, had a phrase and he said, never waste a trigger. And he talked about them being really great insights and tools. And I talk about a similar thing in the physical health world with symptoms, being messengers and being gifts and how they’re actually great communication from our body, even if they’re not comfortable experiences. It’s our body directly talking to us. The same thing with triggers, that that is actually great insight and a great opportunity for healing and learning. So I would love for you to elaborate on that, how we can transform our emotional triggers into a place of emotional transformation.

Raj: I just love that question. So for anybody listening who doesn’t know what an emotional trigger is, think of an emotional trigger as those moments where you have an emotional reaction to something outside of you that you’re not necessarily consciously doing. So if your kids say something or do something or they’re coming into the room and then you have a response or a reaction, that is a trigger. A trigger could be you’re watching the news and then you get some level of sadness or fear that comes up. That’s a trigger. You might be in a conversation with your spouse, and your spouse doesn’t do the dishes for the 15th time in a row and you get angry. That’s a trigger. And these triggers are these opportunities. And when I look at triggers, we define triggers as like this response from a part of you that is unconscious. And that unconscious trigger is responding to something right now.

Now, when you can look at that trigger as this tip of the iceberg, and you say, okay, what if this trigger has actually nothing to do with the thing outside of me? And what if, this is just a what if, you could actually say, all right, instead of this trigger being caused by something outside of me, shifting the language to my nervous system is responding to something outside of me in this way. Why is that? When we can shift the languaging and now begin to ask that question of why and where is this trigger coming from and what inside of me is actually getting triggered, now you begin the journey to actually shifting it for good. Because most people don’t realize that. And this is what I’ve learned over the years. And it sounds like you have too, Katie, is just that these triggers become treasures. Like underneath, like the triggers are actually your nervous system trying to signal to you, hey, there’s this thing that’s showing up right now and I want it gone. I don’t want to feel triggered anymore. I want to feel calm and connected.

So can you actually look at this from that lens of learning? And when we start to look at it through the lens of learning, you can open up a whole world of insight. And that insight is actually the thing that leads to the transformation. It’s like, okay, I’m getting into this trigger with my spouse because he didn’t do the dishes for the 15th time in a row. But when I really sit with it, what I’m really triggered about is the fact that I don’t feel very heard. I don’t feel very understood. I don’t feel very acknowledged. I don’t feel appreciated. And that’s the thing underneath the thing underneath the thing. Now, when you have that insight, the next step is to do something with it and to communicate that. And then there’s a whole suite of tools, right, for nonviolent communication and how to name your needs and how to communicate effectively with others. And we can talk, there’s so many worlds. This is why I’m like this, this body of work has so many different directions we can go in. But that’s the journey of going from emotional trigger to emotional transformation is the journey of asking with curiosity, where is this coming from?

Katie: And so much of it does seem to start there, like the Walt Whitman quote of approaching it with curiosity, not judgment. I feel like that is a tremendous first step because it allows you to not make assumptions of what you think is going on. And when you approach it with curiosity, especially I find with emotions in the nervous system, when you ask good questions, usually it’s very ready to give you good answers. We just often have to learn the process of asking good questions. And like you said, there are, I think, so many tools now available, which I’m so excited about, that can help in so many different areas of this. And I think sometimes that can feel a little overwhelming. I know it did for me when I was trying to figure out what to try and what might work. And I tried a whole lot of things before finding the ones that seemed to be really effective for me. So do you have any ideas or tools or direction for people in how to approach that process and finding the tools that might be most effective for them?

Raj: Yeah, so this is the basis of everything that we’ve been building at Liber8. This was the problem I ran into. When I first got started, there’s just so many books and podcasts and resources and so many people that are swearing by their tool. Oh, this is the thing that worked for me. Everybody’s got to do it. This is the thing that worked for me. Everybody’s got to do it. I’d go talk to my dad, my mom, my brother, my friends, my colleagues. Everybody had a different answer, and it was just so confusing. And that’s basically what our emotional lab reports help people.

To me, that is one of the most effective tools that I could possibly recommend for somebody to figure out what type of tools, what types of resources, what types of books, podcasts, next steps are going to be relevant to your specific emotional triggers and your specific goals psychological landscape because ultimately that’s really what, based on your nervous system, based on the way that you perceive threat, based on your beliefs about the world, based on the way you were raised different tools are going to work for you. Like, you know, if I went to somebody who’s extremely religious, right? And I went to them, and I started talking about all of this mystical stuff over here that’s a kind of woo. It doesn’t matter. It’s just not going to land, right? But if we go to that same person and bring something that is in more alignment with their belief system, something like prayer or something that is more in congruence, that tool is going to be so much more valuable to them than anything else. And so I think being able to take the time, and this is what we’re really, that’s what our emotional labs are. I’d be hard pressed to find another thing that does that because to me, going through the process of actually assessing what’s going on when you’re experiencing an emotional trigger is going to allow, by doing that process, then we can find the right tools. So it is like a, I wish I could just say, hey, these tools are best for everybody. But it’s hard to do that because depending on each individual, it’s just going to be wildly different. And that’s why we built our emotional lab reports.

Katie: And I like this because it gives data. And in the physical health world, we can run labs and we can get data. We can have insight of what’s going on inside of our bodies. And I say very often on this podcast that we are each our own primary healthcare provider and that there are now so many tools available that we can actually take the ownership of that with good data and make informed decisions. I think it’s also true in corollary that we are each our own healer and that no one outside of us is going to be our healer. We have to do that work internally. But now that there are tools that can be very complimentary in that journey for ourselves, and we can have guides and helpers and people who hold our hand. But at the end of the day, we are our own healer.

I think another point of this that I experienced and you might have as well or might encounter people experiencing is when you start doing the work, it seems like it can be easy to then shift from the identity of trauma or whatever you’re coming from into the identity of healing and doing the work rather than and the goal eventually, of course, actually just being healed and regulated and emotionally calm. And so, I think some of these tools are helpful because they can help frame not getting stuck in the identity of healing either, but actually staying on the journey of healing to get to the point of being healed, which is, of course, a lifelong journey as well. And you’ve mentioned nervous system health quite a bit. Can you speak more to whether it be habits, tools, anything that can be helpful in curating good nervous system health. Cause I know this is also very much a journey.

Raj: Yeah. And it’s, and I just want to really name like this body of nervous system health is emerging, right? Like I can share the best that I know today, and in a week with new research and new studies, like this could evolve, so I just want to name that. From what I know for myself, regulating and taking care of my nervous system comes in a few different ways. One is with actually developing a practice to release the bound energy that is coiled up and stored in our nervous system. So over time we have adverse childhood experiences and traumas. We have life stressors. We have big T life stressors and little T like we have little stressors, big stressors, everything just accumulates in our nervous system, right? So developing a practice of releasing that energy consistently and having something you love to do is paramount. So it could be breathwork. It could be it could be hypnosis. It could be ecstatic dance and movement. It could be whatever it might be, but getting into a practice, a practice of consistently releasing energy from your system is one of the most, and I like to think of this as like subconscious rewiring in a lot of ways, like really like, because by releasing the energy from your system, you’re actually rewiring your nervous system to be more resilient, like, because it’s not carrying all that energy. So, that’s the first step.

The second step to me is building a healthy relationship with your emotions and your thoughts. And so, to me, one of the most effective tools to do that is this body work called parts work. And, you know, parts work is, it’s not necessarily like a tool. It’s more like a something that you learn over time, like, okay, when you have this angry part, learning to separate yourself from your anger by calling it a part. I’m not angry. It’s just my angry part that’s out right now. Or I’m not being judgy. It’s my judgy part right now. I’m not being this. It’s my this part and learning to create that spaciousness between you and your part. And when you do that over time, you are literally separating out these parts of your nervous system that are triggery, unconscious parts of you that are not in alignment with this peaceful, loving, calm, connected, confident, creative, compassionate part version of you that is actually who you are. I really believe that’s actually who we all are. Underneath all of our triggers, we’re actually incredible, truly, truly, truly incredible. So it’s building this habit of going from identifying with all of this, the triggery parts to then identifying with these calm, connected parts. And that happens through consistent awareness.

So some tool for nervous system rewiring regulation, a tool to, or parts work and really learning to separate yourself from your thoughts and your emotions. And then we think if there’s a deeper, another tool that I could probably recommend. And then really tracking to me, it’s like, you know, emotional lab reports are one way to track, journals or another way to track, you know, like I’m an avid journaler. And to me, in fact, there’s so much research on, you know, the impact on health and well-being as it pertains to like a consistent journaling practice, like just getting into the practice of consistently journaling your thoughts and your feelings when you feel them is a fantastic way to continue releasing some of that bound energy from the system.

Now, as I said, there’s, I can go a lot deeper once we know more about each individual, but I, from a grand standpoint, like these are just fundamentals that we find to be really important when it comes to taking care of your nervous system, beyond all the physical stuff like sleep, you know, there’s all that stuff as well. I’m not going to go too deep into those departments because I’m sure there’s, you know, you’ve had other experts on the show to talk about that, but from an emotional side, from the psychological side, like those are the three, three tools that I think are great.

Katie: Yeah, I know a lot shifted for me when I even just became aware of the nervous system component as an important piece of health and started devoting intention and time to that. And I had some of those similar experiences where I found things that I had not considered before that were really helpful in that. For me, things like singing randomly, which when you look at the physical health side, it’s great for vagal nerve tone, for stimulating the thyroid. But also, for me, there was the metaphor of finding my voice and getting to process through that. I actually did yelling and tantrums because I had suppressed emotions for so long. And when the therapist first told me to throw a temper tantrum and yell, I was like, ah, it wasn’t going to work. It actually took time to learn how to get in touch with those emotions.

Even things like any kind of movement, like dancing is awesome. Or when I would push against a wall just to have like the physical sensation of pushing against something and getting to like repattern that in my body. I think those tools are so underestimated because of their simplicity, but they’re available to everyone. And they really can make a tremendous difference because anything we are doing that signals safety to our bodies can really help in this process. And I think if we just can have that idea of what can I do to signal safety to my nervous system as a component in our health journey, that’s a huge piece that is often extremely profound in the results that it gives. I’d love to also talk briefly about biohacking for our psychology. If there are any like tips or tricks or tools that can help with emotional resilience, can help with repatterning some of these things, maybe anything you encountered in your journey that was really pivotal for you.

Raj: I think, you know, for me, biohacking, and what I just want to really name, like, safety. Safety is when we feel safe, we are calm, connected, creative, confident. Like, that natural part of us comes up when we’re safe. So I love that you brought this back to safety because ultimately any tool that allows you to connect to safety is a tool that is helping you improve your nervous system health. Like, just think of that as a broad stroke.

Now, biohacking your psychology, this is where it comes down to separating yourself from this part of you that is triggered, limited, kind of reactive to this part of you that is infinite. Right? This part of you that doesn’t get triggered at all. This part of you that is almost, like, just superhuman in some ways. And we all have access to this part of us. Right? And when I think of biohacking or bioharmonizing, whatever word we want to use, it is going from bringing awareness to this side of you and all the ways that it’s playing out. So to me, one of the fastest ways to identify all the parts of you that are sitting in this limited part of you, or all the parts of you that are sitting in triggers, that are sitting in this, and really, again, not actually who you are like underneath all of these triggers, you’re actually an amazing, brilliant human being. So that’s the fundamental thing that just has to be connected with first in order to even explore biohacking.

But once you get that fundamental piece down, now, the biggest thing that worked for me was paying attention to my relationships. Relationships are the source of all of our triggers. I’ll just put it that way. Like to me, like whether it’s relationships with my parents, relationships with my, with my partner, relationships with my, like, I don’t have kids, but if I had kids, like all of this, like the way that we interact with our relationships is the biggest and most profound breeding ground for identifying the quickest ways to go from this anxious part of you, this angry part of you, this resentful part of you, the shameful part of you to this other side, which is this infinite part of you. And I think that frame, and it’s interesting because I wish that there was more like tangible, like, do this thing to get that thing. But ultimately, psychology is not that way. That’s why it’s a soft science, right? Like psychology is a soft science. So we bring in as much, you know, rigor as we can to soft science. But at the end of the day, it’s not like this one definite thing. There’s a body of understanding that by looking at your relationships as teachers, you can find the quickest pathway to releasing the parts of you that are actually not you at all. And when you release the parts of you that are not you, you become the most authentic version of you. And that authentic version of you is brilliantly amazing. And so, relationships are one of the biggest ways. Inside of relationships, my, I’m trying to think if there’s any other tools. I guess I’ll pause there. If there’s anything that’s come up for you in that, I’d love to go deeper. But yeah, for me, starting with the relationships and starting with your emotional triggers, those two pieces are like the fastest way to biohack your psychology.

Katie: Well, I definitely agree based on my own personal experience and from what I’ve heard from so many others as well. And I know we’re going to do a whole follow-up podcast episode. You guys can keep an eye out for relating to the kid’s side and the parenting because often on this podcast, in any aspect of health conversation, there’s a recurring theme of, I wish I had known this when I was younger. How can I help my kids have a healthier framework for this from an early age? We’re going to get to go deep on that because also I think children can be our best teachers and also sometimes our biggest triggers and that the best gift we can give them is our own nervous system and emotional regulation, but that is quite the process and quite the ask. So we’re going to get to go deep on that, but you mentioned Liber8. Can you briefly explain what it is and the tools that you have available? And I’ll of course, make sure it’s linked as well so people can find it and start engaging there.

Raj: Yeah, so at Liber8, our sort of flagship product is an emotional lab report. And what that includes is so you go on our website, you can sign up. When you sign up, you get access to our app, and we start to track your emotional triggers, or we teach you how to pay attention to your triggers. Now, as you track your triggers, we then take you through a 90-minute one-on-one session with someone on our team to help you understand and unpack the root causes of those triggers. Where are they coming from? Where in your childhood maybe did this type of pattern in your life begin? We start to guide you through a really simple process of identifying all that information.

Once we get all that information, we then generate an emotional lab report that includes books, podcasts, resources, and specific tools for nervous system rewiring regulation that are all based in your assessments. So as we track the data, as we see your triggers, we find the best tools that are for you. And you have basically now a little toolkit that you can carry with you throughout your day, throughout your weeks, throughout your months to continue working on your nervous system health and to continue getting the support that you need. And we have so many resources, everything. We have a whole free community that you can go and get access to content and curriculums and one-on-one support. But ultimately, it’s a resource for people who have really not gone down this path to find the right tools for them, so that they can get effective, lasting results and to track that journey. Because in mental and emotional well-being, there’s just no tracking. I never had a way to know if I was actually getting better or not. I just was going to tool after tool after tool after tool after tool. Well, the emotional lab reports can sort of help you quantify, okay, this is where I’m starting. This is baseline. Ninety days later, where am I? Am I getting better? Am I still getting triggered by the same stuff? Those patterns still showing up. We can hold ourselves accountable. That’s ultimately what Liber8 provides. So we have those emotional lab reports and then we have programs for people that want to go deeper. But yeah, that’s the big thing.

Katie: Well, like I said, I’ll make sure that’s linked, but I love this because I feel like it’s essentially the functional medicine approach to mental and emotional well-being because we’ve seen this trend, especially in the health world and a lot of people I talk to and work with of moving toward a more root cause functional medicine approach. And I feel like this is helping do that in that mental emotional landscape, which I’ve seen in my own life be the most pivotal key in even shifting my physical health. So I think this conversation is so important. And I’m reminded of that quote that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our life and we will call it fate. And I love that this is a quantified way to actually start getting some insight because when you are in that emotional landscape, and especially from my starting point, when I was in a place of being very triggered, but also being very emotionally shut down, it’s hard to even try to get an objective look at what’s going on. And so, I feel like tools like this can be helpful because they give us a data point and a tracking and then a goal, and we can move hopefully in the right direction and adjust if we’re not. So I’m so grateful for the work that you’re doing. And like I said, we’ll get to do a follow-up conversation on so what do we do when it comes to kids with this as well. But thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and for sharing today.

Raj: Yeah, thanks so much, Katie. It’s been great spending some time with you today.

Katie: And thanks for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Thanks to Our Sponsors

This podcast is sponsored by Hiya Health, which is a wonderful, robust children’s multivitamin that tastes great and that they make children’s vitamins with no sugar, no gummy junk that tastes great and are perfect for picky eaters. Hiya is designed to fill the most common gaps in modern children’s diets to provide full body nourishment that kids need with a taste that they actually like. It’s manufactured in the USA with globally sourced ingredients that are each selected for their bioavailability and absorption, and it arrives straight to your door on a pediatrician recommended schedule. Your first month, I love this, comes with a reusable glass bottle that your kids can personalize and so every month after, Hiya sends a plastic-free refill pouch of fresh vitamins, which means it isn’t just good for your kids. It’s great for the environment as well. And you don’t have to worry about running out of vitamins as they automatically arrive when you need them. They also have just launched a kids bedtime essentials to naturally support kids sleep and I love that because, like I said, most kids vitamins in general are just sugary gummy vitamins in disguise and Hiya turns that on its head, and now their bedtime essentials really do seem to help my younger kids sleep. They actually like taking them, and I love that they’re addressing the sleep category as well. You can get 50% off your first purchase with Hiya by going to hiyahealth.com/wellnessmama.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse. And this is a company that I got to help co-found and formulate the products for and one that I care deeply about. Oral health has been a fun research topic for me for well over a decade. When I discovered I had some cavities and started learning about the process of remineralization and how our teeth have the ability to stay stronger and healthier, dependent on a lot of factors, including our nutrition, our oral microbiome, and the environment of our mouth. And this is why we use something called hydroxyapatite, which is a naturally occurring mineral that is used in the enamel of our teeth. And there’s some fascinating studies that show that this is really effective at helping keep teeth strong and healthy. And this is also why I chose not to use fluoride in my products. Hydroxyapatite has many of the same upsides without the potential downsides that come with fluoride and is certainly much safer for children as well.
I really delved into the research around the oral microbiome. And I love that this is now an emerging area of conversation and research. But when our oral microbiome is strong, that helps us avoid both ends of the spectrum. One would be things like strep mutans, which is the bacteria linked to cavities, as well as the host of bacteria that are linked to things like gingivitis. Both of those can be combated by having a really healthy oral microbiome.
So we’ve recently released probiotic mints that have four probiotic strains that help enhance the oral microbiome and by choosing microbiome safe ingredients, as well as hydroxyapatite for tooth enamel in the toothpaste. So you can check out those as well as our full line of haircare products and other oral health products as well by going to wellnesse.com.

Katie Wells Avatar

About Katie Wells

Katie Wells, CTNC, MCHC, Founder of Wellness Mama and Co-founder of Wellnesse, has a background in research, journalism, and nutrition. As a mom of six, she turned to research and took health into her own hands to find answers to her health problems. WellnessMama.com is the culmination of her thousands of hours of research and all posts are medically reviewed and verified by the Wellness Mama research team. Katie is also the author of the bestselling books The Wellness Mama Cookbook and The Wellness Mama 5-Step Lifestyle Detox.

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