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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I’m so excited about today’s episode because this one is all about the eight paths to emotional resilience, how to heal, and how to rise. And if you listened before, you might’ve heard me speak about how addressing the inner mental and emotional realm was actually the most pivotal piece for me, even when it came to my physical health and how this was the factor that actually let me finally let go of my thyroid issues, released over 80 pounds of excess weight, and feel energetic and thriving for the first time in my adult life. And I’ve gotten so many questions since sharing that, and I haven’t had great resources or answers until now because this was an elusive, long, and winding journey for me. I tried a lot of really expensive therapies and modalities before finding things that worked. And I realized in hindsight some of the small things that really helped, but I hadn’t found a way to systematize them or share them, which is why I was so excited to talk to today’s guest and to find a program called RISE, which is really inexpensive and would have replaced many of the things that I spent so much money on and so much time on trying to find answers.
I’m here with Ryan Pink, who has quite the incredible story of trauma recovery and healing from some really incredible and extreme things that he experienced in his life, and now has a tremendous passion for helping other people on this journey. And from knowing him in real life, I see how deeply this passion and purpose runs for him and is truly his life work. And so he’s created something I think is truly incredible and that I’m going to be doing as well. It’s a six-week group cohort program that delves into all of the eight aspects of increasing emotional resilience. I think these are truly the foundational things that really set the stage both physically, emotionally, and mentally for transformation to take place. And we talk about that today. He gives some tremendous tools and key takeaways that you can implement immediately. And if you would like to join us, like I said, I will be participating as well and interacting if you would like to go on this journey alongside me. And there’s more information about that in the show notes. We speak about it in this episode as well, I just have seen in my own life just how important this piece is, the emotional and the mental aspect of healing. And I’m so excited to share that journey with you. Ryan, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.
Ryan: Katie, thank you for having me.
Katie: I’m so excited for this conversation and hopefully for the many people that will have transformation as a result of it. I know we’re going to get to delve into some things that have been highly transformative for me. And I’ve talked about this before. People who have listened for a while know my story of doing all of the physical health things for so long, having the spreadsheets, working with all the experts, having, I thought, everything so dialed in. And then for many years, not being aware of, and then for many years after that, not being willing to address the mental and emotional and inner side that ended up being the transformational missing piece for me.
And since sharing about that, I get so much feedback from people and so many questions wanting to know what my process was. And I feel like my process was long and winding and not necessarily effective or efficient for a long time. And I don’t feel like I had perfect answers to give them, nor do I feel like the process is exactly the same for everyone, which is why I’m so excited to talk about what we’re going to talk about today. But I think that’s a little bit of context before we dive into the solution side. I would love for you to kind of walk us through what you see in the work that you’re doing as why we’re seeing so much related to these mental and emotional side. I think finally we’re seeing an awareness that this is a component, but why are we seeing so much struggle here for so many people?
Ryan: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think there’s a longer answer, but the simple answer to that question is we are operating in a way that’s not according to our design. Over the last 150 years, our environment around us has adapted, has changed so much, and we’ve not been able to keep up. And so when you see the fact that now 61% of people are saying that they’re depressed, anxious, or lonely, that’s ridiculous numbers. We’re experiencing over the last four years what sixseconds.org, a great emotional intelligence organization, calls a global emotional recession based on the data that people are becoming less happy, less content over the last four years.
Those are just evidence that we are not living according to our design. And then you add on top of that, Katie, that we have an exploding population of therapists to solve this problem and yet people are still feeling terrible. People are not, it doesn’t seem to be solving the problem. And so, there’s gotta be another way to, there’s gotta be another way to do that. And I think it’s, I think it has to do with understanding what our design is and aligning ourselves with that design.
Katie: Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And like I said, this was an elusive piece for me for a long time. And I certainly spent a lot of time and a lot of money trying things that didn’t work before finding the things that did. And I know this was somewhat your experience as well. And if you’re willing for context, I would love for you to just share a little of your own journey and how that path for you actually led to this incredible purpose and passion for what you do now.
Ryan: Yeah. I’d love to, Katie. Well, as you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur for 15 years. And when you’re young, you seem to be able to have this limitless energy. And I was quite proud of my ability to ignore the way I felt, both physically and emotionally. I could just push through anything it seemed. And about six years ago, things started to fall apart for me. I started to notice that I was, what they call depressed. I was anxious all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I began to experience symptoms of what they call PTSD, trauma resident in my system. And really, I didn’t think I was going to make it because I just couldn’t imagine living that for the rest of my life.
And the very short version of that story is that led me down a path of trying to understand how to align myself with the design of being human so that I could find my path into feeling good again, to changing my emotional experience of life. Because at that point, my emotional experience of life was fear and terror and sadness. And I wasn’t feeling, even though I had some success in my life, I wasn’t feeling very, very happy with my life.
And so I ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my own treatment. Most of that, by the way, on things that were not effective, things that were the wrong, they were the wrong solution to the problem. But eventually over time that, you know, some of the things were helpful and some of the things made a difference.
And so I started to take note, okay, what is actually working and what is not working? I started doing a lot of study. I’ve spent probably two, 3000 hours of study now on this topic of how do we change our emotional experience? What are the parameters that we need to change in order to change our emotional experience? I’ve interviewed 300 mental health practitioners, researchers, neuroscientists. And in the process started a couple of mental health clinics to help other people find their way into a better emotional experience like I was starting to find.
And at the end of the day, a lot of the things that I believed were solutions at the time, I now know are not solutions. I think that we are constantly looking external. We’re looking for somebody else to be the person to change us, to save us. We’re looking for people who consider themselves to be healers because we want them to heal us. But the answer is always internal. And it’s always in aligning with our design, which we’ll get into. But that was the big shift for me is realizing that it was not anybody else’s job, nor was it anybody else’s ability to change my emotional experience. I needed to learn how to do that myself. And even though some external things could help, the help was always temporary because you resort back to your internal patterns. And so I needed to learn how to change those patterns.
Katie: Yeah, I had a similar and I think slower journey of you, and I’m still very much on that journey, but I can kind of correlate that too. I’ve seen this same idea play out in the physical health world of sort of like shiny object syndrome or looking for the new fancy biohack or thing that’s going to fix you or the specialist or doctor who can give you the answers and slowly learning. And now it’s something I say so often that we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And that while we can work with partners who are helpful and that’s wonderful, both the responsibility and the power to create change lie within us. And I think from seeing your work, the same is true in the emotional and mental wellness space of we are at the end of the day, our own healer. And that doesn’t mean we might not be able to find amazing partners in that journey with us, but the responsibility and the empowerment lie within us.
And that’s also why I was so excited to really delve into this in this conversation with you, because like I said, in the physical health world, I spent a lot of many thousands of dollars on things that I hoped would help me. And I did the same in the therapy world or trying all kinds of things, hoping that that would be the answer. And much like you, I learned slowly over time that just like in the physical health world, we sometimes underestimate the simplicity of the foundational things because of the simplicity. And often those foundational things open the doors for really profound transformations later on.
But I also feel like your work specifically, I’ve never seen anyone do it the way that you do it. And I think that that’s one of the things that makes it so profoundly transformational. I also love that you kind of break it down into helping explain and give really tangible tools for that transformation. So if you’re willing, would you start to take us into those sort of eight paths that you talk about, which I think are so profoundly helpful?
Ryan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we consider, based on whole bunch of research, experience with other people, and work with our clients, we’ve seen kind of eight paths or eight domains to mental and emotional health. And we break those up into two categories. And the first category is one that your audience is going to be very familiar with. I know you talk about this stuff a lot. And those are when we eat better, when we sleep better, when we move better, when we connect better, we set the stage to heal better. And that’s the second for domains. And those are when we adapt better, release better, think better, we actually feel better. And so there’s a natural sequence that our bodies and our minds and our hearts want to go through in order to find that new emotional experience, to heal from the hard things of our past and build resilience for the future.
And really the first step of that is because there are so many assaults on our bodies that are affecting the way that we feel, we have to look at little ways, little improvements that we can make. It starts with that. It has to be manageable. We’ve got to look at ways that we can eat better, sleep better, move better, and connect with other people better. Once we have been able to create a better environment there, in many cases, we start to move into spontaneous emotional healing. It’s really quite miraculous. You see that all of these things that you’d struggled with for so long, bitterness, anger, a feeling of like, everything’s not working out for me, all these kinds of emotional patterns that we create, somehow they lose their stickiness because we’re wired for healing.
However, there are still things that we experienced that require extra internal intervention. And so that’s what the second four categories are about. And really it starts with, you know, once we’ve set the environment for healing, we’re looking for what’s the best way to heal, we start with our nervous system. That’s what adapt is about. And I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well. You know, we talk about being in parasympathetic or in sympathetic, being in fight or flight, or being in a rest and digest or fight or flight. And fight or flight gets a bad rap. You know, it’s kind of like, oh, it’s the bad thing. It’s always, there’s always something that we can pin it on. It’s like, oh, it’s cortisol. That’s bad. It’s like, no, it was created for us to help us, you know?
And so what we’re really looking for is to create a state of equilibrium, to learn, to shift between parasympathetic and sympathetic naturally as needed throughout the day. And we can learn to do that. We can actually learn to do that through internal work. And it’s not actually that hard. It’s just that it’s foreign to us because most of us aren’t doing that. So that’s our nervous system. That’s adapt.
Release is about, we build up these patterns in our muscles and in our fascia based on these emotional patterns that we’ve had our whole life. And they reinforce these emotional patterns. So when we can learn to release the patterns that are established in our muscles and in our fascia and our bodies, then we can stop reinforcing those emotional categories, emotional patterns.
And then the area that, and I’m going to switch these last two around for a specific reason. I’m going to go to think. Usually we do feel first in terms of how we work through it. But think is where most therapy comes in. It says, okay, you can change the way you feel if you change the way you think. And it is a valuable lever in changing the way that we feel, for sure. But it’s one of eight. And if all of the other areas of our lives are not optimized for healing, good luck changing your mind. You won’t be able to change your mind. Or if you will, it’ll take a long time. It’ll be very hard, which is a great business model if you’re a therapist.
And, and then the last thing is feel. And I switched that around because this I feel like is. Once we have established that environment with sleep, eat, move, and connect, feel is we don’t realize how much of an ability we have to change the way we feel. We’re often told, hey, you can’t change your feelings, but you can learn to ride upon them, you know, that kind of thing. And actually the research shows that that’s not true. We can actually sculpt the way we feel over time, not just by changing the way that we think, but also by choosing to feel differently. And so, we have a process that we do called Daily Emotional Architecture Practice, and we call it going deep just to be cute. But it’s really about learning to change your emotional experience and all of these eight domains, Katie, they’re all like levers. The more of them that we’re able to have an impact on, the easier the load is on each one of them. And so that’s why we identify all of them instead of just going to the mind. Because we say there’s all these different areas that we can make incremental improvements that are going to lift us into a better emotional experience. But I think this might be, maybe my favorite and the most powerful because I didn’t expect it originally to have that much of an impact. I didn’t think that we can really change our emotional architecture.
Katie: Yeah. And I love this because it’s tangible and you’re addressing all of the areas. It’s almost like the functional medicine of inner work because it’s not going after a symptom like, oh, let’s address the thoughts. Let’s address the sleep problems. Let’s address the, we’ll take supplements. It’s addressing all of it to also sort of find the root cause, which might look a little different than in the physical health world, but in a way that lets you shift that inner experience.
I also know from our previous conversations, I love your analogy and would love for you to explain a little in the functional health world, we hear experts talk about, some call it the rain bucket analogy or the bathtub analogy or whatever it may be. The idea that if we think of our bodies kind of as a container, any number of inputs can go into that. But once it reaches the top, no matter what went in, it’s going to overflow. And that’s when we see chronic disease.
And I feel like we’ve had conversations about how this sort of happens in the mental and emotional space as well as like when we reach capacity, sort of then the overflow happens. And I often hear functional medicine doctors talk about, so we have to get the bad things out of the bucket so that it stops overflowing. You are the only one I’ve heard talk about, and we can also increase capacity to keep it from overflowing as early.
The other thing I love about this metaphor in both the physical health realm and the inner health realm is that it speaks to, you don’t actually have to be perfect in all of these areas in order to see massive change. You just have to create margin. You don’t have to, it’s not all or nothing. Even these little steps, these minor improvements can add up to make a big shift. But you explain it so much more eloquently than I do. Can you walk us through your version of that? And I just feel like there’s so much hope in that.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, first of all, Katie, I think you did a great job of explaining that. I’m going to pull a prop for people who are listening. This is actually just a candle, but we’re going to pretend that it’s a cup. So yeah, exactly. And I think this is true of anything, but certainly when we look at emotional and mental health, we’re often thinking about how do we deal with the hard things that happened? Okay. This is the thing that happened in the past and that we’re experiencing in the present. Well, we take them out by processing them and trying to think differently about it. That’s the same thing as, while removing some of the things from the cup.
So to go to that analogy, if we have a cup and we fill it with some water and some milk and some coffee and maybe a little bit of vodka on the Friday night and maybe some more coffee and it spills over the edge, we’d say, well, what caused that problem, that emotional experience that you’re having? And you would say it’s the coffee. Well, it’s actually all of the things in the cup, right? That’s probably similar to the analogy you’re talking about in that other people use.
And so yes, one of the strategies we can use is to say, what are these things can we take out? However, the better, or sorry, it’s not even really better, but the other option, the other strategy is that we can just expand the size of the container by learning to create capacity. And one of the best ways we can do that is in our nervous system. Our nervous system kind of adapts to the cues that we give it. And many times we’re not being intentional with how we approach our nervous system at all. We just sort of follow whatever it sort of does automatically, but we can train that directly through the nervous system and through other practices to have significantly more capacity than it is operating out right now, which means that all of those hard things have room to heal.
Because if you’re, if they’re overflowing and you’re in a state of significant depression, significant anxiety, you’re experiencing trauma, like it’s really hard to change anything. And it’s also really hard to remove anything. So, the best thing that we can do is to learn to expand the container and particularly in the area of the nervous system. And there’s a lot of things that we can for that. But primarily if we’re looking at, you know, there’s a lot of like things that we can do just in our day-to-day life. Do you want me to go into that? Is that helpful to go into the nervous system? Things that can help to expand the nervous system?
Katie: Yeah, let’s delve into a few examples because I have talked before on this podcast about how, like I said, I was doing all the physical health things, but by not addressing these other pieces, I was, without realizing it, I was constantly in a sympathetic nervous system state, and I was always in fight or flight. So it didn’t matter actually how perfect my diet was, or if I was taking all the right supplements, my body was in this state of stress. And so it wasn’t able to make optimal use of any of those other things that I was doing. I’ve also seen and talked about how much my life shifted when I did address that piece. I also know it can be elusive to figure out how to address that piece. So yeah, I would love to kind of delve into some examples.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, I know there’s, you know, one thing that you talk about, Katie, quite a bit. And I know you’re a big fan of heat and cold therapy, using hot and cold, but we can actually expand the capacity of our nervous system by now, now when you’re in a state of overwhelm, you don’t want to do like significant temperatures and for significant amounts of time, but we can actually stimulate our vagus nerve by exposing ourselves to cold, to cold therapy. We can do really, really simple things. This is about stimulating a vagus nerve, helping you find your way back into parasympathetic, i you’re in a state of sympathetic dominance, which in our culture, most of us, if we’re falling into one category, that’s the direction we’re going to fall in. It’s a very American direction.
And so we can do things like having, you know, as a part of a morning meditation, which I do every day, we can have a humming practice. You know, you can hum for like 60 seconds is enough to give your body the capacity. It’s really a reminder that you can go back into parasympathetic. When we talk about expanding the nervous system, it’s actually just reminding your body of its ability to go from one state to the other, from parasympathetic to sympathetic and back as needed. And if you’re in a state of sympathetic dominance, then your body’s not remembering that you can go into parasympathetic and you have to remind it or you get to remind it, you know? So you can do things like that.
There’s a tool that I love. It costs a couple of hundred dollars, but it’s really, really great for vagal toning. And it’s called TrueVag. And it takes 60 seconds a day. You put it on your vagus nerve. And a lot of people, I mean, I will say generally, I’m really, I have a bias towards things that are not external, but I do, you know, I will embrace using tools like this from time to time. And a lot of people, including myself, including my daughter, have found that when we’re feeling like we’re in a state of anxiety, that using that pretty much knocks it out in about 60 seconds. And my daughter has said that it’s, well, she’s said it’s changed her life. I mean, because she’s really just doing vagal toning. She’s learning to go back into parasympathetic when she’s stuck in parasympathetic. So those are a few tools that are really, really helpful. You know, you can also do things like, the Daily Emotional Architecture Practice is really helpful from a different side, but is also very helpful for that.
Katie: Yeah, I love that. That’s such a great example. And one thing I noticed anecdotally, actually, with the vagus nerve, with using your voice, with humming, all of those things being so interconnected, there’s actually a lot of studies linking this to thyroid function as well, because the vocal cords are so close to the thyroid. And in hindsight, I noticed this pattern that years ago, one of my out of comfort zone activities was to start taking voice lessons. And I am by no means a great singer even now. But when I started taking voice lessons and practicing every day, so I was using my voice much more and in different ways than I was used to, that was around the same time that my thyroid on labs actually started improving. And I was doing all this inner emotional work as well. But I was like, wow, that’s fascinating. Something so simple as singing or humming or using my voice differently actually had such a profound physiological effect as well.
I also know from knowing you and from having gotten to work with you a little bit, there’s so many of these tools that are simple, and a lot of them are free, and they’re easy to implement. But we’re just not taught them, which is the other reason I was so excited to have you on today. Because you said before when we spoke that healing happens in community. And we know that loneliness is epidemic right now. And that community has been really tough for a lot of people, especially the last four years. And we’re seeing, you mentioned the last four years and these statistics and these massive shifts. And I also mentioned how I spent thousands of dollars trying to find therapies and things that would work. And at a time when that was a pretty big sacrifice financially. And I’m so excited for what you have created, because I feel like you are lowering the barrier of entry to a lot of people. And I’m so honored that you’ve opened this up. I would love for you to kind of explain. I know that was a little bit vague. I would love to hear the explanation from you, because you have created something that I think is absolutely incredible, and that I’m actually going to be doing with you and alongside anybody else who wants to join. But I would love for you to explain this journey that you’ve created.
Ryan: Thank you, Katie. I appreciate you bringing that up. Yeah. Well, so the program that you’re referring to is called RISE, and it is the culmination of all of the work that I’ve been doing over the last six years. And you mentioned reducing the barrier of entry. That is my reason for existence. I want to see people having access to being able to change their emotional experience, to change the way that they feel about their lives. And without having to spend, like I did, $300,000 or even tens of thousands of dollars, which is unfeasible for a lot of people.
And so the program RISE is a six-week emotional resilience, emotional fitness, emotional experience program that is walking us through those eight different domains and how we can use those to change our emotional experience. Because let’s be honest, the reason that we go to therapy, or the reason we do most things, is because we want to change our emotional experience. And I have found, both with myself and with clients, that when we focus on these things that we can change within ourselves, we can see massive shifts without needing to go to therapy at all. And I’m not knocking therapy. I run a mental health organization. We sell therapy. I think it’s a very valuable tool at a time. But it should be something that helps to accelerate your healing. It serves as a supplement. It is not the gateway to it.
And so RISE is really designed to help us to access our own ability to change our emotional state over the course of six weeks. It’s a live cohort program. And it is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. It’s the culmination of thousands of hours of study, hundreds of interviews with neuroscientists and practitioners, and a lot of personal work. And I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. So I’m really excited to do it. I’m glad you’re going to be there as well.
Katie: I’m so excited to do this. And I hope that a lot of people listening will join us because I will be in there and I know it’s going to be very interactive. And I’m personally excited to interact with everybody and to share the journey. And I love this because I feel like it is the first thing I’ve ever found that is sort of the emotional or mental wellness corollary to sort of the foundational daily things that I talk about in the physical health world. And I think it’s so complimentary.
And to your point, not that therapy is never helpful, but it’s like those core physical foundational things that they make anything else you’re going to bolt on more effective because you are building the foundation for anything to work better and also potentially reducing the need for the shiny new objects like we talked about. And so I’m so grateful that this tool exists. I wish it had existed a decade ago when I started this journey, but I’m so excited for it now.
And I think, especially as a parent, I’m excited because I know as a mom, anything I can do that increases my own nervous system capacity and my calm and my peace ripples into my entire house. Plus, I feel like as parents, if we can model this, we get to gift our children the foundation we maybe didn’t get as children and help them have a greater capacity throughout their whole lives. And so I just am so grateful and honored that you have created this and that you’re sharing it with us. And so I hope that a lot of people listening will join us. It’ll be a really fun six weeks. And of course, details will be in the show notes.
But I know that you also have some ways that people can find out more now and sort of begin to engage already. Can you speak to the resources that you’ve created? And just, I know how much heart and how much work you’ve put into this.
Ryan: Thank you, Katie. I appreciate that. Yeah. They can go to riselive.us to see the details for the course, for the program that we’re doing together. And also, we’ve talked about the eight domains. We have an assessment tool to help people sort of determine which of the areas in their life may be out of balance and perhaps might be an area that they could make a big improvement. So we’re focusing on the levers that people can push in each of those eight domains. And so if they go to eightdomains.us, they can access that tool for free.
Katie: Amazing. And I know you seemingly work tirelessly on creating so many resources and that you have so much available. So I’m going to make sure all those links are in the show notes for any of you listening on the go. Those are always at wellnessmama.com. And I’ll also make sure to share them in upcoming newsletters. So if you guys are not already received my emails, that’s a great way to get those tools delivered to your inbox as well.
But Ryan, I hope for many future conversations, and I hope that many people listening will join us on this journey. I’m excited to meet and interact with so many of you one-on-one. And I’m most excited for the healing that can happen in community and the transformation. This is, like I said, it was the missing piece and pivotal thing for me. And I’m so grateful that you’ve created something that gives both a system and a structure and a community to that work that didn’t exist when I know when you were figuring it out, when I was figuring it out, I just feel like this is an incredible resource and I’m so grateful for you.
Ryan: Thank you, Katie. I’m grateful for you too, my friend.
Katie: Thank you. And thank you all for listening as always for sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the 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.
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