Greg McKeown:
Welcome, everybody. Before we get to the podcast itself, a reminder to sign up for the One Minute Wednesday newsletter. You’ll be joining more than 175,000 people. You can sign up for it by just going to gregmckeown.com/1mw, and every week you will get one minute—or something close to it—of the best thinking to help you design a life that really matters and to make that as effortless and easy as possible.
So, go to gregmckeown.com/1mw.
Dr. Nicole Cain, welcome to the podcast.
Nicole Cain:
Thank you so much for having me.
Greg McKeown:
Tell us the story behind the book. Why does a person find themselves devoting years and years to writing a book?
Nicole Cain:
This is the book that I desperately needed when my panic and anxiety were at their worst, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. After years and years of teaching on this material and applying it in my own life, I decided I wanted to make it accessible to everybody—not just to the people I worked with directly, my patients and students—but I wanted it to be available to anyone. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, edits, deletes, and rewrites went into it.
Greg McKeown:
So true. And here we are on the other side of it. Was there a particular moment in your own journey that led you down the path of panic treatment and prevention and the holistic approach to panic you’ve now taken?
Nicole Cain:
I don’t know if this is the messaging you got when you were growing up, but I was told that our bodies are broken and they do silly, unpleasant, and sometimes completely awful things to us. And our job as healers is to relieve suffering, which often looks like healing suffering by stopping symptoms or suppressing symptoms. That’s the model I grew up with. By the time I entered college, I was taking six different prescription medications.
What started out as basic allergy symptoms had snowballed into medication side effects, disempowerment, insomnia, depression, and anxiety. And I thought that was the end of the story, but thankfully, it wasn’t.
Greg McKeown:
You weren’t just having a panic attack—you were like in a panic storm. Because there were multiple factors coming together in this unholy alliance to keep you trapped, ever more worried. “What is wrong with me? How could I be experiencing this?” Another set of symptoms, as it turns out, were brought on by the medications. It’s a story of serious and repeated misdiagnosis and mistreatment. That’s what it sounds like.
Nicole Cain:
A bullseye. It was brilliant. it was a complete misunderstanding of what our symptoms are. That’s part of what I had to unravel in my journey. We have this whole foundation that we could explore epigenetics, inherited trauma, environmental trauma, and the nervous system as it adapts to all of that. And so everybody has their unique story and individual way of responding. And for me, it climaxed in 2015.
Even though I read your book and was trying to stop doing all of the things and being a master of none of them, that was my adaptation—doing all of the things in conjunction with this perfect melting pot of panic-producing root causes.
And then in 2015, I was teaching at a medical school, running an integrative mental health practice, and treating really severe mental health concerns like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and panic disorder. But the paradigm I came from, what I learned in my master’s program in clinical psychology and in medical school, was that panic is a problem to be solved, or symptoms need to be suppressed.
And when I hit that rock bottom, as you said, that perfect process to produce panic, then suddenly everything I was an expert at helping my patience with. That wasn’t working anymore.
For people listening to this who’ve taken pharmaceuticals, there’s another answer. There’s an end to the story that doesn’t have to be dramatic, sad, or tragic. You can actually get your life back. Thank goodness.
Greg McKeown:
Well, the way you say it, I mean, it’s like in the midst of the storm, then suddenly it’s like a bomb goes off. Because now you’re dealing with the storm that’s become unmanageable at exactly the time you are required to be the expert. “I have the answers. I am the answer.” And suddenly you seriously don’t have the answer.
There’s something else, though, I think, which is you were saying that what you were trained to do is this is a problem to be solved. But it seems to me that what you were trained to do was a symptom to be solved, a problem to be managed.
And what the work is that you’ve gone on since the storm, since the bomb going off, you know, that represents this new book, is, let’s go back to understanding it. Let’s actually find the problem before we try to manage it. Let’s try to find the cause before we try to solve and treat the symptoms. That seems to me, to be the story behind the story.
Nicole Cain:
Yeah, it’s the story behind the story, and I think it’s the story that we all desperately need to hear, is that maybe I’m not broken. And maybe there’s a reason that my heart is pounding, or maybe there’s a reason that I lay awake at night, or maybe there’s a reason that I feel like my world is getting smaller and smaller. Maybe it’s not just because of some, like, divine, fluffy, vengeful being in the sky that singled you out for divine vengeance. Maybe there’s a reason.
And what if we were able to reverse engineer that reason? What if we were able to ask the right questions to get to the root of what is causing this? It’s sort of like we’re no stranger to this in medicine, right? Somebody goes to their doctor and they’re like, “Okay, I’m losing weight even though I’m eating all the things, and my heart is palpitating and I can’t stand getting warm. I have heat intolerance, my digestion is off and I’m panicking every day of my life.” The doctor, if they studied a little bit of endocrinology, maybe they’d say, “Oh, that sounds like it could be thyroid. Let’s check that.”
But when it comes to mental and emotional health, we don’t have a confirmatory, just one-stop shot blood test for that. Instead of being able to zero in on it, we often find that we just put mental health symptoms in a big bucket and it’s like, “Well, we don’t really know why you’re anxious, but we know that we can try to talk you out of it with talk therapy,” which works well for some people if the anxiety stems from their thoughts. But if it’s coming from the body, like thyroid, talking yourself out of it isn’t gonna work. But I think what you’re pointing out is that with a little bit of curiosity and a paradigm change about the questions that we’re asking, we can find some really interesting answers.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I’m just trying to slow-motion this part of the story, because all the solutions in the world, whether they’re traditional medicine, whether they’re holistic medicine, like, it doesn’t… In one sense, it doesn’t matter how rich your treatment pool is, the depth of the doctor’s bag, if there isn’t upfront repeated work to get to the heart of the matter. I mean, you’re using some language that’s precious to me in the work that I’m currently doing.
“Zero in”—like, that doesn’t… Well, maybe it does sound like something to someone who’s listening or watching this. Maybe they know just what the pain is. To meet with doctors or to meet or to talk… Maybe it’s not even at the doctor level. You’re just talking to other people. And there’s either no or there’s insufficient work to be done in listening and understanding and getting to the bottom of what’s really happening.
I just was speaking to somebody just recently who finally, after years, was diagnosed with a whole series of things. And for years, they feel that whenever they would raise the problem, people around them, specific people, would say, “Oh, this is all in your mind. Oh, it’s all okay. Oh, this is fine.” Completely dismissive. And so whether that’s somebody who’s dealing with panic attacks or whether it’s any number of issues in life, the human bias towards, “Here’s the solution, here’s the answer. Let me give it to you. Let me just fix it,” without first zeroing in in the first place is massive. And I don’t know how you can overstate the case for how much damage that does to people. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted just to underline it. Do you have thoughts on that?
Nicole Cain:
Yeah, I think that I have this urgency to be like, “Oh, and I want to add to that,” or, “Oh, here’s a solution.” And I think that that’s just programmed into the way that we interact is we want to come to solutions, we want to find an answer, we want to relieve suffering. And what I think that you’re calling for, which I love, is being able to sit in the discomfort of unknowing and just settling into the pain of holding space and the patience that comes from just watching and listening and being curious. I think that’s hard.
Greg McKeown:
There was an interesting phrase you used that stood out to me. Something like, “We’re so keen to reduce suffering or resolve pain,” or something like that. And it’s like, I wonder whose pain we’re so keen to resolve.
Nicole Cain:
Our own. Right?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I think that’s what it is. And I think that’s an interesting, like, something like a negative paradox, right, where we’re so keen to resolve our own pain, we are not able to resolve the pain of the person who’s actually in front of us, somebody who we could otherwise help. And so something else you already said today and outlined in your book, but you said if we could just ask the right questions, and these are questions that you have identified that you feel will help people to better, more accurately, and in a more accelerated way understand what’s going on with them.
I assume you’re thinking of the nine types of anxiety here and the quiz that goes with this. The “9 Types Anxiety Quiz” in the book. Am I seeing that right? What am I missing?
Nicole Cain:
Yeah, we want to ask the question of, “What are my symptoms? What is my panic? What is my anxiety trying to tell me needs healing and how?” And so we start—
Greg McKeown:
Slow that down because I know that that’s like a big question. You’ve worked hard on that question. That’s what I would think. And so I bet you’ve had a lot of versions of that question.
Nicole Cain:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
So let’s hear it again. The big question we’re trying to ask is…
Nicole Cain:
“What are my symptoms trying to tell me needs healing?”
Greg McKeown:
Okay.
Nicole Cain:
“What are my symptoms trying to tell me needs healing and how?”
Greg McKeown:
And how. Okay, so symptoms are the gift not to be avoided. And I assume this is true for people that aren’t feeling panic in the way they maybe think of panic being. Because—and you outline this, you know, I think in some very interesting detail—the sort of the way in which we feel the panic. Because you think of a panic attack and somebody said, “Well, I haven’t had a panic attack. That’s not my thing.” Or, “I rarely have a panic attack.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t panic acting on them in their lives in other ways. So talk us—break this down. These nine types of anxiety. It’s a bit anxiety-producing to hear that there are nine types of anxiety. But we’ll put that aside and talk us through them.
Nicole Cain:
We were talking earlier about how we used to have this just big bucket of, “Well, you’re anxious. That’s all we know.” But if we put on a researcher’s hat and we look around—maybe we go to a downtown city center—and if you were to ask every person that you encounter, “What does it feel like when you get activated? Activated, nervous, triggered, aroused, freaked out, stressed,” right? Any number of those words. And we ask what that’s like for each person.
And we can look in the science, we can look in the literature at what all of those most common answers are. And if we recategorize them to try to get a little bit more specific, we can see that there’s nine main presentations. First, which is thought anxiety. So it shows up in your thoughts. Could be anxious thoughts, intrusive thoughts, repetitive thoughts, brain fog, lack of thoughts. Could be chest—heart pounding, heart racing, heart skipping a beat, elephant on your chest, air hunger.
Could be gut—nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, indigestion, butterflies. It could be endocrine. So this is your hormones, this is thyroid, this is cortisol, this is progesterone, estrogen, testosterone. Immune system—so that same immune system chemical, histamine, can also cause panic attacks. So what’s the immune system doing?
And then we have anger anxiety. We have the fight part of fight, flight, freeze. And so that’s anger anxiety.
We also have depressive anxiety. And that’s the kind of hopelessness that we can experience. It can teeter-totter, where sometimes I feel really hopeless and depressed and like giving up. And then I also have this drive and this panic and this need to figure it all out. And how do they coexist? This is depressive anxiety. And then we have nervous system anxiety, where maybe you feel numbness or tingling, muscle tension, headaches, dizziness.
And then trauma anxiety, which is arguably the umbrella that covers everything. But I’ve pulled it out for those where the main thing of the main thing is something happened and I can’t stop thinking about it. I have nightmares about it. I have intrusive thoughts about it. And so then we treat the trauma specifically. So those are the nine types.
Greg McKeown:
And you have a quiz fairly early on within the book where somebody can literally just go through a series of questions within those nine types and have a sense of—well, really begin to go beyond stimulus response thinking about this, where you say, “Oh, I have this symptom imprecisely. I’m feeling something. I’m feeling a bunch of things. I keep feeling them a lot. I’m going to the doctors. Okay, now I’m going to get prescribed.”
Or, you know, we immediately jump from just the beginning of our awareness to a solution. And you’re just saying, well, let’s just pause. Let’s not agree or disagree or act or— We’re just going to understand what’s going on. And so people can take this quiz. And that, of course, provides them with a more precise understanding of what they’re experiencing in the first place.
Nicole Cain:
I like that you said stimulus response. I think that’s such a concise way of kind of personifying the entire medical and psychiatric professions.
Greg McKeown:
Well, now let’s riff on that while we’re saying it, because that’s—because it is. Well, there’s a lot of reasons, of course, but one reason is because it’s the dominant theory of how humans work. The idea of Pavlov’s dogs and habit formation and habit thinking and so on is reinforcing the idea that you see the food on the table, that’s why you eat it. So what you have to do is move the food off the table because then you can’t see it. And it’s not that I think that’s wrong, like that change of behavior can help under certain circumstances.
But behind all of those suggestions, there does seem—well, there is. It’s not making it up. It’s explicitly into the—into those behavioral changes is the behavioral model that says we really don’t have much agency. So anyway, I don’t think that’s nothing because I think there’s few things that can be more life-changing than shifting out of that assumption about ourselves that we can become an observer of what’s happening, that there is a space that we can, oh, look at ourselves.
It’s like the observer looking—”Oh, you’re feeling very anxious right now. You’re feeling stressed, frustrated.” The observer, amazingly, is never stressed, is never anxious, is never actually having a panic attack. Not just as an author, but as a practitioner helping people. You’re trying to be an observer for them, but we can start to do that for ourselves as well.
Nicole Cain:
That’s exactly what I’m trying to help people to claim is their personal sense of agency, of changing the conversation from, “I don’t know, my body, it’s broken,” and then bring it to the authorities, the experts, your parents, the doctors, your therapist, whoever that is, and saying, “Please, please fix me.” And that’s what I did in 2015 when I, as the authority, lost that personal sense of agency because my treatments weren’t working.
And then I went to all of the experts in my field that I could think of to try to fix me, and that didn’t work. And the other thing that I want to emphasize that you said, it brings to mind a metaphor of being the observer. And I learned this from an Ayurveda teacher. He talked about the tale of two birds. So what we have is a street, and down on the street is suffering and mayhem and chaos and strife.
Above the street, there are birds on two wires. The bottom wire is closer to the street, and there’s a bird, and she’s sitting there, and she’s looking down, and she sees and she feels, and she’s recoiling, and she’s suffering, and she’s in it. And there’s a bird on a higher wire, and he looks down, and he can see everything, and he can acknowledge, and he can notice everything, but he’s distanced from it. And he doesn’t necessarily feel all of that suffering.
So being able to be in that space from a place of personal power is one of the greatest gifts. And that’s what this book is trying to teach—how do we reclaim our agency?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I had not heard that metaphor before, but it’s, of course, a beautiful idea for each of us, right? We can be fully in the noise there at the ground level. We can be impacted by it, but sort of still aware of it, but we’re still drawn into the gravitational pull. Or we can be this further observer. Okay, now I’m taking another step away. I can breathe and see it rather than just be consumed by it to one of two deeper degrees.
It’s a beautiful way to frame what you’ve written in Panic Proof, that what you want for readers is an increase in agency—to rediscover their agency. There was something in the way you described running to the experts, and I just was listening to a piece about this, back to the classic study where people had to choose whether to turn up the electric shock to the point that they knew they were killing and would actually kill the patient on the other side. So they thought the whole thing was real.
It was before there were increased ethics processes in universities. And they found like a high percentage would—I’m pulling from memory, but I think something like a third of the participants would, when instructed, move the dial all the way into life-threatening or actually fully killing the patient on the other side. And the key was if the person next to you was in a white coat and would take 100% responsibility for the decision that this enormous number of people would be willing to inflict this pain on the person on the other side.
So it’s been studied many times in lots of different ways. But something about that story and the power of it—the white coat, the person with authority—it clearly goes deep into our psyche. And this is in part what you’re speaking to. You’re not anti-traditional medicine at all. You’re just saying you shouldn’t trust the treatment until you have understood what’s really going on. And you have to take responsibility for that as much as you can.
Did I get it right?
Nicole Cain:
Oh, my gosh, Greg, you’re brilliant. Really could have used your wording. Absolutely, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Tell us more.
Nicole Cain:
I was just thinking about—we’re social creatures, and I think about our various early memories of—even our sense of identity comes from schemas. And so this is a term in psychology that we use where we—it’s the filter through which we see ourselves in the world that is created based on what we see in our caretakers’ faces when they look at us. And our brain, our nervous system, and our other adaptive mechanisms have been building around that. And I think that this is an opportunity where we can actually do a lot better.
In true holistic approaches for mental health, we have the people in trauma-informed neuroscience, and they’re like, “Okay, this is what happened to the brain, and this is what the amygdala is doing, and this is the hippocampus, and this is your vagus nerve.” We have a lot of conversation around our early nervous system programming and the schemas and the way we see the world and then the authority and our sense of agency.
We also have other people in their own areas of expertise. We have the gastroenterologist in the microbiome talking about psychobiotics that are in your gut that can change our moods and our cravings. And we have the immunologists over here saying, “Well, histamine can cause immune system dysfunction, or it could cause inflammation, which can affect the brain.” And so we have all of these different experts, and we’ve been told that they’re the ones that know best. And none of them know what your internal lived experience is. And most of the time, I would argue that they don’t even know what they’re all saying outside of their own worlds. And so when it comes to that personal sense of responsibility and accountability, the authority’s probably not going to figure it out for you.
They’re going to be able to provide you excellence from their area. But that space of sitting on the wire, that bird sitting on the wire, and noticing and holding the space and allowing yourself to be fascinated and curious by your symptoms, that will provide you a foundation to then become curious about the different pieces, which I pull together in the book, because it can be quite overwhelming.
Greg McKeown:
Well, more than a third of the book is going through, you know, some of these different—you know, it’s just all of the different areas of the human system and trying to say, okay, in a sense, it’s a crash course in all of those different areas of biology and psychology that can all be impacting the answers that you give to the quiz at the beginning. I mean, that’s the teaching so that people can have a more integrated understanding themselves, rather than, okay, somebody else, just give me the answer. Okay, now I’ll do that and hope that that works.
It seems to me that one of the bottlenecks on far better outcomes in psychology, in medicine, and in every other arena is the precision of understanding. I’m thinking now of someone who had gone through an undiagnosed condition for years and then had one more specialist second-opinion situation. And the doctor involved, a neurologist, said, “Look, I’m going to start at the beginning. I want the entire story.”
“You can have as many people there as you like. You know, you can have the patient, you can have other people, but one person has to be the voice and tell the whole story from beginning to end.” And this was a 90-minute journey. And all they did was gather the information, you know, creating their own visualization of the story and the journey. I had never had anyone do that before. I’d never seen anybody do that before.
And so not passive listening, but intelligent, acute, apex listening for the whole story so that the doctor is able to connect the dots. I thought, well, maybe not everyone can spend 90 minutes in that way. There’s an argument to be made for that. But actually, what I really think there’s an argument to be made for is that there ought to be that. The National Health Service, for example, in England, I don’t see it very differently in other health systems that I’ve been involved with. They have a quota of how long you can be with each person.
So the general practitioner, the GP who’s taking the patient in, has to get through it with incredible efficiency. So everything has to be simplified to stimulus-response with very little feedback loop process in place. Like you only get feedback if the problem continues and the person comes back to you to say, “You don’t understand.” Otherwise, that person could just go, “It didn’t even work, I’m out, forget it, it wasn’t important enough,” or they go to somebody else or they do something else, and you have no idea.
There’s so much opportunity for a closer way of understanding. Yeah, well, that led to a correct diagnosis and a correct treatment and resolved a very complex, very serious problem. So 90 minutes seems very cheap in time if that’s the outcome.
Nicole Cain:
That’s why I wrote the book. That’s how I practice. Every patient that I see, they have two visits, and they’re both 90 minutes each. So we spend 90 minutes together, and then I create a treatment plan that starts to either continue gathering data, whether it’s running labs or doing a nutrition diary or whatever that would be. And then we have another 90-minute session which may be expanding on the information that came in or learning more about their story.
And that’s cost prohibitive for most people because, as you said, the healthcare model just doesn’t provide the resources for us to be able to do that as it is. And so that’s what I wanted to do in the book—how can I try to break it down into a step-by-step resource for us to do as much of that as we can so that we can then collaborate with our healthcare practitioners where we can go through our history and be like, “You know what, all of this started when I got Epstein Barr,” or “All of this started when my parents got a divorce,” or “All of this started when I went to school in that moldy building,” whatever it is, providing empowerment and agency, as you said, to advocate for ourselves and then work collaboratively.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, well, I love that part of it. I should just share, because it seemed a little awkward not to. I’ve been talking about one of my children and the person that was voiced in the meeting couldn’t be the person because of the medical situation they were in. And so my wife Anna was the voice, and she had kept pretty meticulous notes from the beginning. She had distinct thought early on, “I think I’m going to need to keep a journal of this because I just won’t be able to remember the dates, the order, what the symptoms really were, how it proceeded.” And so she had done that.
So it’s a combination of the 90 minutes’ availability, the listening intelligence of the individual, but also having that information, that high-quality information that was being gathered, that allowed that successful collaboration to take place.
So this is sort of a level-two aspiration for you. It’s like, increase the agency of the individual, but with that agency then, in a sense, do the 90 minutes of your own analysis, of your own learning, of your own discovery, so that by the time you’re in that meeting, you can advocate very differently because you have the data. And for those that are willing to listen and help, they will have better data themselves. Some, of course, can be just dismissed, but I think there’s plenty of medical professionals who are not intentionally skipping the diagnostic process and jumping to prescription and would like to do better, but don’t have the data and have these other systemic reasons that they don’t get to it.
I want to shift to, in a sense, the end of the book. Although there’s quite a bit on this, it’s leading people towards the panic-proof protocol. And I just wonder if you can talk us through that protocol, because ultimately everything else is trying to complete this process.
Nicole Cain:
You know, you’re the first person that’s asked me this question, so I really appreciate that. And on my wall—let me see if I can show you this here.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I can see it.
Nicole Cain:
Yeah, there’s more. But what this is on the wall—and so if someone’s listening to this as an audio—is I have an entire wall dedicated to colored Post-its that are going in a sequence. What that is, is that was me mapping out how I think. And so I want to teach people how to think. How do we look at the root cause, how do we ask the right questions, what do we do with the information that we get, and then how do we build a treatment protocol that actually makes the brain and the body and the nervous system, et cetera, healthier?
Because the idea is not that your body is broken, not that there’s something wrong with you, but rather—and to what I would believe is science-backed information—that your body is designed to heal itself. And so how do we do that?
Now, I’ll get to the panic-proof protocol, but I think this context is a little important. There’s a big difference between somebody saying, “Okay, I have a headache,” and I go to an allopathic clinician, and they say, “Well, take a Tylenol,” versus saying, “I have a headache,” and then going to a holistic practitioner, and they say, “Oh, take white willow bark.”
The better question would be, “What is your body trying to tell you needs healing with the symptoms of a headache?”
And so then, based on that information, we go deeper, and we correct that problem, and then the body will resolve it, and the headache will go away. So I think that’s really important. That’s exactly how it’s built. And when you work through the book, you’re going to have checklists, you’re going to have self-assessment questions, and it’s designed that you write it in the book itself.
And then, as you’re going through that, you will add that information into the spaces provided in the panic-proof protocol so that by the time you get to the end of that, you will have a plan that you can take to your treatment team, that you could take to your doctor, that talks about testing. These are habits that might make sense for you.
Greg McKeown:
The first thing was your description that this was an unconscious thought process that you had been developing over these years, helping other people. Then, of course, also finding the limits of what you were teaching to other people. So having to dig even deeper than before and then teaching that to people and then writing a book—you know, like, this is all of this iterative learning, some of it unconscious, some of it conscious, and you’re trying to get all of it out from behind the unconscious curtain, bring it forward.
And I would think that for you, this is the gold. You know, like even if other people didn’t recognize that, even if other people think, “Oh, well, this is good, suggestions for things I haven’t thought of that might help me with anxiety and stress and panic and so on,” they could find that in this book. You know, if someone picked it up in the middle of the book, they would find those things. But that’s not the gold as far as you’re concerned. This is my hypothesis—that for you, it’s like, no, it’s the process, the protocol, is the gold. That’s my best attempt at capturing in paper and ink a process that otherwise just exists in your own head and that you’re applying successfully to people and with people. And so, you know, this is a non-trivial part of what you’re offering. That is one thought. Let’s have your reaction before I go on.
Nicole Cain:
I feel so seen, Greg.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you.
Nicole Cain:
That’s exactly it. Because anybody could go on Google, and they could say, “What are anti-anxiety supplements?” And you’re going to get a whole list of things, which—those are in the book. And we could do so much better. And so, yes, you can open it to the middle of the page, and you can be like, “Oh, kava kava, I’m going to try that.” And you could feel a lot better. But then when you stop taking the kava kava, theoretically, you might be back to where you started. And so if you have the desire and the bandwidth and the resources to read through the book and build the panic-proof protocol, that’s where the promise of anxiety freedom lies.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. And then there was the second thing. Oh yes, there’s something else that you said. You know, this question, “What is the symptom trying to teach me? What is the data it contains for me? What’s the clue that I can notice and follow down and get to the heart of the matter from that symptom?” C.S. Lewis talked about how none of us want pain, but he said, by God, it’s a teacher, you know, and how true that is because—I read this somewhere—the idea that the totality of everything we know is sort of the reverse of all of the pain we’ve experienced in life. It’s a paradigm, isn’t it? Because we want to say we’ve learned from all these other things. And of course, we can learn from reading other people’s books, and we can learn from other people’s experiences, and we can learn from the good things in life. So, of course, it’s an oversimplification.
And yet, the pain remains. You know, the pain—we never forget the pains. And that’s, of course, when you said earlier on that trauma is really the heart of all of the other forms of anxiety and panic. I think that’s what you’re referencing. Because whether it was something traumatic, so it’s so known in your own life, “I experienced this terrible thing, and everything else has been shaped and warped by that pain level,” or whether they’re more minor traumas in life that leave their mark on us.
I think that’s really what you’re alluding to is that pain teaches, but it gets locked. And so we panic but don’t remember why we panic. We have these experiences, we don’t know why, because the pain locked a meaning in for us. We often don’t remember that that happened. So we only have the manifesting symptom rather than the understanding that it’s connected to.
Nicole Cain:
You’re bringing to mind a quote from Carl Jung: “That which remains in the unconscious will continue to affect us, and we will call it fate.”
Greg McKeown:
That’s really good. Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems to me that what you’ve written with Panic Proof, of course, self-evidently, is about panic. But then, a little less evidently, it’s about all of these different emotions. So whether somebody thinks about themselves as, “Oh yes, I do have panic attacks and panic pain,” there’s a whole set of other emotions that are close to that manifesting symptom that we’ve talked about. So, at that level, the book’s about all of those emotions—stressed and frustrated and angry, sometimes without cause, or defensive or reactive or activated, you know, these words that you’ve shared before.
So that’s sort of level two. But somewhere down the levels, it’s sort of not a book about any of those things. You know, it’s somewhere down the level; it’s about something much more universal than that. And when I look at, like, in Appendix A, you have the panic-proof protocol, but it’s the very simplified version. So there’s really no content in it. It’s just the process by the point that we’re here.
And when I look at that, I see something a lot closer to a sharp diagnostic tool that, with a few word changes, could be applied to many—either to every other symptom or to many other symptoms. Do you see it that way? Do you see it differently?
Nicole Cain:
My late mentor was big on talking about how to think, like, he called them a vitalist.
Greg McKeown:
That’s so interesting. Tell us more. Who was your late mentor?
Nicole Cain:
His name is Dr. Jim Sensenig, and he was one of those practitioners where somebody could walk into a room, and he would see—he could see the very root of suffering. And he was so gifted at helping people find their lives and get better. And so I was so grateful to have him. He was always like, “Nicole, you have to think like a vitalist.” Because if we can start having conversations about how to think differently about our bodies and our symptoms and what that would mean for not only our relationship with self—not just a biological, but a spiritual relationship with self—what that would look like for our families and our communities and our culture and our world is, from a vitalist perspective, that life-giving.
Greg McKeown:
Tell us more about the mentor. What was his profession precisely?
Nicole Cain:
He was a naturopathic physician, and he was trained by the elders that brought naturopathic medicine to the United States.
Greg McKeown:
What do you mean by that? What do you mean by the elders that brought naturopathic…
Nicole Cain:
So naturopathic medicine has been around for hundreds of years. It started back with President’s era hydrotherapy. And he was this farmer, and he worked with animals. And when his animals got sick, he found that if he could apply alternating hot and cold water, the body would heal, and his animals got better. And so then people in the villages were like, “Whoa, this is great. We want to come, and you do it to us too.”
And people were getting better. And so then the royal family came, and they were getting treated by this farmer. And so this was the beginning. We call these water cures because they prioritize heat, heat, heat. They’ll get really hot, and then they’ll jump in the water and get really cold. And that’s a very important mainstay in their health and wellness. And so we brought this approach to healing and wellness—if we stimulate the body’s natural ability to heal itself by using hot and cold and different things like that, the body gets better.
And then these water cure people were getting together with herbalists, and these herbalists are walking around, and they’re talking about the plants and researching what the root does and what this flower does and what the petals do. And then they’re getting together with the traditional Chinese medicine clinicians who teach about Qi.
And so my mentor, Dr. Sensenig, was a reader of old, ancient texts. And he was a strong believer in using the laws of nature to help heal the mind and the body. And so he would always tell me, “This is how you think about it.”
We use the therapeutic order, and the therapeutic order is lightly but not directly addressed in the book, but it’s how to think. And so, number one is: give the body what it needs. And so, does the body need more circulation? Does the body need nutrition? Does the body need movement? Does the body need detox? Does the body need love?
Number two: remove obstacles to cure. Detox. Does the body need de-stress? For me, I needed a “jobectomy.” And then, we tonify weak and damaged systems. And we use acupuncture and herbs to strengthen and build and support. And then, we move blood and lymph. And so it’s this beautiful, wonderful approach to healing that I feel like a lot of people don’t have access to. And that’s, that’s, that’s the book. So I really appreciate the chance to share about that.
Greg McKeown:
Were you mentored by him directly or just indirectly through reading his materials and so on?
Nicole Cain:
Directly.
Greg McKeown:
And when you say that he would walk into a room and he could sort of… what you’re describing is—I mean, you already used the term at the very beginning, and it captured me immediately—was sort of “Sherlock Holmes.” And now we’re sort of full circle back to that because that’s what I think you’re describing in your mentor, that he could walk into a room. And it isn’t at all the same as jumping to conclusions. It’s a strange sort of opposite to that because it’s at the speed with which someone might jump to conclusions. But the paradigm is basically 180 from that because it’s not jumping to conclusions; it’s jumping to understanding. It’s rapid, accelerated understanding diagnostics.
The word that’s used in the classic literature—it’s one of my favorite words now, and almost nobody’s ever used it—but it’s “perspicacious.” They just got lost. It’s been lost from the modern vernacular. And the word being lost is, in one sense, nothing. But having lost the ability of what it means to be perspicacious is very, very important indeed. And so that’s what he sounds like to me. You know, he was perspicacious. He could see beyond the surface. He could see what was going on at considerable speed because he had developed that competence.
Nicole Cain:
Absolutely, yeah. I remember one time I was sitting in a room—I shadowed him when he was practicing—and I remember a woman came into the room, and she sat down, and he just stopped, and he squinted his eyes a little bit, and he tipped his head to the side, and he’s like, “You having some pain right about here in your back?” And he showed her, and she just broke down crying and told this whole story, which started with the pain, took us down this whole journey.
And he held the space, he listened, he did a 90-minute visit, he adjusted her back. And then when they followed up a week later, she felt her symptoms were completely better. Followed up two weeks later, even better—symptoms that she didn’t know she had were better. And he didn’t really do that much. He held space, he gave her a quick adjustment. I think he gave her some herbs or something to make her feel better. I want all the protocols, I want all the interventions, I want, like, the deepest Mary Poppins bag of tools ever.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Nicole Cain:
So simple.
Greg McKeown:
Was it frustrating to you? That’s interesting. I’m sort of surprised by that, in a way. But I don’t want you to back off of it just because I’m surprised. When you were in that moment, you didn’t see magic. You saw, “Oh my goodness, what does that mean? Here I am working on this over here, and I’ve been taught to do X, but really what I needed to be taught was Y.” Was that the frustration?
Nicole Cain:
It’s like, “How am I going to learn that?” I can memorize biochemical pathways, and I can memorize herbal protocols, and I can learn how to decode a really comprehensive stool test or my—I can study genetics and do epigenetics, I can memorize all that. But to be able to look at somebody and hold space in a powerfully deep, understanding way, you can’t teach that by reading books and memorizing things.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Nicole Cain:
And that felt very deeply overwhelming.
Greg McKeown:
Right. So what it was wasn’t just, “Hey, I’ve been taught all these tools, but no one taught me this tool.” It is like that, but it’s more specific and, in a way, deeper than that, which is, “I have developed academic and mental muscle and acumen with which to do a certain set of tasks: read, write, regurgitate, apply. That’s a process. And I’ve become very skilled at that. And I can do it, and I have an appetite for it. You give me the next one, give me that next book, give me that next article. I have a known competence.” And suddenly, you were with someone who had, self-evidently, a competence that had not the least to do with any of those things—or at least appeared to be nothing to do with that skill set. You’re going, “That’s… that’s… I’m at zero muscle availability there. I’ve got 10 out of 10 muscle availability over here. I have strength and competence here. But over there, it’s a little like…”
I work out, you know, every day, and four or five times a week. And I remember when I first started on this more intense workout process, in the first week or two of doing it, I thought, “My goodness, this is hurting my back.” And I said that to the coach that was there, and they said, “Oh no, that’s just… you just don’t have any muscle in that area. You know, it’s not that there’s damage; it’s that you’re weak.” And that feels similar to what you’re saying. So you were going, “Ah, not only do I not have this ability he has, I haven’t yet developed the abilities I would need to be able to develop the ability he has.” That’s why it was so frustrating.
Nicole Cain:
And you know what’s the best part about that is I feel like I have come full circle in… you know, it’s like Socrates. It’s like, you learn and you learn, and you think you know everything, and then you realize you know absolutely nothing. And it’s like, “Ah, now I’ve arrived.” And it was once I had learned all of the things—which I am very well aware I’ve not learned all the things—but I’d learned lots of things.
Greg McKeown:
Sure.
Nicole Cain:
And with my own story, too. It’s like once… just allowing yourself to drop it all and to just be in the space and to just get out of the way and to let the body do its thing.
Greg McKeown:
You said something else that gets us so close to the heart of the matter. It was almost like it was an aside, almost, but it’s not. And that is… well, you described yourself as, you know, being still in this moment, you know, holding that—you’re describing listening to the body. It’s like it’s an extreme and acute apex competence to listen. But then you added this: “to let the body do its thing.” And that is a kernel in all of this conversation.
In psychological terms, it’s the belief, “If I can create the right space, if I can learn how to do that, someone will unravel themselves, and they’ll start to see what’s going on, and they’ll start to discern the patterns and name what the real issues are, and it will all start to heal itself.” But it’s not just psychological. That is a grounding, foundational belief that I think is so game-changing and suddenly applies to everything: to parenting, to management, to being a marketer, to being a salesperson, to being a CEO, to being a mother, father, child—all of it.
The idea that there is something to self-healing that is possible if given the right… the right culture, the right environment, the right space. It’s something much more vivid than that, much more real than that. And it’s closer to a spirit of truth that takes discipline, takes protection, takes pushing back against your own tendency to jump in with an answer. It’s, “Let’s just hold some space to understand. And let’s keep understanding, and let’s keep understanding, and keep listening, and listening, and getting better and better at that part of the process.”
And then, all the other tools, all the tools in the world, can be useful. You want the greatest possible repertoire of treatments, that’s great. Let them be infinite, that’s great. Don’t get the order wrong. The sequence matters. And at the kernel, core of it is the belief we ourselves and the other people we interact with have within them what it takes to heal, to grow, to improve, to change. And that… that belief that they have the data inside of them.
Somebody recently said to me—there’s just an off-the-cuff comment—that they imagined that I would be quite controlling as a parent. And maybe I have been in all sorts of ways. But you know, I talk to my children and I talked to Anna: “You know, to what degree do you think that’s true? Let me listen. Let me understand.” And it just didn’t seem to hold water for them. Of course, there’s times that you… maybe you’ve done it, and everyone does it.
That wasn’t at all what happened. And I think it’s because of this core idea—and I’m not taking credit for it—that the children already have it. I don’t have it; they have it. It’s inside of them. Our job is not to do nothing, but our job is to create that substantive space for them to become more and more of who they really are and less and less of who they really aren’t. That’s not nothing; that’s not trivial.
When I’ve got it wrong, it’s because I’ve jumped in too soon with the opinion, the answer, the thing, the fix, the advice. How much damage can be done in getting that wrong? And how much good can come from getting it right? Give us the final word.
Nicole Cain:
I believe that everybody can heal. I have seen impossible things as possible. And I think that it doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, it doesn’t have to require all sorts of fancy tools and testing and protocols. I think that our bodies are naturally designed to heal. And oftentimes, it’s just a matter of being curious about what they have to say and listening in a way that provides space for your children to become more of who they are and less of who they aren’t.
I think that’s brilliant.
Greg McKeown:
Dr. Nicole Cain, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Nicole Cain:
Thank you for having me.
Greg McKeown:
For everybody listening or watching this, what has stood out to you? You know, when you’re listening to the words, but what’s behind the words? What do you hear as you’re watching this, as you’re listening to this? Is there something in this for you? Is there something meaningful here? Is there some way to apply what we’ve been talking about, either directly through, of course, purchasing Panic Proof and working through that process, or maybe secondarily, to apply this way of thinking to other symptoms in your life—whether yourself or even your relationships? What are you going to do differently? What’s one thing you can do right now?
Now this conversation has come to a close. Thank you. Really. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time.
