Why You Can't Focus: The Truth About Distraction, Nervous System Dysregulation, and Reclaiming Your Attention in Midlife with Dr. Zelana Montminy

Have you ever blamed menopause for your inability to focus — only to wonder if something bigger is going on? I know I did. For years I thought brain fog was just about hormones, but this conversation cracked that wide open for me. I sat down with Dr. Zelana Montminy, positive psychologist and author of Finding Focus, and what she shared genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Focus isn't a character flaw. It's a biological state. And most of us, especially women in midlife, have been operating in chronic nervous system dysregulation for so long, we don't even know what regulated feels like anymore. In this episode, we unpack why distraction is so often dysregulation in disguise, how the cultural expectation of multitasking has wrecked our brains, and why the "brain fog" you're experiencing might have less to do with estrogen and everything to do with decades of cognitive overload. We also talk about grief — the big kind and the micro kind — and how unprocessed loss quietly tanks our ability to show up and focus. If you're a woman in midlife wondering why you can't seem to finish a thought, this one is for you. 🎧 New episodes weekly on The Resetter Podcast. For more resources related to today's episode, visit the podcast page here: https://drmindypelz.com/podcast MORE ON DR. ZELANA MONTMINY: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.zelana/Website: https://drzelana.com/ RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Finding Focus by Dr. Zelana Montminy: https://drzelana.com/findingfocus Check out our community membership at https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And this one is a really important one, which is when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one of the most consistent findings I see, and one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency that can show up as hormonal imbalance, mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues, even stubborn weight that won't budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know.

• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

  Taking an isolated D3 supplement isn't enough. This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D3. Your body actually needs D3 to be combined with very specific cofactors to actually absorb and utilize vitamin D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include these cofactors. That's why I personally love Cataplex D from Standard Process. It's a whole food supplement. It's vitamin D complex, not just an isolated nutrient. There's an incredible difference between checking a box and actually moving the needle on your health, and this one really moves the needle.

• 1:27Mindy Pelz?

  In fact, in my clinic, we used to test vitamin D, and we could see with a product like Cataplex D, we could see on lab work, the vitamin D levels in people go up. So you can learn more and you can get yourself some vitamin D. You can test out Cataplex D at drmindypels.standarprocess.com. Enjoy.

• 1:57Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Reset Our Podcast, I bring you Dr. Zelana Montmini. And she goes by Dr. Z. And I actually stumbled upon her information on Instagram because I started to notice that her content had a very different message than most creators that I see. And this is a really important conversation, and I really want you to listen all the way through, and I'll give you some of the highlights so you know where we're going. But Dr. Z is a behavioral scientist, she's a bestselling author, she's a speaker, whose work explores how stress and modern life are reshaping our attention and nervous

• 2:40Mindy Pelz?

  systems. She is the author of The 21 Days to Resilience and a newly released book called Finding Focus. And what I wanted to do, and why I wanted to bring her to you all, is I wanted to talk about distraction. I wanted to talk about nervous system overload in this modern day. What can we do to start to bring some regulation back to our nervous systems in a world where we're checking social media all day long? We've got the news on 24/7. We're in constant go mode. How do we start to regulate ourselves? And so what you're going to hear in this conversation are some real practical tips.

• 3:24Mindy Pelz?

  And I would say first, we had to go through some of the things that many of us are doing on a daily basis that are putting us into a dysregulated state. And then, towards the end of the conversation, we really got into the practical. In fact, I asked her at the end to create a checklist for us, because I do love checklists, that will help you navigate your way out of an overstimulated world that we're living in.

• 3:53Mindy Pelz?

  And I think what you'll notice and with this conversation is there's a path back to simplicity, there's a path back to slow, even if you're living a very hurried life. And there is a different energy and vibration that we can start to step into that isn't the vibration of a frenzied, crisis-centered world that so many of us are living in. So please stay all the way through because it is, the checklist is at the end and I really want you to be able to put into action some of the concepts Dr. Z brings forward here. And you'll also hear us talk about, and this was one reason that I connected to her over

• 4:36Mindy Pelz?

  a year ago, is we both were living in the Palisades where, in LA where the fires were. And her posts became a guiding light for me. The way she described grief, the way she described what she was going through, I felt seen, I felt connected. And I think you'll hear that in this conversation too. It's so many of us are burnt out. So many of us have brain fog. So many of us just don't know how we can take in one more morsel of negativity. And Dr. Z has some incredible answers and she does it with grace. She makes it easy for us to step into. And you know, like, like many of the women and experts

• 5:19Mindy Pelz?

  that I bring to you, she does it in a way that pulls us all into more community and more connection. So I, it is with great pride, I bring you Dr. Z. Go find her on Instagram and most importantly, grab her book and enjoy this conversation. It's one we all need to hear right now.

• 5:42Mindy Pelz?

  So can we start off with just the concept of focus, distraction? How do we know, how do we know if we're overwhelmed, if we're over-scheduled, if we're just on socials too much? How do we start to weed this apart?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Well, I believe most of us are, point blank. Whether I know you or not, the nature of the world now is absolute overload. And you know, we have these billionaires that use our attention as their profit margin. So we're working against meat forces that are really in the business of capturing.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  And sort of pulling us away from from our lives in a lot in a lot of ways. Again, it's not their fault per se, but it's just so that we understand that this is a collective issue. I think an epidemic of our time. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions that we have about focus in general is that we've always sort of been taught that focus is a character trait. It's something that we have to really learn and be disciplined about. And we have to be more organized and and, you know, if only I could be less distracted and turn off this app or whatever, I'd be able to focus. And what we really miss about focus is that it actually is a biological state.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Because for our brain to sustain attention, as you know, we need to feel safe. We need to have energy and we need to have cognitive bandwidth, right? We need to have all those things. And most of us, if not, I would say probably all of us are missing all three. Because our nervous system is chronically activated. We have just an onslaught of content that we're consuming all the time. And we don't ever really get a break. So we're cognitively overloaded, emotionally overloaded. And then we find ourselves living in constant survival mode because we're always scanning versus being present in whatever we're doing.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And so that's really where we're at. And and I think because our nervous system is constantly on alert, constantly switching tasks, refreshing, checking, thinking, da, da, da, da. We can't force focus when our brain thinks we're under threat. Right? And so what looks like distraction, I find is often dysregulation.

• 8:14Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, which that that ties into menopause because I really, after all the research I've done on hormonal changes and brain changes that happen through the menopause experience, I actually think as we age, our nervous system becomes more sensitive because it's an evolutionary concept where, you know, it's called something I wrote about in Age Like a Girl called the grandmother hypothesis, where the the men would go off and hunt and it was the grandmothers that had to be the protectors. And the protectors at that point was making sure a tiger wasn't

• 8:56Mindy Pelz?

  going to come eat the clan. So I have a feeling that our nervous systems are so much more tuned in to our environment as we age and especially as we go through menopause, which makes the news, makes social media, makes everything going on right now so much more acute.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so much more acute. And also, I mean, listen, we, I just read the statistic yesterday. I mean, I want to, I want to make sure I'm being really accurate about this because it was a study, but it was so profound. I feel like they, there was something to the effect of like, we used to make about, you know, 2,000, 3,000 decisions a day, and now we make like 5,000 decisions or more.

• 9:39Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And so our cognitive load, starting at a very young age, especially as women in this generation, in this world, is unbelievably high. And then you stack that into midlife, right? And we've been caring so much. And in addition to the, you know, the families we've cared for, the work we've done, you know, the children we've brought, like all the things, right? We have like aging parents on top of that. We have different relationships. Most of us are looking at our partners thinking like, is this really my life? Like, what am I doing here? You know, it's like, there's like all these things that really stack up. And I, and, and I, we sort of call this, and I'm sure you've heard of this, like the cognitive load stacking. And so now it's like, women are so.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Obscenely overloaded that when we approach midlife and our estrogen drops and testosterone, and all the hormones that you know so much about, so much more than I do, start, you know, dropping and going haywire. On top of that, we have all of these tabs open and we're just exhausted. So what we often call brain fog and we, like you, always blame our hormones. Honestly, it's, it's really just, I think so much of it is decision fatigue and sort of this like emotional, attentional fragmentation that we've been dealing with most of our lives.

• 11:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, yes, agreed, agreed. Do we have any kind of understanding of what a normal cognitive load would look like in a day?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  For the current?

• 11:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, for this modern world, yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I mean, there's, there's not really science, but I would say, you know, from a, just a clinical standpoint, like from my work, I, I mean, I think what's normal is very different than what most people have. So, normal and common are very two, very different things these days. You know, and I think, I think it really depends on life and, you know, all the things that we're juggling. I mean, a woman who has, you know, three young children is, has a very different cognitive load than there's someone who's not. So I think that's really, you know, what we're looking at. And I think it's very personal. It's

• 12:05Speaker 01

  very different. I think the most important thing is that to anticipate a high cognitive load. And this is where it's tricky with content because when you have a high, right?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  To manage, you have, you know that you're in a season of life where your work is peaking, your, your caretaking is also peaking at the same time. You also have to take care of yourself at the same time. Like, of course, self-care, what is that, right? And so you have all these demands, a visible load of being a woman, generally, period, and you're functioning, you're over-functioning, anticipating that, knowing that, on top of that stack consumption. And when I say that, I mean, we're listening to music, to podcasts, to audiobooks, love podcasts, love audiobooks, but our brain, as you know, isn't meant to consume so much all at one time.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Happening is throughout the normal vicissitudes of a very full life, we just don't give ourselves recovery. That's the problem. And we think recovery is triple screening and binge watching Netflix while sitting next to our partners and buying groceries at the same time on our computer and scrolling through Instagram on our phone, right? Like, let's be real, we think that's a break. And we often say it to each other, like, how many, yeah, I'm just, I'm just gonna chill tonight and like, watch, you know, the reruns of da-da-da. Okay, you might be zoning out a little bit and numbing out, but you're not actually recovering. You're not giving your brain the space it needs

• 13:42Speaker 01

  to reboot, to then come back online at an energetic level where you can really contain everything that's on your plate.

• 13:51Mindy Pelz?

  So do we have any kind of gold standard for what, how much recovery? I understand we all live into, you know, very different lives, but let's, I'm just gonna go back to, you know, the 1970s when I grew up, you know, it was like, Monday through Friday was work, Saturday and Sunday was the day off. And I'd never saw my parents work on Saturday and Sunday, and my dad worked long hours Monday through Friday. We literally had a weekend. Now, fast forward to this time, so many people are expected to work on the weekends, so many people choose to work on the weekends. Like, is there any kind of gold standard for here's what we need for recovery

• 14:36Mindy Pelz?

  in this modern day?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So I think that's a beautiful question, and I think we need to rethink what, when we think about recovery, what that actually means, because

• 14:45Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, good point.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Our brain doesn't actually need full chunks of weekend recovery. What our brain actually needs is rhythm between engagement and recovery. So we need the micro resets throughout our days because our brain and focus actually only work in cycles. So we can't just like sustain all this content and sustain focus and be available and be present, whatever all week. And then all of a sudden just reboot on the weekend and then come back online for a weekend time. Our brain cycles are sixty to ninety minutes or so before we need a reset. And so with that, and and so when we don't take those five to to twenty minute recovery periods

• 15:25Speaker 01

  within our days, that's when our rhythms become completely dysfunctional and our our mental accuracy declines. Our emotional ability to regulate, like errors increase are all the things, right? So what is, you know, so it's the it's the micro recovery that's really, really, really critical within our days.

• 15:48Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, so sixty sixty to ninety minutes is would be like a sprint, like a work sprint.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  That's like, yeah, or anything you're doing. Like even if you're, let's say you're not working, working, but you're with your kids or something or you're, you know, whatever it is that you define as something that you have to be present for, that you have to focus on. After about, I mean, listen, most of us can't even do it for more than five to ten minutes without needing a distraction to self-soothe.

• 16:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, the reality is, if we're really thinking about this, we reach for our phones, not because it's just a habit, but because it's become our emotional pacifier. Like, we just, we just want to press eject eject. Like, we're just like, oh, this is uncomfortable. I don't know what to do with discomfort. I haven't trained my brain to do this enough. I need, I need to go scroll cat videos, right?

• 16:38Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  So.

• 16:40Mindy Pelz?

  So true.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  So, um, so, yes, I think that we really, we need to start small. So when it, when, when I say sixty to ninety minutes, like for a true ultradian rhythm, like a beautiful thing. Yes, you could work up to that, but don't expect yourself to be there like immediately. Um, but yes, within those sixty minute windows, you need about five to twenty minutes to recover after that, right? And when I say recover. Again, we're talking about something that is actual recovery. So you can step outside in nature. You can go for a walk. You could kind of like daydream a little bit. Yes, you can breathe or meditate or whatever or stretch, but it doesn't mean consuming more content.

• 17:25Mindy Pelz?

  Right, yes.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And even five minutes helps, right? Like five minutes can help so much as a reset.

• 17:34Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, I have something I've got to say that I really think a lot of women need to hear. If you've ever followed a health program and it didn't work, check this out. This is not your fault. I promise you. Let me explain. Most fitness programs, most fasting protocols, most dietary advice, it was researched on men. It was designed for men and then handed to women with a shrug. And here you go. Hope this works for you. But here's the thing. You operate on a 28 day hormonal cycle. The food you eat, the length of your fasts, even the intensity of your workouts,

• 18:16Mindy Pelz?

  all of it needs to be timed to where you are in that cycle to actually get a result. This is the science I teach inside my Reset Academy. This is the science that I have researched for over a decade. And inside my Academy, every month I walk you through it in a very practical and actionable and way. And it's actually built for your body, for a feminine body. So it's gonna work. I promise you, I see it over and over again. So no more guessing, no more following advice that was never designed for you. This is a moment to get back into relationship with this beautiful body

• 18:59Mindy Pelz?

  that you are so blessed to live in. So if you're ready to finally understand this incredible body of yours and work with it instead of constantly fighting against it, come find me over in the Reset Academy. It's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. That's resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. I'll see you there.

• 19:25Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I had, early on in my podcast career, I had a brain expert that came on and said that after every interview, whether he's doing the interview or he's being interviewed, he lived down in San Diego, he would go and look out his window and take an ocean break, where he would just let his brain, he goes, I take, he said about a half hour, and I just let my mind wander and look out at the view. And, and what I've been telling my audience is if you don't have an ocean view, you, you know, that you could put on, like, there's, I, I love what went around socials recently about, uh, bird sounds, and how even just bird noises, or, or some kind of sense of nature around you can be calming.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  It activates your sympathetic nervous system immediately, and just this beautiful cocktail of calm hormones is released, and it will just totally de-escalate you. Our brain really needs idle time, okay, to grow, to reg, to, and we're just not giving ourselves that anymore, right? Because the minute we feel bored, like this negative thing, and we have to self-soothe, we cannot deal with boredom anymore. And that's a major problem, because when we're bored, when we go into this, like, D.O.L. network, which you've heard about, when we activate that, when we're bored, that's when our brain starts to integrate

• 20:50Speaker 01

  information, and we regulate, process all our emotional experiences, and do the real work. That's where we get creative. That's where we generate ideas. And we're just not gifting ourselves that anymore. And that's a real problem.

• 21:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. You know, one of my, um, uh, favorite people for many years was Sarah Blakely. You know who Sarah Blakely is?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, and so I used to give these a bunch of talks in Silicon Valley to corporations around stress management and nutrition. And it was a really fun time, and I would always quote Sarah and what Sarah's concept about failing forward. And anyway, she was a shero of mine. And then I ended up being a part of her husband's mastermind. He had asked for some fasting help, and I know, and I got brought into his world. And so I got to meet her. And I was at a small intimate gathering with her. And one of the things he said is, now, if people don't know who Sarah Blakely is, I just want to point out, she created Spanx. Yeah.

• 21:54Mindy Pelz?

  And she is like, one of the rare here in America, you know, billionaires, women, women own, you know, women started billionaires. She came from nothing. And, and so what he, what he said that was so interesting is he said, when I met Sarah, I had never seen a CEO that took so much time off. And she said, the reason I take so much time off is because I need to daydream. That exactly what you just said, I need to daydream so that that's where I get my ideas.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  And our culture trains us for something exactly the opposite. We're taught to grind at productivity and success means, you know, working yourself to the bone without all at all hours. And the biggest misconception is that we have to multitask in order to do that, right? That we have to do multiple

• 22:49Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Once. And now we know, and we have very clear research that shows every time we task switch, we lose about 23 minutes, not seconds, minutes. So our brain takes about 23 ish minutes to get back to whatever we were thinking about or focusing on before. That's a lot of time.

• 23:11Mindy Pelz?

  That's a lot. So what's a task, tell me like a task switch? What does that look like?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I mean, it could be like I'm writing an email to my son's teacher about something and then, oh, my husband is texting me about the groceries and I forgot the milk. That's a task. It's everything. It's what we do all the time, all day long. And so imagine how exhausted our brain is from all of that. And we're taught that that's, that's what success is. And especially as women, there's a cultural expectation that we have to multitask in order to sustain our lives and our families and that we're particularly good at it. But we now know that there's no gender difference whatsoever between our multitask. Our brain just can't and shouldn't.

• 23:58Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  But we've been culturally expected to and

• 24:02Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so true.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  rain fog during menopause, like what? It's like, yes, hormones and also the cultural expectation and multitask is through the roof for us. And by the time we reach 50s, we're like, what? Like, what did I just do with my whole life?

• 24:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, we, I actually, in the research I did for Age Like a Girl, I really think that what happens when you go through menopause is you're not just losing estrogen and progesterone and testosterone, you're losing dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin and GABA and BDNF.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:40Mindy Pelz?

  You're losing a whole array of neurochemicals. And I call it the neurochemical armor. It's like the armor comes down and all of a sudden you see things in your life so much differently. And sometimes you look and you go, oh, my God, anxiety, like I, I get anxious every time I do this or I get depressed every time I do this. And so one of my rally cries to women has been, stop and ask yourself, what is it that's making you anxious? What is it that's making you depressed? Like, look at your day to day. Because you don't have the same neurochemical buffer

• 25:21Mindy Pelz?

  that allowed you to take on a thousand tasks and do everything for everybody else. You've lost that neurochemical buffer. And so you're getting a real glimpse of what your true self wants.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  That's so true. And that's why, honestly, too, I mean, I just, I feel like the divorce rate skyrockets around this phase as well, because like you say, the buffer is lowered, and you just have a much shorter bandwidth for the things you used to manage or put up with, or whatever it is, right? I mean, I think that you've hit the nail on the head. And we, we think of estrogen as like a horm- like a reproductive hormone, but it actually is such a major, like neuromodulator in the brain, right? It actually supports, like you said, dopamine, the motivation, the focus that we need, the drive and the serotonin in our mood. And so, when we lose that support, everything just feels a lot harder.

• 26:15Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  You know?

• 26:16Mindy Pelz?

  You know, one of, one of the, and one of the gifts for me, um, uh, for the, from the fire is, um, my nervous system completely shut down. And I literally couldn't barely function as a human anymore. And it was on the heels of, uh, you know, three, two years of launching a book, writing books, like the pace that came with all of that. And so, one of the things I did is isolate myself. And I went to and lived by myself for four months. I was writing Age Like a Girl, but I just had to slow it all down because my nervous system could not take it anymore. I just, it was not, it was like completely

• 26:58Mindy Pelz?

  frozen and intolerant. And it was so beautiful because that, in that four month period, um, I got to regulate myself. Um, and then when I came out of that, I could add one thing at a time back in. And then all of a sudden, I could start to see, like, I can see now when the pace speeds up, I can feel that anxiety. And I'm like, hey, I call it the fire anxiety, the fire anxiety is back. Um, okay, what am I doing that my nervous system is not happy with? So, not every woman can isolate herself for four months, but is there a way to start to unwind ourself from this kind of frenzied, uh, pace?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think this pace and- I think what this and so we've lived through the fire and that's obviously dramatic grief and when people lose other people or relationships, that's a big traumatic grief. But I think what we're missing a lot in this culture and the load we carry is what I call like micro griefs throughout the day and it can be as simple as you know, like our, I don't know, our partner talking to us in a way that we don't really love or our kid like snapping at us or or ignoring us or a friend not calling back when you expect to. Those are little things that we often don't even really like think about or notice. We just push it away.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And then they just become bigger over time. And so I think what what these griefs and big griefs do really is it's it's really about putting the brain and our nervous system in a state of processing change that we just did not choose. And our modern life is full of that all the time. And so I think that we have these like micro losses, even if presence, like the human a human being needs to be present in order to co-regulate with each other. That's how we regulate our nervous system and we've completely plugged out of that matrix. So we lose, we lose those moments as well.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And so I think that we have so much unprocessed grief layered with chronic stimulation that we just, our nervous system just can't keep up. And so when you're able to plug out of all of that and slow down, which is what grief does, right? Like you were able to just go be with yourself, slow it down, literally one foot in front of the other. We're able to reboot our system in a way where we can now allow entry of the other things in a very, you know, intentional, beautiful way. Not all of us have the ability to do that. And so that's why those micro moments of recovery are so

• 29:42Speaker 01

  critical because not all of us have the ability to just be by ourselves for a while.

• 29:47Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. Yeah, exactly. Like and I didn't, you know, my, my kids are grown and you know, it just You know, there were a lot of scenarios that really helped that allowed me to do that.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Right, but I think that's the beautiful thing. And I think that, you know, I, I think that that's something that you really, we need to really think about, about sort of like, what else is eating away at our nervous system throughout the day? Because all of these micro losses are severe disruptors. And then we help soothe with, you know, our devices or whatever it is, because we don't want to deal with the friction of being human and interacting with each other and actually confronting each other.

• 30:27Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Right?

• 30:28Mindy Pelz?

  Wow.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And so.

• 30:29Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  And we've also trained our brain not to communicate. Like, we've gotten really good at plugging out and calling it self-care.

• 30:38Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. You know, it's, I'm so happy you brought this up because, I mean, we're in a unique moment in history right now. And, you know, I, I, one of the things I want to talk about is how do we digest the news and take that in? And stay informed if we choose to stay informed and, and still, you know, not completely lose our mind. But I'll tell you one thing that I have done in the last couple of months that has been so cathartic for me is to actually have difficult conversations with people in my life that believe differently than me.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yes, that is so interesting. That is such an important, important thing to do because modern life, like I, like I said, has eliminated all friction. Like, we have speed, convenience, we have instant answer, we have AI, we have constant comfort. Like, we don't have to do anything or be uncomfortable ever. But the problem is that our brain was designed to grow through friction, right? Because you know, you know that friction activates neuroplasticity, which is our brain's ability to grow and sustain change. And when the brain encounters challenge, those neurotransmitters, like dopamine, norepinephrine, whatever, strengthen and, and the learning pathways and we become.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  We can become better at dealing with the challenge, right? And so we have now given ourselves, we've lost our opportunity to build any resilience, right? And, and so I often say, like, you know, discomfort is our entry point to growth. It's not that it's the enemy. We've, we've now positioned as the enemy, right? Like, oh, right? Bottom line, like, I don't want to feel any discomfort, you know? But that's how we become strong by moving through the support and the recovery that comes from the discomfort.

• 32:33Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Right? And so we've eliminated that. And that's really true.

• 32:38Mindy Pelz?

  You know, I found some interesting research, and I quote it in, in my book, Age Like a Girl, that was, and it was based off of happiness, that they actually can measure the brains of people that are, you know, statistically the happiest. And I'm sure they did some kind of test or something that, that showed that. But what they found is that it was a very balanced brain. And I started to work back from that idea. I was like, well, what makes a balanced brain? And I then took Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, and I looked at the different stages of the hero's journey and, and everything that you go through in a hero's journey,

• 33:19Mindy Pelz?

  which is our classic, something went wrong, you handled it, you became different. And I, I focused in specifically on resilience. And resilience activates a part of the prefrontal cortex that is really unique for happiness. And you can only activate it through resilience. And I was like, wait a second, here we are trying to avoid difficulty, but if you want a happy brain, you need to grow this part of your prefrontal cortex. And you're only going to grow it by coming up against something difficult and, and overcoming that.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, it really does strengthen all those pathways because effort. Essentially increases your adaptation to do the hard things and then you see

• 34:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  full improvement and that activates those pathways in your brain that basically trust yourself. You know that you can. And so next time when you have difficulty, brain immediately goes back to that like, oh, I got this. Like I can do hard things.

• 34:23Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Right?

• 34:24Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And so it just ner- it just builds the pathways for, you know, optimism and hopefulness. And, and, and so it's our, it's almost like our brain's ability to reinterpret stress. Because once you've done the hard stuff, you build those neural pathways, your prefrontal cortex is strengthened. And then you have that plasticity to then go back and say, you can maintain better perspective. Right? You're like, oh, that, that's stressful, but I got this. Like I know who to call. I know what to do about it. Like I, you know. And then you're also honestly operating from a place of safety. And when you're, when you feel safe, your nervous system can, can regulate much better. And you'll have better focus and sustained attention. And they talk a lot about that in the book.

• 35:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Is there, it's, I love that you bring up safety because I, I always say that the male, both the men and women have, when you look at it from a physiological level, that the number one priority of the human body is survival. But women have a second priority, which is reproduction. And in reproduction, the key to a healthy reproductive system, regardless of your age is safety.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:36Mindy Pelz?

  And I've thought a lot about this because I notice it when I go to socials. I notice it in conversations. I notice it when I'm over scheduled. That there, I've trained my brain to start to go, are you safe here? Are you not safe here?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yes, because historically, women were, were, child rearing requires vigilance. Right? And so like just historically, hormonally, we're scanning, we're kind of always scanning. And we're, we're tuned to. I mean, I think, and you know this better than I do probably, but like, you know, depending, we, we, we have to detect threat and we have to detect threat at an early level. And, you know, obviously our lives have adapted to that, but, but what's left, the remnant of that is that as women, we are highly attuned to social cues and relational dynamics. And we are aware of like environmental safety, right? And signals. And so neurologically, we are constantly activated and, and scanning.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  And that's why I say like, we have a heightened survival mode, right? And, and I think that's really important to understand. That's taxing. It's beneficial. It's evolutionary, but it's also exhausting, especially in a world that has stripped us so much of the circles that have always helped women through the ages survive and function and thrive. We've lost, you know, each other. And we need to find our way back to each other.

• 37:08Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's so true. It's so true. I researched it. My, I won't go into all the details because my, um, my audience has heard it, but I got obsessed with this concept of a lime tree. And it was in a Trevor Hall song. And the, it's, if you can go look it up, it's called the lime tree. And it basically, the words of the song were, there you are. I found you there, uh, up above the city streets. You were always hiding in the lime tree. And I started to geek out on this song. I was like, what is it about? Is it, is it about a person finding themselves? Do they find a romantic partner? So I did a ton of research on the lime tree. And the lime tree back in the medieval days was a gathering place for women.

• 37:53Mindy Pelz?

  And women came together, they cried, they raged, they supported each other in the healing process. And everybody in the village knew that the women under the lime tree were healing. And I, I, I wrote about it in Age Like a Girl, and I keep bringing it into my community. We need to create lime trees where we can come together and step out. Of the madness of the world and start to heal each other.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Totally. And we have to remember that emotional processing happens in relation to others. Yes, it's great to have on your own to process and whatever, but talking and reflecting to others is actually scientifically so critical and activates brain regions that, you know, are all about meaning making and emotional integration. And you know, we, we release, women release oxytocin at a very high level, which is a bonding hormone. And so when we're together in response to whatever stressors we're dealing with, just, our cortisol is lowered when we're together. Like, that's why, you know, even just forcing yourself to meet up with your friends or women, is feels so good after, even if you don't have the time.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yet one more thing to fit into your, your calendar, right? Like, you can always know there's never time, but it's honestly, it's medicine. It's medicine.

• 39:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Right?

• 39:15Mindy Pelz?

  And what do we, but what, what do we do as women? I mean, I did this, I've had this conversation with so many friends where I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. We haven't talked. I've been so busy. I've been so busy. I've been so busy. And we wear busy like a badge of honor. And then you stop and you realize, oh, my God, wait a second. Busy is keeping me out of relationship with really special humans. It's, it's like, we gotta drop that badge of honor.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's like a whole other podcast episode on like our definition of, broken that is, and how we use it as a mask for everything that is. If, if something matters, if something's meaningful, you'll make time for it here. Right? And I think we're also so numb, like we've numbed ourselves. The prolific use of all these devices and tech and our dopamine is completely hijacked. We're just, it's, we're so spent. We're so, we've run out at such a high level that the thought of even like, to see people is, is just, you just don't, you just don't want to do it, right?

• 40:24Mindy Pelz?

  Right. Exhausted. Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and so we have to really lower our threshold for connection to start. It doesn't always have to be a dinner out or, you know, drinks or a big plan or or all childcare. Like you could literally just, you know, after a drop off, you're eating, like go for a walk and talk. Or like si- even if you're sitting at your purpose and you just turn to the woman next to you, even if it's uncomfortable, even if you don't know her, just start talking. Like it doesn't have to be a big thing. And I think we need to be really specific about what it means. Like when you say like, we should meet up or whatever, like, should we do a walk Friday morning? Like, hey, how about 10 minutes after pickup?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Or like whatever it is, like, we need to, it doesn't have to be perfectly hosted. And you don't have to be, you know, hundred percent engaged, or you could even be like cooking to get whatever, doing life to get like, just being in each other's presence is so critical. And we also, speaking of the word busy, have to recognize that when someone says they're busy, that often is like a signal, like red flag undercurrent, like I'm depleted. Right?

• 41:34Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  And so, right. So when you, when, when they're, when they're rejecting connection and there's a stable bond already there, it's not personal. It's generally like, I'm exhausted and overstimulated. And as a good friend, as a fellow woman, you can reflect that back. If you're like, hey, I get it. And also, this is really important to help you with that exhaustion. You'll be less exhausted after you see me.

• 42:01Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, you know, I ha- I have a good friend who she and her mom get on, on Zoom together and they fold laundry together. They be- so that they're in, isn't that sweet? So that they're in relationship with each other in a simple task like folding laundry.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we didn't evolve to be isolated units, sitting.

• 42:22Mindy Pelz?

  No, no.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Like being, like, this is why I have a big thing with when people say like, I'm just an introvert. Like, I don't think that's a thing. Like, you, yes, we need reboots, we need time by ourselves, but we don't need to pretend that we have a certain personality type, just so we don't have to feel the discomfort of engaging with other humans.

• 42:44Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, that's well said, well said.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:46Mindy Pelz?

  What do you think about, yeah, what do you think about social media? I mean, you and I are both on social media. Is there a way to do it gently? Is there a way to put some boundaries around it? Is it even good for us right now?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, I think there, I always, I have such a love hate relationship with social media, right?

• 43:06Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, me too.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I've formed a beautiful community there. I have a subscription.

• 43:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Service there where like people get more of me and it's a beautiful thing. I, you know, I also, it's like really cathartic to me, like all my writings that you you've read about grief and the fire and all of that, like that was a beautiful space for me to, to sort of express my creativity in a way that I probably couldn't do otherwise. But I think that we have to be very intentional about use and we have to know, it's not meant, like, social media and tech in general was not meant to be a constant stream. It's meant to be a container, it's meant to be a dose, right? And so you have to be very conscious about resisting the scroll that they want you to do, right?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  That's like the whole point is just to get you scroll. That's how they have you, that's how they make money. So, yeah, that's what you have to really be cognizant of, be very careful about who you follow, edit, edit, edit, right? And give yourself pockets. Yeah, give yourself pockets of time. You could literally, I have clients who schedule it into their calendars, like, you know, find a social media break and they'll just scroll for five minutes, but then when the timer goes off, they're done. So you actually schedule it in, even knowing that it's maybe not the best thing, but it's like worry time, like you can schedule worry.

• 44:31Mindy Pelz?

  I love that.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Like for people who are very, that's right, you schedule it in, you worry, worry, worry, worry, but then when the timer goes off, you're done, right?

• 44:41Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  And I think you can, you can do social media, but you've got to pair it with some sort of regulation because you're going to be exposed to distressing events, you're gonna be exposed to someone's highlight reel, you know, or filtered women who don't even look like people, right?

• 44:58Mindy Pelz?

  So yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  In a sense of cognitively being aware of that, you pair it with a regulatory event that that promotes recovery, like taking a walk after or like, you know, looking at a tree in the wind. Like, it doesn't have to be major, but you you just have to get out of the vortex.

• 45:17Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I I I love that idea of scheduling it. I even love the idea of scheduling worry that, you know, I did this after the fires. Um, because I had lost a good friend before that of one of my closest friends. He just at fifty two laid down and died of a heart attack. And that happened two months before the Palisades fire. And I was in so much grief and somebody said, make a date with grief. Yeah, sit with grief. And so every morning I would literally make a date and I would think about him. I would think about the Palisades. I'd think about my childhood neighborhood that was completely gone. And I I sometimes I would put sappy music on and I would cry.

• 46:02Mindy Pelz?

  I would just cry and cry and I looked forward to it. And what I love about, I'm going to start doing this with worry. Because what ended up happening for me is, let's say later in the day, my friend would come into my mind and I'd just be like, oh, you know, I I talked to him all the time. I'm like, TJ, where, why, where, why did you have to go? And then I would remind myself, oh, tomorrow morning I can I can sit and really think about him. And it allowed me to move forward in the day, knowing that I had a space holder for that emotion.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. It doesn't mean that you could only experience the big feelings like during those pockets. But what it does for, right, it sort of structures your time in a way that's very soothing. So it's

• 46:47Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Almost like giving your nervous system a break and a rest, knowing something consistent to go to, to express yourself. And yes, you're going to feel sadness throughout the day, but then you could still be a functional human and move through your life.

• 47:03Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Without it really sort of paralyzing you constantly.

• 47:08Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 47:10Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. What about, you know, what about, we have a worldwide audience and, you know, unfortunately, what's going on in the US has now bled into all over the world. But what about news? I've been really surprised in my community and how many people put the frickin' news on in the background all day long? And many of us wake up every morning and we're like, what's gonna happen today? Is there any technique for this historic moment? And how do we stay informed but don't get completely consumed by the news?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So we, we've never, so the human brain and the human system is meant to contain news from just our closest friends and family. Like, we're, to live in these very, very small pockets. We've never been, we've never had the ability to hear and know every little thing that's happening and to have it sensationalized.

• 48:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  So honestly, so much of the overload we feel and deal with every day and our inability to focus is coming from our news consumption. And I'm just shocked by the amount of people who leave the TV on all the time.

• 48:26Mindy Pelz?

  I can't imagine.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I, I, I would absolutely go insane if I did that. I don't even look, I can't even, I have almost like PTSD when it even comes to the newspaper. But we make a very concerted effort to buy paper sources of news, even knowing where it comes from. And, you know, I think news consumption can be done, but at a very, very small amount, and you have to be very, very clear on your source, highly vetted. And I think what happens is when you always have news on or you're consuming content, you're just continuing low-grade stress perpetually. Like, you're just always gonna be in fight or flight because your amygdala, which is

• 49:11Speaker 01

  our, the center of our brain that's always processing stress and reacting, is constantly scanning. So words like attack, crisis, war, like emergency, da-da-da. You're just constantly in this triggered state and you're in vigilance mode.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  So even if you do take a walk or a break and you're still listening on your ear pods to something like you are just your cortisol is going to be consistently elevated and you are just going to be exhausted. So I always recommend for sure never having TV on or news on all the time. Intentional news windows, very short, maybe once, maybe twice a day max. Choose one trusted source, one or two sources and make sure you're living in a world where there are news free cycles and you're not constipated.

• 50:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. And I, and I like what you said about maybe going back to some paper sources.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:11Mindy Pelz?

  Uh, my parents, my mom, my dad's 89 and my mom's 86 and they were over recently and we were, I was reminiscing with them where the LA Times would be on our breakfast table every morning and everybody would grab a section and we would eat and read and then we would go about our day. And then at night, when we gathered as a family, we would talk about the current events in the, in the morning.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:34Mindy Pelz?

  That's how we got our news. My parents were anti-TV. We didn't really have TV on at all. Um, and it was a really enjoyable, enjoyable might be strong, but a really helpful way to take in the current events. And my mom told me that what she does now is she gets the Sunday New York Times and she's like, I spend a whole week reading this. She just gets the Sunday and she spends the whole week reading it.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And that's how our brain can slow drip information and process it well without triggering our nervous system to constantly live in this fight or flight mode. That's how it's meant to evolve. We are not meant to, you know, I mean, I know people who literally have the TV news on while scrolling news sites while also reading on their iPad like news. I was like, what? Oh, I'm just trying to get news from sources. No, you are literally overwhelming your nervous system. You can't actually take this in.

• 51:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Right? And so everything just becomes so much bigger and so much sensationalized. And then you find yourself snapping on people you love a little more easily and you wonder why?

• 51:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah, so true because you're right at that edge.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  You're just like, oh my God, this is a, this is an emergency because other people's urgency and sensationalism becomes ours. We take that in.

• 51:58Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And now we're functioning in a world that literally feels like life or death, even if it's not.

• 52:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so true. You brought up, you just brought up an interesting thing that I've been repatterning. And I'm curious if you've done some research on this is um, other people's urgency. You know, one of the benefits of living here in Santa Cruz is it's a slow town. And I saw a bum and everybody's got bumper stickers. And I saw a bumper sticker the other day that's, that said, I'm not in your hurry.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:30Mindy Pelz?

  And I have used that as a mantra when I get texts, when I get calls. I used to feel like I needed to respond to everybody so quickly. And I've just, I continue to remind myself, I'm not in your hurry. If I don't get back to you for a week, I don't get back to you for a week. I'm no longer in anybody else's hurry.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, because we also, we have highly social brains. We have mirror neurons that want to hear other people's thoughts. And other people around us are stressed or anxious or whatever it is. Our nervous system wants to synchronize with theirs. Like, that's just evolutionary. It's the thing we call emotional contagion. And so that's, that's just, that's just, right now, on top of that, modern communication has amplified this exponentially. Only are we just, you know, constantly carrying these signals. Like, we always text, like ASAP or rapid fire messages or escalate whatever it is.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  We have fifty different ways of communicating in one second. Like, I don't know, you have texts, we have like Slack, WhatsApp, like, we have to just, I mean, after the fire, all those group WhatsApp texts, like, it's lovely, like, for our communities, but.

• 53:49Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Whoa, right? Like, so.

• 53:51Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I was on a few of those. It was like, oh, my God, what's and then you go, what's happening now? What's happening now? And it's, yeah, it's so overwhelming.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  So honestly, one of the most important sort of modern skills is learning to separate someone else's activation from our own.

• 54:09Mindy Pelz?

  Oh.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And our own.

• 54:11Mindy Pelz?

  How do you do that?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  I mean, their urgency doesn't equal. You can do that. You have to set boundaries. You have to constantly be intentional. We have to pause and really ask yourself, is this my emergency? Is this urgent for me? Right? Or is this just their nervous system trying to, like my nervous system trying to mirror theirs? Right?

• 54:34Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  You have to set boundaries with your time and and and it's just it's it's and your emotional energy.

• 54:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Have you done any research on, and this is, you know, really something I've spent a lot of time studying is ultra-processed foods. You know, when we, everything is fast now, so we want our food to be fast. We want dopamine hits from our food, just like we want dopamine hits from our phone. And one of the things that we know about ultra-processed foods that a lot of them have monosodium glutamate in it. And glutamate is is an agitator. And I've often wondered, like, in this day and age, I'm like, how are people even functioning if they're eating horrible food? The news is on all day. They're on their phone. They're doing all the things we're talking about.

• 55:24Mindy Pelz?

  Like, how can they even function as a human?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  They can't.

• 55:26Mindy Pelz?

  So if, yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  They can't. And then they reach for all these hacks, right? And they they wonder that nothing's working. Right?

• 55:34Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Like, oh, my to-do list, like, I do the sauna, I do the red light, I drink green juices. But I don't know why, like, I'm not really, you know, I just have this, like, my life is broken.

• 55:45Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  They're not. So I talk about the foundational skills in my book a lot.

• 55:50Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Think we miss that entirely when we when we talk about mental health. We have to go back to the fundamentals, proper nutrition, proper sleep routines and hygiene, like the basics for human function. I mean, I have um a friend who's uh who does a lot of neuropsych assessments for children. And I can't even tell you how many parents come in there with ADHD children who are symptomatic. This is not to say that ADHD or neurodivergence doesn't exist. It's a very real thing, et cetera. But what I what my point here is that so many of these cases are just undernourished, dehydrated kids. The minute they elevate their hydration levels, they're getting enough water and they're actually eating properly.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  So many of their symptoms that they thought were ADHD dissipate. That's not to say most ADHD is just a food thing. But

• 56:43Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Food, sleep, hydration, as this is critical, regulates our blood sugar or inflammation. Like, we cannot function in this state. And when we do eat ultra-processed foods, our blood sugar is constantly swinging, which just shuts our attention. And then all of a sudden, like, why are we so irritable? And why why do we have brain fog? And then not to mention the gut-brain connection that I'm sure, I mean, you know so much about.

• 57:12Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  It's like when we just regulate that microbiome, that's now we're finding in the research that like ninety percent of our serotonin is built in there, right? And comes from there. So our food and focus is regulated so much by what's produced in our gut.

• 57:28Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  And so when we're eating ultra-processed food and all these high sugars and whatever, we're just disrupting all of that. And so, of course, we're more reactive to stress.

• 57:38Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. So if you're listening, you know, as people are listening to this, they're like, oh, wow. Here's why my anxiety is through the roof. Here's why I can't sleep. I mean, sleeping is a really big one for my community. Can we create some kind of checklist? You talked about the foundational ideas. Like, where do you move from the awareness that we have given people today to actually starting to repattern your life?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Yes, that's a great question. And I talk a lot about this in the book, like, actual, what do we do with this? I think the first thing we have to do before we focus even on sleep or anything else is we have to stabilize our nervous system. And that requires little things, because your body right now is in a threat response, most likely. Daily movement, time outside in sunlight, like, various, it doesn't have to be long, small increments, but consistency is what matters. Slow breaths, like breathing out longer than breathing in occasionally. And amplify your social connection. Most people who are struggling right now are very much alone. And they're lonely, but they're only creating that world for themselves and don't fully

• 58:52Speaker 01

  realize it, right? So we try to actively reach out to your social connections and amplify those. You move towards sleep, right? Because we need to really protect our sleep very aggressively.

• 59:05Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  That helps, like, morning sunlight exposure is critical. Try not to grab the minute you wake up, because our brain wakes up kind of like wet cement and it takes 45 minutes to settle. We don't want to wake up in someone else's life, right? Or someone else's.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Avoid, you know, you know, avoid the news or screams late at night. You need consistent sleep and wake times help a lot with your rhythm.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  And then, you know, then you lose. So once you have your sleep handled, the constant input, you take your AirPods out when you're on a walk and actually you're the bird.

• 59:43Mindy Pelz?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  You try to doom scroll, you drive home and you're actually where you're going versus on autopilot and you're not listening to music on the autobahn. And you sort of let your brain wander, right? Like you're giving yourself space to reboot, to recover. And then I think you mentioned stabilizing your blood sugar, like staying away from ultra processed foods. I think that's really important. Eating protein early in the day will help with your focus. If you're gonna eat hard, pair it with fat, like healthy fats. I think we have really glamorized, like windows of not eating and giving whatever. Like I, I think for focus in your nervous system

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  and your mental health, it's really important that we avoid really long periods without eating. Food is fuel. And so, you know, we need steady fuel for attention. And I think that's where you start.

• 1:00:40Mindy Pelz?

  The right fuel.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  The right fuel.

• 1:00:43Mindy Pelz?

  And what I want to just point out about what you just said is that's not hard. It doesn't cost a lot of money. I mean, this is the thing.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  There's no money.

• 1:00:52Mindy Pelz?

  It costs you nothing.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Nothing. Right? It's like you do not have to spend money. This is, there's a billion dollar industry that is, that is created to try to give us these like magical tools to be human again. That's not, that's not real, doesn't exist if they make the people pitching them to us.

• 1:01:13Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, I used to be, I used to be heavily the biohacking world. And then one, one day it like hit me and I was like, what are we doing? Like, why would you buy a red light bulb or machine if you can just go out to the sunrise and sunset like it's already there?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Mindy Pelz?

  Um, and you know, I just start seeing that you could do everything that you're trying to spend all this money on, you could actually do on your own.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  You, yeah. And like, great, red light, sure. Get a red light if you want, like do whatever. But if you're not doing the basics, if you're not prioritizing the four things, safety, sleep, stable fuel and recovery, basic recovery. None of it. Is going to matter. None of the other stuff is going to make any impact whatsoever. You're you're literally putting money down the drain. Like it doesn't, it just won't work.

• 1:02:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  And

• 1:02:07Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, I love this. I

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Mindy Pelz?

  I I talk, I I'm like now on all my YouTube videos, I'm literally talking people out of supplements. I'm talking them out of products. I'm just like, and stop it, stop it. Let's and a same kind of thing. Let's go back to the basics. People are going to keep giving you what I call shiny object syndrome. They're just going to give you a little shiny object that you're going to go up. I want that. And then you're going to think it's going to save you. And you didn't even realize that the only person saving you is you. And it starts with a really basic routine like what you just mentioned.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Right. And it starts with prioritizing your nervous system, but not in isolation. And it's not to say some supplements don't work really well, or teas, or whatever it is like that. Yeah, that's great. But stop looking for that one quick fix, that magical potion. Like that doesn't

• 1:02:57Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  exist. You have to

• 1:02:59Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  create a life that is supportive of of of you. And that is really basic and doesn't cost much.

• 1:03:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so so well said. How do people find you and your book? I think when I saw your, I actually found you before I saw that you had a book coming out. And when I, when I saw the title of the book, I was like, that's brilliant. Thank God, somebody wrote that book.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, finding focus is found, you know, anywhere books are sold. And then I have a vibrant community on Instagram, Dr. D R dot Z E L A N A. And I have a subscription as well, where, you know, for like the cost of a coffee or something a month. But you get more access to, you get tools, you get resources, you get lives. Um, I just wanted to give people more, you know? Um, and so, yeah, that's, that's how you can find me. And then, and then my website as well has different, tons of free resources. Um, but digs deeper into all of this.

• 1:03:58Mindy Pelz?

  Well, I'll tell you, when I'm scrolling through my Instagram and I come to your posts, what it does, because you're so poetic. And your words, I have to think about them for a moment and like really sit and marinate on on them. They make me stop scrolling and I sit there with your posts and then they're all carousels, right? Most of them or many of them are. So

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  There's Like I can't whittle it down.

• 1:04:24Mindy Pelz?

  No, but it's beautiful. I've sent so many of them to friends. I've told so many people, "You gotta go follow this woman." Like, she's on to a frequency that we're not seeing coming out of other creators. So, I just, I really appreciate what you're doing. And I'm sending you so much, you know, happiness for rebuilding your, your house and your family and the Palisades and cheering you on. And thank you so much for joining me today.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mindy. Thank you for your important, critical work. I mean, what you do is, is necessary and, and you do it with such grace. And I think, you know, we both want to speak in the truths that are, you know, plaguing us in this time and things that Mike talked about that's so important and so necessary. So, I love your voice as well, and I'm just grateful for your support.

• 1:05:19Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So, please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.