HSN Episode #38: Why You Want To Prioritize Your Nervous System with Lauren Charbonneau
Michelle Fox: [00:00:00] Welcome to Healthy Sexy Nutrition with me, Michelle Fox, Culinary nutritionist, health coach, and your host For this podcast, I teach busy professionals how to get more nutrition in their bodies. And how to have more fun in their home kitchens. If you struggle with consistency or sometimes forget to make your needs a priority or you avoid planning your meals.
You, my friend, are in the right place. Join me each week for inspiration to increase your energy, discover new recipes, manage your hormonal woes, and so much more. You are a busy professional, but that does not mean your nutrition should suffer. You deserve to live in a body and have a life that you love.
So let's dig in. I [00:01:00] know you Yes, my friend, my fellow community member. You are stressed. I mean, you are balancing your daily routines. You are, I was gonna say dealing with, But maybe a nicer, friendlier word might be, you are engaging with family members that may take extra energy.
I know you are very concerned with your fitness and you're listening to this podcast, so I know No, no, that you are very aware and conscientious of your nutrition and all of that takes energy, whether we like it or not. Life is going to be life. But the beautiful news is my guest today, Lauren Charo, is here to talk to us about our nervous system.
Yes, my friend, there is hope. There is [00:02:00] help and we are going to dig in. I want to introduce you to Lauren by reading her bio first, and then you know how we do it around here, so let's jump in. So as a somatic stress release practitioner and coach Lauren Charbonneau helps overwhelmed entrepreneurs and executives go from chronically stressed to calm by learning to work with their nervous systems.
Yes and amen. Three years ago, while balancing running a business with a single parenting an infant, wow, she landed in the ER with stress related high blood pressure twice. After much trial and error in the world of self-help, she found rapid, powerful healing and somatic nervous system work, and has since been on a mission to make those tools more widely known.
Lauren is also the founder of Protagonist Career Solutions. [00:03:00] A Boston based executive resume writing agency that's been in business since 2018 and she has a 10 year background in the behavioral and integrated health fields.
So Lauren, welcome.
Lauren Charbonneau: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Very excited. Oh
Michelle Fox: my goodness. Yes. And as you can see, I'm like leaning in. I'm so anxious to ask a few questions to to dig right in. But first, yeah. Would you be willing to play a game with me?
Absolutely. So I call this my rapid fire questions, and it's a rapid way for my community to get to know you. Okay. And so, First, just to start off with a softball. When I say sweet, savory or salty, which one do you lean towards? Salty. Mm, for sure. Is that flavors or is that behavior?
Lauren Charbonneau: Ooh. well, I was thinking of food, so I was thinking.[00:04:00]
Michelle Fox: That's awesome. And that was definitely me just teasing you a little bit because just like my community, I'm getting to know you during this hour, so good to know. Alright, now reading your bio, you have a little one in the house. I don't know how much technology or media you get to indulge in, but do you have a show that you've recently binged and
Lauren Charbonneau: loved?
Yes, I do. the Lost Kitchen, it's on, you can catch it on Discovery. Plus, I don't know if you're familiar. Erin French is amazing. I love her food. I love to watch her make the meals. It has just been a joy. I've been the whole series this winter, so
Michelle Fox: yeah. Oh my goodness. Yes.
Katie Seitzer and I, who is also a fellow Origin Empress, the way that you and I met through Kate Northrop's program, the Origin Collective, she, Katie is also a podcast guest, but she and I were like, I. Raving about the last kitchen. That's kind of the thing we bond on. And so [00:05:00] I love that you Yeah. Touched on that.
I love it. I love it. That show can be
Lauren Charbonneau: addictive, right? Oh my God, absolutely. And, and it's so soothing. It's so like, oh, now she's gonna make the soup. It's like I'm talking about the nervous system today. I'm like, this suit's my nervous system.
Michelle Fox: Oh my goodness. Yeah. And I know this is rapid fire and I have one more question, but Okay.
Just to stay on this topic though, cuz No, I'm, I'm indulging in this with you. It's so interesting to me that you're saying it's soothing, which tells me you have the tools for nervous system. Cuz for me, as much as I love food and teaching how to cook, It actually gives me anxiety, like when, Erin and her team on the show are like mm-hmm.
Trying to prep and get everything right and just perfect for, their guests. I'm like, like, the whole time I'm like, this. If I love it for you, you're like, yeah,
Lauren Charbonneau: well see. I just know they're, there's gonna be a good outcome. Or they wouldn't put it on tv. So I'm like, I know, I know your brand, I know the show's brand, so I'm just, I'm just gonna wait for the good outcome.
I [00:06:00] love that approach. And how often do we get to feel that in life, right? I know there's gonna be a good outcome. Like that's, I love a show that can give me what life can't.
Michelle Fox: Oh my goodness. See, I'm learning from you already and it hasn't even been five minutes. Okay. So last question. And speaking of kitchens, would you be willing to share one of your childhood memories in the kitchen?
Lauren Charbonneau: Oh, oh, good question. Oh my goodness. one of my childhood memories in the kitchen. hmm. I think, you know, baking cookies was a lot of fun as a kid. I think it was, I got a real sense of agency when I could like, you know, whip up the. The box mix and bake of myself and got, got a little creative, put some different stuff in there sometimes, and sometimes that was good and sometimes not so much.
But, yeah, that was a lot of fun.
Michelle Fox: Hmm. And that actually speaks to your entrepreneurial spirit. It sounds like you were in the kitchen handling things and figuring things out on your own. Am I, am I intuiting that correctly? Well,
Lauren Charbonneau: just with the [00:07:00] cookies. My mom was, was pretty on point with the dinners and I, I actually didn't really learn how to cook, like cook, meals and food that would be appealing to people until I was in my mid twenties.
Interesting. Yeah. Interesting.
Michelle Fox: Yeah. Yeah. Good to know. Well, alright, well let's jump into the Juicy Juicies. Hi. Was really attracted to the work that you do because not only do you and I learn certain tools or have learned certain tools in the networking group that we're in, but you like really dive in and I know that's more of your focus.
And yeah, a few of my clients, I will tell you. When I start to talk about making changes in their diet and or in their routine, like I can just see their face and their body and it's like, you know, Michelle's gonna make me change. So yeah, off with that, like when somebody is going through a transition, whether it's with [00:08:00] food or maybe going through a divorce or maybe changing jobs, like how do you approach the nervous system with change?
Lauren Charbonneau: That's a really good question. So, you know, we all have our own, kind of default patterns that we have in response to, to life, right? There's, there's different, you may, folks may have heard of, fight or flight and then there's freeze and there's, fawning and, and you know, so there's these, these different kind of states which are more.
The more extreme states of the nervous system. and then, you know, in response to stress, like even just regular, everyday stress, we have, we have a response in our nervous system. It's called activation, right? It's like something comes into my awareness and I'm activated in response to, it lets me know that there's something that needs to be attended to, right?
And so, you know, and if you pay attention to how you feel in your body, when something comes into your awareness, right? A surprise email that you weren't expecting, something like that, it, you'll, you'll [00:09:00] notice something will happen in your body, right? So we have. Our body responds to these things.
And so change, typically, registers as it, it definitely registers as something that needs our attention. And depending on the kind of change, I mean, if it's something like divorce that's often tied in with feelings of, of loss or, or of having failed or of, you know, regret or, there could be a myriad of emotions that are coming up, that's gonna certainly.
Our nervous system is gonna have a response to that. And so, it's important, I think, you know, it, the lens that I view the world through is that it's important to know what is going on in the nervous system and how, what state we might be in because, If we're responding to the change from, let's say there's some change, I'm gonna change my meal plan, right?
And I'm gonna, and that feels really stressful. It feels like something I maybe can't do. Right? Or maybe I am, just feeling like, oh, is this gonna be another [00:10:00] thing that I fail at? Right? And we're, and, and we're going into a, to a state of, of maybe even feeling fight or flight about that. It's gonna be really hard to respond in a way that's constructive if we're responding from that state.
Right. And same if we go into freeze. Right. And that's gonna be also a challenge to respond from that place cuz it's likely we're gonna have a hard time actually taking action and you know, I am sure everybody's heard of like the self-fulfilling prophecy, that it kind of does become a self-fulfilling prophecy because we feel like we can't do it and then we're, we're, we're, we're doing it from this state that we're not even really aware that we're in.
And then it does create these results and it's not, and it's not so much about thoughts. It's really about what's going on in the body. so I don't know if that makes sense. It's, it's not a one size fits all answer to change, but I think it's important Yeah. To know. Where we're coming from, and I will just say, you know, as far as fight or flight and freeze, we can often [00:11:00] distinguish what state we're in just by listening to the quality of our thoughts.
Like so, you know, fight or flight. Typically there's gonna be some sort of like, I have to defend myself or like maybe even like, who does this, Michelle, think she is to tell me to change my meal. Doesn't she know I'm busy? Like, I'm quitting this coaching program, I'm outta here. Right? And freeze might be more like, what's the point?
There's no point anyway. I always fail, like, why try something new again? Like, you know, this sort of like, it's hopeless, it's pointless, right? And so when we listen, To the quality of our thoughts and the content of our thoughts, we can often distinguish a pattern of like, oh, that's the state I'm in.
Whereas, if we're coming from a state of feeling safe and connected and anchored in the, what they call the ventral vagal part of the system, which is where we'd ideally like to be when we're. Taking action toward things that are important to us, that's gonna feel like, oh, there's possibility here.
There's hope. I've got this coach, I've got some good information here. it seems like it might be worth [00:12:00] trying something new this time. You know? And so these different, and, and what's really cool is that once you understand the landscape of your nervous system, There are practices that you can do that can help bring you from one state into another so that you can get to that place of possibility without having to do a whole lot of heavy mental lifting or like cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets.
And you know, there's just sort of the stuff that can feel very overwhelming when you're already overwhelmed. So, yeah. Yeah.
Michelle Fox: Long answer to your question, but. No, that's fabulous. So what I am hearing you say is it's really important to name where we are and what we're feeling, that there's, there's power in naming that emotion.
And so I also heard you say those emotions as it comes to the nervous system, you're identifying as fight, flight, or freeze. Did I get that
Lauren Charbonneau: right? Yeah. And I mean, those aren't, I. Those aren't really emotions. They're ner, they're states of the nervous system. So emotions would are more things like sadness, anger, you [00:13:00] know, and we can have, we can have different, we can be feeling different emotions in our, in our different states.
but yeah, there's so in, in the extreme. when we come upon something stressful, the response in our body is just activation, right? I'm activated. And then sometimes what can happen is we can become so overloaded with activation that it sends us into a fight or flight response, or it sends us into a freeze response.
And those are, Those states exist so that our bodies can conserve energy. You know, if you think of the, the, the person, many thousands of years ago who would be out hunting and encounter a lion, right? if there wasn't a possibility of a. Getting away. Right. You would like collapse and play dead in hopes that the lie, right?
It's like, so we, we have these states that exist just to help us conserve energy. It's energy conservation. It's just, and it's an automatic thing. It's not something that we're, you know, thinking about or choosing. Hmm. [00:14:00] Yeah.
Michelle Fox: And when I hear you say activated, I will say my family and I've got three teenagers and a husband and we've been.
Practicing. It's definitely still a practice in, in movement. But I will say we have this term called thinking state. So, ah, teenagers comes to me and it triggers me, like I've trained myself to be aware of that trigger. Which it sounds like you're calling activation. Mm-hmm. And I'll say I'm not in a thinking state right now, but can we talk about that when we're both in a thinking state and nine times outta 10.
Both of us. Like if it's me and a teenager or even me and my husband, it's like, yeah, like that's all we needed to hear to kinda like relax and do it and know that Yeah. We'll talk about it when we're both not activated.
Lauren Charbonneau: Yeah. And that's a beautiful, I do a similar thing with my daughter, although she's a lot younger.
but yeah, and that's a beautiful illustration of what I was just talking about, which is that we. To be aware, right. That I'm not in a thinking [00:15:00] that there's a state that exists, that I, there are states that exist that we shouldn't necessarily be doing all a bulk of our thinking from. Right. And, and to know that we'll do the thinking, then I think that's really important.
Yeah.
Michelle Fox: And so we can be prepared, but I really love your word of the activation. I'm gonna. I'm gonna meditate on that one a little bit more cause that feels more encompassing of how I physically feel like when I get triggered. Yeah, like everything's on like. Yeah, hyper vigilant?
I'm like, what is happening? And I'm all of a sudden aware of how my body's feeling, what I'm looking like, where my environment is. Yeah. Yeah. To your point, it's probably not so natural for just me hanging out in my house where there's truly no danger compared to being out in the wild where there might be that cyber tooth.
Is it cyber tooth? Sabertooth?
Lauren Charbonneau: Sabertooth tiger. Yeah, tiger. And yet, and it actually. It actually is natural. I wanna just validate for you and for everybody that, that it is 110% natural. This is our biological [00:16:00] adaptation system. I mean, this is how we, it, the threat may not be a si sabertooth tiger. It might be a teenager who wants to have a conversation.
And yet, like these biological, states and, and reactions exist simply to alert us that there is something in our, in our sphere that needs to be attended to. Right. And if we didn't have. A signal for that. I mean, really, what would life look like? Right? We need some way to know. right. And so that is, that is the first step of the stress response cycle.
And that does, that's universal. It happens for all of us. This is, this is what our human bodies do in response to a stressor. And it doesn't, a stressor doesn't need to be something terrible like, You know, a bad thing or a toxic relationship, it can, it, it's just the things in our world that are important to us.
Right? And so parenting is, can be a stressor and work. And even if those things are enjoyable and important, they still come into our awareness and require our attention and, and our energy. And so [00:17:00] yeah, it's, it's totally, normal. It's a normal way to, to respond, to become that. I appreciate you saying that.
Yeah.
Michelle Fox: So related, but a little different. I would love to talk to you about. Hustle culture. Hmm. I will tell you, just two months ago I was speaking with a fellow entrepreneur and she was talking about, strategies and her five year plan and you know, B, B, B, and I have no doubt she will achieve all of it.
And as she was talking, like I felt myself getting a little bit more anxious and then my response to her was, That is amazing. And I was totally sincere and, and I said, for me, at least for this first quarter, I'm truly going to focus on my nervous system because I do not wanna get burnt out again this year.
Yeah. As many times as I got burnt out last year, and she just looked at me like I had two heads on my shoulders. She like, she was like nervous system, like, kinda like, and I was like, okay. I, I, I think that actually triggered me. So I didn't [00:18:00] have the words at the time to explain. And so, you know, if you were me, how, how might you talk to her right now to share like why we might wanna focus on our nervous system?
Oh,
Lauren Charbonneau: that's such a good question. I mean, I think that, why we might, you know, why anybody would wanna focus on it is if we wanna have more, I mean, for me at least, this, it's about having. Having freedom and having choice. And I'll explain what I mean. So there are certain defaults that we can go into with, in our nervous systems responses to things, right?
And particularly like I will say, you know, although I just emphasized how normal activation is, we can also get stuck there and we can end up chronically activated. And that is not good because then. You start your, your energy is constantly being depleted, so what you wanna be able to do is go from activation and complete the rest of the cycle, which typically means releasing that activation from your body in some way, and then [00:19:00] coming into deactivation, which is the winding down, and then restoration, restoring your energy.
So if you're not aware of that, right? And you're in the hustle culture and you're chronically activated, and you're like, I'm just gonna work until 11 o'clock every night, and then I'm gonna crash into bed, and then I'm gonna jolt awake at 2:00 AM and then I'm gonna take something to fall back asleep, and then I'm gonna wake up feeling like I have a hangover and drink a ton of coffee and do the same thing every day, right?
Like, what is the quality? You know, your, your, your body is gonna have like a ton of tension stored. And which is gonna limit the way that you, are able to move. It's gonna limit, you know, it could go on over time and you can end up kind of in, in also in, you know, fight or flight or freeze if those are, are part of your reality.
And so when we're, again, like I said, when we're thinking right, we just, the word thinking state, when we're making choices from this place of. Like tension, chronic tension, feeling like there's an [00:20:00] emergency and, and I'm always on. The quality of our decisions is not gonna be great. Right. and also, you know, if we're not able to, To be with, we can get so used to being activated.
This is what happened to me. I got so used to being in a state of activation all the time and deactivation and restoration. Those more restorative states felt very uncomfortable to me physically. oh, interesting. You know, if, if there was a time that, life was more useful, I would feel really.
Uncomfortable with that. Right? And I could, I really couldn't tolerate it. And so what I would do is go find something that would make life more challenging. Right? And so this is how I, you know, ended up a single parent, as you know, and, having a, having a business and a baby and not enough support, right?
Some of that is because of. Choices that I made in people and in situations, right? And in, in a workplace, I worked in the behavioral health field, which is notoriously low [00:21:00] pay for high energy, high burnout work. And so, a lot of those choices I made in my life were based on. What I had capacity for in my nervous system, right?
And so the work that I've done to widen my capacity to be able to be activated and then come out of it and become, you know, deactivated and restore, I have more options now, right? I have more options in my business model in, how I choose to offer my services in the type of behavior that I will tolerate in my relationships, in what I require from people.
To be in relationship with me. Right. it's, you know, I, there was a history of me having folks who would, not be able to show up or not be able to be supportive or expect a lot without giving a lot in return. Right. And so I've been able to access new situations, new ways of being because of. The work I've done with my nervous system.
And so for me, I think that's for any of [00:22:00] us, that's the kind of the global reason we'd wanna pay attention is because if there's patterns of situations that we are not liking in our lives, it's likely that the, our nervous system defaults kind of have something to do with that. And, and this stuff, we just come by this, honestly, we can just become acclimated.
in the homes we grow up in or even, you know, intergenerational trauma is very real. And so, you know, we can even inherit these patterns and they're just not, we just, you know, came by them by virtue of coming into the world. and then we can get to know them and say, oh, Wow. Okay. I, I really wanna build my capacity for something else.
So I don't know. I wanna, I wanna jump in and
Michelle Fox: talk about that because you said earlier tools to release activation. Yes. Like that's where I'm leaning in. I'm like, give, gimme some tools. Like yes, I know this is your business and your practice, and people pay you to teach them these tools, but can you give us one or two tools that our listeners can walk away with today?[00:23:00]
Lauren Charbonneau: I will give you the universal tool, and that is movement. That is, that is the way to release it is movement. And I wanna qualify what I mean by that. I don't mean cuz if I had heard that, when I heard that a few years ago, I was like, well, I'm doomed cuz I hate exercise and I've never been able to have an exercise routine and, and shut up and I'm shutting this off.
Like that would be my response. So if that's your response at listeners, stay with me because I'm gonna explain. So the way, so I'm talking about somatic movement, which is, which is a little different from like what we think of, you know, particularly in the United States, like exercise, like you gotta get on the treadmill for 30 minutes.
Like this prescriptive, there is nothing wrong with that. I'm not insulting it in any way. It's, it's actually really important for us to get a certain amount of cardio, certain amount of weightlifting, for our health. But so somatic movement though, is, and I'm gonna give you an example from actually from yesterday.
Somatic movement is really feeling into the body and feeling into, you know, feeling into that activation and, and asking yourself like, how does this [00:24:00] want to move? Like, do I feel like I wanna push on something? Do I feel like I need to kick something? Do I feel like I just wanna like, Move my neck in this way or do I need to shake?
there's even movements of the eyes that you can do. There's ways that to do this stuff, like where like no one even knows that you're doing somatic movement. It's like secret. Right? So that's,
Michelle Fox: that's our corporate women who are, and so that's out loud with their, uh,
Lauren Charbonneau: Exactly, exactly. Hiding in the bathroom, doing your somatic movement.
No one knows. and so, you know, the, the value of working with a practitioner and, and being in a program or, or any of those things is that you can kind of have a container to get, to get to know what movements work for you and, and get practice with it. But, but I will just tell you that that is, that is what mobilization is.
It is always it's movement. sometimes it can be breath, but usually it's movement. And so that is where that release comes from. And so, yesterday, I'll give you just a concrete example of what that looks like. I [00:25:00] became totally exhausted yesterday afternoon. I, I was, I have, you know, there's a couple family members who have, really serious medical issues going on, people that I love dearly and, and I just got over Covid d so I've got some tiredness myself.
And so I, yesterday afternoon, I was like, I have gotta lay down. Oh my God. So I laid down and, and there was this, I'm trying to relax and there was this pain in my legs. It was like this tense pain, like deep inside my thighs. And I'm thinking to myself, I haven't really moved. So like, it's not like I hurt myself or my, I'm not tired from physical activity.
And you know what it was, it was built up activation from Covid. From caring for my dau, you know, my daughter and I had covid at the same time. Oh. And from, receiving phone calls from the hospital repeatedly, with bad news or, you know, different and, and that builds up in your body. And so, because I can tune in and feel this, I really was like, oh, okay.
Like, that's what this is. It's activation. And so what I was able to do was [00:26:00] figure out that what I really wanted to do was push on something with my legs. And this is not something you could use in like a board meeting, but I laid on my floor and pushed each leg into the wall and just pushed until I felt the release.
You will actually feel it. Like you will feel it and they'll be typically a yawn or you know, you'll be like, oh my God, that like, oh, there it goes, you know? And I could feel my body like just release all of that tension and begin to wind down and deactivate, and I was able to lay back down and actually feel a deep sense of relaxation in my body.
Mm-hmm. Which is. So very different from before I knew about the nervous system and this work, I would be like, oh, well, let me take some Tylenol and then maybe I'll drink, maybe I'll, have a glass of wine or I don't know, maybe I'll call a friend. Like, you know, we're kind of guessing and doing all these things that, that aren't quite, and it's just like so simple.
It's like I've just gotta get this activation out of my leg. [00:27:00] Like, yes. Pushing to the wall, like, and so that. That was that. And you know, that that's something I use on almost daily, right? Mm-hmm. Is, is really feeling in and being like, okay, where does this need to go? How does this need to move?
You know? And it takes some practice, but over time and over time, you find yourself really, really having increased range for what you can hold, for what you can tolerate, for the kinds of, you know, um, Being able to make, you know, stay present in difficult situations and really be with it without feeling completely overtaken.
Is is a wonderful thing. And these are
Michelle Fox: sounding familiar. So is this Yoga Nidra, is that, would that be one of the methods that you use
Lauren Charbonneau: in that Yoga Nidra? I do incorporate Yoga Nidra into my work. and yeah, so that's typically a restore, like a restoration practice. So you wouldn't wanna go from, if you're activated, you don't wanna like go do yoga nidra.
I mean, you can, but you would wanna first try to get, you would wanna first try to [00:28:00] mobilize that activation right. And do the release. So, so as
Michelle Fox: an example, just to make it super practical, I can see one of my clients perhaps, Driving home from picking up her daughter from soccer practice coming home.
She's got, you know, a million thoughts about the day in her head. As she's driving, somebody cuts her off, she's like, Ugh. That kind of threw her off a little bit. She's also worried about, oh shoot, I forgot to pull out the meat to defrost for dinner. What are we gonna have for dinner? So she's got all these thoughts.
So she gets home and I would say she is activated. Yes. And so what's a great tool that perhaps she can do that could. Happened just maybe even five to 10 minutes before she moves on to be present with her
Lauren Charbonneau: family. I would say just figuring out what kind of movement is gonna release that activation. So does she need to shake, does she wanna punch a pillow?
Does she wanna like push on something and just get that out? Right. You know, having a lot of things come at you can feel really overwhelming and just pushing on the wall can be like, I'm reclaiming my [00:29:00] space. Right. so that something to get that activation out. versus try, because when we just try to like breathe deeply and force ourselves into relaxation, it doesn't, it doesn't really work.
We need to re do the release first, and then the relaxation often just comes naturally. Yeah. I, so I would say, yeah, find a way to, to get that activation out that really feels like there's a release and then later in the night, you know, put on a yoga knee, drill recording before bed and get some extra deep relaxation going before you fall asleep.
I think that would be really supportive. Does that make
Michelle Fox: sense? It does, it does. Okay. I, one of the tools I love to do is I use my, yellow lab as I'm pointing to her, laying right over there across the room. I use her as a great example to remind me sometimes to just shake it off, like when, yeah. You know, if she gets activated again, I can't get enough of this word, but when she gets activated, she shakes it off and then it's like nothing ever happened.
And so [00:30:00] just the other day, there was an ambulance out here, and everything was great and I don't need to go into that story, but it was for a neighbor. And it just, it activated something in me like I was, concerned for the neighbor. I was curious, I was fearful, like a lot of emotions came to the surface.
And then when we realized everything was fine, I came inside, back into the house after, I checked in on everybody and Chloe, Doug and I, right here in the middle of the living room. Like we just did a full body, like shaked out. Every single, you know, inch of the body. And I'm like, okay,
Lauren Charbonneau: I can get track now.
And that's exactly it, that you completed the stress response cycle. That's you did it. That's what you were doing. You just didn't have the language for it. But you know, that's, but that's mobilization, right? That that's shaking. Hmm. Shaking. Whatever movement feels like it gets it out. Right. So it's shaking.
Yeah. It's not about a specific movement, it's about whatever is cooks for you in that moment. Then I'm [00:31:00] gonna
Michelle Fox: just guess that Lauren approves all of the dancing we do in the kitchen. Yes. That's another one, right? That's it. Another release. Yeah.
Lauren Charbonneau: Yeah. And if you watch the animals and, and kids, they do this naturally, right, with the shaking that's, you know, they have the same animals, have the same.
Cycle. So that is a great example of it. And kids will do this naturally too. Like if you've ever seen a kid throw themselves on the floor and have a tantrum, that's what they're doing. They're mobilizing, you know, they're, they're completing the stress response cycle, and it's, these behaviors just, they get socialized out of us as adults, and then we lose touch with the fact that we need to, we too need to release whatever is going on in the body.
Michelle Fox: As soon as you said that, I got this image of my three-year-old daughter, I remember. I mean, she's always been a very willful child, which I so appreciate as far as independent woman. Yes, you go. But as you know, as a mom, yeah, that can be a little tricky [00:32:00] sometimes. But I just remember, yeah, at three, if I'm holding her or when I was holding her, and I would say, not now.
And, you know, doing all the languaging, talking, like, she would literally just go limp and like, she would just, just, everything was so embodied and so dramatic, and I'm like, yeah. Whew. Again, as a mom in that moment, didn't feel great, but definitely reading on her for, you know, taking care of her body's needs at that point.
Yep.
Lauren Charbonneau: Exactly. Exactly.
Michelle Fox: Yeah. I love it. And so, Lauren, how do people work with you? Do you do one-on-ones? Do you do group
Lauren Charbonneau: coaching? I do, I do both. my, I have a new program, which is a rolling six month group program, and it's a hybrid between one-to-one and group, and I really created this so that. Folks could get, really a wraparound support with incorporating these practices into their life in a way where it is intuitive that, you know, in the moment, like, oh, okay, I need that.
I'm activated, I need to mobilize. And also providing a container to really look at like these patterns, right? [00:33:00] Like I mentioned these patterns around, Maybe not being able to, to be in, To be in a state of ease, right? If that feels really uncomfortable to the nervous system, building that capacity so that you can have different things in your life, right?
Breaking these patterns. and so, that is a six month program. It is, a combination of group and one-to-one. And so that's, that's new. and it's rolling so folks can join when they join and their six months begins then. And so that's just really exciting.
Michelle Fox: So what a gift. And so then where can we find
Lauren Charbonneau: you?
You can find me on my website, which is well with lauren.com.
Michelle Fox: Beautiful. We will of course include that and a few other links in the show notes so that my community can come find you and, and be able to start to name when they're activated and perhaps name some of these emotions so that we can have a sense of more control over the feeling of being activated.[00:34:00]
Huh? I'm actually literally feeling just more grounded just in this conversation. So thank you for that, Lauren.
Lauren Charbonneau: You're very welcome, and thank you for inviting me and, and allowing me to share this with you, and with your listeners. It's very exciting.
Michelle Fox: My pleasure.
If you recognized yourself in this conversation, you are activated. Perhaps your nervous system is quite frazzled. And you're grasping for help. I want you to know my friend. You are not alone. And I would love to. Nurture and nourish you in the Dominican Republic this October. If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, please go to Kravewellness.com/retreat, and you will see all of the juicy details. Including you learning a little bit more about my friend and colleague, Dr. TJ, [00:35:00] Dr. Tyrrell Jenkins, who will be co-hosting the retreat with me.
You'll also see how we will have a strong focus on gut health and helping you to find your energy. And more important. We're going to create a safe space for you to find answers. To your health so that you can have more energy. And at the very least of course you will be in an environment where you get to relax. In our private pool. At our private beach. Well, with. Delicious nourishing food. Prepared by our private chef. So head on over to Krave wellness.com/retreat. And plan to join us.
I would love to see you there.
Thanks so much for listening to Healthy Sexy Nutrition. Have you been driving, doing laundry or walking around the neighborhood? [00:36:00] Sweet. I've got show notes for you at michellefox.com/podcast. Click over there when you are ready. I will let you know that on the page you will find resources to support what you just learned on today's show.
And of course, you can grab some health supportive freebies as well. If you enjoyed this episode, I would be so honored if you would leave a review on whichever podcast platform you are listening on. It will help me with my mission to build healthier communities one person at a time. Big love from your favorite culinary nutritionist and health coach, and until next week, keep showing up for yourself and know that you and your health matter. [00:37:00]
