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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: Hello, and welcome to the HOLISTIC HOT podcast. I’m Katie from holistichot. com and I am back today with Dr. Darin Ingels to talk about how our mind, our brain is the most powerful healing tool we have available and how to use it to our advantage. If you missed our last episode, we talked about Lyme disease.
It’s a very helpful episode, especially if you are navigating that as Dr. Darin literally wrote the book on recovering from Lyme disease and has navigated that himself. In this episode, I was so happy to go into one of my favorite pet topics, which is the mindset piece and learning how to see yourself well. How to implement totally free, easy daily practices that can make a drastic difference in how we feel and how our recovery goes. And I feel like he gives some very actionable, easy takeaways that we can all implement right now. And I have personally seen drastic changes when I addressed the mindset piece in my own life. I love his approach to this.
He’s a well known naturopathic doctor and author and international speaker. He’s helped thousands of people recover from many kinds of chronic illnesses and Lyme disease. And I love his explanation in this episode of just how important the mindset piece is. So let’s jump in and learn from Dr. Darin Ingels.
Dr. Darin, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.
Darin: Oh, thank you, Katie.
Katie: Well, we had a fascinating first conversation that went deep on the topic of Lyme disease, and I will link to that in the show notes if any of you guys missed it.
And especially if you’re navigating Lyme disease, I feel like Dr. Darin gave us so many valuable action steps and key takeaways, and there are more resources in those show notes if that’s something you’re navigating. In this one, Dr. Darin, I want to take a little bit of a turn and delve into something else that I know you’re also an expert in that I feel like is almost universally relevant, which is mindset and the brain as potentially the most powerful healing tool that we have.
I feel like this applies to almost anyone who’s listening in some way. And I’ve seen this in my own life, just how dramatically this can make a difference. And I know you probably have personal and professional experience around this as well.
So to start off broad, can you introduce us to what you mean by the brain being the most powerful healing tool we have?
Darin: Yeah, I mean, if you think about well, maybe you don’t think about this, when you look at the brain, of course the brain is involved in so many different things. Of course, it’s memory, it’s focus, it’s concentration, it’s awareness. But, it’s the communication with the rest of your body, that neural network that is literally hardwired from the brain in your skull all the way down to your limbs, to your heart, to your lungs, to your gut. The gut brain connection is so well researched and understood now.
The fact that you got more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your own brain is pretty telling about how important that relationship is between the two. So we’ve got this neural feedback kind of going up and down between the brain and the rest of your body. And the power of utilizing the brain to influence what happens downstream, it doesn’t always have to be directly chemical. There are these very subtle things that happen in ways that I don’t even know that I completely understand. I think our overall understanding of how powerful the brain is, we’re just starting to scratch the surface of really appreciating what the brain can do and does. We know what the neural pathways are. We know the up and down, we know the different chemical mediators in between. But if we take it a step beyond about the subconscious brain, what that can do to your body and certainly how we can apply that to health and healing. When you start talking about this out in most conventional medical forums, it sounds kind of like wacky woo woo kind of stuff. And it’s beyond just sitting there in a dark corner and saying Ohmmm and meditating.
I mean, that can be incredibly helpful too. But, how do we, elicit that part of the brain that starts to heal us at the most basic level? And that’s the conversation that I like to have with patients is, again, how can we start to shift your brain in a way that’s working for you instead of against you?
Katie: Yeah, like I said, I think this is such an important and relevant topic and I love that it seems like you are bringing kind of multi perspective knowledge to this and taking the practical route of how do we actually begin to enlist our brain to be on our side. I know from personal experience for me, one element of this was learning to sort of audit and make friends with my mindset.
So even when I was navigating, for instance, thyroid disease, instead of saying even internally, like I’m sick, my body’s attacking itself, it was learning to have a different relationship with that and say, I am healing, or I’m almost healed, or my immune system is working on my side, always, or things like that. And that was just the little mindset piece that made a drastic difference for me, but I would love your perspective on this.
How do we begin to enlist our brain to be a healing tool?
Katie: Yeah, you kind of have to force the issue. I think for so many people, it doesn’t feel natural to do it. And in some cases, it almost sounds kind of stupid. Like I said, when you start giving positive affirmations, when you start acknowledging that there is a problem, and I think what happens for so many people certainly dealing with chronic illness, it’s very easy to get stuck in this mental pattern or say a mental loop of despair, frustration, anger, aggravation.
And look I’ve been there. I’m human like everybody else. I went through it when I had Lyme disease. And then many years later I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and it’s the same kind of issue in that, Why me? Why am I not getting better? Why aren’t things happening fast enough? And so to break that cycle, to break that loop, it takes a very concerted effort to do that. And it’s one of these things, again, it’s not an overnight thing you do. It’s something that you have to make time in your day, schedule it out, like you do everything else. And it is that mindfulness of, I want to change my brain. I want to start, seeing my body, seeing my mental and spiritual self in a different light. You just have to make a concerted effort to start that process. It’s kind of like exercise, right? The first time you exercise, you’re like slogging through and it’s not fun.
It kind of sucks. And the more you do, it’s like, Oh, but now I feel better. Now I have a better outlook. Now my body’s responding. It’s that cumulative effect that happens over time, and this is really no different with changing mindset. It doesn’t happen in a day or two. It’s probably gonna be weeks and maybe even months. And there’s really great programs out there that I recommended. A dynamic neural retraining system by Annie Hopper. Primal Trust is another great program where you can have someone guide you through that process. If you really find it difficult to do on your own, and so many people do, it’s nice to have a coach there for you who can walk you through that process of different exercises to start doing to help shift your mindset, shift your framework in a more positive way.
And these are great. I mean, these are programs that are paid programs. Not everybody can afford to do that. But you can start, like I said, with positive affirmations. What’s really interesting about the subconscious brain is that it actually doesn’t respond to words as much as it does images. So one of the exercises I do and that I learned and I think is incredibly powerful, is starting to have that image of what you are, where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, when you are well. What does that look like? And for some people, it’s been so long since they’ve truly been well, they kind of forgotten, but start imagining it and make that very sensory. What do you smell?
What do you hear? What do you feel? Who are you with? How does that picture look? And it is interesting. If you look at any successful person out there in the world, a lot of them will tell you that part of what led to their success was that I had this vision. I had this image that I was going to accomplish this. So although they may have applied that in a business sense, we can apply that in the health sense. And again, your body listens to what your brain tells you. So it can be that guided imagery. It could be… I think you can find other ways through journaling, starting to write things down. Drawing art and pictures can be very powerful, but having that thing you do on a consistent, regular basis of having that vision of where you are when you are healthy and well, that is a great place to start. And then again, you carve out 5, 10, 15 minutes of every single day that you’re committing to working on shifting your mindset. And I think a gratitude journal is something that is cheap, easy, everybody can do. It takes literally less than five minutes.
Every day write down three things you’re grateful for. And I know how it is. Sometimes when you’ve really feel bad, your gratitude journal is I got out of bed, I showered, I cooked a good meal today. And you look at it and go, well, gosh, that doesn’t seem like very much. I’m like, It may not be very much, but you know what? It starts to change the way that you think about your body, your life, your health, that we get so caught up in the mire of everything we experience that we forget to be grateful for the things we do have. Hey, I got a family who loves me. I have a job that I like, I have a roof over my head.
And applying that gratitude a little bit every day really does change your mindset. I mean, we have research behind this that something like a gratitude journal can go a long way. And look, I’m always for things that are cheap and easy and doable. When you’re tired and exhausted and overwhelmed, the last thing I’m going to do is add more to your load to make life difficult. But there’s no problem with grabbing a notebook for a few minutes and just jotting down these few little things to start to be grateful for. That can be incredibly powerful.
Katie: I love that. And like you said, this is something anyone can do. It’s not outside of anyone’s time or budget really and I think there’s the dividends on that, just a few minutes a day can be so drastic. It reminds me also, I had a guest Dr. Kourtney Hunt who her first step with her patient’s is to help them learn to see themselves well. And it sounds like that dovetails perfectly with what you’re explaining.
Don’t just think of what you want, but learn to get into the feeling of it and embody what it would feel like if you were already well, because like you said, our subconscious can connect to that image more easily than words or than a to do list.
And that maybe takes us out of the kind of the mental loops and into the sensory experience and lets us access that feeling of how would we feel if we were well. And I know one thing that was really revelatory for me was, when I used to say things like my body is attacking itself, to actually learn to understand that if my body wanted to kill me, it could do it instantly.
My body was always on my side. And so even these things I called symptoms or disease or problems were actually still my body working in my best interest. With the variables it had to try to keep me as healthy as possible as functioning in the world as possible. And when I reframed it that way, I was able to kind of enter from a place of befriending my body and learning to listen to it versus learning to resist it.
And I know that sounds kind of amorphous and hard to like pinpoint, but over time, that was such a drastic difference in how I interacted with my body, interacted with the world. And I really feel like that compounded over time and changed really, my whole mindset. And on the gratitude piece you mentioned, I think this truly is one of the best health tips that anyone can implement and it’s so low risk, low time, like all of us can do this and it will pay such dividends in life.
I know one thing I’m still currently learning and working on is it’s easy to, of course, have gratitude for the things that go well, and it’s easy to have gratitude for the things, even the hard things when we look backwards and see all the bautiful things that came from those struggles. What I’m working to learn right now is how do I shorten that gratitude curve?
How can I learn to find gratitude even in the hard things without already knowing how that’s going to lead to beautiful things, but just trusting and finding gratitude even in the struggle. And I find when I’m able to access that, I just unlock so much more joy in daily life. So even the hard things feel much easier to navigate.
Darin: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that. I think when we look at our symptoms and we see them as bad things, our body gives us these cues for a reason. There’s a reason we get inflammation. There’s a reason we get pain. Your body’s trying to tell you something. And so if we reframe it, that my body hates me and is working against me. My body is trying to raise a flag that there’s a problem. It’s trying to help me, my doctor, my team, figure out where we need to correct this imbalance of what’s going on. Again, I can only speak from my own experience with multiple sclerosis. Before I really started getting symptomatic, I had four practices in three states.
I was flying all over the country. And it’s almost kind of like the universe is saying either slow down or I will slow you down. And I kind of think to a certain degree, that’s kind of what happened. It was very stressful and I could go into a lot more about that. But, I think it was nature’s way of saying, hey this is not healthy for you.
So in some strange way this kind of came upon me to literally slow me down and start again, taking a deeper look at my own health and how I’m living my life. So if we can reframe our health in a positive way that like the situation isn’t what I want. I want better health. Okay, we have this collection of symptoms that’s giving us clues of what’s going on. But again, no matter what health state you’re in, there’s nothing that really stops us from utilizing our mind and our mindset as a way to start to shift that in the positive direction. So that even if you’re doing all the stuff with your diet and herbs and nutrients and whatever else you’re doing in your world, using the brain to start to implement that at the most basic cellular level. I think there’s very few other things that do that. And it takes a little bit of a concerted effort.
Katie: I agree. And I don’t have any studies or data to back this up, but I would suspect that, for instance, we could be doing all the things on the checklist perfectly, like eating the right diet, and getting sleep, and doing all those things, and if we’re doing that in a state of fear or stress, then we still might not be getting the maximum benefit from those things, as if we were even just eating our meals slowly in a state of gratitude or getting sleep from a place of gratitude versus checking it off of a to do list.
And like I said, I don’t have any studies to back that up, but it seems to me that if we’re able to shift out of fight or flight and to be more present in our everyday moments, we actually are going to get more compounding benefits from all the things we actually are doing to help us. And to your point, I think it’s so brilliant to hone in on symptoms being messengers and rather than viewing them as a thing, a bad thing to strictly just eliminate, view them as something we can listen to and be grateful for that direct line of communication from our body. And to observe that without judging it, but to learn from it. Kind of step into curiosity and learn what our body’s trying to tell us that over time we can develop such a beautiful partnership there.
And kind of in that idea of being in that state of a more positive mindset while we’re doing these things that help heal us, I know from firsthand experience, there’s very much, of course, a feedback loop between mind and body that can go seemingly either direction. So when I was in that, why me? Why is this so hard?
Those were the answers my subconscious was giving me because that’s the questions I was asking. And all the things I was doing felt more difficult. And when I shifted and learned to support both my body and my mindset, it kind of created a positive flywheel that over time made all of those pieces easier.
So I’m curious if there’s any like physical aspects that we can do to support the body as we’re also working on mindset. Whether it be with gut health, whether it be with getting more morning sunshine and helping our hormones to regulate so we feel more positive so that gratitude feels easier. Are there ways we can kind of contribute to that positive flight wheel?
Darin: Yeah, well, I mean, you said it a little bit ago this sympathetic overdrive that I would argue most Americans are stuck in, your body doesn’t operate well in that state.
We are designed to operate in a parasympathetic, relaxed state. Our sympathetic nervous system was really there as a way to getting us out of danger. You know, back in the day when we were being chased by the woolly mammoth or bear or whatever it was, we needed that short term burst to get us out of these situations.
What’s happening in reality now is that we’re all stressed out and we stay in sympathetic overdrive, which is affecting our gut health, affecting our sleep, affecting our mood. So, there’s so many things we can do to get out of that sympathetic overdrive, get in the parasympathetic state.
Again, the most basic thing is conscious breathing. Most of us are not aware of our breath. As of course, your brain will tell your lungs to breathe on your own without thinking about it, but if you intentionally slow down your breathing, it automatically engages your vagus nerve, which is your largest parasympathetic nerve in your body. And the simplest thing is what we call box breathing, where you inhale for seven seconds, hold for seven seconds, exhale for seven seconds, hold for seven seconds, and just keep repeating that cycle. And what you find after you practice doing it is that it starts to slow your heart rate down, starts your respiration down. And ultimately, you do it enough you can get yourself from stressed to non stressed in a very, very short period of time.
Again, free and easy. It just takes a few minutes of doing that box breathing to just kind of help get you out of that state. So that’s really easy. For people who like meditation again, meditation can be incredibly powerful. I personally find it very challenging because my brain wanders and all the people I know who are experts in meditation say that’s fine. That’s normal. You don’t worry about it, you let the thought come, let it go. I struggle with it. But again, it’s one of those things that with practice can be very helpful in getting you in a more relaxed state. But I think as humans now, particularly in the United States, we’ve lost our connection with nature. Getting out in nature in whatever way that is for you. I mean, I live in Southern California. We’ve got access to beautiful beaches. I love going down to the beach, walking along the beach.
We’ve got mountains nearby. In Japan they’ve actually got studies on, they call it forest bathing, where you literally take off your shoes and you walk through the forest and have that direct connection with nature. And of course we just got done talking about Lyme disease, so people are like, Hey, going barefoot in the forest doesn’t sound like a great idea. But, I think the idea of connecting with nature in that way, there is an energy with nature that resonates very well with human cells. And so whether it’s getting in ocean water, being in a forest whatever it is for you that makes that connection it can be incredibly healing.
And I think Japan’s been one of the leaders in research in this area. It’s as simple as just having that period of time where you get to connect with nature again. So making that effort. And no matter where you live, there’s something in nature near you. And it could be walking out on your backyard and just putting your toes in the grass and connecting that way. But spending a little time getting some sunshine, getting outdoors, connecting with nature. That can be incredibly powerful. You know what? I certainly for my California patients where again, our weather’s nice most of the year. I said, look, why don’t you go down to the beach set up a little chair and an umbrella. Bring your gratitude journal, sit down there, have a nice cup of tea or whatever, and connect with nature for 30 minutes, write in your journal. Iit doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s easy in and out and it can just be incredibly healing.
Katie: Such a good point, and I’m so glad you brought that up, and I feel like it’s important to highlight when we’re talking about these things. I think they’re actually some of the most high ROI things we can do for our health. And often they get overlooked because of their simplicity and because they’re not the new shiny object, biohack or fancy supplement.
And so we tend to kind of underestimate how drastically they can actually impact so many areas of health. Whether it be things like you said, like just going in nature, getting morning sunlight. I know I saw a drastic difference on my hormone labs from making morning sunlight and getting a little bit of midday sunlight, a regular habit, and that’s free. And just improving our sleep. That’s also free if we make it a habit. And I think to like hone in on this, it’s also, of course, these are extreme cases, but how powerful the mind is in the healing process. We hear of those kinds of outlier cases where someone is diagnosed with something terminal.
They die on schedule, and then in the autopsy it’s discovered they never had that thing to begin with. But because their mind believed they did, that was how their body behaved. Obviously, most of us are hopefully not navigating something that extreme, but I think we’re just beginning to understand how powerful that connection is. And I think how much our physiology responds to our mind much more than perhaps we ever realize. And I love the tips you’ve given of just these simple, short daily practices of breathwork and gratitude and nature. And so I just wanted to highlight like these things can be drastic needle movers.
And I just think there’s a tendency to underestimate them because they are simple.
Darin: Yeah, well, if you’ve ever read anything by Dr. Bernie Siegel, he was a cancer surgeon at Yale in Connecticut. And he had several patients who had “terminal cancer” who came back months later and through the power of mindset and attitude kind of overcame their cancer without ever doing chemotherapy and radiation.
And I’m certainly not suggesting if you have cancer, you just ditch all that and focus on mindset. But he showed in his own patients that when people have that positive attitude, when they really made an effort to shift their mindset, it had this profound effect on their cancer process and their body was able to help deal with those rogue cancer cells. So I think it applies to any other potential chronic condition that again, when we apply it in the right way, when we have the right attitude, when we are grateful, all of that changes the way our body and ourselves respond to these different disease processes that might be going on.
Katie: I agree. And I know there’s still obviously so much more to learn on this topic and so many resources that you have for not just this, but for like Lyme disease, as we talked about before, and for many other things that people might be navigating. So I’ll put links in the show notes, of course, but can you let people know where to find you, how to work with you, if that’s possible and, or where they can just keep learning from you online.
Darin: Yeah, the best place is just to find me on my website. It’s just dariningelsnd.com. And we have all of our practice information and other great information we’d love to share with your community.
Katie: Amazing. Well, I love that we got to go deep on mindset. I think, like I said, this is something that can help anybody listening with anything that they’re navigating. And I love that you bring this approach into your work along with the clinical and the botanical medicine that we talked about in the last episode and the multifaceted way that you approach your patients and the work that you do.
It was an absolute joy to get to connect with you today, and I’m so grateful for your time. Dr. Darin, thank you for being here.
Darin: Great. Thank you so much, Katie.
Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the HOLISTIC HOT podcast.
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