How Stress & Emotions Affect Your Physical Health: Understanding The Mind-Body Connection & How To Feel Better Ft. Nicole Sachs

Michael Bosstick (0:01)

Welcome to The Bossticks.

Starring Lauryn Bosstick and Michael Bosstick. Together, they are The Bossticks.

Lauryn Bosstick (0:14)

Welcome back to The Bossticks. This episode goes into the mind-body connection. If you are someone that has had any kind of pain in your body, you need to listen to this episode. If you've had headaches, back pain, neck pain, any kind of pain, gut pain, you need to listen to this. It will blow your mind. I have just started JournalSpeak, which Nicole Sachs invented. She is the guest of our show. She's a psychotherapist, bestselling author, speaker and podcaster. In this episode, Nicole challenges the way we think about pain, symptoms and what it means to actually heal. We're breaking down why the nervous system can continue producing very real physical symptoms even after the threat is gone. This is a must listen. Nicole Sachs, welcome to The Bossticks.

Tell us, someone's listening, they have a pain.

What is the first thing that you recommend?

Nicole Sachs (1:10)

Okay. So if you don't mind, I'm going to start a little bit with my personal story because it helps invite in the answer to that question. When I was 19, I was at college and my back went out completely. Not a little bit like I couldn't walk. I needed someone to take me and carry me to the bathroom, like a full on. And so my parents came and got me and did what any responsible parents do, an MRI, x-ray, orthopedic surgery, consults, all the stuff. And I had a very significant finding on my films, which was degenerative spondylolisthesis. And so of course, everybody who looks at this is in 1990, keep in mind, are like, oh, well, that's the reason you're in terrible pain. And I was just like, of course it is. I agree, doctors are gods. Like, let's go.

What do we do about this? I can't live like this. I have to go back to college. I was a freaking freshman, like just starting my life. And they're like, well, there's really nothing we can do about it. Like you could get spinal fusion surgery one day, but you're 19 and otherwise healthy. Like not now, thank God. But it was like a major recovery. So they said, all you have to do is this, no more exercise, no more travel, no more sports, no more riding in the car for more than an hour because the bouncing motion will destabilize your back and the likelihood that you'll have a biological child is slim to none because of the months and months of bedrest that would be required for you to not completely destabilize your back. And essentially, and this was the subtext, that it would be like your fault, that you'd be like in a wheelchair. And so that's 19 years old. And so I'm not going to go into like all the gory details, but just suffice to say, I was a psychology student, I was contemplative, I was curious, and I was a bit rebellious. And I was like, yeah. I mean, I took it seriously, and I was definitely really upset, but I wasn't completely killed by it. There was something, some spark in me that was like, we'll see.

And in the by and by, I found the work of Dr. John Sarno. So at first he was recommended to me, and this is really funny. And my whole life, when I look back, life is so interesting being seen in the rear view. It's like all the things that transpired now have sort of a hilarious place in my life. So Rosie O'Donnell, back when she had her daily talk show when she was at the top of her game, had an episode called Fix Jeannette. Now Jeannette Barber was her producer, and she was in a motorized wheelchair because she had foot, leg, and ankle pain that was so severe, but nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. So Rosie goes on air and she's like, my audience, this is a precious person to me, and Jeannette wheeled out in her wheelchair, and she's like, can somebody help her? And people wrote in and said, check out the work of Dr. John Sarno.

Cut to my mom, sort of hysterical mother at this point, hearing this prognosis for her only child, is watching the follow-up episode, and Jeannette Barber had just run the New York Marathon.

My mom calls me, and I was in grad school now at this point. And she's like, you have to get this book, Healing Back Pain, oh my God. So I got the book, and just to be totally honest, I was like 24, I didn't even read it. I read the back cover.