Sleep Is Not Just About Sleep with Maria Ruberto

What if your sleep struggles have very little to do with sleep itself?

For many women, particularly during midlife and menopause, sleep can suddenly become elusive. We find ourselves waking at 3am, replaying conversations, worrying about tomorrow and feeling exhausted yet unable to switch off.

But according to Maria Ruberto, founder of Salutegenics, sleep is often just the messenger.

In this deeply insightful and surprisingly comforting conversation, Maria joins me to explore the connection between sleep, nervous system regulation, stress, resilience and emotional wellbeing.

Drawing on more than 30 years of experience in neuroscience and emotional intelligence, Maria explains why our nervous systems are shaped long before adulthood, how childhood experiences influence the way we respond to life, and why so many of us unknowingly live in a constant state of hypervigilance.

Along the way, Maria shares beautiful stories from her Italian upbringing, where food, family, ritual and connection were woven into everyday life. It is these moments that help illustrate one of the central themes of our conversation: wellbeing is not simply the absence of illness. It is the active cultivation of the things that help us flourish.

Together we discuss why so many women feel tired but wired, what is really happening when we wake in the middle of the night, the difference between safety and feeling safe, and how self compassion may be one of the most powerful tools we have for building resilience.

This conversation felt like a warm exhale and one I know many listeners will return to more than once.

In This Episode We Discuss:

• Why sleep is often a symptom rather than the problem itself

• The connection between menopause, stress and disrupted sleep

• How childhood experiences shape the nervous system

• Why familiarity often drives our adult behaviours and relationships

• What happens in the brain when we feel tired but wired

• Why so many women wake between 2am and 4am

• The surprising reason trying harder to sleep often makes things worse

• The difference between safety and feeling safe

• How self compassion helps build resilience

• Practical strategies for falling asleep and returning to sleep

• The role of rituals, connection and everyday moments of wellbeing

• Salutegenics and the science of helping humans flourish

• Resilience First Aid (RFA) and understanding the biology behind behaviour

About Maria Ruberto

Maria Ruberto is the founder of Salutegenics, a practice grounded in neuroscience, emotional intelligence and strengths based approaches to wellbeing. With more than 30 years of clinical and organisational experience, she supports individuals and teams to build mental fitness, navigate adversity and lead with authenticity.

Her work focuses on helping people understand how their brains influence behaviour and equipping them with practical tools to move from reactivity to resilience.

Connect with Maria

Website: www.salutegenics.com.au

Instagram: @salutegenics

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Inside Out Connections, where we explore the link between your skin, your gut, emotional health, and your deeper sense of self. I'm your host, Tracy Ann, a wellness coach exploring what it really means to reconnect from the inside out. There was a time in my life where sleep came easily. My head would hit the pillow and I was asleep within minutes. But lately, like so many women I speak to, sleep has become more layered. Waking up during the night, erasing mind, feeling exhausted physically, but unable to switch off emotionally. And perhaps for many women in midlife and menopause, this can feel particularly confronting. One minute you're sleeping soundly for decades, the next your body feels unfamiliar. You begin questioning whether it's hormones, stress, emotional overload, modern life, or perhaps it's all intertwined. It made me realize that maybe sleep is not just about sleep. Perhaps it's about the nervous system too, about stress we have normalized, about emotional overload, overfunctioning, and the way our brains and bodies respond when we've spent years simply pushing through. Today's guest is someone who has spent decades helping people better understand the connection between the brain, behavior, emotions, and resilience. Maria Roberto is the founder of Salutagenics, a practice grounded in neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and strength-based approaches to well-being. With more than 30 years of clinical and organizational experience, Maria supports individuals and teams to build mental fitness, navigate adversity, and lead with authenticity. In today's conversation, we explore sleep through a much deeper lens, why so many people are feeling tired but wired, what happens in the nervous system under chronic stress, and why so many women often carry invisible emotional loads, and how understanding the biology behind our responses may help us finally access deeper rest, regulation, and resilience. We also touch on the fascinating RFA training and why nervous system awareness is becoming such an important part of modern well-being. Maria, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

Tracy, and I'm really excited about having a conversation with you around the area of sleep. So thank you so much for the invitation. You know, I'm so happy um to be extending more information where we can.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Especially for women of my age with um midlife and menopause, I feel like it's a hot topic right now. Literally. So I would love to start with your story because your work feels deeply personal to me. Growing up with parents who had very different personalities and ways of navigating life, how did that shape your curiosity around emotions, behavior, and resilience?

SPEAKER_04 3:14

It is a it is a big question, and it is a question that um uh sits with me very personally because my parents left their hometown of Italy. You know, it's the classic immigration story. But I think the story is more about that when they landed, they landed with no language and they and they landed with no sense of the community that they were moving into. But they certainly did come with their own set of belief systems and they uh Italian Catholic, you know, it doesn't get any more than you know what what that looks like typically. However, what was interesting is that they came with the highest hope and the greatest sense of optimism. And the optimism wasn't just a mindset, but it was acted out. And I think that part for me, the optimism was very visible. And and it was very much about what does it look like when we connect with family, with friends? What does it look like when we connect with earth? There was a lot of gardening, there was a lot of fresh produce that was very dominant as part of growing up. So what we ate was what was grown and how we then developed our produce. So, you know, there was the sauce making and the sausage making, and and we were very connected to where produce came from. And there was a celebration, you know, you talk about the personal stories. What I remember vividly as a ritual in my house growing up was that at the turn of every season, whether it was tomato time or strawberry, or whether it was the beans, or whether it was the fig tree, or whether it was the persimmon tree, that the very first fruit or vegetable produce, that there was a ritual that my father would pick the first piece and then come into the kitchen where my mother was, and he would hand over the first piece and he would say, This is the first tomato, this is the first fig, this is the first, because he'd been gut watching it and nurturing it from afar. And he would hand it over to her and he would say, Um, taste it, this is for you. So she would all always be the first person to taste the produce. And I think for me, watching that was this honouring of what was created together and also this celebration of a uh approach to whatever we are doing, we are doing together. But this sort of shared joy and celebration of what that look like. And that there were lots of challenges that they had regarding their ethnicity and regarding how they were seen. But what was really interesting, Tracy Ann, is that there were a lot of conversations around the table. And so dinner time was heavily ritualized. We would all come to dinner. And what was spoken about even when I was small, they were all adult conversations. Nothing was reserved for adults only, that everything was done as a family. And so I sat and grew up in a chair dinner after dinner after dinner after dinner, listening to what the challenges were and then listening to how they problem solved, listening to their approaches, their ideas. And there was a huge amount of learning in the observation of that. But there was also a huge amount of humour, lots and lots of laughter.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Oh that's what a beautiful that just made my heart just so warm and fuzzy. Firstly, I'm envious. I wish I had grown up in your house.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

Mine was And there was lots of food. There was always so much, there was always so much food, you know.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

My upbringing was vastly different and there was a lot of processed crap. So I feel like I've I've gone completely the opposite way to my family, but I love that. And those rituals sounded like the fundamental the fundamentals to your your upbringing, just the ritual of celebrating each fruit and vegetable that came into season and redirecting the stress and the challenges that they faced through being and celebrating. Yes. Just yeah. Yep. Just beautiful. So do you think many of the nervous system patterns we carry as adults begin much earlier in life than we realize? So this is a really big question.

SPEAKER_04 8:27

And it's a big question because uh neuroscience at the moment is telling us that there is prenatal development of the last trimester where there is a huge amount of influence around sound and voice and tone and also the rhythm that the mother experiences. We know that our nervous system when we are born is incredibly immature and completely totally dependent upon its carer. So when we think about that, the nervous system that we are born with, even though there is a genetic transference, that there is some inheritance there, that what seems to play an even greater role is the role of the environment and the rhythm and the tone and the pace and also the intensity of that environment on the developing nervous system. And given that we as newborns are so completely dependent upon those rhythms that are around us, that that's what our nervous system and of course our brain maps as we develop and as we grow. So it is a huge influence. As we then develop and grow, and as our nervous systems take all of that mapping, we then start to create patterns. And we start to expect certain patterns because as the brain maps, it begins to predict what might come next. And so whatever patterns are around us are the patterns that we then in I guess socially inherit. And become drawn to because it's familiar. So if if we are raised with lots of music, for example, and we are raised in environments where there's lots of record play. Well, look, this was me, it's showing my age. There was lots of record playing, there was lots of singing, and during the weekends, my parents would put on some beautiful Italian, you know, the Italian singles that you would put on the record player. But that music wasn't played softly. The music was played at quite a volume. And of course, there was singing. So before I started primary school, my English was very, very poor. It was, you know, English was almost a second language, but it was this sound, this constant music that was around us and singing. So the the music was loud enough for when my parents were outside in the garden for them to hear the song, for us to be inside. So as I grew up, my attraction to music and song and the 80s, you know, I was I was the 80s girl. There was a lot of music that influenced my life. Can't play an instrument to save myself. But you love rabbit. Which is desperate. But I I love music and and the singing that I do. I get into the car on my own as I go home, Tracy, and and I become a rock star. We all do. Nowhere else. Nowhere else.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Yeah, you can't have it turned on too far because when you do and you're singing, it's yeah, it's just not the same. You speak beautifully about well-being needing to feel real before it can be shared. What does that mean to you personally?

SPEAKER_04 12:12

So when we tune in to what is hard, that intensity in our bodies become that becomes quite loud. It is really easy to pay attention to levels of anguish or levels of displacement or levels of trespass. And our bodies express that quite loudly. We receive it quite uh significantly because we have a nervous system that scans for cues of threat or it scans for cues of safety. It's one of the sort of primordial genetic encoding that we've received ancestrally over the years, and it serves us really well, and it is something that that continues to be required, and we need to nurture that. However, because we pick up cues of threat so quickly, and that those cues turn into really loud emotional signals, we we can mistakenly bias ourselves toward that type of noise, pay lots of attention to it, stay in that space, and then we find ourselves being really encapsulated by high levels of energy that's unpleasant, that may feel like long-term or protracted anxiety or fear or defensive patterns. Well-being requires us to notice the opposite. Well-being requires us to notice those cues of safety that might be quiet or they may be a bit softer. And unless we are spending enough time in those states of well-being, we may miss them and we may misinterpret them as just being moments of rest or moments of relief, where we just go, Oh, I'm glad I'm not feeling anxious. So well-being is not about the prevention of illness. Well-being in and of itself is really about how do we optimize our healthiest states for the purpose of living well, not for the purpose of having to defend ourselves against symptoms.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

I love that. It's easy to get it confused, isn't it, in the wellness space.

SPEAKER_04 14:46

And I guess for us at Solutegenics, that's our mission is really about developing the proactive health space, that we don't spend our life just preventing the illness, but it is really about understanding what well-being looks like. And its purpose is to raise us, to allow us to be more adaptive, greater functioning, to have greatest creativity, to problem solve with the least amount of burden as possible. And I think that space really requires its own focus. So when we own that and when we spend time in that, that's where we can say, now I have this capacity to now share it. Uh, you know, I've got it for me, I I want to share it with you and I'd like to share it with others.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

It's like the fundamental foundations to wellness.

SPEAKER_03 15:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

So I want to touch on sleep. Why do you think sleep has become such a major issue for so many women, particularly women in midlife?

SPEAKER_03 16:01

It's so layered. It's so it's so so layered.

SPEAKER_04 16:07

Yeah. So let's start with just a basic premise, and that is that sleep is a biological imperative. Sleep is not an option, and nor is it a negotiated space. But we have come to negotiate it for a range of reasons. Some of it's really adaptive. You know, we negotiate sleep for women early when we have babies or where we have responsibilities to look after others. We need to be alert and we need to be awake and responsive to those needs. But as we grow older, we know, and especially as women, that our past experiences are mapped in our nervous system. And that those past experiences, it's not that they live in our nervous system, it's that they are mapped. So we're not saying that they are absorbed because there is a, you know, a whole lot of con controversy on at the moment about how we understand uh previous concepts. But because there is a mapping, there are neural pathways that are fired a lot more easily, more frequently, without a lot of effort. And that's just a neural pathway that exists neurologically in our brain, but also in our nervous system. Now that mapping is important. And the reason why it's important is that when we are younger, we have the energy to be able to respond and make sure that we're on track with all of the responsibilities that we're having. Our bodies, because we are younger, we are better resourced, our assets just feel like that we're developing them and we're able to respond quickly. We've got sharper thinking. But at the same time, we are also being very busy responding. And sometimes that becomes a way of masking what might be happening. As we get older and menopause happens and our hormones change, and we experience perhaps fatigue a little bit more, or that we take longer to slow down, to reset, there is less distraction. And so where there is lowered level of distraction around having to respond all the time on this high energy level, like you do when you're young, you're going, going, you know, you've got a mortgage to pay, you've got kids, or you might have a really busy schedule, or you've got a really big career. And so you're going, going, going the whole time, there isn't really a lot of time to really be thinking about how that's mapping you, which is this sort of really high level of uh sympathetic uh response. But as you get older and life starts to slow down and hormones change. Suddenly. And then the added benefit of just more emotional awareness as you age. Yes, and more awareness of everything. Suddenly there is less noise around you, but the noise inside then becomes more prominent. So we start to feel more, we start, and this is this is not generically across the board, but it sort of gives you an idea of why sleep can become as elusive as it is, is that it's not just sleep itself, but it's the things that we bring into the pre-sleep stage. All of the worries that we have, all of the things we never did, all of the considerations that we are thinking about as to how women are judged, how we look, how we feel, how we are presented, all of the advocacy that we are being forced to do so as that we continue to be recognized as valuable and valid, and that we continue to be adaptive, that we continue to have a role. That advocacy in and of itself places even more pressure. And so there are so many elements that then buy into that. And then sometimes that our nervous system has been mapped to be wired, we're now dealing with that amongst all of these changes that are happening. And so then sleep disruption becomes a real issue. Going to sleep, staying asleep.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Yeah, particularly like you said, for the the people that have been wired a certain way and they are perhaps hyper-vigilant or a type A personality, it sounds like it would impact them on a greater level later on in life. It's like the music in your kitchen growing up, it's just been turned up really loud.

SPEAKER_04 21:15

That's a really that's such a beautiful way to get. You are absolutely right. I love that. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when someone says, I'm exhausted, I can't switch off, what is happening within their nervous system?

SPEAKER_03 21:36

So we call that tired but wired.

SPEAKER_04 21:40

And there is an enormous amount of research around this where we have a nervous system that remains highly active pre bedtime, and we haven't really learned how to soften or regulate and What we do is that we carry that with us. Our circadian system is saying to us, it's time to sleep. So we have, we're, you know, we're doing the right things. So we are not having coffee for the the eight hours before we go to sleep. We're not having the wine because that has a huge impact too. We are turning down the lights. We are not spending the last half hour on our phone. Uh, you know, we are doing all of the things. We're doing our our cleansing routine, you know, we do our cleanser and our foamer, and then we do, you know, our nighttime anti-aging, whatever it is, you know, and and we put on our sleep attire. All of those things are really important rituals that we call sleep hygiene that allows our nervous system to say we are preparing for this downturning, this reduction of energy so that we can move into the first stages of non-rim sleep. And behaviorally, we're doing all the right things. And then we get to bed where it's quiet because we need to have a quiet environment to sleep. If our environment's really noisy, the brain says, Oh, we still need to be alert. So it's quietening down, reducing the room temperature. We know about all of that. But what happens with a system that has been in a heightened sympathetic state for a protracted period of time is that that sympathetic system continues to remain on alert because it is tuned into what happens next, and that's when it's quiet. Our brain then says, now's the time to think about monsters. Now's the time to think about everything that is upsetting. And so then, you know, we find that our body is tired, but our mind is wired. And so we continue to start to engage in lots of thinking that becomes looped, rumination.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

We hear it in our heads. And then we have another part of us that are trying to shut it down. So you've got the wired and tired bit that's ruminating, like you said, and then you've got the other part of your brain that's like, it's, you know, just shut up, like stop thinking. What do you know? And so Well, at least in my brain.

SPEAKER_04 24:35

100% That is exactly. And so you have this conflict and even this conflicting conversation around just shush. Yeah. Oh, that's yes, you know, that's but and this debate can actually go on for hours. And there is this helplessness that starts to just sink into your body where you feel like you just can't do anything about what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

And I'd imagine a certain level of anxiety leading up to sleep for a lot of people as well. Am I going to get enough sleep tonight? What if I don't get enough sleep?

SPEAKER_04 25:14

Not only does that happen, Tracy Ann, but it's also part of a clinical presentation when we're working with some of our clients that uh we call it type two worry. So worry is where I worry about something that may happen that I am dreading or that I feel I don't have any control over. Type two worry is where I worry about my worry. So if I'm worrying about not being able to go to sleep, that's one level of intervention that's required. But for some people where insomnia really has or is sitting in a clinical space, they also have type two worry, which is that they worry about the worry of going to sleep. And that's really complex. It's compounded. And it is such a serious psychological state to be in because you become so trapped in this space of wanting to control the sleep.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:17

And neuroscience says we can't control sleep. We can't, we, we have no control over going to sleep. And it's it's also a protective mechanism.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yeah. Because when you're sort of going into this, right, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna get some good sleep tonight, and you're determined, almost forcing some kind of outcome from the sleep, that can then send a signal to your brain to be on high alert or it's danger, and it messes with your nervous system, I would imagine. Totally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:51

That's totally how it happens. You know, I I remember doing some early studies around sleep. This was years ago. And I remember one of the things that one of the researchers around sleep talked about. And he said, and I remember this always because it was just I I remember it was like someone hitting me with a brick. They said, the most dangerous thing that a person that a human can do is go to sleep. And I just went, well, now what's that meant to mean? Like here I am wanting to go to sleep, and you're telling me that it's dangerous. But neurologically he's right. From a safety perspective. From a safety perspective, for you to go to sleep, it means you have to let go of any type of protection you feel you need to have. Control. Control. Control. And so if you tend to have the personality or personality is the wrong word, if if you are habituated to believing that you can control most things, or that you like this sense of high structure, high control, high organization, and that is a successful methodology for you in your life. So when we have a look at some of the cohorts of people who find it really hard to sleep, sometimes come from vocations where there is high control, high structure. The legal community, vets, pilots, the medical profession. So I'm just sort of thinking about some of the clientele that I work with.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:35

Because they are so successful in their jobs and women who, you know, really run their family lives with high structure, which by the way, high structure is very important. So we don't take that away. But if we believe that we are successful because we run such a tight ship here, what we do, erroneously, is that we take that mindset and we overlay that to sleep. And we say, well, if I if I can control this and this works really well, well, then I should be able to do the same here. So you put lots of structure around sleep and you try and manufacture going to sleep, and then that fails. You go, well, everything that I know to be successful here, why can't I just work? Why is it not working here? You're now dealing with a biology. You're not just dealing with sociology over here.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Interesting.

SPEAKER_04 29:35

So interesting.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

So do you think modern life and the life how we live it and we know it now has normalized a constant low-level state of stress and hypervigilance?

SPEAKER_03 29:51

The answer, the answer is yes, for people who are not aware of their well-being.

SPEAKER_04 30:01

Our world is spinning very quickly. There is a lot of information, there is a lot of change. We are seeing more change today, especially in our technology and in how we live our lives, that there is a greater focus on the individual, that there seems to be more to think about simply because we have more access to information. When we buy into having to be present in that space continuously because of FOMO, I don't want to, I don't want to miss out. I don't want to not know about something because it will be asked, and then I I want to be able to know about it. When we get stuck in that space, we spend very little time in knowing how to soothe, in knowing how to pause, how to reset, how to choose to not be consistently wired all the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

It's like so addicted to being in that state that we don't know how to be, to just be. It's almost like it's too noisy without all the distractions. Like it's a different type of sound.

SPEAKER_04 31:24

Yes, and we overvalue, we overvalue what that gives to us. And what that gives to us may be information, but what that also gives to us is a training or a mapping of no pausing, of no time to reflect, no time to sit, no time to consolidate this information. And suddenly, you know, what we value has less focus, and suddenly we believe we've got to value everything all at once.

SPEAKER_03 31:55

It's exhausting. Um it's exhausting.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

So we we spoke about like falling asleep and and the type A personalities that might have trouble to do so. What about the people that can fall asleep okay, but then they're waking between the times of like 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. and can't get back to sleep? What's going on there?

SPEAKER_03 32:22

No, that's a really interesting question.

SPEAKER_04 32:24

When we have a look at some of the research, if you sort of think about anthropologically, what has our sleep looked like over the years? It's really interesting because there's some studies that have actually looked looked at that as humans we have not always slept for eight or nine hours. That in the past we've gone to sleep when the sun's gone down because there was no electricity. And we're talking years ago. So there would be a period of sleep where you would get lots of sleep because you know in some places the sun goes down at, you know, six o'clock. So you would go to bed and then you would have a full range of sleep for quite a few hours. And then there would be a wake period to wake up and check the environment and just spend some time in this space where there is no stimulation and that there may have been lots of reflection time. So it may have been a period where people sat and wrote, or people sat and they thought about, or they mapped, or they planned. And the reason why that was so productive is because they had already received a lot of non-REM and REM sleep that had processed a lot of that information. So they were waking up with this cognitive sort of reset where suddenly there was lots of really good thinking. They would do that for a couple of hours and then go back to sleep. So we've almost got this little bit of a genetic residue where there may be, for some people and not every not everyone, this moment where you're awake and then you can go back to sleep. However, and that's so that's important to know about. However, that can also be a patterned response. That can also be we've had something happen in our lives. We've woken up at two or three o'clock in the morning. We have um been awake because we're worried about something, or that we we're waking because there's been a disruption just within our REM or non-REM cycle. And then that happens a couple of times, and suddenly we pay enough attention that it just becomes a ritual and we've not noticed that that we're doing that. And so then that itself becomes mapped, and we've got this pattern. And there are a number of people, number of clients who will say, Why is it that I always wake up at exactly 2.37 a.m.? And I wake up at that time all the time. Why is that? And Matt Walker talks about this, who is the wonderful sleep ambassador, the global sleep ambassador. You hear a lot of sleep scientists talk about this too. And the question is, how do you know? How do you know that it's that time? And it's because I'm looking at my clock. And I look at my clock because I want to check what time it is. And when you check what time it is, you go, oh my gosh, it's that time. Exactly. That's mapping that particular time. And so you will wake up to that time, not because that, you know, the stars or the moons are aligned, but because you're actually training your brain to wake at that time. Pay enough attention. Yeah. You go into that wake space, and then suddenly you're stuck there for a little while.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

It's interesting. I had Kim Votney on, who's a pelvic floor specialist, and spoke about often as women, we wake up thinking it's our bladders that have woken us up, we need to go pee. But often uh it's not the case. We're waking for some other reason, and then we're like, oh, hang on a minute, I actually need to pee. But I imagine um the habit of waking up, particularly for women at at that particular time at this stage in our life, could also be from a hormonal flush or overheating or something as well, right? Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_04 36:38

And I love that because as we become older and our body starts to change and shift, we are waking for a range of reasons, you know, um, restless leg syndrome, yeah, uh we are getting too hot. We haven't thought about what duna we've put in, you know. Do we need to get rid of the winter duna now and in winter use the summer duna for us, depending who you're sleeping next to, you know, it just so there are a whole range of reasons, and that is a really lovely way to be thinking about that we're not just waking up because we need to go to the toilet, we're waking up because there are all of these other things that are interfering. You know, what's happened to me during the day may have been quite pertinent, and so it's sitting in my mind. And as I'm moving from non-rem to rem and I'm in one of the REMs, that that level of emotional intensity during that REM sleep actually then wakes me. And then suddenly I'm aware. I'm aware of the time, I'm aware of the bladder, yeah, I'm aware of how hot I am, I'm aware that my pillow feels hot. You know, how many times do I have to flip that pillow? And in fact, I've got to tell you. So I went into um a bedding place. I'm not gonna tell you because you know that's no one's no one's paying for marketing. But I went into a bedding and they said to me, Do you have trouble with heat at night? And I go, Of course I can't. And and he said to me, We've got a gel pillow. Like it was a ridiculous amount of money. And I've gone, doesn't work? And he said, gel. And it's there's a cooling gel in it. Anyway, this pillow is the weight of a brick. So I bought the pillow because I was desperate. Looking in twisty, and I was desperate. I thought it and do you know what? There's one side that it is a little bit warmer, but then there is the other side that is really cool. So now when I flip my pillow, there's this icy cold feeling, and I go, Oh, that's so nice.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

Wow, I feel like I need one to go over top of the mattress as well.

SPEAKER_04 38:36

Well, there are now all sorts of um material uh tools and one that you can put over the mattress that you can actually program to stay cool. Yes. To keep you cool. Yeah. Yeah. So they they are worth investing in if you if you're hot, if your heat during sleep is really chronic.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

Yeah. They really are worth disrupt your sleep. But what I what I loved about what you were saying before, it's not so much the waking. It sounds, it is normal for us to wake up at any given stage in our life. Absolutely. But it's what you do with it when you wake up between those two hours. It's how you handle the response of waking up at that time. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 39:31

So during sleep, and especially during our REM periods, where there are high beta waves and there is high acetocholine, which both of those states are seen during wake states. But we are having combinations and low norepinephrine and low serotonin. So it means you've got that sort of heightened neurological functioning, but you're not awake to be able to move into those behaviors or really problem solve. But during the REM period, there is a process where the day's information and the day's emotions are being analyzed and processed. And the brain takes liberty in being able to use this period of time where stimulation from the outside is blocked off. So we're not getting additional information come in. And the brain, which is so sophisticated, uses this REM period to go, let's close off all the gates, let's close off all the noise, shut it all down, stop the body from moving, shut it all down so that we don't have, because there's a lot of information and stimulation that comes during the day. But let's shut everything down. We're gonna put you in this sleep coma. And now what the brain is going to do is that it's just gonna take all of this information during the day and we're going to process it. And in that processing, the brain then starts to link that information and it starts to link it to post past experiences, past memories, and it starts to consolidate that. Does it match what we've done? Is this different? And all of that emotional processing also occurs, which means the brain's starting to make sense of all of this, and then it sort of starts to give it to different areas of the brain so that memory consolidation happens. So during that period, there is a lot of activity, and sometimes the activity is so much that you wake up from it. Now, what's important is what you then do when you wake up. And so if you wake up and you then are uh you're either alerted or you're alarmed by the dream because there's lots of dreaming that happens during REM, or that you have just started this pattern where you're waking up at a particular time. When you wake up, what you then do predicts how well you then go back to sleep or not go back to sleep. And one of the things that that we uh that the reasons that we see in the research is that, you know, we talk about if you need to go to the toilet, go to the toilet, but don't switch on big lights. Keep your lights really dim. Or if you know your way, just sort of navigate your way to the toilet. Um I always say to people, make sure that when you go to sleep at night, that maybe you don't put the toilet seat down, the cover down, because sometimes you just you want you to go to the toilet, you're not, you're still half asleep and you sit on the toilet and you just realize yeah, that's the toilet seat and now I'm in trouble. Yeah. Um so you shuffle your way in in the dark. Yeah. You shuffle your way in. And then shuffle your way back as quietly as possible so that you are not telling your body that you are awake.

SPEAKER_03 43:14

Don't look at the clock. Don't pick up any light.

SPEAKER_04 43:17

Try and keep it low noise, low movement as much as possible. However, for some women, and I know that it's me because and with most of my clients too, is at the minute that they are awake, the brain goes, Ah, I've got you. Now it's time where we're going to think about what we have to do tomorrow. Yeah. Now it's time to think about how we're going to respond to that person. Yeah. You know, that conversation that I had with my mother in law last night. Yeah. I'm still not happy about that. I need to now work that out. All these little niggly things then become really magnified because it's so quiet. And so your brain says, Oh gosh, I now realize. There is nothing else to distract me. Let's let's try and think about it. So what's the best thing to do in that moment? So there are a couple of things that research is talking about. And the first one is that if you are engaging in that type of thinking, it is impossible to say to yourself, don't think about it. That that's that is the most ineffective strategy. And because when you do that, you're going to think more about it. But then when you do that, you will be disappointed and then you will become even more exasperated by why you can't fall asleep. So the research is beautiful. It says rather than try and push away that thinking, just say to yourself, I know that's there, but I'm going to think about something in my life that brings me joy that I like to think about. And it may be a memory or it's something that has just happened that you've really enjoyed, but not to narrate it. Because when you narrate, you start to hear a voice that tells you about something. But rather than narrating, stay firm on the visualization of it. So I'm going to give you an example, and it's one that I do for me. One of the loves of my life is my dog. And he is the most special soul in the house. I mean, yes, my family is too, but he's special. I've got a job. And yes, and so what I do is that I have a ritual with him. So I go to the cupboard, I take out his collar, he gets so excited. And then I prepare him, I put the collar on, and you know, and and off we go on our big walk. And we always go through the same door, we go down the, we go down the driveway, and we always turn right. We are never a left-turn dog walk, we are always a right-turn dog walk. And he knows that. And so sometimes he'll take off ahead of me, and we've got a little park, and he sniffs the park for a little bit because we've got a lot of possums, and it's just it's a very small area next to us. So I give him some time there because he enjoys that. And I love watching him enjoy that space. And so we're there for about five or ten minutes, and then I hook him back onto the lead, and then off we go. And there is a pathway that we follow. Now, research says if you just focus on the visualization of those micro steps, and you can see yourself walking down the driveway, you see yourself turning right, you see which tree he goes to, and you stay in the visualization of it without a voice telling you about what's happening. That is a really reliable intervention.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 46:59

Or it may be something that you imagine yourself walking along the beach, or it may be a memory that you have with a special person at a bench, meeting them there. What does it look like? Where are you? But staying with the visualization and not focusing on the auditory part of that.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

It's more the visual steps and not jumping the steps and jumping ahead. It's staying all the little micro correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:32

Noticing what's on the ground, what's on the what's on the park wall as you're walking, where are the leaves, what's in the park. Noticing, noticing, noticing. Because that visual imagery area is where the hippocampus in the very mid-area of the limbic system, uh, where a lot of that memory sits in. And that's also part of the brain that is highly active during sleep. So you're actually just tuning in and nurturing that and aligning with that type of activity.

SPEAKER_00 48:08

I can imagine that being a very helpful tip for falling asleep as well, as going back to sleep. I mean, in the early stages of going to bed and waking up.

SPEAKER_04 48:19

But you know, Tracy Ann, it takes practice. And one of the things that, you know, you and I briefly spoke about was that's not going to work the first, the third, the fifth, the tenth time. That needs so much practice. It's a habit. And it is a habit and it needs to be formed over a number of weeks. And when we expect a sleep strategy to perform well the first time or even the tenth time, it's not the way our brain neurologically maps so quickly. It just needs so much repetition.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

It's a really good tip. Your work focuses heavily on understanding the biology behind behavior. Why is it so important for people to understand what is happening within their brain and body?

SPEAKER_04 49:15

You are asking all the big questions.

unknown 49:18

So sorry.

SPEAKER_00 49:22

These are such big questions, and they're so important. Yeah. Just that connection between mind and body is really important to me.

SPEAKER_04 49:32

Tracy, and and it's even more than that. People don't like to be told. We don't like to be told this is the strategy, just go ahead and use it. Sometimes it can actually feel even offensive because if I say to you, look, don't have anything to drink half an hour before you go to sleep. That's actually part of the strategy. Or I might say to you, um, I might say to you, make sure that you about 45 minutes, but an hour to 45 minutes before you go to sleep, make sure that you dim the lights. So let's just say I give that, let's just say you're someone who really struggles with sleep, and I give you that strategy, and you go, right, she's qualified in this area, she's worked in this area, that must be a good strategy. And you sit there and I give you this strategy, and suddenly you feel almost offended because you in your mind, you're saying to yourself, but I've been using that for the past two months and that's not helping. So what you've just said to me actually doesn't sit well. Okay. So now let's take the biology before behavior methodology that we use. And if I say to you, Tracy Ann, let's look at what happens with light in the brain.

unknown 50:56

Right.

SPEAKER_04 50:57

So there is at the back of your retina, you actually have particular light-sensitive cells. And those cells, they use a particular protein. And what they do is they use that information and they send it to the hypothalamus that's in the limbic system middle of the brain. It's a small almond shape. And in that hypothalamus, there is a particular area called the suprachiosmatic nucleus. Now, these are all really big words that may not make sense to you, but if I ask you to think of the suprachiismatic nucleus as a mirror ball, I want you to imagine you've got this little mirror ball in the middle of your head, in the middle of your brain, sorry. During the day, and we know that the brain is in a black box. So there is this black box, it's very dark in there. The only way light comes in is through the eyes and it hits the supracosmetic nucleus. You've got a little mirror ball, and this mirror ball reflects the light and it sends it to all parts of the brain to say, Wake up! It's a disco. We're awake. Yeah. It's a disco. Yeah. Yeah? So under the mirror ball, we're all dancing, we're all awake, high energy. That's your daytime. As night starts to set, there is less light that's reflecting on this mirror ball. And suddenly the mirror ball slows down. When the mirror ball slows down, it tells the pineal gland to now release melatonin. And melatonin can only be released once that disco ball slows down. And melatonin is actually not a sleep hormone. Melatonin has no or very little effect on your actual sleep. Melatonin is simply the mum that comes in and goes, bedtime. Can we all get ready for bed, please? We all need to calm down, slow down. That's what melatonin does. Yeah. It's it tells the rest of the body, now it's time to sleep. None of that can happen if the light stays on. Suddenly you go, oh. Well, look, I dim some of the lights, but I don't really dim all of the lights. Or I dim the lights, but then I sort of carry my phone around and that's really bright. So suddenly the reason for the light reduction now makes sense to you. Yeah. You now understand the mechanism. And when you understand the mechanism, you are more likely to honor the intervention.

SPEAKER_00 53:42

And that changes the game. Well, I'm definitely not taking off my blue light blocking glasses from 6:30 at night anymore. Now that you've told me about the disco ball. I've for me, I found them to be a huge difference just in helping me wind down. Just watching a bit of telly at night, I've got them on. Sure, it distorts all the colours and it's not as visually amazing, but it really helps just calm. Yes, it helps calm the whole system down. Even just the light, the lights, like you said, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, whatever, it's they all have an impact. They do. Particularly as we age and and not having the same sufficient hormones that we used to have to be able to withstand certain things, we do become more sensitive. I don't know if I slaughter that or not, but you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_03 54:36

We do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

So can chronic stress change the way we think, react, and relate to others? So we've spoken about it impacting our sleep as well. How else can stress impact us? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:54

So stress, unfortunately, in our society has some misunderstanding around it. So we talk about stress as being a bad thing. And in fact, when we look at our biology, stress is really important. It has a very big role to play in our ability to mobilize, in our ability to respond, in our ability to think. So for us to be awake and focused, we actually need quite a significant surge of cortisol, noripinephrine, so that we are awake, alert, we're thinking. So cortisol is implicated in learning. So for us to have really good solid learning, we need to have this heightened level of stress. And unfortunately, people think that stress is bad because people think of stress only in its heightened state. And a heightened state of stress is also not bad because our biology is telling us that it's required for something. So, you know, if you're, let's just say you are having a party for one of your children at home, if your level of stress remains consistently low in preparing for the party, you're going to prepare poorly. Or if your level of stress remains consistently low during the party, you're going to be low energy and you're going to be lagging behind. And you're going to find it difficult in engaging to the pace of what's happening. So stress is highly adaptive. And it's also required in heightened levels at particular times during the day. And what we also know about high levels of stress is that it actually builds our immune function. So we know that a really good way to think about stress is that stress equals energy. So if we just think about stress as energy and not stress as something bad, suddenly it redefines how we do things. So you will need high levels of stress to do things, and then you will need lower levels of stress to do things.

SPEAKER_03 57:11

And that's just your energy going up and down.

SPEAKER_04 57:16

But when we live our lives on consistently high energy in a protracted state, our bodies then are really loading with that energy. But you're also loading with more hormone that is required. And then that comes at a cost. This is the beautiful work by Professor Bruce McEwen, I think in 2012, who's now, who now has angel wings. And his work around allostatic load was such a phenomenal piece of research in a seminal paper that he talked about how this type of loading is highly adaptive and functional. But when we synthetically raise this loading because we are operating at this higher level of energy at a on a protracted period of time, it comes at a cost. And there's inflammations, there are health issues that are a response to that. Heart, stomach, irritable bowel, you know, there are a number of um health conditions that come out of I think not being able to understand well-being well enough where we are considering that the internal systems that we can't see are being impacted.

SPEAKER_00 58:45

And that just that's everything I believe in. And I and I'm trying to translate for people to see and understand or at least plant a seed. It is the mind-body connection is such a powerful piece. And I know for me, growing up in a trauma household, as a child, I was very hyper-vigilant, had mild anxiety growing up. But that hyper-vigilance has played out throughout my whole life. And now at 50, I'm only just becoming aware of the connection and understanding, like you said, things like IBS as instead of looking at food as the enemy and oh my God, you have to eliminate every single food and do this instead of that. And you know, that just creates more pressure on the nervous system. But it comes back down to my wiring and understanding that has just changed everything for me. So I'm so pleased that you just articulated it in such a way that made understanding it better.

SPEAKER_04 59:50

And retraining is possible. You know, this is treatable.

SPEAKER_01 59:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 59:55

However, it takes patience, but it also takes self-compassion. Yeah. You know, we need to be kinder to ourselves. And yes, there are some foods that we do need to avoid, but not everything all the time. You know, it's important to enjoy little things when we need to, um, but most of the times really be thinking about, you know, what does this diet mean for us? So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

I was just thinking back to your kitchen growing up. That sounds perfect for me right now.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:29

Well, well, it it it was, you know, we we didn't know back then about um all of the particulars around food that we do today.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:40

But what I do know is that we were raised with food that came straight from the garden outside. And I watched my mum clean it, and there was no packaging, and it was all washed, and and she had a beautiful ritual with how she would clean her lettuce, and um, you know, and there was an honoring of an a gratitude that we were so blessed to have those tomatoes come from the garden. And we wouldn't just eat, you know, my mum would constantly say, This is the third tomato that I picked. We wouldn't we would know about how many tomatoes were out there, whether it was a third tomato, the tenth tomato, whether it, you know, whether they ended up with 300 grams of beans that they picked out, and that we used to have what we call pasta and fajoli, which is a beautiful Mediterranean sort of um peasant dish that we thought back then and you pay huge amounts of money for it now, where it was uh beans and pasta cooked together in a broth and it's just so so good.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:51

But also it's nothing quite like having something picked straight from the branch and you know, it's just full of nutrients, just all the good stuff for your microbiome. It's completely different. Yeah, yes. Yeah, it does. I've got a tiny veggie patch that I get about a tomato a, you know, a month or something, but it's so exciting when I get one, and we all want to fight over it to taste it straight away. There really is something special if you're able to grow your own vegetables. It's yeah, highly recommended.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:22

Certainly is. I married somebody who also loves a veggie garden. You know, you choose people in your life that feel familiar to you, you know. So, you know, I married a husband that's probably is a lot like my own dad. But my husband keeps this most meticulous herb garden and he loves a veggie patch. And when I watch him out there do his thing, I can see how nurturing that is for him.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:52

Um, and he will say to me on a weekend, he'll call me and I'm upstairs doing, you know, he'll call me a million times and I just go, Oh my god, don't call my name so many times. I've got so many things to do. But he'll call me and I go down and I'll go, What? What is it? You know, I'm upstairs. He says, I need to show you. We have, we have basil growing. Come and have a look. I'm just going like this, right? We do, we do need time to honor. And so he'll take me through what's growing, what's coming through, the spring onions that come through, have a look at the silver bead, the silver beet's growing. And he'll say, you know, I planted the one that you like, you like the colored one, you don't like the non-colored one, have a look at how many we've got. And so I just go. These are moments of well-being that don't look like an intervention.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:36

But they are just a pause, a conversation, a sharing of joy that we we need to give more times to those moments.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:47

Um They highlighted that i in the in the blue zones as well. You know, that was one of the big concepts for for longevity was just so simple as having a veggie garden and community and and rituals like that. And going back to our biology. Yes, 100%. So, how important is emotional safety when it comes to nervous system regulation and sleep?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:15

So emotion system safety is paramount. However, we are becoming very confused with what is safety and what is safeness. So the idea of safety is am I free from harm? Am I free from attack? Am I free from my integrity being harmed? Am I um am I being respected? Am I am I, you know, safe where I am? Am I physically safe? Is this building going to crumble? So safety is about my environment being one where I know that I am free from that harm. Where anxiety or depression, where symptoms of mental illness are present in our lives, we confuse a lack of safety with a lack of safeness. So safeness is my ability to be able to be in a space. And even when things are happening around me that I'm that I may not like or that may not be conducive to me feeling okay, I can still be safe. So the idea that I can be in a meeting, in a really difficult meeting, or be in a conversation with somebody that's really challenging, that they might be challenging a belief or that they might be challenging something that I've done, that I don't lack safety. I have safety. The building isn't collapsing. I'm on a really comfortable chair. So it's not the safety that is the issue, it's how threatened I may be feeling and whether I have the resources to sit and manage that. So, for example, one of the areas that can trigger symptoms around mental ill health is uncertainty. And where there are high levels of uncertainty, I can mistakenly believe that I'm unsafe. The reality is you can have really high levels of uncertainty, but still be safe. You can have really high levels of anxiety, but still be safe. What you may not be feeling is a sense of safeness. And that is different because that's an emotional state that you're in. And that sometimes when we when we don't have the resources or we've established the resources to be able to bring in our own sense of safeness, we then go, I must not be safe. So I can't be here. So I avoid coming to work or I avoid coming to school because I go, I'm not safe. You may have a really good space of safety, but there may be things within that space that's causing you distress. And so we falsely assess that as being unsafe. Well, it's not that it's unsafe, it's just that it's causing you distress. But you can be distressed but still be safe.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:29

Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, interesting. Yeah. So what do you do in that moment? So you do have a sense of feeling safe or safety. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:40

So the intervention is less about what do you do in that moment, and it is more about what we're building beforehand. Some of the beautiful research that's coming through looks at the development of our own well-being. How do I see myself? What do I do for myself? How do I value myself? And that sits in this area of compassion science, where compassion science talks about our ability to develop our self-compassion, which is not feeling sorry for ourselves or not just making sure that we are feeling good all the time, but it is about how do I talk to myself? What internal dialogue am I using about understanding who I am, understanding about how I think about myself? If I spend most of my time critiquing with a high self-critic about what I look like, what I'm eating, what I shouldn't be eating, if there is this constant vigilance about if I'm doing something right and wrong, am I on track, am I off track, all of that impacts our ability to believe in ourselves, but it impacts how we feel about ourselves. When we begin to nurture and value who we are, what we do, what we stand for, and we spend time thinking about valuing those aspects of ourselves and then being kind to ourselves and then acting that out and being kind to others. It doesn't sound like an intervention, Tracy Ann. It sounds like something that's very fluffy. But when we look at the clinical intervention of this, that all of that background building during the day, how we fight that internal dialogue, all of that background building then creates this rise of capacity, a rise of self-knowing, and it creates agency in us. So that when we are in moments where there is that dissonance or that challenge or that adversity, rather than being afraid of how bad that feels, we know that we have a set of skills or strategies or a sense of knowing who we are, that we don't need to be afraid, but we can understand that this emotion is just providing us with some insight into what this particular situation may be needing.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:28

And it sounds like No, that makes complete sense. No, I love this. And it's very much that self-acceptance piece. You meeting yourself where you're at with curiosity rather than judgment.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:44

With compassion, with gentleness, with love, with this level of acceptance around it's not perfection, but look at this amazing opportunity that I have at life with whatever with whatever I have, look for it because it's there.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:01

I find for me, journaling has been such a wonderful tool in developing that. Not journaling and keeping, journaling and deleting has just been a fabulous way around that self-acceptance piece with more compassion and love. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:17

Yes, yes. And also journaling to our glimmers. You know, I like to say to my clients, what are the glimmers that happen during your day? So things that happen that you don't expect or that you may not normally take notice of, what are those little glimmers that just catch the sun ray just at that moment? And it they're so tiny.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:42

But then if you turn towards that and you pay enough attention, you stop and you breathe into that moment and you go, Oh, that was pretty special.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:54

The more micro we become in looking for those glimmers, the greater the neuroplasticity on a daily basis that we start to rewire the way that our brain processes.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:06

That's that. You sound to me like a bit of a disco girl from the 80s with this sort of glimmers and disco balls. I'm not showing these analogies.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:17

I'm not showing you photos. I have plenty of them. I did have the fluoro leg warmers, I did have the lace gloves. I had oh yeah, we had it all.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:27

My daughters just started getting into Michael Jackson. I'm like, I had the Michael Jackson Barbie doll, just so you know. So the word salutatics itself feels incredibly intentional. Can you explain the philosophy behind it?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:42

So salutogenesis is the name that Aaron Antrobsky gave to the theory of building human assets. And I became very interested in that in my early undergraduate years because it was, and maybe because I'm a little bit more wired toward optimism and well-being because that's where I've come from. I was really interested how he wasn't able to make enough noise. So I tracked his research for a long time. After years and years and years, I decided to open up my own business and move into clinical practice. I thought, what am I going to call it? I want to call it something and I really want to stand for who I am. So then I looked at salutogenesis and I thought, this is really interesting because the first part of the word, salute, in Italian, you know, when you pour yourself a glass of wine and you clink it and everyone goes, salute, yeah? In Italian, salute means good health. It's the translation of good health. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. That really sat well with me. And I thought, oh, saluto Genesis. And I thought, well, what if I take, what if I keep the Italian part with the E in it, not the O. And genetics is the verb to Genesis. So for me, my work was all about just creating good health. And that's what we'd be. And so salutogenics is a nod to salutogenesis, but an even bigger nod to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:20

So how does this approach differ from traditional symptom-focused models of health?

SPEAKER_04 1:14:28

Yeah, it it really welcomes our broad perspective into what well-being looks like, understanding it without a focus on just prevention. It really welcomes us into our biology of well-being, understanding that the development of the way that we build and know how opt o how we optimize as humans, what best practices, what adds to the development of human assets, what adds to our emotional competency, our building of safe connections, how we speak to people, the tone that we use, how we use our eye contact, how we are able to listen with an intention to be present and be supportive without wanting to control the outcome? How how do we open up our world to diversity, to knowing other ways without having to feel threatened? How do we have a circle of influence that allows us to bring in information from different walks of life and to honour the way that our earth moves through space and the way that our environment has actually been set up to nurture us and that we give that respect. So it's this holistic understanding. You know, I I I've been following David Attenborough's work for a long time. I have such gratitude for what he has brought to us. But when I have a look at his commitment to understanding every life form, and that every life form brings us closer to information as to who we are and where we've come from, that there is a moral obligation for us to really understand that kindness and compassion and love is really the makeup of the origins of our biology and where we are met with this stunning, awe-inspiring form of human that we I think spend not enough time in and not honouring it enough. And so our work is really about bringing our focus back to the function, the purpose, and the presence of how our biology allows us to be with ourselves and be with one another.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:23

I mean, that was just beautiful.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:30

You know, it you uh uh you're probably the first person that has asked me that publicly, and I've been able to say that out aloud. So, you know, it was a it was a beautiful question to ask, and I and I want to say thank you for allowing me to say that out aloud.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:46

And I could feel the heart in that. I could feel feel your family values pouring through that as well. I could feel your garden moment, the music moment, everything that you've spoken about. I could just feel all that coming through. And and you just have this beautiful way of translating everything. Like I feel so calm. My nervous system is really chill right now. So thank you. It's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:16

It's my pleasure. It's been such a privilege to share this platform with you. And I'm I'm just so grateful, so grateful to be here with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:26

Before we wrap up, I really wanted to touch on your RFA training course because I know listeners will be curious. I know I was when I jumped on your website. So, what exactly is RFA?

SPEAKER_04 1:18:42

So, RFA stands for Resilience First Aid. And Resilience First Aid uh is a certified and also a nationally accredited learning program around the science behind resilience. And it is a program that is owned by uh Driven and the wonderful person behind that is um Yuri Russo, who has been the backbone of this. And I was fortunate enough for him to invite me to come and co-design. You know, he sort of said, What if we created a certified program around the neuroscience behind resilience? And I just went, oh, this is really exciting to bring you're talking my language. Well, to bring neuroscience into some everyday language that our population can understand without having to dig so deep. Although I do have a bit of a love of neuroscience. So, you know, when when people come and train with us, it keeps oozing out of my mouth. And we have such a great time, but we learn about the six domains of resilience. Uh, and it is a program that very deeply looks at the six domains. And we spend time understanding what the nervous system and the biology behind that resilience looks like. So, yeah, it's a really important program. I would love to be able to just pour it in in the water and then sell people water bottles with this information so that we just absorb it. Anybody can do the course. If you have a little bit of love around neuroscience, you know, come and talk to us because we we will immerse you in it. But if you are wanting some deep insights into what the framework of neural resilience looks like, it's a really important framework to consider because it gives you a lot of the basics.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:40

And I think that's a really great place to start. We spoke about right at the beginning, the fundamentals. Yeah. Yes. So I've got one more question before we wrap up with my moment of reconnection questions. What gives you hope when it comes to the future of emotional well-being and human connection?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:01

Sorry, it's another big one.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:06

These are such mammoth questions, but so enriching.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:13

What gives me hope is our ability to pause and question is what we're doing okay? Am I helping or am I harming it?

SPEAKER_04 1:21:34

And that my hope is that we become much more morally and ethically aware around who we are in this place, in time, on this earth, and what is our responsibility to self and other so that we and I have hope that we are able to reset ourselves with all of what's going on around the world and really hold peace and harmony at the core of why we're here and how we build and construct each other's health. Love that. So that's my hope. And you know, I will fight it to my last dying point. I can see that. Whoever can come on board and do this work with us, we are, you know, really hoping that we find more people to join this sort of pilgrimage with them, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:36

So lastly, what does your body taught you about yourself?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:42

Oh, my body has taught me to listen, listen so many times. I have, even after all of the training that I've done, my brain goes, Oh, that's a really good idea. Maybe we should look at that. And my body just goes still, or my body has this, I have this feeling where something happens and it's this tap up against where I've gone, oh, that's a good idea. And my body just holds me just for a moment. And it's a very gentle one, but I'm listening to it more. And even as I'm hitting my 60s, I'm thinking I'm still learning to just listen to my body and give it space and allow it to talk to me, not in minutes, but just stay with that for hours and go to it after a couple of days and ask it, what are you telling me?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:45

That's a great question. That is, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:51

Lastly, what are your go-to sleep rituals you can't live without? Oh, what I cannot live without is my electric toothbrush.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:02

I've got some beautiful house shoes. They're like little slippers that I put on um Peter Alexander. So put those on. Um, my pajamas. I I cannot live without my herbal tea before I go an hour before I go to bed. And I've got so many. Uh we we are a massive tea drinking family. Um and what I love to do, so I about an hour beforehand, so I my algorithms are elephants in rainforest, the orphanages in the south of Africa, the giraffe, the beautiful plains, and watching how people care and look after these beautiful species that we have, and watch how they're bottle-fed and watch how they're cuddled and hugged. And I spend a lot of time with that because that soothes my nervous system. But then I spend a huge amount of time watching comedy. Um, and that brings a really nice balance where I'm where my sympathetic is elevated enough to really enjoy and be awake to life, and then the soothing part where I can calm and know that there are many people doing lots of safety work around this.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:25

What a great way to wind down. Maria, this has been such a thoughtful and deeply reassuring conversation. Thank you for the incredible work that you're doing and helping people better understand themselves. Where can people find you and your work?

SPEAKER_04 1:25:43

So please come onto our website at salutagenics.com.au. We have some new products that will be landing soon for the corporate sector where we are going to be rolling out a very new program around compassionate conversations of care that specifically target our nervous system. So we welcome people to come on and have a look at the work that we're doing, read some of our writings, the references that we have, and follow us on Instagram too. We have a lot of fun, which we know is important, and you'll see the girls in green. Okay. That's us. Uh, and we would love to see you about, you know, connect with us and follow us. Jules. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on, Tracy. And I cannot tell you how privileged it has been to be asked the questions that you have and for giving us the time together. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:47

Thank you for joining me on Inside Out Connections. I hope today's conversation reminds you to tune in and find small ways to self reconnect. If this episode resonated, please share it with a friend or leave a quick review. Come join me on Instagram at insideout skin gutcoach.