Dr. Nicole LePera

One of my aunts came up to me and my mom and her were very close, especially when I was born.

My mom was 42 at the time.

And because she had already had two children, my older siblings were 15 and 18 years older than me.

They were not trying to get pregnant.

When my mom started to have pretty consistent morning sickness symptoms,

Very much because there was a lot of health-related issues in my family with my older sister in particular.

So there was a lot of when something happened, right?

And I was a little girl who assumed something happened bad to mom.

It was because often what was bad happening in my family was health.

So my mom's mind immediately went to, I'm having morning sickness.

I'm sick.

I must have stomach cancer.

So she confided in this aunt looking for support, you know, that she thought shared her belief that she was likely coming down or had stomach cancer.

And my aunt, you know, very much urged her to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis.

And the diagnosis was me.

So I now think, right, how much cortisol.

was washing through my mom's body because not only were they living in a stressed environment, in a city with dangerous things happening outside the door to health-related things happening inside with her child included, now she's having these symptoms that she thinks is cancer, right?

All of this cortisol washing through the placenta and impacting my neurological development.

So again, the lack of memory, I kind of have a new awareness and it all maps onto what we're talking about here, which is chronic stress, whether it's in our ancestors or our environments in utero or not, will impact the way our brain wires and fires, right?

Many of us are going to be then born with a amygdala, right?