Dr. Nicole LePera

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?

That emotional center that's always scanning for danger, that's overreactive, constantly scanning for danger, right?

With a prefrontal cortex, right, that's not as online as we would like it to be.

And we quite literally in a way we become we are born wired for the threat that we might not even actually have physically experienced or may never experience in the environment that we're living in.

So kind of going back to the foundational place where change happens, we cannot...

Create, make, even think about, remember, even this conversation with maybe all the new tools I'll share with you now, unless our body is feeling safe.

So kind of back to those building in consistent check-ins, setting alerts on our phone, post-it notes, kind of connecting this new check-in habit with something you already do every day, brushing your teeth, drinking coffee.

Building those moments of refocusing our attention to our body's signals of stress are so foundationally important for two reasons.