In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we explore the power of the mind-body connection. My guest, Dr. Serena Sterling, opens up about her experience with impostor syndrome and the ways in which she self-medicated during challenging times. She also shares how understanding the mind-body connection has helped her and others to better manage physical and emotional pain. Most importantly, we discuss ways that listeners can take action to address their own pain.

About Dr. Serena Sterling:

Dr. Serena Sterling is author of the best-selling book: Pain: A Love Story, holds a master’s in International Journalism, a doctorate in clinical psychology, and is a certified Life Coach. As a journalist in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, London and New York City, Dr. Sterling wrote about health-related articles. Due to her own experience of overcoming chronic fatigue syndrome and finding ways to alleviate her own chronic pain from years of living with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Sterling pursued a degree in clinical psychology and learned advanced mind body stress reduction techniques to assist others in overcoming their own health challenges. She works with people from all over the world via remote sessions.

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Connect with Dr. Serena Sterling:

Visit her website at: https://www.drserenasterling.com/

And check out her book here: https://www.amazon.com/Pain-Love-Story-Serena-Sterling/dp/0986330957/ref=sr_1_3?crid=XLD8ZJ8OYUSI&keywords=Pain%3A+A+Love+Story&qid=1650928892&sprefix=pain+a+love+story%2Caps%2C236&sr=8-3

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Transcript:

Kim Meninger
Alright, welcome, Serena, it’s wonderful to meet you. And I’m excited for our conversation today. I’d love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited for the show also. And so I have a doctorate in clinical psychology. However, I don’t practice as a clinical psychologist, I use my training and education and then I work more under the umbrella of a coach so that I can work with people all over the world remotely via zoom. And then I also bring in a number of mind-body stress reduction techniques to access the physiology of someone’s emotions, to ask the body for answers, rather than just focus on the talking out approach.

Kim Meninger
I’m really interested to learn more about that, too. I want to start by just talking to you a little bit about your own experience with impostor syndrome. How has it shown up for you? How do you think about impostor syndrome?

Dr. Serena Sterling
I feel like the first time I really noticed it, I was, I had just graduated from a master’s in international journalism in London, and I landed this job in New York City called Spirituality and Health. It’s still around. And I was so tired. I was there… I was already tired before I started working. But then I started working. And I was just like, even more tired. And then I was there when 9/11 happened. And I was working in lower Manhattan, it was two blocks away. It just kind of exacerbated all the fatigue I already had. And my medical doctor basically gave me a sense of like, well, there’s no cure, learn to cope. It’s like, well, that’s not gonna work for me, because I just, I was always driven. And I always had a lot of goals. And so I initially took matters into my own hands and I self-medicated by well, I wanted to get Adderall or like Ritalin or something like that. Because I don’t have ADHD or ADD, but I knew that like, in college, there were times where I would take that and then pulled an all-nighter, and it would, it would still be good work somehow, I don’t know. But looking back was probably terrible work, but, but to me, I like, I scored well. And so I was like, okay, if I can just like, get myself through the day until I figure out how to figure this out, I’ll be fine. And my friend who could have gotten me the Adderall was like, I can’t get you this, but I can get you cocaine. And I was like, oh, I okay. I was like, desperate. So there I was, for a few months, I was doing lines of cocaine in my kitchen. I had to work from home for five months because my office was damaged and took like that long to be cleaned. And there I was, like, I was using cocaine as a means to stay awake. And I wouldn’t do it on the weekends. And I would stop at like 3 pm so I could go to sleep. But I was working for a health magazine. And I was like, this does not align with my values. This is… I’m working in editing and finding articles about people’s health. And yet I’m doing something that is so far removed from anything that seems healthy that I was just, I felt like such an impostor even though we didn’t have really that word that we were using as much 20 years ago.

Kim Meninger
Wow. I mean, it sounds like you were in basic survival mode. And that was the, the tool that helped you to get through the situation. What, what happened? How did, how did that part of your life end?

Dr. Serena Sterling
I think that I remember walking into my apartment building thinking you know, this is a slippery slope. Like I’m, I have it under control right now. But how long am I going to do this? At what point am I going to stop and say enough is enough? Like I, I need to get some real answers and a part of me really thought that a lot of what I, what was underneath fatigue was emotions that I had repressed and I had been introduced to mind-body stress reduction therapy while I was in college on the west coast called neuro-emotional technique and it was really fast and it was really precise and always worked really well. And I found a doctor in New York. She did this and I was like, well we’ll see, we’ll see if this works and like after the first session I was so much better that I walked home from her building from her, from my appointment and they walked like… in New York, you can just be walking and like not know your… everything’s, there’s everything to look at. But I could only walk like three blocks and then take a nap for two hours. After the appointment. I walked three miles and I was like okay, there’s something to this and so I stuck with her and I just stopped using it. I stopped using the cocaine. I stopped having, like she put me on really a restrictive diet. But I felt amazing in three weeks that I was like there’s something to this.

Kim Meninger
Wow, thank God that you were able to break out of the unhealthy ways of doing things and find a better approach. And it’s so interesting that you make that, obviously, the, the mind-body connection, right? The fatigue coming from another place that it was deeper than just being tired. And I want to highlight that for a moment because I think there are a lot of people right now. I mean, burnout is on the rise. There’s so much exhaustion from everything that’s been going on with the pandemic and the uncertain state of our world right now that I’m sure a lot of people are feeling really tired and aren’t necessarily recognizing that there’s more to it than that.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Because I mean, the crisis back in 2001 was 9/11. And how do we come back from this terrorist attack and all that? But I felt like even when I was leaving London, I felt like a little disillusioned by journalism and feeling like there’s something more I want to do, but I don’t know what it is. And, but then when 9/11 hit, it was kind of like, I, like forced myself to cry that night of September 11th. But I just kept going, and I was like, I’m in a new job. This isn’t the right time, I’ll deal with these emotions later. So I was always very cognizant of what I was doing. But also knowing that at some point, I was going to have to deal with these emotions. Whereas I think, for a lot of people, it’s, it becomes more of an unconscious process of like, you don’t realize the amount of stress, relationship stress, work stress, all of that is piling up. And you just keep going. And then you wonder why you’re so exhausted.

Kim Meninger
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting because I don’t want to suggest that everyone who experiences impostor syndrome is in the wrong field. But I do want to pick up on the fact that you had that inkling that there was something more out there for you. And I wonder how much you connect your experience of not necessarily feeling good about yourself in that role to the fact that it just wasn’t the right one for you?

Dr. Serena Sterling
Well, I think that I, I liked psychology in high school. I got to college and I felt like the psychology classes were very dry and more, like, scientific than I wanted. I was much more interested in like, understanding how the mind and what you think can cause illness in your body and how you can also think certain things and have that reverse without going into like, the statistics and the science and the research behind it. Like that was all great. And we had to learn in grad school how to read those papers, but I was more interested in like, what is the phenomenon that happens? How do you understand the placebo or the no-placebo effect? And so I feel like, I feel like that was always there. But I also, I always like to write I always like to read and so it was just kind of like an I like to read magazines, and I was kind of wanted to create my own magazine. And also though there is a huge stigma around psychology in my family. So like only sick people go and see a shrink is the kind of messaging I got growing up. So I always felt… I went to see one school psychologist my senior year of high school and I left halfway through the session because I was so ashamed of needing help. And so the idea of going into the field of psychology was never even… like it took classes in college but that was it. And so then I considered other things like acupuncture, chiropractic. I remember being in New York with my friend from journalism school, we were talking, and I was saying like, I just think there’s something else but I don’t know. And now I have this degree in journalism. And she was like, pay attention to that, like, watch the things that you read or like the things that you’re attracted to, and maybe you’ll figure it out.

Kim Meninger
Wow, that’s, that was great advice. So is that how you ultimately decided to go into a doctoral program? How did that happen?

Dr. Serena Sterling
I was so impressed and fascinated with my recovery from chronic fatigue, which my medical doctor told me I’d never got over. So I had this like three weeks of doing these mind-body sessions plus a really restrictive diet plus like homeopathy and supplements. And I mean, I was young in my 20s at the time. But I was most interested in the way that these therapies worked, that I was like, this is what I want to learn. But in order to learn them, I have to have a higher degree in one of the healing arts, which included psychology, acupuncture, naturopathy, chiropractic. And I looked at all of those, I really studied them. And I was like, I’m really interested in that mind-body phenomenon. And you can do that in these other fields. But I was really I just decided, like, okay, I’m gonna, but I also was like, I don’t want to take the GREs. I was listening to your podcast about like, you did like 98th percentile on your and I’m terrible. I like basically could have, if there was a way to flunk your SATs, I basically flunked my SATs. Because I’m so bad at multiple-choice, I would prefer to write a 20-page paper on one question. And so I was like, I really don’t want to take my GREs…if I have to. And so I found there a few, a few schools, there is Naropa, in Colorado, and then there is the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, which is where I ended up going. And there is the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and none of them at the time required the GREs. So I was like, let’s see, I’ll apply and see what happens.

Kim Meninger
Wow. And so the mind-body piece is really interesting. And I think we hear that term a lot. But not necessarily any deeper than that. Can you share a little bit about your perspective on the mind-body connection? Like why is it interesting to you? What, what do you see as the benefit of paying attention to that?

Dr. Serena Sterling
I think that even in school for psychology, we’re still taught. I mean, I learned a lot of theories. And I studied a lot of different theorists. And we, in even, in my school of this mind, body, spirit school, we, I feel like I was still taught to treat the person from the head up, or the neck up, like you’re not, yeah, there’s this idea that it’s all connected. But like, I really think we should have learned about nutrition, like what you eat affects how you feel. I mean, I took a course on like neuropsychology. But we, there’s so much more of how I mean, a basic example of the mind-body connection is that you wake up from a nightmare that you know, a pack of wild rhinos are just chasing you down, and you wake up like that really was, felt so real. But obviously, it was just dream. However, your heart is racing, you’re sweating. You’re, you know, in a panic. So your mind is reacting to something that is not happening. And your body also reacts to it.

Kim Meninger
That’s really interesting. Yeah, that’s a great example. So what can we as, you know, average people living our lives who don’t have advanced degrees in this area, like how can we use this? Or what, what would we… maybe we need to work with people who do but I’m just curious, like, what are some of the steps that we can take that fall under this mind-body umbrella?

Dr. Serena Sterling
That’s a really good question. I feel like I struggle to create content on social media because I just assume everyone knows things that I do. And then I’m like, why would this interest people? But I would say that, you know, there are steps you can take every day of really monitoring how you feel in the morning, how you feel interacting with certain people, even if they’re close friends or family. Because sometimes the way that we develop our friendships, relationships are not in our best interest. Or we, we fail to communicate how we really feel. And I feel that is like the number one piece of how then we develop anxiety or depression or even chronic pain because we repress the things that we want to say. We don’t say them for fear of hurting other people. And then if you grew up in like a family, where you weren’t encouraged to speak up, then you and then perhaps you make that other person feel bad, then it’s kind of like you feel like you’re to blame, you should then soothe that other person’s emotions. And so it’s kind of like well, it’s just easier not to say anything. But then that creates, like, miscommunication in relationships or even at work. So to become really aware of your thoughts. To even like, you know, you can zone into your body every day and be like, okay, do I have any pain? Do I have any discomfort? If you didn’t fall, if you have no injury, if you weren’t, like, you know, sitting at your desk reading for eight hours, then it’s likely that there’s some sort of emotional component that you’re not expressing or that you’re, maybe someone cut you off at work or you know, driving. And you just kept thinking about it. If there are, if there are thoughts that run through your mind a lot. One has just become aware of that. And then you can like express it to a friend or partner or, you know, write about it. Like, there are lots of ways to just start to become more aware of what the thoughts we have, and how you’re expressing or not expressing them.

Kim Meninger
I really like that approach. It’s consistent with how I think about confidence management too, is, we’re so busy, and we’re so reactive to our environments, we’re not necessarily getting to that level of self-awareness, and really seeing what’s actually going on. We’re not, we’re feeling the pain, but we’re not necessarily tying it to anything. And so, it feels a little bit arbitrary. And we don’t necessarily have ways of addressing it, if there, if we haven’t named it yet. So I love what you’re saying about almost taking inventory. Like, what am I feeling? And in different situations, what am I noticing about my physical response, my emotional response. Before you can even do anything, you have to start with a basic understanding of what’s going on.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Absolutely. And it’s hard, though, because we’re in a fast-paced society these days, and even you can think, okay, well, I don’t know if this is going to bother me later. But you can take note and come back to it and be like, oh, yeah, that was on my mind all day. And we sometimes do recycle the same thoughts over and over. And if it’s something, if it’s something to do with another person, the harder thing to do is then tell that other person how you feel. But it’s so liberating, and sometimes that, that part alleviates pain in someone’s body.

Kim Meninger
That’s so fascinating. I think that’s the, that’s a really interesting part about this. And to your point, a lot of us struggle with this, either, because we weren’t taught these skills growing up, or we grew up in families where it wasn’t safe to speak our minds or conflict wasn’t modeled for us. And so there’s a lot of reasons why people just avoid it entirely. And it doesn’t go away. It’s not like avoiding it means that it will just disappear. It re-surfaces in other really inconvenient ways. And so I’m curious if you have thoughts on ways that like, if someone’s listening, who’s feeling, gosh, I don’t, I don’t feel safe doing that, or I don’t even know how to do that. What’s the resource? What’s the first step to tackling that issue?

Dr. Serena Sterling
Awareness is, is a really big part of this. As we’re talking, I’m thinking about one client I had who… So, a lot of people come to me with chronic pain, but they also come with like anxiety and depression and things like that. And this guy had woken up, and he just could not, he had horrible pain in his back. And he was like, well, you know, I did fall off my bike like 12 years ago. And I’m like, yeah, that’s not it. Like he should, is, like, that’s an old injury. But it turns out that like, a lot of what we tackled was him, like he had this relationship maybe 20 years ago. And he always felt like the woman was far superior, you know, like, she was more beautiful than he could ever be in his attractiveness, and more successful always. And so he always held back from saying anything, and now it was catching up to him 20 years later, and the relationship didn’t last also, but I feel like if you’re in a situation like that, or if you’re in a situation where you’re like, you know, this is coming to mind, this reminds me of this, the first step would be okay, so you have awareness around that, that’s fantastic. Or insight. So start writing about it, just write about all your feelings as much as possible. As you’re writing feel the feelings of like, oh, this makes me so frustrated, I feel so sad or so defeated that this, this and this is happening. And then if it does involve another person to find, find that motivation in yourself to then talk to the other person, which is hard. It’s still hard for me at times too, because it feels like the other person is going to get really upset with you and you don’t want, no one wants that. So it’s better to just avoid it. But a lot of what happens is something I call emotional reality, where we basically create these scenarios in our minds, almost as a way of having this fake, or false sense of security of this, like, I know what’s going to happen. And then I’m going to live as if that does happen. This person is gonna react this way. I’m gonna react that way. Yeah but that person, like, doesn’t even exist in your mind. Like, that person is over here, like not existing. But you’ve created this whole scenario, and then you live as if, like, that’s true. So that’s interesting, because sometimes… I had a friend who was in New York on 9/11. And she was at she was working in the World Trade Center number seven. Like two days later, she got transferred out to Connecticut. And she hated Connecticut. She like, was always born, bred, like, New Yorker. And she would go to her apartment and just be like, oh, I hate where I live. And everyone’s mean to me at work. And she would come in with this idea. And they’d all be like, Hey, Susan, how’s it going? And she’d be like, wait, that doesn’t match my, the way that I see people in my mind. But it had all been this, like, false reality. So, some things you can do are just like some steps that I learned not even in school for psychology was more of like, kind of like the Landmark Forum, there was something similar going around in, in San Francisco called the Liberty Experience, and it was kind of like, steps to say, you know, I, I feel like when you didn’t respond to my remark last night that it made me feel like this, it made me feel unseen. I made up in my mind that you don’t care about me. I don’t know if that’s true. But that’s how I feel. And I wanted to talk about it. Like there are steps you can do. There are like communication books you can there are people on Instagram that you can follow that like are just, if you can find really basic things like that it does not have to be complicated. It can be so freeing for both people.

Kim Meninger
You’re so right. And it’s funny that you bring up the Landmark Forum because I actually went through the Landmark Forum’s basic program right before 9/11. I actually didn’t go to the final session, because it was 9/11 itself. But what I took away from that session was, I made a commitment to myself to tackle the biggest thing I was not saying, and it was confronting my dad about his emotional absence from my life. And I am a people pleaser, a conflict avoider. I had all the same kinds of stories in my head that you’re describing of no, this is not a safe conversation. I’m not going to do this. But I’m also an achiever, and I set it as a goal. And once I set it as a goal, it was more painful for me to not achieve the goal than it was to actually go through with the conversation. And so I was at his house. And I remember the clock ticking and thinking, if I don’t do this now, this is not going to happen this time. Then I have to wait until the next time I see him and I only saw him once or twice a year. So finally mustered up the courage and I had this scary conversation and it changed my life. It was absolutely life changing for me, not because he did anything particularly remarkable. There weren’t a lot of surprises, although it was helpful to get some insight from him. But because I walked away feeling so empowered and feeling like I did the scary thing that I needed to do to grow in that relationship. And that’s the example that I point to when I think about how much, you know, we think about how much pain there is that’s likely to come with that one encounter. But we don’t think about how much pain we’re carrying around with us on a daily basis by avoiding it. And I think that that’s the, you know, the analysis we have to do in our own minds of which is actually more painful.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Yeah, that’s such a good point is that that’s another thing we learned in that similar kind of forum. It was like, even however, the other person reacts, it’s not about you, it’s about their issues. So even like I talked to my dad also, and I was like, you know, I went through the script that they gave us and he had some reaction, like, what is this psychobabble that you’re using these days? And it wasn’t even like I wasn’t even in school for psychology, but he was so unable to tap into his own feelings. But they had helped us understand, okay, that other person’s reaction has all, all this other history in their lives. So it’s not about how you show up but like you talking about how like you finally were able to say what you needed to it’s so liberating. It’s so kind of like, you’re right like we hold on to all this like fear and anxiety. And I don’t want to say this because of whatever… all these different things you hold on to from your history. And once you just release that, like that’s, that’s kind of that tension that we feel. And that’s why it can help people unravel pain in their bodies.

Kim Meninger
It’s so interesting because it’s not something that I necessarily consciously think about, the whole connection between the mind and the body. But I wonder, just from your perspective, and I’m not even sure if I’m asking this question in an appropriate way. But would you recommend that we adopt as a practice just this notion of staying attentive to that connection? Like really keeping it top of mind? Or is it something that you think we pay attention to that when we notice other things going on, like, you know, unexplained pain or something like the… from a way of life perspective, what’s the best way for us to stay connected to this concept?

Dr. Serena Sterling
Well, I think that our bodies speak to us in the form of symptoms, but we don’t, that was not a language course, I could have taken in high school, there was like French, Spanish and Latin, there was no sort of like, this is how your body talks to you. I would have taken that. I think. I think that if something comes up, if you feel not yourself, if you feel upset, if you feel like oh, I have this tension in my neck, maybe I should get massage or see chiropractor like… Well, maybe it’s something that you’re avoiding talking about or something… And so you can do exercises around like, okay, how am I feeling? What in the past, like, 24 hours or week upset me that I’m not dealing with? Something probably will come to mind. And so I don’t think that you need to do it all the time. But, but if there is something that’s on your mind, I mean, you can do an exercise to challenge yourself and to just always, like, tell the truth to other people, tell them how you really feel. That’s not very easy. You know, like, we hold back all the time, we’re polite, or we just decide like, no, it’s not worth it. I’m not gonna say anything. But if you can challenge yourself on that, it could be helpful,

Kim Meninger
I would imagine boundaries would play into that too, right? So there’s the honesty, there’s also the saying no when you really want to say no over eight, instead of going along, doing the thing you’re gonna resent doing. And then that not only undermines the relationship, but it also makes you feel bad about yourself. And so I would think that might fall into the same category of being honest.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I used to think like, I could say no, but I didn’t realize how, how many different scenarios it can show up in. Like, just telling someone like a friend that like talks to you for hours on end, and just being like, you know, what? I don’t, I don’t feel I have the energy to give you and, you know, it seems like you take a lot and I don’t really get… maybe you need to see a therapist, you know? Or, I don’t know, say no because someone’s asked you to do something. And it’s actually really not making you feel comfortable to do this thing. To actually say, you know what, this doesn’t feel good right now, can I help you with something else? But, but because it shows up in different ways, but we’ve been told to be like, oh, well, this is a boundary. This is where you can say no, like, it’s it. There’s so many different scenarios.

Kim Meninger
That’s a good point, too. So I think really understanding yourself and what you value in a given situation, too, because there are some things that we know, or have been conditioned to believe are boundary appropriate, and others that maybe we feel guilty about or feel ashamed of. And then that’s just going to layer emotion on top of emotion.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Yeah, absolutely. Boundaries. I didn’t know what a boundary was. People were talking about boundaries, my first year of grad school. And I was like, should I look this up? Like, it seems like everyone knows what this is.

Kim Meninger
Yeah, no, that’s another thing that we’re not taught. I feel like a lot of what we’re talking about is a function of the fact that we all come from very different places and we don’t have a common forum for getting this kind of insight or learning these kind of approaches. And so, so many of us are experiencing so much stress and pain because we don’t have another way to think about it.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Yeah, and I was thinking about how that all shows up, it can, as impostor syndrome. Like many years of my grad school, I was like, why, how I like this seems like the worst possible field to go into for someone who has self-doubt and self-esteem issues and not knowing how to identify my own emotions. How am I supposed to do this with other people, or you know, having those lack have boundaries or not being able to express yourself like, it feels like the impostor, the self-doubt creeps in all the time.

Kim Meninger
Yes, I certainly find that myself too. And on the one hand, it was what motivated me to focus so much on impostor syndrome was my own experience with it. But on the flip side of that, too, it’s like, who am I to help other people with impostor syndrome, when I still have my own self-doubts, right? So we tell ourselves these, these stories.

Dr. Serena Sterling
I know, and I look around and, and I have clients to do this to where they’re like, well, and I call it like, the Facebook facade, like, you go online and you see, like, everyone’s got, like, the coolest life, they travel, they have the best-looking spouse, like, everything’s amazing. And it’s horrible. It’s like what beauty magazines did to us in the 80s and 90s. Like, oh, like, no one has struggles. Everyone’s just wonderful.

Kim Meninger
Exactly. And then that whole response of there must be something wrong with me kicks in, right, which absolutely contributes to impostor syndrome in so many different areas of our lives. Is there anything else that you would recommend as a, either an action step or a resource that people can turn to if they’re really feeling like, I want more of what we’re talking about right now.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Um, let’s see. I have a free guide on my website about like, you know, ways to get out of pain, and it couldn’t work for like, emotional and physical pain. And that’s just really to like, you know, ask yourself some questions and pay attention to your thoughts and feelings. And you can, you can certainly find books on, on this topic. But I think that just a really basic thing to start with is to really notice how you’re feeling, how you’re feeling physically, emotionally, mentally, after interactions, or as you go about your day, or even after, like, pay attention to how we ingest, it’s like, I just sometimes have to like, be like, I’m just not going to pick up my phone today. Because there’s just, there’s so much information that like, I don’t read a lot of books as much as they used to anymore. But I feel like I read so much online. And sometimes, the online stuff makes you feel bad. And so to become really aware of like, what you’re consuming, whether it’s online or offline with other people, your relationships, and really consider how you feel, and then do some work around that of, like do some journaling, you know, like, just become very aware of what it’s like.

Kim Meninger
That’s a great point. And I am a news junkie, but I’m also somebody who is particularly sensitive to the news. So the other day, my husband and I were talking about a particular headline in the news, and he said, I really don’t like that you’re reading this right now because I know what it’s going to do to you mentally and physically. I appreciate that. But it’s so hard to stay away. But I think that’s a good example, is just knowing that that’s the effect. And I have definitely because I have tuned into that, I take breaks, I don’t, I don’t allow myself to consume as much of it as I otherwise would have. Because I know the effect that it has on me.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Yeah, that’s a good point. Because I also feel like, this is like the work I do is about connecting the dots of like this happened, this is how you feel. Now how do we release this? And so if you read the headlines before you go to bed, and then you wonder why you have insomnia or you wonder why you don’t sleep that well. Well, it could be because you’re reading about horrible things in the news. And then that goes into your subconscious and that’s trying to work itself out. And you don’t, you know, you’re not thinking of like lovely things while you’re going to sleep.

Kim Meninger
Exactly, exactly. This has been so helpful, Serena, I’m really grateful for this conversation. For anybody who wants to connect with you or learn more about you, where would they go?

Dr. Serena Sterling
My website is a really good place. It’s DrSerenaSterling.com. That’s Dr and then my name.com. And you can find the free guide there. And I also have a book that I’ve written that came out last year. It’s about my own, my own struggle with chronic pain and how I got into this work and then I intersperse it with clients I’ve worked with and help them with similar things that we’ve talked about on the podcast today. So you can pick that up on Amazon.

Kim Meninger
Excellent. And I will link to both of those in the show notes as well. And thank you again. It’s been such a great opportunity to chat with you today.

Dr. Serena Sterling
Thank you. I love what you’re doing.

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