62. Your Body Knows Best: How Stress Impacts Memory and Why We Should Listen to Our Bodies

This episode is a compassionate call to notice the red flags our bodies raise, recognize our limitations, and honor our needs.Many women in perimenopause and menopause experience brain fog and memory loss, but this is seldom talked about openly. Drawing from my own recent experiences, and with support from Dr. Gabor Maté's book When the Body Says No, we explore the ways our bodies communicate distress, often through symptoms we might overlook—like memory lapses, mental fatigue, or even physical illness.

Key Topics:

• The impact of chronic stress on mental faculties and overall wellbeing.
• How small and significant stresses accumulate, often unnoticed, shaping who we become.
• Practical insights on tuning in to bodily signals and making space for rest and recalibration.
• Affirmations that remind us of our worth beyond productivity or societal expectations.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the fast pace of life, battling stress, or noticing changes in your mental clarity, this episode offers permission to pause, breathe, and reconnect with what truly matters. We close with a powerful affirmation to guide you on this journey: "I am valued, accepted, and loved as I am. It is safe to be me."

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This episode was edited by Aura House Productions

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, I'm Serena Loh. If you're used to hearing that introverts are shy, anxious, antisocial and lack good communication and leadership skills, then this podcast is for you. You're about to fall in love with the calm, introspective and profound person that you are. Discover what's fun, unique and powerful about being an introvert, and how to make the elegant transition from quiet achiever to quiet warrior in your life and work anytime you want, in more ways than you imagined possible. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of the Quiet Warrior podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Today's episode is a little bit different because I'm not interviewing anyone. I'm reflecting, and this is not so much to do with introverts and highly sensitive people, but more to do with that aspect of the Quiet Warriors journey, when you start to lose control over parts of your life that you always took for granted you would have. So let me give you some context. This morning I drove my child to school for a VCE exam, and this is a road that we have taken many, many times. I know it by heart. I don't need the Google Maps or the GPS, but as I was driving along this familiar road, it suddenly became unfamiliar to me. It was like something was clouding my brain and I couldn't tell where I was and what I was doing there. So, as you can imagine, when you are in that kind of a situation and you have to deliver somebody somewhere, you have to be somewhere at a certain time. That is very alarming. There was no time to stop and recalibrate. I simply asked my child is this the route we usually take? And she had no idea. It turned out it was the right road after all. A few seconds later, I was able to recalibrate myself and reassure myself that I was indeed on the right road.

Speaker 1: 2:08

But that tiny episode shook me and though I was able to get to school safely, I had another episode on the way back. It's a 45-minute journey each way, with a lot of it being on the highway very straight road, nothing to look at, no markers, not much of a landscape. I know there is a phrase for it, called highway hypnosis, and this is perhaps a little bit like that, but a lot worse. It's like there is a gap in your brain where you should be able to be fully alert, able to think clearly, able to feel a momentary panic, for instance when another car comes too close, or react to road conditions, and that capacity was just not there. I was driving like a zombie. Not that I know what that feels like, but it certainly felt like only half my brain was present. And I have to say I don't like this feeling. I don't like this loss of control over my brain and over my ability to be a reliable driver. It affects my identity in a very deep way and my identity being someone that others can rely on, that my children can count on if they need a ride somewhere and for me to get safely around. It makes me think how heavily have I been using my brain all these decades that it is now protesting.

Speaker 1: 3:42

I'm currently reading this book called when the Body Says no the Cost of Hidden Stress, by Dr Gabor Mate, and it has been very illuminating, also very humbling, to read stories of people whose bodies just gave up, refused to cooperate, set off the alarm system in a very frightening way life and death situations, total loss of capacity in some cases. And what is the body trying to tell us? It is trying to tell us that it wants our attention. It is time for us to pay attention to the red flags it has been giving us over the years and a lot of time. We ignore these red flags until something serious happens, but on a day-to-day basis we may say I can handle this, this is not a big thing. Let me just finish this piece of work. Let me just wait till my children grow up and finish school. Let me wait till I retire. Let me wait till a better time when I don't have so much stress.

Speaker 1: 4:45

And what I'm learning from this book is that chronic stress, stress that is beyond the body's capacity to cope and beyond the brain's capacity to cope this is at the root of many diseases. It's very much about how we perceive our environment, how we interact with it, how we interact with our family of origin, the experiences we had growing up. And this is not necessarily about trauma with a big T, about specific incidents that have happened to us. It's also about all the small T traumas that even well-intentioned parents can perpetuate. And I find it in a sense reassuring as a parent to know that I too can make those mistakes, that none of us is perfect.

Speaker 1: 5:36

As parents, we never know how exactly to work with the children that we are given. We never know how exactly to work with the children that we are given. Every one of them is different. I have two, and they are both so different in their personality, in the way they interact, the way they think, the way they make decisions, the way they reason, and it's been an ongoing journey for me to understand them, to understand myself and to see where I am projecting from when I make a comment, when I lash out, when I lose my temper, when I'm at my most patient, when I'm able to listen calmly. Where is all that coming from? And so I'm busy joining the dots between who I am now and what I experienced as a child. It helps me, looking backwards, to be aware of what has got me here and why I am the way I am, and what changes I might need to make if I want a different kind of relationship with my children and if I want my children to grow up to be a different kind of human being.

Speaker 1: 6:53

And so, in this season of transition, with both children now having finished high school and also with my health challenges, it's an opportunity for me to ask myself some deeper questions what am I meant to be doing, the thing that I thought I was meant to be doing? Am I still doing it? Do I still want to do it? Is it still the right path for me? And if it is not, what is? And it's being able to sit with all this uncertainty, in the midst of all the chaos that's swirling around in the external environment, in my own inner thoughts, in other people's judgment or expectations, trying to find that peaceful place where I can think calmly, where my emotions are regulated, where my mind is clear, where my heart is at peace when my heart is at peace. That is what I'm currently working on. So if this is you also feeling that life is too chaotic for your comfort, things are changing too fast. You can't keep up, you don't understand what is going on. You wish someone could just sit you down or take you by the hand and give you permission to rest, to catch your breath, and give you permission to rest, to catch your breath, to rethink things, to change your mind, then I give you permission to do that today for yourself.

Speaker 1: 8:18

We never have all the answers all the time, but sometimes we do get glimpses of what is the right thing to do next. Our intuition tells us, our bodies tell us, and it is perhaps a misfortune of modern civilization that we are so wrapped up, rushing around, doing things running, trying to juggle multiple responsibilities, trying to meet multiple expectations, setting ourselves too high a bar, expecting too much from ourselves and from others, that we have forgotten and we have disconnected from ourselves. We have forgotten that we are just one entity mind, body, spirit. All of these have to work together, and so, perhaps in my case, I have overtaxed my brain for many years and relied too much on it, to the exclusion of my other parts, and it is now time for me to do some work to bring back some balance, to bring back the re-energizing, the replenishing, the nourishing and the nurturing of those parts that have been neglected, to perhaps rely less on my brain and more on my intuition and on my heart, to allow those complex and difficult emotions to rise up, so that I can sit with them, make friends with them, acknowledge them and allow them to teach me. So this is, in its own way, an exciting new season for me, way an exciting new season for me.

Speaker 1: 9:50

I have been overly focused on the cerebral and the intellectual, and I've just perhaps received a reminder from my body to also pay attention to my other parts, and so I hope for you, too, that you will take time for yourself to know yourself better, to understand what makes you alive, what makes your heart sing, and I want to read a little passage here from when the Body Says no, where Dr Gabor Mate writes this about Tuesdays with Morrie, the book that Mitch Albom wrote, and he says here Morrie learned at a young age that his value depended on his ability to serve the needs of others. That same message, taken to heart by many people early in life, is heavily reinforced by the prevailing ethic in our society. All too frequently, people are given the sense that they are valued only for their utilitarian contribution and are expendable if they lose their economic worth. I think the same thing goes for us too, that in whatever season of life we're at, and especially as we are getting older and our sense of our economic worth starts to shift, it is important to stay grounded and to recognize that we are so much more than what others measure us by. We need our own way of valuing ourselves and recognizing our own worth.

Speaker 1: 11:15

So I want to leave you with this affirmation I am valued, accepted and loved. As I am, it is safe to be me. I'm valued, accepted and loved. As I am, it is safe to be me. See you on the next episode. I'm so grateful that you're here today. If you found this content valuable, please share it on your social media channels and subscribe to the show on your favorite listening platform. Together, we can help more introverts thrive. To receive more uplifting content like this. Connect with me on Instagram at Serena Lo Quiet Warrior Coach. Thank you for sharing your time and your energy with me. See you on the next episode.