I’m so pleased to speak to Nahid de Belgeonne, the nervous system whisperer, one of the OGs in London wellness and author of the book Soothe: the book your nervous system has been longing for on today’s episode of Period Story podcast.
In this episode, Nahid shares:
- Why she hated her periods and found them a complete inconvenience
- How finding a healthier relationship with her body and emotional state changed her relationship with her period
- What wellness looks like for her in her 50s and why it’s important not to lose the potential for new things as we get older
- How your brain keeps the score, but your body is a scorecard
- How her new book Soothe is a accessible way to learn how to tend to your nervous system in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening
- A simple technique to start your day with
- And of course, the story of her first period
Nahid says we need to gatekeep our nervous systems because if you don’t, nobody else will. She says our world is getting faster, so we really have to be mindful of what we open our nervous system up to.
Thank you, Nahid!
Get in touch with Nahid:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Le’Nise Brothers: Hi Nahid. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today. I’m really excited to speak to you and hear lots of your wisdom. But first, let’s talk about the story of your first period.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Sure. So thank you so much for having me. What a great idea for a podcast. It’s going to be so useful to people. And when you asked me to be on it, I was laughing because my knowledge of periods and my period education was hopeless.
So my mother, bless her, I write a, a little bit about her in the book is her mother died when she was young. And she came from a culture where, you know, to be a woman was a bit of a burden because you weren’t economically able to stand for yourself and earn your money. You were dependent on men.
So you know, even though she’s a feminist, that kind of deep roots of a culture is really hard to break. So anything to do with being a woman, she didn’t really love, she loved dressing up. She was very beautiful. But you know, the, the deep down thing, which is really interesting because she, you know, her, her degree and her MA was in, um, physiology.
So I just find that really interesting. But she treated it with real, it was a real inconvenience and with slight disdain. So I really don’t remember how old I was. I feel like I was a bit later. So maybe around about 14 or 15. I wasn’t one of the mature girls at school at all, and I’d heard whispers about it and we’d had some sort of slideshow about it, but I didn’t get it.
I didn’t really understand it, and we were kind of, in my school, which was a state school, it wasn’t really something that you talked about or you revered or it was like welcome you into womanhood. It was very secretive. So when I think my sister told my mom and my mom’s period conversation was simply this.
She got me into the living room. She gave me a massive sanitary pad. It was huge with two loops on the end, and I, with nothing, she didn’t tell me what you did with the loops. And then she just said, use this. If you need to, you cut one in half, stick it on top and then use that. And I was just like, how, where?
I have no idea. So, and it was just all very hush, hush. And then you were left to fend for yourself. I didn’t even know what to do with them. Once you had used them, where’d you put it? You know, not down the toilet. I knew that. So the whole thing was kind of like, keep it a secret. And I think, I don’t know about you, but you know, certainly in London and, and you know, in the kind of seventies when I was growing up, you didn’t really want to be a woman.
You know, that wasn’t really celebrated. You wanted to be one of the lads, you wanted to be a boy, you wanted to be free. And that whole thing of coming into womanhood was a bit scary because you got attention that you didn’t want, you know, and nobody really told me what to do with that. My mother also didn’t talk about sex with me, so I was absolutely clueless.
And as a consequence, I hated my periods.
Le’Nise Brothers: Right. You got your period around 14, your kind of education around it was quite cursory.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: How did you teach yourself about what was going on with your body?
Nahid de Belgeonne: So I didn’t. I didn’t teach myself at all, anything. I just hated them. They were a complete inconvenience.
And I would do anything to not have them. So I starved myself throughout periods of my life so I could just stop my periods. I just hated them when I had them. They were really heavy and very painful. So I, you know, there was some huge dysregulation going on there. . It was only towards the end of it that I got into a really good rhythm of how they worked and had better you know, menstrual kind of things that I use. So the menstrual cup, I really love that and I sort of used that more towards the end and I loved it ’cause it just kept you in touch with yourself. I felt everything else was really messy or I used to use tampons a lot and I felt they really dried you out. And I felt that felt very unhealthy.
And in fact with um, my parents are from Bangladesh and I had a friend and we both came on at the same time. And then I found out about tampons through miss Magazine or some sort of teenage magazine and thought, these are great, and you could send off coupons, you could send off and get some free samples. So I did that and I sent her some, and her mother found out I was never allowed to talk to her again.
And you know what? My parents and their friends were quite liberal, but it was seen as a real affront. So everything to do with periods was just taboo and not talked about. And I don’t think I even talked about it with my friends, but yeah, it was only towards the end of my menstruating life that I kind of got into a really good relationship with it.
And I understand it understood it a lot better and I understood the different phases and when you should rest and when you can use it for creativity. And I feel really sad about that. I feel really sad that throughout my life I hated that part of being a woman. I wasn’t in touch with that. And so I love what you are doing and what you are putting out there, because I will send this to all the young girls I know ’cause I just think the more we have conversations around it, the better. And I actually, I love this whole opening up about all that it means to be a woman because it’s really needed.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah, definitely. It really is needed. Was there a turning point that you can think back to that caused you to have a second look at your relationship with your period?
Or was it something that just happened organically?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Well, I think so my sort of evolution in terms of who I am and aligning, you know, with myself and having a better relationship with myself, yeah, I think it was probably at that point that I got into a healthier relationship with how my body works, my emotional state and how that was very much influenced by my physical state and vice versa.
So I got very interested in that. So I’ve, I’ve always moved as a youngster. I, I kind of realised I come from quite a dysfunctional family. Very volatile, very stressed because bless them, nobody had taught them how to self-soothe, so they didn’t know how to pass it on. And, but I always had this innate understanding that if I moved, I felt better.
So way before I kind of really fully researched it, I understood that movement helps you to regulate your emotions. And so another thing about having periods was I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do because when I was younger, I didn’t realise that you changed things and you adapted for how you felt.
But of course, I’m, I’m in much better alignment now. And being involved in movement, you know, like you, I’m, I was a yoga teacher for quite a while. I, I, but I trained in everything because I had studios in Central London that we taught yoga, Pilates, and short kind of fitness classes. So I trained in everything that we offered, but, and I also had teachers there.
And I think what I found through that was that everybody was seemingly doing the right things, but they had fertility issues, sleep issues, they were burnt out, you know, chronic anxiety and so on. So I wanted to get underneath the bonnet of what was going on, and that’s how I kind of really delved very deeply into the nervous system, which is your master system.
It’s your brain, your spinal cord, and the communication from that into your organs and body and back from body and organs into spinal cord and brain. And it’s listening to the signals coming up from your body and there’s much more communication from, you know, the bottom up body up to brain than there is the other way around.
It was really understanding that that helped me to be more at peace with myself and have a better relationship with myself and listen to all of those signals. And I, you know, again, I feel that it was just such a shame that I missed out. Having, having my knowledge now, I wish I could sort of almost transpose it back there and help the younger me to just be in better relationship with herself, not fear it and not be so, in, yeah, in fear of how the world, you know, how our culture treats young women about to, you know, reach into womanhood because it’s, it’s a bit frightening, isn’t it?
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: A frightening time if you have, if you don’t have support around you.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. And now that you’re on the other side, what would you say your experience of the post menopause has been?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Um, I think not being in good relationship with myself for most of my life meant that my menopause. I, I had done all the well women yoga courses.
I’d done it all. I thought read all about it. I was like, yeah, yeah, I’m completely prepared. I can do this. Didn’t feel particularly under stress, although I was managing studios at the time and, you know, they were busy. But when the menopause came, all the physical stuff, I was like, yeah, I’ve got this.
You know, I can totally ride this. It’s not a problem. But then I didn’t realise that the mental aspects of the menopause, because again, I wasn’t very well prepared, Le’Nise, I don’t, you know, I don’t believe that I wasn’t, but I wasn’t really, I kind of thought like, yeah, I got this. Cognitively you can convince yourself a lot, can’t you?
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm.
Nahid de Belgeonne: You know, you can convince yourself that you understand things you’ve got, but if you are not completely attuned to what’s going on anyway, what hit me very suddenly was I had, I felt really vulnerable. I felt quite vulnerable, which isn’t me at all. I felt like I didn’t really want to go outside on my own, that vulnerable.
But the worst thing was I didn’t sleep for about three months very well. Um, I. There was, you know, there’s lots of things going on in my life as well as often happens when you’re at that cusp. And I didn’t really know what to do. And interestingly in the wellness world, and because I had done, you know, all these different sort of courses and studied it there, at the time, there was a real disdain about going on HRT.
So I didn’t feel that was an option for me. I mean, it’s changed now. You know, people were a bit sniffy about it and you kind of felt you had to do it naturally. And I had done all the things I possibly could, but it wasn’t working for me. Um, and then I happened to be on retreat with a journalist who just told me all of the facts and the re latest research around HRT and I got interested and a younger friend of mine actually took me for a talk with, um, Dr. Louise Newson. And her mentor, who I’ve forgotten his name. Nick. Nick, um, Dr. Nick something. And it was just great. It was really informative and I really understood it and I took away some research and literature and then I went on HRT and I love it. I absolutely loved it. I slept immediately. And I really enjoy being on it, but I’d never been on the pill.
I remember having the pill for a week and just flushing it down the loo thinking I don’t want to take medication. So I’ve pretty much had a medication free life. But equally believe that if you need something, you need it, you know, go on it. And then see if you want to come off of it sometime. So my menopause was equally horrendous as my periods be, but I think it was my attitude to be fair, and I think I hadn’t really fully researched, and the research at the time was, as ever, it’s quite polarised, isn’t it?
You’re either in or you’re in this camp. But I think it’s a lot more freer now. And, you know, we’re, we’re all about the research now. So, yeah, I don’t think my journey through womanhood was great.
Le’Nise Brothers: Well thank you for your honesty because I think, you know, we sometimes in the wellness world, we can sugarcoat things a little bit because we want to put on the, you know, the best possible.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: Face for our clients and you know, social media and all of that. But I think this honesty is, is really important. And so thinking about where you are now, so you were like an OG in wellness in London, you know, Good Vibe Studios. I remember and you had the power plate.
Nahid de Belgeonne: I, that’s what I started with. So we were the first independent power plate, um, studio in London, in the UK actually. Yeah. And I’ve still got one, I’ve got a small power plate here and I use it every day. And it’s interesting ’cause there was something in the Times about these longevity experts and they all have one cause they’re fab things because they, you, you stand on them, they vibrate and your brain thinks you are falling. So your muscles lengthen and shorten very quickly. So it’s great for women, great for bone density, great for creating muscle. So if you have a place that has a power plate, jump on one because they’re brilliant.
Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: And so, apart from the power plate, what are the other things that you have in your toolkit that you are relying on in, in this time in your life?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Okay, so sure. That’s a good question because it changes and it sort of doesn’t. So I’ve always had movement as my theme throughout my life and I’ve worked across four different industries, all startups, you know, from fashion was my first then technology I think, and publishing, and then wellness.
Um, and thanks for calling me the OG of, uh, fitness studios. I was, I love that. So I always knew that movement was very important to help me to regulate, and that was the recurring theme. And it’s true, we are moving dynamic organisms and we need to move a lot. So what I often do, and I encourage my clients to do, is if you are feeling kind of, you know, if you’re feeling a little stressed throughout the day, do something about it then and there, because the most appropriate thing to do with that cortisol spike, which is the release of the hormone to alert the system, get you ready to run away from the danger. Then the most appropriate thing to do is move. So you could shake it out or you could move a bit. So in my repertoire of movement, things behind me might be able to see a reform of party reformer, which is my little present to myself when, um, I got my advance for my book.
And we used to have reformers in our studios, so I, I’m. In my late fifties, I’m coming up to 58 in May. So my movements have changed, but sort of not. So I use a power plate. I use, um, the reformer a lot. I go for walks rather than run. I used to run a lot before and I’ve got a little mini trampoline, and then over there at the back I’ve got all lots of resistance that are, um, resistance bands that are against a frame on the wall so I can pull things and hang from things and pull myself up.
And I choose different things according to my mood. So if I’m angry, I’ll jump on the rebounder. If I’m in grief about the world, I will get on the floor and I’ll do some rolling. I’ll do some rocking, lots of somatic movement, so many means of the body, so it’s going to moving according to your felt sense.
Um, if I feel you know, I’ve got some energy, I’ll use my kettlebells and I’ll get on the power plates. So I kind of always say to people, just have a range of things that you love to do, and then choose them according to how you feel and the energy that you have. And I generally tend to do my energetic stuff in the morning, whereas when I was younger, I’d do that, i’d do it at any time of the day, but, you know, I kind of want, want to get my brain working and the blood pumping. So I’ll do that in the morning. And I’ve incorporated since last year, um, an afternoon walk with the dogs and sometimes I can get a bit inside myself. And my work is very internal and it’s quite cerebral if you like ’cause I’m having to think about people’s issues and their, their problems and how I’m going to help them unpick those movement patterns in their body. And so I, I’m thinking a lot and I’m sitting at my desk it’s a high desk, but still I’m sitting thinking a lot. It’s kind of breaking up that deep focus.
I, I often do that, so I always go out for a walk in the afternoon and I try and have a conversation with someone else even though it’s of no great importance. But those side of the mouth conversations with another human being I think are really good. ’cause in my house it’s just me and my husband working in, I’ve got studio in the garden so you know, I have a commute across the garden and then, you know, we kind of talk furbish to each other ’cause we know each other so well.
So you have to kind of break that up. Because the best way actually to get yourself constantly in expansive, you know, an expansion kind of mode, and to pull yourself out of your patterns of behavior, be it stress or anxiety or whatever, is to introduce new experiences to your nervous system. Yeah. And so the more you can do that, the more capacity and possibility you have.
And I think that’s really important as we get older as well, is to not lose the potential for new things. Not lose your potential full stop really ’cause then that way you are keeping youthful and you’re keeping the whole system youthful as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you say a little bit more about the patterns?
Because I see this a lot in the work that I do.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: The nutrition side of it and the hormone side of it where people do get into these patterns and we have our routines, we all have our routines, but they’re very wedded to their routines and then their fitness routines, their daily routines, and then getting them to unstick these patterns and open up to newness can be, it can take time. Can you talk a little bit more about that side of it and how that, that is helpful for the nervous system?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yeah, of course. All right, so let’s go back to the nervous system and how it’s formed. You form your nervous system by learning.
So when you were a baby, you would’ve rolled around, you would’ve put your foot in your mouth. You would’ve just been discovering things. You would’ve crawled towards your mother or your caregiver. And that’s the way you develop, you know, your secondary curves of the spine. You look up ’cause you hear her voice and it develops, you know, the curve in the neck and then you might try to stand and that develops a lumbar curve.
Yeah. So it’s all by interacting with your space and you interact with your space by moving. And then what happens to you after that is, oh, oh, and another really important thing, when you’re very young, you make no distinction between mind and body. You are this whole self and you are responding to the world with your whole self.
When we get to an, you know, to be adults, we kind of think we’re sophisticated and we are, but not in the way that we think we are. You know, we are still really sophisticated, but maybe we take certain things for granted or think they’re a bit primal because your whole system is still responding. The body responds first.
Your cognitive mind makes sense of it based on your experiences. So for instance, if you come from a family where, let me just think of something really simple. I don’t know where girls were, you know, after a certain age girls were, had to cover up, for instance, then that’s going to really limit your ability to do things.
You know, you might not jump on a skateboard. You might not jump on a bicycle easily. You might not go out on your own. It starts making you a bit fearful of of, you know, certain, of all possibilities. And it’s interesting ’cause I often have women of a certain age that I teach, and when I say simple things like, and just take your legs a little bit further apart because they’ve always been taught to be ladylike or cross their legs, or, you know, to be tiny and small and not take up space.
You, you sort of notice this like, kind of like, oh, is this proper, so it’s interesting, isn’t it, how our environment really shapes our experiences and our ability to be free, if you like. So what I see in clients is, and clients will come to me typically with burnout or chronic stress or chronic anxiety, and I see trauma, people with trauma issues because their therapists will have referred them to me, um, at the point where talking therapy has reached its natural conclusion.
So it’s kind of the next step on from that because I don’t believe you can think your way out of a feeling state and how I see that in clients is, so for instance, in the COVID years, lots of people came to me with, you know, chronic anxiety. And years afterwards, and in the COVID years, what I’m seeing was like people were really drawn in here with the head coming in forwards.
Yeah. It was kind of like, I want to retract, I want to, you know, I’m sad, I’m anxious, but I also want to retract from the world and I don’t want to make eye contact with someone because we are told to stay away from people and you know, so on. And then what that does over time is it makes those muscles tighter.
So then your breathing will be affected. Your head is now forwards of your spine. That puts a lot of pressure on your organs. And your organs aren’t meant to be weight bearing and they’re meant to have this really lovely expansive retraction, retractive quality. So it’s kind of looking at the movement patterns that are associated with that emotion because you will have heard of The Body Keeps The Score.
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Well now with neuroscience, it’s been updated. Your brain keeps the score, but your body is a scorecard. So it’s all happening in the brain. The brain sending messages based on the signals coming up from the body and your, how you interpret those signals. So how you respond to something alarming might be different to how I respond to something alarming because of our, you know, our history and our experience starting from home onwards.
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm. So you use this word somatic.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: And it’s something that is, is cropping up more and more in the wellness world.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: For someone who is not familiar with somatic movement or anything in that space, can you talk a little bit more about what that is and what that word means?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yeah, of course.
And also there, you know, there’s a, people are using it, but they’re not really offering somatic, and that’s quite a big distinction. So somatic, it’s like an umbrella term. It means, it means in the wellness world, it means of the body, soma means of the body. So it’s a fancy word for saying kind of body based really.
But somatic practices is an umbrella term. And underneath it, you might have heard of Rolfing or the Alexandra technique was really popular at one time. Um, I come from Feldenkrais kind of, lineage, and that’s a four year course and I’ve had lots of teachers who were influenced by it. So I’ve, I’ve, it’s been in my kind of experience and, um, yeah, it’s been in my kind of yeah, experience for a very long time.
I think I met it about 25 years ago officially, and then have been very curious about it. It’s not exercise. So that’s something really important to remember so you’re not repeating the same thing and doing many reps of it. You are being guided by somebody and you interpret that guidance. So there isn’t a right way to do it or wrong way to do it.
So somebody might say to you slide your hand up and then do it without moving your pelvis, and then do it in this way, and do it in that way, and so on. So that your brain is getting really interested in this new information coming in. And where you are given a constriction. So I might say to you, okay, you can do that, but you can’t slide your pelvis down to take the arm up.
The pelvis has to stay as it is now, take the arm up. And then it encourages you to use other parts of you that don’t necessarily get involved in that movement. And that way you find kind of whole body engagement and collaboration if you like, because in the culture that we live in, ’cause we sit down a lot, we generally tend to do a lot from here, not from here, you know, moving around.
And we generally tend to do, you know, we move in isolated parts ’cause how will we taught, we’re taught biology as isolated parts. Hmm. We, when we go to a PT. They tell you to squeeze your glutes and do this and do that, you know, and we’re taught in isolated parts, and I don’t mean that as a you, you, you, we stand on the shoulder of, you know, good medical kind of training and medical understanding and anatomy, but it’s moved on since then.
The more we find out, we realise that actually were this interconnected systems in a big interconnected system. And when you understand that. You have a better sense of the flow of forces through you and how you can involve your whole self. But what’s so beautiful about it, Le’Nise, is that it isn’t me telling you what to do and telling you what to feel.
I’m giving your nervous system some guidance and your nervous system organizes itself, so it’s beautifully self-sufficient. It’s self-learning. It’s this really beautiful kind of new way of doing things and how that changes you is this, you learn your patterns typically when you are young in the family home, maybe you are the pretty one or the stupid one, or the clever one or the whatever.
You will learn your patterns from then and that pretty much stays with you all throughout your life. So I see people who are still get really red. You know, they might be really high up in their careers, but they get really red faced if they’re asked a question because once upon a time a parent had said to them, you are stupid shut up. Or you don’t know anything, unless you resolve that in some way, that deep, deep learning is really embedded in there. And so what I do is we just unpick that. You don’t have to tell me anything about your personal history. I’m literally just looking at your movement patterns ’cause I’m interested in the flow. But people will end up saying, oh, that was because this happened to me. I’m like, oh, that’s, you know, that’s really interesting ’cause I can see that’s stuck at here just in your movement pattern. So let’s find ways that you can move this. I generally don’t isolate. I generally go to the whole system going, where are you holding tension?
Let’s let go of that, because your whole system is like a fishing net and if you’ve got a pool in one place, it’s going to influence everything else.
Le’Nise Brothers: Oh, you said earlier you talked about the feeling body and I think what’s really interesting is that we are so we we get so stuck in our heads.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: And getting people to make that connection between the thinking body and the feeling body.
And then, you know, like you mentioned earlier, the brain is sending signals to the nervous system to the rest of the body, but to be really aware of what’s happening in the body and then taking that awareness and building this self-soothing, this what you mentioned earlier, this self-regulation pattern is really interesting and it’s something you talk a lot about in your, your book.
Nahid de Belgeonne: It is, yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: So in, in my book, I really wanted all this stuff to be accessible because I’ve grown up with lots of people who bless them, were dysregulated, they had no comfort, in their lives because. As immigrants to this country, you just run, don’t you? You land and you run and you don’t stop running ’cause there’s no safety net.
So hard work was the only way to get out of it. And you know, my parents were middle class, they had nice middle class jobs, but still it was a really tough environment. And, you know, and getting again to this age, you kind of think, how did they do it? How did they do this? And bring up children and, you know, all the rest of that.
It’s quite impressive. So, so I think the book really was born from that. It’s kind of like, I feel so lucky to have found these things. I feel really happy in my skin. And it’s effortless. Um, and I didn’t have that all throughout growing up. I had that real mind body disconnection of pretending to be successful, good striving, dah, dah, dah. But having this real unease in my body, because I was tired and I was fearful, and I was pushing because I was scared to stop. I thought, if I don’t keep working like this, I won’t, you know, I’ll lose everything, you know, all that that was bound up with your identity.
And my identity was being a striver, being clever and being a striver, being able to put that to some sort of use. And everything that’s ever happened to me, it sort of all happened quite organically. And then you suddenly end up with something quite big where you just think, ah, I’m not sure if I meant that.
So this is really about intentional living. It’s kind of just asking yourself, do. I’m going to give you a really, really good example. So I, ’cause you know, my home life is a bit volatile and everyone used to shout all the time, all my relationships. I used to have fiery relationships and choose fiery men because you also, I, so I thought that was passionate, that was passion.
Do you know what I mean? And I remember having an argument with somebody I was going out with and we were just shouting at each other. And I think I started it and I remember just shouting going, I don’t really mean this. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I’m just going to shut up now.
Because it was kind of like, I don’t know where this started from.
I’m not enjoying it. I don’t know why I’m doing it. Let’s, can we just stop? But it’s, it’s that thing of interrupting your automatic learning that you, it’s a habit, right? That you fall into, you fall into these traps because we don’t seem to have any time in life to go is this what I intend? Do I want to be this?
So somatic, you know, movement gives you that chance to internally reflect because your brain naturally toggles from external sensory processing and internal reflection. But of course, in our culture, it’s all outwards. We’re full on and we’re just projecting out out and taking in all the stimulation and we don’t have these internal reflections where I think the wellness world could, perhaps its messaging could be better.
Is that or our understanding of it could be better, is that there isn’t you, and then your fitness regime or you, you know, or your wellness regime. That isn’t, it’s this, you are this.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Because if you don’t care for yourself, you know you’re going to, you’re going to break down in some way. You’re going to have the impact of that will be felt when you’re older.
And I teach people all the way from their twenties up to their seventies, eighties even. And you know, some of them you just think, oh, bless you for the want of just having done a little bit of movement when you were being, you know, striving all throughout your life, you could have avoided this quite serious kind of impact on your health.
So going back to my book, it’s a really accessible way to a, understand the science and the context because the more you understand your biology, the easier it is to actually implement lots of those kind of lessons and strategies, and you understand that you are an organism, not a machine. So you need, you need to have action, and then you need to repair from action.
You have action and you repair, and that goes on throughout your day. It isn’t here I am going, you know, hell for leather and here’s an hour a day where I go hell for leather in the gym. You know, that’s, that’s not, um, I don’t really love the word balance. I think resilience, you know, that’s not really resilient way to live.
And so the book gives you the science and the context, and then it gives you the lessons that you can do morning, lunchtime, evening, and then there’s a little bit on emotional rescue of what you can do in the moment. And I’m super proud of it, and I think it’s a really great resource for people to kind of spend a bit of time, drop into it, really understand themselves, and then implement these very simple kind of lessons and movements throughout their day.
Le’Nise Brothers: I really like what you’re, you said about doing things in the moment, and that’s definitely something that I talk about a lot because like you said. You. You can’t just do something in an hour at the end of the day, go to the gym, sweat it all out. You need to have these little moments throughout the day where you’re able to tend to your nervous system, where you’re able to make that shift out of fight or flight, back into a place where you can, you know, just be a little bit calmer and what I love is, you just mentioned it where you talk about things that you can do in the morning, midday and in the evening. And for someone listening who doesn’t have your book yet but is hopefully going to pick it up.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: What’s something simple that they could integrate in the morning and then perhaps around lunchtime, that would help them tend to their nervous system.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yeah. Great. Um, so I like the word rituals rather than a routine or a regime. Routines or regimes sound a bit like school, don’t they? A bit unfun. So if you think about rituals. So first of all, if you think about being in relationship with yourself and what your rituals could be to kind of tap into that and the tapping in is like, how am I feeling right now?
So in the morning, you know, I know everybody says it, but don’t go on your phone because you’re stimulating your nervous system. The best thing to do with that really calm energy that you have in the morning. It’s to set intentions. So I will breathe. I might breathe, with movement generally, not now, but I certainly did when I started.
I would breathe with movement, but I will just prop myself up and breathe six seconds in, six seconds out which is just the most easiest breath practice that you can do suits everyone. So you know, if you are, if you’re kind of hypervigilant, it’s not going to send you into kind of even more hypervigilance.
And it oscillates you between the go part of your nervous system and the rest part of your nervous system. And you want to oscillate. You don’t want to be in one or the other. And so I have a 20 minute practice of that in the morning, and that really sets me up. And then I’ll write down what I what I want to do for the day and part of my breathing practice. I set a little intention. About how I’m going to greet the day, and then I just might either check, actually I, I write the night before, so I might just check what I’m doing and just kind of get into gear for that. And then really interesting, I’ve just changed how I eat based on your circadian rhythm and the work of Dr. Stacey Sims, which is brilliant. But she, I’ve just been reading lots about her and listening to her podcast. She had said, and I vaguely knew this, but fasting isn’t great for women. Because if you don’t eat straight away in the morning, your energy, you know, your, your energy stores will then come from bone and muscle, which isn’t great.
All of my life, I’ve had a rhythm of not wanting to eat in the morning, so I never used to eat until midday. And recently I’ve just got really tired. So I decided to start eating and it’s really good. So I have protein before I work out. And so I do my big workout in the morning. And that big walk workout could be a walk, a long walk or something like that.
Hmm. Um, so it’s kind of my energetic stuff happens in the morning, my, my day setting, tone setting for the day. And then my energetic, you know, walk or a reformer is all right getting on the power plate and some weights. And I’ve eaten breakfast already and then. I work in bouts of deep focus and then letting go of that focus because that’s great for your brain and that is how the brain works.
So I have 90 minutes of deep focus every day, followed by it, roughly 20 minutes of mindlessness. So not as deep a focus, focus in the ideal world. That could be going out for a walk or it could be a practice. You know, a contemplated practice, be it meditation, breath work, somatic work. But even if you, hang the washing out or play with your dogs or you know, cook, whatever, it’s fine.
I think, do you know what I mean? It’s just not that really deep focus and you’re moving your way out of this fixed state. Yeah. And then I then I’ll come back for another bout of then I’ll have lunch. And then I’ll have another bout of deep, deep focus. And then I’ll intersperse that with some somatic stuff.
I try and have a nap actually in the afternoons for about 20 minutes these days, or breathing practice. And then in the evening, I’ll have a little practice, I’ll have some sort of ritual to take me out of my work and back into my life because as you will know as well, when you’re working with people on a nervous system level and uh, emotionally, you kind of don’t want to carry that load in your bones take, you know, and kind of be thinking about or, or it to have an effect on you.
So I will probably get on the rebounder and kind of jump it all out before I go back in. So I’m prepared. I’ve also started walking at dusk ’cause again, understanding circadian rhythms. So that I’ll go for a little dog walk around about that time to just help my whole system to kind of recalibrate and get ready for evening time.
Le’Nise Brothers: I love that you mentioned walking because I think, I do think walking is really underrated and I appreciate it more now. I got a dog last summer and exactly. A cockapoo. Oh yeah. And he requires at least two walks a day. And for me, I’ve gotten into this really nice rhythm where in the morning we’ll be out for an at least an hour, getting that light even on a day, like in London, it’s not very nice today. Right. Yeah. But getting that light into my eyes to reset my circadian rhythm. Yes. Then, you know, getting that as you get older, you do need that bone bearing, weight bearing exercise that is just, it’s just so helpful and you can add a little weight.
Like I actually purchased a weighted vest.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Oh yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: I haven’t actually used it yet, but I, I’m going, I’m a little bit nervous. I don’t know why
Nahid de Belgeonne: I used to have, I used to have one years ago and used to run with it. Oh
Le’Nise Brothers: wow.
Nahid de Belgeonne: I know madness.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. But even like that you, in your book, you talk about connection.
And just to touch on that a little bit, like having a dog where living in the city you do sometimes get really disconnected. You get into your routines, your rhythms, getting from A to B. Having a dog and those like natural moments, oh, hi. And your dog says hi to another dog and you have a little chat with the dogs.
I actually really love and appreciate that so much. And I just talk a, can you talk a little bit about connection?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yeah, I can. So it’s interesting living in cities, isn’t it? Because I’m from London, I moved out, at the, towards the end of COVID to the seaside. Not that far from London, but, um, it was a, it was a real adjustment because people say hello and you have a lot of space and you know, everyone’s really friendly and it’s quite easy to meet people and then everyone has time. And in London, I mean, I love it. I love the bustle of a city. There’s just the energy of a city. I absolutely love it. And, and miss it sometimes, but what’s so interesting when you go back is that you notice that everyone uses a lot of energy to not look at you and not talk to you, because there’s so many people that if you had to connect with everyone.
It would be very energy depleting and would probably add on three hours to your day. But also you don’t know everyone like you might in a village. So, you know, if you smile at someone, you might get aggro back or do you know what I mean? There’s a certain mode of being that we all drop into when we’re surrounded by a mass of people, you know?
And it, isn’t it interesting how we’re really good at self-policing, you know? Mm. We kind of walk past people and we make sure we don’t bump into them and you know, we don’t kill each other. And you know, it’s quite interesting how we can just go with the flow of the mass. Of, um, people wherever we are, you know, whatever’s going on and with the sort of a behavior of others.
And having a dog is so lovely because you get really connected to their nervous systems. They use a lot of energy when they want to. They eat, you know, obviously you are feeding them, but you know, they eat at generally good food, you know, and because our dogs are really quite lean, and then they sleep a lot throughout the day.
And I kind of once think, actually the best thing anyone could do is just follow the rhythms of their dog. Then it would be so good. And just like you, I adore those doggy conversations. I remember because people tell you a lot through the conduit of their familiar, you know, their dog. And I remember stopping, we were just a couple, a older lady and her son, old son older son came along and kind of loved our dogs and everything, and then told us their whole life story. So he obviously lived at home. He was, you know, he was quite older, but he really cared for his mother. He lived at home with her still. They’d lost her dog, she’d had an operation, and you’d just get all this lovely human interaction that you just wouldn’t, if you didn’t have that, the conduit of the dog.
So I really love how that frees up our humanity, our kind of connection with others. And I think, you know, being a city girl, when you’re young, you are young, you’re tall, aren’t you? Self-sufficiency, you don’t need anyone. People are a nuisance or a hindrance. And you can just get by on your own. And I certainly had that.
It was just like, I won’t rely on anyone. I’m totally good by myself, but actually I think as you get older, actually, you know, you realise the kindness and the compassion, compassion of being in relationship with yourself and others. And I think that, I think it’s really important to understand yourself and you don’t have to understand yourself to be in good relationship with other people, but it’s, it makes for sweeter relationships.
You know, when you get annoyed, you are annoyed because of something that you have learnt. You know, it’s an experience that you’ve learned and that makes you annoyed. So it’s not the other person’s fault, you know? And you have that real kind of understanding of what triggers you, what prompts you into certain responses.
And once you can be curious about that, you are in a really good place to be in happy relationship with everyone around you and you stop thinking, oh, you are really annoying ’cause of this. Or there’s too many people around and they’re just really annoying. It’s kind of like, well, maybe it’s because you need to be with people and then you need to retract from people.
That’s not weird. That’s normal.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: And so I often have, you know, clients who kind of go, am I autistic? Because I’m like this? And I’m like, well, first of all, I don’t really believe there is such a thing as neurotypical. I think we’re all, you know, it’s called a spectrum, isn’t it? Because it’s a spectrum.
So I think we all have our little ways that we’ve learned to be, and it’s really good to understand, you know, to really have a good understanding of that and figure out where you’re comfortable, where you’re not comfortable, um, and then you can better communicate that. The more you can feel, the more you can put words to your feelings.
And that’s a healthy place to be. Because if you can’t name it, you can’t really do anything with it. And so I think being in connection with ourselves is probably the most important thing. And many people aren’t, you know, many people live their whole life not being connected to themselves at all until they hit a crash, a wall, health-wise.
And then. That then enables you, I think, to be in better relationship with everyone, friends, you know, partners, whatever. And then with the wider world. Because once you start thinking about the consequences of your actions to yourself, to your community, and then to the environment, that really changes everything, doesn’t it?
I think we live, we live so divorced from the consequences of our actions, which is why we can buy loads of crap and just chuck it in the bin because it’s going to go over there somewhere where you don’t really think about it. You know?
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: That’s not healthy and it’s not sustainable.
Le’Nise Brothers: No, it isn’t. What’s a one thought that you’d like to leave listeners with today?
Nahid de Belgeonne: So the one thought is tend to yourself, care for yourself. Gatekeep your nervous system because if you don’t, nobody else will. You know, it’s getting, our world is getting faster and faster and more dysregulated. So you’ve really gotta hold on true to your values and really gatekeep, be really mindful what you’re opening up your nervous system to.
Who’s giving you that message? What is their, you know, why are they doing that? What’s their ulterior goal? And it’s good to be engaged. So I’m not for retraction at all, because if we’re not engaged, you know. The people, toxic people are taking over the world. I don’t want them to have it. I want to have a, I want to have an equal, equal kind of footing in this world and all the good people with me.
So I don’t believe in retracting, but I believe in really resourcing yourself well and knowing where you can go in and then where you can come out again, because you also have a life, you know, and to have to have value of your life. To treasure it is to be very connected with it. You know, all the things that give you joy, the connections with other people, the things that you do that give you value.
So, you know, don’t feel either that you have to self-sacrifice in order to be engaged. There’s a kind of stepping in and the stepping out. And I think, you know, in our world there is a, you know, part of our identity can often be self-sacrifice and that’s no good to anyone. You know, you end up burning out and being of no use whatsoever.
So that really understanding your boundaries, how you thrive and where you need to repair, I think is useful. So, but ultimately gate keep your nervous system. That’s really important.
Le’Nise Brothers: I love that. Gatekeep your nervous system. That’s, that’s so great. So if people want to get a copy of your book.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: How can they get the book?
How can they find out more about you, your programs, the work that you do?
Nahid de Belgeonne: Sure. So I do a few things. I teach online in the main, so I have a program called the Soothe Program, and it’s a 12 week program and it’s really about unlocking those deeply held patterns that you’ve had for a really long time. And really you’ve been, you’ve tried a lots of different things and it hasn’t worked and you’re really ready to change it.
So that’s where, you know, are my work steps in, all sorts of issues, burnout, anxiety, stress, and so on. Um, I teach retreats, so I’ve got a day retreat. So I teach three times a year in London. And that’s a full day and it’s just lovely. You know, we do lots of kind of mobilisation and awakening practices in the morning and the afternoon is lots of restorative practices all have somatic movement and folded into it.
And then we have lunch with a lovely chef that I use called Kate. And it’s a great way to kind of meet like-minded people and remind yourself that the world is good. Um, and then weekend retreats and I take people abroad in to Greece. And I do quite a lot of corporate stuff as well. Oh, Substack, it’s called the Soothe Club is where you can find me.
And that’s my newsletter. And for 10 pounds a month you get lots of little audio lessons. And we have a monthly live session with 60 minutes where we all meet and I can meet the community. So that’s a really great place to come find me. Otherwise, the website will kind of be the perfect place, which is the human method.co.uk.
And you can buy my book at all good bookshops, I’m sort of trying to avoid. The big ones with links to awful things. Um, but just, just Google it and it will come up. It’s called Soothe: the book your nervous system has been longing for, it’s out in paperback now. And go to your local bookshop and ask them if they have, I really love going into shops on my high street because then it means that we can keep them going.
So if you can do that, try and do that. But otherwise get it.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Nahid de Belgeonne: It will help.
Le’Nise Brothers: And, and everything will be linked in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today. I definitely feel soothed from our conversation and I can’t wait for this episode to be out in the world.
Nahid de Belgeonne: Well, do you know what? Thank you for the good work you’re doing ’cause this is a really important resource and I wish you’d been around when I was younger.