159. Epigenetics
Is there something you really want but you’re deeply scared of going after it and you can’t figure out why?
Maybe you want to talk to your spouse about household spending, but the idea of actually opening your mouth and saying the words causes you to shut down completely.
Maybe you want to negotiate a flexible schedule at your office job, but the idea of asking for work from home Wednesdays inexplicably makes your mouth dry and your heart palpitate.
Maybe you want to speak up when you see people behaving cruelly, but the idea of defending yourself and others results in cold sweat and a strong desire to leave the room.
There can be lots of reasons why we don’t take action even though we want to.
(It’s something we talk about all the time here on the Satisfied AF podcast).
This week I want to talk about a reason that might not have occurred to you, one you might not even be aware exists at all.
If you feel big fear about something, and you can’t think of a logical reason that fear exists, it may be the result of epigenetics.
Epi-what-who?
To my layperson understanding, the main idea of epigenetics is that experiences and behavior can impact not just the person who experiences them, but also that person’s offspring, the offspring’s offspring, etc.
So, for instance, things that happened to your grandma in her life could impact how you experience things in your life.
This is very science-y, and I am not a scientist, but I think there are important implications for coaching.
For instance, if your grandma had difficult or frightening experiences relating to finances (and many of our grandmas likely did, since women had fewer rights and avenues available to them when it came to making and accessing their own money), you could also experience fear or dread when it comes to handling or having conversations about your own finances.
It’s also important to say: this is not bad news.
Learning about epigenetics doesn’t mean you’re screwed.
Instead, it’s a way to understand yourself (and other people) more deeply.
And it’s an additional reason to be kind and encouraging with yourself instead of being critical and judging yourself.
If you have inherited fear about something, that doesn’t mean you’re bad in any way. Nor does it mean your relative was bad. It just means you may be starting from a different spot than someone else.
And when we start from a different spot, we may need different steps or a different route to get to the place we want to go.
But we can still get there.
Join me today to learn more about the science of epigenetics, how it might be impacting you, and how you can create a wildly delicious life even if it is.
My small group coaching program, Satisfied AF, is officially open for enrollment! Click here to schedule a consult call for Satisfied AF and we can figure out what’s not working in your life and career as well as how to transform it into something that delights you.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What the science of epigenetics entails.
How I think about the impact of epigenetics from a coaching point of view.
Why I believe it’s important to consider epigenetics when it comes to building your wildly satisfying life.
The conclusions we often jump to when we struggle to take action.
How understanding the concept of epigenetics can give context for your (and others’) behavior and experiences.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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Check out my post on what I learned at Lesbians Who Tech!
35. The Pleasure Gloss: The Secret to Creating a Career You Love
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about epigenetics.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious day. I’m having a wonderful day. Last week I went to Lesbians Who Tech, which is a big summit or conference in San Francisco and it was super fun and I learned a lot and had some fun experiences. And then Alex and I went down to see her aunt and uncle outside of Santa Cruz. And that was fun, it was really nice to see them.
And then we got home yesterday and I am just relishing in the deliciousness of being back in my own space. Sleeping in my own bed is one of my greatest joys. Alex and I like a pretty firm mattress, and a lot of the mattresses out there in hotels and various places you can stay aren’t that firm. So we’re always super excited to come home, sleep in our own bed.
The weather has cooled down, we had some rain. It’s feeling like fall, it’s feeling moody. And I’ve had a very productive day so far, got lots of stuff done that I wanted to get done. So I’m feeling really good about things and I hope you’re having a lovely day too.
Also, before we dive into this week’s conversation I just wanted to share some of the things that I heard at Lesbians Who Tech that I found to be really impactful. So one of my favorite things that I saw was a fireside chat between Lexi Butler and B. Pagels-Minor, I’m hoping I’m saying those names right.
It’s been a few days since I heard them announced over the microphone and I don’t know if your brain has this, but I’m always really nervous that I’m remembering people’s names wrong. I actually had this as a kid too because I learned so many words from reading books I wouldn’t know how to pronounce them.
As an adult I now listen to audiobooks most of the time, that’s how I get most of my reading in, and it’s great because someone else pronounces the words and then I know how to actually pronounce them. Versus when I was a child I would just make up pronunciations. I actually remember this one time I said something was trans succulent and I meant translucent, but I had only ever seen that word in writing and so I didn’t know how to say it. So that’s a fun little tidbit.
Anyways, Lexi Butler and B. Pagels-Minor – And Lexi Butler, actually one of the things she said was that she has a podcast that she just started. It’s called You Can Sit With Us, and we’ll link it in the show notes because I actually found that to be a little difficult to find just because there’s multiple podcasts with that name. And so I’m going to start binging that and you might want to as well.
And mostly in that conversation, Lexi Butler was kind of like asking B. Pagels-Minor questions. And one of the things that I thought y’all might appreciate was this idea that there’s lots of ways to get things done and you kind of have to check in with yourself to see what’s going to work for you and feel good.
So at one point Lexi asked B. some question, I don’t remember what the question was. And B. told this story about how early in their career they got hired and then the first assignment they were given turned out to be something that they didn’t know how to do. I think they were in maybe an MBA program at the time, and so it’s something they were going to learn how to do, but they maybe hadn’t hit that part of their curriculum yet. And so they just didn’t know how to do it.
And so they were telling a coworker like, oh, I don’t know how to do this. And the coworker was like, just talk to, they said, Brian, so I’m assuming that was the boss, right? Just talked to Brian, like let Brian know. And so B. did and it worked out, right? Brian, whoever that was, the boss probably, was like, okay, it’s fine, we’ll start you with this instead.
And then Lexi asked this amazing follow-up question of like, okay, but if you’re a person who does not feel comfortable telling the powers that be at work that you don’t know how to do something, how else might you handle that? And Lexi then had this conversation about things you can do, and a lot of them were actually very community oriented, which I thought was really powerful.
Like figure out who the safe people are in your workplace, and then ask those safe people like, hey, do you know how to do this thing? And be really mindful that if you’re asking someone else how to do something, then also make sure to express gratitude and do things in return.
So a great example is if you want information from somebody, maybe take them out to lunch. If you need to learn something and someone takes time out of their day to help you, which isn’t required in their job at all, maybe when their kid is selling girl scout cookies, you buy some. Stuff like that.
So I love this idea and this answer because, again, it’s like if you’re comfortable telling people you don’t know how to do the thing, that can be really powerful because you get the deliciousness of being transparent and being celebrated anyways. And if that doesn’t feel comfortable to you, if that feels like too far away, too out of reach, another opportunity is instead to kind of find some safe people to get some guidance from. And then try to find a way to get it done so that you don’t need to tell the powers that be that you don’t know how to do it.
Okay, there were more things I learned, but in the interest of time I’m going to leave you with that one for now. But you can go over to my Instagram and check out some of the other things I learned at Lesbians Who Tech.
Okay, so now let’s talk about epigenetics. Okay, first things first, the disclaimers. I’m not a scientist, I’m a lay person when it comes to science. But I’ve heard a lot about epigenetics and I think it’s really powerful in how we think about ourselves, how we think about our careers, how we think about our relationships, how we think about creating our wildly satisfying life. And so I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with y’all for a while.
And it’s funny, because I think I actually started recording this podcast once before and became so frustrated by my inability to explain the topic deeply, that I just turned the recording off, recorded some other podcast for that week and was like, ugh. And it was funny, too, because I had this memory of recording a podcast about it, so I had to Google my own name and epigenetics to find out, did I already record this podcast and I just feel like I didn’t finish it?
So I couldn’t find it, so I’m assuming I haven’t done one. My podcast team will let me know if that’s incorrect. But we’re going to have this conversation. So what is epigenetics? From what I understand, epigenetics is basically the idea that when someone, and in the study I’m going to talk about it’s mice, but I’m going to propose that it’s probably got relevance for human beings as well.
So when someone goes through an experience, it can have such a big impact on them, that they can pass that impact on genetically. And it’s interesting because from what I’ve read, it doesn’t actually necessarily impact the DNA itself, but it kind of impacts how the DNA is read or how the DNA is interpreted. I don’t really understand these deep science things, so let me just tell you what I do know.
What I do know is they took some mice and they piped in the scent of cherry blossoms, while giving the mice mild shocks to their feet, which I personally think is very rude. But they did it already, so we’re going to talk about it. And then they bred the mice and then they let the little mice babies grow up and become mice adults. And then they piped in the scent of cherry blossoms to see what would happen to the mice.
And from what I understand, when these mice who’d never encountered the smell of cherry blossoms before, by the way, I forgot to mention that. They raised the new baby mice to adulthood without ever letting them smell cherry blossoms. So the mice had been babies, they had been adolescents, now they’re adult mice. And they give them the smell of cherry blossoms for the first time and then the mice become anxious and fearful.
And they looked at their brains, because of course, and they found that there were more cherry blossom detecting neurons in their noses and more space in their brain detected to cherry blossom smelling. And I’m pretty sure they actually took the study further and had more generations of mice, and that that impact of fearing the smell of cherry blossoms lasted for at least a few generations.
Okay, what does this have to do with you? What does this have to do with work and your love life and starting a business and all these things? I think it probably has a lot to do with it because you’ve got to think about if mice had shocks and smelled cherry blossoms at the same time, and then their offspring feel fearful smelling the cherry blossoms, what maybe got passed on to you, right?
So a key example I’ve heard of this, how it relates to people socialized as girls and women, and actually maybe even people socialized as men. I don’t know because, again, I’m not a scientist. But let’s just talk it through.
So if a woman in your lineage, let’s just say in the last few generations because, again, we’re not 100% sure how long this lasts. Let’s say maybe your grandmother told someone no at work and had a really negative experience. Because of that, you might feel fearful when you’re considering telling someone no at work. And you might even be like, why am I so afraid of this? I don’t understand why I have this deep bodily fear of doing this.
I think probably there’s also a lot of impact from interpersonal relationships because there were a lot of time periods where, as a woman, it wasn’t safe to tell people no, especially in relationships. Like women couldn’t legally open a credit card in their own name until, I think, 1974 or something in all 50 states in the US. I think some places you were able to before that. But there was a lot of time, not that long ago, that women really had to depend on the men in their life, whether it was fathers, husbands or brothers, to have access to money, to have access to credit, to buy a house.
And so if there’s ever a time, like let’s say when you’re trying to have some kind of conversation about finances with your significant other and you feel a really deep fear and you feel uncertain about where this bodily dread is coming from, it could be coming from epigenetics. Like 100%, I don’t know, but here’s how I think about it from a coaching point of view.
Usually when we want to create more satisfaction in our life, in our career, in our relationships, there’s things that we know we probably need to do, that for some reason we’re not doing them. And what I want to give you with this conversation is the realization that if some things feel really fucking hard and scary to you and you are combing your life for like, why is this like that? It might not be something from your life. It might be something that was passed down to you from someone else in your lineage.
Now, I think at first this can sound like really bad news, right? You’re like, well, okay, so I have to contend with all my own shit from my own life. I have to contend with all the socialization I got. And now maybe I also have to contend with the genetic impacts to my ancestors of things that happened in their life. And when I say things, I think from what I understand with the mice study, it’s specifically about trauma, right? It’s about pain and danger and bad things happening.
But it’s possible there could be other things as well, right? Like, I wonder if ever epigenetically maybe we have the opposite, where it’s more like a glimmer, right, where something good happened. And then the genome was like, this seems important. I don’t know.
Again, I’m not a scientist. I have read the science as much as I can, but again, I think it’s important context. And I think one of the reasons I think it’s so important is because I see so many of my clients beat themselves up and speak to themselves unkindly when they don’t do something that they think they should be doing.
When we can’t figure out why we’re not taking action, so many people jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with them, or they’re a bad person, or they’re just lazy, or they’re a fuck up, or they’re a failure. And I just don’t think that’s the case. And, as you know if you’ve been listening to me for any time at all, I don’t think speaking to yourself in that manner is going to give you long-term motivation to change your behavior.
So learning about epigenetics may seem like really bad news, like I was saying before. But I actually think it’s really good news because I think it can help you contextualize the things that are happening in your life. It can help you understand why something might feel really scary. And if there’s something you want to do in your life that you’re not doing and you haven’t been breaking it down into super small steps and then celebrating the shit out of yourself as you move forward on it, a lot of people don’t do that because they think they shouldn’t have to.
But let’s say you find out about epigenetics and you’re like, well, no wonder this feels fucking hard and terrible. So of course, it makes total sense to break it down into these tiny, tiny steps and then celebrate the shit out of myself, because maybe I’m overcoming this intergenerational fear.
Maybe my fear of doing this thing, whether it’s public speaking, or setting boundaries in a personal relationship, or changing jobs. Maybe my fear of this isn’t the same as everyone else’s fear. Maybe I’m having a different experience here. And maybe it’s okay, even useful, even wonderful to treat myself with kindness and gentleness as I go about figuring this out.
Maybe I don’t need to minimize the thing that I’m trying to work on, like saying it’s just a talk, lots of people do talks. Maybe instead, I need to really celebrate like, hey, for reasons I don’t totally understand this feels really hard to me. How do I want to navigate that? Do I want to go after it anyways? Is there something easier I could go after? Can I break it down into smaller pieces? Do I need more celebration? Do I need more comfort?
Do I need to show myself how this is actually really safe, even if it feels really dangerous to me? Because, again, if you think about those mice, the scent of cherry blossoms is not dangerous. What the scientists did was they, I mean, from my understanding, created an associative connection, right? An associative connection between the cherry blossoms and the shocks to the feet.
The cherry blossom scent wasn’t actually causing the shocks to the feet, so it in itself wasn’t dangerous. But because they happened at the same time, the brain created this connection like these go together, so when you smell the cherry blossoms you feel fear.
So that’s actually another element of this to really kind of think about is like, oh, is the thing that I feel afraid of, was that actually like the thing that was the problem or did that just happen alongside it? So if you think that’s really interesting conceptually, you should go listen to my podcast episode about the pleasure gloss because the pleasure gloss is sort of the opposite. It’s when you develop an affinity for something because it’s associated with an area where you get pleasure or a reward, right?
The quintessential example is runners. Sometimes when they look at their running shoes, they’ll get a little runner’s high even though they haven’t run yet because their brain has come to associate the shoes with the running. And the running is when the runner’s high happens, so sometimes just looking at the shoes can create the high.
So epigenetics is more like a displeasure gloss. Although again, it’s possible it works in the pleasure direction too, but it’s intergenerational, right? So the podcast on the pleasure gloss is about things from your own life and experiences, whereas the concept of epigenetics is really putting it into context that you came from somewhere and things happened to the people you came from.
And the things that happened to the people you came from may actually be having really big impacts on your life in ways that are hard to decipher because they may seem mysterious to you until you realize this concept and you think about the lives of people from the last generation and the generations before that. And then you’re like, wait a minute, this might make total sense.
So some of the key things you might take away from this episode are, you probably make more sense than you think you do. And you make sense in a bigger context than maybe the one you’ve been considering. And even if epigenetics gear you up to be having a certain experience, we’re not mice, right?
We have a lot of tools that mice don’t have and you might be able to overcome epigenetic functions or epigenetic preferences because you can have awareness of them and because you can break things down into smaller steps and you can create pleasure glosses to counterbalance the epigenetics.
And if nothing else, I think this is just an invitation to be so much more gentle and kind to yourself in understanding that there are so many influences on you. And usually what these influences are trying to do, they’re trying to keep you safe. They’re trying to keep you out of pain and out of danger. But they’re not always sophisticated in how they do that.
So sometimes the way these influences try to protect us is by shutting us down from having access to the things we really want, like switching industries or moving to a different country, or having a difficult conversation with our partner, or saying no at work, or speaking up publicly, right?
So that’s another example that I think is really key. Like if there’s something you want to speak up about and you’re struggling to speak up about it, in addition to it being about anything going on in your own life or the timeline in which you’ve been alive and the things you’ve witnessed happen to other people, it could also go back further than that, and it could be something that was passed onto you genetically.
So again, even though some of this may sound like bad news, I think it’s very good news. I think you can use this information to have a more curious, compassionate relationship with yourself. And I think, again, you can still go after all of those really big goals, but having this awareness might change how you go after them. And it might change the methodology with which you pursue them, and especially how you speak to yourself, how you treat yourself and how you celebrate yourself along the way.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Thank you so much. Have a lovely week, and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello, happy Wednesday. I hope you’re having a glorious day. I’m having a wonderful day. Last week I went to Lesbians Who Tech, which is a big summit or conference in San Francisco and it was super fun and I learned a lot and had some fun experiences. And then Alex and I went down to see her aunt and uncle outside of Santa Cruz. And that was fun, it was really nice to see them.
And then we got home yesterday and I am just relishing in the deliciousness of being back in my own space. Sleeping in my own bed is one of my greatest joys. Alex and I like a pretty firm mattress, and a lot of the mattresses out there in hotels and various places you can stay aren’t that firm. So we’re always super excited to come home, sleep in our own bed.
The weather has cooled down, we had some rain. It’s feeling like fall, it’s feeling moody. And I’ve had a very productive day so far, got lots of stuff done that I wanted to get done. So I’m feeling really good about things and I hope you’re having a lovely day too.
Also, before we dive into this week’s conversation I just wanted to share some of the things that I heard at Lesbians Who Tech that I found to be really impactful. So one of my favorite things that I saw was a fireside chat between Lexi Butler and B. Pagels-Minor, I’m hoping I’m saying those names right.
It’s been a few days since I heard them announced over the microphone and I don’t know if your brain has this, but I’m always really nervous that I’m remembering people’s names wrong. I actually had this as a kid too because I learned so many words from reading books I wouldn’t know how to pronounce them.
As an adult I now listen to audiobooks most of the time, that’s how I get most of my reading in, and it’s great because someone else pronounces the words and then I know how to actually pronounce them. Versus when I was a child I would just make up pronunciations. I actually remember this one time I said something was trans succulent and I meant translucent, but I had only ever seen that word in writing and so I didn’t know how to say it. So that’s a fun little tidbit.
Anyways, Lexi Butler and B. Pagels-Minor – And Lexi Butler, actually one of the things she said was that she has a podcast that she just started. It’s called You Can Sit With Us, and we’ll link it in the show notes because I actually found that to be a little difficult to find just because there’s multiple podcasts with that name. And so I’m going to start binging that and you might want to as well.
And mostly in that conversation, Lexi Butler was kind of like asking B. Pagels-Minor questions. And one of the things that I thought y’all might appreciate was this idea that there’s lots of ways to get things done and you kind of have to check in with yourself to see what’s going to work for you and feel good.
So at one point Lexi asked B. some question, I don’t remember what the question was. And B. told this story about how early in their career they got hired and then the first assignment they were given turned out to be something that they didn’t know how to do. I think they were in maybe an MBA program at the time, and so it’s something they were going to learn how to do, but they maybe hadn’t hit that part of their curriculum yet. And so they just didn’t know how to do it.
And so they were telling a coworker like, oh, I don’t know how to do this. And the coworker was like, just talk to, they said, Brian, so I’m assuming that was the boss, right? Just talked to Brian, like let Brian know. And so B. did and it worked out, right? Brian, whoever that was, the boss probably, was like, okay, it’s fine, we’ll start you with this instead.
And then Lexi asked this amazing follow-up question of like, okay, but if you’re a person who does not feel comfortable telling the powers that be at work that you don’t know how to do something, how else might you handle that? And Lexi then had this conversation about things you can do, and a lot of them were actually very community oriented, which I thought was really powerful.
Like figure out who the safe people are in your workplace, and then ask those safe people like, hey, do you know how to do this thing? And be really mindful that if you’re asking someone else how to do something, then also make sure to express gratitude and do things in return.
So a great example is if you want information from somebody, maybe take them out to lunch. If you need to learn something and someone takes time out of their day to help you, which isn’t required in their job at all, maybe when their kid is selling girl scout cookies, you buy some. Stuff like that.
So I love this idea and this answer because, again, it’s like if you’re comfortable telling people you don’t know how to do the thing, that can be really powerful because you get the deliciousness of being transparent and being celebrated anyways. And if that doesn’t feel comfortable to you, if that feels like too far away, too out of reach, another opportunity is instead to kind of find some safe people to get some guidance from. And then try to find a way to get it done so that you don’t need to tell the powers that be that you don’t know how to do it.
Okay, there were more things I learned, but in the interest of time I’m going to leave you with that one for now. But you can go over to my Instagram and check out some of the other things I learned at Lesbians Who Tech.
Okay, so now let’s talk about epigenetics. Okay, first things first, the disclaimers. I’m not a scientist, I’m a lay person when it comes to science. But I’ve heard a lot about epigenetics and I think it’s really powerful in how we think about ourselves, how we think about our careers, how we think about our relationships, how we think about creating our wildly satisfying life. And so I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with y’all for a while.
And it’s funny, because I think I actually started recording this podcast once before and became so frustrated by my inability to explain the topic deeply, that I just turned the recording off, recorded some other podcast for that week and was like, ugh. And it was funny, too, because I had this memory of recording a podcast about it, so I had to Google my own name and epigenetics to find out, did I already record this podcast and I just feel like I didn’t finish it?
So I couldn’t find it, so I’m assuming I haven’t done one. My podcast team will let me know if that’s incorrect. But we’re going to have this conversation. So what is epigenetics? From what I understand, epigenetics is basically the idea that when someone, and in the study I’m going to talk about it’s mice, but I’m going to propose that it’s probably got relevance for human beings as well.
So when someone goes through an experience, it can have such a big impact on them, that they can pass that impact on genetically. And it’s interesting because from what I’ve read, it doesn’t actually necessarily impact the DNA itself, but it kind of impacts how the DNA is read or how the DNA is interpreted. I don’t really understand these deep science things, so let me just tell you what I do know.
What I do know is they took some mice and they piped in the scent of cherry blossoms, while giving the mice mild shocks to their feet, which I personally think is very rude. But they did it already, so we’re going to talk about it. And then they bred the mice and then they let the little mice babies grow up and become mice adults. And then they piped in the scent of cherry blossoms to see what would happen to the mice.
And from what I understand, when these mice who’d never encountered the smell of cherry blossoms before, by the way, I forgot to mention that. They raised the new baby mice to adulthood without ever letting them smell cherry blossoms. So the mice had been babies, they had been adolescents, now they’re adult mice. And they give them the smell of cherry blossoms for the first time and then the mice become anxious and fearful.
And they looked at their brains, because of course, and they found that there were more cherry blossom detecting neurons in their noses and more space in their brain detected to cherry blossom smelling. And I’m pretty sure they actually took the study further and had more generations of mice, and that that impact of fearing the smell of cherry blossoms lasted for at least a few generations.
Okay, what does this have to do with you? What does this have to do with work and your love life and starting a business and all these things? I think it probably has a lot to do with it because you’ve got to think about if mice had shocks and smelled cherry blossoms at the same time, and then their offspring feel fearful smelling the cherry blossoms, what maybe got passed on to you, right?
So a key example I’ve heard of this, how it relates to people socialized as girls and women, and actually maybe even people socialized as men. I don’t know because, again, I’m not a scientist. But let’s just talk it through.
So if a woman in your lineage, let’s just say in the last few generations because, again, we’re not 100% sure how long this lasts. Let’s say maybe your grandmother told someone no at work and had a really negative experience. Because of that, you might feel fearful when you’re considering telling someone no at work. And you might even be like, why am I so afraid of this? I don’t understand why I have this deep bodily fear of doing this.
I think probably there’s also a lot of impact from interpersonal relationships because there were a lot of time periods where, as a woman, it wasn’t safe to tell people no, especially in relationships. Like women couldn’t legally open a credit card in their own name until, I think, 1974 or something in all 50 states in the US. I think some places you were able to before that. But there was a lot of time, not that long ago, that women really had to depend on the men in their life, whether it was fathers, husbands or brothers, to have access to money, to have access to credit, to buy a house.
And so if there’s ever a time, like let’s say when you’re trying to have some kind of conversation about finances with your significant other and you feel a really deep fear and you feel uncertain about where this bodily dread is coming from, it could be coming from epigenetics. Like 100%, I don’t know, but here’s how I think about it from a coaching point of view.
Usually when we want to create more satisfaction in our life, in our career, in our relationships, there’s things that we know we probably need to do, that for some reason we’re not doing them. And what I want to give you with this conversation is the realization that if some things feel really fucking hard and scary to you and you are combing your life for like, why is this like that? It might not be something from your life. It might be something that was passed down to you from someone else in your lineage.
Now, I think at first this can sound like really bad news, right? You’re like, well, okay, so I have to contend with all my own shit from my own life. I have to contend with all the socialization I got. And now maybe I also have to contend with the genetic impacts to my ancestors of things that happened in their life. And when I say things, I think from what I understand with the mice study, it’s specifically about trauma, right? It’s about pain and danger and bad things happening.
But it’s possible there could be other things as well, right? Like, I wonder if ever epigenetically maybe we have the opposite, where it’s more like a glimmer, right, where something good happened. And then the genome was like, this seems important. I don’t know.
Again, I’m not a scientist. I have read the science as much as I can, but again, I think it’s important context. And I think one of the reasons I think it’s so important is because I see so many of my clients beat themselves up and speak to themselves unkindly when they don’t do something that they think they should be doing.
When we can’t figure out why we’re not taking action, so many people jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with them, or they’re a bad person, or they’re just lazy, or they’re a fuck up, or they’re a failure. And I just don’t think that’s the case. And, as you know if you’ve been listening to me for any time at all, I don’t think speaking to yourself in that manner is going to give you long-term motivation to change your behavior.
So learning about epigenetics may seem like really bad news, like I was saying before. But I actually think it’s really good news because I think it can help you contextualize the things that are happening in your life. It can help you understand why something might feel really scary. And if there’s something you want to do in your life that you’re not doing and you haven’t been breaking it down into super small steps and then celebrating the shit out of yourself as you move forward on it, a lot of people don’t do that because they think they shouldn’t have to.
But let’s say you find out about epigenetics and you’re like, well, no wonder this feels fucking hard and terrible. So of course, it makes total sense to break it down into these tiny, tiny steps and then celebrate the shit out of myself, because maybe I’m overcoming this intergenerational fear.
Maybe my fear of doing this thing, whether it’s public speaking, or setting boundaries in a personal relationship, or changing jobs. Maybe my fear of this isn’t the same as everyone else’s fear. Maybe I’m having a different experience here. And maybe it’s okay, even useful, even wonderful to treat myself with kindness and gentleness as I go about figuring this out.
Maybe I don’t need to minimize the thing that I’m trying to work on, like saying it’s just a talk, lots of people do talks. Maybe instead, I need to really celebrate like, hey, for reasons I don’t totally understand this feels really hard to me. How do I want to navigate that? Do I want to go after it anyways? Is there something easier I could go after? Can I break it down into smaller pieces? Do I need more celebration? Do I need more comfort?
Do I need to show myself how this is actually really safe, even if it feels really dangerous to me? Because, again, if you think about those mice, the scent of cherry blossoms is not dangerous. What the scientists did was they, I mean, from my understanding, created an associative connection, right? An associative connection between the cherry blossoms and the shocks to the feet.
The cherry blossom scent wasn’t actually causing the shocks to the feet, so it in itself wasn’t dangerous. But because they happened at the same time, the brain created this connection like these go together, so when you smell the cherry blossoms you feel fear.
So that’s actually another element of this to really kind of think about is like, oh, is the thing that I feel afraid of, was that actually like the thing that was the problem or did that just happen alongside it? So if you think that’s really interesting conceptually, you should go listen to my podcast episode about the pleasure gloss because the pleasure gloss is sort of the opposite. It’s when you develop an affinity for something because it’s associated with an area where you get pleasure or a reward, right?
The quintessential example is runners. Sometimes when they look at their running shoes, they’ll get a little runner’s high even though they haven’t run yet because their brain has come to associate the shoes with the running. And the running is when the runner’s high happens, so sometimes just looking at the shoes can create the high.
So epigenetics is more like a displeasure gloss. Although again, it’s possible it works in the pleasure direction too, but it’s intergenerational, right? So the podcast on the pleasure gloss is about things from your own life and experiences, whereas the concept of epigenetics is really putting it into context that you came from somewhere and things happened to the people you came from.
And the things that happened to the people you came from may actually be having really big impacts on your life in ways that are hard to decipher because they may seem mysterious to you until you realize this concept and you think about the lives of people from the last generation and the generations before that. And then you’re like, wait a minute, this might make total sense.
So some of the key things you might take away from this episode are, you probably make more sense than you think you do. And you make sense in a bigger context than maybe the one you’ve been considering. And even if epigenetics gear you up to be having a certain experience, we’re not mice, right?
We have a lot of tools that mice don’t have and you might be able to overcome epigenetic functions or epigenetic preferences because you can have awareness of them and because you can break things down into smaller steps and you can create pleasure glosses to counterbalance the epigenetics.
And if nothing else, I think this is just an invitation to be so much more gentle and kind to yourself in understanding that there are so many influences on you. And usually what these influences are trying to do, they’re trying to keep you safe. They’re trying to keep you out of pain and out of danger. But they’re not always sophisticated in how they do that.
So sometimes the way these influences try to protect us is by shutting us down from having access to the things we really want, like switching industries or moving to a different country, or having a difficult conversation with our partner, or saying no at work, or speaking up publicly, right?
So that’s another example that I think is really key. Like if there’s something you want to speak up about and you’re struggling to speak up about it, in addition to it being about anything going on in your own life or the timeline in which you’ve been alive and the things you’ve witnessed happen to other people, it could also go back further than that, and it could be something that was passed onto you genetically.
So again, even though some of this may sound like bad news, I think it’s very good news. I think you can use this information to have a more curious, compassionate relationship with yourself. And I think, again, you can still go after all of those really big goals, but having this awareness might change how you go after them. And it might change the methodology with which you pursue them, and especially how you speak to yourself, how you treat yourself and how you celebrate yourself along the way.
All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. Thank you so much. Have a lovely week, and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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