The Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast

E91: Building Emotional Health with Dr. Shahana Alibhai

• Kerry Reller

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Welcome to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast with Dr. Kerry Reller! This week, I'm thrilled to have Dr. Shahana Alibhai, a family physician and mental health advocate, join us. In this episode, we explore the importance of emotional health and how it impacts our daily lives. Dr. Alibhai shares her personal journey with mental health, including her experiences with OCD and postpartum challenges. We discuss the significance of emotional intelligence and literacy, and Dr. Alibhai provides practical tips for building self-awareness and understanding our emotions. Tune in to learn how to foster deeper connections and support both yourself and the young people in your life!

Dr. Shahana Alibhai is a TEDx speaker, family physician and mental health advocate. As the medical director at British Columbia’s largest youth health centers (Foundry Abbotsford), much of Dr. Shahana’s career is focused on those struggling with their mental health. Her insights are highly sought after and she has been featured in multiple major media including CTV and Global. Her quote “We do not suffer from a lack of joy simply a lack of recognizing it” was chosen for an award winning planner that will be handed out to all of the stars on the red carpet at the Emmys in a few days. Dr. Shahana has been privileged to work with New York Times Bestselling author Adrian Gostick in order to publish her own book, “Feel Better” releasing Sept 26th 2024 and most recently her book was endorsed by Mel Robbins. 

0:28 - Introduction to Dr. Shahana Alibhai
0:46 - Overview of Dr. Shahana’s Background
3:21 - Shared Experiences as Moms
3:59 - Dr. Shahana’s Personal Journey with Mental Health
8:11 - The Importance of Connectivity in Mental Health
10:20 - Navigating Postpartum Challenges
12:10 - The Role of Communication in Healthcare
14:52 - Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Explained
20:36 - The Impact of Emotional Literacy
22:32 - Practical Steps to Build Self-Awareness
29:12 - The Emotional Inukshuk: Understanding Emotions
31:00 - Real-Life Examples of Emotional Health in Practice
34:49 - Dr. Shahana’s TEDx Talk and New Book
36:39 - Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Connect with Dr. Shahana
Website: www.drshahana.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/shahana-alibhai-feelbetter
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.shahana-feelbetter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@thedrshahana

Connect with Dr. Kerry Reller
Podcast website: https://gethealthytbpodcast.buzzsprou... 
My linktree: linktr.ee/kerryrellermd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClearwaterFamilyMedicine
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clearwaterfamilymedicine/
Clearwater Family Medicine and Allergy website: https://sites.google.com/view/clearwa...
Podcast: https://gethealthytbpodcast.buzzsprou...

Subscribe to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Pandora.

Kerry:

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kerry Reller, and today we have a very special guest coming from all the way outside Vancouver. Dr. Shahana, is that correct?

Shahana:

perfect. Yes, I know. It's a bit of a mouthful, right? Yeah. No, thanks so much for having me.

Kerry:

Yeah, I'm excited to hear everything about you. And why don't you give us a little brief overview of who you are and what you do?

Shahana:

Yeah, no, of course, of course. So I always like to answer this question, like say if I met you at a dinner party, for example, like it's so easy for me to say, yeah, I'm a physician, a family doctor. I'm a mom. That usually floats to the top somehow, because it seems to be the most stressful or overwhelming role, but I'm the mom of three young boys. I could still consider them young, five, seven, and nine. And I love speaking. I love speaking. I that's something that is so close to my heart and a way that I can color outside the lines. I think medicine tends to be, and don't get me wrong too medicine is a lovely profession as well, but I think sometimes the overall nature of it is, Don't screw up. Don't make a mistake. Don't miss anything. Don't kill anyone. Like, that kind of is the air in the room. And it Rightfully should be, but I feel sometimes medicine is quite a tight rope. So when I speak, when I write, when I'm able to do this and just have dialogue, you can see things that you're experimenting with. You can see things that are creative analogies, and you can change the way that you start to think about things, which is why I love the art of speaking too. So that in a nutshell is the higher level identity piece, but I always laugh too, because sometimes and for the longest time. I've hidden behind the fact that I'm a doctor, or I've hidden behind the fact that I'm a mom. But the true story of me is that I actually love taking care of people who are marginalized. Like, I work with adolescents between the ages of 12 and 24. A lot of them, many of them, have a story. Many of them have a very difficult story. And I would have never thought that that was the type of work I wanted to focus on. But perhaps what gravitated me towards working with them is when I became a patient. You know, that's the more interesting story. It's not that I was a doctor, mom speaker, it was Dr. Shahana as the patient, being on the other side of the couch. And for me, having the bottom fall out from underneath me and going, who am I if I'm not necessarily those things? Can I be enough without an MD behind my name? Can I be enough without a mum behind my name? And that's a very, very, very vulnerable place to be. So I think it's so interesting how we can get caught up in these definitions. When the thing that brought me the most pain is now typically what I lead with.

Kerry:

Yeah, that's really interesting. I can't wait to hear more about that. My kids are also five, seven, and nine.

Shahana:

Seriously? Oh, wow. Oh, do you have boys, girls, or?

Kerry:

It's girl's the oldest, and then boy, boy. Mm-Hmm.

Shahana:

we are like, right. Oh, cool. Okay. I'll have to compare notes. Yeah.

Kerry:

Yeah. I know, right? But yeah, so I think that, I mean, amazing. Obviously I was, you know, looking at over all the amazing things that you're currently doing with your blogging, you write, you speak and all these other, identifications, like you said, like we have, but like, what does that really mean? And who's, is that really defining us who we are? So I, I like that you are, you know, speaking out about everything so did you want to share like a little bit about your story of how everything kind of,

Shahana:

No, of course. Of course. Like, you know, I take it back, for me, my real story was started when I was four or five. So I started having these Thoughts. I didn't know what they were. They were really disturbing and very, very, very deeply, deeply horrifying to me. I, when you're that age, you don't know what's happening in your brain. You're trying to figure things out, and that went on for years and years and years and years. And it wasn't until 20 years later, until medical school, where a slide flash before, and it was a psychiatry professor, and he had a little asterisk, and in super, super, super small font, had the subtype of OCD being pure OCD. So these folks, like myself, don't have any of the compulsions. They're not checking locks. They're not washing their hands. They're not organizing. So nothing to the external world seems quote unquote abnormal. However, these folks still have the intrusive thoughts and let's not be, let's be correct here in saying most of society has intrusive thoughts. That's not the issue. The issue is people with pure OCD. and OCD in general, those thoughts are a lot stickier, right? They start to change the way you approach life. You either approach things differently or you start to avoid things because of those thoughts. And it changes the way that you sleep, eat, function, all of the rest of it too. So it was at that moment that I finally found this safe haven of a diagnosis. And I think when we talk about mental health, I always like to tell my youth that you're as unique as a snowflake. But, when mental health, I think a lot of us don't want to be looked upon as, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or, that's weird. Like, you don't want to feel other. I always joke with my youth, it's that you don't want to be the rash that no one can figure out. And us doctors know that, right? Like, you want to have a name for what you're going through. And what a name does, it offers you hope and it offers you connectivity to someone or somebody else who's walked the walk and gone through the road you have. So I did what every good medical student did. I ignored it. I said, okay, perfect. I have it. We'll forget it, right? Because the premise being I'm too good for that. And I hate to admit it, but that was the hypocrisy of the situation. I felt like I had too much knowledge, too much affluence, too much And too much going for me, and I'll just be the first to call myself out on all three of those that I thought just not gonna deal with it, not gonna deal with it. Little did I know that pure OCD really creeps up during the postpartum period, even for women who do not have a pre existing diagnosis. Even for someone who has no pre existing diagnosis, pure OCD in the postpartum period is very common, especially with thoughts relating to, could I harm my child? Which are obviously utterly and incredibly distressing. So that earmarked the first year of my postpartum journey nine years ago after the birth of my first son. And that sent into a spiral of denial, suppression, blaming others, you know, trying to just survive. I ended up going back to work at four months because work was a place that I could put on a nice shirt, I would put on pants that didn't go up to here, you know, and actually feel quote unquote normal. And yet I'd come home and I would be completely dissolved into a puddle of tears too. It was a cry out for help. It was a call to the crisis line. It was all of the things that we think about when somebody hits rock bottom. And it was not a running out of that. It was a slow crawl out of that. Right. I got into it with 25 years of practice of those thoughts. It took counseling, seeing a psychiatrist, medication, all of it to crawl my way out of it. And I think mental health is not something that is necessarily always curative. I think it can wax and wane. I think it ebbs and flows. And I speak for myself when I say that, that learning to live with it, and live well with it, is something that was a huge mindset shift for me.

Kerry:

yeah, absolutely. I can't believe you remember, you know, being four or five years old and even having those thoughts. Like, I don't think I remember much about, Being four or five at all, but it's amazing what we learn in medical school and the things that we go through that, you know, some of these things kind of come out more. And one, like you said, Oh, we learn more about it. You can, I don't want to say put a label on it, but like, maybe like the diagnosis or something like akin to it. And it's, it's interesting that at least, you know, you got that opportunity, right. To learn about it. Yeah.

Shahana:

yes, yes, like, that provided so much solace, a form of peace in some ways, a form of knowing that when I needed to look into what this was, I didn't have to Google myself. I knew there was a name for it, right? So like, you want to feel like there's a community, a name, a diagnosis, a specialist, even, that you can start to direct yourself towards. So all of that. But I think the message is, no matter what you're dealing with, I think the bottom line is that we crave connectivity. Like, we do. Like, that's, that's the bottom line is that Dealing with something in isolation, dealing with something just in the depths of your skull is so much more scary and daunting than it is just to say it, just to actually say it and say it in a trusted way. So, it took me years, even when I gave my TEDx talk, I didn't use the words OCD. There's a certain comfort and security in saying anxiety and depression. It's almost like the world post COVID gets that. Right? I can say anxious and depressed without feeling like I'm going to cause anybody to do what I feared most, which is take a big step, hypothetical step back from me. But the minute you say the words bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, suicidality, borderline personality disorder, it almost, you can feel the distancing between yourself and that person. So somehow we've drawn this line in the sand of what is mentally acceptable and what is mentally too much. And I always. Bring that up so we can actually say, here, this is what we're doing as a society. But can we talk, when we say we accept, can we actually talk openly about it all?

Kerry:

Yeah, I feel like that's so true. I mean, I feel like even with the postpartum thing, we hear lots of postpartum depression and even postpartum anxiety. We're screening for it, right? But these other things that are occurring like postpartum, perhaps maybe you became more aware of it postpartum, but yeah, we don't really talk about that as much. And like you said, I feel like. After COVID, everybody's certainly more accepting of those diagnoses, but not, I think you're right. It's still not the rest of that as much.

Shahana:

Exactly. It's a proverbial to, and I'll be the first to say it, like it's a proverbial to crazy. And I think we need to really watch ourselves on that too, which is why I forced myself, this is many years ago now, on a podcast, they asked me, And I, for the first time, was told the truth. And there was something so relieving in telling the truth. And I think, I talk about this in my new book, which is called Feel Better, is like dipping your toe into the water. I'm not asking anybody who's trying to figure themselves out, or who's trying to maybe reconcile with the diagnosis, or even symptoms, to go scream it at the top of the, you know, and say, like, this is what I'm having. But I really had to dip my toe into the water and I start, and I actually studies show that talking to somebody who's not extremely close to you or extremely distant from you, but somewhere in between. So I talked to a colleague actually, an acquaintance. So if it didn't go well, I didn't have anything to lose per se, but it's practicing the verbiage of how would you say this out loud, because it's very different when it's in your head versus when you're saying it out loud.

Kerry:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's interesting. You mentioned like someone in the middle, like not a colleague, not a trusted, I mean, sorry, not a trusted friend, not someone too distant, but like in between, I think that's, that's interesting. So how do you use like your story and everything in what you're kind of focusing on and doing?

Shahana:

You know, it's brought a whole other depth and flavor to my writing. Working alongside the youth that I do, as well as being a family doctor. I also work in breast cancer and breast health. And I think all of those elements, one of the key pieces of the profession that I've chosen. I always laugh because during my surgical rotation, the surgeon I was working with said, great head, meaning great knowledge, not so good with your hands. So like, so I'm like, great, because I didn't choose to be a surgeon. Like, that was never my forte, but good thing I didn't, because apparently not very good with my hands too. But each, each of those professions that I leaned in towards Breast health, working with youth, working as a family doctor, they all have one common thread, which is the power of communication. How you are breaking the breast cancer news to somebody, how you're sitting down with the youth and talking to them about suicidality, how you're speaking with the woman who's going through perimenopause and feels like her life is falling apart. All three of those requires a presence, Requires vulnerability on the other side, but requires really eloquent communication, and I think all, and being able to read the other person. So, all of those elements are encompassed within emotional health, or having a higher EQ. Checking in with yourself, having situational awareness. And then being able to be aware of the person who's sitting right in front of you, too. Like, I've worked in the breast cancer world for 10 years now, and one of the jobs I have is to break the news of breast cancer to a woman. And it's so interesting now, over the decades, seeing the various reactions that people have. Some people burst into tears. Others are stoic. Others are angry. Others are numb. Everybody is allowed to have the full palette of emotions. Transcribed But sometimes we are so scared of holding space for any emotion, right? Because that's, emotions are biology and biography. It's how you were raised. Did you feel uncomfortable when people cried in your house? Was it really common for people to get angry and upset in your house? It all depends. You didn't come out of the womb with a preconceived notion of how to deal with these certain situations. It's how you were raised and who you perceived as experts. So for me, it's been having to take a step back and learn how do I sit with somebody who's falling apart? How do I sit with somebody who's angry and it feels like they're angry at me, but I know they're not actually angry at me, but how do I hold space for their anger in a non judgmental way? So these are life skills. They're not physician skills. They're life skills that we think we all need and we all need to be teaching our kids as well.

Kerry:

Yeah, they're definitely life skills. Not, I mean, not every physician is very tactful and eloquent when, you know, really like discussing bad news or anything like that, or having the good bedside manner that the surgeon with the excellent hand skills that are like healing everybody in that way is probably may not be that good at, you know, delivering the news. So, I mean, What I find interesting about, you know, just to share, but the like cancer diagnosis and things like that, especially with breast cancer, I feel like the imaging centers are like getting this information and, you know, doing the biopsy and the, the, the person who's doing that is It's having the discussion with like my continuity patient before I even get to it, which I find a little hard to deal with. Like I'm supposed to follow this up too, but they've already been broken the news. So it makes it a little easier on my point, but I agree. It's still nice to be able to have that conversation and hold space for whatever the emotion that's there feeling at that time

Shahana:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And then sometimes with that can come a sense, not of misinformation, but you don't really know you're having to undo what certain people have said to it can create a very confusing space for all of that as well. But yeah, all of to have longevity in this profession. I think part of it is really having to be self aware of what you are feeling. I would have never, ever, ever Stopped to think so deeply about this stuff if it hadn't gone through my own journey. And the reason is, is because I kept asking myself is how after an undergraduate degree in kinesiology or exercise science, how after studying nutrition, how after studying medicine, Did I still end up flat on my face? Like, I really believed I could just drink copious amounts of fish oil and everything would be okay. Or I could yoga my way out of it. Like, I tried both and both didn't, both were supportive, but both were not curative. Neither are they meant to be curative, right? But I forgot, and this is on my website, that the foundation to all of this is Training your brain, you have to work at this, right? Your brain with the negativity bias is always going to look out for things that are coming, coming in your harm's way. I always say your brain's really good at cautioning you, don't do this, don't do that. Critiquing you, see, I told you, you never could do that. Or comparing you to other people. Like just the other day I had a colleague who works Emerge in a rural town. And she's telling me about this, and I haven't, I don't talk to her regularly. I went home and the only thing I could think of is that I'm less of a doctor because I don't work in rural Emerge. That was the only clear thought I could have and I thought to myself, is that true? But it was this voice in my head saying, see, you, you haven't put a cast on in years. You haven't stitched up a laceration in years. You're not a real doctor. You just talk to people, right? Look at the voice of comparison. So that is trying to train your brain, not out of that, but recognizing it. That's what, that's the foundation of the optimal health pyramid, which you'll see on the website. And second to that is. Connect deeply when I had my when I was going through residency when I had my first son, I was totally isolated. It was just my husband and I and my family. I had forgotten how to be a good friend because all I cared about was graduating and having a kid graduating and having a kid. So I think the bottom had fallen out for me because the found I didn't have a foundation anymore. So this is why those layers are so important to the pyramid, which you'll see on the website as well.

Kerry:

So what, what did you mention EQ earlier? Can you explain that a little more?

Shahana:

For sure, yeah. So emotional intelligence, or EI, when you think about how good somebody is, we all know what IQ is, right? Your, your measure of intellect, and that is relatively fixed, right? If you take an IQ test, that is your IQ, whatever it happens to be. It's very hard to measure. for that to be malleable. EQ on the other hand stands for emotional quotient, right? So your EQ is very malleable. You can get better at it with time, right? Oftentimes people say my IQ is such and that's what it is. That's not the same thing as EQ. EQ can improve. You can actually start to hone your skills to say, can you be more self aware? Can you be others aware? Can you learn to communicate well? This is the skill I had a really interesting conversation with an Ivy League professor in the States, obviously, and he was telling me, he's like, Companies are telling him, do not send me any more smart engineers. I don't need more smart engineers. I need engineers who can communicate, who can be part of a team. You know, this is the fallacy that we just need smarter people. We don't. The number one predictor usually is EQ of what your success is going to look like. But yet we talk about them being soft skills. It has nothing to do with that. That actually dates back years and years and years ago when hard skills were actually, like when you actually look at doing something physical, right? Like physically manipulating something. So that everything else was called soft skills, but now it leaves the impression that soft means physical. Like we don't really care. It's squishy. We don't really think of it as as important or stoic as it needs to be, right? So in fact, I think the focus, the hard skills in the soft skills, we need to put a spotlight on those for our kids. And it's much easier to model those than to actually say it because our kids learn by what we do, not necessarily by what we say.

Kerry:

Yeah, we just had an episode recently on obesity medicine and how our kids pick up and, you know, model all of our habits and things like that, rather than, you know, like you said, just like being told something they pick up on what we do, which

Shahana:

Exactly. Exactly. And that's why emotional health is that much harder because it's unlearning. It's not about learning. It's about unlearning your coping mechanisms because you've developed these for decades until you finally realize that, Oh shoot, like I better, I need to start doing something about that. And I give the Cinderella example that the clock resets at midnight. It's not like I got this. I'm good at it. You're good at it today. And then tomorrow you're sleep deprived and you're busy and you're tired and. whatever happens, but you have a chance every single day. And the biggest thing that you can do is just to admit that, oh, look, mommy did this, or daddy did this. I probably should have reacted like this now that I think about it. That's where the learning becomes too, right? But I grew up around, you know, Most of us probably grew up around parents that didn't have that kind of dialogue or language, right? So it takes a lot of unlearning from the coping styles that we're used to.

Kerry:

So how is emotional intelligence different from emotional literacy?

Shahana:

Yeah, so all of that, I think they're, they're all related, right? Emotional intelligence is that umbrella term basically as well. Emotional quotient falls under there. Emotional literacy is how well you're actually, it's the action part, how well you're actually incorporating it into your day to day life. So you can say, are you emotionally literate or not? Emotionally literate and high emotional intelligence means somebody has a high emotional quotient, right? So all of that to say that they are working synonymously together. Someone is able to be aware of their own thoughts and be aware of the thoughts and feelings of others, and then be able to communicate in such a way. So they're all related terms to each other.

Kerry:

Okay. And so you mentioned all these negative thoughts that we have to learn to undo. How does that kind of play into learning about self awareness? Like how do, what are some practical steps that they can take to build that?

Shahana:

Yeah, no, I want you to imagine an Anakshuk for a section. Do you guys have Inukshuk there, like three rocks stacked upon each other? Okay, maybe it's a more Canadian thing, too. So an Anak

Kerry:

cairn? C A I R N?

Shahana:

Oh, C A I Maybe

Kerry:

stack rocks to find your location?

Shahana:

Okay, yeah, exactly. There's like, so we Yeah. So for us, it's, yeah, it's called an inukshuk, but very similar to that. So you have, you know, rocks stacked upon one another, stacked upon one another. You might see them at the beach or whatnot, too. So I call it the emotional inukshuk, because basically you have the three things that every emotion is trying to tell you, right? No emotion is good or bad. I think many of us have heard that before. We hear it, but we don't really believe it, right? Because we've grown up with the premise that. If I feel angry, I am angry. That's the first thing to teach your kids. Stop saying, I am, and say, I feel. Because I feel creates a way of going, that emotion comes and goes. Emotions are energy in motion. They are not part of your DNA. You can feel, when you look at any sort of painting, you're never just going to see light blues and light yellows and pinks and whites. You're going to see maroons and olives and charcoal greys. You're going to see depth of colour. I call emotions comfortable and uncomfortable emotions. Let yourself feel the palette of emotions, too. But the minute you think that because you feel resentful, you are a resentful person, That becomes etched and sketched into your DNA. So changing that actually changes the way that you start to think about your emotions. So when you think about the three clues that emotions give you, if I made you walk down a dark alley right now, Without even thinking about what you're feeling, you probably might feel a little bit sick to your stomach, or your heart would start to beat, or your palms would get sweaty. So your body is sending you signals before you even have a chance to consciously think about what you're feeling. So that is actually the feeling component, the feeling within your body. That's how feelings and emotions are different too. We call that BQ, your body quotient. So you might know IQ, we now know EQ, but what about BQ? So BQ has become, we live in a very disengaged society. My body's doing something over here, my mind's doing something over here, my emotions are doing something over here. That dissociation has actually become the norm. So can you start to listen without judgment to what your body's doing and just even pay attention? So a great way to do this is when you're driving and stopped at a stop sign, Just think, like, without judgment, what am I doing? For me, it's wearing my shoulders like earrings. Like, I walk around like this. Right? Like, can you actually relax here? Do you cleanse your jaw? I went to the dentist yesterday. She's like, do you grind your teeth? I'm like, yeah, probably. You know, there's so much tension in here. So can you start to just Squeeze and relax. So there's a great thing that you can do on your steering wheel. Squeeze the steering wheel and relax. Because sometimes you might think, everything feels fine, but you need to actually induce tension in order to relax the tension. So if you see me driving with my kids, I might be annoyed at them, that's why I'm squeezing the steering wheel, but I'm also doing this exercise, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing. So that's the sensation or body quotient component of it. The next thing is the story in your head. You know, I used to watch Matlock as a child. I'm not sure if anybody used to watch that, you know, the courtroom drama. And any courtroom in that time period, I grew up with Matlock, there was always a typographer in the corner. Always, usually, some woman sitting there typing, typing, typing, typing. Like, you type everything, right? This is what's happening in your brain. Someone is just like going at it, like constantly narrating to you what's happening, right? Am I doing a good job on this podcast? Is my stomach going to rumble? Is my tea still warm? Are the kids misbehaving? Like all of these thoughts, I call it multi thinking, not multi tasking. I'm not talented enough to multi task. I can multi think a lot. So many browser windows open in my head, but that's where the quote, quote, negative thoughts come into play. So the shoulds, the nevers, the can'ts. If you're a golfer, I call these your mental sand traps. Those are the traps that you fall into. I used to think that you'd want to go into the sand and when I was playing golf because it was a fun thing to when I was little. My dad's like, no, that's not the point. It's called a sand trap. Like you don't want to go in there. But that's what's happening. You're falling into those sand traps. See, I should be able to. Just like with that doctor who was an emerge doc. See, you can't, you can't do that. See, you never, right? Those are the ways that you, we don't get to hear other people's inner voice, but that's what it sounds like. And the last S, the last rock, so sensation, story, significance. We all talk about, what's your value system? And I started off this whole podcast talking about, I care about marginalized populations. But I would only know that If I got really angry at a situation, you typically don't know your values by thinking, what do I really care about? Like, that's an idyllic form of it. But if you get super pissed off about something, your value is somewhere lurking in there. So if I saw somebody get really mistreated, someone that didn't have a high socio economic status, that fires me up. But if I didn't care about that, it wouldn't fire me up. If you go to a birthday party with a climate conscious parent and they see tons of waste, they are going to get their back up. Like, we all know those birthday parties with tons of waste and you're going, oh my word, like, do we need all of this plastic? But if climate, you know, is not on your mind, then you kind of go, alright, fine, let's use another juice box, here we go, right? So it depends, what fires you up is a great backdoor way to get into what your value systems is. And you only have an emotion because It's like a compass. It's pointing towards something that you value and something you find significant. So those are the three S's. Those are the clues. If we can teach this to ourselves, if we can teach it to our kids, and each one would require practice and practice and practice. But that gives you a bit of a roadmap,

Kerry:

So it was sensation at the bottom?

Shahana:

story in your head, the typographer typing, typing, typing, and the significance. What fires you up? What is your value system? It's like my son, my eldest son, the nine year old who to this day. Fair. Everything must be fair. Like, you split a chocolate bar, you better take out a ruler. And it's like, I'm like, life's not fair, bud. But that was him when he was two, which is what drove me crazy. It's because everything had to be fair. So now, instead of getting angry, which I still feel angry at times I remind him, I'm like, You really value fairness, don't you? And then I have to remind him that life is not always fair. So, I think this is the teachable moments too. And we were born with certain things and sometimes we inherit them along the way.

Kerry:

I definitely see how this can be very helpful in applying it to your kids. Like that's what I'm thinking when I have, like, I also really liked your analogy of all the open windows, the taps.

Shahana:

windows, yep.

Kerry:

Yes. I mean, I have that right here. And then obviously I'm probably thinking all of these things too.

Shahana:

It's like I tell you, like you, if anybody could do a thought bubble, and I use moms, but I'm sure and dads are there too, but I think moms are the prototypical example of this as, as we're folding laundry, we're thinking about dance practice, hockey practice, or trying to mend the, the hole in my kids saw like all, like all the different things and sometimes you just feel like you wanna take that hat and put it aside. I feel like we just keep adding to it so it becomes like that frog in the boiling water that before you know it you have a hundred browser windows open and you're not doing anything about it. So

Kerry:

Could you, can you provide some examples of how emotions have guided you and your patients making significant life changes?

Shahana:

Oh, so the book is filled with Anonymous, of course, but examples of real stories of, of really cool things. So one example I gave on the book is this, this young, this young 14 or 15 year old girl. And sometimes I have to talk a lot about what they care about. So I'm talking, you know, because I need to relate to them. So talk to me about your favorite celebrity. Talk to me about your favorite, you know, tick tock meme or whatever the case might be. And they will often remind me that they were born the year I graduated. So that's also a very humbling thought to go, there's this big age discrepancy. So they love to remind me of that. So in any case, we were talking about a celebrity or a makeup trend. And I looked at the patient, I said, okay, so what do you love about yourself? Like here, you're talking about this person, but what about yourself? And she was kind of caught off guard by this question. And then she looked at me, she's like, my left eyebrow. This is a true story. I sent you. Your left? She's like, oh yeah, I said, what about your right one? She's like, how could you say such a thing, my right one? It's ugly, it's this, it's that. She went on for a long time describing how much she hated her right eyebrow. So it was a beautiful opportunity for us to talk about the three C's of what the brain does. How much it loves to critique you. How it's constantly comparing you to somebody else. And how it's telling you, see, you can't. It's cautioning you, holding you back. So that was a wonderful example of that too. Another example was this young man who came in with low back pain. Was, you know we were chatting and I always ask about family history. And he had told me his mom was in rehab and his dad was in jail. And I spun my chair around because my back was turned to him as I was trying to type. And he looked at me, he pointed his finger right in my face, in a nice way, and said, don't feel sorry for me. I see myself as a person with potential.

Kerry:

I love that.

Shahana:

So that is the inscription on the book now to, to my kids. I hope you see yourself as a person with potential. Because as a parent, I can't think of. I don't want monetary success for them. I don't want, like, whatever they choose to do, they choose to do. It wasn't like me, where I was like, be an engineer, a pharmacist, or a lawyer. Like, that was kind of my, my, my options of the world. But what I want is for them to see themselves as a person with potential and probably to add to that so that they can give potential to other people. Right? So that they, there's a service component to it. But in that moment, he became the teacher, I became the student, and I began to ask him, how? You've been in foster care all of these years, you don't know your parents, how? How did you think about that? How did you perceive this? And he talked to me a lot about his forgiveness aspect, him having to accept the childhood that he did have. But him also striving to undo the cycle, to break the cycle. So it was all about perception. So I've got this beautiful slide when I give my talks, that we, it's very easy that he could perceive, had perceived all of this as stress, and why did this happen to me? And he would be in his right mind to do that. That's okay. But a simple shift of perspective, he changed that into his story and he used his story as a springboard. That's what I want for my youth is to use the only thing you own. I always tell them, I said, you don't own the clothes on your back, but you own your story. So start to be proud of that story. That is who you are uniquely and my job and your teacher's job and everybody else who comes your way. Can we use that story as your springboard? So that those are just a couple of examples that come to mind.

Kerry:

Those are, I mean, those are great lessons that you're, you know, giving back. I love it. So you've mentioned a lot of things. You, you, you know, you have a TEDx talk, a book and all that stuff. Can you tell us all about those things and where you can find them

Shahana:

No, of course, of course. So in 2019, the first time I ever got on stage was at the TEDx talk, and I fell in love with speaking. I just didn't know, how do I do this again? How do I get onto a stage? You know, medicine is very linear. Sit, see patient, chart, patient goes, next patient. Like, you know, speaking is, sorry, what? Like, I need to, so it was, it's been a journey trying to get onto more stages. And I've really loved podcasts because I think through there, you feel You can speak, you can share your story, but you can also hone your craft, right? So, I've been on a lot of podcasts, those are on my website, you can check out the TEDx Talk on Emotional Literacy that was from 2019, just type in Emotional Literacy and Dr. Shahana and it should pop right up. The new book Feel Better is coming out September 26th, you can pre order it on my website, but maybe by the time this airs, you can get it on Amazon. Mel Robbins endorsed it, which I was really happy about because I think she even said that it was provided important tools and takeaways. This book is a relatable book, even if you find one, two, or five things that you can take away in terms of analogies, I consider that a win. There's a free workbook that you'll be able to download on my website as well, too. And then on Instagram, at The Dr. Shahana, on LinkedIn, at Dr. Shahana Alibi. So come visit me on any of those platforms. Yeah,

Kerry:

Yeah. I had to find you With the doctor show

Shahana:

Exactly. Apparently someone has Dr. Shahana's so I to be the so we'll go with it.

Kerry:

that's much more, you know, important. Yes. I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing everything and your expertise and we're, you know, you have lots to share. So we'll put all that in the show notes. And I mean, is there anything else you'd like to add or share with the listeners before we.

Shahana:

Yeah, no, I think, you know, sometimes when you listen to this, it's very easy to and I was I was this person. So that's why I can say it is, you know, I don't I don't need help with that. Like, I'm good. Give me the tangible stuff, like give me the things that I can buy or do or if you don't listen for yourself, just we all have a child or an adolescent in our life, whether you're a parent, an uncle, a coach, a teacher, whatever. So listen for them. Like that's the advice. And then maybe some of that will spill over to helping us.

Kerry:

I love it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time today. And yes, everybody, you know, tune in next week for your for the next episode. And if you need a primary care doctor, I'm here for you at 727 446 1097. Bye everybody.

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Dr. Kerry Reller

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