GABBY BERNSTEIN ON TRAUMA & MENTAL RECOVERY | ROADMAN CYCLING

Gabby Bernstein has written nine books on trauma, meditation, and mental health. This one took six years longer than she planned. She couldn't write it until she was on the other side of what she was describing.

Key Takeaways

The thing Bernstein keeps coming back to in this conversation is the difference between anxiety you can meditate your way out of and a biochemical condition that needs medication. She had postpartum depression with suicidal ideation, months of agoraphobia, insomnia. She was raised homeopathic, had real stigma around psychiatric medication. Took it anyway. Says it saved her life and gave her a stable enough baseline to then do the trauma work. Worth hearing if you or someone around you is dismissing medication as a lesser option.

The small 't' trauma piece is relevant for anyone who picked up a story about themselves young and never put it down. A boy told Bernstein she was stupid when she was six. Eight books in, she still wouldn't call herself a writer. She'd say 'I just write in my own voice' rather than own it. She used a trigger audit from the first chapter of Happy Days: what triggers you, how does it feel in the body, how do you respond. Three columns. She says when you see the pattern across multiple triggers you start to see what you've been running from.

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If the mental side of training and performance is something you're working on, the episode on eliminating toxic thoughts gets into that more directly. The Ger Remond episode covers resilience and recovery from a very different angle and is worth your time.