How To Calm the Nervous System to Alleviate Stress, Pain, Anxiety and Surgery with Dr. Amy Novotny

Today I visit with Dr. Amy Novotny, founder of the PABR Institute, which aims to provide natural relief for pain, stress, and anxiety. Dr. Novotny shares insights from her extensive background in orthopedics, sports, geriatrics, and chronic pain, explaining her unique method that combines pain awareness, breathing, and relief (P.A.B.R.). She also discusses the significant role the nervous system plays in overall health and how proper mechanics of breathing and body posture can alleviate stress and chronic pain.

In addition to her medical achievements, Dr. Novotny is an accomplished marathon runner, Ironman triathlete, and wildlife photographer, with her photos being recognized by National Geographic. She uses her experience with penguins, as a symbol of rebirth and overcoming adversity, to inspire her patients and clients. The conversation covers practical tips for enhancing physical, emotional, and spiritual health, strategies for creating personal and emotional wealth, and methods for managing weight and aging through nervous system control. Dr. Novotny emphasizes the importance of the autonomic nervous system in regulating various body functions and shares actionable steps like proper sitting posture, eliminating inflammatory foods, and incorporating reciprocal movements to help calm the nervous system and improve overall health. 


Learn more about Dr. Amy's work and PABR at https://www.pabrinstitute.com/

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 0:43

Welcome back to A Magical Life. I'm your host, Magic Barclay, and today I'm joined by Amy Novotny. Dr. Amy Novotny founded the PABR Institute with the mission to provide pain, stress and anxiety relief to those who seek a naturalistic form of treatment when other treatment methods have fallen short. Her unique approach comes from her experience treating in a variety of settings and with a wide range of patient populations over the past 13 years. Her background in orthopedics, sports, geriatrics, balance disorders, nerve injuries, and most recently chronic pain and influences from coursework at the Postural Restoration Institute Gave her the foundation to develop this treatment method to address a wide variety of painful and restrictive conditions. Her methods have helped countless people reduce and eliminate pain, stress, anxiety, orthopedic surgeries, sleep issues, and the need for medications. She coauthored two Amazon number one bestselling books. Don't quit stories of persistence. Courage and faith and success habits of super achievers which share her journey on how and why she developed the P. A. B. R. method. Dr. Amy's ability to speak French and Spanish has allowed her to communicate with and help various clients from all around the world, including France, Mexico, Central America, and South America. She has a variety of interests, including running 40 plus marathons, running 10 ultra marathons, including two 100 milers, completing an Ironman triathlon, photographing wildlife and landscapes all over the world that has led to several of her images being chosen as photo of the day, most notably National Geographic, your shot world top photo of the day For more on her photography portfolio, have a look at amysimpressions. com. Welcome Dr. Amy.

Dr. Amy Novotny: 2:57

Thank you so much for having me, Magic. It's a pleasure to be here.

Magic Barclay: 3:01

It's so great to have you here. And just to give the listeners a little bit of context, we were talking off air and you had some beautiful photos of penguins behind you, you know, penguins are so unique and I think we as humans need to take a little more from the animal world as a learning and a teaching. Why penguins? What's so attractive about them to you?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 3:26

Well, it started off, I wasn't really into penguins and I was hired through this method that we'll be talking about to help a gentleman, a world famous bird photographer, avoid a knee replacement and a rotator cuff surgery. And part of my work with him and coaching him on this process led us to go down to Antarctica, where he was having a workshop. And while I was there, I absolutely fell in love with these magical creatures. And I was able to see the harsh conditions they must withstand on a yearly basis. And they still raise their chicks. They thrive. And so if you look them up and kind of the symbol that they stand for. It's Rebirth against adversity, strength against adversity. And so because of that, and my love of watching and observing them for 38 hours, I actually use that now as a symbol for my company because it's what I want others to achieve. And I just found, I was so amazed by them. So why not use that as a way to communicate what I want to get for other people?

Magic Barclay: 4:43

I love that. Okay, Dr. Amy, I ask all of my guests the same three questions and everyone gives me different answers. Your first one is around health, and that is what can your expertise do to accelerate health, not just physical, but also emotional and spiritual health.

Dr. Amy Novotny: 5:03

Sure. So the process that I teach people of calming down the fight or flight nervous system helps people both physically, mentally, emotionally, and even in a performance way. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners so that they can. Think better, have more focus, attention, be able to analyze, create. But so much of our health is determined by our physical status and how well we control this nervous system, since all body organ systems are affected by it. How you sleep, your cardiovascular, your endocrine system, everything is affected. Affected. So the work that we do encompasses all of that and can provide many benefits. And sometimes I don't even have in my radar, some of the benefits, but my clients will tell me what they are after the effect.

Magic Barclay: 6:00

Great. And we talk about wealth as well. People think wealth is just the financial, certainly, you know, what's in your bank account, what's in your wallet, wealth can also be personal and emotional. So what would be your top three tips to creating wealth?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 6:17

Sure. So for me, the top number one is feeling good in your body. And feeling as though you're making decisions on a daily basis that promote your body feeling good, because if you have the ability to feel good in your body, you're going to impact other people in a positive way, whether it's part of your job, your business, or just even your interactions. That so just feeling good in your body and choosing correctly for your health is what I would say is the number one, but closely related to that is emotional wealth. I would say often when we're growing up, we're not always taught emotional skills and how to regulate our emotions. And that can make or break you. And it makes or breaks you in the physical world, the financial world, the business world, the career world, all of those aspects. Of our lives, so learning how to have the ability to modulate your emotions. And by that, I mean, not that you hold in your emotions, but that you allow them to be expressed and you're okay with. Understanding your response to something and learning how not to be emotionally reactive, unless the situation dictates it. And then the other part I would say for wealth is having a good network of people around you that push you to grow, push you to think differently, challenge You're limiting beliefs on a daily basis that help you get to where you are, maybe not necessarily holding your hands the whole way, but just being there for you and providing guidance when needed. And if you have these three aspects. The financial part can come, but if any of these aspects are basically not there, it's going to be harder and more of a struggle financially. And I see that often in people and it's hard to want to work on these personal aspects if you're struggling financially, but it can make a huge difference because it impacts how you show up in the world.

Magic Barclay: 8:41

And our final standard question is around weight. Have you ever battled your weight? If so, how did you win that battle? And what can you offer the listeners who might be in this journey at the moment? And I just want to Add in that from my own personal experience, the nervous system has such a big part to play in the weight battle.

Dr. Amy Novotny: 9:05

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I have a few times in my life I have battled my weight and not been where I wanted to be. It's usually those times. We're actually when I was extremely stressed out, I was in situations and in relationships where they weren't building me up. They were tearing me down and I didn't have the strength or the courage to end the relationship or to adjust the relationship. And it led me to using food as a coping mechanism. And I was fully aware that I was doing this completely and utterly aware. But still did it because the idea of trying to get out of that situation was too stressful for me to take on. And so I just coped through that way. So, eventually though, I realized I was jeopardizing my health. And I started working on my nervous system. At that time I hadn't developed this technique fully yet. And so I didn't have all the tools at that time to go through it. But I did recognize that. My eating habits were as a coping mechanism for stress. So I worked on the ways that I knew how at that time to help with stress. And that was, that was good. And it was able to get me out of that situation. But I do tell people, like you just mentioned, the nervous system is very, very related on many levels.

Magic Barclay: 10:41

It is. And let's delve into the nervous system a little bit more now. What is the P A B R? And what do you really want people to know about the nervous system? I know, you know, we, we live in a society worldwide where fear seems to be the currency, what does that do to the body? And what can we do about it?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 11:09

Sure. So. The P A B R method, it stands for pain, awareness, breathing, relief. So what we're doing is working to get you from whatever pain you're having. It doesn't have to be physical pain. That's some, some of the people I work with, it's trauma, anxiety, stress. We're getting you to relief by working on awareness, awareness through your nervous system. And Breathing mechanics changes, so it's not breath work that a lot of people are used to doing or hearing about, but it's how do we change the mechanics of your breathing? So it's not in a fight or flight pattern, because if you do breath work in a fight or flight pattern, then you're further reinforcing that nervous system state. So we have to work on getting your nervous system to calm down and change your breathing mechanics so that your state can change. And I'll explain that a little bit more. So when we talk about the nervous system that we're talking about, it's the autonomic nervous system, and there's different components to it. There's the parasympathetic, which is relaxation, digestion, rest, and repose. There's enteric nervous system, which is your gut and your digestion. And then there's a sympathetic, the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, fawn, meaning people pleasing or trying to lessen the danger by. Accommodating to the danger. So with the fight or flight nervous system, and we had talked about this a little bit beforehand, just how we seem to have this dominance in the system. And so what we want to do is give people control back over their body so that they can release. From being in that nervous system and what we don't know is how we hold our body, the actual physical way we hold our body and stimulate that fight or flight nervous system. And this isn't talked about in many different, aspects of the health and wellness world, because it's not really known or studied, but. I just want to go over, is it okay if I go over a little bit of kind of the details of it to help it make more sense? Please do. So that fight or flight nervous system lies a longer spine in our back. The more that we follow the advice, chest out, shoulders back, suck up your gut, The more our back muscles kick in to physically stimulate the fight or flight nervous system. An example of it is if you're super tired and you decide, I'm going to yawn and stretch. What we do is we put our arms up in the air, we bend our back, we lean back, we yawn and we stretch and like, Oh, okay. And then you feel more awake. So what you're doing is you're taking your back muscles, stimulating the fight or flight nervous system to waking you up because you're sleep deprived. Unfortunately, though, the way we hold our body and we're told to suck your gut in, lift up your chest, pull your shoulders back and exist that way, you're putting your body in a continual fight or flight state and continual stimulation of the fight or flight nervous system. When that happens, you cause a physiological change in your body where the muscles start to contract without your awareness. When they start to contract without your awareness, they often start to move bones and joints out of a position that would be considered neutral. Over time, if you don't release this on a daily basis, your body starts to change position. The other problem is, as soon as you do this with lifting your ribs up and sucking your gut in, you decrease support for your diaphragm. So when you go to inhale, you breathe in and you can feel your chest lift up, your shoulders lift up. You can feel possibly your back arches, your head lifts up. So if you feel your ribs lift up when you breathe, You know, you're not fully using your diaphragm. So this goes against this idea that diaphragmatic breathing is belly breathing because we don't want to shove our belly out to breathe. We want to draw air into our lungs to breathe. So by going into this posture, that's often taught to. Make us look good. We're actually putting our body in a state of fight or flight and our breathing mechanics in the state of fight or flight, which wrecks havoc on our body. And this can truly impact all of our interactions, our health organ systems and everything.

Magic Barclay: 15:58

So when people aren't breathing. Well, or, you know, when they're doing that very shallow nervous breathing and their nervous system is kind of going into that, you're going to die. Thinking mode. What can people do about that? How can they start to turn that around for themselves?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 16:22

Right. So I'll just be plain and blunt. It is a process. It's not something where you're going to snap your fingers. I mean, sometimes it takes me working with clients for weeks. To get them out of this habit, but some simple things that we can start to do is when you're sitting in a chair, sit all the way back in the chair, let your low back be supported, stop sitting at the edge of the chair, stop arching your back, let your back round out and allow yourself to feel supported by the chair. Also, along with that, you want to feel your feet on the ground, and then if you look at the height of your knees in comparison to the hip crease in the front of your hip, the height of your knees should be at that level or slightly higher, and what that does is it starts to get your body So, Into a relaxation position so that when the next thing you do is stop sucking your gut in so that when you blow out, your belly starts to relax out. You start to feel your body calm down and you can have a huge impact just by doing that little step just so you can start to feel what it feels like for your body to relax and to calm down. The problem is That's only step one, because you're learning to relax, but you don't know yet how to stabilize there. So, it's great to feel relaxed and to feel your body let go, but the problem is, we need to be able to keep it in that position and learn how to stabilize in that position, which is part of the process that can take people weeks to get.

Magic Barclay: 18:09

So many people, I think the nervous system works in isolation and, you know, to some extent it's one of the main systems of the body and pulls a lot of strings. How can you explain to people that maybe haven't studied all the systems of the body, so the everyday person, how can you explain to them the interactions between the nervous system and many of the other main body systems?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 18:40

Sure. So there's several different types of nervous systems. There's nerves that go throughout our body that make our muscles work, where if I lift up a bucket of water, I can feel my bicep muscle in the front of my upper arm work, and I can turn it off. And that's voluntary. The nervous system that we've been talking about today is it's called your autonomic nervous system. It runs a lot of organs without our control. Having to do it. So you don't have to say heart, please beat it's this nervous system that just does it for us to allow us to exist and survive, it tells the stomach to work, it tells all the variety of organs that the muscles need to contract, And because it does that, it can have an influence on these other body parts. For instance. The adrenal glands, which sit on top of your kidneys, they release various hormones, stress hormones. And so if this nervous system, this fight or flight nervous system is stimulated, it tells The adrenal glands, Hey, guess what you need to release this hormone called cortisol or even adrenaline to kick in and to cause a different effect on the body. And so when that happens, then that impacts your heart, it impacts your breathing, it impacts how your muscles work. So there's this cascade effect all because a nervous system perceives a stress or a danger. It also impacts your sleep. So many people who have a lot of stress feel like their mind is racing and they can't let go. And the problem with that is if they can't let go, then they can't get sleep, and then it gets, they get into a cycle where their nervous system gets ramped up. We know, though, that we have sleep cycles of about 90 minutes. Before midnight, there's a predominance of deep sleep. After midnight, there's a predominance of REM sleep. The, when deep sleep is more predominant, that's also when your body shifts from a fight or flight state into a parasympathetic state. So all you night owls, I really encourage you getting to bed before midnight so that your body can learn how to calm down because that's when our body likes to shift over.

Magic Barclay: 21:16

So in my practice, I talk to people a lot about the PNEI system, P being the psycho, N being neuro, E being endo, and I being immune. The nervous system is so entrenched in responding in a way to keep us safe to what we're thinking and feeling. To what our hormonal system is doing and ultimately sends messages to the immune system to create a response. If someone finds themselves in a state of chronic stress, and let's face it, that's a lot of people around the world. How can they head off this pathway, the PNEI pathway? what are some easy techniques to stop the nervous system response?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 22:07

Right. So what I described earlier with kind of how your position in your body is definitely part of it, because that actually impacts your digestive tract. So we know that a significant majority of the immune system actually lies in the digestive tract. We have a gut microbiome where you have flora and fauna that are working hard to absorb nutrients. So things that help promote that will always be beneficial for your nervous system. So simple things like looking at the foods you eat and working to avoid inflammatory foods. Dairy, gluten, sugar, caffeine, we want to try to minimize those as much as possible, because it's going to help the gut heal and eating a wide variety of plant. foods, herbs and spices, they give our immune system a great boost. So things like that, getting sleep before midnight, well before midnight also helps convert the nervous system over and sleep helps boost our immune system as well. It allows for more digestion. So it's. It's a combination of factors movement as well. We need movement. Our nervous system calms down when we have something called reciprocal movement. That means our body is alternating and moving back and forth. So, when we walk in, our left leg goes forward and our right arm goes forward. That is reciprocal and alternating and then you step forward with the right leg and the left arm swings forward. Same thing with running. That's why you see a lot of people who are stressed go out for runs because it forces two things. It forces them to breathe. And it forces them to do reciprocal motion that helps move them and calm their nervous system down. So there's many different ways where you can physically help your body. Now, psychologically, part of the process that I teach is calming the nervous system down, but there's a psychological component where you're learning to release stress. Different areas in your body from their physical hold on you. So areas such as the armpits, the front of the hips. The breastbone area, the base of the breastbone area. These are all areas where we guard and we store emotions from our past. So learning to physically free up these areas and release them can go a long ways to helping psychologically, as well as obviously working with a professional. If you've had. Any type of cycle, any type of trauma or anything, or just even if you haven't, but you want to speak with someone that helps you develop some type of emotional fortitude or mental fortitude, where you're working on how to release from daily stresses or something from your past. So there's many ways that we can take action where we're calming down the nervous system that really promotes our health and. What's nice is when you affect the nervous system, you're affecting multiple body systems, which is always a great way to have quicker change in your life.

Magic Barclay: 25:38

Now we've covered a lot today, and I just want to ask, is there something that we haven't mentioned that you feel the listeners need to hear?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 25:50

Yes, actually, I think this was related to aging. Aging is always a sensitive topic with people, and There's this fallacy out there, at least in my opinion, because I've seen differently, that when you get older, that, that means you're going to get some type of ache or pain. And I tell people, it's not the age that creates it, it's the amount of stresses that create it. Arthritis, Does not mean pain arthritis is a degeneration of cartilage. And what happens is as people have stresses over their life, their muscles activate without their awareness. Kind of as I was describing earlier, and when that happens, it starts to pull on muscles and bones and joints. And when over time that pull of muscles, bones, and joints, they start to shift position. And we start to get our bones and joints out of a position that would be considered. What they had maybe as a child that was free flowing and playful over time as the joints start to change positions, you start to get maybe aches and pains and often it happens one day you wake up after something very stressful and all of a sudden you have a pain somewhere in your body and you wonder where did this come from? I didn't do anything. And so, people will go to a doctor, a physician, and have an x ray, they are told it's arthritis, and be given either medicine, or surgery, or some type of injection, and I say, what if we instead teach you how to calm down the nervous system, so it releases the muscles in the joints. the joints that were being held in an abnormal position. And I see this all the time. As soon as someone learns how to control their nervous system and calm themselves down, they can get rid of pains that were attributed to arthritis and avoid surgeries. It's so powerful. And then once they can do that, they can continue to apply it. Because this nervous system release that I'm talking about, we want it to happen on a daily basis. Otherwise, your nervous system learns to hold you in a different pattern, and it will continue to do so until it's taught differently. So if we start thinking about our aches and pains as something that we have taught to our nervous system, then that gives us the power to change it and to change our life. So I just wanted to clarify that or bring up that point, because it's a different way of, it's a different perspective and it teaches people, guess what? You have a lot more power than simply the number of birth days you've had.

Magic Barclay: 28:42

100%. What a great message. Now, before I let you go, we love freebies here. What can you offer the listeners and where can they find it?

Dr. Amy Novotny: 28:57

Or, um, what they can do is on my website, I have a guide that they can download. You do it, you do sign up for my email list and those, the email list gives you tons and tons of tips. And so, but the guide, it will get you started on this process and give you like an actual worksheet that you can go through to start practicing this. I highly recommend that and it starts you on. looking at how to sit and change the way you're sitting and some of the breathing mechanics changes. And then if you continue on the email list, there's a lot of tips about various body pains and aches. And the best place to do all that is on the website. It's p a b r institute. com. So pain awareness, breathing relief institute. com. Wonderful. Now people

Magic Barclay: 29:48

also on Facebook. people can find you also on Facebook at Dr. Amy Novotny, you're on LinkedIn, Instagram. And Twitter, YouTube, you're everywhere. So people just get in touch with Dr. Amy, she has so much to offer you. And, you know, one of the most marvelous systems of the body is our nervous system. So I think it's time for us all to cherish and love that system for everything it does to keep us going.

Dr. Amy Novotny: 30:18

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share. And I'm always happy to talk with people and just really get them thinking differently about their health and how they perceive it and how they have control over it.

Magic Barclay: 30:34

And thank you so much for joining us. Like this has been such an enlightening conversation. I really do appreciate it. And listeners, thank you for your time. Go forth and create your magical life.