In this bonus episode, psychiatrist and REAL SELF-CARE author Pooja Lakshmin returns to discuss how to tune in to your inner voice—and why that process isn’t as simple as it might seem. Plus, in a special segment for paid subscribers, Christy answers a question about how to avoid comparisons and start noticing your own inner voice specifically when it comes to food and your body.
Dr. Pooja Lakshmin MD is a psychiatrist and author, the founder of the women’s mental health platform Gemma, and a contributor to The New York Times. Her new book, REAL SELF-CARE: Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble-Baths Not Included, a national bestseller, has been featured by Good Morning America, NPR’s Code Switch, The New York Times, Vox, The Guardian, and translated into 8 languages. Pooja serves as a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine, and maintains an active private practice where she treats women struggling with burnout, perfectionism, and disillusionment, as well as clinical conditions like depression, anxiety and ADHD. She frequently speaks, advises and consults for organizations on mental health, well-being, and real self-care for employee wellness and for brand social impact initiatives. Her clients include Peloton, LinkedIn, TheNew York Times, 23andMe, Edelman, Pearson, McKinsey, Memorial Sloan Kettering and more. Learn more about her work at poojalakshmin.com.
Resources and References
Pooja’s book, Real Self-Care
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Subscribe on Substack for bonus content and more
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is psychiatrist and real self-care author Pooja Lakshmin, who returns for a bonus episode to discuss how to tune into your inner voice—and why that process isn’t as simple as it might seem. Then I also have a special bonus segment for paid subscribers where I answer a question about how to avoid comparisons and start noticing your own inner voice specifically when it comes to food and your body. Now, without any further ado, let's go to my bonus Q&A with Pooja Lakshmin. So Pooja, thanks for coming back for this bonus episode. Really excited to talk with you some more.
Pooja Lakshmin: Absolutely.
Christy Harrison: One thing that I wanted to talk about is the notion of tuning into your inner voice. You advocate for people to find the answers within themselves and define that as part of real self-care, which I love, and I've personally found so much healing with that approach too, like self-compassion, cultivating boundaries, defining my values, finding my power. All of those things I think are so important and can be such an important antidote to the kind of black and white thinking that we're conditioned to do in diet and wellness culture. But one thing that I see in my work as an Intuitive Eating dietician is that although people may desperately want to get to a place where they can be Intuitive and trust themselves with food, they've been on so many diets and they've spent so much time steeping in diet-culture that they really have no idea how to trust themselves in their intuition.
And they're on this sort of push pull or restrict rebound cycle that we were talking about a little bit in the main episode. And so when they tune in and try to listen to their intuition, it's often coming from this reactionary place and an anxious place at first, or sometimes it can just sound like diet rules because they never really internalized anything different. And I know that's the case for many areas of life, not just food. We can apply that kind of thinking to a lot of different domains. So I'm wondering if someone is in that place of wanting to trust themselves, but maybe not being sure how to tell what their inner voice is actually saying. And maybe there are some reactionary sort of rebellious energy there. Or maybe it's just like you've internalized so many rules that you don't know how to even listen and hear what your truest self wants. How can people start to get clearer?
Pooja Lakshmin: Yeah, so I love this question because I think that it's something that's so many folks struggle with whether or not you have a history with diet-culture. If you're someone who deals with anxiety, right? This can definitely be the case. So my suggestion for a situation like this is that you have to come to it indirectly. You can't be like, okay, now I'm going to listen to my inner voice. That doesn't work. It has to be coming from indirect activities or spaces or thought exercises. And then you peel back the layers on those images or experiences to get to the feelings and the intuition. And so even with values, I think this question also speaks to the person who says, well, I don't know what my values are. I don't know what I really care about. Yes, I love my family, I value my job, but besides that, I don't know how to go the next step.
So I have these exercises in the book, which on first glance maybe seem a little silly, but it's actually about using an indirect approach. So one of them is this dinner party exercise where you imagine you have $200 and you're going to throw a dinner party. What is that dinner party going to look like? It's pretty easy to understand that every single person on the planet is going to have a completely different version of a dinner party, and there is no right or best $200 dinner party. It really is up to what do you see in your mind? What sounds good to you? So are you going to hire your friend who plays the guitar to perform at the dinner party? Is it going to be a potluck? And are you going to ask everybody to bring a dish from the most recent country they visited?
Are you immediately thinking about the setting of the table and thinking about what colors you want? Are the aesthetics really something that give you energy? Are you thinking that when you look around the dinner party, you want to see everybody laughing because maybe silliness and humor is something that's really important to you and valuable to you? Or on the other hand, do you want to look around the dinner party and see everybody in intimate in-depth conversation? Because connection and intimacy is something that's really important to you. So that's kind of an example, kind of peeling out those words and then sort of tuning into that your inner voice. The key is to start in low stakes places. Don't start with the most important decisions or the most important questions. Start with the stuff that's on the edges, because that's going to be easier for your mind to access. There won't be as much negative there. There'll be more freedom to play. And the other thing too is anything you can do to get into your body, get out of your head and get into your body. But I recognize that's also kind of fraught advice for folks that might have a history of disordered eating or disordered body image. So that might not be an available option right now.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it can be tricky for sure in getting the right support around that, I think is key. But yeah, I think there are small ways that people can start to tune in and let go of the shoulds and the intellectual top and try to let feelings bubble up from the body and from within.
Pooja Lakshmin: The key is spontaneous. I have some patients that are in this category where you really are just so disconnected from it. Sometimes it gets as granular as keeping track of like, oh, well, that's what it felt like when I had to use the bathroom. Right? That's a sensation that I know and kind of starting there. Oh, I feel, well, this might be tough with eating, but I think some of it is getting more accustomed to paying attention to the sensations that you're feeling in your body and really verbalizing them.
Christy Harrison: And you don't necessarily have to act on them right away either. You can start to notice and tune in and not do anything with that for a while.
Pooja Lakshmin: Exactly.
Christy Harrison: Well, thank you so much for everything you shared. This was such a lovely conversation, and for anyone who's just tuning into this bonus episode and maybe hasn't heard the first episode yet, can you tell people where they can find you and learn more about you in your book?
Pooja Lakshmin: Yeah, absolutely. I am Dr. Pooja Lakshmin. I'm a psychiatrist. My book is called Real Self-Care Crystals, cleanses and Bubble Baths Not Included. You can get it anywhere that you buy books. There's also an audiobook that I recorded. My website is Pooja Lakshmin dot com, and I have a Substack newsletter called Therapy Takeaway.
Christy Harrison: We'll put links to that in the show notes for this episode too. Thank you so much for being here. It's really great talking with you.
Pooja Lakshmin: Thank you, Christy.
Christy Harrison: Thanks again to Pooja Lakshmin for being here! Now I want to share a special bonus segment just for you, as one of my lovely paid subscribers. In this segment I answer a question about how to avoid comparisons and start trusting your own inner voice specifically when it comes to food and body stuff. I think it’s a great companion to the segment you just heard with Pooja, so I hope you’ll enjoy.
This question came from someone in my Intuitive Eating Fundamentals course, who asked it in our most recent monthly Q&A. And I gave an answer there that I’m going to expand on a bit here. The person wrote:
Hi Christy, thrilled to join this forum. Thank you. I'm struggling with comparison, what others are eating, comparing how I look, and also what is the healthiest thing to be eating, et cetera, et cetera, would love to get your advice on how to deal with that.
