Rewriting Your Brain’s Stress Instructions, with Dr. Tracey Marks

How do you know if you even need a reset? Some more subtle signs of, say, being overwhelmed would be things like slow thinking or feeling like you've got brain fog, having to reread things over and over, or not being able to remember what someone said. Those are signs that working memory is being depleted, or full, or just not working well enough. Hi, friends, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." (gentle upbeat music) Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how we're taught coping skills that don't really match the piece of modern life. So many of us think, "Push through, or don't feel, or just keep going." Does this sound familiar? So I sat down with Dr. Tracey Marks to talk about what she calls our brain's operating instructions for stress, how they get written, why they can work against us, and how we can rewrite them as adults. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, Dr. Marks. I've been listening to interviews, and I've read a lot of your content, and I'm just... I'm so excited to have a conversation with you today. How are you? I am great. Thanks for having me, and I love talking about this kind of stuff. We're on the same page here. Same wavelength. I love this. Yes. So, just to get started, what first pulled you into studying the brain? Like, especially with regard to how we handle stress, was there a moment early on in your life that sparked that interest? That would make for a great story, but I don't have one specific experience that I had. It's really been an evolution. So I have always been interested in how the mind works and seeing the importance of people understanding how their mind works. And so, I really kind of made that shift from focusing on the physical body, I was gonna originally do internal medicine, to switching over to the mind, brain, and psychiatry. From there, though, it still was more... Even though I learned a lot about the interface between the mind and the brain, and my residency, my residency was very psychoanalytically-oriented. It probably was in the last few years as probably post-COVID, seeing all of the burnout in people and things, and being more interested then, and how to help people understand how their mind and brain work. So that understanding could help them better regulate their emotions, prevent overwhelm, and have more resilience. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up post-COVID because I feel like now, five years later, we're just beginning to peel back the layers of the ramifications on the toll it took on our mental health. Have you noticed the same researcher... Like, the same surge of information in your field? I have, yeah. I mean, one of the things that's been very striking that I've paid closer attention to is the effect...