Interview with Paula James PodCast
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[00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome back. I am so excited to have all of you here. Today is one of my favorites of having a special guest with us. I'm so excited about that. . I am doing my escapism challenge and putting my phone down and it has been amazing friends.
I am telling you, I'm getting so much work done and I also feel This very grounded sense. So thank you so much for holding me accountable and helping me with my escapism out of my phone and into my life. Now, today, my guest is my lovely, beautiful friend and client, Paula James is with pain free with Paula, so please do look her up. We'll give you the links at the very end, but here [00:01:00] we go. Paula, welcome! Thank you, Teresa. It's wonderful to be here with you. Thank you. I appreciate it. So Paula, you and I have had so many interesting conversations and I feel like I am learning as much from you in coaching as you are from me.
Before we get to pain free with Paula, I just want to get your take and your kind of spin on what is it like for you to work with me? I heard, well, besides wonderful, I heard someone else recently describe what she does as bringing, um, making your business, uh, have more ease and be more effective and give you bang for your buck.
And I thought, well, that's what I do. And then I thought, and that's what Teresa does. One thing that's very helpful is you don't waste time, you understand what are some of the features of neurodivergence and because I have [00:02:00] ADHD, there can be a tendency to loop on things and not be able to direct attention.
So as a short example, I had a text recently from someone that was very attacking and you looked at it and said, This isn't about you at all. And so it just helped me direct my attention instead of trying to read it or go through it line by line. It was, this is all projection. So let's put your attention elsewhere.
And we talked about my money story and you summed it up as well. When you are seen and heard and valued money flows into your life when you're not, it doesn't. So now I can just put my focus on showing up online, creating my own podcast, putting value out into the world. And I don't have to go into all of the things I tried that didn't work.
I can just easily put my attention on what's effective. And then I get more bang for my buck out of the time I spent with you and the time that I spend, [00:03:00] um, directing my attention into my personal life, into my business. Oh my gosh. I love that. It gave me chills. Paula, how did you get your name? What does it to me when I hear pain free with Paula?
I think if I see you, I am going to learn how to live my life pain free and I feel like I should just give you money by hearing your title. So can you tell me a little bit About what does that mean? What kind of services do you offer? And then we actually have a special, a very, very special topic for to the two very special topics for today.
So I am a movement specialist and I got into this field because of a vehicle accident that left me with 10 years of low back and neck pain. So I absolutely understand not just what is it like to have something that hurts. [00:04:00] But to hurt all day, every day for a long time, and what the impact is on your life, on your sense of humor, on your patience with other people, on you having a sense of horizon and possibilities in your life, right?
Because then you start planning your day around, well, what if I hurt more today? What if those chairs bother me? I saw a lot of health professionals during that 10 years and I still hurt all the time and it was me learning how to align my body differently and get all my parts working together more like a harmonious team that took me out of pain completely and I don't have pain now.
So I'm interested in that for other people is, well, how can we get your body a little bit of a reset? reset the muscle length and tone, but also just give you a reset in how you are relating to interacting with your own physical [00:05:00] self so that you, right, then the world opens. Oh, I'd like to go for a walk.
It's not like climbing Mount Everest. Oh, I'd like to go to that event and it won't wear me out. I can sit in the chairs or I can make the chairs work for me so that you have more possibilities in your own life. And that you get to show up to connect with yourself, to connect with other people. Because chronic pain like that, it's almost like being in poverty.
Oh, I'd like to, but I can't afford it. Oh, that would be too much for me. And so what I'd like is to help more people have the effect I've had, which is, oh, Now I can sleep comfortably. I can wake up rested. I can do things that I would enjoy doing. I can show up for people in my life. I can show up for myself.
I absolutely love that. Oh my gosh. I like sign me up and, uh, I'm just so excited to work so much more with you in the [00:06:00] future. Right. That just, That sounds beautiful. So you and I have talked multiple times about this word, this thing that's called hypermobility. And I think the thing I'm going to tell a little bit of my backstory, and then that's kind of how it was brought up with you.
Right. And then you can kind of explain the whole audience about what is hypermobility? What if you have it, but you don't know what it means? And what if you don't, nobody's ever told you, you have it, but these are the symptoms, right? And then we'll move into some, tips and tricks to help you.
Hypermobility, I was always told growing all growing up and into my twenties, thirties, forties of how flexible I was. I was always over flexible. Everybody always said you really could be, you know, uh, a professional gymnast because you could [00:07:00] go over the amount. Sometimes kids would think that I'm weird because my joints flex further.
I don't know if you could tell in this, shirt, but my joints overflex. Right. So for me being so athletic growing up, it was Nice because I could do things that other people could do, couldn't do. And I had a lot of muscles, right? I always had to have a lot of muscles to not be in pain. Right. Yeah. As I'm getting older, what I am noticing is.
As I don't have as much muscles as I did, I do notice that my pain has gone up and nobody really has a really good explanation for me of how to reduce the amount of pain in my body. And so you've taught me in coaching sessions, you taught me, it's like, you're so passionate about it. You can't. Not help other people, right?
So you've told me a few [00:08:00] tips and tricks in our coaching sessions, but I'm going to pass the baton to you so you can tell everybody else what is hypermobility? What if you've been told you have hypermobility, but you don't know what that means? And what if nobody's ever told you you're hypermobile, but maybe you have it.
Great. So, let's back up just a little bit and talk about what is connective tissue, , also known as fascia, F A S C I A. So, connective tissue is a little bit like a bubble wrap that goes around every cell in your body, and that's what holds things in place, right? So, like, when you jump up and down, you don't shuffle up your stomach and your liver.
Like, your heart stays where it is. It's anchored in place by that connective tissue. And so it is, I have heard it described as an organ of shape or structure, right? So it's another really important body system. And so it holds the cells and [00:09:00] organs in place. It binds muscle cells into groups so that when a muscle cell contracts, it's contracting along a line and that's along that line of connective tissue.
And then when you get. Thicker sections of connective tissue, we call those tendons or ligaments, and the ligaments in particular provide boundaries that limit the range of motion in a joint, and these connective tissues can create, um, what are the fancy term is kinematic chains, which provides some efficiency.
So if you have a kinematic chain, so then when you make a change, it ripples through the system. So, for example, a squirrel tail, there's not much there, right? There's bones and skin and fluff, but it's not a really muscly thing. But there are ligaments that go along holding those bones together.
And so then a squirrel makes a small movement at the base of the tail, and just like [00:10:00] the Jacob's Ladder here, that movement ripples up through the tail. In somebody that has regular average connective tissue, Their joints are not super flexible like yours, and then they get the benefit of kinematic chains like this because they make one muscle action in one place and it ripples through the tendons and the ligaments.
Now, people who are hypermobile have what's called variant connective tissue, and It's just stretchier. So if you think about like a car steering wheel, some cars are very responsive and you turn the wheel just a little bit and then the the wheels of the car turn. And other cars there's a lot of play, so you have to turn the wheel quite a bit before the wheels catch up.
And so someone with this variant connective tissue, it's like there's more play in the system. And because there's more play in the system, sometimes you don't quite know how much effort is required, right? How far do you have to turn the wheel before? [00:11:00] The tires turn and because there's more play in the system, then the muscles have to do more work stabilizing the joints because the ligaments aren't.
Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And because the ligaments aren't are allowing more play in the joints. Your, your muscular effort is not as efficient because you don't have those kinematic chains like the squirrel tail, you would imagine that the squirrel needs to go and move every single bone in the tail through muscular effort, instead of it twitches one muscle and there's a ripple effect.
Is that making sense? Totally. Yeah. What's also a big deal then, if your ligaments are not providing as much structural support to the joints, is it can be easy to dislocate a joint completely. Or to have things just shift [00:12:00] enough so that you get pressure on a nerve or so that you aggravate a joint capsule because the bones are moving further in relation to each other than kind of the blueprint intended.
Yeah, because this connective tissue is everywhere. It also is in the walls of the blood cells. And so people with variant connective tissue sometimes get dizzy if they stand up quickly or spend a long time standing because the blood vessels. Allow a lot of the the liquid volume in the blood in the lymph to drop with the pull of gravity and so then you stand up and there's less blood in your head and more in your feet and that can be to the extreme, called POTS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or it might not be enough to be diagnosed, but some of these folks find like if they, if they take a long hot shower, They could just pass out or [00:13:00] standing in line can be very difficult for them, right?
They can feel dizzy. They can feel faint. So those are some, but it can also cause issues with digestion, right? Because the connective tissue is everywhere. There's not really an area that it doesn't touch in terms of your physical body and, and depending on your situation, you might have more or less, Influence on on different body systems.
Does it does that much make sense so far? It totally does. I'm curious, though. How does hypermobility and neurodivergent individuals connect? Yeah, so then that's where that's where I was going next is there are some researchers that have done the very interesting thing of Comparing brain scans of people who are hypermobile and people who are not and so first of all There's a higher overlap like about 20 percent of the general population is hypermobile And it can [00:14:00] go up to 50 percent or more in neurodivergent populations Oh wow.
There is, uh, not every neurodivergent person is hypermobile. I have A-D-H-D-I am not hypermobile, but, but a lot of people who are A DHD, autistic, dyslexic, different kinds of neurodivergence also have hypermobility as one of the, one of the things that's going on.
Of neurodivergent people who are also hypermobile, so it's, not a one to one, , but there are more neurodivergent people are hypermobile than in the general population. And here's what's also interesting then when researchers do brain scans comparing hypermobile people with people who are not hypermobile.
Your skin experiences the world directly, right? And ideally, your brain does not. So your skin experiences wet or dry, hot or cold, and then it sends [00:15:00] messages up to the brain. And so your brain cells receive signals along the nerve pathway from your skin, from your digestive system, from your muscles and joints.
And then there's the question of, well, what's famous in your brain? So. You can think about these as different TV stations that are sending signals. So how many brain cells are watching which TV signals? Well, in hypermobile brains, In the brains of hypermobile people, the amygdala tends to be larger and more active, so there are more brain cells perceiving signals related to environmental stimuli and inclined to interpret those signals as threats.
You've got to be kidding me. No. So if a, if a hyper mobile person, whether or not they're neurodivergent and a non hyper mobile [00:16:00] person are sitting in the same room and then the bright lights come on, or there's a sound in the hallway, the hyper mobile person is more likely to have the brain say, Oh, red alert.
There are bright lights. And the non hyper mobile person is just Okay, there was a sound, but the, there's. Fewer brain cells interested in the sound for the non hypermobile person and fewer brain cells saying, Whoa, danger. Oh my God. You know, I have actually have a story about that. Um, I, so I, you know, I was on a TV show and I, I got in the top 10 of this TV show.
So when I got into the top 10, I am telling you. That place was cold. It was so cold, but when they put us on the stage and they had all of the lights out everywhere, except for on the stage, [00:17:00] they had these like intense, like intense lights shining on all of our faces. And then all of us in the top 10 had cameras.
It's all getting every, and I was freezing. I was absolutely, and I was miserable on that stage because I felt like I could crawl out of my skin. Um, I was so cold. I felt like I couldn't cover my body up enough. And then the lights were actually starting to give me a migraine. It was a lot. And so what I say, if you are hyper mobile and you want to go be on TV, beware, beware of how cold it is and beware of all those lights.
And then the other thing too is cameras. I had so many [00:18:00] cameras, uh, lights shining in my face. And that was, It was really, every single time it clicked, that was a lot for me. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So it gets more interesting. The brain scans also show that hypermobile people have a larger and more active emotion center in the brain, the anterior insula.
So there are also more brain cells paying attention to the emotions and then the emotional experience. The, the individual experiences, their emotions is bigger. Right. So what might be a minor disappointment to someone else, because only 10 percent of their brain cells are processing the emotion of disappointment.
But what if 40 percent of your brain cells, like, like when you, when you kind of check in what's going on, there just are so many more brain cells saying, Whoa, this is sad or disappointing, or this [00:19:00] is the best day ever. Right. So the, um, because more brain cells. Right. Uh, are more active in the area of emotions than emotional experiences are just bigger.
Oh, wow. Oh, that's, uh, I mean, I feel like you just told my life story, right? And so I think you want partly is if you, so if you have a friend, a family member in your life, you want to just know, Oh, They don't have a choice about this, right? Like there was a sound and they just got flooded with stress chemicals.
They, they don't get to decide. So, um, you need to understand this. They are perceiving things as a greater threat. And so then you need to say, well, that light. Was turned on for this reason, or that sound was this, it's not actually something [00:20:00] coming into the room, but give them, give them some context or some sense of control.
Now, the other piece, so those parts of the brain are bigger and more active, and then there's a part of the brain that is smaller and less active and hyper mobile people. And that is the part that processes internal signals. So interoception, am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Do I need to pee? Fewer brain cells interested in those stations.
I, we don't know because nobody in the brain is watching those channels. proprioception, how long are my limb? Is there much pressure on my joints? Where am I in space? If I reach out for the doorknob, how far away is it? And so you get a lot of prediction errors. Oh, I reached out and I just got empty space because I thought my arm was longer.
Or I reached for the salt shaker and knocked it over because I thought my arm was shorter than it is. So you have this interesting combination of, [00:21:00] I perceive the world as more threatening. And I have less confidence in myself to respond to it. Is that making sense? If a ball comes at me, I might miss it.
I might not catch it or block it. And so, and that makes sense to me because the connective tissue, that fascia, is rich in sensory nerves that are sending messages to the brain about so that if you If, if you're not hypermobile, you can open and close your fingers and, and I know how far, what, what's the shape of my hand without looking because it's the nerves in the connective tissue.
If your connective tissue is variant, you might not be getting. Those signals might or might not be getting sent up, but also there are fewer brain cells that are even interested in them. Oh, fascinating. Oh. So when I was a kid, right, we, we didn't have the internet and all the [00:22:00] many, many channels that we have now.
We had a few TV channels and every Sunday you would get a paper, a new printed newspaper, and there'd be a TV guide in there. They would list all the channels and, and sometimes a station would, you know, put on a special so that you would watch their channels. So then. The question is, of all these nerve signals that are coming up to the brain, how many of those channels are even getting watched, right?
Because that's how you know about it is your brain pays attention to it. And then how are those, how are the programs on those channels getting interpreted? So it could be more are being interpreted as threatening, right? Like you've got a conspiracy theorist team in the brain. Um, and it could be that more are being interpreted as emotional events and there's just less information, which is complicated.
There's less information about where are my body parts in relation to each other, which means that if you just go to work out at the gym or take a [00:23:00] quick moving aerobics class. You could really get hurt because you don't even know where your parts are. So it's so easy to dislocate something. Yeah.
Yeah. Or just overdo it because, uh, you know, I have, it's like, I can feel everything, but I have a hard time feeling certain things. Like I just forget to eat. Not because I'm intentionally forgetting to eat, but just because I can't sense that I'm hungry. And you know, there's been, I drink water all the time.
I'm, I can't go without drinking water and I feel like I'm going to die if I don't drink water. And that sounds extreme, but it's, that's my experience. The same, it's the same thing with pain. I mean, I get bruises. I will hit myself and get bruises and not. Completely forget how I got that bruise, or I remember getting hit, but I don't remember when or how or what I did, [00:24:00] you know, stuff like that.
So this is all making sense. But as far as the physical movement, Because I've always been so active, I think I've kind of figured out where I am in space. Although what I do remember being super clumsy as a kid. And then as I got old, older, it got a little bit less and a little bit less, and a little bit less, and I'm still known to, you know, bump into a corner of a wall or miss.
Misjudge how low a chair is and fall into the chair because I can't figure out how low it is. But for the most part, I think I figured out where my body is, but that working out piece is huge because I will be doing certain things, whether it's lifting things at home or cleaning out a closet or cleaning my car even and getting in these funky positions.
And all of a sudden my back hurts and I don't know why, [00:25:00] or I'll go to the gym and I'll go work out. And people keep saying, well, when you go to the gym and you work out, you know, yes, the pain comes two days later, but for me, it's not two days later. It's. A couple of hours after the gym, because I didn't realize that I had over maxed what my body could do.
And I am so used to being so athletic that I'm used to being able to do a lot. Right. And now I'm getting older and my body's like, actually, just kidding. You can't do that much anymore. And then a couple of hours later, I'm like, Oh, wow, I really feel that it's not a day or two days later, like people's, I think non hypermobile people feel for me, it's a very different experience.
Yeah, so that all makes sense. Oh, good. So an analogy I'd like to offer is a musical instrument, right? So if [00:26:00] you have a string musical instrument, and it is out of tune, some strings too short, some strings too long in relation to each other, It doesn't matter if it's a Stradivarius, it doesn't matter if it is a renowned concert performer who's playing, an out of tune instrument sounds out of tune.
And if you have been using extra muscular effort to compensate for ligaments that don't properly give boundaries to your joints, some of your muscles are going to be tight because they're tired. They've been overused. And they've been used for jobs that aren't really what they were designed for. So your movement through space muscles are not supposed to give postural support, but if your ligaments aren't providing enough support for posture, you might be recruiting movement through space muscles to handle posture and now they get tight and tired and now you give them an extra challenge, like let's go to the gym, but let's say your muscles are out of tune.
Some are too [00:27:00] short, some are too long. Well, now you're going to have the experience of working out. Being out of tune and that's going to have you feel less harmonious and less coordinated. And even if you managed to get through the workout, it wasn't a pleasant experience for your body. It was an out of tune experience.
Okay, so I had a student join my in person classes this summer who is hypermobile. She used to run and she loved running as stress relief and she felt great. And then the last year she's had too much pain, so she hasn't been running for a year. And her doctor told her we'll lose weight, she's not even overweight, lose weight and drink more water, which did nothing for her pain.
So she came to my classes and we did things about improving awareness, improving teamwork, improving alignment. And last week she ran five miles and she had no pain. She had no pain when she finished running. She had no pain the next day. Two days later, she just had no pain. And I love about that in part is when I asked her what was going on, she [00:28:00] said, well, it was a lot of what you taught me.
And also it was kind of getting out of that binary. Like it's not run a marathon or be a couch potato. So she ran part of it, but she didn't push to run as fast as she could, and she walked part of it. And she says, it's not like I'm going to lose my Nike contract. So. She was present to herself when she was running, and she was using some of the alignment awareness, movement awareness that she'd gotten from me.
And so she just was able to go out and run and enjoy herself and not have pain afterwards. So when you get your muscles working in balanced teams, then you're more harmonious, you're better coordinated, your movements are better coordinated. And. If you can get out of strength versus flexibility, or strength and flexibility is the only thing you do in the gym, or strength and cardio is the only thing, and instead improve your internal map and communication, improve [00:29:00] how the muscles work together, work with your body in ways that are friendly and supportive.
Um, then more things become possible and you're not ignoring the pain. You're not just trying harder with things that don't work. You're just going about your life, doing things you enjoy. Oh my goodness. So can you just in maybe two minutes, give a couple of, uh, tricks or a couple of things that people practical things people could use starting today.
Yeah, so one I like and I'll just present this very briefly and then I've got a I've got a podcast episode of YouTube piece that goes into it in more detail. If you let your arms hang down to your sides. and rotate so the palms of the hands face the wall behind you, and rotate so the palms face forward, right?
We're going to think about a line of dominoes. If you push the first, all you have to do is push the first domino, right? And then the rest fall down. And so [00:30:00] then in what direction are you pushing the first domino? If you rotate so the palms face the wall behind you, when I do that, the next domino that falls is my shoulders start coming forward.
If I stay there, the next domino is my head starts coming forward. If I stay with it, I really get into a whole posture of collapse. When I rotate the other way, so the palms face forward, the next domino to fall is that my shoulders move back, my chest lifts, my head comes up. It's not extra muscular effort, I am not trying harder to stand up, I'm just setting a cascade in motion so that uprightness becomes easy and effortless.
Does that make sense? Totally. And so, if you're working at your desk, you just put a little external rotation spin on your arms. and then bend at the elbows and turn over from the elbows to reach your keyboard. [00:31:00] And now you're already set up to be more upright and your head more over your spine, your neck and shoulders are going to be in, in better shape.
So I'm not trying to get people to micromanage their posture all day or add in more muscular tension. We just want to, um, set alignment in place so that there's more support from the structure that you have. Oh, I love it. I absolutely love it. So Paula, can you tell me where can people find you?
painfreewithpaula. com. Oh, awesome. And what I really want for hypermobile folks is that you outsource some of the stability so that your own muscles aren't doing it. And so whereas we're in a culture where we sit a lot, and especially if you've got Standing your blood dropping when you stand up issues, you're going to be sitting more.
So what I [00:32:00] have done for your audience is a quick tips to pain free sitting. And that is at resources. painfreewithpaula. com. So there's a short video demonstration, some slides showing the anatomy of it, and then also a PDF with some tips to refresh their memory later. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for giving that gift to all of our, do you guys hear that Neurotribe?
We got a free resource. I'm so excited. Thank you. And for all of you, I am very, I'm putting it out there. I am putting this out for the whole world. I am trying to talk Paula into joining the Neurotribe.
So hopefully when my membership launches and you are all joining, we will also see Paula in there. Do you see how I did that? I called you out. On around the world, I would love to do it. I'm [00:33:00] doing that in someone else's membership right now. Just a 15 minute tip every week. And people are showing up live for those and they're recorded.
So they have them as a resource to go back to. And it's been, it's been fun for me. And it's nice to be able to, you know, interact with the people in the group. And, and get them some practical tools because there's so much that's so easy, right? Just like rotating the arms, they can make a huge difference.
And, and then all the gifts you have to bring to the world, you get to use. You're not always, Managing your pain levels. Yes, exactly. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for coming and being a guest today. And thank you for the beautiful gift that you are giving the neuro tribe. And I love you guys all please do like subscribe, share this video, this podcast, and we will see you next time.
Bye [00:34:00] bye.
