My MB Alex breakdown is supported by Helix sleep. Bring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues, night sweats, back pain, motion transfer, those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door, which is so much fun with free shipping in the US. They have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus they're happy with Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Go to helixleap.com slash break down for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash break breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Shhh. Shhh. Hi, I'm Mayan Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we are sharing a special episode that was previously only available to our breaker community over on our substack page. It was a conversation that Jonathan and I had with leading mind body expert, Nicole Sacks, about the emotional journey to a pain-free life. Now, Nicole Sacks is a licensed clinical social worker who started her work with the very famous Dr. John Sarno, who revolutionized the way we look at mind body pain. She worked directly with Dr. Sarno and she's the architect of the journal speak method and the host of the cure for chronic pain podcast. She has changed so many lives. The work that she does is absolutely incredible. She treats patients suffering from chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, long COVID, things that people were told they would live with forever that literally disappear in a matter of months in many cases. We can't wait for you to hear this episode. Nicole talks about her personal miraculous story of healing as well as dives deep into her healing method with many examples of the kinds of transformations that people experience. The approach that Nicole is going to talk with us about has helped people struggling with fiber myalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, anxiety, PTSD, addiction. As Nicole says, pain isn't a broken part of you. It is information. And once

you learn how to listen to what your body's trying to say, the possibilities for your life are really endless. It's a fantastic episode. We can't wait to share it with you. If you haven't already, come check us out on Substack, my and Bialyx Breakdown on Substack, where you can get ad-free versions of the episode as well as bonus content you can't receive anywhere else. We really hope you enjoy our conversation with Nicole

Sacks and we'll see you over on Substack. Break it down. We talk a lot about extra sensory ability, how we change our perspective, how the reality that we think we're living in is malleable, how much we co-create our reality, and never is that more applicable than when we are in physical pain. Like when we experience physical pain, I can speak for myself, that's as real as it gets. You're like, this is pain, it's objective, our minds go to think like, how do I fix this thing? There must be something wrong because I'm getting this sensation, but the reality is actually far larger than that that we're going to unpack today. And there is a connection to syphonomenon intuition, extra sensory ability because it is about our perceptual system. It is about how we are common our bodies, how we feel safe, what we're able to perceive when we are regulated, and how pain interfaces with that. Nicole, start to help us understand this idea of mind body connection. And I do wanna get into your story because when you and I first met and we started talking, I was just incredibly moved by your own personal transformation, but how do you like to begin? So much of what you guys discuss on your podcast is like hand in glove with everything that I talk about. And in fact, one of the things that has me screaming and looking like I have schizophrenia when I'm walking around with your podcast in my ears is that so many of the conversations get right up against what I'm doing and then I want

to be like, yes, and this is what's next.

Yes, this is how to live in the solution.

So I'm just thrilled to be in the conversation because I think that it will be impactful

in terms of the mind-body connection.

Because you guys, you really do talk about it all the time, you know, the mind body and spirit. What was your worst moment? Well, where did you get to and then tell us how you got there? And also seeing a lot of comments, people saying, Nicole has saved my life. So it sounds like also a lot of people who have really benefited from places where sometimes traditional medicine, right? Meaning Western medicine and that sort of model is not fitting the needs of a lot of people's descriptions of a pain that often is highly related to psychological processes, trauma, things like that. Okay, well thank you for sharing that because I am not able to keep up with the comments. Okay, so my personal story and and I will truncate it because it obviously is a very long story, is that when I was 19, my back went out. That's the best way I can describe it. I was doing something very, you know, not an extreme thing. And I bent down and I stood up and my back was so out, I actually needed to be physically brought home from college. My parents had to come, bring me home, and like any responsible parents, I underwent every test.

You know, the... was so out, I actually needed to be physically brought home from college. My parents had to come,

bring me home, and like any responsible parents, I underwent every test. You know, the X-rays, the MRIs, the orthopedic surgery consults, and I actually have a very, very significant structural finding. And it's called degenerative spondylolysthesis. It's mouthful. And essentially what it means in in layman's terms is I have a pretty severe abnormality in my lower spine that was corresponding

exactly to where my pain was at the time. So it was 1990. And we certainly can't be angry at any doctor who was like, okay, with my condolences, and really it was like a very uncomfortable moment with a teenager. This is a very, very serious situation and you're otherwise healthy. So you'll live to 40 without spinal fusion surgery if you can. But here's how we're going to do it because at the time spinal fusion surgery was a very, very extreme procedure that they didn't want to recommend and they're like, so here's the deal.

No worries, just no more exercise, no more travel, no more riding in the car for more than an hour because the bouncing motion could destabilize your back, very specific sleeping positions, and here's the kicker. The likelihood that you'll have a biological child is slim to none because it would require Like, seven months plus of bedrest to not really put yourself in an extreme situation.

So I'm 19 and I am like whatever's happening with me like denial denial here one word denial denial my mother who is like the quintessential Jewish mother is like this you know just like next to me in the surgery suite, you know, just freaking out

with this, it was console.

And essentially what I can say is that I took most of it

and I took it seriously.

I took the most extreme stuff and I put it on the sideburner

like not having kids.

You know, it was too crazy to think about

and I altered my life, you know.

I sort of lived through the lens of fear

and with enough steroids and muscle relaxers and whatever they used, I was able to return to school. They gave me a little handicap thing to put on my car, my friends loved it because I could drive to class, and I went to Lehigh, which is built on a hill that's like this trajectory, so I was popular. But the long in the short of it is, I went through life knowing that I was the girl with a severe problem, bad back. I defined my life as such. When I was in graduate school and I was studying to be a therapist, so obviously I was minded for this kind of conversation. My mother came across the work of Dr. John Sarno. Now I know that you guys have heard of Dr. Sarno. She called me in like a rather hysterical moment and was like, I know what's wrong with you. And I was just like, all right. And she said, you're very angry. And I was just like, all right, tell me more didn't really think so. And she said, get this book. It's called Healing Backping. So I got the book and I always admit I was 24, I skimmed it, I read the back cover, I was like I get it, I get it. And because I was psychologically minded and in graduate school studying to be a therapist, I realized this is not such a huge leap. I'm having pain and maybe if this doctor is correct, there are big emotions that can also channel as pain through the body. It was a little crazy in my opinion, but I was like, whatever. So I decided to do a science experiment with myself, which was every time I was experiencing any sort of like a big back-zing, I would pause and I would say, why am I angry? And I would start just this very, very little seed of like one level down of more honesty with myself. For people who have no idea who Dr. Sarno is, can you give the gist, and we've talked about Dr. Sarno, and I used to do this kind of therapy, like meaning as a practitioner, but as a client, just for people who don't know, give us the thumbnail sketch of how Dr. Sarno kind of revolutionized the way we think about back pain. Okay, so I always say when I do this little speech that part of the things that I'm going to say came from what he created. And then some of it is, is my work because I have sort of evolved his work over many years because he passed away quite a while ago. But he and I were, he began as my doctor. We became, he became my mentor, and then we became colleagues, and we lectured together for years at NYU, where he was an attending physician for 50 years. So he is the grandfather of mind body medicine. He was a doctor of rehabilitative medicine in the 1950s, and when he to see that his patients weren't getting better. They weren't getting better through surgery. They might get surgery and they might have a temporary cessation of pain, but then for some reason it would be like in their upper back when it had been in their lower back before. He was doing rehabilitation with people and so they would rehabilitate from like their torn ACL and then two years later, they're like, why do I still have knee pain? Sorry, no, it was also one of the first people to identify and quantify that many people who had herniated discs, bulging discs, actually reported zero pain. So what he said is if everyone who is told you have pain because you have a herniated disc, if that is true, you should not have a significant proportion of people who have herniated and bulging discs by a scan reporting no pain, there's something else going on. And that was what his sort of revelation was. Yes, and so what was sort of genius and amazing is that he took that information and he started talking to people like revolutionary idea. He started connecting with his patients and he started finding out that people were reporting, my pain really spikes when, you know, I'm in a fight with my husband or my pain really spikes when I have to make a big decision and I feel like I have no voice. And so he started sort of honing these stories and this anecdotal evidence at first. Now the science has completely caught up, which is so exciting. And he wrote several books, Mind Over Back Pain, Healing Back Pain, The Mind Body Prescription, The Divided Mind. And so he was evolving it himself. And then we, as his patients, We started coming together and we would get these huge lecture halls together at NYU and we would sit on the stage and tell our stories. And then there'd be this robust Q&A and all this stuff. So he essentially was, he's the grandfather of the theories that I teach. And through this process of understanding his work, I started to feel different. I started to notice 10 minutes later after this little science experiment I did that when I identified the reasons that I was like really pissed that I couldn't say, I was like, what just, my back doesn't hurt as badly. My back would go out usually on the anniversary of my father's death or right around my father's birthday and it was like clockwork every year. And I was like, what is happening? Meaning, sure, you could say it's coincidence once, maybe twice. If this keeps happening, it means that there's some process in your mind, in your heart, that is impacting your body. Yes, indeed. And you know what? I know Jonathan the part of the story that you want me to tell it. I want to tell it. But I want to say something about the neuroscience first, especially because I'm sitting here with Mayam, which is, although this is all a very relatable notion, especially in 2026 in the conversations that anyone is having who wants to watch this live, There is solid neuroscience behind why this is happening. And I want to say it really quickly and clearly because one of the things I'm most proud of is that I want to teach people themselves, teach yourself yourself. It's so confusing being a human being. The body is doing all these things all the time. So essentially, the easiest way I can explain it is, when I'm teaching people, they already believe. I could be lecturing to a room of a thousand people and I could say, raise your hand if you've ever had a stressful day and been really overwhelmed and gotten ahead of, right? Every single hand will go up and I get very excited and I go, okay, okay, okay. your hand raised if you ran to the ER that night for a CT scan because you thought you had a brain tumor.

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