Overcome PCOS Fatigue [Podcast]
“We deserve the best in terms of support from ourselves and in terms of love from ourselves.” – Karen Deichmann
One of the most common and frustrating symptoms of PCOS is fatigue. We’re tired. We have no energy. Relief is here! Karen Deichmann shares her secrets for boosting energy and what we can do to flip the switch when we’re feeling drained. She identifies 5 major sources of energy and explains in simple terms how to amplify them so we can thrive each day. Her practical visualizations, tips and tricks will change how you move through your day and life. Listen in (or read the transcript).
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Complete Transcript:
Amy: Today we’re going to be talking about energy. If you read my book, Healing PCOS, you know I talk a little bit about this as we get into the protocol of healing PCOS, and I talk about how women with PCOS are very sensitive to energy. Whether it’s energy that somebody brings in, a friend or a family member brings into a space or energy from our thoughts or energy from the food that we eat. I’m going to quote Dr. Nancy Dunne. She, and I wrote this in the book, she says that “women with PCOS, our nervous systems are a little bit more reactive when we have higher androgen status. In our current culture, that can mean things like chronic anxiety and insomnia and eventually depression. On the flip side, it can give us advantages of perception and motivation to change.” I want to dive in deeper into this topic of energy and what we can do to flip the switch when we’re feeling that our energies are being drained. I brought in an expert on working with people to take control of their energy and use it for greater effectiveness and healing. That expert is Karen Deichmann. Welcome, Karen, to the PCOS Diva Podcast.
Karen Deichmann: Thank you. I’m so excited to be with you all today.
Amy: I just want to give our listeners a little more info about your background. You’re a human resources consultant and a life coach who works with individuals and groups seeking to uncover their true passions and purpose and partners with them to create action plans to live their most fulfilling lives. You’ve also done a lot of work on energy healing. I can’t wait for you to share with us today.
Karen Deichmann: Well, great. Thank you, Amy for having me today. I’m so excited to be with the community. I think we all know that it’s incredibly important to have an awareness of energy in the context of healing because the body requires a tremendous amount of energy to heal itself. We know this because when the body is busy trying to heal itself when we’re sick, we feel exhausted, right? We know that people are always telling us, drink your fluids and get your rest. We know we need a lot of energy to heal ourselves. I think where we go wrong is, we don’t often think about what energy is and where it comes from.
Amy: You know what? Karen, I just want to interrupt for a sec. You know, that’s like one of the biggest pain points for women with PCOS I think is that we say we’re so fatigued, we’re so tired. We have no energy. As I mentioned, I think we are more perceptive, maybe we don’t know it, but to the energies around us and I’d love for you to maybe give us a little bit more understanding of what energy is.
Karen Deichmann: Fantastic. We know that energy powers the universe, right? We know that energy powers us. In quantum physics, they say that energy holds the smallest particles of matter together. Energy is what holds the atoms together so we know that energy is inside all matter and space. It’s all around us. It’s running through us, and energy is everywhere. I think the key for us to get control over the energy in our bodies and to make sure that our bodies are at the highest vibration possible is to understand where energy comes from so that we can ensure that we are maximizing our opportunities for ensuring that our bodies are at the highest vibrations possible. I can share with you now, there’s about five major sources of where energy comes from. Energy primarily comes from what we eat. Everything has a vibration, we have to remember that even food has a vibration. We want to ensure that we’re eating food with the highest vibration because when we eat foods with a high vibration then we’re going to obviously feel the most energy.
If we eat foods with a low vibration, we’re going to feel sluggish, right? High vibration foods are those that are nutrient rich. This is probably not a surprise to anyone in your community who reads your newsletters and listens to these broadcasts that foods with the high vibrations are going to be the raw organic fruits and vegetables. Dark, leafy greens, sprouts, berries, et cetera. Then the lowest vibration foods are going to be those with refined white sugar, white flour, processed foods. The highest vibration meats or proteins are going to be your freshwater fish, your lamb, your poultry. When you think about animals with high vibrations, high energy, that’s going to be your lamb. When you think of animals, the slowest moving animals, it’s probably not a surprise to know that the lowest vibration meat is actually pork.
Amy: I think of when I want to get some extra energy, you think about reaching for caffeine, coffee or tea, but oftentimes I’ll go and either I’ll make some green juice, or I’ll go through like my local cafe that they do their own juicing. That green juice can be really energizing. I think it is because it’s a high vibrational food.
Karen Deichmann: Right. Those dark leafy greens, it’s going to be the highest vibration that you can bring into your body.
Amy: I think it’s important for us to think that food, it’s not only affecting our blood sugar. You know, when you have a slice of pizza and feeling like really logy afterwards and needing a nap, it’s not just the effects of the white flour on your blood sugar, but also the vibration of the food as well.
Karen Deichmann: Right. There are also many other sources of energy that we should be aware of. We can also get energy from the environment. For example, music and color, each color and sound has this distinct frequency or vibration due to the wavelengths. For example, red has a larger wavelength and it’s more stimulating than say blue, which is proportionally the wavelength is proportionally much shorter and it has a calming effect. That’s why when you hear the quick notes of like drums, they stimulate emotions. They express in sound what the color red expresses because their wave lengths are similar. While the neutral tones of like flute or a horn have a quieting influence because their wavelengths are similar to the color blue.
It’s important to be aware, sometimes when you walk into a room and the music is, it’s not really reacting well with your body and it can have an effect on the energy that you’re feeling in your body if it’s not mixing with you well at that time. At times you might need more stimulating sounds, but then there are other times that you need some more calming sound. Just be aware that sound and color can have an impact. Then also in the environment when you walk into a room, you want to be aware of clutter because clutter can also flow, block the flow of energy in a room.
Amy: I think it’s interesting what you said about color and I have sort of painted my house in various shades of like green and blue. I think it’s just because of that anxious energy that I tend to operate at, definitely the color does help calm me. The other thing is the music, and I don’t know where I was reading this but you know, if you listen to like a symphony, a Mozart symphony, that vibration of the symphony is very calming and it’s kind of at the same number of beats as your heart beats when it’s calm. Listening to classical music like that can really have a calming effect on your energy. Then like you said in the reverse if you need to get a little pep, you can put on music to energize you as well.
Karen Deichmann: Yeah, it’s great because I know in my office I have two paintings. One is primarily in a red, orange, yellow theme, and then the other painting is in a blue green theme. When I need more energy, I look at that one. When I need to be calmed down because I just had a really anxious meeting, I look at the blue and green painting.
Amy: That’s a great idea.
Karen Deichmann: Yup. Okay. Then another major source of energy, which we should be aware, it’s probably not a surprise, this come from nature because again, everything has a vibration and a frequency. You can get energy from the sun, from the ocean, and you can actually get energy from trees. I know people laugh at tree huggers. Nature people are called tree huggers, but tree hugging is an actual thing. I love to go out in the backyard and there’s a really big tree out there and if you hug the tree you can actually pick up the vibration from the tree. That’s why when you walk in nature, whether it’s in the forest or on a beach, you can physically feel the change in your energy because it’s a cleansing renewal type energy that comes from nature. Then there are two other major sources of energy that we should just quickly chat about. Of course, I think you’ve mentioned it in your book, but thoughts are a primary source of energy as well.
It’s really important to know that your thoughts are energy and your emotions are energy because when you’re in a good mood, you have a higher vibration, you have more energy, and when you’re sad we have a much lower vibration. When you walk into a room, you can feel a good vibe or a good vibration or a bad vibe based on the energy in the room, which comes from emotions and thoughts. I feel this in business a lot. If you are in an environment where you know your company is going through an acquisition or there’s going to be layoffs and everyone’s gathered for a meeting and you walk into the room and you suddenly feel like sick to your stomach, that’s actually you’re picking up on the thoughts and the emotions of the people that are in the room.
Amy: As I mentioned earlier, I do think that we, women with PCOS are more perceptive to that. Just the way that physiologically, you know, we are at that higher androgen status and I’m hoping that you’re going to give us some tips on in a little bit on how to protect us from that negative energy so we don’t absorb it.
Karen Deichmann: Absolutely, because the last source of major energy are the people around us, because you know that you can be around what we call high energy people, people that bring you up and you can also very easily be around low energy people. I call them energy suckers. They just come by and maybe they’re in a bad mood and that you’re sitting at your cube at work, someone comes by and lay something horrible on you that happened at their home or something bad that’s going on in the world. Then you just feel really like someone just pulled the drain out of you and all your energy just left your body. I call those energy suckers. I think it’s really important to be aware of how to be aware of the impact that people around you have. I do want to refer really quickly to Carol Lourie, I think she’s a doctor.
Amy: She’s naturopathic doctor. I’ve had her on the show many times.
Karen Deichmann: Yeah, I remember. She was on a podcast earlier in the year and she talked about how knowledge is empowerment versus power. I think that’s so important because empowerment is an important word because it talks about taking control of one’s self as opposed to being a victim of what comes at you. When you’re aware of the impact or the effect that people around you have on your energy, the first step is awareness. I thought we could talk about some tips and tricks about how to be more in control of the energy that comes at you throughout the day, whether it’s from an energy zapper or something to that effect.
I think the first step is just remembering that thoughts and words have a vibration and you’re the one that’s in control of your thoughts. If you send a beautiful electrical charge to someone by encouraging them or paying them a compliment, it’s going to send a positive electrical charge back to you. The opposite is true, if you send out a criticism, you’re going to be the receiver of that negative charge. You just want to step up your awareness of your thoughts and words because you can be in control of the impact that those thoughts and words have on you in terms of your vibration so, you really want to make sure that you’re surrounding yourself with positive, high energy people wherever you can. Then another tip and trick is to, again, just be aware of your surroundings now that you know that color and clutter in your environment have an impact on how you feel, it’s just being aware of how you can make a change to that.
If you walk into a room and there’s a lot of clutter, just increase your awareness around that. Maybe you want to pick up a book of like Marie Kondo. She’s the joy of tidying up. If the items in your house are not sparking joy, then you might want to get rid of them so that the energy is flowing positively in your space. The last thing I want to say about energy zappers, the people that come by and do an energy zap on you. I think the most important thing is to recognize that you have control over how they affect you. If you decide beforehand, say there’s an energy zapper in your life and you can’t minimize your exposure to them. Maybe you’re married to an energy zapper or maybe they’re a coworker. You can decide ahead of time that they’re not going to impact you. You can do this by visualizing that you’re a duck. A lot of times I’ll visualize I’m a duck and ducks, what they do is they shake the water right off their back, right?
They just give their selves a shake and they don’t let the water penetrate them. What you can decide is that their negative words or thoughts are not going to penetrate you. You’re just going to shake them off like a duck and then remind yourself that their low energy or their grumpiness is not your issue. That’s really important. It’s their issue and not yours. You can turn their negative comment say into a joke or something like, you know, you may be grumpy, but I still love you. Something that will remain playful so that you can keep the energy light and maybe pay them a compliment and hopefully you’ll get a smile. I know I did this, I realize it took a little while. My husband travels a lot and he needs a lot of sleep. He would come home from a trip and I want to make sure everything’s clean. He would come home then he would immediately find something to get upset about.
We would just make a joke that he was just finding something to get upset about. Maybe it was a piece of mail or the paper towels weren’t filled, but it’s just that he’s grumpy and tired and he’s just looking for a need to fill that grumpiness and it’s not about me, it’s about him. We just learned I’ll just welcome him home and then he goes to sleep and then everything’s fine the next day. It’s really important to be aware that their grumpiness is their issue and it’s not about you.
Amy: One thing that I talk about is how we need to, and I read this in the book that we need to really be aware of the people in our lives that sabotage and suck from us. It’s like those that energy vampire of like you’re talking about versus those that support and stretch us and to think about spending more time obviously with those that stretch and support us. You can kind of with friends and acquaintances that you can pick who you want to spend time with but your family members, it becomes more difficult. I think we need to have these tactics and I like that idea of shaking the water, shaking the negative energy like a duck would shake water off it’s back so that it doesn’t absorb and detract from your lights and your energy.
Karen Deichmann: Yeah. Especially if those with PCOS are more perceptive to energy. It’s really important to be aware that you are feeling their negative energy, but you can be in control of that and not let that permeate you.
Amy: Yeah. What else can we do?
Karen Deichmann: Okay, there’s a couple really important visualizations that I do often, they’re pretty quick. Once you do them once, you can get into the habit of doing them very quickly so they become like a protection mechanism. There’s three of them I can lead you through really quickly now. There’s one visualization that you can do if you feel like you’re in a space where there’s a lot of like dirty energy or bad energy because energy is everywhere, right? Everyone has energy. When you’re in a room, you’re on a plane, you’re in a crowd, everyone is bringing their energy in. It’s almost like germs. You can pick a bad energy from crowded places. One thing I like to do is what I call the violet flame. All you have to do is just do kind of visualize a little flame in your heart center, which is in the center of your chest, just visualize a little violet flame and let it grow quickly so that it illuminates like the inside of your body.
That violet flame is going to clear out any dirty or stale energy that’s in your body. Then you can visualize that flame getting a little bigger or broader so it extends outside of your body just by a couple feet or you can go wide. You can extend that flame all the way through your house. If someone has been visiting and you want to clear your house, you can visualize it out to your house, your town. If it’s just for you, just visualize it going out a couple of feet outside your body and then make a little bubble or surrounding around your body and that will cleanse and protect you when you’re in a crowd, when you’re on a plane. I do that routinely when I get on to planes.
Amy: Not a violet flame, a violent flame?
Karen Deichmann: I’m sorry, a violet.
Amy: A violet.
Karen Deichmann: Color purple.
Amy: Okay. What’s the significance of violet?
Karen Deichmann: Violet is a cleansing color. It’s the longest wavelength, I believe, in the spectrum and there’s something, the cleansing element about that color. I’d have to read another book on it, but it’s known to just be the cleansing color. I think it’s used a lot like lavender is violet as well. There’s something about that color that lends itself to cleansing, has a cleansing element.
Amy: Okay, great.
Karen Deichmann: A couple other quick visualizations I do, one is it was grounding your energy. If you’re in a situation where you’re feeling very anxious, there’s a lot of energy swirling around you, you can do a quick grounding exercise. What you do is just put your two feet on the floor and you visualize your energy stirring at your heart center, your center, your body. You’re going to push that energy all the way down your body, through your thighs, down your feet, all the way to the center of the earth, and visualize this energy being pushed through a cable that goes all the way down to the center of the earth in hooks around the center of the earth and then comes back up through your feet and through your legs, and back up to your heart center. Anytime you feel a swirl of energy, you’re about to give a presentation or something that causes anxiety, just send the energy down to the center of the earth and then the earth’s energy will neutralize that energy and bring fresh energy back up to you.
Then there’s one quick one other visualization I do when I need a charge of energy. Once you grounded yourself, you can visualize white bright light coming in from the heavens down through the top of your head and into your heart center. This brilliant white light from the heavens has the highest and purest vibration and it can give you a charge whenever you need it. If you’re feeling sluggish, you need a renewal, just do this quick visualization, bring in the brilliant white light down to your heart center because the creator of the universe created the universe in perfect balance and harmony. When you pull that harmony in on demand if you will, you can do that whenever you need it, when you need to restore balance and harmony.
Amy: Wow. Those are some really great tactics and tips. I’m really looking forward to trying them. The other thing that really helps me too, and it’s hard being up here in New Hampshire when things are so cold for so much time of the year, but like you had mentioned earlier about being in nature, being on the beach or just grounding your feet, like your bare feet on the ground, I think is so healing and kind of gets rid of that bad energy. What do you think about that?
Karen Deichmann: Absolutely. That’s the way of, you know, there are a lot of strategies with detoxifying and that’s another one. When you use your bare feet on the ground, it has an element of pulling that all the toxins and the bad energy out and it releases through the soles of your feet into nature which will then cleanse it and restore it.
Amy: Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about anxiety and depression. So many women with PCOS suffer from anxiety and depression. It’s thought that about 60% of us have some mood related disorder. Do you think depression and anxiety can affect our body’s energy or vibration?
Karen Deichmann: Absolutely. The challenge about depression is it’s living in the past and anxiety is living in the future and the body needs to be in the present to heal because in the presence is where the body is going to have the highest vibration. The reason why depression draws so much energy is that the body requires a tremendous amount of energy to hold on to hurts from the past. When you’re able to let go of those hurts from the past, it frees up that energy to deal with the present. One strategy that people can use to identify what might be holding them, holding onto pain from the past is if you sit quietly and a lot of times you just do some belly breaths, and belly breaths mean, sticking your stomach way out, which will fill your lungs with air and then pressing your belly in which will get all the air out of your lungs. If you do about three deep belly breaths, that will quiet your mind and your nervous system.
If you give yourself the gift of a few minutes, like three really deep belly breaths, your mind quiets and your nervous system quiets, then you can ask the creator what resentment or areas of unforgiveness am I holding onto. When you ask that question, you might be amazed at what comes up when you allow your nervous system to settle down. If you have a journal nearby and you take some notes, you can see that there might be some things that you’ve forgotten about or maybe you weren’t aware that you were hanging on to. You might feel some pain coming up, and that’s okay. You can just feel that pain because when the pain comes up, it’s like washing a sweater. You know, when you wash a sweater, you have to get the soap out and you rinse it and then there’s more soap. You might have to rinse it a couple times to get all the soap out. When the pain comes up, just feel it and let your body cleanse if you need to have tears or what have you, that’s your body’s way of cleansing from the past.
Then if there are areas of resentment or areas that you need to forgive and it’s really difficult for you, it was a really painful experience, you can ask for help. You can ask the creator for help and forgiveness and ask the creator for help in releasing that resentment. What you might find over the next couple of days. You might be surprised at circumstances that come up that allow you to release some of those things that you were holding on to. It’s similar with anxiety where depression is living in the past and holding on to past hurts, anxiety is worrying about the future. You’re living in the future, which is basically what they say is anxiety is a wasted emotion because it drains all your energy about thinking about the future when you could be using that energy to experience and more effectively engage in the present. When your mind is in the present, it sends the highest vibration to your body.
Whatever you can do over time, and I know it doesn’t happen in an instant, but over time, if you can learn to let go of the pain from the past and let go of the anxiety of the future, recognize when you’re living in the future, when you’re worrying, well, what if it happens? What if it doesn’t happen? What good is that going to do if you’re worrying about if it does or doesn’t happen? You really want to try to let that go and just remain in the present and then your body’s going to be at the highest vibrations to set your body up for healing.
Amy: There’s so much wisdom and living in the present, and I didn’t realize that it sends the highest vibration to your body, but that makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you about low vibrational thinking. I think a lot of women with PCOS, we think that we are not enough. Our bodies aren’t enough, we’re having trouble conceiving, we’re growing hair where we don’t want it, we can’t lose weight. It’s all of these messages we send ourselves that we are not enough. I know that that must be playing a role in draining our energy and even sabotage healing. What are your thoughts?
Karen Deichmann: Yeah, absolutely. Like we’ve talked about a lot, you need to have the highest vibration to heal yourself. Love is the highest vibration. The best way to raise the vibration of your body is just to flood your body with love. You have to love yourself in order to increase that vibration. Several years ago, when my kids were young, I remember sitting at a traffic light and sitting at a traffic light when my kids were young, and I was working full-time. That was like the only time to get quiet. I remember sitting there and I asked the creator, what does it mean to truly love yourself? Because I know people say that all the time, just love yourself but what does that mean? I think I struggled with that growing up, always being told that we need to be meek and think of others first and all that stuff. I asked the creator, what does that mean to truly love yourself? At that moment I remember suddenly being overcome by an incredible love for my children.
Then I realized at that moment the message I was receiving was to truly love yourself is to view yourself like you love the most important person in your life. Maybe it’s your spouse or your parents or your dog, but that feeling of love that you have for that other person, that incredible love, that’s how we need to feel about ourselves. When we think about that other person that’s special in our life that we love so much, the way you view them is usually to see them as being absolutely incredible, right? Being full of possibility that they could do anything, right? I think that’s the key in loving ourself is to view ourself that way, that we are so incredible, that we can do anything. The key is to see yourself the way the creator sees you. We were made perfectly in the creator’s image and the creator sees us as perfect. We are the only person who can be us and therefore that makes us perfect, right?
Just like we see the other special people in our lives, whether that’s our children or our parents or our spouse, you see them as being perfect just the way they are, regardless of what they look like, right? That’s the kind of feeling that you need to fill yourself with. I often say like when we have to do something major, maybe it’s a presentation or we’re thinking about how we performed in a certain presentation, we need to think of ourselves as we would say, a child that was getting onto stage for the first time. What would you do for that child? You would give them encouragement. You would give them love and support and say, that was fantastic. No matter how they performed, right? That’s how we have to treat ourselves. That’s how we have to treat ourselves when we look at ourselves that we’re incredible and that we can do anything and we deserve the best in terms of support from ourselves and in terms of love from ourselves.
Amy: Actually, I love that message. In my jumpstart program, I actually encourage women to find pictures of themselves when they were four or five years old, like right out in front of, you know, on their desk or a place where they’ll see it every day because when you start with that negative nasty self-talk, you look at that little girl and think, would I ever talk to her the way that I’m talking to myself right now. I think it snaps you right back into reality like of course not and I shouldn’t be talking to myself that way. You have given us so much wisdom and tips and tricks in a subject that I don’t think we often think about as integral to healing. Do you have any last words of advice for Divas listening?
Karen Deichmann: What I would say in closing is that the creator of the universe wants desperately for us all to be happy and healthy. The creator wants us to let go of the past and live in the present in gratitude and joy. When we make the decision to go on this path, we need to do all we can do to keep our energy vibration the highest you can and so the body has the highest energy it needs to heal. When we do that, I think the creator will support us through whatever process it takes and whatever things that might be happening for us. The creator is going to be our biggest fan and our biggest advocate. I think it’s just the most important to remember to be living in the present in terms of gratitude and joy. All good things will come to us from there.
Amy: Absolutely. I would love for you to tell listeners where they can find out more about the work that you do, how they could reach out to you if they feel like they need more work around this area of their life?
Karen Deichmann: Sure. I have a website called karendeichmann.com. You can see my work there and if you want to reach out to me, there’s a contact section. You can just click on that and send an email if there’s something that you’d like to pursue, whether you’re looking for an individual coaching session or if you work for an organization and you’d like to have me come in and talk to a group of people about how they can be more mindful or maximize their energy through grounding exercises and energy work, I’d be happy to work with you. Just reach out to me through the website and we can talk.
Amy: Great. We’ll put that in our show notes, so it’ll be easy for people to access. Well thank you Karen so much for being with us today.
Karen Deichmann: Thank you, Amy. It was a pleasure to be here. Have a wonderful day.
Amy: Yeah, and you too, and thank you everyone for listening. I look forward to being with you again very soon. Bye-bye.
