Episode 235: My guest this week is Sarah Salmon. We cover Sarah surviving a brain tumour, introversion, Highly Sensitive Persons (HSP), boundaries and creating a life that is aligned with who you are.
Sarah is a Coach, introvert, homebody, INFJ, brain tumour survivor, Nutritionist, TED talker, and highly sensitive person (HSP). Sarah specialises in helping overwhelmed introverts get their energy back.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 235 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/235.
Just a note before we get started: I’m currently taking on new clients. I have just two spots available. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, overexercise or exercise compulsion, or dealing with irregular cycles or cycles that have ceased altogether. If these are areas that you struggle with and would like to make a thing of the past, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include it in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I am a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
This week on the show, it is a guest episode, and my guest today is Sarah Salmon. Sarah is a coach, an introvert, a homebody, an INFJ, a brain tumour survivor, a nutritionist, a TEDx talker, and a Highly Sensitive Person. She specialises in helping overwhelmed introverts get their energy back.
I first became aware of Sarah when watching her TEDx talk where she talked about how getting a brain tumour changed the course of her life, and actually for the better. I then heard her on Summer Innanen’s podcast talking about the work she’s now doing with introverts, and these were both areas that I thought I’d love to be able to chat with Sarah about, so I invited her on the show.
With this interview, I had a lot less time than usual. It’s amazing now because I’m so used to having two hours that when it’s an hour or so, it’s incredible with how quickly the time passes by. But we did get to cover a lot in the limited time. One of the areas we touch on as part of this conversation is Highly Sensitive People, or HSPs. I forgot to mention it during the show, but this is something that I’ve covered before, and if it’s of interest to you, then please check out Episode 190, where I interviewed Barbara Allen all about the topic of HSPs. I think it’s a great companion episode to this one.
So, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Sarah Salmon.
Hey, Sarah. Thanks for joining me on Real Health Radio today.
Sarah Salmon: Hey, Chris. It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Chris Sandel: I’m really excited to be chatting with you. I remember watching your TEDx talk and thinking, “I really need to have this person on the show.” Glad that it’s now happening.
There’s two main areas I want to cover today. The first is about being a brain tumour survivor that you are and how this experience changed you and continues to change your life. I know this was a big part of your TEDx talk and I’d love to share this with the listeners. And then the second part is about you as a coach and the work that you do. I know previously, this was helping women after recovery from major illness and helping with post-traumatic growth and the experience that accompanies that, and then more recently you’ve shifted your focus to working with introverts and helping introverts to live and thrive in a world that often feels like it’s in opposition to their health and happiness and wellbeing.
So that’s what I’m hoping to cover, but I want this to be a conversation, so I’m happy for it to go off in other directions and tangents and wherever we need to go. How does that sound?
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. Sounds great.
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Chris Sandel: To start off with, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on yourself – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Sarah Salmon: I am a coach, as Chris mentioned. I specifically coach introverts, and I’m sure we’ll get more into that, but I am basically trained as a Co-Active Coach, and I also use a lot of my past career as a graphic designer, where I have 12-15 years of working as a graphic designer in leadership positions, so a lot of brainstorming skills and problem-solving skills – all of that comes into the work that I do now.
But my backstory is more that I started out my career as a graphic designer, and I knew I wanted to do that when I was 16. The context of this story is that even when we’re kids, we know what we want to do, but of course we’re still growing and evolving, and we always change. [laughs] So I started as a graphic designer, and then this whole brain tumour thing happened, which I’m sure we’ll get into, as you mentioned, and that completely changed everything.
I quit my six-figure career after that because I was like – we’ll get into this, but I quit my six-figure career, went back to school, studied nutrition, and was in nutrition coaching for a long time. And then that evolved into the story where you picked up there. So that’s my basic background, but I could talk about it for a long time. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: I can start with that and I’ll go through different bits. I saw as part of your bio, you studied graphic design at University of Bournemouth in the UK?
Sarah Salmon: Yeah, I did. I grew up on Grimsay, actually, and I did all my school, university on the mainland in the UK.
Chris Sandel: Okay. I wanted to find out if you were originally from here or from Canada.
Sarah Salmon: I’m a dual – technically I’m from Canada, but I grew up in the UK.
Chris Sandel: Cool. Bournemouth is a lovely place. I was recently down there a couple of weeks ago in the New Forest for a holiday, and it is just such a beautiful part of the UK with lovely beaches, and I think probably the best weather of anywhere in the UK. So yeah, it’s a nice spot to do university.
Sarah Salmon: Yes. Understatement. [laughs]
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Chris Sandel: With the graphic design – it sounds like obviously the brain tumour was the thing that allowed you to see “This isn’t the career path that I wanted to be on”, but how long were you enjoying the graphic design? And when did those thoughts start to creep in? Was it really just with the brain tumour?
Sarah Salmon: Well, I think we all go through ebbs and flows in jobs and careers. As a designer, I had worked with really big brands, like Dell and Mercedes-Benz and Harley Davidson and big banks that I’m under NDAs and can’t talk about. [laughs] Big global banking.
Before I discovered that I was in this health situation, I was working with the big banking clients that I didn’t love just because of the bureaucracy in the organisation, and then a lot of the things I was being asked to do. There was a sense of disease around it – sorry, not disease, dis-ease. Ironic. [laughs] Yeah, there was this disquiet around it where I was like, “This isn’t sitting right.” But it also was a client that I just didn’t like, knowing that I had liked my previous clients and knowing that I liked other clients that were in the office at the time.
So I went into this whole phase of my life where I discovered I had a brain tumour and all that, and all of what that entailed, with a sense that I don’t like my current client. I had been working with them for a year already and I was always looking for a way out. So I was primed and ready.
Chris Sandel: But probably not for that.
Sarah Salmon: Probably not for that as the way out. [laughs] But yeah, I was trying to extract myself from that client and to move to another one. But I was also equally accepting it. I wasn’t working that hard at getting out. There were some opportunities around it that were allowing me to transition out of design into more account management, so I was working on that, too. So that was trying to look on the bright side whilst also accepting that there was a lot of things about this that just weren’t feeling right to me. But at the time, I didn’t really have that self-awareness to be like, “This feeling that I have is valid.” It was at that point in my life where it had to be a little bit more literal, and my boss had to be a horrible person or the client – it had to be more obvious. I wasn’t really tuned in in that way yet.
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Chris Sandel: Yeah. So how did the diagnosis come about? What symptoms were you getting that led to you visiting the doctor’s office?
Sarah Salmon: It’s so interesting, because I had only just moved to Toronto, and I had moved from Calgary. In Canada, when you move from one province to the other, you get a new healthcare card just because those things are managed provincially rather than nationally. I didn’t even have my new healthcare card yet. I was still working off of my old one, so I didn’t even have a doctor yet.
I was a runner at the time, running half-marathons, so when I’d go out for a run, I felt like I was kind of imbalanced. My left foot was scuffing. And then the weirdest thing happened. You know when you walk into a room and say it’s in the middle of the night, but you know where the light switch is, so you just put your hand back behind you and flip the light switch, right? You don’t even need to look at it; you just know where it is. I did that, and I turned the lights on, but I couldn’t feel myself turning the lights on. My hands were working, but not the sensation of feeling the touch of the light switch and the movement and the result of that.
So I had that happening, and my foot was scuffing, and then the final straw before I went to the doctor was that I was out, I was in a busy bar and I was talking to friends. I was talking, and you know when you’ve had a few drinks you tend to gesticulate a little bit more? [laughs] And then something hit my hand, and I was like, “What is that? Who’s in my space?” I’m very protective of my personal space. [laughs] Something whacked my hand and I instantly got so annoyed because that’s my go-to in that situation, and then I realised, “Oh my God, that was me. It was my other hand.”
That’s when I was like, “Okay, maybe I should go see the doctor. There’s something weird going on here.
Chris Sandel: Were you really concerned or freaked out at that stage? Or you’re like, “It’s fine”? What was your initial thoughts?
Sarah Salmon: My approach is always very light-hearted, jokey-jokey. I had to go to a walk-in doctor. I don’t know if you have them there, where you don’t have an appointment, you just show up if you don’t have a doctor.
Chris Sandel: Not sure. Possibly before the pandemic. Not sure now.
Sarah Salmon: Definitely a whole other world. [laughs] So I went to the walk-in clinic, which means you basically go and show up and you just have to sit in line and wait, and you see whichever doctor is there and available.
When I was leaving work, I was like, “It’s probably something in my head. You all know that I’m crazy” – which is language that I don’t use now. So we were all joking and laughing, and then I got to the doctor and he’s like, “Well, hopefully it’s not something like a neurological condition. I’m going to book you in for a CT scan. Hopefully it’s nothing.” But the good thing about walk-in doctors here is that very often, they’re very paranoid because they don’t have your medical history or anything in front of them. So they tend to over-test, which can be a good thing, as it was in my scenario.
I went for the CT scan, and the lady, the tech, was like, “They’ll probably get back to you in like a week and they’ll let you know what’s going on.” The next day, they phoned me and they’re like, “You need to go see your doctor.” So I went to see this walk-in doctor again and he goes, “So it looks like you have a lesion on your brain.” Chris, if someone says you have a ‘lesion’, what does that mean to you?
Chris Sandel: Considering you added ‘on your brain’, it would probably have more of an impact.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. For me, ‘lesion’ wasn’t really alarm bells just yet. To me, a lesion is a bit like a blister, maybe like a boil. I don’t know. [laughs] Me and my uneducated medical sense. I was like, okay. And then by the end of this 10-minute conversation, it had evolved into a tumour. I’m like, “Hang on a second, you just said this was a lesion.” And that’s where it all began. Very quickly, the next week I had a neurosurgeon, and then I had a surgery appointment, the craniotomy to have it removed.
But the thing that was very interesting that is not in my TED talk is that all the doctors, including the neurosurgeon, were like, “This is so weird. Your symptoms don’t align with where the tumour is. It doesn’t make any sense.” Turned out the tumour was actually asymptomatic. I would never have found it.
So my neurosurgeon actually booked me in for an MRI, because as you may know, CT scans don’t show everything; MRIs show different things in the brain. But it was six months after my surgery because it’s hard to get in to get an MRI here. You can wait a long time.
Despite the fact that I wasn’t loving my work, I had the most incredible boss at work, and she was like, “No, this isn’t good enough. I’m going to pay personally for you to go down to the States and have an MRI scan.” Toronto is only a two-hour drive from the border, so a lot of people will drive down to Buffalo and get medical testing and stuff done quicker.
I did that, and that showed actually that I had demyelination as well, which is basically MS (multiple sclerosis). So in the same week, I was diagnosed with a brain tumour and multiple sclerosis. So, you know, that was just one of those weeks. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Wow.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. The MS I just put aside, and I asked my neurosurgeon to refer me to the best neurologist that he knew, which was his buddy down the corridor. So that was all fine. And then I had surgery a few weeks later to have it removed.
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Chris Sandel: What was the prognosis or what were the odds they were giving you as part of having the tumour and having it removed? Did you go into surgery feeling fairly confident?
Sarah Salmon: Well, it was not considered a cancerous tumour, but when you have a brain tumour it’s never really considered benign because a mass in your head is never benign. It’s always going to have some kind of impact on your functioning. People who have had the same kind of tumour as me can lose their eyesight, they can completely change their personality. It just depends on where it is in the brain as to the impact that it has.
I was very lucky that I also had these symptoms that were coming from what was the MS, actually, and that the tumour was – I mean, it was the size of a golf ball in my head, but it could’ve grown to be the size of a grapefruit and then completely changed my personality. I could’ve lost my vision and all sorts. So the universe had my back, in a very strange way.
Going into surgery, I had never been in hospital before; I’d never even had the flu before. I was just a healthy 31-year-old, or so I thought. Who knows what’s going on in your body at any given time. I was absolutely terrified because I met with this neurosurgeon once before, and he was describing to me how “We’re going to make a cut like this in your head” and he’s drawing with his finger this big line around my head. I was like, “I just met you. I feel like we should know each other a bit better before we do this. This is very intimate. You’re going to touch my brain.” [laughs]
So it just was very much like I had nothing to equate this to. It was very trippy for me. Going into surgery was terrifying because for me – I haven’t really been under anaesthesia that much, but that is always the scariest part for me, the anaesthesia part and not being in control and not knowing what’s going on. That is always the scariest part, when they’re asking you to count down, and then it’s like, “Who knows what happens now, if I wake up.” I mean, obviously, I did wake up. I woke up in ICU, and I had four or five IVs and different things going into my arms, and I had tubes coming out of my scalp and a massive bandage on and I couldn’t lift my head up. It was just wild.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I imagine knowing going in that this could mean that it affects your eyesight or it affects all these areas of the body, you’re waking up after major surgery and not being able to lift your head very much, and really not knowing, “How has this gone?”
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. And you don’t know until the doctor comes around with all his medical students, and they all scurry around your bed, and like, “Oh, this is the patient who I told you about who has blah-blah-blah syndrome.” I don’t even remember when he was saying, but you become a teaching piece as well, and meanwhile you’re completely out of it – because as well, the nurses come every hour on the hour, no matter what time of day or night, and do neurological checks on you. They flash lights in your eyes and they ask you to do this, and can you feel your toes and lift your arms up over your head, just to make sure there’s no complications.
But the big complication that I had and I didn’t realise for maybe a week is that I lost my sense of smell. Which is very interesting in these times. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Has that come back, or that’s now permanently – you’ve lost it?
Sarah Salmon: No, I haven’t had it since, for 10, 11, 12 years. But what I did have was these weird – they’re called olfactory hallucinations, which means that you smell things that are not really there. It’s a bit like when an amputee feels the limb that was amputated.
So I would get that, but at that time, at first I was smelling – one of my go-to hallucinations I would have would be a chemical-y smell. That just happened to be what I was smelling in the hospital, so I thought, “That’s what hospitals smell like”, until I got home and couldn’t smell strawberries, for example. I’m like, “Hang on a second. There’s something weird going on here.” To be honest, now it’s a good thing. I go into public washrooms and they’re perfectly clean. [laughs]
00:19:39
Chris Sandel: What was your recovery like? How long did it take to get back to feeling normal, or new normal?
Sarah Salmon: I would say to have my whole life in place again was a whole year. Obviously I had very good benefits at work. I’m coming from a North American perspective here, of course, in that regard. We have a nationalised health system a bit like the NHS, but then we also have private insurance at work that gives you extra things. So I had very good insurance through work that covered my full salary for three months. It would’ve been supplementary after that.
So I had a full three months off work. I couldn’t go anywhere that was busy. If you imagine all of the stimuli that come in at you at any given time – it can be touch, it can be sound, it’s the things you see, it’s the things that you’re tasting, it’s all sorts of things, hundreds of thousands of things thrown at you every single day, and your brain picks and chooses what it allows through to your consciousness.
This is just my language; I don’t have the technical term for this, but my brain had no way of filtering anymore. It just allowed everything in. So if I went for a walk with my dog, I couldn’t also watch TV for two hours. It was a big of a situation at first, being a spoonie, where you only have so much energy and you have to divvy it out in the day.
So if I had a friend come over to see me, they had to sit down next to me, they had to speak very softly. They couldn’t use their hands a lot to talk, they couldn’t walk and talk, because I could only take in so much at one time, which – I’m sure we’ll get to – had a really interesting impact on my self-awareness and my introversion and my sense of being a Highly Sensitive Person as well. It really exaggerated all of those things for me.
There was this one time – in Toronto there’s this incredible farmer’s market called St Lawrence Market, and it’s in this beautiful Victorian building, jam-packed with stands, and it’s always super busy and a thriving place. It was one of my favourite places to go. Maybe a month after my surgery, I went there. I had a hat on my head because I had a massive scar in my hair. So I went there and literally it was like being in a movie and the camera is spinning around you faster and faster. All of these thousands and thousands of inputs coming in at once. I literally lasted five minutes. I’m like, “I have to get out of here. I can’t be here.” Went home and slept for three hours, just from that five minutes.
I was off work for three whole months, and then I slowly started going back to work. I started with a four-hour work week where I just did four hours in the morning, and then an eight-hour work week, which was two four-hour mornings, and slowly building up over three or four months back to full-time. And even then, before I went back to work, I was exercising, I was going for long walks with my dog, I was doing some gentle stuff in the gym, but then when I went back to work, I didn’t have the energy to do that. That energy had to go into work. So it took a full year to get back working, exercising, going out and having friends. It took all that time to get all of those things back into place, like your full life.
00:23:24
Chris Sandel: Wow. Was it then because of that year-long experience as well as probably the shattering of invincibility that we have at that age because of having the brain tumour that meant that you started to really reflect upon your life and the direction it was going and “is this how I want to spend my time and my days”?
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. First of all, it really was a wake-up call around self-awareness and what is going on in my body, how am I feeling, just because I realised I only had so much energy, that I had to really notice my energy levels and how I was feeling and then divvy it out appropriately, making a choice: “Where am I going to spend this energy?”, so to speak.
It really brought a self-awareness around the body sensations and energy and that perspective, but then also there was the whole – it was two days after I got home from hospital, just two days, and I was like, “I can’t do this job anymore. I can’t be in this career anymore.” And not because I couldn’t physically do it in that moment because I was recovering from brain surgery, but I was like, “The work that I’m doing does not align with my values.” I had this epiphany. I realised what this sense of dis-ease and – it’s so funny I keep using that word, right? [laughs] Isn’t it ironic?
But I was able to articulate what it was: I’m working for this big bank as a client and we’re putting fine print on pages that sell people credit cards that will ultimately really screw people over if they default on their payments for three months. Every single person has gone through a time in their life where they have to put off their credit card payment, and they get a little bit of extra interest. But it was like, “This does not feel good to me.” And it was also at a time when there was a big crackdown on giving people credit limits in North America because of the whole housing crash. They had been giving people credit limits that were not proportionate to their income and their ability to pay it off.
I was like, “This fine print is really going to screw people over in a really bad way”, and it just wasn’t feeling good to me. It really encapsulated my whole problem with where my career had gotten to, which was “I am using my many, many years of experience to help big corporations get richer.” I’m like, “I can’t do this anymore.”
I also knew that I shouldn’t be making any big decisions in the next year because I’ve gone through something big and traumatic, and I had Googled that you should not make any big decisions for a while. But this was brewing in my head, so I basically used my health benefit. I got back to work and I got everything in place. And within a year and a bit, I had this meeting with my client. The bureaucracy in huge organisations is such that as a designer, you are working with your clients, but they report to the person above them, who reports to five other people above them, this whole chain of people.
The whole project just fell apart because they had not communicated appropriately within their own organisation. I literally left that meeting, grabbed my boss, pulled her into a meeting room, and said, “I can’t do this anymore. I quit.” And that was it. I didn’t tell my husband, I didn’t tell anyone. That was the moment where it all came full circle. I’m like, “I’m done with this.”
Chris Sandel: At that stage, did you know “I want to go into coaching”? Had you figured that piece out, or you’re like “I just know that I don’t want to do this part, and the other part I will figure out”?
Sarah Salmon: I knew in that moment that I didn’t want to do that job anymore. I had serious doubts about my whole career, but I knew that that job, I had to get out of there right now. It was the beginning of the summer and I decided, “I’m going to take the summer off. I’ll figure it out. I have lots of connections.”
So I did that, and by the end of the summer I was picking up freelance work and financially it wasn’t a big deal. I was very lucky. Which gave me some noncommittal buffer career-wise to figure out what I wanted to do. But meanwhile, on another track there, I had started digging into the MS side of things and was paying attention to my nutrition around that and had met with a doctor, and they had offered me medication, which is what they always do. Basically it’s like you’re on medication for the rest of your life.
I didn’t have any symptoms at the time. The thing with MS is that you never really know, if you have a mild case, whether improvement in your symptoms is due to just the course of the disease or whether it’s due to the medications. When you have a much more serious case, it’s much clearer and there’s some very clear steps to take. I decided not to take the medication, rightly or wrongly. I was young and I was like, “I don’t want to jump on medication from a five-minute conversation.” Again, like with the neurosurgeon, I’m like, “We need to slow this down a bit. I need to figure things out for myself and process things.”
And then I ended up finding the autoimmune protocol, the one that’s aligned with paleo and things like that, and did that. My symptoms never came back, so I decided to never go on that medication. But at the time I was like, “Okay, there are other ways to do things”, so that’s what led me into ultimately studying nutrition. And because I was doing this freelance work as a designer that pays you unethical amounts of money, ridiculous amount of money, I was able to take two years off work to do that.
Chris Sandel: Wow. That is a real gift.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. I am not blind to the fact that I was very lucky in that the kind of work that I was doing really set me up to make these decisions. It’s not always that easy, for sure.
Chris Sandel: My partner was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and that was shortly after my son was born, probably three and a half years ago. She also tried out the AIP, autoimmune paleo diet, and it did not have a beneficial impact for her.
Sarah Salmon: I think it’s important as well to notice, is it the food or is it other things that I’m doing? My sense around it is that my life was heading in a direction that wasn’t right for me and I wasn’t able to see it, or I didn’t have the courage to do something about it. I don’t want to sound flippant around people who are going through big things in their lives health-wise, but in hindsight it felt like if these things hadn’t happened to me, I would probably still be in a career that I didn’t love. My health would not be where it is now. I would definitely be in a relationship that was not right for me. There’s a lot of things that it did for me that probably I would not have had the courage to do before.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I so agree with that, and I bet you wouldn’t wish to go through all of that again, but I know loads of people talk about the fact that “Hey, I think getting cancer and surviving was one of the best things that could’ve happened to me” or “Going through that bankruptcy and getting through it was one of the best things that could’ve happened to me”, getting divorced, etc. These parts of life that are deeply unpleasurable and painful and tough, actually, coming out the other side are in service of a better life and you having more self-awareness and having a better understanding of how you want to spend your days on this planet. So I think that is true.
Even with the work I do with eating disorders, I do think that it can be in many ways a gift if it can be seen in that way and you can then learn through that experience of “Okay, now I can learn other ways to cope. Now I can learn about things that have happened in my past that have had an impact on the way that I am.” It can be something that gives you a reason to start exploring and doing the work, because otherwise, as you say, you can just cruise through life on autopilot where it isn’t actually that meaningful, and it isn’t actually the life that you could have if there was a little more attention being paid.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah, and there is another way to live life. We end up in the life that we are from a whole host of influences – the way we’re brought up, the society that we’re in. There’s so many influences that when something big and bad and scary happens to you, it’s never pleasant, it’s never fun, I would never wish it on anyone, but the thing that comes out of it is so often you have this sense of self-awareness. I feel like it gives you that self-awareness that opens your eyes to a whole host of things, and whichever direction you choose to step in or how it affects you is the most perfect thing for you in that moment. That’s the thing that you needed.
00:33:23
Chris Sandel: Yeah. So when you started working with clients in terms of – I know you had a period where you were working with clients with chronic illness and going through major life changes – did that feel like a natural place to focus because of your own experience?
Sarah Salmon: When I started having qualified as a nutritionist, I started and opened up the classic nutrition practice, one-on-one, in-person. I didn’t work online at all. I was mainly working with people with autoimmune conditions and digestive complaints like IBS, like that classic doctor who says, “Oh, you have IBS.” It’s the catchall diagnosis digestively, right? So I was helping people with that and some mental health things here and there, like anxiety. I had one client with bipolar. So helping people in that regard.
And I guess let’s just add a caveat in here that I don’t think nutrition can solve bipolar. That wasn’t what it was about. We were helping balance her blood sugar and helping her have the right foods in her freezer for when she was going through more of a depressive phase and things like that. So I just want to put that caveat in there for people.
I was doing that, but when I moved, one of the things that was a result of my brain tumour and that whole big awakening that I had was that I was living in downtown Toronto but actually was a really outdoorsy person. So one of the big awakenings I had was “I’m living in the wrong place”, and I actually ended up moving from Toronto to the far west coast of Canada, to Vancouver Island, which is where I am now, living rurally on an acreage with horses all around and all sorts.
But when I moved here, I just wasn’t inspired to restart my nutrition practice. It just seemed like such a drag to me, and I had even more of an awareness and some more education and realised that I was an introvert, and the way that I had been working was actually very challenging for me. I was taking on a lot of people’s energy. So that was a whole other layer of awareness and change that “Okay, there are certain ways that I need to be in the world that are going to make me more successful.”
And I guess I should add in that when I was working as a nutritionist, I was also consulting in a health food store. I was helping hundreds of people a day, which for some people – it’s like, there’s nothing wrong with that job per se. Many people thrive in it and do so well, and I thrived in it to a point where I had a lot of regulars who would come in and see me. People would line up to see me in the store. I would go to the washroom and people would be clamouring around the door, waiting for me to come out. It was very claustrophobic and oppressive.
That job burned me out so much, not because it was the job but because I was an introvert and I was forced to be dealing with hundreds of people a day – and not just hundreds of people, but hundreds of people and their problems. You’re trying to convince people who are looking for an easy option to actually take some responsibility for themselves and make decisions that are good for themselves in a 10-minute conversation.
For me, when I discovered that I was an introvert and this is why I’m so exhausted, I actually had to step away from that as well because it was a whole new awareness around how I could be successful, and it had to be in a way that worked for me as an introvert.
00:37:13
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It’s interesting. I am an introvert as well, but I feel like there are definitely some differences between us. I discovered I was an introvert probably more – around about when I was 30. I lived in London until I was 30 or 31, so it was then moving to the countryside that I really discovered that I was an introvert and enjoyed spending a lot of time on my own and out in the countryside. Or Ali, my wife, would be off riding a horse all day and I would be perfectly okay in my own company.
When I reflect back on why it took so long to figure this out, it was I was basically single all through my twenties, so even though I was living in London during that time, I did get a lot of alone time. I was never one for going out much mid-week, so I was always getting early nights and having time in on my own, or even on weekends, there’d be some weekends I’d do something, some weekends I wouldn’t. I had sort of naturally found that way of being, and partly because I was single during all that time.
I also think I’m probably not at the far end of the introvert end of the spectrum, a little more towards the middle. I’m also not Highly Sensitive, a HSP. This is something I think would be useful for us to get into as well, because I think for a lot of people who are introverts, there is this overlap with being a Highly Sensitive Person, and that’s not me. I don’t get stressed by violent movies or loud noises or repetitive noises. I spent a large part of my twenties in clubs and in venues with loud music and lots of people, and that doesn’t overwhelm me. I mean, I don’t want to do it every single day, but it doesn’t overwhelm me in the moment to the point where I’m like “I have to get out of here.”
So I definitely know that I am an introvert and I need more time alone to recharge and I prefer having conversations more one-on-one even if I’m in a group setting, but I don’t have many of the other HSP type traits that often get talked about as part of being an introvert. I think they need to be separated out.
Sarah Salmon: For sure. First of all, it’s so interesting that before you even knew this idea of being an introvert, you were just going with the flow in that regard. You say you were single and you weren’t really going out much on the weeknights. But someone who is more – just to provide the context for everyone, introversion and extroversion are on a spectrum, one on each end, and you fall somewhere on that. So you’re never just one or the other, but you tend to be more of one than the other.
But it’s just so interesting that you naturally did that, whereas I think that someone who is more on the extroverted end of that spectrum would actually be seeking to go out more often because that’s where they get their energy from. They would’ve been going out after work every night for drinks. I was in London at that same time in my life and that’s what we did, and I don’t know how I survived it, to be honest. [laughs] I think I just went out after work and not on the weekends because I had a very social workplace.
Chris Sandel: I didn’t. I worked for local governments and fell into a job that was then a very easy job. I then, a couple years after moving to London, started studying on the weekends, and I had the most low-stress job with lots of people who I didn’t want to spend time with outside of work, so it wasn’t a work experience that meant that I was out at the pub with work colleagues all the time.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah, I can imagine that. [laughs]
00:41:39
Chris Sandel: Let’s talk just to sharpen up the HSP side. How would you describe this?
Sarah Salmon: First of all we have to talk about what is introversion versus HSP. For people who are not sure if they are an introvert or an extrovert, basically in the most simplistic terms, an introvert recharges on their own. If you are at the end of a busy day, if you are more inclined to go somewhere quiet on your own with fewer people, it’s highly likely that you are an introvert or are on that side of the spectrum between introversion and extroversion. If you’re someone who loves to be around people and you gain a ton of energy from being around those people, it’s more likely that you are an extrovert.
But I just want to clarify there, because my wording wasn’t quite right. Just because you’re an introvert, doesn’t mean you dislike being around people. It means that you recharge on your own. It doesn’t mean that you’re antisocial. It doesn’t mean that you have social anxiety. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be loud and confident and lead a room at work or do big things in the world. It just means that you recharge on your own and that your nervous system is more sensitive to stimulation. It’s not just being around people, but if you’re in a very hectic place, that can be more tiring for you than a nice calm, quiet place. So that’s the basic thing there.
And then we have this idea of being HSP or being a Highly Sensitive Person, which means – I think the statistic is something like let’s say 70% of HSPs are introverts as well, and then maybe the rest are extroverts. So extroverts can also be HSPs, just to clarify that, but there’s a big crossover obviously with introversion.
Being an HSP basically means that it’s not that you are emotionally very sensitive, like “Oh, you’re so sensitive, Sarah” – which, as an introvert, I was always told as a child. That’s always a sure sign that you’re an introvert: when you were a kid, people said, “Stop being so sensitive.” It’s just because you were overstimulated and didn’t want to be there. You wanted to be in your room, reading. You didn’t want to be forced out to play with the other kids. That doesn’t mean you’re being emotional; it means that your system is more sensitive to sensory inputs, like bright lights and loud noises and stimulating energy, like you walk in a room and it’s very high energy. It’s more things like that.
So when I was talking earlier around when I was recovering from my brain surgery and I couldn’t be in the farmer’s market because all of these inputs were coming at me, that was something that really exaggerated that HSP nature in me. And I feel like that still remains to some degree, and that’s something that really brought HSP to my attention because I think it’s important to note that we are the way that we are, but then things in our lives can exaggerate certain qualities in us, and that’s something I feel like exaggerated that HSP quality in me.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And I think if you’re doing the things that are supporting your health, you have a greater tolerance for things. And if you’re not doing the things that are supporting that are supporting your health, it doesn’t take as much to then push you overboard.
Sarah Salmon: Exactly, and if you don’t have that self-awareness – which is not something that we’re ever taught; no-one teaches you that at school or in life around, “How am I feeling in my body? How is my energy? How is my mental health? And how are certain things affecting that?” Awareness is hard to come by, I think, especially when we’re young. Maybe it’s something that we more grow into. But if we don’t have that awareness, it can make us really sick if we’re not honouring what our body is asking for in that regard: time alone, nice quiet, calming spaces, one-on-one, deep, genuine conversations.
As you know, Chris, I talk a lot about burnout in my work. A lot of people say “I’m so burned out”, and it’s always equated to their job and to work. That’s the classic definition, that you are overworked, underappreciated, don’t have time. It’s a bad work situation that takes you into an extreme sense of exhaustion and even mental health crisis.
But I also have this unofficial burnout, which is about introvert burnout, where you are in situations that there’s technically nothing wrong with them for most people, but for an introvert, they are going to exhaust you. And if you don’t have the self-awareness to go out there and be building in moments to recharge, time alone, the kind of activities that give you energy, then you can often end up in a similar place.
Chris Sandel: Totally. When I reflect on me, I think part of why I may feel that I’m not so far at the ends of the introvert spectrum is that I’ve set up my life to cater to how I am best served. I was doing that in London just by chance, and now I do that very intentionally. I have an office that’s in our garden that I work from on my own for the day; I spend time in nature; I really prioritise sleep, so I go to bed early. I have set up my life in a way that means that my introvert side is completely nurtured so that then when I do go out into situations where it can be more taxing, it really doesn’t have an impact on me because I’ve done all the things to create that solid foundation.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah, and you have that safe haven to come back to. You have that, knowing that you might go to a wedding where you know nobody, let’s just say, which for an introvert is kind of overwhelming. But alcohol helps. [laughs] Let’s say it was a conference that you went to, and you know nobody, nobody knows you. That’s challenging for an introvert. But at least if you go home and you have that safe haven where all the things are as you need them and like them to be, then it’s all fine.
What I love, and what you’re saying, is that you have – I doubt that you’ve built it around the whole fact that you’re an introvert. It’s just like, “I like these things; therefore, I’m going to make decisions to make my lifestyle this way. I live rurally and I have an office in the garden. It’s just how I like things to be.” But your introversion and many other things about you play into that.
The thing that this highlights to me is that as an introvert, it’s very easy to be exhausted all the time and come home from work and not have the energy for anything that you really want to be doing. You don’t even have the energy to think about, “What would I really love to be doing right now? What are my passions?” But the secret to having all the energy you want as an introvert is to be the introvert that you are. And that’s something that you have intuitively done and I have done as well.
But the rest of the world, the extroverts out there – the world is built around extroversion; that is the definition of someone who’s successful and blah, blah, blah, someone who’s extroverted. The rest of the world is built around them, around getting energy from other people and being social and gregarious and this and this and this. When you’re immersed in that your whole life, it’s so hard to step away and do what you have done and what I have done. But that ultimately is the secret to having all the energy that you could possibly need and want: to be the introvert that you are as much as they are being who they are.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Often a thought experiment of like “design the perfect person or who you’d want to be”, a lot of the time you do come up with this fantasy person who, as you say, is gregarious or is the life and soul of the party or the leading man or woman from films who’s loud and brash and witty and takes over a room. But just because that’s the fantasy of what people come up with, doesn’t mean that that’s actually what that person really should be doing.
I think once someone can live in a way that is genuinely in accordance with how their body is naturally wired, and they see the benefits of “this is what happens when I do get downtime, this is what happens when I set proper boundaries” – the novelty of trying to be that other person, I don’t know, appears more as a novelty. It doesn’t hold the same weight. Like there’s no part of me that wishes “Oh wow, I wish I would be more extroverted.” I feel very comfortable in how I live my life and this is how I am. I think that is somewhat born out of the fact that I’m living in alignment with how I should be.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. A lot of my work is around and based in the studies around authenticity. One of the studies show that those people who are happiest are being themselves, are being authentic in themselves. It’s a perfect case study right here: you have designed this life and lifestyle around what you love to do, and it makes you happy. And why would you want to be any other way?
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You talked about the being burnt out from seeing clients; in terms of now knowing you’re an HSP, knowing you’re an introvert, have you got a real limit on the amount of people you see? Or was it more about the environment and being in that shop and people hassling you as soon as you come out of the toilet that was more of the problem?
Sarah Salmon: That whole situation was a big problem. [laughs] Outside of nutrition, that exposure to so many people, and then also it being their problems, was a big problem for me or for any introvert.
But what I noticed working as a nutritionist, early on – we were talking before we started recording around when you start as a nutritionist, you often just start being a nutritionist. You don’t really have a focus of what you’re doing. I, like everyone, started that way, but then started noticing that there’s so much more to guiding someone in their health than just telling them the food they should eat. Telling someone “Avoid these foods, eat more of these, this is the reason why” is all very logical, but that’s not why we make decisions. That’s very much more your expertise now.
But I really noticed that I have this tiny chunk of information in my role as a nutritionist – which is still a huge, vast amount of information – but why people do certain things is vast, which is why I stepped away from being a nutritionist, because I saw that there’s so much else that people need help with beyond the specifics of the food that they eat.
In the most simplistic terms, you can give someone a meal plan to eat all these things, but if they’re not sleeping, if they’re sleeping four or five hours a night, nothing’s ever going to work. In the most simplistic of terms. That’s why I evolved out of that work, ultimately, because I saw that I needed so many more skills and there’s so much more to this than what I was taught in nutrition school.
00:54:00
Chris Sandel: Yeah. with the people that are coming to you, are they already saying – obviously you’re branding yourself as the Introvert Advocate; they’re already on board with the fact that they’re an introvert? Ora re you getting people that are like “I’m not sure”?
Sarah Salmon: People who come to me typically have a sense that they’re an introvert. They don’t necessarily know, for example, their Myers-Briggs, which is the classic way to tell your personality type in that regard. And if anyone wants to learn their Myers-Briggs profile – for example, I’m an INFJ – there’s a website called www.16personalities.com. That’s a great place to start to figure out where you fall on this spectrum that Chris and I are talking about between extroversion and introversion.
Chris Sandel: I will put a link to that in the show notes. I’ve never done Myers-Briggs. I have no idea what my word salad or letter salad is.
Sarah Salmon: I’d love to hear what you are when you do it. So they have a sense that they’re an introvert, and then once I get talking to them, so many of their problems are to do with the fact that they’re an introvert living in an extroverted world and they haven’t made adjustments in that regard. That’s always the first thing we do, like “Let’s get everything in alignment for you as an introvert, and then we can go work on making you an introvert who is truly flourishing and doing big things in this world because you’re an introvert and not in spite of it.”
Chris Sandel: Are there certain things that come up again and again? What are the one or two or three main things that seem to come up most in terms of why someone’s floundering instead of flourishing as an introvert?
Sarah Salmon: I think at work, it’s that – how do I encapsulate this? It’s that they are unable to set the boundaries that they need to in order to work in a way that works best for them. That’s really hard. Sometimes workplaces can be very political and such. Setting your workspace up and the way that you arrange your day in a way that works for you as an introvert can be challenging to do in the context of your workplace. So I really help people check some of those boxes, first of all the low-hanging fruit, and then we refine from there.
I’m trying to think of what else. Just a general sense of malaise and exhaustion that doesn’t actually allow you as an introvert to truly think deeply. We really love deep thought. We’re in our heads. Our minds are always busy thinking about things very deeply. If you’re exhausted all the time, it can be really frustrating because it feels like you’re living very superficially when your mind loves to be really deep. It just gives this sense of dissatisfaction because you can’t truly be who you are, even within your body, in your head, how you think, because you do not have the energy for it.
I talk quite a lot about coming home from work and all you have the energy to do is to sit and binge-watch on Netflix. Which we all do from time to time. That’s fine. But if it’s every night, it just becomes something that numbs you, when as an introvert we really like to think, and that’s just blocking that whole part of us.
Chris Sandel: Do you ever have a situation where someone comes to you where they think they’re an introvert and actually it turns out that they’re an extrovert? The reason I ask this is I’ve had it both ways with clients, but that is definitely something that has happened with me, and especially for someone who’s had a longstanding eating disorder, an eating disorder that maybe started when they were in their teenage years, and that becomes very isolating. It affects them in terms of their desire to be around other people, etc. But as they then get better, they actually discover that no, they’re not the introvert they thought they were. So I’m just wondering, have you come across that in the work you’ve done?
Sarah Salmon: I would say that’s not uncommon. I work with introverts, but we have to also have the awareness that there’s so much else that feeds into who we are and how we show up in the world, whether that be the example you shared just now, people who’ve experienced trauma of all different kinds – it all changes how we show up in the world.
For example, an extrovert who has low self-esteem, poor confidence, is shy, all of these things are possible in extroverts. They’re still human beings. They can appear to be introverted, but what’s going on in their head is very, very different around – you’re in a big group of people, for example, around a dinner table; an underconfident and shy extrovert is going to have a different sense of self-talk to someone who they’re sitting next to who happens to be an introvert who is simply sitting back, observing, considering the conversation, and then will have something quite profound to say when they choose to speak, whereas the extrovert is kind of scared to speak or scared of the judgment.
But I usually, as a coach, can tell immediately when I talk to someone based on their energy and how they present themselves whether they’re an introvert or an extrovert.
Chris Sandel: I think there’s, as you said, so many different things that can have an impact on this, whether it be about upbringing, trauma, the state that someone’s currently in, etc. I think really, at the core of the work that you’re doing, even though it’s framed through the lens of being an introvert, is what happened with you as part of going through the experience of having the brain tumour, which is just “know thyself.”
It really is about the self-awareness piece and helping people to start to understand that by pulling on some of the levers that tend to get people to better understand who they really are so that when you are in a better place where you’re well rested, well nourished, are spending your time in a way that feels enjoyable, you start to get a real better sense of “Okay, how do I want to be doing things? How do I want to be spending my time?”
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. Know thyself and then be thyself, having the confidence to do that is another big component as well.
01:00:53
Chris Sandel: I was just going to say, I think Susan Cain, in terms of her book Quiet, gave a lot of people confidence to be an introvert, starting to see that there is a strength to this and there are benefits to this. I think there have been some critiques of Susan Cain’s work in terms of it’s looking a lot more at a HSP and calling it introvert, etc., but I do think there was some really good stuff that came out of that in terms of, as I said, helping introverts to see that this isn’t a handicap – this is really something that is valuable, and in the right settings, it’s a real strength over an extrovert because you’re able to do this thing differently and that thing differently.
Sarah Salmon: Yeah. Susan basically brought introversion into the mainstream and told us all that there’s nothing wrong with it, which is huge. Even my mom is like, “Oh… they’re kind of introverted” as if it’s a bad thing. I’m like, yes, awesome, they’re introverted. I celebrate it.
When I have someone who’s concerned or self-conscious about the fact they’re an introvert, I’m like, do you know that you can do all these things that most of the population can’t do? You have these skills. Your sense of observing, your ability to observe people and general situations and environments is far superior to anybody else. That thing that you noticed in that person that flinched in their face when you said something, extroverts don’t notice that in the same way. So when introverts choose to have conversations with the right people and we say something and we realise that it hits badly or not in the way that we intended, we know immediately because we see the body language, we hear the inflection in their voice, we notice how they touch their hair. We notice that that didn’t land as we hoped it would, and we correct immediately, whereas an extrovert, it goes way over their head.
And I don’t want to generalise here, but just by way of example, that’s something I notice all the time. Introverts, we have these skills that other people simply don’t have. You just have to learn what they are.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Sarah, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. I’m really glad that you’re doing the work that you are doing in the world and, in a really weird way, had the brain tumour and experience that you did, because it’s taken you on this path.
Sarah Salmon: For sure.
Chris Sandel: The final thing is where can people find out more about you? You can talk about social media or website. I’ll put it all in the show notes.
Sarah Salmon: The best place, the hub of everything, is my website. That’s www.introvert-advocate.com. I put all my best stuff in my emails, so that’s a good place to sign up. We were talking a lot about energy today. I have a great eBook there that you can get, which is 20 Introvert-Friendly Ways to Have More Energy, which go way beyond just simply spending time on your own because there’s so much more to it.
And then on social, on Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, I’m Introvert Advocate. And that’s where you can find me.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. This was awesome.
Sarah Salmon: Thanks, Chris, so much.
Chris Sandel: So that was my conversation with Sarah. I hope you enjoyed it. She really is doing great work in supporting introverts and talking about this topic.
As I mentioned at the top, I’m taking on clients again. It’s a limited intake and I have just two spots left. If you want help with recovery, body image, getting your period back, exercise compulsion, getting out of quasi-recovery, or any of the areas that I cover as part of this show, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.
That is it for today’s show. I’ll be back with another episode shortly. Stay safe, and I’ll catch you then.
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