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You replay the scene in your head, what was said, what wasn't, what still hurts, your
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joint tenses, your chest tightens, your heart races.
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Resentment isn't just emotional, it's biochemical.
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Migraine Heroes is a podcast for chronic migraine sufferers who've seen countless
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doctors with no results.
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Learn how to reduce your migraine attacks without endless medications or constant sacrifices.
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Hello, I'm Diane Ducarme, I've helped over 500 people break free from migraine, even
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after suffering for up to 60 years.
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My mission in life?
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To bring this relief to a million people using a unique blend of eastern medicine and western
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In this episode, you will learn how resentment and rumination keep your stress chemistry
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locked on, what brain regions and hormones shift when you practice forgiveness, and how
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both western neuroscience and eastern philosophy teach the same truth, peace is physiology.
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Stay with me till the end, because once you see what resentment does inside the brain,
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forgiveness stops being abstract and becomes deeply practical.
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And by the end of this episode, you will know what makes me angry on a day-to-day basis.
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When you relive a painful event, your brain doesn't label its memory, it experiences
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it again in real time.
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The amylda, the brain's emotional alarm, fires, and the hypothalamus sends signal through
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the HPA axis, releasing cortisol and adrenaline.
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Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure spikes, inflammation increases, and if you
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repeat that pattern daily, through resentment, anger, and silent rumination, those hormones
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stop being acute responses, they become your baseline.
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Chronic activation of this loop has been linked to fatigue, anxiety, cardiovascular disease,
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A 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who habitually replay grievance
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show increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a region tied to self-referential
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thought and stress persistence.
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By contrast, subjects trained in forgiveness practices showed greater activation in the
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ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the brain's self-soothing and empathy center.
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Forgiveness then is not moral permission, it's a neurological release.
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Forgiveness interrupts the cortisol feedback loop and restores parasympathetic tone, your
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body's rest and repair mode.
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Another meta-analysis from Annals of Behavioral Medicine in 2021 found measurable drops in
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inflammatory markers after consistent forgiveness exercises, especially IL-6, a key cytokine
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linked to chronic pain and depression.
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Forgiveness isn't letting someone off the hook, it's taking your nervous system off
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So, I want to share this story about a man, it's a very, very private story, so I'll
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keep the details immensely generic as to no name and no location.
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So it's a man, he lives in the US, he is an executive in a company.
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We worked together, this was three, four years ago, and his migraines drastically improved.
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He was really down to a very low grades, regular, but very, very low type of migraine, he could
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completely concentrate at work, until one day, a little bit out of the blue, he had stopped
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He sends me a very strong message on WhatsApp and says, it doesn't work, I have migraines
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again, and I'm infuriated, and I said, oh, I replied immediately, I said, I felt so bad,
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I was like, I'm so sorry that, I don't know, like your patterns seem to be so good,
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I'm so sorry for what's happening, let me help you out.
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And so I continued to text him, at the time I did not have the Migraine Heroes app yet,
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so this was all on WhatsApp.
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I text him and I say, well, is there any context, is there anything that changed while I go
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in your profile and in your data?
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And he replied to me, something I did not expect, he replied to me, my father died.
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And I said to him, oh, okay, very sorry for that, can you send me a picture of your tongue?
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Now, the tongue, if you know my work, it's really related to a muscle that relates to
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your base nerve and is an amazing map into your gut brain axis, incredible.
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You know, you can see on our app, we always ask for a picture of your tongue.
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And so on his tongue, which I asked 24 hours later, I write to him and I say, look, I'm
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so sorry to be a bit off boundary here, but I'm not seeing grief on your tongue, I'm seeing
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anger and resentment, can that be?
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And then he replied to me, he said, oh gosh, you know, I've done years of therapy, I am
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deeply angry at my father for a lot of reasons, I just, please, I just, I just don't want
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And I said to him, look, it's absolutely okay, I can either ask you to forgive to your father
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or to stop being angry at him, which is really difficult in the case because he's no longer
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there anyway, and he's leaving his mess behind,
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or I can ask you to have a chamomile and goji berries infusion or a chamomile infusion.
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So, you know, there you go.
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And just in a couple of days, he was back to his norm because the more he was going
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to be angry, the more he was going to have migraines, but the more he was having migraines,
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the more it would flare up his liver.
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You see the emotional to gut axis is bidirectional.
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And so within three days, we got him back on track.
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And I just want to illustrate this example of how the anger and how the resentment really
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acts like a boomerang, like you think you're harming the person in front, but really the
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first person that you're harming is yourself.
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And I'll share my own story later.
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In traditional Chinese medicine and Buddhist psychology, like resentment is seen as heat
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of the heart, what we call heart fire can be also live a fire.
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And when anger or injustice isn't expressed or resolved, it becomes an internal fire burning
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the chest, tightening the breath and disturbing the sleep.
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But fire in the sense isn't evil. It's energy without direction.
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And when you hold a grudge, that energy circles inward.
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And when you forgive, it moves outward, transforming into compassion, which naturally cools the
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Eastern teachings don't define forgiveness as approval.
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They define it as release of resistance, not saying it's okay, but saying, I will no
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longer carry this.
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Breathing into the chest, exhaling longer than you inhale, literally signals the vagus
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nerve to relax, placing a hand on the sternum while exhaling releases the tension that resentment
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And over time, these small rituals retrain your emotional circuitry to recognize peace,
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not as passivity, but as safety.
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And from safety, the mind can finally soften, the fire dims, the body cools.
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In both frameworks, neuroscience and Eastern medicine, forgiveness is re-regulation.
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That's what happens when the storm stops spinning and the heart remembers its home.
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So if you've been holding on to anger, betrayal, disappointment, remember your body is holding
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Every thought sends a chemical and every memory writes a hormone.
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Forgiveness isn't for them. It's for the system you live inside every day.
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It's the decision to stop being triggered by the past and starting being present in
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your own life again.
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You don't have to forget. You just have to stop re-injuring yourself through replay over
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Because when you release resentment, you don't erase history. And the peace that follows isn't
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philosophical, it's physical.
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I wanted to share what sometimes, and sometimes in my day to day, makes me not angry, but
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So I've been living here in New Zealand for the last 10 years, and I'm incredibly grateful
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I mean, it is just paradise.
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It's been a home to my children, it's been a home to my family.
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It's allowed us to become a family and spend so much time, quality time together.
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It's also allowed me to completely change career 180 degrees.
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I discovered what we could do for people suffering from migraines. And from that moment, I never
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looked back. And I think New Zealand allowed to reinvent myself and not feel like an imposter
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when I was initially one, but own my purpose and own my freedom and move forward.
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And since 2019, we've grown and our app has done, you know, amazing things and we're able
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soon, very soon, to help people in an automated way.
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So give all of our wisdom and our learnings to millions of people worldwide in an automated
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way at a small price, which has been for me always, always the end result that I was hoping
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And so it's incredible.
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And it doesn't come with tremendous hard work.
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And so I have a team, there's roughly 12 of us, and all of my team is based everywhere
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in the world, mainly concentrated, mainly concentrated in Europe.
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And it's difficult for me, I mean, you know, mind you with one in Canada and one, two in
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it's difficult time zone wise, because it means that every single morning, the day starts
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really early and every single evening, the work goes late, which, you know, some funny enough,
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But what I do mind is that in the middle of the day, I have so many things to do, and
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I can't access people because they're asleep.
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And so that has led me to be sometimes at times resentful, and I have to catch myself
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because I can't do that.
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So I've, I've learned to have my own techniques to, you know, peace and quiet.
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And these days, it's about a good romance and a good love book to just in between really
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intense activities, just recenter myself a little bit, or if I'm feeling that way,
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to recenter myself.
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And so it can be anything.
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I think it works wonders.
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I know that the universe would take me to a closer time zone to where I need to be.
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And meanwhile, I try to focus on the gratitude that I have that this geography allowed to
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be on purpose and helping all of you.
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And so in your day to day, some things may make you angry, like an unclean kitchen, a
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child that forgot his hockey bag and sports bag yet another day, a husband that doesn't
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remove his shoes when he comes home, you know, small things like that.
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And it's just try to let go, let go of the small things, let go of the larger things
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for your own and very selfish importance benefits so you can love and be in return.
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And remember, every small step you take moves you closer to freedom.
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You are powerful, you are resilient, and you are no longer alone.
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Keep rising, my Green Hero.
