Hey y’all! Excited to share this chat with my wife (!) Hilary. Hil is a therapist in town and an avid fitnesser and has lots to say about the intersection of the two. Regretably our on camera chemistry was so intense it broke the camera, so this episode is audio only. We’ll tone it down next time, promise!
Noah: Hello, my wife. Welcome to Physical Education, and welcome to you, viewers out in the world. I’m sitting here with my wife, Hilary Neblett. We have actually recorded this before — this is the second time we’ve recorded this. The first time we talked for a very long time, and we thought it might make more sense to split some of those thoughts into different episodes that are a little more directed. But without further ado, Hilary, why don’t you introduce yourself, tell people a little bit about your background, and then I’ll talk about why I brought you on and why I think this is an interesting conversation.
Hilary: Hi everyone, I’m Hilary. I’m a therapist here in Austin in private practice. My practice has been open for about a year and a half now, almost two years. This is my second career — I came from a whole different industry. I used to work in events and entertainment, went back to school, and now I get to think and learn about all the stuff that’s interesting to me.
Noah: I’ve had talking to you on my list for a while. We often talk at home about the intersection between physical health and mental health — how some of the stuff you do for work shows up in your practice, and maybe vice versa. A lot of people have some understanding that mental health is a component of your physical health and vice versa. I thought it’d be interesting to dig into that with a little more nuance and depth than just the rote, hey, going to the gym makes you feel good. So let’s start with some background. Not everyone knows about fitness or mental health, so I want to set the stage before we start tying pieces together. Give us a brief overview of your fitness background and how you got to where you are now.
Hilary: I didn’t really grow up being super involved in fitness — never played sports or anything like that. I started to dabble more in my early 20s, various forms of strength training, bits and bobs here and there. It didn’t really get serious in the way it is now until my late 20s, and it was sort of a happenstance thing. One New Year’s Eve I just decided I’m going to sign up for a sprint triathlon in June — just something to push myself. Over those six months, I became very consistent with my training for the first time. It showed me not just the physical benefits but a lot of residual ones. I tend to be an anxious person, and it really helped balance out my baseline day-to-day. Noticing those changes helped me stay consistent with it and became another reason why.
Hilary: Then when I moved to Austin, I was experimenting with different forms of fitness, and I met Noah. I was at this other gym — Castle Hill Fitness, which is an awesome privately-owned gym in Austin — and they had a class on Saturdays that I now understand was a functional fitness-based class. I’d come home and tell Noah, “Oh my god, we did power cleans today!” And he was like, you should come try our gym.
Noah: At first you were a little resistant. But when you started talking about that class, I was like, I think you’re doing what we do — so maybe try it.
Hilary: Yeah, and I did, and became really into it. It’s become one of my favorite forms of fitness.
Noah: Cool. So let’s talk about your work as a therapist. What does your client work look like? What kinds of issues do you work with people on? What are the commonalities among the people coming to you?
Hilary: My work is pretty varied, but it boils down to a few things. A lot of anxiety in all its different forms — whether it’s related to relationships or just the scourge of the 21st century, existing in the world right now. A lot of shame and self-worth work. Many people come to me with an initial goal of, “I really want to build confidence, I don’t really trust myself, I feel incapable in certain areas.” I work with a lot of young adults, so there’s identity work too — figuring out who I am, who I want to be, separating from the pressures of the world.
Noah: So we’ve talked about who you work with and what you work on. Now I want to talk about the how — your overall philosophy of treatment, your approach to helping people with those things.
Hilary: The more I do this work, the more I think about what is underlying so many of these different challenges. The way I think about it: how do we build a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity? And how do we become genuinely curious about ourselves and our experience from a less judgmental stance — more like a scientist observing what’s happening from a neutral place? A lot of people’s tendency is to push themselves with criticism, or to treat a negative data point as a derailment. Like, this says something about me as a person, rather than just, oh, that didn’t go the way I wanted.
Noah: It’s funny — we prepped a little last night, but we didn’t actually talk about this. And I talk to people in the gym about exactly this a lot. That’s a cool framing: the curiosity approach, the “it’s all data” mindset. So when you’re working with somebody to get there, what helps them tolerate uncertainty? What helps them foster curiosity? You throw around the term “psychological flexibility” — what does that mean?
Hilary: Psychological flexibility is connected to the “how.” I practice a modality called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — ACT. That’s where I ground a lot of my work. The goal of ACT is to increase psychological flexibility, which is essentially: how do we build awareness of our experience, notice it in the moment, stay open to it — versus trying to control it, avoid it, or change it? And then, with all of that happening, how do we continue taking action in line with our values? It’s less about changing thoughts or feelings, and more about developing a new relationship to them.
Noah: I just thought of this and it’s a little jokey, but: is psychological flexibility similar to flexibility in the gym, in that it’s something everybody knows they need to work on but keeps putting off? Like, “Oh man, I really need to stretch my hips” — and then, “I’ll do that tomorrow.” Okay, that’s a joke. Work on your mobility. But more seriously — let’s talk about how this shows up in the gym.
Hilary: I think a lot of people doing what we do know that feeling. The old CrossFit adage is “be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” and often that’s meant quite literally — like, my body feels gross. The first time you experience it, it can be really distressing. And then over time, most people get it: yeah, it’s okay if I’m really out of breath. It’s okay if I’m really hot. This doesn’t mean I’m dying.
Hilary: When I first started CrossFit, every third class I’d just start crying kind of randomly. Not connected to any feeling of sadness — it was literally just my body going, whoa, what’s happening here? And the more I stuck with it and started to understand that feeling, I was able to modulate myself within it. You train not just your body but your mind: hey, this is okay, I’m safe here, I can keep going. And that’s essentially what we’re working on in the therapy room too. The gym can be such a great training ground for it.
Noah: We have few opportunities in our lives to do things that feel intense both mentally and physically at the same time. A lot of what we do requires you to be very locked in intellectually — you have to pay a lot of attention, execute at a high level of coordination — while also experiencing pretty intense physical sensations. Those two things together are rare. You might have work where you’re very intellectually focused but your body isn’t doing anything. Or you go for a run that’s really hard but your mind is kind of zoned out. Having both at once, I think, is a lot of the power of what we train.
Noah: And what I’ve seen is that as people get more comfortable with this, as they have experiences where they try something hard and get through it, bite off a little more than they can chew and it ends up being okay — that ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable, to realize that this is just a feeling like any other, can carry over into life. They can take that practice and use it in other places where they’re feeling uncomfortable, uncertain, even overwhelmed.
Hilary: Kind of what you’re describing is: in every moment in the gym, you’re deciding how to respond. Am I going to stop, or am I going to continue? And the more you make that choice to continue amid discomfort, the better you get at making that choice. That increases overall confidence. It means, yeah — we can do the things that matter to us even when I’m feeling anxious or upset, because our feelings don’t have to be the decision-maker. I can feel these things, my mind can tell me all this stuff about what might happen, and I choose to go anyway.
Noah: Because the discomfort is the point. In the same way that a challenging workout has a part where you’re like, this is really hard — that’s what creates change. That is the training stimulus. And the same goes for a social situation where you feel anxious or uncomfortable. It probably means you’re putting yourself out there, stretching into an area that isn’t fully trained yet. That discomfort is almost like a training stimulus.
Hilary: And certainly there could be times where it’s like, no, this is too much — this is inappropriate for my current level of development, I need to pull back. And there are times where it’s uncomfortable and that’s okay. It’s not about always pushing yourself through discomfort. It’s about discernment — finding the appropriate zone — and really, it’s about creating more space to make a choice instead of having an automatic reaction.
Noah: One of the things we see with brand new people at the gym isn’t that they’re not capable — it’s that they don’t know their own bodies yet. They haven’t developed what my colleague Bret calls “the gears.” They don’t know what heavy feels like versus medium. And that makes sense, because so much of it is experiential and relative. Heavy is relative to a person. You need to hit a bunch of different data points before you can say, this is heavy, this is hard. I think socially and emotionally, it’s the same thing. If we’re never in those situations, we can’t build that relativism — but we can practice it.
Noah: I want to get into the curiosity piece. One of my big AHAs when I started doing this work was that playful, exploratory quality — you can try things, they’re weird and different, and that’s great. Especially when we’re doing something like finding a max lift — a real binary pass/fail situation — I talk to people about approaching it as identifying data points. Do I think I can lift this much? And if I can’t, that isn’t some commentary on me as a person or that my training sucks. It just means I found my level. And the curiosity is: I wonder why I’m able to do X and Y but not Z? What’s interesting about that?
Hilary: Right — collecting data from a place of genuine observation. There’s a difference between genuine curiosity and pseudo-curiosity. Genuine curiosity is like, huh, what is this? Interesting. Whereas we might use the language of curiosity but really mean, “What the hell is this?” — which is closer to alarm. True curiosity is pretty neutral. Not even positive or negative — just, what is the base element of this?
Noah: We talk about tracking in our Foundations program. I’m a big believer in it. But there is such a thing as too much data. We show people our tracking tool and say: here’s your quantitative data — scores, times, weights — those are your hard objective facts. But I always push people to add qualitative data too. Context. Just got back from vacation. Up all night with the baby. Or on the positive side: I moved my meal back an hour and felt great when I usually feel stomach upset. Did some extra hip mobility before squatting and it felt really smooth. Those qualitative pieces satisfy the curiosity — they give you the contextual reinforcements of, yeah, do this again. Or sometimes, don’t max out your back squat the day you got back from a three-week vacation.
Noah: I think we’re close to a good place to wrap. I want to quickly cover resources for people who are interested in going deeper on the mental health side, and then any last thoughts — a connection or lesson that’s been important to you in the space where your work and what we do here meet.
Hilary: One of the things we touched on and I want to come back to: connecting to your why. We don’t just push through discomfort for the sake of it. What are we doing this in service of? When you’re feeling frustrated or upset — do you want to not go to the gym tomorrow, or stop training, or punish yourself in some way? Or do you want to let yourself feel it, reconnect to why you do this hard thing, and make the choice to try again tomorrow? Not letting the feeling be the decision-maker of how you move forward.
Noah: I like that — unhitching the trailer of meaning from gym performance. If you’re bad at cleans, you are not a bad person. If you had a bad day, it’ll work out. It’s not because all your training is useless. Especially because a lot of what we do lives in this overlap between training and actual performance, and in performance, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose — that’s part of the whole thing. It’s not expected that every time you go from training to performance it’ll be exactly what you want. The unknown is part of why we do it. Taking those negative outcomes as part of the point, rather than tying them into some deeper commentary on ourselves.
Hilary: Our minds are just meaning-making machines, and the automatic interpretation is often not a kind one. So pausing to question that a little bit — treating your mind like an advisor, not a dictator. You can question what your mind is saying, take it with a grain of salt, and say, “Thank you for that feedback, but I’m going to take my own path.”
Noah: If somebody’s thinking, man, I want to think deeper about these things — whether it’s stuff in the gym or life in general — how would they go about doing that?
Hilary: For digging into psychological flexibility, one of my favorite books that isn’t super clinical is A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes — he was the founder of ACT and one of the key researchers in this space. It’s both explanatory and very actionable, with a lot of exercises and things to practice. There’s also The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris — another very accessible book on similar territory. And if you’re interested in exploring these things with a therapist, seek out someone who practices Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or that style of work. That would be my first recommendation.
Noah: And I’ll put Hilary’s name plate on the desk in a special role as the Lumos mental health advisor. What she means by that is: when people are thinking about finding a therapist, that’s obviously not something I can do — scope of practice and all — but in helping somebody find a good fit or sift through resources, I do that in the same way I do when someone asks me about gyms in a new city. So throwing that out there: if you’re a member or a friend of the gym and you want help navigating that, reach out to me and I’ll connect you with Hilary.
Hilary: Yeah, that’s something that’s really important to me — helping connect people to resources in the community. If you have my information or reach out to Noah, I’m happy to talk with you and help however I can.
Noah: Well, thank you for coming on. If you’re thinking, man, I want to talk more about this — or there’s something we got into that you’d like more on, or something we didn’t touch at all — let us know. We’ll get right back on here and do it. Thanks, bye.
