In this episode of The Infinite Life Podcast, Sarah Anne shares her powerful journey through bipolar diagnosis, insomnia, emotional instability, and recovery through gut health, self-awareness, and daily regulation practices. This conversation explores the deep connection between mental health and the body, and how self-love becomes a lived, embodied practice rather than a concept.
🎧 Listen to the full episode below:
Context & Deeper Insight
What makes this episode particularly powerful is the intersection between biology and consciousness.
Sarah’s experience highlights something that is often overlooked in both traditional mental health systems and spiritual communities:
- Not all emotional distress originates from trauma or mindset.
- Some of it is rooted in physical dysregulation within the body.
Her journey reveals how:
- Gut health directly influences emotional states
- Inflammation can amplify anxiety and instability
- Daily regulation (movement, food, sleep) becomes the foundation for healing
This aligns with what we see across many sessions — whether through regression work or lived experience:
- The body and the soul are not separate systems.
- They are constantly communicating.
Full Transcript
Below is the full transcript of this episode for those who prefer to read or revisit specific moments.
Sarah describes how emotional instability, insomnia, and physical symptoms escalated despite no identifiable trauma, eventually leading to a bipolar diagnosis. She later discovered that her symptoms were deeply connected to gut health, inflammation, and daily lifestyle patterns rather than purely psychological causes.
Katische Haberfield:
Welcome to the Infinite Life Podcast with me, your host, Katische Haberfield. This week I’m really, truly privileged to bring somebody to you who is new to me in the past 12 months. Her name is Sarah Ann. She’s an Aussie like me. She’s Sydney based. She’s an author. A speaker and a community strategist, and she’s known colloquially as the “Facebook group girl”.
After being told she was legally disabled at 18,. She went on to build a seven figure business, probably more by now, and thriving online community of more than 8,000 small business owners.
Through her book, “million Dollar Groups” and Coaching Programs, Sarah helps founders and coaches turn their life experiences into profitable purpose-driven communities that change lives, starting with their own. Sarah Anne and thank you so much for coming on, and welcome to the podcast.
Sarah Anne:
I’m so excited to be here. Thank you.
Katische Haberfield:
I think that one of the fundamentally most difficult things people need to learn and understand about the world that they live in is their perception of self. I think everybody on the planet struggles with how they look, how they feel, how they think, what they should do, what they shouldn’t do.
And they have lots of judgements and labels about themselves. Tell us your background, because you’ve been on a profound journey of self love since you were a little girl and it really has helped me reflect on my own journey of self-love.
Sarah Anne:
Cool. I like that. I don’t I don’t actually talk about self-love a lot, but I’m super excited to talk about it. So when I was young, let’s say 10, 11, 12 I had all sleeping issues from a really young age. I never really slept super well.
And then like before I was a teenager I had somehow developed binge eating issues and my parents would have to lock the food or not buy food. Like I was quite overweight at a very young age and I was just always wanting to put food in my mouth.
And then by the time I was 17. My sleeping problems were getting worse and worse. I was getting more aggressive, and then I’d reached this point where I had complete insomnia, like I would sleep maybe an hour a night consistently.
So I started having like psychotic breakdowns and I went to a psychiatrist just before I turned 18. No, I went to a doctor actually, and I said to the doctor, I said, something is wrong with me.
I have all of these feelings. I’m feeling hurt. I’m feeling angry. I’m feeling, all these things, but there’s no reason. There’s no reason for me to feel this way. There’s nothing wrong with my life. My parents are great, they love me.
And of course, I was just about to turn 18, so I wasn’t quite old enough for an adult psychiatrist. And they’re like, look, you can go see a child psychiatrist with your parents, or you can wait until you’re 18.
And I think I ended up seeing one child psychiatrist with my mom, and they were trying to to a hammer, everything’s a nail. And so they were trying to push me down this route of finding some trauma or something in my life that was causing all of these emotions, which wasn’t the case.
And then eventually I made it to an adult psychiatrist and they diagnosed me with bipolar and borderline personality disorder. On top of that I had the insomnia and the migraines and the whole host of just problems.
My anxiety at one point was so bad that I stopped talking completely for weeks, just didn’t speak at all. And I would cry. I would scream, I would bang my head on things. I would punch walls anything to make like this physical pain that was inside of my body stop.
And I guess that’s the, starting point of my whole journey.
Katische Haberfield:
And anybody who hasn’t slept well knows that you can’t think well, and if you’ve got migraines and pain. It can be awful. One of the girls in in migraine at school, she actually jumped off the story bridge in Brisbane committed suicide because of bad migraine and neck pain.
I honor you for overcoming that kind of mental and physical pain in order to find some solution for yourself because everybody knows somebody who has has not been able to get past that.
Katische Haberfield:
What happened next? What did you start doing for yourself to make yourself feel better?
Sarah Anne:
Yeah. When does it stop?
That’s crazy and that that makes me really sad to hear stuff like that because I did have times where I jumped out of a moving car. I nearly jumped out of a building and I had very fast acting friends. I overdosed on any Psychotics and I had a dad who made me vomit a bunch of stuff, but one time I nearly did die.
I paralyzed myself completely and my whole body shut down, but my eyes were still open. They were pinned to the roof, and I could hear my mom in the other room. She didn’t know that I was paralyzed in, my bedroom, like on the verge of dying.
I could feel my whole body, just like my heart was just pounding through my chest trying to pump the drugs through me. But I was completely paralyzed.
And it’s so sad. Like when I hear the amount of people that struggle and I don’t hear many people that come out the other side, like it’s so rare to hear people get over it.
And I think for me, the starting point of being able to really heal and get better because I didn’t go through a trauma, there’s so many studies now that link our emotional and physical health together, right?
And our mental health to our gut health. And if there’s something wrong neurologically will all of those neurotransmitters. And that all starts usually in the gut, right?
So there’s so many studies for that now, but 10 years ago there was no studies for anything like that.
And so it was really just me getting this diagnosis and having this belief, if I wasn’t born like this, that I can get better.
Sarah Anne:
And so it was really just me getting this diagnosis and having this belief, if I wasn’t born like this, that I can get better. They’re saying, oh, it’s a chemical imbalance, there’s nothing you can do, but take these drugs.
And of course I had to take the drugs ’cause I needed to sleep. But the thought that there was nothing that I could do, and this was my prognosis, was to go live on a disability pension. That never once crossed my mind, and I didn’t even get the disability pension.
Like I worked having migraines in door-to-door sales. I would have to sit on the street at 3:00 PM in the afternoon when the migraine kicked in, and I couldn’t walk, knock doors anymore or whatever. But I just, I never believed that I couldn’t heal.
Logically it just didn’t make sense. I wasn’t born like this, so if I wasn’t born like this, surely I can fix it right.
Katische Haberfield:
Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah. This Yeah, for me, I’m like, if I get a, and I haven’t had one for a long time, but if I got a migraine, I have to, would have to go and lie under bed, under the covers with the ice all around my head and that’s it.
I’m just in bed. So I can’t even imagine sitting on the side of the road and then getting back up and doing door to door sales.
And you emotion mentioned that you were an emotional eater. And I know girls in particular we, can be emotional eaters we train ourselves. I’ll feel better if I have some chocolate. And it does work.
But you can get stuck in that cycle of I, I deserve a Tim Tam today.
So I’m interested, did you read a book on gut health or something, or did you see a TV program? How did you link that?
’cause that’s a big drastic change from being emotional eater to actually knowing that your gut was the key to that, and that, as you said, the books only came out recently.
Sarah Anne:
Yeah. That was just years and years of just back and forth trial and error and studying. I’m 33, so I was like 18.
So there was like just starting to be books and stuff about this around, about then, but it was not mainstream medicine and I don’t think it is now.
Still, I think if you go to a psychiatrist now I don’t think they’re gonna tell you to check your gut or check your diet or are you eating gluten? Are you eating inflammatory foods?
I don’t think that’s still in the mainstream medicine, but there was starting to just starting to be some books.
I remember when I first started looking into it, I was researching borderline personality disorder and BPD and all these things.
I’m watching these YouTube videos and I’m just watching how bad it is.
And then at first I’m just like watching and feeling oh, that’s me, that’s my problem.
So I’m feeling like a bit of a connection okay, I’m not alone in this.
And then at some point I just started I was just trying to get healthy. it wasn’t like I thought this is gonna be the thing that’s gonna fix me.
It’s, I was just trying to be healthy and so I was listening to books, or I was reading books.
I found some stuff like on the gut brain. I found some stuff on the microbiome.
I was, but I did all kinds of stuff. I did Tony Robbins and I tried to listen to.
Sarah Anne:
Who’s that? You and Joe Dispenza.
It’s what’s the name? Is your really famous book how to Undo Being Yourself or Change
Katische Haberfield:
Okay.
Sarah Anne:
Yep. But anyway, I tried to listen to it and I couldn’t get through it ’cause it was like too big and wordy for me and stuff.
But I was just on this journey of just trying to learn and trying to get better.
So there was never really one time where it was like, oh, this is my strategy, or this is my path forward, or this is how I’m gonna fix this.
At some point along the way, I had seen studies or information about wheat and gluten and depression and mental health issues and stuff like that.
But I went to the doctor and they did a test and they’re like, no, you don’t have any wheat intolerances.
And they said that I was fine. And so I was like, okay I said I was fine.
There was a really big turning point where I’d gotten into rock climbing.
I was really interested in just being healthy, and I went vegan, and I’m not vegan now or anything like that. And this is not like about going on a vegan diet, but I was just on a mad health kick.
And I think I also went gluten free and I don’t know why, but I was just eating just a lot of beans and fiber and veggies and all that stuff.
And I was feeling really good and I was climbing and I was really active and lean.
And then an accident, I hurt my shoulder and the first thing I did was start eating crap.
And I noticed that every day that I ate wheat, I started to feel worse and worse, not just worse, like pain in the stomach or lethargic.
But then I started getting really moody and emotional and all of a sudden I started snapping at people and causing fights and looking for problems that didn’t exist.
And of course I had a problem as well, but like it was exacerbated worse every day that I ate wheat.
And I was like, hold on.
This is very interesting.
’cause I haven’t really felt like this in a while.
And so then I cut it out again, and then I tested this again like a little bit later and I started eating the wheat again and I noticed, hey, every time I eat this every day, like consistently, my moods get worse day by day until I’m at a point where I’m like pretty much an emotional wreck and I’m lethargic.
When I noticed that was a huge trigger for me and I was like, okay, this really is the thing, this really is the path.
And then the process of healing that I think was actually not being obsessed with healing it and just being healthy ’cause it’s a really long process to heal longstanding gut problems.
And I also have some other gene defects that needed some supplements that I didn’t know about and, other bits and pieces.
And so it wasn’t like, again, I have a roadmap forward to fix this, but I was just on the journey of being healthy and I found that one big trigger and so I cut that out and that was really helpful.
Katische Haberfield:
And today as Sarah in 2026 how do you structure food and fitness and the healthy version of Sarah into your life? Because you have a very busy schedule.
So what are your non-negotiables? What do you do in your world to keep yourself feeling great?
Katische Haberfield:
I think it’s still my, ’cause life is really busy at the moment. I’m traveling a lot. I’m not home much, and so I’m still working on my perfect routines and days and non-negotiables.
But definitely for me I don’t eat wheat ’cause it’s very inflammatory to me.
And it I notice that I don’t feel good.
I feel lethargic.
I get gassy.
I get moody, and then I don’t have the energy or the mental bandwidth to think and operate the way that I wanna operate.
So I just don’t need it.
I can eat potatoes, I can eat rice, I can eat sweet potatoes, like I don’t need wheat.
I don’t eat bread.
I don’t need that.
And then exercise.
It’s so basic, right?
I did a genetic methylation test, and I don’t know if you know what a methylation test is, but we have this cycle in our body that helps convert certain vitamins to an active form, which we can use them predominantly.
It’s B vitamins, but there’s, other vitamins and stuff involved in this.
And because of certain defects that I have in this.
My body doesn’t detox very well, so my detox pathways are impaired and I don’t convert certain vitamins, which, it regulates.
So like people with a DHD have this gene defect because it regulates your dopamine responses and other neurotransmitters, your serotonin, your dopamine your detox pathways.
So you think about if your dopamine receptors are not regulated properly.
And neither is your serotonin and you’re not detoxing all the crap we put into our body on a daily basis.
That’s really gonna slow you down cognitively, right?
And because of one of these defects, I need to get my heart rate up every day.
And it helps somehow.
It helps with the, I don’t know, it must burn off a certain thing to another thing or something.
I don’t know.
I had a consult with someone and I do notice that if I exercise a lot more frequently.
I fucking feel way better.
It doesn’t have to be long.
doesn’t have to be big workouts.
It’s not like crazy high intensity workouts, but I have to get my heart rate up every day.
And I notice if I’m only getting my heart rate up two or three times per week, I don’t feel as good as if I’m like five or six or seven times per week.
So that really important.
For me.
And then just get your steps in, get your sunlight.
Try to have a good sleep routine.
Like routine.
The basic shit, it’s so basic, but it works right.
Katische Haberfield:
Yeah.
Yeah.
I never even personally thought about doing something like that, but yeah if your body doesn’t detox, then yeah, of course you’re gonna feel that crap.
And, when you do get time to yourself what sort of things do you do to de-stress to decompress?
Because you, run so many different masterminds and coaching groups and you speak a lot.
So what do you, just outta curiosity what does Sarah do for fun?
I feel amazing after doing this, and that was just for me, other than exercise?
Sarah Anne:
Yeah.
Other than exercise,, i’m like, a climb and I snowboard.
I love those things.
But then just in terms of de-stressing, I don’t necessarily have a set routine, but I feel like I’m very in touch with my body and what my body needs.
And so if I need to breathe, if I need to walk, if I need to nap, if I’m at a certain phase in my cycle and I can’t push today, like I’m just very in tune with that.
And so I feel like regulating is a, it’s a daily thing, like your daily, just bringing yourself back to a grounded space or pumping yourself up ready to work or calming down, ready for bed or like your state regulation isn’t something that some people can plan it in 7:00 PM or 8:00 PM or whatever, but it’s this thing that we’re always just doing.
And so I think if you can get really in tune with your body, then you can give it what it needs.
When it needs, and it just flows through the day.
Katische Haberfield:
Yeah, absolutely.
And you work with a lot of small, tiny, and massive entrepreneurs and you teach them how to grow Facebook groups and communities so that they can achieve their goals and they can serve and help people.
And I know that one of the things that we all have to face when we are actually trying to do something like talk to strangers on the internet is emotions.
And talk me through how you find the internet to be like a great big emotional challenge for entrepreneurs and how you, help them get past those emotions to do this stuff that they need to do.
Sarah Anne:
Yeah.
I remember the first time I did a Facebook Live, one of my mentors said, go and share your story about how you got into sales.
And the way that I got into sales was through mental health, because I was kicked outta school.
I wanted to go get breast implants, but I’d spent half the money and I’d already booked in the surgery and I needed a job to make quick
Sarah Anne:
And I was still at that time trying to study psychology and go, what the heck is wrong with me? And then I was also studying sales, and I just found that the more I understood myself and human behavior.
Then the more I understood other people, the better I became it sales.
And so that was like the story that I had to get online and tell for the first time. And I’d never publicly told people that I had mental health challenges.
And there’s a lot of stigma around it. I didn’t wanna be seen as like attention seeking or making stuff up.
I was 25, so I was really on the turning point of coming out and being at this point where I was like fully healed and I was still running from it.
Like when you are chasing this new version of yourself, there’s like this fear of slipping back into this old version of yourself.
And I was still at that phase where I was like running from it and I didn’t wanna acknowledge it, I didn’t wanna talk about it, didn’t wanna be seen as that.
So that was really scary.
Sarah Anne:
And I did that first live with my hand shaking so badly and then I had to swap it to the other hand ’cause it was just going crazy and I was at the beach.
And so I think people just thought it was like crazy windy or something oh, like it was so, scary.
But the amount of people that reached out to me that I did not know were following me, were watching me, that were still friends with me, people from previous jobs.
And so thank you so much for sharing that. That was really helpful for me really struggling, that was just such confirmation that, you know what?
Sarah Anne:
I do need to turn up online and be seen and share this stuff even though it’s, even though it’s scary.
And someone told me once.
And I think it’s true that like your body doesn’t know the difference between excitement and fear.
And I just leaned into it and I held onto that and anytime that I had to do something that was scary, I just told myself I was excited to.
And I just formed this habit of saying I’m excited, to speak on this stage. I’m excited to go and do this live. I’m excited to jump off this bridge.
Oh. I’ve jumped off a lot of bridges. It’s scary and I’m excited is what I say.
I don’t say I’m scared. I say I’m excited and I use that like in my business life and in my personal life, because I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie as well.
So it’s always, I’m excited to go and do this thing, like I’m climbing up this a hundred foot wall and it’s completely exposed and the move is very big and scary and powerful, and I’m shitting bricks.
I’m excited to be here. I’m so excited. I’m having fun.
Sarah Anne:
So I really leaned into, I’m excited.
And then I really held onto those when I first did it, and I got that first positive comment or that first thank you.
I really held onto that too.
I think people can get so fixated on a negative, like that first negative comment or that first naysayer or that first mean person, whereas I focused on that first positive comment, right?
And that first person that said they helped, and I chose the beliefs that were going to serve me.
If I knew I needed to turn up and do it there, there’s no point in like fighting it.
I’m never gonna feel ready.
I’m never gonna, I’m like, that fear is probably not gonna go until I do it.
So if I logically know that, then I just need to choose the beliefs and the focus that’s gonna serve me in moving forward and doing what I wanna do in my life instead of choosing the beliefs and the focus it’s just going to keep me stuck for longer.
Katische Haberfield:
I know from watching you in group coaching calls and things like that, that a lot of people who are starting businesses or have had a business for a while are really emotionally scared of doing that simple thing.
It seems simple to the rest of us who can go live.
Just the act of getting in front of the camera and going live is terrifying for them.
And I have noticed just how patient you are because one of the things that I think that shows how good you are as a coach is that people can ask you the same question 57 times in a different way in one call, and you are are remarkably patient.
Katische Haberfield:
I don’t know whether you take internal deep breaths, but you just smile and you state it in a way that they understand that the last person who said exactly the same thing.
And didn’t understand what understands it for them.
So I wanted to say that I think that’s one of your key brilliances, that you also seem to be able to just really be there for people with their emotions and it’s as if you can see that their emotions are a clouding their ability to hear you and follow the instructions.
As and as an observer I really appreciated that because I don’t have that level of patience with people.
It’s you don’t get it.
Sarah Anne:
It’s totally learned.
If you like, look at my disc profile, I’m a red yellow, which means that there’s no patience in me whatsoever.
I’m very fast paced, I’m very big picture.
I’m an action taker.
I’m outcome focused.
I don’t get bogged in details just as a personality trait, right?
It’s just how I, and in corporate, I remember.
Because I had a sales career in corporate and I remember doing this we did personality stuff in corporate and team building stuff and things like that.
And there was a day when I realized that my abrasive no patience.
I just care about me and I don’t give a crap about you attitude was not serving me.
Sarah Anne:
And so quite naturally I am not a patient person and my mom needs to hear all these people internet saying that I’m patient, but realized that was not gonna serve me when it came to dealing with other human beings.
And you can’t be successful in life unless you are successful at connecting and communicating and dealing with people.
It’s completely, for most of us, it’s completely unavoidable.
Usually the most successful people in the world have figured out how to connect, communicate, or take themselves out of that role and put someone else in that role that is successful.
So I just had that awareness at some point.
I had some good mentors incorporate at some point that mentored me on my abrasiveness when I was young.
And I learned, and then I made a conscious decision on what kind of person I want to be.
Like I say all the time.
I say lead with love, because that’s the message I needed.
Lead with love.
Sarah Anne:
And so every day when I turn up, and we can do this, when we’re doing scary things, and we’re doing frustrating things and we’re learning new things and we’re whatever, and we don’t wanna do it.
The question that I always ask myself in our relationships, if maybe you’re feeling really insecure and that means that you wanna lash out or whatever, the question is always what kind of person do I wanna be?
And we get to program that.
Like this up here is a machine that we can program, which is really cool.
Sarah Anne:
And if you say it enough times and you practice it enough times the amount of times I have said in my head to myself that I wanna be the kind of person when someone is really frustrating, really dumb, really annoying, freaking out any of these things.
I’m the person that smiles and is grounded and chilled and I program that.
Katische Haberfield:
And I think that in my own journey, my biggest resistance has been I’m the opposite to you.
I have banged my head against the wall in terms of paying for mentors.
I have banged myself because it’s I can figure this out by myself.
Sarah Anne:
I honestly think it comes down to how badly do you want it.
One of my mentors when I was in sales said to me, Sarah, you can be right or you can make a sale.
And that line changed my life because in that moment I learned that I can have ego or success.
I feel like I’m winning now when I let my ego go.
Most people do not.
But when I realized that by letting someone else be right and letting someone else win, that I actually win because that’s the game, right?
Sarah Anne:
And so now I’m the most coachable person.
I do it even when I think it’s not gonna work.
And this is what one of my mentors says about me.
He gave me an award for being the most coachable.
I just sit and I listen.
I go, okay.
And then I do it.
Because I have realized like we fight it because our ego wants to be right, but I’ve realized that if I fight it it actually makes me a fucking idiot because they have the results and I don’t.
So who’s the dummy?
Who’s actually the dummy here?
So I’m still ruled by ego.
That’s the funny thing about it is I’m still ruled by ego, but I have realized that to be right, I have to be wrong and to have success, I can’t have ego.
Katische Haberfield:
And yeah, I think I’ll have a cup of tea and sit down and have a think about this.
If you’d just to let people know how they can come become part of your world and maybe what you’ve got coming up in the first part of this year.
Sarah Anne:
Yeah.
Amazing.
I don’t know who your listeners typically are but you guys can find me on Facebook.
It’s Sarah Ann.
You’ll see it says the group girl.
If you are in coaching or in business, or you wanna build a community, I do have a book on Amazon.
It’s 27 bucks, but if you just message me on Facebook book, I can give you a link to get it for free if you are building a community of sorts.
If not we can just be friends.
Katische Haberfield:
Perfect.
And I’ll link in the show notes to your Facebook profile so that they can do that.
And I just wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule today to help us understand your journey and how to push the ego to the side and get some results.
Thank you, Sarah.
Appreciate it
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