A (3:43)

What are some signs, in your view, that might indicate our nervous systems are a little bit out of whack, which may color the way we view the world and change the way we experience life?

B (3:57)

So some signs would include forms of reactivity. So if you're like, knee jerk, anger is obviously a clear one. Or if there's a sense of fatigue or lethargy or sleep is obviously a huge one as well. That's a big symptom of nervous system dysregulation.

A (4:17)

What, that we can't sleep?

B (4:18)

That we wake up, struggle to fall asleep, struggle to kind of downshift at the end of the day without kind of using substances. And also, I think challenge in relationship is a huge one that I see in my students. So whether it's kind of conflict in different areas or challenges with creating a sense of connection with people that are close to you, there's a lot. Early symptoms of burnout is another one as well. So I think about it in terms of, like, feather brick, dump truck. And in the beginning, maybe your nervous system is telling you, like, almost like tickling you with a feather of, like, maybe you're going a little bit too hard. Maybe it's time to take a bit of a break. And then there's maybe a brick, which could be, you know, you wake up feeling exhausted. Maybe you've got brain fog. Maybe you can't really perform at work. And then for some people, it takes a dump truck, which might be, maybe it's like an intense breakup or it's like a health crisis. And it's often, unfortunately, the dump truck, which gets people to really tune in, but it's really just the body giving you feedback.

A (5:21)

Yeah, it's interesting, those symptoms you mentioned there, some of them, you know, being overly reactive, relationship struggles, maybe anxiety would be in there for many people. These are very, very common. These Days, many people are walking around with these kind of tight and wound up nervous systems that they think is normal, yet they don't realize that there is another way to experience the world out there, isn't there?

B (5:48)

Yeah, beautiful. I mean, anxiety, I think is a really good example. And it actually, the word anxiety comes from the Latin ango, which literally means to constrict. And a lot of people try and manage anxiety or like conquer anxiety, but it's really just our reaction to a kind of an underlying emotion. And so it can be really helpful to kind of learn to notice the constriction in the body and kind of like allow it to open up. And there's a number of different practices for that.

A (6:20)

Yeah, that's interesting. Anxiety is a reaction to an underlying emotion. I imagine that a lot of people think that anxiety is an emotion.

B (6:29)

Totally.

A (6:30)

Right. But you're sort of framing it slightly differently.

B (6:32)

Yeah, it's kind of like a defensive strategy that our nervous system has to constrict against. I think about almost like a hose pipe. Like you can turn on the tap really strongly and the water will kind of go through. And if your system is kind of unclenched and doesn't have tension, it'll kind of flow cleanly. But if you're resisting, some aspect of your experience could be anger, could be sadness, could be frustration, whatever it is. And a really obvious example is like if someone is before an important conversation, maybe they feel scared and afraid and there's a sense of anxiety, but that could also be excitement. And it can just. If that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then that it's really just energy, like energy in motion that's kind of moving through.

A (7:20)

Is there a difference between anxiety and excitement or is it just the way that we're framing that tension?

B (7:26)

It's the tension in the body, I think.

A (7:27)

Yeah, same tension. Yeah, that's a really interesting concept because we know that anxiety is on the rise. So many people are struggling with anxiety and. And you're saying trying to manage it can make it worse, which in many ways is counterintuitive for people. But I think that's because people, they don't know what it feels like these days to experience their body. So I imagine some people will hear you talking and go, yeah, but what are you talking about constricting in my body? What the hell does that mean? And so do you find that in the modern world many people are stuck in their heads and, and don't even know what's going on beneath the neck.

B (8:08)

Yeah, totally. So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery of kind of working with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about. And the first is exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our internal experience. So it's called interoception is the kind of fancy name. I know you've written about it in your book and it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all of the time. The second skill is self regulation. And this is what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety. This is. There's kind of three ways that I think about self regulating. There's top down approaches, which might be like cognitive reframes, might be positive affirmations. Mindfulness is a good example. The second is bottom up, which is, this is my favorite, honestly. It's like working with the, or leveraging these levers in our physiology. Things like the breath is a really common one to literally shift our state and create that sense of safety. So bottom up techniques or practices would include things like humming is actually really effective. It increases nitric oxide BY I think 15 fold. And it's a vasodilator, it helps with eye strain as well and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state. Other things would be long hold stretches, exhale, emphasized breathing practices. So like 4, 7, 8 is a really common one. Or just any breath where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, it will have a kind of calming effect. And another one that you can do is kind of playing with your awareness. And awareness is again something that a lot of people don't think about. But your awareness in any moment can be kind of expansive. You could be aware of the space, the sides of you, the space above you, below you, or usually when people get stressed or reactive, the awareness is almost like. It's like experiencing life through a straw that's just in front of you and very narrow. So you can be aware of the space behind you, feeling your feet on the ground, attuning to the sounds around you. And the more that your awareness is kind of expansive, I'm doing it a little bit right now, you can kind of put your hands out and then as you kind of move them behind you, you're kind of expanding your peripheral vision and that has this kind of expansive effect and it creates a sense of spaciousness in the system.

A (10:32)

Yeah, that whole visual piece is really Interesting. I work with this incredible movement coach called Helen hall. And one of the things Helen has helped me with is understanding the importance of peripheral vision when let's say you're running. And she has shown me, and I've seen the data that when you are running or walking with narrow focus vision, you move a certain way and if you then tune into expanding your vision, softening it, making it more peripherals, your whole movement pattern changes. There's more fluidity, there's more flow. Yeah, it really helps the way you move. And we know that your vision is, you know, is super related to the state of your nervous system.

B (11:20)

Totally.

A (11:21)

So those practices, actually, yeah, they're really helpful to think about. I want to go into some of them in detail. Right. But you mentioned this bottom up practices. Okay. And before you mentioned top down. So it sounds like there's a variety of different body based actions practices that people can do. And is the suggestion for people to play around and experiment with curiosity a variety of these practices and maybe choose a couple that they really like that they can practice regularly that allows them to train this skill of letting go. Is that a useful way to look at it for people?

B (12:06)

Yeah, I think that's a really useful way to put it. And I think I really emphasize the experiment based approach. I think in my experience the bottom up is the most underappreciated and kind of most ignored. And I do believe it's the most effective. If someone is in a state of their anxiety is ramping up maybe towards a panic attack or they're getting really stressed. It's the most effective kind of short term intervention. But in terms of the long term, I mean, I think it's actually this is kind of going a little like a layer deeper. But I think that both top down and bottom up interventions can also be used to avoid feeling emotions. And this is something I call the self regulation paradox in that if you're just using journaling or CBT or breathwork to kind of ground yourself, but ultimately avoid feeling whatever the emotion is, you're not going to make progress over time. Because I view these practices as purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance and then to allow the emotion to actually move through. Because if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is, then we will always be making these predictions that like, oh, that's bad, we're not gonna go near that. And so the, the intensity of our, in which they present in Our bodies will just get worse and worse over time. And we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self regulate. And the third kind of pillar or category is emotional fluidity. And that is, it's the one that probably takes the longest to learn, but it's learning to welcome the full spectrum of human experience. And beneath anxiety, for a lot of people it is either like frustration or anger, or sometimes sadness. And once there's that sense of kind of safety and calmness that's created from the self regulation, then the emotion can kind of come through. And it's actually, it's the resistance to feeling the emotion that is the bit that sucks. Basically. The emotions themselves don't last for more than 10 to 20 seconds. It's the way that we constrict intense against them and try to resist feeling them. That is the bit that causes the

A (14:26)

challenge that's really interesting. The emotions themselves don't last beyond 10 to 20 seconds, I think, which is wild, right?

B (14:35)

Because like it is wild. We don't think about that normally. And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotions or avoided emotions and specifically emotional debt. Because the more that we go through life and our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses, which in many, many situations is super useful. Like let's say someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry. It's actually good for me to be able to suppress that and kind of save it for later. But if I do that repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it. And in the nervous system, this is a buildup of allostatic load. And what this does, this kind of wear and tear, it drains energy from the system, which reduces our window of tolerance. So I imagine listeners will be familiar that maybe they start a new job. And in the beginning they've got a ton of energy and they feel vibrant. But as time goes on, it feels like they get more and more reactive over time. And that I believe is due to this buildup of allostatic load, which is in part contributed to by not allowing the emotional reflex arc to be completed. And so many of us are walking around with pockets of buffered emotional responses, which is contributing to this sense of exhaustion and fatigue and low capacity.

A (16:09)

Basically, yeah. I really like that idea of emotional debt and this idea that we're not completing our emotional responses. I think it's a really, really important point for us all to reflect on. I know you like to give the example of the lion in impala, so maybe perhaps use that as a way of helping people understand what it means to complete that stress response fully.

B (16:36)

Yeah. So people can search this on YouTube. There's a great video of a impala that is chased by a lion. It's literally like in its jaws it manages to escape and the next kind of five minutes it finds its way to hide under a bush and it just lies down and its entire body just starts shaking. It shakes and shakes and shakes for about two or three minutes and it just gets up and it's totally fine. But that shaking is the kind of mammalian response that we all have of discharging that intensity and that stress that it just went through. And humans have kind of forgotten how to do that. There's definitely ways that you can, whether it's through breath work or whether it's through either practice I call somatic surfing or even just creating a sense of safety, sometimes the body will kind of go into to complete that emotional response that it wasn't able to at the time. Because often we will disassociate or we'll push it down and again, that's great. But if we don't set aside time for some kind of processing to just allow the emotions to complete, then they, they get stored and they drain energy from the battery of your body. Basically.

A (17:46)

Yeah. That's a very vivid image. An impala almost being dead and having all that stress within them that they then process. The stress is gone. They go about living their life. Yeah. So we're feeling reactive over something. We can learn some top down practices or some bottom up practices to reduce that reactivity and perhaps reduce how much we react to that stimulus in the future.

B (18:19)

Exactly.

A (18:20)

Unless we go one level deeper and go, okay, we've reduced the reactivity. Now let's really feel that emotion and let that emotion work through us. Like the impala sort of shaking it out, it will still be there. It will be having a hold on us. Like. And when the right scenario presents itself. The right comments.

B (18:45)

Yeah, exactly.

A (18:46)

The right amount of sleep deprivation, the right comment from your boss. It's like a match that still lights it.

B (18:52)

Precisely.

A (18:53)

So going back to your example about the wild and how mammals will complete that stress response, I'm guessing the impala, they've just got this intuitive mechanism that perhaps we have had before and we've lost right of shaking it out of their system so that they're free afterwards. It makes me think of this movement deprived western world in which many of us live right and we talk about the benefits of physical activity for our whole hormones or our physical health. There's more talk these days about what physical activity does for our mental well being. But as you were talking I thought do you think that one of the reasons why movement, whether it be walking or running or going to the gym, makes us feel so good is because it completes or it helps us complete a stress response that may have been left partially uncompleted within our bodies?

B (19:57)

Yeah, I think that's largely a big part of it. And I used to go for a run like that was my way of if I'd had an intense day, I'd kind of go for a run around the block or in the park and I'd feel better when I got back. But ultimately you're just trying to get back to what that Impala already knew, which is this just way of discharging the energy.

A (20:18)

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