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Welcome to the Joy Broadcast.
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I'm Ali Mortimer, joy coach, mentor, and life confidant, and I'm here to tell you something that might surprise you. Joy is not fluffy. Joy isn't frivolous. Joy is not the reward you get
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after you've ticked all the boxes.
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Joy is the only strategy you will ever need. It's your competitive edge, your antidote, and your super attractor. It's the power that creates miracles and makes life feel like magic. In my life, joy is the acronym for just on you. Because you matter. Your joy matters, your life matters, and it's time to act like it. Whether you're in the dark with nothing or at the top with everything, and it's feeling so overwhelming, joy is always the answer. Joy is a strategy for every era of your life. And this podcast is the space for women in the boardroom, in business, and those women who are running the show at home. This is your reminder to choose Joy not as a reward, but the strategy that gives you your competitive edge, the energy that will expand to give you the capacity to hold everyone and everything. Now, before we begin today's broadcast, I have an invitation for you. If you would like to go deeper to prioritize your joy, come and join
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me in the Joy Rebellion.
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It's my membership where I invite you to align to Joy every single week and where I support you in clearing
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the path when it's hard.
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Or work with me in Brilliance, my mentorship for women who want to bring
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brilliance to the boardroom because they feel
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fabulous in the bedroom and in their body. But right now and every week on this podcast, I going to be bringing you the ideas, the stories, and the strategies to make Joy your lifestyle, your strategy, your North Star. This is the Joy Broadcast.
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Let's go. Welcome back to the Joy Podcast, everybody. I have quite a meaty podcast for us today, and I've even got lots of notes. It was a question, actually, that came in through my DMs, and I thought I would make the distinction and the clarification between two phrases. I heard a lot on the Internet, but I actually don't think many people really understand the depth of what they actually mean. And it's emotional regulation and nervous system regulation. Now, I'm going to start with the fact that I don't like the word regulation and I don't want to use it, and I'd rather you didn't, too. I don't think it's a particularly joyful practice, and I don't think it really refers to what I think this is all about. And I'm going to share why in a minute and then I'm going to talk to you about the different systems, your nervous one and also your emotional one. But first of all, let's start by talking about why I don't like the word regulate. I think I've spoken about this on a podcast or I've definitely done a reel on it before. But it helps me to explain this by sharing the fact that we live in a really beautiful old house. We are the custodians of a house built in the 1820s. It is beautiful, it's very old, it's crumbling a little bit. And with it we also bought the old stables and coach house that were in the grounds. And during lockdown we converted those into some really beautiful properties. You can go and find them Shameless plug. You can rent them at unique home escapes.com. i'll put the link in the show notes for you. But basically, one of the things that we put in there was an incredibly modern heating system. It's James's pride and joy and he often goes into his plant room, as he calls it, and he twiddles his knobs. I don't mean that in a rude way, but basically there are so many pipes running through this house, which side note, it's so fascinating when you build a house from the ground up and you actually get to see all the pipes and the wires and everything that goes in behind the walls of the home. And really they are this incredible system that runs through the home to create the right temperature. And James often tells me, because he's got an app on his phone that tells him when the system has gone down or if it's overheating or if it's gone. And he says, I'm off down to the coach house to go and regulate the temperature and the heating. I'm off to regulate. And I think that's why I find it so jarring when people say that they're regulating their emotional system or they're regulating their nervous system. Because I'm just like, yeah, but we aren't heating systems with knobs. It makes us feel, or the way I see that regulated word makes us think that there's something outside of us that is going to regulate what is inside us, something outside of us to regulate our nerves or emotions. But again, even that really bothers me because my feeling is that emotions are here to flow and, you know, create this beautiful equilibrium in our body. But pipes are very one directional. They're very, you Go this way or that way, and this is the direction in which you go. But I feel that, you know, emotions and nerves aren't one directional. They make us whole as a human being. We've got this incredible network of nerves flowing through our body that tells us what kind of state we're in. And we have these incredible feelings that tell us how we are emotionally. To me, we are oceans, if we're thinking about water, because I understand why people use the word regulate, probably because it is to do with water. But to me, we're oceans, not pipes. And how do you calm down an entire ocean? You can't do that with knobs. So that's really what I wanted to come in and talk about today on the podcast, so that you can make a very clear distinction on what is happening in your body to make you feel good, to make you feel joyful, to make you feel whole, and then almost like which one you're focusing on. Because when I speak to many of my clients, many women I work with, they have a really good understanding of one or the other, but maybe not necessarily both together. And I think this is really important to make those distinctions. So if you aren't aware, you have one system, I suppose, which is our cognitive system, our psychological state, which is our emotional awareness. It's our emotional intelligence. It's everything to do with our mind, our thoughts, our feelings. And then we also have our physiology, our physiological foundation. And this is the nervous system, the body, the network of nerves that tells us how well our physical body is. And often when I work with my clients, they're either one of those systems in our body is potentially in chaos. You know, sometimes they're really emotionally literate. They know how they're feeling, they can name their feelings, and they can create that mental calm, but they're still absolutely exhausted. And. And that's because they've got no nervous system awareness, or they're just bypassing it in order to get things done. And I reflect back on my own kind of like, journey, and I think when both my cognitive, my physiological and my psychological systems were completely, well, for want of a better word, fucked by 2016, that was when the joy list was founded, when. When that was gifted to me in my subconscious and I started to write the joy list of all the things that I love to do, the little things that brought me joy, then I started to do them. I was healing myself and regular. Oh, I nearly said the word there because it's so used. But I started to heal myself from the inside out. I started to heal my nervous system. I started to drop into the parasympathetic state and I also started to calm that ocean of emotions as well. And that's why the joyless does both. And that's why I think it's one of the most powerful tools that we can all ever use. So if you don't know what I'm talking about in terms of the joy list, you can go and listen to one of the very first podcasts, I'll drop it in the Show Notes where I talk about this story. Or you can actually download it and I'll drop the link in there. You can get it in the Joy Emporium. It's the number one. It's number one on the shelf of the Joy Emporium. You can get it for free. And I talk you through the process of the joy list. Let's go a little bit deeper, shall we? So let's start with our nervous system. As I say, if you think about it, you know, our nervous system is this network of tiny little nerves that go everywhere into our body. They go in every part and every nook and every cranny. It's almost like this is our information center telling us and how our brain understands what's going on in our body and how it's feeling and whether it's doing well or not. They are nerves. They are pathways through our body signaling what our outer world and outside of us is impacting our inner world. It's how we respond. It's a prehistoric system, really, if you think about the human race, of how we kept ourselves safe and how we survived what is going on in the outside world? What do I need to keep myself safe from that thunderstorm? Oh, and there's a saber toothed tiger. What about the hairy mammoth? What do I need to do? Do I need to run? Do I need to fight? Do I need to hide myself in a cave? Okay, well, that's what I need to do. And it's this prehistoric system for survival. You probably have heard the words as well, if you're educated. I've got this parasympathetic state and a sympathetic state, and it's how we flow between the two. It's not about regulating it. We need both. We need both systems to be alive, to feel alive, to stay alive, to survive. Let's take it both in turn. The parasympathetic state is often referred to as the rest and digest state. This is when we have really healthy bodily functions. We are living, we're enjoying, we're eating, we're digesting everything really, really well. We're procreating, we're enjoying the other sex. Everything is good, we're making babies, we are healthy, we are good, we are relaxed. We also have this other state, the sympathetic state, often referred to as the fight, flight or freeze mode. And this is when we're in that stressed state. It's our stress response. This in a prehistoric term is when we realize that there was a thunderstorm coming, there was a saber toothed tiger, as I said, that hairy mammoth. And we need to do something. We either need to run, we need to fight or we need to hide. And our body has this like response to the outer situation and it triggers certain things in our body. So it almost says, well, I know that I'm not going to be eating while running or fighting or I'm not going to have any food if I'm stuck in a cave. So therefore I need to find a way to store food. And the body's stress response in that situation is to raise the cortisol hormone in our body. And that's what stores fat for fuel in our body. Side note, this is why so many women who I work with are trying to lose weight. But don't they feel like they're doing all the running, they're eating healthily, but they're not focusing on the fact that they're super highly stressed and they cannot let go of that cortisol. And that's what I help them teach. But I think knowing the science can really, really help. Trying to teach them how they need to rest and relax in order to lose weight goes against everything they've ever heard of before. And it's saying actually doing some yoga, some breathing, some sleeping, some resting is the best thing you can do not to go on another run or marathon or starve yourself. Because if you're starving yourself, you're just going to keep more cortisol in your body. I've gone off on a side note, but I just wanted to explain that. So your cortisol is going up. So it's storing your fat for fuel in the event that you have to fight for a long time, in the event that you have to run for a long time, or if in the event that you are stuck in a cave and without any food for a really long time, okay. So it's also going to switch off digestion so you're not going to be eating while you're doing that fighting and that running. So it says, well, I don't need that function I need to really, really focus on what I need to be doing, which is running, fighting. So I don't need digestion because there's going to be no food for me to eat. Can you see what's happening? There's a pattern here. In a response situation, it's also going to increase your adrenaline, so increasing your alertness, increasing the blood rushing around your body, pumping, your heart pumping harder so that you can fight. So you're alert to run, to fight this saber toothed tiger. So it's so interesting how our body is responding based on a real prehistoric system, but that actually still happens today, so we still go out and face the challenges. Maybe not walking out the front door and meeting a saber toothed tiger, but you may walk out of the door and come face to face with an angry neighbour. Sadly I did last week. You know, you might come out and face traffic and you're late for a meeting. You may be given a huge work project that you have no idea how you're going to face. You may walk into the office and be made redundant. You may find that you've got children who don't want to go into school today. There is so much going on in our lives that can make our bodies have that immediate, immediate stress response because it feels like it needs to slip into that survival mode. Because ultimately that's what the sympathetic state does, is about how do I survive when I am threatened? And there are so many threats for us today, so it's, how do we do that? How do we return to our baseline every single day of being able to shift those states into the parasympathetic state as well? How can we turn back on our digestion, how can we turn on our fertility, how can we make sure that our cortisol levels drop, our adrenaline levels drop, how can we rebalance or bring equilibrium back to our nervous system so that they're not fired up, so that they're just like, ah, now we need both. I'm not saying that we don't want to be in that sympathetic state. You know, some stresses are really good. You know, I was speaking on stage the other week and I know my sympathetic state went skyrocketed, but that was so good because my adrenaline was high, I was alert, I was ready to go, it felt really good. But afterwards we dropped back into that parasympathetic state. Now the danger zone I see with so many women and men, if you're listening, is that that heightened state of stress has become a bit normal. Even if it's A lower state of stress, it's become normal. We're like feeding on the frenzy of stress. And, and while that might feel good, it's not necessarily so good inside our body for our longevity, for our joy, for our happiness. Now how do you know whether you're in this low level state of stress? I think a lot of people wear, you know, Apple watches or monitoring watches. You can watch for your hrv, your heart rate variability. You can watch what's happening with your heart. It's fascinating. You can understand and become aware of how you're breathing. Are you shallow breathing or are you allowing yourself to breathe calmly? How's your muscle tension? Muscle tension is a huge signal for me. I get it in my shoulders all the time. Some people get my husband get his, gets his in his lower back. That can often be a real signal of heightened states of your parasympathetic or sympathetic states. You can also wear cortisol monitors. I had one, I can't remember which one I had. I was working to understand my hormone levels and I was wearing one of these little needles that stick into the back of your arm that can monitor your stress levels and watch your cortisol. It was always so fascinating to see. I thought when I had those cortisol spikes, it was actually really interesting. I was wearing one at the time when my youngest son came into the bedroom and said he wasn't, wasn't feeling too good in his groin area. And I knew exactly what had happened. And he had testicular torsion just like my other son. But watching the spikes on the chart was that literally went off the scale because I was so worried. I knew what was coming. Anyway, side note, right, let's go back. So if you are in this heightened state of nervous system, sympathetic state, you're in your stress response, you're in that fight flight, freeze response. What is happening here is that also your prefrontal cortex is almost like going offline. It doesn't need to think or be rational or to be logic. It doesn't need to be aware of emotions. So this is where I think so many people may be struggling is because this is what they don't realize. Because the emotional system, our psychological, is all about the cognitive. It's all about the mind. It's how our mind becomes aware. It's our conscious awareness of our emotions. It's the recognitions of our feelings and of our emotions. How we can understand our feelings by becoming aware of them. This is why we go to therapy to help us talk through how we're feeling, trying to make sense of what we're feeling. It's using the practices of mindfulness to really consciously become aware of our emotional state, of the thoughts that are perhaps creating these emotional states and feelings in our body. It's working with coaches or therapists to express your emotions, to name them, and then letting them flow by letting them go, by not storing them in your head or those emotions in your body. It's about learning how to reframe consciously those feelings, to see them from different perspectives, to see life from all of those different perspectives, to understand what is actually happening in your subconscious and bring it up into your conscious. This is one of the very reasons I love working with my coach, it's one of the very reasons I love working with my clients is because I often say this phrase. Brain surgeons can't do brain surgery on themselves. It's having somebody else to be able to witness what's going on in your mind, to draw out, to ask those questions that you may perhaps be too frightened to ask of yourself. It's learning about how to self soothe. It's learning about self compassion. One of the very first things that when I was in that awful state in 2016, my therapist actually introduced me to know how to do the self soothing. It's being able to sit in real discomfort, in uncertainty, in not knowing. There's so much uncertainty in the world right now that makes us feel uncomfortable. I can feel the social unrest, maybe that's why my neighbours are so angry. But it's about knowing that we can respond to this rather than overreact. It's about just being able to be aware of our emotions and our feelings. And that can become incredibly hard if your nervous system is stuck in that freeze or in that fright or flight mode, because that prefrontal cortex has just gone offline. So you don't have really this capacity to think or rationalise. And therefore that's why we can feel this real compromise in our body. So on the back of all of that, I hope that that has given you a much clearer understanding of the difference between your nervous system, which is very much a body physiological function, and then also your emotional system, which is very much a psychological system. And my feeling is that you can do your own assessment. Which one do you need to go and have a look at? Which one needs attention? Is it your body? Go and have a look at that. Go and feel into your body. Are you sitting there with a heightened state of, you know, a heightened heart rate? How are your. How tense are you? What can you go and do to relax your body? How can you go and drop back into that parasympathetic state? How frequently are you in that heightened state? Just start to become aware of it. And if you find that you're living in that low level stress, in that sympathetic state all the time, then there are some really wonderful ways in which you can shift yourself back. If you can flow, if you can create that equilibrium in your body and knowing that both are good, but it's about allowing yourself to flow between the two. Go back and listen to the really wonderful podcast I recorded with Louise Mortimer. I'll put the show the link in the show notes again, but this was. You can use breath work, sound baths, movement, cold water plunges like Wim Hof. Not for me, but some people love it. It's about how can you get yourself into that parasympathetic state? How can you allow yourself to flow through both physiological first so that your prefrontal cortex can come back online, so that that can then be able to start to understand the emotional ocean that is within you. That's how I like to see it. The body, the physiology, your network of nerves. The body is the container that holds the emotions, the ocean of emotions that you have within you. Now, as I said, I feel that many women confuse the two and that's where the dysfunction can come in, that's where the frustration can come in. So I always think body first, then the brain, the container and then the energy, the container being your wonderful body to that ocean of emotions. So I hope that this has really helped you understand the difference between the two and pinpoint where perhaps if you're feeling that something's slightly off where you need to go and do some work, if this is something you want to dive into on a more deeper level, if you want to have a little bit more personalisation and work with me, a couple of options that you can look at. Come and join me in the Joy of Rebellion. This is my movement, this is my membership. This is a beautiful community where you have access to all of the programs that will talk you through how you can do both of these. We've got the Big five Calm Concepts which talks to you about mindfulness. We've got the Life labs, the mindfulness as a way of living. We've got Wired and tired, we've got Lean for Life. There's so many different programs that can help you understand and be much more in tune with your physical body and your emotional ocean. It also provides you a space to come in and talk in the community and share. So powerful for both looking at our nervous system and our emotional systems as well. You can come in and talk and I'm always there to guide you on where to go, what to do and what you can do next. So that's the joy rebellion. That's £222 for a year long experience with me, which is just a wonderful process to have. Or if you want something maybe perhaps a little bit more intense, maybe you're going through something really quite intense in your life, maybe you have a lot of responsibility in all areas of your
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life, then brilliance, my one to one
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package could be really that option for you. It's private, it's very much in the moment. It's 24 7, it's bespoke. It's being witness to your emotions, your feelings. And it's completely confidential. So no one is ever going to know or hear or see. Not your partner, not your people, no one. It's just about you. So those are some options. And I will put links in the show notes as well. Or you can just drop me an email at ali@alimortimer.com and I'd love to help you with your next step, but I hope you've enjoyed this just so that we can get that real distinct differentiation between the two so that you know you're working on the right system rather than the wrong one. Lots of love.
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My mission is to spread love, joy, peace and abundance to as much of
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the world as I possibly can so
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that every person knows that they don't
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have to walk alone in their darkness.
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So if you've enjoyed today's podcast and this episode, I'll be so honored and happy if you would support my mission and share this with your network, your
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friends and your family.
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Please feel free to leave me an
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honest review on Apple or Spotify.
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And until next time, remember, the ripple
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of joy starts with you.