How I Learned To Regulate My Nervous System

All right, welcome to the mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today is the final installment of the May Mental Health Month. I have been sharing four crucial tools, resources that have been instrumental in my own improvement of my mental health and well being. And so today I'm going to share about how I reconnected to and regulated, began to learn how to regulate my own nervous system. So you can think about this as how you can return reconnect and regulate your nervous system. And in the video I'm gonna share a few things. One, my story about it because like most people I grew up with add and so in order to function properly in the world, I needed to learn how to regulate my nervous system. But I'm also gonna talk a little bit about embodiment, what that embodiment means. Cause that term gets thrown around a lot. So I'm going to show the etymology of it. I'm going to recap how, just in a very basic way, how the nervous system functions in case you're not fully familiar with it. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about simple steps, very tactical, tangible steps like I've been doing in all these videos, what you can do to begin to reconnect to and regulate your nervous system. So this was important for me and took quite a while for me to grasp and wrap my head around, and wrap my body around, around because like I said as a kid, I grew up with pretty severe add. I was the class clown. I had a ton of sugar constantly flowing through my, my, my veins. I think I was probably like 1/4 sugar in my blood. I would like stash chocolate chips in the couch, eat cookie dough raw, you know, have ice cream, giant chocolate chip muffins for breakfast. Like I, I had unfettered access to basically as much sugar as I could possibly consume as a kid. And because of that I became an adult who didn't know how to regulate his nervous system. I didn't know how to really operate from a normal level of homeostasis. So my homeostasis, my normal mode of operation from a physical standpoint was actually quite high. It was very challenging for me to sit still. It was very challenging for me to slow down my thoughts. It was very challenging for me to focus in on normal just tasks to take care of even something like this. Recording something like this video would have been an impossibility five, 10 years ago, especially 10, 15 years ago, because to focus for this long would have been very, very challenging for me to do. I became a kind of Addict, although this loose terms, but I became very hooked on stimulus. And for me a lot of stimulus came externally, right? Stimulus through social media, stimulus through caffeine, sugar, street racing. I mean I loved any kind of stimulus that put me at that edge where I felt a little jacked up, my senses were heightened and I really had to sort of like focus and hone in. And so I used to love to take my motorcycle at a thousand cc motorcycle and go street racing, you know, doing 320 kilometers an hour on the highway, like just, just kind of wild stuff. And so because of that, because of my sort of propensity to love stimulus, I needed to have suppressants to bring me back down. And what I learned from a very young age was I got stimulus from external things. And so I wanted suppressants from external things. And so I would use things like alcohol or sometimes weed or even sometimes things like pornography or sex, right? Because there's nothing that's going to help your, your body sort of calmed down. Like the post orgasm dopamine dump. It would trick my body, all these things would trick my body into sort of coming into a downregulated state which we're going to talk about later on. And so this is the case for many people, right? You think about how much time you spend being stimulated constantly, that's sort of pushing your nervous system up and up and up into this upregulated state. Again, I'm going to define this in a minute, but just think about the fact that most people are checking their phones something like 77 to 92 times a day. So just the act of that, taking in constant stimulus, checking messages, getting likes, scrolling through social media, all of these things are stimulus intake that pushes our, our nervous system, especially when we're interacting with things that are confronting and challenging and conflict oriented. You know, which is most social media. Now if you go on Facebook or Twitter, there's constant debates. All of those things are pushing you into the sort of fight, flight or freeze part of your nervous system, which we'll talk about in a moment. So how do we reconnect with our nervous system? How do we begin to regulate this essential aspect of our body? Because the nervous system is really the conduit between your consciousness and the external world. Everything that you come into contact with externally, your relationships, your partner, your boss, your work environment, your children, it gets filtered through your nervous system. So if your nervous system is in a heightened state, a lot of those interactions are going to be colored based on the state of your nervous system. So it's very important for us to begin this work of self regulation. So how we do this is we begin to understand what it means to be embodied. And this term gets thrown around a lot. Embodiment, you just need to be more embodied. You need to get in your body. So the term, if you break it down, embody, literally means to be in the body. And the actual definition that I have here is to be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to an idea, quality or feeling. So you could give a visible form to joy or sadness or anger or stress. Right. Or you can give the tangible form to an idea or a quality. Right, A virtuous quality. So that's what it sort of means to be embodied. The etymology of it is actually from the Latin incorporare, which translates as to take in or contain something. So in this sense, I like embodiment because we do contain a lot within the vessel of our body. And it's how we relate to what we're taking in and what we are containing within our body that dictates a lot of the relationships in our life, whether that's with a partner or a colleague or whomever, you know, family member or boss, etc. So to be embodied simply means that we need to get out of our head and into our body. And that's what I'm going to talk about in the reconnection part when I give you some tactical steps, is that the tactical steps will actually help you start to understand what the action of what the verb of being embodied looks like. Feels like. Sounds like. So first, a brief overview of the nervous system. Very, very quickly. The self regulation of the autonomic nervous system, which is a branch of your, of your nervous system, can essentially be broken down into two kind of opposing functions. And basically it does two things. It goes up or is it, it goes down. So the autonomic nervous system will go up or it will go down. And if you think of the two branches like that of the gas pedal and the brake of a car, one is going to accelerate, the vehicle is going to have more energy, access to more energy. It's going to propel you forward, it's going to make things go faster or the other side will be the brake. It's going to help to slow things down, it's going to allow you to travel less quickly. And so the two branches are the SNS or the sympathetic nervous system, which makes up for the gas pedal. The sympathetic nervous system is the part that is going to be responsible for upregulating which I'm going to define here in a moment. But that sympathetic nervous system is also responsible for what you may have heard before as being referred to as fight, flight or freeze. And so that's the response mechanism that when we intake stimulus and it feels threatening, we go into this sort of limbic brain, lizard brain, and we try and respond from a very survival based mentality. And that is good in some situations, but in situations where there's no real threat to us, we can respond from a place that isn't so generative for our relationship or connection, et cetera. The other side is the parasympathetic aspect of the nervous system. That's the pns. And the parasympathetic is the aspect that helps us to calm down, to begin to slow. And the way that I like to look at this is that the sns, the sympathetic nervous system, is more arousal, heightened arousal. It moves us into a state of higher arousal, both neurochemically, physically and emotionally. And the pns, the parasympathetic, helps us move down into a lower state of arousal. And here arousal often obviously doesn't mean sexually, it means energetically, physically, emotionally. So what we're really looking for here is to begin to understand where we get upregulated, where our nervous system moves. And I know this is sort of somewhat technical, but I'm going to give you step by steps here in a second. But what we need to know is how do we connect to our nervous system and know when we are being moved into an upregulated state? Right when our SNS is activated, our sympathetic nervous system is activated. And what allows us to move into a down regulated state, what allows us to move into the parasympathetic nervous system? And for many of us this is incredibly important because it allows us to have a little bit more sovereignty and authority and sort of leadership within our internal ecosystem. And, and rather than just having stimulus coming in and us being upregulated, triggered into our sympathetic nervous system and reacting from a place of aggression or fear or hostility or whatever it is, we can have a little bit more sovereignty and authority over how we respond. And this is an incredible tool and asset to have, especially if you have kids or if you have a challenging work situation, or if you have conflict in your marriage and in your relationship. So upregulation is when we have, we move into a higher state, we move into a higher state of arousal and downregulation is when we move into a lower state of arousal and we are more Calm. So that's what we're aiming for. So where do we begin? The steps are as follows. Number one, begin to know where your homeostasis is and what it looks like, sounds like and feels like. Begin to know your homeostasis is and what it looks like, sounds like and feels like. Now, a good way to do this and what I did was that I practiced every single day just doing a check in. And you can do it four or five times a day just throughout the day at work, after a conversation with your partner, after an interaction with your kids. And you just ask yourself the question, what is my level of autonomic arousal? You can reframe this as what is my level of physical or nervous system arousal? So how upregulated or alert am I versus how calm am I? And you might want to rank both of those things. So what I started to do first was like, you know, at what level is my nervous system at right now? Oh, I'm at, you know, an 8 on the anxiousness, on the stress, on the alertness scale. Oh, I'm at a two on the alertness scale. Okay. If I'm at a two on the alertnESS scale, where am I at on the calm scale? I'm at a three. Okay, how do I get myself to an eight? So begin to notice where your homeostasis is for some people. And homeostasis, as I'm defining, is just your normal state of operation for your nervous system. And how you do that is by step number two, you begin to identify your version of being upregulated versus down regulated. So what does it feel like in the body when you are upregulated? Do you feel tingling in the hands? Do you feel tension in the chest? Do you feel pressure in the head? Do you feel like your feet want to take you somewhere? Do you feel like you want to make fists and punch things? Right. Like, start to tune into when you are upregulated. When your body is in that anxious or stress response, what do you physically feel in the body? And what's the most intense component? So just start to take track of those things, right? So you do the check in. What's my level of autonomic arousal? Right. What's my level of nervous system arousal? And then what am I actually feeling in the body? If I am very anxious, if I'm very alert, what are the sensations that I'm feeling in my upregulated state? What are the physical sensations that I'm feeling in my hands, my arms, in my chest? For many People, a lot of the men that I've worked with, when they feel anger, it sort of begins maybe in the belly or in the chest specifically. And very quickly, if they're not careful, as they get more upregulated, as their nervous system moves more into the sympathetic nervous system, they go into fight, flight or freeze that anger, the energy of anger moves into the head and they feel a lot of tension and fullness within the head. Right. A lot of stress within their face and in that states where they're hijacked. So they moved into an upregulated space where they can no longer really communicate consciously or sort of control their emotional response. The last piece, after you have done this, check in after you've identified what upregulation and downregulation looks like, sounds like, feels like in the body is beginning to use somatic exercises to down regulate back into the parasympathetic. So for me, I used a number of things. One of the best things that I usually share with people is to use something called the box breath. And the box breath is inhaling for four, pause for four, exhale for four, pause for four. And there's a lot of research that that box breathing, what that does is help to reset, almost like a recalibration of our ans of our autonomic nervous system. So if you've moved into an upregulated anxious stress response, where you've moved almost fully into that sympathetic nervous system, by using this box breath for at least four or five minutes, it's going to help pull you back down into a more downregulated parasympathetic response within the body. And you can start to notice that the other exercise I can give you is something that I call the straw breath. And the straw breath is very simple. It's that you. You almost like purse the lips, almost like you're going to drink air through a little tiny straw. And your inhale is two to three times longer than the exhale. And the exhale is a sigh. And it's a very light one. And it's almost. You're not pushing air out, you're just letting the air sort of drop out in a very relaxed fashion. And what happens when you do this over again, four or five minutes, is that it helps to reduce your heart rate. So when you are in an upregulated state, your body is responding accordingly. It's releasing cortisol stress hormones. You know, maybe your palms are sweating, but the response within your heart rate is that your heart rate goes up. And so you start to oftentimes use more oxygen. It can feel quite constricting. And so the straw breath helps to bring that heart rate back down, which can pull us into a downregulated state, back into the parasympathetic nervous system. So the straw breath sounds something like this. Again, it's in for two to three times longer on the inhale, and then the exhale is just dropping out. So.

And as you breathe in on the straw breath, you. You imagine, if you want to close your eyes, this is probably the first time on my show that I've ever just closed my eyes and done some breathing for you. But you imagine that you're. As you're sucking the air in, it's going all the way down into your pelvic floor, all the way down into the pelvic bowl. And when you do that, you are elongating, you're relaxing all of the sort of muscles and tissues in the body. And then on the exhale, you're exhaling as if you're just letting everything go within the body. So this is a great one to do if you're stressed, if you're really angry, if you feel a lot of tension in the body, it's a really, really good one. Four to five minutes of this can help to downregulate into the parasympathetic quite quickly. So the aim here is that we begin to arm ourselves with tools and develop the skill set to know, ah, I am upregulated. Now my nervous system, my sympathetic nervous system is activated and sometimes literally, still to this day, catch myself in the act of. I'm like, I am upregulated. And I'll say to my wife, I just need to pause for a moment and I just need to go breathe. I don't use the language like the, you know, the psychoanalytical language. I don't say, I'm upregulated. I need to go down regulate. I just say, you know what? I'm activated right now, or I'm angry right now. I just need to go pause and breathe. And so I'll remove myself and I'll use one of the tools in my arsenal to downregulate and move into a more parasympathetic nervous system and a more downregulated response so that I can communicate from a more grounded and calm manner. The truth here is that great things can happen when we are parasympathetically dominant, when we are living, breathing, interacting, relating with other people. More from our parasympathetic nervous system. We have more freedom of choice, we have more freedom of response. We are less reactive, we are less aggressive, we are less hostile. We are more likely to produce an outcome that is aligned, coherent and congruent with what we ultimately want within our life. Our breath is full, it's slow, it's deep in the body. The digestive system is allowed to work well because when we're in the sympathetic nervous system, we carry a tremendous amount of tension within the body. We carry tension in the jaw, in the neck, in our shoulders. We're tight all the time and we're in a stress response mode of communication. So think about how many times maybe you've come home from work, you had a bad day at work, the boss was angry or one of your colleagues was an ass, and you carried that stuff into your home and you walk in through the door and you're tight and you're upregulated and you're stressed out and you're. And all of a sudden your wife or one of your kids says something to you or your partner says something to you and you react and you attack them and they haven't done anything. It's just that you and your nervous system are hijacked. You're upregulated into a stress response and that's all that you can do is respond from a stressful state with them. So ideally, what we want to do is cultivate more and more and more of the capacity and the ability to, to not only be embodied in our parasympathetic nervous system, but to be able to downregulate when we catch ourselves in the act of upregulation of stress response. And this can take some practice, right? This takes some time. You're not going to get this in one go. It's something that you're going to need to practice over and over and over again. And so if you are in a relationship, I encourage you to listen to this with your partner because it is something that we can all use, it's something that we can all execute on. And if you want more exercises on how to downregulate DM me, message me mantalks on Instagram, you can respond to this online if you're watching this on YouTube or you can email me infoantalks ca and I would be happy to field some of your questions and maybe do another video specifically on a couple steps that you can use to down regulate. But I hope that you enjoyed the content for today. Thank you so much for joining me. Don't forget to share this rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you are tuning into this on. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.