Ep 17: Upgrading Your Operating System: How to Get Out of Fight or Flight and Back Into Choice

Here's something most people don't realize. You can't change your life from survival mode. If your body is in fight or flight, if you're tense, reactive, on edge, no amount of mindset work will stick because your system isn't optimized for change. It's optimized for survival. And when you're in survival, your world gets small. Your thinking narrows, your capacity disappears. So today I want to talk about something foundational. Not motivation, not hype, not discipline or willpower, but upgrading your operating system. Because when your nervous system feels safe, everything else becomes possible. Welcome back to Built for Impact. I'm Jake Burhans, and this is the podcast where inner peace meets high performance. And where building your dream life starts from the inside out. In The Built Framework, awareness comes first, and we touched on that last episode. Awareness gives you the choice, but choice alone isn't enough. You can be the most aware person in the world. You understand you're not your thoughts or emotions. You know all your limiting beliefs, but if you can't regulate your nervous system out of that survival state, your body is not physiologically in a condition to change. It never will. The example I used last episode, you'll be painting those leaves on the tree green your entire life, but the roots will keep feeding it. You know, the, the roots will be in poor soil and you'll never get that, the outcome, it'll never feel natural. So this is about nervous system regulation coming out of fight or flight and returning to a calm, grounded baseline where real change can actually happen, right? The first point is you can't change from a survival state. What is a survival state? We have these two states physiologically, and they're mutually exclusive. Meaning you can only be in one or the other. Okay? And this has to do with your autonomic nervous system. There's two states. There's the parasympathetic state, which is fight or flight. That's survival. Fight, freeze. Your perception is narrow. Everything, your, your, your brain and body is prioritizing speed right now because we are going to be, we're getting chased by a lion. That's what fight or flight is for. That's what our physiologically, that's what it's for. It's to, to narrow our focus. We're not meant to be creative. This isn't a time to contemplate the nature. Of our existence or figure out how to make more money. This is a time to save our lives. So it's a, it's a great biological adaptation, physiological adaptation, except we're, we're stuck in survival mode in traffic, or we're stuck in survival mode when our boss sends us an email that makes us mad, or our spouse says something that ticks us off and we're in survival mode for 4 hours. So stress is good in an acute sense, meaning for short durations, but chronic stress is where so many health issues come because You're in this overdrive. You're in literally overdrive. It's like stepping on the brake in traffic and then just slamming on the gas. You're just revving outta control, but you're not going anywhere. That's fight or flight mode, but that's not where growth happens. You can't make lasting change from a survival state. And this is where a lot of, you know, mindset and stuff falls short is they don't talk about the physiology at all. And it's so foundational. Like you can't just will your way with your mind. Towards positive thinking or towards a new state of being if your physiology is in fight or flight, because your body and your subconscious programming isn't going to be open to what you're trying to tell yourself. You're saying, I want to be confident, I want to be at peace, I want to be loved, I want to be whatever, you know. If your body's in this fight or flight state, you're not going to be able to reprogram at the root level. And that's what we talk about in Built for Impact. That's the whole program. That's the whole The whole shindig is reprogramming your identity so that everything flows naturally from there. So effort stops feeling like a force because everything flows downstream from identity. Okay? You don't, you don't get what you want. You get who you believe you are, and that's the reality. So if you believe that you are a fit person, guess what's easy to do? Go to the gym. You wake up and you want to go to the gym. It's never a force. It's never a struggle. You're excited. It validates you, who you are. But guess what's very hard? If you fundamentally believe you're a lazy person and the gym has always been hard, guess what's gonna be hard? Going to the gym, right? You're gonna think like, oh, the gym is fricking brutal. I hate going to the gym. I don't know how to do anything. I'm always nervous, you know, always self-conscious. People are looking at me because I don't know how to lift weights. And then that leads to emotions of, you know, dread, which leads to the behavior of sitting on the couch. So what happens is we try to force change by just willpower. Yeah, New Year's resolution. I'm gonna go to the gym every week and this sucks, but I'm just gonna push, push, push, push, push. Discipline, discipline, discipline. Guess where that gets you? Nowhere. It gets you burning out and, and, and you're gonna quit. Okay? Because your attractor state, okay, your attractor state is where, where you collapse to. Okay? So an attractor state, I want you to think about a marble in the bottom of a bowl. Okay, you can push that marble up the wall, right? And that's your willpower and your pushing and your effort and your discipline. But as soon as you drop that marble or you let your finger off and you stop pushing, guess where you go? Back to your baseline state of being. It's the same thing when you try to change. If you do not change the underlying programming of how you see yourself, your force and willpower and discipline is like trying to push that marble up the, up the wall of the bowl. And the second you stop forcing, Right? 'Cause you're burnt out. Where do you go? You collapse back, self-sabotage back to where you believe yourself to be. Okay? So that's what's called an attractor state. It's like you're always reverting back. So our goal is to change that attractor state to be the new 2.0 identity of you. In order to do that though, you have to regulate into creative state. You can't be in survival OS, you have to be in creative OS operating system. Okay? So you're aware, and then a lot of times we're triggered though by different things, right? We're triggered by something. Someone said to us, we're triggered by a limiting belief of we don't have enough, or scarcity, or money's gonna run out, whatever that is. We're aware of that as a conditioned belief and thought pattern, and then we have to regulate ourselves back into a grounded, regulated baseline state, cuz that's where change happens from the creative state. Your body will not learn the new neural sequences and patterns and responses and emotional habits if it is in a fight or flight state. Makes complete sense. It wants to preserve your life right now. It doesn't wanna grow. So we need to regulate. In regulation, it turns the CEO back on, which is the prefrontal cortex in the front of your brain. That's where all the planning and the decision making and the strategizing and the growth can happen. But when you're in fight or flight, that region of your brain literally goes offline and energy goes elsewhere. Blood flow goes elsewhere, so you can't even think. So it turns that part of your brain back on. So awareness gives you the choice. Regulation is the choice. So you're aware that someone was making you angry. In the last episode, I was using that example. Someone is, says something to you and you respond by freaking out. Like you get this angry response every time someone makes a, a sly comment at you and you're trying to fix it. Okay, so be aware that you're making that, that you have the urge to do that, to re— to respond in anger. Maybe you feel that anger boil up when someone says something, but oh, you're aware. That's what's different. You're aware, oh, I'm, I'm feeling anger right now instead of I am angry, which causes you to get wrapped up in it and take an angry action that you're later gonna regret. You say, oh, I'm experiencing anger. Interesting. Okay, now let's regulate. Let's regulate back to a grounded state. So we use our breath to do that. It's the best way to regulate. It literally tells your nervous system, cuz like slow breathing, there's this thing called interoception. Which is how your brain responds and interprets signals from your body. It looks at different things like your muscle tension, your posture, and your heart rate. So one of the things that slow breathing does is it slows your heart rate, right? Which tells your system, ah, I'm safe. Okay? So you breathe in, you can do box breathing, 4 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds out, 4 seconds hold. Or you can do maybe like a 4-second inhale, followed by a longer exhale, maybe 6 to 8 seconds. And that will allow you to respond to the creative state. And then you can act in accordance with who you want to be, right? The way that your 2.0 self would act because you're regulated, but you gotta have the awareness to create that separation. And then you need to use your breath to, to get back to that regulated state. And over time, our subconscious conditioning or our subconscious programming, it's changed through repeated effort, repeated effort. So yes, it's gonna be a conscious choice every single day that you make. I, I call it getting on the horse. You gotta get on the horse, you're gonna fall off, you gotta get back on, you gotta get back on, you gotta get back on. So the marker of success here isn't not reacting. Okay? So we, we need to be careful not to fall into self-judgment about this because again, we're looking at these reactions and these thoughts and these behaviors as learned programs. They have nothing to do with who we are as a person. They're learned programs. And the beauty of that is that means they can be reprogrammed. It can be reprogrammed. So you just look at it as an old program, right? I'm just changing the old program. And the win is how quickly you can return to regulation. That's the win. It's not about never experiencing these emotions. Like, every single time you want to become aware quicker and then return to regulation quicker. If you're aware of it happening, that's always a win because that means you're on the path, right? So we're gonna slip up, we're gonna fall off the horse, but the more that we do this work, The easier it is to ride the horse and you start riding it for longer distances without falling off, right? So awareness says, I see what's happening. Regulation says, I choose the safety. Only then does the body allow change. And that, and then we'll get into visualization, right? And letting go of old patterns. But you can't visualize or do any of that stuff if you're in the fight or flight state. So a huge thing too here is like gain so much capacity back because you're in a creative state, cuz that survival state is very intensive. It drains your energy. You can't think, you can't do anything. So I think capacity is really a huge benefit of all this. Like you have more energy, you have more emotional bandwidth, you can think better, you have better ideas, you can deal with people better. You have more capacity. You freed it up cuz you're not draining it all in fight or flight. So we wanna try to, or we need to, to train that and get outta that state, be in a more grounded state. So here's the question I want you to reflect on. Where in your life are you trying to force change while your body feels unsafe? Because that's what it is, right? You know, like I said in the previous episode, is that our nervous system, okay, and our subconscious conditioning and our mind wants to keep us in what's familiar. So if what's familiar to us is responding in anger, or what's familiar to us is not going to the gym and sitting on the couch and doing these things, when we try to consciously change that, the system predicts that it's a threat because it's unfamiliar behavior, unfamiliar thoughts, unfamiliar patterns. It doesn't know that consciously, that that's good for you. And that's like what's in your best interest. Again, it's not designed to make you happy or help you chase your goals. It's that designed to keep you in the familiar. So if what's been familiar to you is all these other things, your 1.0 identity, we have to work to change that through repetition, through awareness, through regulation. That's the work. That is the inner work. So where in your life you're trying to force change while your body feels unsafe. In closing here, upgrading your operating system isn't about becoming calmer forever, right? It's about returning back to calm and safety when you leave it. That's the work, right? So regulation restores your capacity, as I'd mentioned, and then the capacity restores your choice. And choice is where peace replaces pressure. If this episode resonated with you or made you feel a little bit more grounded, please share it with someone who's trying to change their life from a stressed out place. Okay? Because success should not cost their peace of mind. And that's really the mission with Build for Impact. It's a movement to reprogram how we look at success. We're all focused on force and willpower and strain. You just gotta listen. You just gotta do more. You gotta be more disciplined. You gotta do this. You gotta do that. Listen, if your subconscious programming is stuck in these old patterns, you are swimming upstream. I don't care how much discipline you have. You're gonna have a miserable life and you're gonna quit at some point. Might not be now, might not be in 6 months, might not be in a year, might be in 2 years, might be in 3 years, but you will quit and you'll be so freaking run ragged and burnt out and hating your life and miserable. But you can avoid all that if we just choose to do the inner work. And then you still have to do the external work. There's no doubt about that. You gotta be extremely consistent. You gotta put in that work, but you gotta put in the inner work first. Upgrade that hardware, upgrade that horsepower, upgrade the engine. So that you can, you know, it's like you're trying to download, you have this old outdated survival operating system. Okay. And you're trying to like put a Ferrari engine in it, you know, like an old Toyota Corolla frame, right? And you're trying to go take that engine out and just stick a Ferrari engine in it. The car's just going to fall apart. The wheels are going to fall right off the second you get over 80 miles an hour. It ain't going to work. You got to upgrade the frame, upgrade the structure. And then let's go chase our goals. Then let's do the things right. This is the first step. This is the inner work. Till next time, and make sure you're subscribed with notifications on so you're reminded when new episodes drop every Monday. Till next time, all the peace, all the power.