Ep. 30: Nervous System Awareness: The First Skill of Inner Peace and High Performance

You're getting through your day, you're answering messages, hitting deadlines, showing up for the people in your life. From the outside, things look great, but inside something is off. Your jaw is tight, your shoulders are up at your freaking ears, your chest feels compressed. There's this low hum of urgency under everything that you do, like you're always slightly behind even when you're not. And here's the thing that almost everybody misses. This is not a personality trait. That's not just how you are. That's a nervous system in survival mode. And until you can recognize it in your own body, you can't actually change it. So today I want to talk about the skill underneath every other skill in personal development, the one that has to come first, because if this is not in place, nothing else will work. 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. The BUILD Framework is built on a simple idea, folks, that the life you're building on the outside can only go as far as the inner world you're building it from. And the foundation of that inner world is two things: awareness and regulation. That's why they're the first two pillars. So Break Limiting Beliefs is all about developing awareness. Of our thoughts, of our beliefs, of our identity patterns. And then Upgrade Your Operating System is about nervous system regulation, understanding how to be in a regulated physiological state so our prefrontal cortex can be on and firing and we can be creative and problem solve and think and do all the things that we want to do. The first point to understand is that you are not your thoughts. We talk about this, understanding that awareness is the spotlight. So think about yourself like a Ferrari, and I've probably used this analogy before, but we are like Ferraris. We're these incredible machines. When a trigger happens in your life, it's like someone just stepped on the gas of the Ferrari and the, and you, and your hands flew off the wheel. The wheel's spinning around like crazy. You just gotta get your hands on the wheel. That's awareness. That's catching yourself in survival mode or catching a dysregulated thought or a negative thought. So our awareness is like a spotlight and it observes everything. It observes. You know, our phone, our computer, our car. And we understand that. We understand we're not our phone, our computer, or our car. Oftentimes we don't look at our thoughts and emotions in that same way, which is what we talk about in Built, is that our thoughts are separate from us. Our emotions are separate from us. So we need to use our spotlight of awareness to look at those negative thoughts. Oh yeah, there's that negative thought and let it go, right? Cognitive diffusion. Oh yeah, there's that emotion. Let it go. Wegner's White Bear Study in like 1987, I think it was, where they told people, don't think about a white bear. Obviously everyone was thinking about a white bear. So it was on the paradoxical effects of thought suppression and basically how when you suppress thoughts or fight them or try to reframe them with positive remarks, that just tells your system it's a threat. There's something wrong with it. So awareness is about noticing, noticing these things and letting them go. We're not trying to make up a story about it. So we can train our awareness. By just a simple reframe in our verbiage, right? Instead of, I am anxious, it's, oh yeah, there's that thought that I'm anxious, or there's that feeling of anxiety, or the feeling of anger. Oh yeah, there's that limiting thought that I'm not gonna make enough money. And in that moment, it doesn't make it go away. It's not a magic pill, but it reduces the charge enough to give you the opportunity to respond and make the best decision. So we need to begin to be aware of our internal environment, and that is the skill of interoception. It's the ability of you to have this awareness. So once you understand your awareness is like a spotlight, so it could be on your you're doing a report and then a thought comes into your mind, oh my God, I gotta do this, that, and the other. What happens is your awareness is now focused on that thought. And if that thought is a negative thought or an anxious thought, you put enough attention and energy on that, you're gonna get into an anxious state cuz you're feeding it with energy. So the key is to observe the thought and just let it go. Only be on it for a few seconds and let it go. Now, as you practice that skill of noticing thoughts that come into your environment and notice when you're distracted, you're developing the skill of metacognition. And cognitive diffusion, not fusing with your thoughts, you can start to notice feelings in the body. And that's the next point I want to, I want to talk about is we're always running around in survival mode. It's probably the biggest epidemic in this freaking country and in this world for that matter, or at least in this side of Western society, it's people running around in a sympathetic nervous system state. We are not designed to be there for a prolonged period of time. Yes. Like acute Nerve, um, fight or flight is good. It strengthens us like going to the gym, but chronic fight or flight is what's causing health issues and diseases and cancers. And it's crushing your ability to perform more than anything. Because when we are in a dysregulated fight or flight state, blood flow goes away from the prefrontal cortex, which is where we create and think and problem solve because we're in, we're trying to run away. We're not trying to think and, and, um, and solve problems and think about the world. We need to, we need to run. So if you're running around in this low-grade survival state all day long, and it's not like a full-blown panic attack, but you're a little on edge, a little urgent, a little anxious, you are not accessing your full brain capacity. So in whatever you're doing, you're a teacher, you're a salesperson, you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, you are a husband, a wife, whatever you're doing, if you don't have the full power of your brain on to emotionally regulate and think through problems and think of solutions and plan and do all the things you need to do, you are not performing at your most optimal. And it's not fair to you and it's not fair to everyone else around you. So we need to begin to develop our skill of awareness of our thoughts, our emotions, then use that spotlight to now notice feelings in our body. And you'll notice how freaking quickly that you go into survival mode. Someone sends you an email, milliseconds before your conscious mind even comes online, your body's going into survival. And now mind you, that's a good mechanism. Like we want our body to do that. Physiologically, right? Because if you're, you're walking in the woods and your body thinks it sees a snake, you don't want to wait 3 seconds to turn your head and be like, oh, is that a snake? Interesting. Is it? Yep. That is a snake. Thing would've already bit you and you'd be dead. Body has been wired to the second it thinks that there's a threat, it's going to go into survival mode, right? So I can jump back from the snake before my conscious mind even goes online. Now the difference is your nervous system doesn't know the difference between a snake and just being upset. At something someone said, or being upset about an email, or being scared for a sales call, or whatever that anxiety is. So it goes into survival. And if we don't catch that we're in survival mode, we're, we're in that mode all day long. It's draining us. It's like we're sitting in traffic with our foot on the brake and our foot on the gas and vroom, right? And we wonder why things are breaking down. So we need to be able to build that awareness and understand when you're in a dysregulated nervous system state. And that practice is gonna be so powerful for you because when you can catch it and then you can do things to regulate out of it, you're going to start to have so much more energy, so much more clarity. You'll think better, you'll act better, you'll be able to solve problems, you'll be more creative, you'll overall be in a much better state of being. So developing that awareness, understanding we're in survival, and then when we want to get out of survival, we need to use body mechanisms. So some ways that we can regulate our nervous system, one is the breath, right? Um, Andrew Huberman talks about the physiological sigh. So it's a deep breath in all the way, and then one little more, one more little sip at the top of breath, and then a long exhale. If you do that 5 times, you'll kick yourself down a few gears. If you just have a longer exhale than an inhale, so maybe a 4-second inhale, 6-second exhale, you will put yourself into the parasympathetic. So you have sympathetic fight or flight, parasympathetic rest and digest. Now, the vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, 10th cranial nerve, longest one in the body. And it is, you know, it's a nerve that goes from your brain all the way down into your organs, like all sorts of organs in your body. And most of the signals from on that vagus nerve are going from your body up to your brain. So when you do things like breathe slowly, you exhale longer than your inhale, you're signaling the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic, right? And you're calming yourself down. So you don't have to believe that it works. You don't have, it's nothing cognitively, right? Because when you're in survival, you're, your cognition isn't really online anyways, but breathing is so powerful because it puts you into a phys— a regulated state without even having to think about it. Right. So breathing, getting out and walking, right. Um, is going to help as well. Uh, just getting out of overstimulated environments. I think that's, you know, it's like an attack on our nervous system. We got our computer going, music in the background, our notifications are going off. We're thinking about this, we're thinking about that. We are like overwhelmed, overstimulated. It's like, our nervous system is the electrical system on a house and it's just been overrun, right? It's been overrun. It's the, the, the flip is switching. So we gotta get out of our office, go walk around, go breathe, slow down. Humming is really good too for the vagal tone. So like, hmm, doing like a big inhale in and then mm on your exhale. It's called the Basmari. Brahmari, Brahmari, buzz breath, I think is what it's called. But that humming will literally, it's like vagal toning. It activates your vagus nerve. It will calm you down. So breathing, humming, you can also splash cold water on your face. That'll trigger the mammalian dive reflex. And then holding your breath also triggers mammalian dive reflex. So a few different things that you can use to regulate. But the biggest thing I want to talk about today was just being aware of when you're in a survival state and start to track that in your body. And when you are, just regulate and just practice that, practice that, practice that. And every time you go back to a regulated state, you're training your body to a new baseline. A new baseline state of being of one of relaxation. So this kind of piggybacks off last week's lesson. I was talking about the nervous system as well, but I do think this is important because nervous system health is everything. Absolutely everything. And I recently learned, I already, I already knew this, but I was kind of doing some more research and like sauna and cold plunge are great for nervous system health. And I was like, you know, feeling it the other day. I was like, I had been working a lot. I was like 3, I had been working since like 5 or 6 in the morning. I was, you know, I could just feel it in my body. I was kind of strained. I was like, I need to take a break, went to the gym, but then I did the sauna after and I hadn't done it in a while. I just felt significantly better after the sauna. I think it really reset my nervous system. So if you have access to a sauna or a cold plunge or cold shower, two great ways to just regulate your nervous system and kind of decharge all that, that tension. Biggest thing I want you to do this week is just be aware of that when you're in a nervous, uh, a fight or flight state and regulate out of it. And in reality, the whole thing just comes down to this. You can't build a life of peace from a body that is stuck in survival mode. Okay. So we got to start there. We notice the state, right? And then we're going to regulate and come back home to that new baseline. That is the foundation. That is the work. It's a lot more subtle than a lot of people expect, but that's it. If this episode landed for you, we have more in the Built for Impact community. The link will be in the bio. It is free to join. We are building a community of people, uh, that want to build from peace instead of pressure. You can get in there and check out, um, a lot of the free stuff. Uh, the main thing is the Built Core System. That is a system that's going to completely rewire your internal state of being. If you have any questions about it, you can reach out to me or anyone else in the community who has taken it. And again, this is for people, if you still think, you know, more deals, more money, more things is kind of the answer, and that's what you're looking for, Built's not for you. Built is for people who have done all the external things, they've had the success, and they're still anxious and burnt out, and they're like, there's gotta be a better way to go about this. That is Built for Impact. But until next time, folks, all the peace. All the power.