How to Regulate Stress

You think that stress and anxiety is just the price of admission to success, but it's just not the case. Your body was not designed to sustain this chronic state of fight or flight and survival. We're meant to go into survival but then return to a regulated state of being where we live 90% of our lives. The single greatest skill that you can develop to recognize when you're in a survival state so that you can regulate is the skill of interoception. It's the ability of your awareness to recognize certain states in the body. Do you have a tight chest? Do you have a pit in your stomach? Are your shoulders up? Is your jaw Our body is triggered into fight or flight in milliseconds all day long, and if we can't catch it, we can't regulate. And being in a regulated state of being is where all of our creative thinking happens. That's where we can think and we can create, we can plan, and we can strategize. So if you're running around survival mode all day long, you don't even have access to 50% of your brain. So all of life, all day long, becomes about understanding when you're in a dysregulated state and regulating. So start to develop that awareness of your body. When are you in that survival state? Someone said something to you, you opened an email, you wake up and you're in that state.. And when you're in that state, you can use physiological levers to calm yourself down. Just getting control of your breathing and making sure that your exhale is longer than your inhale. So if you do a 4-second inhale and then a 6-second exhale, every time your exhale is longer, you're signaling the parasympathetic nervous system in the vagus nerve. So just get a hold of your breathing when you recognize that you're in that state, and you'll begin to build the internal muscles of being aware of when you're in a survival state, regulating yourself back, turning your brain back on, and functioning at the highest level.