Transforming Stress into Strength: Unlocking the Power of Mind and Body Mastery with Dave Wood

We have become a very reactive species. Social isolation is terrible for us. Our brains have not evolved much in the last 10,000 years. There is no difference between stress and excitement. If you want to protect your energy, then get off the screen. You're not busy, you're just not productive. It's really taxing your energy. You feel exhausted, you don't have energy. I had a lot of anger. I look at that stuff as ridiculous. Reacting can get you killed. You're dead. The solutions are right in front of you. I remain calm and in control no matter what. When you're looking at a screen, the first thing that happens is, yeah, I've seen up devices.

Are you stressed? Are you experiencing anxiety from time to time? Are you feeling like you're not being your best self and reaching your potential at whatever it might be in your life, your career, your hobbies, your sport? Well, today's special guest is one of the world's top specialists on stress mitigation. Why is that so important? Well, when we mitigate stress, we're allowing ourselves to be our best selves. Today we're going to go deep with Dave Wood. He's such an incredible operator. We talk about how the human body works, how we can get it to work at a higher level through breath work, through focusing, through mindfulness. And also we're going to record separately a breathwork exercise for you to do with Dave, which is just on honestly. So simple, but so powerful. Sit back and enjoy the show, Dave.

A huge welcome to the lead on purpose podcast.

Cheers, James. Straight off the plane and straight here.

I love it. Well, welcome down to the South Island.

Yeah, cheers, man.

Look, I'm just so excited to talk to you. I've been following your work for a while and more and more organically through chatting to people and working with people. They talk about your work, they've been to your workshops. Just last week I had a client said me and my wife went up to his workshop.

Yeah, New Zealand's a small place which has its, you know, has its benefits, right? Like you can get your name out there relatively quickly. And yeah, it's like some, it's always someone knows someone else, especially in the sporting world. And so, yeah, New Zealand's great like that.

Only when you do good work, though, you know what I mean? So obviously you're doing great work and stress mitigation and mental skills. So there's going to be listeners and viewers watching going, okay, I am a professional athlete, I want to listen, but however, I want to also just cover off who Else needs to be thinking about mitigating stress and working on mental skills. Who else comes to your workshops?

Basically, I always say if you are specialized, then you're an athlete. And by specialized I mean if you sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, if you're a builder, if you're a painter, if you're, whatever it is that you do, if you're specialized, you should be treating yourself like an athlete and everyone should treat themselves like an athlete. And so I don't really differentiate from, you know, I work with a broad range of people. I love working with athletes, but I also love working with professionals and leaders and corporate and just people that are struggling with stress and pressure.

I love it. And let's just talk a minute for about stress.

Stress.

Like I've had a bad day at work, glass of wine.

Cool.

But actually let's talk about like leaving stress and not managing it and just being tough and toughing it out. Once we fast forward 10, 15, 20 years of being tough and not worrying about stress, what's the consequence?

The consequence is that we're all busy, right? And.

You need to be in an upregulated state throughout your day to get stuff done. And you will get a lot of stuff done in that up regulated stress state. But there's a opportunity cost and the opportunity cost of that is, you know, getting burnt out. And a lot of people get burnt out, they take a risk and then they go again. And we talk about sustainable peak performance. Peak performance is doing anything to the highest of your physical and mental potential. Sustainable peak performance is being able to do it over and over and over again without getting burnt out. And sustainable peak performance is about getting the balance right between stress and recovery. Stress is not bad for us. You know, like if you, if you take your average day, you need to be really focused, you need to have that.

Sympathetic part of your nervous system engaged to get things done. But then once you've done something, you then need to shift back into a recovery state. That's what we call the parasympathetic part of your nervous system. And getting that right is everything in terms of sustainable growth. So we want to push and then we want to be able to pull back and recover. And we have to do that throughout the day. Because if you're stuck in an upregulated state throughout the day, don't expect to sleep at night, don't expect to switch off at night. So the balance in your nervous system is this combination of pushing and then stopping and recovering and the recovery has to be active. You know, you have to be a participant in the recovery. It's not just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. Because what do we normally do when we sit on the couch? We get the screen we put in front of our face. That's not recovery. I'm talking about active recovery in terms of like going down to the park, going for a walk, using your peripheral vision, listening to the sounds of nature. This is all really calming for your nervous system. But we have a bunch of protocols for active recovery and we use a lot of breathing, breathing flows to create more parasympathetic tone in the nervous system.

That's amazing. And it's interesting you say that because I feel like we are a very addicted society to devices and often that spiking dopamine, cortisol, we are hooked. Yesterday I took my son to a swim lesson. I'm looking around, there's 12 other parents and 11 of those parents for the 35 minute swim lesson were hooked to their phone, didn't look up to their kid once. And that's not surprising, right?

It's not surprising. But if these people understood what it's doing in terms of the imbalance it's creating in their nervous system, they wouldn't do it.

So what is it doing?

When you're looking at a screen, the first thing that happens is that your vision becomes.

Tunnel vision, right? You're staring at something. Now, back in the day.

This is the first line of your nervous system, your eyes. And when you don't have good peripheral vision because you're focused on one thing, whether it be a screen or whatever, that activates the sympathetic part of your nervous system. Now, if you think back in the day when there was a lion or a tiger or a bear coming towards you, would you need to have good peripheral vision? No, you need to focus your vision. Same when you're going hunting and you know you would focus your vision. So when we're looking at a screen that.

That focus.

Our brain is detecting that as right. We need to activate the body's stress response, we need a bit of adrenaline, we need a bit of cortisol, we need to increase the heart rate a little bit, we need to increase the blood pressure a little bit, we need to get more blood flow to the skeletal muscle and it's really taxing your energy. It's why you get to the end of the day. And if you've been on your phone all day, you feel exhausted, you don't have energy, so you're robbing yourself of your energy, your energy is your most important thing. And so I have for myself, I know what it feels like to be on my phone all day. And so I have really strict sort of rules and guidelines around the use of my phone. But I mean we just. The first. What's the first thing that happens when the plane lands? Yeah, so you have all these choices throughout the day. And if your choice is to just constantly, you know, plus you being on the phone all day, it's like watching. There's a bit of research and they likened it to watching four movies in a day. The amount of, the amount of screen time that we're having. And it is addictive, you know, like you're trying to do something and you know, you might be trying to do about a focus work and your phone's there, you just pick it up, you look at it, you start scrolling, you put it down, you pick it up. Every time you do that, you interrupt your focus. So it has massive ripple on effects. And you think of like kids, especially in the young development ages, when their nervous system is developing and you're putting this constant stimulus in front of them.

It has huge ripple on effects. And.

Yeah, I think if you want to protect your energy, then get off the screen.

And to the parents who use devices as child minding devices and it's maybe I've seen upwards of five, even seven hours a day where a kid's consistently on this device. What advice do you have for them in terms of what they're doing for that child's future?

You're creating, you're creating a person that is really going to struggle to focus on one thing because there's so much stimulus coming in. And so we're just adaptive machines, right? And so if you're looking at all this constant stimulus coming in, how are you going to hold your focus on one thing? And you know, not being able to focus is terrible.

100.

Relationships for health, for work, for everything, for everything.

And being able to focus unlocks your creativity. So there's so many ripple on effects. And I think you're also going to create a very agitated individual because it's agitating, it's too much stimulus. Our brain weren't designed to, you know, to receive that much stimulus in a day.

It's interesting you say this. So my little son, Finney, 7, and he gets access to the iPad. We have an agreement that he's agreed to. It's two hours across the week and he can split it up to five minutes here, ten minutes there.

Whatever.

When he puts his headphones on and he's playing a game, I hear his breathing.

And we do five minutes and say, hey, just give us the iPad. And when he gets off, he is stressed. He's maybe a bit grumpy. What's happening? Why is his breathing doing that when he's playing this game? Is there stress inducing chemicals? What's going on there?

The body doesn't know the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat.

Right.

And so if you're playing a game and there's a perceived threat there, which most of these games are. Right. It's like.

Then your nervous system, your brain is interpreting that as a real event. Yeah. And so, you know, the part of your brain that detects that, the fear, the fear processing part of your brain, the amygdala, is activating your body's stress response. So you may just be sitting there playing a game, but you're in an up regulated state. Wow. And that significantly, over time impacts our breathing. We're just not aware of it. You know, I see a lot of, a lot of the clients that I work at work with who are burnt out or overloaded and stressed. They have jobs. A lot of them have jobs where they talk a lot. And that impacts your breathing. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk small, inhale, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk small, exhale. And over your day, you end up establishing a pattern of breathing that is subpar.

So for me, because you and I chatted before we went on air. And I do keynotes on stage quite often. And when I'm on stage, I feel very relaxed and happy and I'm enjoying it. There's no fear when I'm on there. But when I come off, my God, I've been sweating a lot. Why am I sweating? My breathing would be totally dysregulated then when I'm on stage.

Well, not if you have conscious awareness of it. And you know, not all stress is bad. You need to get up on stage, you need to be, you need that stress. That stress is like, it's wonderful. Adrenaline is like a beautiful hormone that, you know, gets us ready for battle. Again, your body doesn't know the difference between getting up and talking in front of 200 people. And a few thousand years ago where you were going out hunting, the stress, the stress response is nonspecific.

By bringing conscious awareness to your breathing before getting up to talk or while you're talking, you are able to take some control of your body stress response. With the body stress response, you will get an increase in breathing rate and depth. Well, you may want to be in a stress state, but how stressed do you want to be? You know, that's on a spectrum, right? And so being able to take conscious control of your breathing, to slow down your breathing, to soften your inhale, to prolong your exhale, these are things that create more parasympathetic tone, the calming division of your nervous system. And so being consciously connected with your breathing is one of the most powerful ways to control your body's stress response. And we all have access to it. It's right there in front of us. But we often, especially when we're overwhelmed by stress and pressure, we often look for convoluted solutions to simple problems, or we often look for things that are extern. But we have these body systems that are intricately designed to regulate our stress response. And when we tap into those, when we're able to understand and control some of these body systems, like your breathing and your nervous system, which we do have active control over, you can be in these really stressful environments and have some control of where you are on that spectrum.

I find that fascinating because I remember going back to when I was competing as a drummer was like everything was about the world championships and building up to that, and that was really important. But I would regulate myself in the morning and in the evening. And how I would do that is in the morning I'd have three creamy coffees with a bunch of sugars. That would get me regulated. And then in the evening, I'd have two to three glasses of wine or bottles of beer. That was me regulating. I'm just chilling out, I'm relaxing. But actually, that compound didn't end up with a very average result for me physically and mentally. What are the other things that people reach for? Alcohol, coffee. What other things are you seeing that people justify as regulators before they start working with their breath?

I think it's external things.

And there's hundreds of external things you can latch to, right? Food, alcohol.

But.

I think that.

I think that a lot of it is just a misunderstanding of what strength is. You know, we have this. We have this interpretation of strength as being just add more load, just add more load, just push more, just drive more, more hours working. When actually that is not the definition of strength. The definition of strength is knowing when to push and when to pull back. And so when, if we're talking about things to regulate throughout the day, most of these things require no external focus. They require internal focus where you are softening your mind, where you Are controlling your thoughts, meditating. And there's other really powerful ways to regulate throughout the day. Reconnecting with nature is one of the most powerful ways. When we look at the pillars of health, there's the two most powerful ways to regulate your nervous system. To shift back into a calm state throughout the day is to reconnect with nature. And I mean in a meaningful way. That's difficult for some people, right, because they work in high rises. And some of the clients that I work with say, how do I reconnect? Find a way. You have to find a way because that's. We were designed to be connected with the earth. It's not hippie stuff, you know, when you are out in nature, it calms your nervous system, it creates more clarity of mind. And the second thing, the second really powerful way to regulate your nervous system throughout the day is social interaction. You know, how good do you feel when you go down and you have a coffee at lunch with a mate or a beer at the pub or whatever it might be? You walk away from that feeling really calm. So I've sort of deviated from your question, but there are a bunch of things that we latch to externally to be able to control stress and none of it works. In my opinion. What works is integrating the pillars of health into your everyday. Making sure your nutrition's right, your sleep hygiene, that you have a, that you're challenging yourself. Exercise.

Some form of active recovery and meditation is a really powerful one. And then you have, and then the clients that I work with, then we start putting some, what I call some.

Guidelines around that. And that is values, vision. You talk a lot about this. Values, vision, goal setting and mindset things.

When you talk about that. I feel like there's such a strong alignment between what I see as high performance. And it's funny because you just defined peak performance a moment ago, I just resonate with that. So for me, my thought around high performance is performing above the standard norms over the long term whilst maintaining positive relationships and well being.

Yeah, well, a bunch of people. It's not hard to achieve peak performance. It's not hard. You can do it by just pushing, you know, grinding it out. You can do it with minimal values without goal setting, but it's not sustainable without having clear guidelines. You know, these things that we talk about, goal setting, vision, mindset themes.

And how you do. But, but that's not sustainable. It's never going to be sustainable because you're going to burn people on the way. Right? Yeah.

Look, I'll give you an example of sustainable peak performance.

You go and stay in a hotel, you know, a beautiful hotel room, and.

You leave that hotel room. How do you leave that hotel room? Well, I always leave the hotel room exactly how I found it. It's easy to leave the towels everywhere and leave your rubbish everywhere for someone else to do. Right.

The sustainable part comes with having really clear values, morals, ethics. And when you set these guidelines out for things like your values, it totally dictates how you, how you turn up. Right, of course.

And so sustainable peak performance is about, for me is about getting these foundations right, the pillars of health. Clear values, clear mindset, clear goal setting, clear vision. And most people, I feel they're looking for the 1 percenters, right?

You got to get the big things right? And these are the big things. The big things are the pillars of health. And, you know, the values, the vision, the goal setting, the mindset, things.

That's amazing. And for the listener and viewer right now, that's going to. Well, I want to do that. What's step number one?

Step number one is ask yourself, in your day, in your busy day, are you integrating the pillars of health into every single day? Nutrition, I mean, that's a massive one, right? Sleep, do you. I sit personally, I set my sleep up from the time that I wake up and throughout my day I push and then I recover. That's how you set your sleep up.

Can we jump into that sleep bit for a second? You talked about sleep hygiene. That's something I'm familiar with, something I'm currently trying to improve and work on. But for those that are listening, what's sleep hygiene? What is it? How do we get better at it?

Sleep hygiene is. It's basically setting yourself up so that you are.

You've heard about circadian rhythm, right? You are working in a way that is in line with your body's natural circadian rhythm. You go to bed at the same time, you wake it up at the same time. You view natural sunlight in the morning, you view low level sunlight in the evening. That's what we used to do. You have a day where you push. Think of what we did back in the day. We would go hunting, right? So we would leave the village and we would go hunting. And the hunt could sometimes last six hours. We would need to be in that regulated state. Then when we finish hunting, we bring the kill back. What do we do? We're in a social environment, social connection. That's calming. We're cooking the food up. That's calming. So we have this balance between pushing and recovering. And so if you want to set your sleep up, if you're struggling with sleep, you have to look at what you're doing throughout the day. Are you actively recovering throughout your day? And if you don't, your nervous system gets stuck in what we call that sympathetic state. It's like having the accelerator on adrenaline, cortisol, upregulated. It's addictive. And when it comes to the evening, you will not be able to switch off because our nervous systems don't work like that. That's the imbalance is, it's too much load. And so, you know, there's too much. What we call sympathetic load. Yeah. So sleep hygiene is really about what you do throughout the day, more so than what you do in the evening. But there's some really smart things you can do in the evening. Dim the lights. You know, in our house we dim the lights after 7:30, having bright lights on the screen. That suppresses the release of melatonin. Melatonin from the pineal gland. And you are now getting adrenaline release from the adrenals. Yeah. And so we're going against our circadian rhythm and our natural hormone release.

And so blue light blocking glasses could be helpful.

I look at that stuff.

Is ridiculous.

So that's you kind of messing with the natural nature of things.

It's like, I think, just keep it simple, right. We, I think we get into this pattern of like thinking where it's like, okay, well, we're the blue blockers or we won't have our co. You know, we won't have a coffee till 11 o'. Clock. And there's all these little things that people are doing. Right. But then they're not doing the big things. Right. Yeah. And the simple things. And yeah, I understand the thing behind the blue block. Yeah. And for some people, they'll, they'll help, but just do the basics and you don't need those little, you know, the things that are out on the periphery. That's my take on it. Yeah. And yeah. So we've got, you know, nutrition, sleep, hygiene, exercise. What are the other pillars of health?

Social interaction and reconnecting with nature. Okay. If you get those things into your everyday, you will have balance and it's all achievable.

Like totally say all of that. Like, well, I could do, I could do all that.

I'll tell you what the problem is that when you are stressed, when you're anxious, when you're overloaded, when you, when all of the stuff ends up culminating in mental health issues.

It is a.

It can sometimes be a tricky place because we don't understand what's going on. And we. And so we start looking for these convoluted solutions because it's convoluted in our heads. The solutions are right in front of you. And, you know, I deal with a lot of. A lot of the clients that I deal with are really stressed and anxious, and that manifests in patterns of behavior. And they start looking for these external things like what we talked about, alcohol or coffee or whatever it might be, because they're addicted to the stress. When you put these things into your day, you are balancing your nervous system. You are promoting recovery, and you can still get lots of stuff done. So I have something that I program for my clients, which is a 10 minute breathing flow. Okay. And I say to them, hey, you got to do this twice a day. And they look at me like I'm mad.

20 minutes of my day gone.

Like, there's no way. Do you realize how busy I am? I'm like, you're not busy. You're just not productive. You're multitasking. You're trying to do 100 things at once. You're cognitively overloaded. You can't focus. You do this two lots of ten minutes every day, and you watch what happens to your ability to be more productive. Incredible. And, you know, we work really well in one and a half hour bouts of work. And then we have recovery. Yep. But we're not doing that.

We're just going and going and going.

And we do not work well like that. There's a company that.

I went into to try and work with the owners to improve worker satisfaction and productivity. And one of the things that we did was right, because they were sitting in front of screens all day. And when I went around and interviewed these people, a lot of them were really suffering. You know, there were people that weren't sleeping. There was one guy that was having chronic headaches. And so there was all these. And when I presented this back to the owners, they were like, we had no idea. So we brought them this. We brought in two things. One was meditation pods. So they would be able to go and do these 10 minute meditations just listening, just sitting down on a beanbag. And the other thing that we brought in is that this is outside of their lunch break. Every single day, they would have 20 minutes where they would go for a walk. Amazing. The other thing that we brought in was a timer on their desk. And when the timer was on, it would be a timer that Would count down from one hour. That's when they were doing hyper focus work. And you could only distract them if it was an emergency.

Wow.

And these things drastically improved productivity.

I'm not surprised.

And the main one was the walk. Getting out, viewing natural sunlight, using your peripheral vision. Very calming. You know, they talk about the magic number being 10,000 steps, but it's just moving.

Yeah.

You know, you've got to burn some, some, some energy physically to then be able to switch off at night to go to sleep at night.

It makes sense. And I'm a deep believer in the meditation side of things. I've been practicing seven, eight years every day, just a little bit. Sometimes it's five minutes, sometimes it's an hour.

You learn something new every single time you.

About myself and about others. Absolutely.

Yeah. Every single time.

I'm like a rookie every time.

Yeah.

And that's the beautiful thing about just stopping and listening. You know, meditation is just a word that means something different to everyone. Right. And I am limited by my vocabulary. But meditation to me is not about creating singular focus. It's the exact opposite. It's just about stopping and not filling that. That, you know, if you think about, for most people, when they stop, what do they do? When they actually just stop, what do they do?

Breathe. Right.

But hey, they, they fill the void. Yeah. They cannot just stop. So they fill the void.

They'll pick up with the phone. Right.

Or they'll pick up or a snack. Yeah, yeah. So they can't just be still. You think back to when, if I think back to when I was a kid, you know, we didn't have phones. And I remember like my mates would come in and we'd sit out at the beach. We had this room that looked out over the surf. Our lounge. And there's a bunch of couches. And we would sit there all day just taking it in, talk and like. Yeah.

What we do now, when we find that space, that quiet space, is we fill. I call it filling the void with nonsense. Yes. And meditation for me is about being still, being in a quiet place and not filling the void. And that may look like a guided meditation. It might look like a breathing flow.

But then meditation becomes everything that you do. It could be a walk when I'm running the sand dune. When it gets stressful, my mind latches to the end. Whenever something is stressful, your mind will latch. Then you can't even stop it. As soon as it latches thin, I bring it back. What am I training? My prefrontal cortex sustain Focus, short term memory, creativity. And so when I'm driving out to pha, I'm gonna, I'm gonna follow that white line and I'm not gonna take my focus off that white line. 200 meters. Do I get to the end of 200 meters? No, I get about 50 meters long and my mind goes somewhere else, and then I bring it back. So meditation is everything, and that is incredibly powerful because without an ability to focus, you cannot unlock creativity. Without ability to focus, you cannot convert stress, apprehension, tension, fear into excitement. Because the two are the same thing. Neurologically, biologically, physiologically, there is no difference between stress and excitement. It's just that one, isn't it? For a lot of people, stress is a negative emotion and excitement is a positive emotion. But the two are the same. We just pumped up. We have adrenaline, we have cortisol, we have the stress hormones pumping around. How do you bridge that gap between the two, your ability to focus? When. Because when you can focus, you can unlock your creative mind and you can start using your language, you can start focusing on your breathing. You can do these things to bridge the gap. You know, when I, when I got up to talk in front of 300 people, I was highly stressed, man. My, my hands were clammy. I could feel it in my chuck, feel my heart beating. I was stressed, but I converted it to excitement through my ability to focus and use my language. I'm ready for this. I've got this. Shift my perspective and respond creatively. We all have the ability to do this.

And that's exciting to know that any human can actually adapt and adopt using simple techniques and strategies.

Simple, simple. Just so simple. The exercises that I give people are the same for everyone. It's just the variables that change. And it's understanding human behavior and what this, what this one person might need versus this person. But really, people need three things when we're looking at like, stress and pressure and your ability to make calm under pressure, to be more focused, to work on mental preppiness. People need three things. They need to understand the underlying mechanisms of stress and pressure and how it has manifested in them in terms of their behaviors. They need the skills. And then they need practical simulations, all three of those things. That's how the human brain learns. Boom.

It's not reading a book and you're transformed.

No, Right.

It's practical. It's understanding.

Because that information that you're reading, you'll put in your head and you'll double it up and come up with your, Your own thing. Yeah. When you understand your own behaviors and some of these subconscious behaviors.

Or unconscious behaviors, when you understand that, I mean, some of them are great behaviors that are powerful in terms of health and performance, but some of them are behaviors that are holding us back. Avoidance, fear of failure, fear of what other people might think, fear of letting people down. Procrastination.

When you start identifying these patterns of behavior, then you can start changing them. And that's incredible powerful because we can by identifying and coming up with new patterns of behavior. We do this in exercise called establishing your mindset. Mindset themes. Identify the pattern that's holding you back. Come up with a mindset theme around it, flipping on its head 360 degrees. Start training a new pattern. An example. For a long time I was very reactive. I had a lot of anger. And so I identified that in my late 30s, really started identifying as something that was holding me back. I used to think it was a strength. Identify the pattern. My mindset is I remain calm and in control no matter what. And I wrote that down and I started practicing that. So someone pulled in front of me, the car would not give it my energy. I'd be in a confrontation, I would not raise my voice and I'd go against it, right? But it would affect me because I was going against the system and protocol that I created for my mindset. Now train that pattern that ends up becoming subconscious. That is one of the most powerful forms of. That's like when we talk about change. That is change. And you have to really ingrain these patterns so they become hardwired so that when you go into stress and pressure moments, the patterns that come forth are positive patterns or patterns that are.

You know, serving you, helping you.

What I love about this, when you're sharing it, Dave, is that I can see how a UFC fighter will come to you and it would be just so life changing for them as a performer. But equally I can see how a mum who's dealing with three kids and a job and life, how it could be equally as transformational for her. So for the people that are watching this right now that would love to come along to one of your courses, what does that look like? What do they go through and what do they end up feeling and experiencing at the end?

The thing about our course is that it doesn't matter if you're an elite level athlete or a 60 year old office worker. Everyone works within their own capacity. And we've set the workshop up like that so you can push yourself as much as you like and you can Pull back as well. But we're all just humans, we're all kind of the same. You know, this whole thing of, you know, the exercises that I give an elite level athlete are the same exercises that I give the mum or the dad or. And again, you just change the variables.

So. And you can see a lot of. In this workshop, we do an exercise which we sit in a group and you have to go around and talk about one of your weaknesses. And it's really confronting for some people. Some people are terrified about getting up and talking. And I will always start and I will talk to one of my weaknesses. And then the next person goes and the next person, the next person. And you start just seeing. People want to share this stuff. They want to share and they don't hold back.

And.

The powerful thing here is that when you say your weakness, I'm like, oh, man, I do that. And then the next person goes and I'm like, far out. I do that. And we're all very similar. But it's the three things that come up time and time again. Fear of failure which results in holding ourselves back. Procrastination, Avoidance. Fear of letting people down. Why? Because we've either been let down or we've let someone else down. Growing up.

And fear of what other people might think is a big one. Fear of what other people might think.

We have not evolved, our brains have not evolved much in the last 10,000 years. If we weren't part of a group back in the day, if we weren't part of the tribe, you're dead. You know, you've got to be part of the tribe. And so we want so much to belong to something. And if I work with a client who's socially isolated, the first thing before adding anything else is you have to join up with a group, whether it be a yoga group or whatever, you have to join up with a group. You have to be part of a group. Social isolation is so detrimental to. I mean, anyone knows the social isolation is terrible for us.

Yeah.

And for some people, it's frightening being in social situations. Even for myself, when I go into a social situation, I think, you know, you. There's always. It doesn't matter how confident you are, everyone is the same. Going to social. Yeah, yeah.

Everyone thinks that I'm very natural in a social setting. But I'll tell you what, going in and sometimes when I'm in it, I'm actually uncomfortable and anxious and I'm nervous and.

And that comes back to this thing of like, we all experience that how do we convert that into excitement? It's all just through your internal dialogue and your perspective of the thing. Create a challenge. You know, like this is the other thing is for a lot of people that have experienced trauma or have a negative relationship with stress, they will stop challenging themselves.

But that is what creates the stress. Because when you have a challenge, you have focus, you have something that you're heading towards, right? Like the challenge is everything. If you're not challenging yourself, you're just not. There's no personal growth. Right. I know this is like.

Sounds pretty self explanatory, but a lot of people have a negative relationship with stress and we need to understand that. Stress is not bad for you. Uncontrolled stress is not good for you. Controlled stress, incredible for you because it.

Drives you to focus on specific outcomes and tasks.

Well, controlled stress is. Uncontrolled stress is. Look, this is how I frame it. Chronic stress is practicing acute stress over and over and over again with no control. And we are doing that all the time, hundreds of times a day because there's so many opportunities or so many, you know, examples throughout our day where we can activate the body's acute stress response. You know, nowadays it's waiting in the line for a coffee, five minutes until I get to get back. Acute stress response. Someone pulls in front of the car and we get all pissed off. Acute stress response. So you keep training the pattern and that becomes chronic stress. Chronic stress is terrible for you. So now you have hundreds of opportunities throughout the day to practice controlled stretch. Something happens to you, the stimulus, and you don't react, you just take a step back. You know, Viktor Frankl, he talks about this working in the gap between stimulus and response.

So that space in between, right, and.

Then the pause, that's where all the good stuff happens. And the stimulus is the stressor. Nowadays.

The most prominent stressor is psychological stress, stress and more. And defining that down even further, it's our thoughts. Because thoughts stimulate thinking, thinking stimulates emotions. Those emotions dictate our actions and our actions dictate our destiny. And so if we get the thought, the thing right at the very. And again it comes back to awareness. Being aware of our thoughts and how we react or respond to them and working in that gap between stimulus and response, or stimulus and reaction. That gap is where all the good stuff happens. And most of the time it's just stopping and taking a step back.

The power is in the pause.

The powers in the pause. Man, I've heard you talk about this. And in the emergency Services. I was an intensive care paramedic for 12 years. We would never run into any situation. You would never run. You would walk in, you would stop, you would use your peripheral vision. I would always consciously control my breathing and I would take the environment in. I wouldn't get tunnel vision. And before, you know, in these scenes they're often, you know, a car crash, for example, you can just go straight in and start tending to a patient and not see what's going on around you. That is reacting. Yes. Responding is just stopping. Yeah. Using your senses, what's going on.

That takes so much awareness, but also self control. And I remember seeing something unfold in Canada and it was on a beach. There was a child who was having difficulty breathing. I think it was an allergic reaction. And paramedics were called and 15, 20 minutes later they arrived and seen the two paramedics. I was about 19 at the time and I seen them just walking and I was like, are you kidding? Like, you should be sprinting, guys. Yeah, yeah, totally. I was like, what are they doing? And then now when you explain, I'm like, this makes sense. They're taking it all in. They're going to be calm when they arrive. They'll make better decisions. They'll assess the situation and not be all hyped up.

The biggest problem we are facing with humanity at the moment.

And my belief is that we are very reactive. And we are reactive because we're spending so much time in that sympathetic part of our nervous system which is designed for survival. It's not a place for loving or for caring or for taking a step back for critical thinking. It is a space for survival. And yeah, we have become a very reactive species. And reacting can get you killed. Yeah, you know, responding is. Reacting is that part that amygdala, that fight or flight center in your brain. And responding is using your higher brain centers, your prefrontal cortex. And you can bring that, those higher brain centers back online when you are in very stressful, high pressure situations by just taking a step back.

Two breath cycles. We have a five step method and it is, the first step is I'll just go through it quickly, embrace the stress, pressure, fear, apprehension, tension. Because most of the time if you try to push it away, it's still there. Second thing is to change the language. That's the most powerful way to intercept stress here psychologically pertaining to your mind. Change the language. When you change the language, that is activating your prefrontal cortex. When you are consciously controlling your internal dialogue. Hey, I'm okay, here, just stop. What's going on? Third thing is shifting your perspective. The more ways you have at looking at something, the more options you have. The fourth thing is conscious control of your breathing. When you take conscious control of your breathing, what you will often notice in stress and pressure moments is that your breathing has shifted into your upper chest. You are shallow breathing, small inhales, small exhales, or you are breath stacking. Normal inhale, short exhale. These are all patterns of breathing that are keeping you in a stress state. So by taking step number four, conscious control of your breathing, slowing it down, you are doing the opposite of your body stress response. And the last thing is do a quick body scan, find where you're holding intention and let it go. If you are holding tension in your body, that's that fight, flight, or freeze. The freeze is in your musculoskeletal system. You're holding this tension. You are sending signals to your brain to keep you in a stress state. So as soon as you relax your body, you are sending signals to your brain. Hey, everything is all right. And this is just simple stuff that people can do in real time. And.

We hold a lot of tension, man. Yeah, with the clients I'm working with, you can see it. They're just sitting there holding this tension. You say, hey, just. Just relax your jaw and your shoulders. And they go, oh, what's that all about?

Didn't even know they were doing it.

Yeah, well, that's a sign of nervous system dysregulation, spending too much time in that sympathy part of your nervous system, which we need again, the sympathetic is not good or bad, and the parasympathetic is not good or bad. It's just that it can get imbalanced. Just like we have musculoskeletal balance, cardiovascular imbalance, nervous system imbalance, there's imbalance in all of these body systems. We're just made up of 11 different body systems.

But two of the key ones in terms of remaining calm under pressure is your breathing system, your respiratory system, and your nervous system. And with the clients that I work with, man, there's a lot of imbalance there in most people.

Yeah, most of us have it. And when we talk about nervous system. So central nervous system, autonomic. Which nervous system? Are they interrelated?

I do a lot of work around people with the autonomic nervous system. So the central nervous system, brain, spinal cord, is like the computer of your car. It's receiving information from your external and internal environment. It's cold, put A jumper on. Touch something hot, you take your hand off. That's all being processed in your central nervous system. And then we have what we call a peripheral nervous system. So think of all the nerves coming off your spine to innovate. Your heart rate, your blood pressure, your breathing, the digestion of your food. That's all taken care of by your autonomic nervous system. Two branches. Sympathetic parasympathetic. Sympathetic accelerator on adrenaline, cortisol. You're pumped up.

Parasympathetic, brakes on. So the all blacks called this sympathetic, was red brain. Parasympathetic, blue brain. And Richie McCord deeply understood this. And that's why one of the reasons why he was so good at remaining composed and neutral even. You know, he'd be on the ground, some guy would uppercut him or stomping him, he'd just be neutral. He, he understood how important it was to get this balance right between accelerator on red brain, brakes on blue brain. And the work that I do with my clients is getting them to understand this and have a visual connection to it. So I show them, I show them I had that. You have to have a visual connection to your diaphragm if you want to have better control of your breathing. You have to have a visual connection of what's going on. And this imbalance that we see in the autonomic nervous system, you know, the far spectrum of the red is anxiety. At the far spectrum of the blue, parasympathetic is depression. And some people toggle between the two. That's called nervous system dysregulation. Some people are stuck in the middle. They don't have to turn it on. They don't know how to turn it off. Some, some people love being in the red. I'm one of them. I love being in the red. I love having a busy day and just getting stuff done. But I understand now that if I do that and I stay there, man, the, the.

The side effects of that are significant. And it ripples over into my sleep, my ability to focus, irritability.

So I know now that because I am busy and productive. Yeah. But I understand that I have to get the balance right between stress and recovery. And stress is good as long as you have recovery with it.

And it's like, tap on, tap off. I know when to turn the tap on and I have to work and perform, but actually I know how to turn the tap off.

Yep. The other day, two o' clock in the day, I'd just been pushing all day on the computer, doing this Doing that. And I could feel myself just getting more and more agitated and reacting to things. So I went to open the door to my gym at home, went in, lay down the ground, put on my 10 minute breathing flow where I follow a cadence. For this particular day I did a 6 in, 8 out, 6 inhale, 8 exhale. And within 10 minutes I was calm again, then went back out, pushed again.

Amazing.

The powerful thing about this breathing, six in, eight out. This is just a number that I use. The exhale is always longer than the inhale. So if you inhale now, is that more active or passive?

To me, I would naturally say active.

Active. Yeah, it's more active. Now take the same breath in. Now exhale, relax. Is the exhale more active or passive?

I feel it's way more passive.

Passive. The inhale is innovated by the sympathetic part of your nervous system and the exhale is invaded by your parasympathetic.

Just like on and off.

Yes. So now if you have a longer exhale and you relax into the exhale. So if the exhale is longer than the inhale, you're going to create more parasympathetic tone. So you're going to activate more of the recovery division of your nervous system just by following this breathing flow for five, 10 minutes. So you can be. So I identify, right? I'm too far in the red. I'm, you know, it's starting to affect me and my ability to be productive on this day, right? I'm going to go reset and push back into the blue. Then I come back out and I go again and then I reset again. And my resets, you know, I am an active relaxer. So I like my resets. I like, man, just going to the gym and doing some weights. I find that very calming. I find it very calming going for a walk on the beach or running the sand dunes or getting up in the bush and walking up and jumping in the cold water. I find doing my contrast therapy hot to cold. And then I'll go into the gym and do five minutes of breath. Man, this stuff is just so powerful and accessible. Accessible. And I talked to you about this before. But for a lot of people to get relaxed, you have to create a little bit of stress. And so there are certain things you can do to create stress that will then make you calm. And these are things that are controlled stress. Ice bath, for example. If you get an ice bath for two minutes and you control your breathing, your mind latches, then you bring it back. Body scan. You don't hold any tension. And after two minutes of controlling that stress, controlling your body's response to that stress, you get out, you will feel calm, you won't feel stressed. If you get in there and your breathing's all over the place and you're tensed up and you're fighting it, you will get out and you will feel stressed. So we can create controlled stress to actually calm the system.

Incredible.

Yeah.

I love the way you say about just you go in and you lay down for five to ten minutes. Often with my one to one clients who have lots of stress, whether they're athletes or they're leaders, I'll say five to thrive. Just find five minutes in your day between meetings to thrive.

Five minutes is good, man. Five minutes is good and one minute is good. Yeah, you know.

I don't think there's any research that shows because people always want to be told what to do. They want the exact number. Right. You got to do exactly 20 minutes of meditation three times a day for such and such months. This is not a program, this is a lifestyle. This is about making choices throughout your day to shift back into a calm state. And hey, it can be five minutes, it can be 10 minutes. I will often trick myself, I'll say, I'm going to do five minutes. Because you know that's a cheat.

You'll do so many more.

Right. Then I'll end up doing 20 minutes. Yes. But if I go like, okay, I'm going to do 20 minutes, I'll often, man, I'll often avoid it. Because it's a chunk of time. Right? It's a chunk of time. So you can trick yourself and. Yeah, yeah.

One minute of just stopping, going and finding a quiet place and controlling your breathing, you'll be surprised that you can come out of that feeling quite reset and calm.

Yeah, I agree with that personally. From my own experience, just using breath work or even just a cold shower at the end of a warm shower, I feel like a different human.

Yeah, yeah. Practices again, that are just right in front of us. But I'm free. Free right in front of us. But we look for convoluted solutions to relatively simple problems. That's my experience of, you know, what I'm seeing with the clients that I'm working with. But it's also, you know, if we, if we're talking about things like anxiety and OCD and.

They are really tricky.

Things to navigate. Right. Because there's so much information out there. There's a lot of information you've got to sift through the nonsense to find the good stuff. And the good stuff, I keep coming back to it and I will keep preaching this over and over again that the good stuff, the. The big things are integrating the pillars of health into your everyday and creating clear values, clear vision, goals and mindset things.

I love it. I mean, I. I will adopt that way of thinking 100% because it works.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a recent client, he. He works in an office and he messaged me the other day a picture of him walking through the park in Auckland city in his bare feet.

Good man.

Yeah, man. He's reconnecting in a meaningful way with.

Nature and he's making an effort.

Yeah. And his response to me was like, this has become like something that I have to do in my day.

It's a practice.

It's a practice and.

There'S a lot of research around now. Being in nature and just listening to sounds of nature and how calming that is for your nervous system, just listening to sounds of nature.

My girlfriend is going through a difficult time at the moment. And every day she gets up, she goes and sits outside, she views the natural sunlight and she's in nature.

And she'll just listen, you know, and she always comes back in looking like a different person.

How simple for her to do that and that. And again, accessible. It's right there.

Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that. I'm sorry that she is going through a tough time. It's never easy, but you're saying, bring it back to the simple things. Productivity, I think I'm going to call it. This toxic productivity is a big challenge for us. I was going to do the dishes the other day and I thought, oh, I could put a podcast on while I do the dishes. And then I heard the birds in the distance and I went, don't be an idiot. Put the phone down, open the window, listen to the damn birds and do the dishes. There I felt so much better.

Conscious awareness, man, of what's going on around you. And.

Yet.

You know.

There is a lot of value in post traumatic growth. And we often think when we're going through the thing, how bad it is and how detrimental it is to our health and all that stuff. But.

Those going through those things, I call it going through the fire and realizing that none of us get away. You know, like we all at some point are exposed to.

Trauma. And post traumatic growth is when you learn from that, you're consciously aware of that process, process of going through that and how that can end up making you more resilient.

And.

And using everything to your advantage. That's the mindset. It doesn't matter how bad something is. My leg gets locked off. How am I going to use that to my advantage? Does not matter how bad something is. You can find a way to use it to your advantage. And having that type of mindset.

Is.

Really.

For me and for my life and the things that I've been through is.

One of the most powerful ways, I think, to look at how to just grow.

That's beautiful. It's rather than post traumatic stress, it's post traumatic growth is what you're saying. And it's almost like problems present possibilities, man.

They do problems present possibilities.

And I think all of this stuff just comes back to being aware of our thoughts. And it's not about having positive or negative thoughts. We're in a time and age now where everyone's saying, hey, you've got to have positive thoughts all the time. No, you don't. You do not have to have positive thoughts all the time. Negative thoughts are fine. That's just a thought. And actually we really have no control of them just popping into our head. What we do have control of is how we respond to that thought. So I have a mindset thing. My mindset is I do not view thoughts as good or bad. They are just situations to respond to. And it's my response to the thought that matters. So I can have a negative thought come in, self doubt, whatever it might be before I get up to talk to 300 people. I'm not ready, but I'm minimizing. The guy before me was incredible. And the thought will come in. I will bring the thought and I will embrace it. I will change the language, shift my perspective and respond creatively. And you can start doing this with everything. It just becomes a pattern.

Incredible. I love that. And again, it's achievable when we can all step into that. That's just amazing. Now, look, I want to say to the listener and the viewer that Dave's going to take us through a breathwork exercise, something that we can use as a skill. We're going to put that in the show notes, notes below. So you can just click the link. It'll take you over to YouTube where we'll show it exclusively. But Dave, I've got one last question for you. And I actually feel, I'll be honest with you, I feel like we're going to have multiple conversations over the years to come.

I hope so, mate.

I can feel it. I really do. And I think I need to get up and experience the course as well. I'll sign up and come up. I'm sure Caroline will come up with me too and be really great to go through it with you. I've got a lot to learn. Be awesome. But one last question, and that is if we were to fast forward many years into the future, you know, it's your last day here on Earth and someone very young that you deeply care about and you love, they come into the room and say, dave, how do I lead my life on purpose? What do you say to them?

Wow.

What do I say to them?

I would say.

I would say don't search for happiness. Search for challenge and experiences. Challenge yourself every day and make and go towards big challenge and search for experiences and you will find happiness. Yeah.

Great advice, Dave. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the amazing work that you do for everyone here in New Zealand. But I know it's going global as well, so for people that are listening that are not from New Zealand, they should get in touch. I'll put in the show notes to your website and all of your socials, going to encourage people to go and check it out, follow it. I know that they can send corporate teams along, sports teams along, individuals can go along.

So I'll put it all in the.

Show notes and I look forward to reconnecting again soon.

Yeah, thanks very much, man. And I've, I told you before I came on the podcast, I've listened to a bunch of your podcasts and I have learned a lot by just listening to those podcasts and some of them, of those podcasts, you know, I've been listening to them, written down a bunch of notes and I've applied that with some of my clients. So thank you for what you're doing.

No, thank you. Pleasure's mine, legend.

Cheers.

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