How To Reset A Dysregulated Nervous System (Best Techniques) ft. Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Every single day you will constantly be shifting between three different nervous system modes, likely without even realizing it. However, if you practice the skill of noticing your body and listening to it as it moves through these nervous system states, you can unlock a whole new world of skills that allow you to complete the quests that are most meaningful to you in your life. Some of these quests might include having a prestigious career, completing a PhD in neuroscience, or becoming a published author. And today we're talking with my friend Anne Law who's completed each of these quests and is here to discuss our favorite evidence backed protocols for peak and nervous system performance.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, I studied emotions and feelings almost as if the rest of the nervous system didn't exist. Nothing under the shoulders existed. I really liked mental models of the world A, then B, then C. And if something didn't work the way I expected it to, probably something in the equation was wrong. Discovering the concept of interoception, which is fairly recent for me, I only started reading about it about last year, I was like, oh, there's this entire cupboard in my kitchen I had never looked at.

There are different lenses on our internal experience. And you know, most of us are aware of the, the cognitive like thought lens because we just hear the thoughts go all day long. But there are also so many other layers. There's layer of our physical somatic sensations, like am I hungry right now or am I noticing like this tightness in my chest or in my gut? There's the breath, like how is my breath in this moment? There's all of these different, I think of them as like flavors, like a interoceptive chef. In that last year, since you've like discovered this from your head down more down into your body and living more in this place, what are some of the shifts you've noticed?

So first confusion because things felt more out of control than they they did before when it was all cognitive. And then almost a sense of wonder, curiosity and o discovering that I had all of those parts of me that.

Had been ignoring in the research. There is this idea that we have four times more efferent neurons going from the body to the brain and afferent neurons going from the brain to the body. This like super highway of information that I'm otherwise missing out on that impacts my intuition, the way that I make decisions, the way that I feel about other people, and the way that I also, you know, take care of myself. It's like, it's like any habit. The more times that that little Check in. Muscle gets built, the stronger it is. Interoceptive capacity is. It is a skill that can be learned and cultivated and practiced. You know, there's other ways, like this breathwork experience, which really amplifies all of the sensations that are already there, but just it brings much more like aliveness to them. What was your internal experience like during this like amplified state?

Yeah, my head felt really full this morning, but it almost felt like it was a little bit disconnected from my body also. And then with Kelly, you felicitated this breathwork session. It was an amazing way to reconnect. I've actually only done breath work in a group and it's as if you're feeding off the energy of everyone else around you.

Typically the journey follows the arc of a bell curve. So it starts off quite gentle, like first or second gear, and then increases in intensity and energy and aliveness and emotions. And then there's the peak and then you kind of come back down into integration, relaxation and just calm. Basically.

I ended up crying. Some shared that it was extreme clarity.

Like stuff got out of the way.

Exactly. Accessed, unlocked.

I've burnt out in the past and I think that was largely due to overriding and not listening to the feedback that was coming from, from my body.

I've also experienced burnout several times. I still very often feel like I could be on the verge of it. What are other ways I could access that information so I can maybe see burnout coming from further away?

I created something that I call ape, which stands for awareness, posture, emotion. After I get up, I do some stretching, do some moving. In the morning, take our dog for a walk. I'll sit down, drink some tea and just tune in. How is my awareness okay? In this moment it feels quite expansive. I'm like aware of the space behind me. I'm aware of you, I'm aware of the cameras over here. How is my posture? Tuning in to see what is present. It's nice to do in the morning and evening because that's when there's naturally a period of spaciousness in between meetings, remembering to listen and to tune in.

For me, anxiety shows very much in the belly and I feel like this very uncomfortable warmth sometimes. Psychologists call it free floating anxiety. To me it is the worst kind because again, I'm a problem solver. Being anxious when there's a clear reason is fine, but this free floating anxiety where I'm literally typing an email and all of a sudden I'm like anxious and I don't know why. I really like dancing in My living.

Room dancing is amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now I get up, I put some music on and I just dance. I'm very city in my living room and I do that for five minutes. In this whole process, there's no point where I managed to label and interpret what was wrong at a cognitive level, but I feel better and I can go back and sit at my computer and keep on working and it's fine.

Yeah, yeah, Beautiful. I learned recently that the word anxiety, the Latin root, it comes from a word that means to constrict. Anxiety is actually a sense of constriction or resisting other emotions. And so your practice of noticing that tuning into interoception, putting on some music and then moving your body and allowing your body to just move, allows whatever that emotional energy was to just be discharged. And like you said, you don't even need to know what the underlying emotion was, let alone what the story was. And you can sit down and you feel good again. That moment when you feel the, the anxiety kind of in your, in your belly, that's something that I think of as a cognitive canary, early warning sign that if you were to ignore that, that would then lead to a full blown panic attack. In that moment, there's different options. You can either do exactly as you did, which is like play music, move the body, dance, feel it out. You could do, you know, like a breathwork practice to downregulate your nervous system and calm down that way. There's ways in which the breath work practices can be used to self regulate away emotion, which might work in the short term, but in the long term you're just adding more emotional debt and that over time creates more fragility in the nervous system, which creates a whole host of challenges.

I've noticed this with public speaking for me, where I used to have this knot in my stomach before coming on stage, and I still have it, but the big difference now is that I actually notice it and I say hello. Or I used to have anxiety about that because I felt like, oh, maybe it's because I'm not good at public speaking and I'm not, I haven't maybe prepared enough. And this is why it's there now. I'm like, no, actually I'm just feeling a bit anxious because I care. I want this to be good. It's connected to the concept of meta emotions, the feelings about feelings, which is a word you would see in modern research, but it's not new at all because I don't know if you know about the concept of the double arrow in Buddhism, like the first arrow is the shame, the second arrow is the shame about the shame. And you're suffering twice ashamed of that shame about the shame. And it never stops. And some of the benefits of interoception is just stopping that vicious cycle in its tracks.

Yeah, particularly in our culture, we spend so much time avoiding what are labeled like bad emotions. Anger, grief, shame. And in my experience, if our meta emotion, if our relationship to those emotions is bad, then we resist them. And that resistance is actually what causes the suffering versus if you take the interoceptive route, you stay with the sensations, the unpleasantness or the discomfort will pass very, very quickly. The life cycle is like 15, 20 seconds. And then there's, there's this clarity and freedom that emerges on the other side. Because if someone doesn't have any interoceptive capacity, they'll just be in the story over and over again and they will experience the resistance they have, which just causes that like infinite double arrow thing. For quite a few people. Every time they made a bad decision, there was some kind of gut feeling or some sense that was being like, like actually you shouldn't do that. But it was overridden by like, no, this is actually a great opportunity or I'm going to make loads of money or whatever that decision is. I have a decision to make. I'll be like, okay, does this feel expansive or does it feel like it's contracting in my, in my body, in my system? And that is a really good. Even if I don't know why, that's a really good indicator of do I start this business project? Do I go in this direction? Do I do this trip?

Which is counterintuitive to a lot of people who consider themselves decision makers because they're trying to make the most rational, most log difficult decision. And they'll almost tell you don't trust your intuition. And what you're saying is actually maybe trust your intuition.

Yes, there's no such thing as a non emotional decision. All decisions have emotional kind of undertones. And then we tend to post rationalize if I'm in a, in a kind of tense or challenging conversation, let's say with, with my wife Kelly, my default tendency is to go into the kind of like shutdown, freeze response and it'll happen and I'll go numb. And I won't even realize in that moment, as soon as there's awareness, like acknowledging it, not making that bad, not making that wrong, I'll usually say, hey, I need a moment to just like return back to my body, get up, move, shake, do some breathing, and just like get some energy going to bring that sensation, bring that interoceptive sensation back online.

One that it takes me longer sometimes to notice is when I'm having a difficult conversation with someone. It will sometimes take me a good five, ten minutes into the conversation to notice that I'm like this and I'm very, very tense, which has an impact on the conversation. My way of responding.

Yeah, the freeze response. It's also known as dorsal shutdown. It is basically like a protective mechanism to protect us from feeling stuff in an extreme situation. You know, let's say like an impala is in the jaws of a lion. Like, you're going to want to not feel that. It can be a problem if, as you say, you're in a conversation, you're frozen and you haven't even noticed, or you, you do notice, and then you make that a bad thing. And so for me, it usually requires getting up and moving to some degree. Sometimes making sounds is helpful as well, like humming or singing or vocalizing. Toning is another way of saying it. And so there's these different strategies depending on how the body is responding to stress.

A practical question I wanted to ask you. Are there any ways to apply these strategies when you're in a context where you can't really get up and make monkey sounds, for example, because it's great if you're having this difficult conversation with your partner and he knows that you're working using, using these modalities to develop interoceptive awareness. But what if you're in the office with your boss and you're having that difficult way that is, I guess, socially acceptable.

Breath and awareness, I think, are the two things that can be played with subtly that in a way that no one else notices. In the case of the freeze response, bringing your awareness and sensations down into your feet on the floor and also your hands, like, to your extremities and feeling the contact between the feet and the ground. When the physiology feels safe, that's when the system relaxes again. Touch and heat is a great one. Maybe you're holding a cup of tea, like really feeling the warmth of the tea, like really coming back into the senses. Secondly, playing with awareness. So often when we're angry, frustrated, or shut down, our awareness goes from being kind of expanded to very, very collapsed. And so there's a way that when I'm speaking to you, like, my voice kind of sounds different. It sounds a little bit tighter when I'm contracting my awareness. This is what happens when we get stressed versus if I start to relax and just allow everything to be more easeful and be have the awareness in the back of my body behind me, there's more spaciousness and even the tone of my voice starts to change. I could have done that and you might not have noticed that I was doing that. If we were just in a meeting or something where your awareness is and coming into the sensory qualities, I think is the. Is like the way back. We're going to do something called vu hum or be breathing. So this is kind of weird, but it's fun. Your thumbs are going to go inside your ears like this. These two fingers are going to be over your eyes and your ring finger is going to be over your nose cartilage. And we're going to take a full breath in, hum all the way to the end of the exhale. And the humming should kind of vibrate in your nasal cavities. And this vibration releases nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. It feels immensely calming. It reduces eye tension. It's a great way to just really come back into the body and feel great.

I'm ready.

Okay, great. So thumbs. Yeah. Not like fully in, but just like touching fingers over on the eyes. Yep. And then ring finger on the nose. We'll take a full breath in all the way to the top and then hum on the exhale. So inhale.

It feels a little bit weird. Yeah, it's like vibrating everywhere.

I mean, the vibration is good. That means you're doing it, right? Yes.

Okay, let's do it again. I'm ready. I won't laugh this time. You didn't lie when you said you can hold your breath for a very long time. I stopped humming. And you were still going for a very long time. It reminded me of a sensation deprivation tank. It was very comforting once I got past the word sensation of the vibration at the beginning. It was very comforting.

Yeah, I find it. It's really good for me, particularly after I've been on zoom or looking at screens a lot. When I have eye tension, it really helps me to relax the eye tens. And it's so simple. I love that. It's just like it's humming. Right.

I will be humming more often.

I think of these, like, three different strategies for changing our state and changing how we feel. There's the top down, which you mentioned already. One example was like the reframing of your anxiety before speaking, where you turn that into like, wow, I really care about this. There's the bottom up, like the humming, for example. And then there's the environment. Design the outside in, which is, you know, going outside in nature or changing who we're around, changing the sounds, changing the sensory stimuli that we're being impacted by. So what would you say, one or two of the most effective, like top down cognitive practices for changing the way that you feel about something At a.

Broader level, I would say journaling is one of the most effective ones. Just writing about your emotions, writing about the context around those emotions, understanding that those are deeply interconnected and that you very feel emotions in isolation. Another tool that I like also very often as part of journaling is what's called affective labeling. It's really just putting words onto emotions. It doesn't always work. And we've discussed sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes it's fine to just process the emotion. But it can be helpful in some cases when they keep on coming back to just naming, name them. An affective labeling is literally as simple as putting a word on it. And you can do it as an iterative process where you write one word and you sit with it a little bit. Is that anxiety really or. Oh, maybe it's actually fear of being judged or maybe it's excitement. But I'm interpreting it as anxiety because you mentioned the environment because maybe my co workers are all very anxious around me. I'm actually excited about this, but I'm feeling anxious because everyone is running around being stressed about this thing. So just labeling it and sitting with that label and until you feel like it perfectly aligns.

So do any kind of environment design shifts come to mind for you in terms of like helping you to feel more at ease and just good in your, in your body?

A big one for me has been being a bit careful about the kind of foods and snacks that I have in my kitchen because I, I kind of regulate with sugar. If I'm stressed, I will just eat a lot of chocolate and things like these. And so I found that by having more like fruit and good things at home or eggs or things like these, I can have a little snack and I don't feel bad. So that's been a little environmental design tweak that I've made that's been really helpful.

We, we moved house recently somewhat that was like more in nature where I, the first thing I do is get outside, like put my feet on the ground, get some sunshine and like that's a really, it's a much better way to start the day. There's less traffic, noise balancing Those stimulating environments with places where our systems can actually like, relax and recharge. There is spaciousness amongst the stimulation as well.

I like that. I actually live very close to a farm in London.

Nice.

And that's also been something. I didn't think about it this way before, but anytime I feel a little bit overwhelmed, I'll walk there. Just a lucky accident that I moved very close to one of the very few farms in London. But it's been really good for just regulating my nervous system, taking care of my mental health. And I've been doing this in an automatic way, which makes me realize that we probably instinctively do some of these things already where we know it feels good. And learning about how it works is maybe just a way to do it in a more systematic manner. Doing it more often.

So that's, that's one more thing that I want to like, almost double click on, which is paying attention to the times when we actually feel really good. Like, like when there's a certain person that we're around that our body just feels great around or, or the farm or the animals. And like, really, maybe more than any other day, like paying attention to that and then be like, okay, how can I be around this person more? How can I collaborate with them? How can I go to visit this farm on a more regular basis? Because that's, you know, such great feedback for our bodies and making decisions from that place with that, like, like, wow, I feel great in this situation is. It feels essential. And again, I think it keeps coming back to interoception because without noticing that and like acknowledging that mentally, we could just completely miss that really valuable piece of info.

And we tend to only pay attention when we're feeling bad.

Yes.

So making a conscious effort to notice when we feel good.

I really like that and celebrating it and be like, wow, I feel great right now. Like in this moment, I feel great.

More of that. More of that in our lives. Yeah, I like that.

If you want to learn more about mastering your nervous system, watch this video next to keep on learning or click the link in the description to get an instant report on your current nervous system quotient or NSQ score.