The Truth About How Your Nervous System Operates

What most people don't realize is they are constantly ignoring, waging war, or overriding their nervous system. And what's more, this inefficient resistance exacerbates negative spirals. We waste so much energy fighting against or falling into downward cycles, depending on how you're wired. You find yourself in spirals of negativity, fighting this feeling, which inevitably leads to more frustration, anxiousness, or panic. Others will find themselves on the other side of the spectrum experiencing numbness, disassociation, or in extreme cases, total shutdown. You've probably experienced this yourself to some degree. Frankly, we all have. So the real question is, what's the alternative? What can we do here? How do we avoid feeling like perpetual victims of our nervous system state? Instead, imagine if you could collaborate with your nervous system, shift into a state with greater capacity so that you can remain courageously present and lean into whatever internal or external challenge you're facing, so that you're neither overreacting nor withdrawing when life gets challenging. To do this, I want to introduce you to what has been, in my experience, a life changing meta skill that will rewire any anxious patterns or reactive tendencies. And once you have this skill, it's sort of like having the source code for your nervous system. And with practice, your life can become playful, like a game where you can match your current adventure or quest for the state that is most appropriate for completing it. So how do we tap into this biological source code and rewire our systems? What are some levers that we can pull? Well, the starting point is something that you probably take for granted. And it's been literally right under your nose this entire time. Your breath. Nothing is more natural than breathing. It has been controlled by autonomic or automatic nervous system. However, unlike most bodily functions, it can be controlled when you bring awareness to your breath and get curious about it. The experience of breathing is very different. Simply by bringing it into your awareness, it will likely begin to drop a little bit deeper, or even go into the back of the lungs and start to fill out that area as opposed to the front of the chest. Even though technically you're still using the exact same mechanical process as when you weren't breathing consciously. When you inhale, your diaphragm pulls down in order to pull air into your lungs. Your lungs push oxygen into the vessels of your bloodstream, and then the diaphragm pushes back to expel the CO2. But here's where it gets interesting. Deep inside your brain lies a piece of biological hardware called the insular cortex. This is Basically spying on your breath and interpreting the rhythms of your breathing. When you breathe through the mouth and into the upper lungs, Signals are relayed to activate the sympathetic or activating part of your nervous system. This creates a cascade effect which signals to the endocrine system to produce adrenaline and cortisol, which in turn generate measurable shifts in your blood chemistry. These shifts in blood chemistry impact the types of feelings that you have and even the thoughts that will arise, like impulsive actions, anxiousness or feelings of frustration. We can fall into a trap because these unproductive thoughts and feelings serve to reinforce the breathing pattern and nervous system state that created them in the first place. What I find fascinating is that there are dozens of breathing patterns. Sharp inhales and gasps, inhaling through your nose, mouth or sighing. Each of them serves a different purpose and sends different signals to the nervous system. And just like normal breathing, they happen reflexively when you're surprised, tired, relieved or laughing. Or you can choose to do them. In other words, you have two operating modes. You have default breath, which is regulated homeostatically based on your default response to the environment, oxygen levels and CO2. And you have manual breath, which you can choose to engage in to do things like sighing, swimming, humming. And this is really important because how your breathing works runs in parallel to your entire nervous system. And this difference between automatic and manual processes unlocks the secret to becoming an ally of your nervous system. By default, the nervous system has two modes, which we introduced in the last video in this series, the sympathetic or activation mode, and the parasympathetic or recovery mode. And like we saw with our breath, the body moves through these two modes automatically. It automatically shifts between these modes in response to stimuli and triggers from the environment, as well as in response to the various ways in which your nervous system has been conditioned since birth. For example, the unique set of life experiences, particularly in the first decade of our childhood, shapes how we respond to similar situations later in life. And your nervous system will have responded to these events using adaptive strategies, leaning into various modes to ensure that connection to your primary caregiver or parent was prioritized, which at the time could have been essential. Maybe you were told by a parent or teacher that you couldn't sing or that you were annoying. And whenever you think about speaking or performing to a group, your sympathetic system, which is responsible for that fight, flight, taking action, goes into total overdrive. As we've already covered, the sympathetic nervous system is essential for physical activity, facing challenges, confrontation. But if you get stuck there in this activation mode, the adaptive strategy, which was designed to protect us, is no longer appropriate, resulting in various degrees of panic, anxiety, and eventually swing into full burnout. Or perhaps, like many of us, your emotional needs weren't entirely met growing up, even exposed to subtle or obvious abuse at home, your nervous system will have developed a different set of adaptive strategies, essentially protecting you by turning down the unpleasant experience, disassociating or withdrawing just to get by. If so, your nervous system has reinforced the parasympathetic branch which is responsible for recovery and rest, but if pushed too far, can become a disassociative mode, which leads to prolonged depression and avoidance of life. Or maybe you were fortunate to have been raised in a creative and welcoming environment where you're fully authentic expression and emotions were fully encouraged and accepted, and your body is primed to enter new social situations with anticipation of being rewarded with possibility and connection. In that case, your nervous system will exhibit what's known as strong vagal tone, or to be wired for connection mode, which is responsible for feeling intrinsically safe intimacy with ourselves and others, as well as creative expression and flow. When you exhibit strong vagal tone, which is correlated with high heart rate variability, then you will be able to remain present, grounded and safe, even when there are external challenges or stressors coming at you. In this state, you don't need to fight your nervous system. Instead, because you feel safe and connected, you can allow the activation, energy or intensity of the moment just to flow through. Even harnessing it to give a powerful public speech will perform your craft. These are extreme examples, but in each case, your nervous system is primed to default into one of these three modes, either activation mode, disassociative mode, or connection mode. And these three responses happen habitually in any situation, just like breathing behind the scenes. And more importantly, these modes dictate whether your capacity is drained faster, maintained, or even recovered. Your nervous system only has so much capacity, and if you use that capacity well, you can accomplish what you want in your day, week or life. And remarkably, when you consistently use your capacity in connection mode without completely exhausting it, or becoming unable to recover through sufficient rest, you actually gain capacity over time thanks to the neuroplasticity in your brain and nervous system. In other words, you actually want to use your capacity. Your nervous system doesn't exist just for you to sit around and lay in bed. Just like an airplane. It's designed to be well used for a purpose, to learn, to grow, to complete meaningful quests, forge connections and share your gifts with the world. That requires energy but each mode helps you use your available energy differently. Red Mode Sympathetic Activation will increase your stats, your alertness, intelligence, strength, focus when you really need it. Your heart rate increases, your pupils dilate, your body springs into action. This temporarily increases all of your stats and allows you to take the actions you need to level up in exchange. Your capacity is drained faster, but it's worth it to accomplish the stuff that really matters. But that stat boost is wasted if you're ruminating or you have anxious energy about something that isn't really important. Likewise, Blue Mode Parasympathetic Mode is fantastic for recovering, resting, digesting. Blue activities slow down the loss in capacity and allow you to rejuvenate. That said, if you spend all of your time in Blue mode, you will miss out on engaging with the world and make little progress on your quests in the times when you need to perform and show up harnessing your latent energy stores. Being stuck in this Blue mode will keep you disengaged and on the sidelines. And finally, Green or Connection mode is fantastic for feeling a sense of intrinsic safety, aliveness, creative flow, appreciation, gratitude, or just being social. In groups. Connection mode can be blended with either Blue or Red activities to create deep rejuvenation, which combines Blue and green or powerful states of creative action combining green and red. These blended states are ideal, but can often feel out of reach or inaccessible in the stresses of daily life. Like it only appears in moments of rare calm connection or flow instead of something that we can access whenever we need it. Like many of us, you might feel at the mercy of your nervous system as it shifts through these various states states you might feel entirely disconnected from the situation and how you'd like to feel. Out of sync, lost, unable to do what you want to do. Some call this limbic hijack. When you're deep in a reactive state, triggered by factors outside of your conscious control and unable to climb out, Limbic hijack creates tension in your system. And sometimes you can even feel the muscle tension or stomach contraction, which leads to spending your nervous system capacity in ways that aren't effective. They drain you and leave you accomplishing way less in your day than you would have ideally wanted. But it doesn't have to be this way. Just like breathing, there is a second way that we can operate our nervous system. We can use manual mode. We like to think of our body as something that is receiving and responding to objective signals in the world. But in reality, we're not only interpreting, but actually co creating our real time experience of reality. Filtered through the models or predictions of our prior experience. Updating these models. When novel sensory data creates what's known as a prediction error, we like to think of our brain as being in charge, like some kind of CEO behind our eyes, helping us to decide what quests to pursue or what relationships to nurture. But the biological reality is that it is projecting what it thinks will be there based on past experience, responding automatically, manufacturing or confabulating justifications for those responses after the fact. The mind is in fact more like a PR team responding to current events. But like our breathing, we can intentionally rewire these outdated predictions and turn on manual mode for our nervous system. How? In simple terms, the nervous system constantly looks for signals from inside and outside the body. Signals that cue corresponding nervous system states red, blue or green. By activating these signals for ourselves, we can self regulate or create more internal safety and capacity to remain present, shifting into green or blended green states. The self regulation skill tree can be broken down into various sets of interventions or protocols that allow us to manually trigger these state changes. Broadly speaking, these three categories are top down interventions, bottom up interventions, and outside in protocols. Top down interventions involve reframing the story that we're telling about a certain situation, using something like mindfulness or visualizations to shift our state. These can certainly be helpful, but they often don't work in really high stakes situations. Bottom up interventions go in the opposite direction. I also like to call this state before story augmenting the signals sent via the network of afferent neurons from the body to the brain, or in other words, pulling on physiological levers like breathwork or other down regulation activities in order to access green mode. The third intervention, outside in, is when we make environmental changes or connection with others in order to change our state. This could be anything from a walk in nature, forest bathing as the Japanese like to call it, to physical touch or or co regulation with a loved one playing a certain piece of music or even smelling something delightful. It's really anything that brings you deeply into your sensory experience. And once you start to hone these skills, you can drastically increase your capacity to remain present and then actually begin to welcome whatever emotional experience you might be having when previously you would have been overwhelmed or shut down. But now you're working with your nervous system as opposed to against it. And as you start to level up your skills in each of these categories, you get more powerful and fluid with each. And thanks to neuroplasticity, they actually begin to influence even your default reactions, rewiring your default responses so that you can remain present, grounded, and connected, regardless of what is happening around you. But before you can really harness these state changes, you have to be able to understand exactly what state your body is in. What state are you even in right now? Because if you can't notice yourself entering, approaching, or being deep in the middle of a mode, emotion, or trigger, you won't have the data to respond how and when you need to. That's why there is one capacity that you need to be able to work well with your nervous system. The underappreciated skill of interoception. We'll cover that in depth in the next video of this series. Learn more and watch the next video right here.