9 Powerful Tools to Regulate Your Nervous System (And Stop Living in Fight or Flight)

In today's overstimulated world, we are literally overstimulated. We are getting dings, notifications, alerts, triggers basically that activate us into a sympathetic aroused state. What that basically means is we're often in a hyper or activated state that is similar to fight or flight. Our nervous systems are not built for that. They're meant to be primarily in a rest state and then cycle up when a real threat is happening. But when you get a social media notification that feels scary, email notification about a meeting or a client concern, or a great flood wipes out 150 people in Nepal, and then everything is activated to drive us towards fear. Marketers have learned that the biggest motivator for people is to avoid pain, so they're constantly stepping on that lever. Fear is a big activator, and because it activates our amygdala and sends us into a fight or flight, which activates our brain's number one instinctual desire, which is to survive. Let me break down what I consider 9 of the most powerful tools. These are not exclusive, but these are 9 of the most powerful tools for regulating our nervous system and bringing us back in a calm state. The first one is a pretty simple one, what I call the reassurance breath, which is basically take one hand on your chest and one, one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Then you just take some deep breaths and you just are silently or verbally communicating to yourself that I got you. I got you. And you're just bringing yourself down into a calmer state. And you might say out loud, I got you. So reassurance breath, that's one of my favorites. Easy. You can do that for 1 to 2 minutes and you'll bring yourself right down from a hyperactivated state to a calmer state. Second one is box breath method. This was invented or created by Dr. Andrew Weil. He was also one of the early kind of pioneers in psychedelics, and he is also the founder of True Foods Kitchen in America, which is one of the more popular organic food chains. And as a doctor, a medical doctor, he has also popularized this thing called box breath method, Which is basically 4 seconds up, 4 seconds across. Exhale for 4, leave empty for 4, inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, empty for 4. So we'll just do a couple rounds of that, and you'll notice you'll start downshifting into a calmer state just by doing that. So here we go, just follow my, my voice. Breathe in through your nose and hold at the top. Breathe in. Inhale. Hold for four, three, two, one. Out through the mouth. Leave empty at the bottom for another four, three, two, one. Breathe in. Hold for four, three, two, one. Out through the mouth. Empty at the bottom for 4, 3, 2, 1. Basically a round of 4 to 10 times, and you're gonna see that you're gonna come back into a calmer, more regulated state. Next one, 2x breathing. So this is a little similar to box breath method, except you're breathing in through your nose and then out immediately, but twice as slowly as your in-breath. So breathe in, out slowly. There you go. One more time, breathe in, and out. And what you'll see, you do that a pattern of 5 to 10 times, and you start downregulating. One of the reasons you want to downregulate and get back into a parasympathetic state is it creates more activation and accessibility for your prefrontal cortex, which is your decision-making part of your brain. So think about it like this: if you are in an activated fight-or-flight state, especially very activated, your perception of reality shifts because your brain's number one job is to help you survive. And it feels like your life is in danger. So literally digestion shifts, your repair shifts, you shift out of calm state into inflammatory state because your body's bracing and ready to send adrenaline and cortisol and all those things. So your perception of your options narrows. So like, let's say reality is like this. I have all these options. Well, in a fight or flight state, it might go down to these many options. In a parasympathetic state, you might be here. Again, your options are actually here, but you can only see this many because you're human and you're fallible. Fight or flight, you got a handful of options. And that's why decision-making from a fight or flight state, if you're an executive, if you're a business owner, if you're a mom, if you're a dad, if you're a doctor, whatever, you're in this narrow range. Mm-mm. You can't see all the options. You're not going to be nearly as effective. That's why you look at pro athletes, you look at doctors, for example. You want your doctor to be calm. You don't want them to be flustered. If you're in a life-threatening situation, he or she is not going to make the best decisions if they only see these options, right? If you're a parent and your child is like activated and activating you and you only see these options, they can feel that. And also fear or anxiety is the most contagious emotion. Literally, our mirror neurons start picking up on someone else's anxiety in 0.2 seconds, which is why it's so important, especially if you have young children. So my daughter is 5 at the moment. She's in that heightened neuroplastic window of 0 to 7, which is where she's passively absorbing things in the environment— words, phrases, energies, presence— and I want her to absorb peace, not fear. I don't want her blueprint or her core highway, neuronal highway, to be fear or anxiety, nor does my wife, right? Next one, powerful alter ego. I find this to be one of my most favorite tools, and a lot of my clients use it a lot. I use it in a lot of my deep rewiring sessions and mini sessions. And the reason this is so powerful is because if most of your blueprint that you know is fear or anxiety, Guess what? You don't have an alternative. You don't have an option off the interstate. This is all you know. So like if I say, hey, be calm, you're like, I don't know what that's like. Or be powerful, be confident, be abundant thinking, think and feel great and joy or whatever. No. If all you know, if your core blueprint, what you primarily know is anxiety, then it doesn't work. You need another alternative. And this is where the alter ego or part psychology comes into play. So if you don't have access to that part, then you gotta start creating access. You gotta identity stretch. You gotta go over here and get access to that part of you. I have some other videos on creating your alter ego and the power of the alter ego effect, which I highly recommend you take a look at. I'm not gonna go down through the whole rabbit trail of creating your alter ego today. This is one of the most powerful tools because now I have this option. So you have multiple personas for multiple behaviors. For example, I have a playful, loving dad. I know how to shift into him now. First couple years of my daughter's life, I was mostly in my get shit done Mike mode. So I would come home from work or whatever, and I was intense, and I was going at it because that's what I was doing in my work, was going at it. I didn't know how to transition into playful, loving dad. I also have my part that is called Magic Mike. He creates magic in his life and in the lives of those he serves. When I first created him, I was going through a pretty big financial setback where I lost over $1 million. And that part that was in charge of me at the time, I called him Weak-Ass Willie because he was like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs, filled with shame. And when I first was developing this access to Magic Mike, I could be in Magic Mike land for basically 20, 30 minutes a day. And I had to intentionally go there because he felt unfamiliar. Now I'm pretty much there all the time. Weak-ass Willy has not really shown his face at all in the last few years. So you want to create this powerful alter ego because it creates a new exit off the exit ramp. Let's say you're going down the highway and, you know, you know how to get to anxiety or fear or stress or I'm so busy. That's another stress state, by the way, an anxiety state. But the anxiety ramp or the exit ramp for peace and love and joy and playfulness Has been barricaded most of your life. Well, now we want to open that up, and that's part of what I do in my Rewired sessions and my facilitators as well. Now you can get off of that exit ramp and gain access to that part, and the more you take that pathway, all right, and you might have to intentionally focus on being that part of you, feeling into that part of you in the morning, the evening, afternoon, whatever, creating space for that. Even if it's 5 minutes at a time, now you're creating more access, okay? And you're starting to create more familiarity with that new persona, all right? And I want you to think of yourself as you're one team with many players, right? Even in spirituality, like in the Christian tradition, you've got God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All 3 are expressions of God or personas or parts of God. But it doesn't mean you're disintegrus or you're multiple personalities. You, in a way, you're multiple personas and you are the master. You want to think of your higher self as the master of all these personas or the chairman of the board or CEO, whatever you want to call it. Okay? So you want to be able to bring in the different parts of you that need to show up at the right time. Get the right part of you playing the right position at the right time. So that's powerful alter ego. Next one, future pacing is one of my favorites. And I originally learned about this through NLP, but it's a powerful visualization technique where you want to go into the future and you might use the powerful alter ego. You might use some of the breath methods to get you in a calm state, then powerful alter ego, and then you go into the future from one of these powerful personas and you feel into what it's like to play out the scene. Like let's say you have a big business deal coming up in a month and a half. Or next week or tomorrow, you might go into the future and play it out in the way you want to show up. Feel into your body, into your heart. How do I want to show up? What's my calmness? What's my presence? What's my heart like? How smooth am I with my words? Am I calm, connected, or am I a frazzled version of me? We don't want to be the frazzled. We want to be the calm, cool, collected. So that part of you, if you can future pace, go into the future and basically play out the memory, Play out a future memory before it's happened. That basically retrains your nervous system to feel safe with that memory. So by the time it actually happens, the more you visualized it, the more you felt into it, and the more it feels like it's already happened, and you've reduced anxiety. For example, I took a client, 2024. She had a huge— she has a big YouTube channel, had a big event coming up, her first ever live event, and we did about 6 to 7 future scenarios where we went into the future. We helped anchor into the big event happening, being fully sold out, butts in the seat, her delivering, her walking with this presence and connection. And by the time it happened, she was so calm and cool and collected that it just went so smoothly. She was in her feminine. She wasn't, you know, dominating from her masculine. She was just anchored. And she was elegant and present versus if we hadn't done that, then she was stressed. Like at the beginning when we first started working on it, she was so stressed about this and felt overwhelming and it was like scary, this whole giant new thing that she'd never done before and she's gonna fail and all the self-sabotage and all the stories came up. Well, because we worked on it over and over and over using microdosing, using some of these techniques we're talking about today, That she had basically played out that movie and already seen it, you know, 6 or 7, 8 times with me, much less all the time she visualized it on her own, that it was no big deal by the time it happened, right? We had de-escalated the intensity of it. So that's future pacing. 6th one. This one will come up a lot if you are working through some dynamics of your childhood trauma or just parts of your Childhood, that maybe these wounded little boy, wounded little girl parts did not get fully seen and validated. So 6 and 7 is adapted child and wounded child. So adapted child is almost in IFS, think of a manager part that takes over. And you think, all right, I went through this. My dad was an alcoholic and there was all this uncertainty and fear and anxiety in my home. So I had to become the manager. I had to hold everything together. I had to become the adult in the room because there was no adult's presence. Mm-hmm. Mom and dad were not present. So that's the adapted child that takes over, and that part can be dominant in our modern life and in your present life. So what you might want to do if that part feels so rigidly— and that part is like a control part that needs to be in control of everything, because what happens if he's not— he or she's not in control? Things fall apart. Mom and dad fight and beat each other up or whatever, right? So that part Has good reason for existence, but it's operating as if a reality that happened 10, 20, 30 years ago is still present today. Okay. And then overbearing with your spouse or your children or your work or whatever, or just your own nervous system, it's not able to relax. So what we want to do with adapted child or the wounded child— and the wounded child is the part that was just really scared. Okay, so behind an adapted child is a wounded child. Meaning this part that was right, hey, felt abandoned by mom and dad, was really hurt, was really just deeply scared, and no one was there for him or her. And that part also needs to be held and seen and acknowledged. So you— what you can do in this part with both the wounded child and the adapted child, so you can thank them. So take the adapted child, for example. This part is really in control. He or she is a badass, like holding things together. Then they helped you survive that crazy rough situation where you had to be the adult in the room when the adults were absent, emotionally absent, or they weren't present, right? And you let that part know that she did a good job, you're grateful for her, and you just hold her and hug her, doing the breath with her as well, right? 2X breathing, help her with a little 2X breathing or box breath method. And help her see that that situation that she was in doesn't exist today. You're no longer in that house, you're no longer with those people, you're here now. And let her know that she doesn't have to carry the same intensity into today's moment as she did then. And that wounded child that was unprotected, that's angry and upset and mad and resentful, let him know, hey, you don't blame him. He has every right to be. Take some deep breaths with him as well, but then let him or her know, hey, we're not in that house anymore either, that he can let go of the energy or the intensity, diffuse or discharge that intense energy that he or she has been carrying. And breath is one of the best ways to do that. Letting it out. And then when you're done, The ninth strategy: heart coherence meditation. I have a whole video on this. I'm not going to break it down now, but I encourage you go through that. It's six minutes or so. You can literally get in heart coherence in thirty seconds to two minutes. The hug or the reassurance breath that we talked about earlier actually helps you do that. But you also start focusing on what am I grateful for? What do I have to celebrate? So. It's really hard to be in a vibration of resentment or fear if you're in an energy of gratitude. So moving towards gratitude with a heart coherence meditation, click the link below for that. But that will also help bring you into a self-regulated state. And from that regulated state, in heart coherence, our heart is 65 times more powerful, electromagnetically powerful, than our brain. And when we're in a heart coherent state, Guess what? Our heart field extends up to 9 feet. So literally people are picking up unconsciously 9 feet away our heart field versus when we're in stress state and it's like inches away. You're so much more powerful when you're state of coherence or state of self-regulation, calmness, and presence. And that's why these tools are really useful for you in your daily life, in your leadership, whether you're Leading yourself, a family, or your work. If you do these tools, I promise you, you will find deeper effectiveness, deeper joy, and more presence, and people will notice your difference. So I encourage you guys, use these tools frequently and stay tuned for more.