Why did nobody teach us this?

Welcome to today's episode. Today I'm going to teach you how to do something called self soothing, which is something that we were never taught as children, but basically how to take yourself from a really heightened state, angry, frustrated, anxiety, depression, whatever it might be, to a calm and centered state. Let's dive in. Why the hell were we never taught this? And what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about how to become a better, calmer, more centered, less triggered, less anxious version of yourself. Sound pretty good? I'm gonna give you five different tips to how to be better, calmer, less anxious, more, less triggered, more centered version of yourself. And a little bit ago, I talked real quickly about self soothing in an episode, and I got a ton of responses from people being like, can you talk more about it? Like you just kind of brushed over it. So, um, here we are. Now we're gonna talk about it today. Um, what we're gonna talk about is we're gonna talk about the act of self soothing. And so what I want you to understand is that self soothing is something that, that I guess you could say animals naturally do, but it's kind of programmed out of us as adults. Uh, it's kind of programmed out of us as children and as adults, we, you know, are. Don't know how to self soothe. We were never taught it. And the reason why we were never taught is because nobody ever, our parents didn't know this and no one ever really talked about up until recently. So self soothing, I'll give you a good example, is a simple way of thinking, is the act of being able to bring yourself back to homeostasis, back to calm centered state after being triggered in some sort of way. It's a reset to your nervous system. So, you know, there's a, there's a couple things that are really interesting that I want you to understand when you look at other animals versus humans. So there's a video, there's two separate videos you can watch on YouTube if you want to. One of them is called Polar Bear Trauma. You can look it up and you can actually see there's this video of years ago. There's these guys where they're, they're studying polar bears. And so in order to study polar bears, they have to get in a helicopter and they have to shoot it with a tranquilizer gun so they can get close to it and they can start to study it. Right? And the polar bear is still awake. It's just kind of calmed down. And what's really Interesting is the polar bear. Polar bear does this really crazy shake. Like it's basically convulsing. And the guy says just give it a second. It'll eventually take a really deep breath and then it'll calm down. And so it's doing all of this convulsing and then it goes and takes this really deep breath, stops convulsing and the starts taking really deep breaths and kind of calming down. And you're able to see the triggered heightened state of anxious. Everything that it's feeling is basically being shake like shooken shake. Shook and shook out of the body. I guess you could say shook out of the body. Then there's another video and the other video is, is an impala and it's an impala who is attacked by a cheetah. And it's. The cheetah's got it in its grasp. And then something happens off camera, you can't see what it is, but the cheetah ends up letting go of the impala and running away. And the impala sits there on the ground for a couple minutes and then it sits up and it does the exact same thing. It starts convulsing and what both of those animals are doing. And just so you know, the impala convulses for a little while and then stands up and runs away. Both of those animals are releasing and removing the trauma, the emotion, the everything that, that comes from, from that state of, of holy shit, I'm about to die. Basically, which if you look at that chemically, that's cortisol, that's adrenaline. It's removing it from the body. And this is something that children do. Children literally do this, but we program it out of them to stop doing it. So if you ever see a child that doesn't get what they want, their emotions will go crazy and they will throw a temper tantrum, they will freak out. You know, they might freak out when you don't want them to in the middle of target, but they freak out in some sort of way. And that is their, their way, a child's way of self soothing and getting the emotion out of them so that therefore they can go back to homeostasis. The only problem is we program that out of children. And now we have adults, 25, 45 year old adults that don't know how to move emotion through their body because they were taught that it wasn't right when they were a kid. And so self soothing is something that we know how to do. It is built into us. It's why children like pacifiers is because that's another form of self soothing in some sort of way. So basically what, what it is is it is a heightened state in some sort of way. And then bringing yourself back to homeostasis, it is a reset to the nervous system. And so with our triggering, we can be triggered in many different ways. We can be, our triggering can be anger, it could be rage, it could be sadness, it could be fear, it could be being anxious, it could be depressed. And the first thing I want you to understand with, with all of those things, the rage, the anger, the sadness suppression, all of the things that I just said, there is nothing wrong with those emotions at all. Emotions are emotions and should never be, should never feel like they're wrong. They should always. But the thing is they should always be expressed because if they're not expressed and they are repressed, it will turn into a depression. Right? Makes get it? Make express, not repress. Express that is repressed turns into a depression some sort of way. And so we're not talking about trying to bypass all the emotions that are quote unquote, society would say are bad or lower vibrational ones. They're not bad, they just are what they are. But we don't want to live there. We don't want to bring our, we don't want to bring that into our natural state. The problem is when someone has anxiety and that anxiety doesn't leave them. It's all day long. You'll hear in episodes that I have coming out with, with a couple different, with a therapist, a couple different episodes coming out and she actually talks about how anxiety is a good thing. I've had episodes about how anxiety is a good. But when it becomes a chronic anxiety, that's when it becomes a problem. And so we want to develop some sort of strategy to bring ourself back home and back to a place of that feeling of just calm, centered, peaceful. And you know, I gave an example not long ago where, where we try to self soothe in a way, where we bring external substances, exogenous substances to ourselves. Where you know, you might have a really shitty day at work and your boss was triggered, you or your, your co workers were just a bunch of little shits, right? And you come home after a really long stressful day and what you do is you drink wine to take the edge off. And in reality you've got to ask yourself why is the edge there in the first place? The path to better health isn't rocket science, it's health science. If you want to live a Longer Health, Healthier Life Ditch the fad diets, the blanket supplements and impersonal health advice that you see all over social media. InsideTracker reveals the exact areas of your health that need improvement through comprehensive blood testing, DNA analysis, sleep and fitness tracker data, and your current daily habits. InsideTracker also provides a personalized action plan of science backed recommendations with the goal of improving the quantity and the quality of of the years ahead in your life. And one of the things that was recommended for me was intermittent fasting which I started doing seven days a week. This is something I've tried out before and I loved it. So it's refreshing to know that in fact it was the right choice for my body. So be sure to add inner age 2.0 to any plan for a definitive calculation of your true biological age to see how you're aging from the inside out. Get 20% off your inside Tracker test today with the Code Mindset Mentor. So go to insidetracker.com today and use the Code Mindset Mentor with no spaces for 20% off your test today. And is there a way that I could bring myself back to calm and centered and develop a process that doesn't require something like alcohol? Because a glass of wine or a cigarette or scrolling on social media or playing video games are actually forms of numbing more than anything else. And because of the fact that adults were never taught how to self soothe. And so we search for external substances, exogenous substances, in order to be able to soothe us in some sort of way. And you know, like a glass of wine. I've got nothing against wine. I love wine. I think it's great. We go to Italy. I drink wine all the time when I go to Italy. A glass of wine, although it's amazing, it's the easy way. There's no growth from being triggered and having a glass of wine to try to calm you back down. There is growth from being triggered and then figuring out a way to bring yourself back to the place that you want to be in so that you can get yourself there quicker next year, a year down the road, two years, three years, five years down the road. You know what would be better than having a glass of wine? Maybe going for a run to get the extra energy out, the triggered energy. The same way that the polar bear and the and the impala both have to remove energy from them. Instead of holding onto that energy and then numbing that energy with a glass of wine or a cigarette, whatever it might be. It's how do I take this energy in the same way that those animals did remove the energy, going for a run to get out the extra energy, figuring out some sort of way, maybe doing some pushups, maybe going into your room and screaming as loud as you possibly can into the pillow and punching the bed and just getting that energy out of you in some sort of way. Really what it comes down to is kind of like an adult temper tantrum because as a child that's what we naturally knew how to do and it was programmed out of us. Don't go and beat somebody else up. That's not what I'm saying. But do it in a safe place where you're not injuring yourself, you're not injuring other people. You could go to the gym, you could figure out some sort of way to go on a long hike if you want to, to get the energy that is inside of your body out of you so that it doesn't turn into some sort of problem in the body. And then what you can do after the, after the run, after the workout, after the screaming, whatever it is, is sit there and do a quick, you know, 15 minute guided meditation and try to bring yourself back to a calm and centered state. Maybe journal a little bit and journal about why were you triggered, what came from it. And I realized that it's a lot sexier to have a glass of wine. It's a lot easier to have a glass of wine. They're not sexy, they are harder to actually go and do this. Having a glass of wine is a lot easier and a lot sexier than deciding that you're going to go for a three mile run. But the glass of wine doesn't change anything. You're still the same person when you sober up tomorrow and you didn't learn anything about yourself and so you haven't grown in any sort of way. You're the exact same person mentally tomorrow as you were today. Which means the exact same things that triggered you today are going to trigger you tomorrow. Then you're going to have to go for some exogenous substance to make yourself feel better versus being able to do it in the moment and training your, your, your brain, your body and your nervous system to soothe. And so I'm going to give you a few different examples of self soothing that can kind of help you in different ways depending on what the situation is. One of them, obviously, you know, I'm going to bring this one in is meditation, meditation in some sort of way. But what I prefer is conscious breathing with meditation. And so this conscious breathing can be you know, six deep breaths and you could do six deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. Your exhale is longer than your inhale and you allow that to kind of get you into your meditation. It could be Wim Hof an actual real breath work and doing three rounds of it. Um, it could also be like Wim Hof doing three rounds of breath work. And if you don't know what that is, Wim Hof is a guy. You can just go onto YouTube, type in WIM Hof breathwork. You can actually do a 15, 20 minute session, do three rounds of it, and then do as many pushups as possible. Um, all of these allow you to get out of your head and into your body and allow yourself to release some of that energy in some sort of way. And so there's, there's definitely breath work. I do breath work at least two to three times a day. I do it every single morning for about 10 to 20 minutes in the beginning of my meditations and then I do a meditation after it. Because I find that when I do breath work I'm way more calm, I'm way more centered and my, my meditations end up being way better. When I don't do breathwork before meditation, I usually just think about other shit that I have to get done for the day. Like it's, it ends up being really hard sometimes. So meditation in breath work with meditation can be a really great way of self soothing. So if you have, you know, a hardcore thing at work happens, you get fully triggered by your boss, go into your office, shut your door and go onto YouTube, type in 10 minute breath work and take 10 minutes just to recenter yourself and get yourself back to where you need to be. So that's the first one. Second thing that I really love for self soothing as well is music. Music can really help you self soothe. Music changes your state extremely fast. And so what I prefer is getting headphones, closing my eyes and listening. So like when I get triggered, there's two songs, I've mentioned them before and I want to bring myself back to kind of a calm centered state. There's one song that's called Weightless by Marconi Union. And I listened to that and you know, like the other day I was super triggered by something and I was on my drive home and it was like a 12 minute drive and I was triggered and I was like, I'm gonna put this song on. And I listened to it for the entire 12 minutes and as I was listening I was just deep inhales DEEP exhales I got back to my house, felt fine, felt amazing. So wait list by Marconi Union is one. And the other one that I really love, I don't know why is the out of Africa theme song. Those are two that you could steal. Or if you have your own song, you can do that. But music is a really great way to bring yourself back. The third one is some sort of movement. Um, it's your pick. It can be upbeat, it could be slow movement, it could be jumping jacks, it could be push ups, it could be an entire workout, it could be dancing, it could be going for a run, it could be doing pull ups, it could be all of those. Or it could be yoga, it could be stretching, it could be moving very slowly in some sort of way. It could be literally just standing up and shaking everything for 30 seconds, exactly the same way that the polar bear and the impala both do. It's a way of getting that cortisol and that adrenaline and that stress out of your body and being like, this does not live here and I'm not going to keep it inside of my body. It's getting yourself back into your body, removing all the stress, the anxiety, whatever it is that triggered you, the anger and taking those emotions and those, those hormones and pushing them out so that you can therefore get yourself back to calm. Next one, it's a really good one, is actually tapping the body and tapping different parts of your body. So for me, what I prefer to do is actually standing up and literally taking my fist and smacking different parts of my body and just getting your, literally your entire body. I do this at least once a day and I usually do it before a workout too. And so I literally take it. And what you're doing is you're trying to get the blood flow to all parts of your body. And, and if you just stand up and set your timer for three minutes and you take your both your fists and just lightly or hard, however you want to tap every single part of your body, from your feet all the way to the tops of your heads. You get your ears, you get the top of your head, you get your neck, you get your shoulders, you get your every single part of your body, what you'll realize is that you're actually moving energy through your body. And so tapping is a really great way to do it as well, and really great way to get yourself back into your body. And then the fifth one, which is the fastest out of all of them, is, you know, I recommended breathing in number one with the meditation. But the fifth one is something that's called a physiological sigh. And a physiological sigh. It's real interesting because I used to hear my wife do these all the time. I still hear her do them all the time, but I never noticed another person doing them before. But it's just like a natural thing that we do like multiple times an hour. And it's two quick breaths in and one longer breath out. So it's just basically that's it. It's just. And I heard my wife do it for years and I was like, it's so crazy. She always does this. And then I listened to Andrew Huberman and he was talking about this thing called a physiological sigh. And it's just basically a way for your body to release cortisol adrenaline. You do this all day long and it's how your body releases extra CO2 and adrenaline and you can make yourself do it on purpose. So if you're just sitting there and you notice yourself stress something coming, it's just you can do that a couple times. You actually start to notice with the extra unneeded CO2 being released from your body, your body starts to release and be a little bit more relaxed. And so that's like the fastest way to do it if you want to, is a physiological sigh. But really what it comes down to, and the most important part that I want you to understand is this emotion is not bad. Emotion is something that needs to be expressed. It needs to be moved out of the body. We need to release it. We need to have tools to release it. And these are all ways to release and to let yourself let go of it. There's other things that you can do to help yourself besides what I just said. There's, you know, smells, there's baths, there's journaling, there's building your self awareness. There's a lot of different things, but really what it comes down to, and the point I want you to really get from today's episode is that there are ways to bring yourself from a heightened state down to a calm state. One of the another easy way to do it just I was about to sign off, but I'll just give you another extra tip because it popped in my head, is do a workout and get yourself to a heightened state. And then in your 62nd or 90 second break, try to see how much you can calm yourself down. Like calm yourself hardcore. And so this is one tip that I got from my friend who's a body worker and breath worker, is to get yourself to a really heightened state in a workout and then try to calm yourself down as quick as possible and then get yourself to a really heightened state and calm yourself down as quick as possible. And so sometimes what I'll do is I'll lift as heavy as I possibly can for a set and then I'll close my eyes and for 90 seconds I'll do I'll close my eyes, I'll put on call music and I will literally just try to breathe and get myself back to as calm as possible and then I'll get myself to an extremely heightened state again and then try to calm myself back down. And I'm basically building up the reps of Heightened state to self soothe. Heightened state to self soothe. Heightened state to self soothe. And you can use your workouts to be able to help you with this as well. So I guess I gave you six tips because that one just popped into my head as well. But really what I want you to get out of it is there is a way to bring yourself back to calm, to centered, to homeostasis, so that therefore once you start building this up, you can get yourself back to calm and centered quicker. But you also just don't react to things as much as you used to. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you have a if you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at robdial Junior. R O B D I A L J R and with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.