Unlock Nervous System Regulation: Master Signal-to-Noise Ratio for Calm & Clarity

How does your body interpret the difference between sensations on the internal that might be perceived to generate some threat? Or how does your body interpret whether that sensation is something that can be something that's safe? And this comes down to the vagus nerve, the concept of interoception and specifically the conversation I wanted to discuss today was around signal to noise ratio. And we'll dive into what that is. But it's a very important concept to understand when it comes to the nervous system. And when you can understand this kind of signal to noise ratio concept, it helps to really implement things into your clients lives, into your own life, to start to change the way that your, your psychology interprets your internal sensations. But before we get there, I have been away from the camera for a little while and that is because my one year old daughter, or she's due to be one year old in a few weeks time, is demanding more of my attention. When our baby was first born I knew that my ability to produce content for you was going to go down. However, the first three or four months that was okay. Obviously she was very young and very, very dependent on my wife Delphine. But now she has become more and more dependent on myself. And if I'm honest with you, I enjoy being a father. I enjoy being present, getting to sit down and just play with all the toys, watch her develop, watch her grow. But also to know that I am actually setting up her nervous system to be, to be safe, to be able to so she can thrive in her life. So that's where I've been. I am out on a walk this morning. Sun's coming up here in Western Australia. It is fresh. Temperature dropping down to around about 10 degrees Celsius in the morning now. And this is what gets cold for Australia. But we are going to France and the UK in a couple of weeks time and we'll be seeing our family introducing our little one to her great great grandparents, to her grandparents for the first time. And I'm very excited. So if that's where I've been at and I hope you can appreciate and understand, but let's dive in. So safety and threats. How does your brain interpret what sensation means? What and how does it know to interpret, say your heart rate or the heart beating in your chest or some tension in your gut as something that you should be approaching with anxiety or interpreting as just something that is a sensation that's playing the role or purpose that it needs to do. So we have the mind, body connection, we have the brain always anticipates you Know, it's always trying to create predictions based off prior experiences. So we have what are called affective priors, emotional priors, or in other words, they might be called metacognitions. If you've taken the concept of cognitive psychology or if you're looking into trauma work, this is where people say that trauma is stored in the body. That's not quite true. It's kind of stored in the brain stem, but we'll get to that. So information that's being sent down is from the brain. Information that comes from our body and goes upwards primarily comes through either the spinal cord, which will be a reflex. You put your hand in on hot water, a hot stove, sorry, you're going to instantaneously pull that hand back without thinking, very, very, very fast. Because that information is relayed through the brain stem, which is, sorry, from the spinal cord or brain stem, which is very, very fast information. Then we have the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve, you know, primarily is 80% afferent fibers. So these fibers are going from the body upwards. It's primarily a sensory nerve. And the role of this nerve is to play a role in helping support and maintain homeostasis in our body. Homeostasis, you know, our ph, blood glucose, salt levels, they all need to be within a certain range for metabolic enzymes to work and therefore for survival. But this vagus nerve, I want you to imagine it as a information carrier, like a highway, a highway that is traveling from now your heart, your lungs, your diaphragm, your gut, your kidneys, and relaying information to the brain. However, the information that has been passed up needs to be interpreted. And one of the main things that the information being interpreted from is this prior memory, the prior memory that is set within our brainstem and our nervous system. However, there's also what's called signal to noise ratio. You imagine signal of information, electrical information, being a smooth wave of information going to the brain, quite high amplitude, so the information being pushed through. However, in the background there's something called noise. And this is like, like a little fuzzing that you hear on the TV, the old TVs, that white noise that might be in the background. Or if you haven't quite got a radio tuned inappropriately, you can hear the voice of the song. But in the background there is like a hissing noise. Well, that is noise. And essentially this happens in our nervous system. Noise means frat. It means hard to distinguish what signals come in through. It might also mean novelty. It might also mean that it can't be interpreted and all these things basically means that the brain can't predict what's going on in the body. And that means there's an error in a system. When there's an error in a system, two things happen. Your brain creates a big sensation. Those sensations we know our emotions. Typically when there's a an error, it's usually an emotion that's high arousal. It's trying to give you energy to do something, to change, to take action, to bring yourself back into homeostasis again. However, there are two parts of the brain that kind of filter the signal to noise ratio and dampen down the noise. One part of the brain is called the thalamus and this is like the gain controller. It relays, helps to kind of dim or increase the information that's coming through. And then there's another part of the brain called the insula. Actually it's called, it's the posterior part of the insula which then helps to filter whether the information that's coming through and how we need to interpret, but also how we should feel that information based off prior experience. So what are the sort of things that increase signal to noise? Well, first of all, let's talk about like a high signal to noise ratio. So this highway that's traveling from the vagus nerve up to the brain, imagine that like a highway, you know, a highway that you're driving on. If all the cars are going to the speed limit and they're also in order in their lanes, they're indicating, and everyone knows where you're going on the journey, you feel quite safe on that journey itself. It's predictable, you can see what's going on. In fact, you can even anticipate what might happen when those turns occurring and people come on and come off. And therefore the brain is like happy with that. But what about if everyone on that road was speeding? Not only speeding, they were merging lanes when they shouldn't be. There was no indicators kind of going on beforehand. And also people are screaming and shouting at you. That is a highway that has a lot of noise. Imagine someone speaks to you very fast and all of a sudden you're trying to interpret what they're saying, but they're just not stopping, they're not taking a balls to breathe. And then how does that make you feel? Anxious. So that's exactly what a high signal to noise ratio in our interceptive systems does as well. It creates anxiety. So things that will increase signal to noise ratio, which actually is positive. We're going to start with the negatives first. Things that are detrimental to signal, signal to noise ratio. This is poor sleep, this is, you know, a lack of rest recovery, this is inflammatory foods, this is excessive screen time. Constantly listen to, to, to noise, being exposed to sensory information and not getting away from it, you know, being disturbed from notifications consistently on social media or your alarm going off in your pocket. Other things are now the pollution in the air, the impact that it's going to have on your immune system, inflammatory markers in the immune system, cytokines, they all will increase noise in the nervous system. Other things that will cause noise is obviously where the nervous system is at in its state of arousal. That is the main thing that impacts noise is overall arousal in the nervous system. In fact, it's neuroadrenaline itself that acts on the thalamus, which is the gain controller of signal to noise ratio. And the more neuroadrenaline, the more noise that comes through, the more likely your brain is going to interpret a sensation as a threat. Now why is this important or why does this matter? This matters because it's a difference between interpreting your heart beating in your chest and like I say earlier, a bit of tension in your gut as being hungry or you know, being excited to just feeling a fret because there's noise and the brain can't interpret what that signal is. However, if we are to dampen down the noise, make the signal clearer, you know, to slow the breathing down, to increase vagal tone, that is what is increasing signal to noise ratio, dampening down the noise and making the signal clearer. So this is getting appropriate for quality sleep. Now looking at having diet, three fluids that are anti inflammatory, eating things like fish or adding fish oils into your diet, not spending all day in front of a screen, looking after yourself, moving consistently, getting into your body and even playing around with interpreting and being embodied in your body itself, this is going to help increase noise and reduce, sorry, increase signal and reduce noise. Why is this important as a facilitator to understand this or a coach to understand? Because we do things like breath hold training, we do things like heartbeat sensing exercises. You know, we put people into situations to expose people to sensations through somatic practices, through trauma, informed practices, through breath work, conscious connected breathing. The issue is the brain interprets those sensations of noise and guess what happens? We might re traumatize, we might actually sensitize people to CO2 rather than build tolerance to that and build tolerance to air hunger. It's the difference between habituation and sensitization when it comes to creating change through things like exposure therapy. So it's really important that we understand this concept because it means that we can take the appropriate steps in a coaching program such as making sure people have a ground in breathwork practice. Yeah, when they ground people, we bring down noise. We're creating a familiar situation or a familiar environment in where people practice their breath work or their movement so that their brain has familiarity, so it understands the signal and can reduce the noise. Because there's no longer novelty, now we're in a position to do things like deeper breath work sessions to do stronger breath holds. And by doing that, we're gonna get what we want. We're going to give the clients the resilience. We're going to make sure that their fears start to unfold away. The monster and thing that's been holding them back is no longer scary to them. Because 50% of our perception is weighted to our internal sensations. Actually, if you have PTSD or trauma, it's even more than 50% social anxiety. What is that? Focusing too much on your heart rate and what you're feeling in your body rather than being present in the external. Your perception of the external is weighted so much by this, these priors, these, this memory that we have in our nervous system and we need to dump and down noise in our nervous system and increase signal and align this highway so that people can appropriately interpret things, so they can habituate, so they can improve accuracy in their interoception which ultimately improves self awareness and emotional regulation. So I'll leave that with you there today. If you have any comments, any questions about this video at all, just drop them below. Don't forget, obviously I'm going to be bringing out more breath work protocols that you can use yourself more practical knowledge and trying to get more of these episodes out to you. So like and subscribe and I will catch you soon.