Anna Ferguson

So it looks like... And this is essentially mimicking how our lungs inflate every five minutes or so with an involuntary and inaudible sigh.

And what this does is it kind of activates all of these different mechanoreceptors and baroreceptors in our lungs, which slow down our heart rate.

lower our blood pressure and dip us into that parasympathetic state.

So most of the time, like before interviews, before anything that I have to do that's scary, I'm doing physiological size as much as possible beforehand.

So it's a really portable and subtle tool that you can use.

Other techniques that you and I were discussing beforehand was like an ear massage.

Massaging the lobe of your ears, the inner part of your ears is called the simbaconche.

And this is where your vagus nerve is very close to the surface.

And if you think about how we connect to people, how we connect through the voice is a really powerful way to

that we can get signals of safety, that it's okay for me to be here, that it's not a dangerous environment.

So by activating our vagus nerve in our ear, we start to shift the way we're actually auditarily kind of taking in the environment and that sensory input that we're getting is very, very powerful as well.

So gentle massaging of your ear.

the earlobe, the inner parts of your ear is a really beautiful way that you can downregulate your nervous system.

I mean, some of my absolute favorites for long-term downregulation of sympathetic response is cold exposure.

So something really interesting happens when we're exposed to cold, especially when cold water comes onto our cheeks and our nose.

So immersing your face in cold water

is really powerful to do this.

So we have something called the mammalian dive reflex.

So this is essentially when we hold our breath underwater, all of our internal systems, so our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, all of these slow down.

So we can activate this mammalian dive reflex by putting cold water on our face.