Dave Wood

That's actually the two opposing systems in your autonomic nervous system.

Red, sympathetic, your stress response, getting stuff done.

Blue, parasympathetic, your recovery response.

Now, how the system works best is

And how you improve stress control and stress resilience and energy management is having more balance in there.

But if you're always in the red and not enough time in the blue, you take that imbalance into everything in life where you need to make decisions, be clear, be productive.

So when that system is out of whack, it impacts everything, including your sleep and including the relationship you have with yourself because being in the red all the time is a reactive state.

Emotional regulation, loving and caring comes from the blue part of your nervous system.

And so, yeah, I think the biggest problem that I see, and I work with a lot of clients, is spending too much time in the red, not enough time in the blue, and understanding that, man, there are warning signs there, signs and symptoms, and we tend to ignore them.

Irritability, reduced focus, impacted sleep, lower back pain, neck pain.

These are gut issues.

Yeah, tick, tick, tick.

Gut issues.

These are all things that are related to chronic stress.

You're never going to find balance.

Everything's in favor of being in the red, right?

I'm in the same boat, like I run a business.

And if I go away from some of the key foundational things that help me balance

balance balance and strengthen my nervous system shift back into a calm state takes a couple of weeks and my sleep starts getting impacted and so it's actually really simple things and when we look at you know the science and research and biologically how we're designed to function um they are things like connecting with nature getting out in nature social connection um

sleep, you know, prioritizing your sleep, real simple things, eating healthy food, exercising, you know, dimming the lights in the evening.