John Assaraf

And then if I take my focus on my lips, and as I'm breathing out, I pretend there's a straw in my mouth.

and I breathe it out as slowly as I can, if I do that five or six times, take 60 to 90 seconds at most, we can actually, in an FMRI machine, see the blood flowing away from the part of our brain, that Frankenstein's monster that's got activated because it's worried that you might get emotionally or mentally or physically or financially hurt.

It calms down.

The circuit switches, and all of a sudden, the Einstein brain comes back online to say, hey, hold on.

You've practiced this.

You know your stuff.

The audience is great.

They want you to succeed.

I can do this.

Let's go.

And you've just shifted your entire nervous system, your self-talk, and your focus towards what you want versus what might happen that your brain automatically is trying to protect you from it happening.

So these are very, very, very sensitive circuits that get triggered like a light switch on or off.

You're walking down the street, you're about to go off the sidewalk, and all of a sudden you hear the tires of a car maybe 30 feet away.

And if you jump back on the street, that's automatic because sound travels automatically.

at the speed of sound, and your subconscious is processing this, and then it's activating neural circuits around cars coming really fast, don't get off of the sidewalk, jump back on the sidewalk, before you even had a chance to think about it.

These are all subconscious processes that happen beneath our level of moment-by-moment awareness.

However, when we have a feeling of stress, we can be aware of that.

We just have to listen to what we're saying.

We have to pay attention to our behavior.

We go, oh, hold on.