Podcast Appearances
And a really obvious example is like if someone is, you know, before an important conversation, maybe they feel scared and afraid and there's a sense of anxiety, but that could also be excitement.
And it can just, if that system opens and they're kind of connected to the breath, then that it's really just energy, like energy in motion that's kind of moving through.
It's the tension in the body, I think, yeah.
Yeah, totally.
So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery of kind of working with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about.
And the first is exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of
regaining sensitivity of our internal experience.
So it's called interoception is the kind of fancy name.
I know you've written about it in your book.
And it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all of the time.
The second skill is self-regulation.
And this is what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety.
This is kind of three ways that I think about self-regulating.
There's top-down approaches, which might be like cognitive reframes, might be positive affirmations.
Mindfulness is a good example.
The second is bottom up, which is, this is my favorite honestly, it's like working with or leveraging these levers in our physiology, things like the breath is a really common one, to literally shift our state and create that sense of safety.
So bottom up techniques or practices.
would include things like humming is actually really effective.
It increases nitric oxide by 15 fold and it's a vasodilator.
It helps with eye strain as well and helps us kind of downshift into that parasympathetic state.