Episode 5: Nervous System Regulation; Stop Stress Affecting Your Success

Are you sick of feeling stressed out? Are you always busy but not really productive? Do you wish you could feel less anxious?

If you've answered yes to any of these questions, this episode is for you.

Nervous system regulation is a term that's being thrown around A LOT right now and in this episode I share what it means in simple terms, why it's important and a few ways you can do it and help your body and mind feel better.

Episode highlights:

• Understanding your nervous system
• An explanation of what nervous system regulation is
• The ways stress impacts your physical and mental health
• Stress, heart health and HeartMath
• Simple, effective ways to start regulating your nervous system
• What's needed alongside nervous system regulation to really change your life
• How I can help you feel better and do better

Learning to calm your stress response on demand alongside understanding why you're stressed in the first place will transform your quality of life as well as your relationships.

I'm here for that! If what I've shared in this episode has piqued your interest, please book a complimentary Zoom call with me here and let's dive a bit deeper into how I can support you.

If you've got big goals, but you're totally stuck about where to start, I invite you to book a complimentary strategy call with me here.

We'll uncover what's holding you back from the goals you want to achieve and you'll leave the call with actionable steps to get you moving in the right direction.

For the tea on me, how I work, who I coach and the packages I offer, please visit my website - www.emmaobriencoach.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach where I share an abundance of tools, strategies and brilliant content, you might also see the occasional dog.

Check out two of my FREE online workshops:

My 7 Step Formula for Getting Unstuck

4 Ways to Stop Procrastination in its Tracks

Transcript

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Emma O'Brien: Hi folks welcome to episode 5 season, 2 of the lemons and pineapples. Podcast today, I'm going to talk to you about nervous system regulation, and how

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Emma O'Brien: your stress affects your levels of success and what you can do about it. Most importantly.

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Emma O'Brien: nervous system regulation is one of these terms that is bandied around an awful lot.

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Emma O'Brien: You've probably seen people talking about it on social media. You'll have seen blog posts about it. So I wanted to unpack a little bit more about exactly what it is.

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Emma O'Brien: why it matters, and how you can do it.

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Emma O'Brien: So

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Emma O'Brien: we have

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Emma O'Brien: a central nervous system in our body, and our body's nervous system is the command center. It controls everything that happens in our bodies, from the physiological processes

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Emma O'Brien: through to complex cognitive functions, and it is divided into 2 main parts. So there's the central nervous system which includes the brain and the spinal cord. And then there is the peripheral nervous system which connects the central nervous system to the rest of the body via a network of nerves. These are the ones that people climb on when they're irritating you, so you'll be familiar with these nerves

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Emma O'Brien: so effectively. Our body is our whole

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Emma O'Brien: system filled with nerves.

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Emma O'Brien: and these nerves are sending messages to each other. They are sending messages to your hormonal system, to your adrenals, to your brain, to your heart, everywhere. So it is a really important system. A lot of it is happening completely under the hood. We're not aware of it.

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Emma O'Brien: But the stress we have in our lives and the stress that we experience influences. What happens in this nervous system. So this is where the nervous system regulation piece comes in.

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Emma O'Brien: So

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Emma O'Brien: a regulated nervous system

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Emma O'Brien: keeps your body in a state of what's called homeostasis, where it can respond to internal and external stresses in an appropriate way.

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Emma O'Brien: appropriate being the word that we want to be focusing on here.

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Emma O'Brien: if you are constantly feeling anxious and constantly feeling stressed, your nervous system is not responding in an appropriate way.

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Emma O'Brien: You've this is where the work comes in of nervous system. Regulation in theory, a balanced and properly functioning nervous system should be able to

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Emma O'Brien: hype itself up and do what it needs to do to respond to a stress, and then it should be able to calm back down to its neutral level.

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Emma O'Brien: My experience of my own stress and experience of people I've worked with is that the level never comes back down to neutral. It's constantly heightened. And and I see people who were constantly in a state of chronic stress.

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Emma O'Brien: and it is

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Emma O'Brien: so bad for your whole body system, and you will know, if you live with anxiety and depression and stuff happening in your head that you don't really want, you'll know, and you'll be very familiar with the adverse effects that stress can have on us.

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Emma O'Brien: So

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Emma O'Brien: we have

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Emma O'Brien: 2 2 bits in the nervous system that we want to be talking about. So the autonomic nervous system

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Emma O'Brien: is a part of the peripheral nervous system which plays a really big role in regulating the whole thing. And this is what we're talking about when we talk about nervous system regulation and the autonomic nervous system is divided into 2 parts.

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Emma O'Brien: Now, you're gonna be familiar with these when I when I share them with you.

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Emma O'Brien: And there's 1 part in particular that that is where the focus of nervous system regulation comes in. So we have this autonomic nervous system, and it is divided into 2 parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. So the sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight system. If you

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Emma O'Brien: feel stressed a lot of the time, if you are very reactive. If you are feeling very triggered, if you are feeling you know that you're at the mercy of what's happening in your emotions. You are dealing with an overactivated, sympathetic, nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: In theory this fight or flight system is there to prepare the body to respond to a perceived threat. So when we were back living in caves, this would be a lion tiger or a bear coming up behind you, so you'd want to be able to be able to run, climb a tree, think on your feet, and find a solution to that, or fight it in, you know, depending on how brave you are. But you're

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Emma O'Brien: sympathetic nervous system is gearing you up to save yourself from that perceived danger. Unfortunately, what's happening for most of us these days is that we're having this massive fight or flight response to an email

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Emma O'Brien: or to a comment on social media or to a meeting with our boss. It's

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Emma O'Brien: the the threat has entirely changed, but our body is responding in a really

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Emma O'Brien: the same way, which is often, you know, quite overly exaggerated.

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Emma O'Brien: And what happens when we get into fight or flight is, our heart rate increases.

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Emma O'Brien: and our bodies

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Emma O'Brien: are filled with cortisol and adrenaline, getting us ready to move.

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Emma O'Brien: And what happens when the relationship between cortisol and stress. And how you feel is that the more cortisol you have running around your system, the less serotonin you have available in your brain, which is why, when you feel very stressed for an extended period of time, you can feel anxious. You can feel depressed, and you can really struggle with your mental health

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Emma O'Brien: because our hormones are completely out of whack.

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Emma O'Brien: So when you can start to find a way to reduce the cortisol levels, you will find that your serotonin levels balance out, and you have more available serotonin in your brain, and you feel better.

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Emma O'Brien: One of the the things I talk about often is when we feel better we do better. And there are a variety of reasons for this that come down to. You know it's a hormonal level thing. It's it's not just, you know. This is why never system regulation is thrown around like a phrase, but it is really really important.

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Emma O'Brien: The other system we have as part of the autonomic nervous system is our parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest system, and this promotes relaxation and recovery by slowing our heart rates. It helps us digest food better, and it helps us to conserve energy. Of course you can also end up if you get stuck in a freeze

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Emma O'Brien: mode. If you are stuck in inaction.

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Emma O'Brien: you don't know what to do. You want to go and hide in bed and sleep the whole time.

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Emma O'Brien: Obviously we're too much in the parasympathetic nervous system. So nervous system regulation is about bringing the 2 branches of the autonomic nervous system into alignment

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Emma O'Brien: so that you can respond appropriately to something that is stressing you out, and then come back to that state of neutral relaxation.

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Emma O'Brien: And I'm going to share a little bit more about why this work is important and how I can help you with this.

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Emma O'Brien: But I just want to talk a little bit about why nervous system regulation is so very, very important. I've touched on it already when you can learn, and you can learn to do this to get those 2 branches of your autonomic nervous system into alignment, and you can stop being in a constant state of stress and reactivity. Your mental health will improve

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Emma O'Brien: the less cortisol you have flowing around your body

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Emma O'Brien: the better you are going to feel. And of course

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Emma O'Brien: you will probably be familiar with the fact that if you are chronically stressed, and you are chronically

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Emma O'Brien: constantly kicking out adrenaline and cortisol because you are stressed all the time. This leads to burnout and adrenal burnout and adrenal fatigue

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Emma O'Brien: which does not help with your thinking power at all.

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Emma O'Brien: The more you can calm this, the more access you have to be able to think more clearly, make better decisions. And of course, when we make better decisions, we take ourselves further away from being in stress, you'll know if you've met people you work with people. If you are a people who is reactive, you don't make your best decisions when you're operating from a place of heightened stress. You don't have your best interpersonal reactions with people. When you're communicating from a place of reactivity, it has a massive knock on effect.

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Emma O'Brien: The other thing is better. Physical health.

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Emma O'Brien: When your nervous system is constantly activated, you can end up with hypertension, with heart disease. If you've constantly got an elevated heart rate, it is not good for your heart

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Emma O'Brien: one of the things that heartmath talks about, and I'm a heartmath practitioner. So I'm going to share a bit more about that is

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Emma O'Brien: your heart rate variability. And when you're very stressed, your heart rhythms, which is what you're looking at with heart rate. Variability are very. They're very shallow. They're very jagged. They're very uneven because your heart is under stress. It is. It is really like responding all the time to something when you can bring your heart rhythms down into more coherence as it's known with heart math. Your heart functions better. It doesn't have to beat so fast. It doesn't have to work so hard.

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Emma O'Brien: So you know what's happening with stress has has a big effect internally for our not just our hormones, but also our body.

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Emma O'Brien: Better. Cognitive function is going to be the result of a regulated nervous system. So when we are in a fight or flight mode, you're operating from your limbic brain, which is your amygdala, which is the little alarm centre in your brain that's scanning all the time for lions, tigers, bears horrible! Email.

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Emma O'Brien: Oh, a coworker that I don't like. Oh, she's coming. Okay. It's scanning for that all the time

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Emma O'Brien: that a uses an awful lot of mental energy. And when that amygdala is reacted into fight or flight. And it's like, Oh, my God, she's coming! We're going to. Are we going to hide? Are we going to run? Are we going to have a fight with her.

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Emma O'Brien: It takes your logical brain literally offline the signals that go from your amygdala

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Emma O'Brien: arrive

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Emma O'Brien: into into your your brain

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Emma O'Brien: just before

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Emma O'Brien: they can get to the prefrontal cortex, which is your logical bit of your brain that would go hang on a minute. We can just tell her we're busy. We don't have to have a massive overreaction to the coworker. We don't like coming into the office.

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Emma O'Brien: but if the amygdala gets hold of that 1st you've had it so cognitive function is a big part of this. When you can learn to calm that stress response down, you are not living at the mercy of it, and how it affects your ability to think.

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Emma O'Brien: And of course, when you can regulate your nervous system, you are also going to be more resilient to things that don't go to plan. And you're going to be able to cope better with life's challenges, because, you know.

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Emma O'Brien: you can pull that stress response back at will. That is what nervous system regulation is about. It's not about getting rid of the things that stress you out, because, unfortunately, that's not possible. But you can get a handle on this nervous system so that you are not living literally at the mercy of what thing is happening to me next.

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Emma O'Brien: So here are a few ways that you can start to regulate your own nervous system

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Emma O'Brien: when you're feeling stressed. And the more you do, nervous system regulation exercises. When you are not stressed, you are helping to

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Emma O'Brien: train your system back into alignment, so that when there does come a time that you're stressed. You can apply these same tools, then, and calm yourself far quicker.

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Emma O'Brien: So breathing exercises are great, something as simple as box breathing, which is breathing in for account for

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Emma O'Brien: holding for a count of 7, and breathing out for a count of 8.

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Emma O'Brien: Super. Super easy, very, very simple

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Emma O'Brien: heartmath, which is what I teach. So if you're curious about nervous system regulation, please pop me a message. When you've listened to the podcast the email is at the bottom of the show notes. It's Emma mrobbioncoach.com. I train people to do nervous system regulation. I train people with heart math techniques and heart math is really about tapping your heart's innate wisdom.

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Emma O'Brien: I look at it also as being able to tap your own higher self, if you like your own innate wisdom. So you have access to better decision making. I also think heart math, the tools and the nervous system regulation help you to really access your intuition and your

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Emma O'Brien: gut instincts which so many of us have forgotten how to listen to.

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Emma O'Brien: So this is about influencing your heart rhythms. I've talked about that a little bit already, and it is the best system I have seen by far to retrain an overstressed nervous system. So when you practice it regularly, heart math is a there's a series of nervous system regulation tools. One builds on the other. It not only helps to reduce your cortisol levels which helps to balance your serotonin levels.

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Emma O'Brien: it also increases. Your dhea hormone. I won't try and give you the whole long name of that.

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Emma O'Brien: And this is the body's natural anti-aging hormone. So when you are calm, you make more of this. So if you want to look at the

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Emma O'Brien: A anti-aging benefits of nervous system regulation, then that's all internal as well as external. So it really is very powerful.

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Emma O'Brien: So if this appeals to you.

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Emma O'Brien: get in touch with me, I would love to talk to you about how I could share this work with you and help you to really tap these very, very valuable tools. Mindfulness and meditation

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Emma O'Brien: are really powerful. Meditation is super powerful. If you can meditate a little bit each day it starts to calm a very busy brain, and it starts to get you

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Emma O'Brien: setting up your day off to a good start before you've gone out to work. You're going out calm, being mindful about things being present, paying attention to what you're doing in the present moment as opposed to being stuck in the past or the future.

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Emma O'Brien: When we're out in the future, we're worrying and we're causing ourselves stress. When we're reaching back into the past, we're ruminating, and we're also causing ourselves stress. So the more present you can be

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Emma O'Brien: the better you are going to feel as well. Physical activity doing some exercise is a great way to really work through and work out cortisol and adrenaline out of your system. So doing.

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Emma O'Brien: Yoga going to the gym, going for a walk, dancing. Whatever you want to do. Some sort of physical movement is really really good for helping to just disengage those stress hormones and to

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Emma O'Brien: give you some physical release with your body.

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Emma O'Brien: Getting a good night's sleep is really is essential for nervous system regulation. So most people need between 7 and 9 HA night, and the more consistently you can create a good sleep routine the better you're going to feel. Remember when we don't get enough sleep

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Emma O'Brien: we don't

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Emma O'Brien: operate from the best place. You're probably going to be irritable and grumpy and anxious, and again, when we're operating from us those kind of negative states. Nothing good comes from that. No good decision making comes from that. You need to get a good night's rest.

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Emma O'Brien: Eating well is really important. Good nutrition is important.

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Emma O'Brien: So

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Emma O'Brien: a balanced diet

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Emma O'Brien: which supports your overall health is, of course, really really helpful

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Emma O'Brien: things like Omega. 3 fatty acids are really good for your brain and for your nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: And also there's a supplement called 5 Hdp, which is very, very useful for helping to boost serotonin levels and reduce anxiety and stress. And Ashwagandha is also really useful for this as well. So there are lots of natural ways you can start to support your body and your nervous system

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Emma O'Brien: often. What you eat has a massive effect on how you feel. I think a lot of us forget that, especially when you live busy lives, and you're drinking lots of coffee, and you're reaching for sugary foods. A lot of these things have a really detrimental effect to how you're feeling. So it might not just be the horrible coworker wandering into office. It might have been what you've eaten for lunch, and the 10 coffees you have this morning, though also influencing how on edge and stressed out you feel.

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Emma O'Brien: making sure you're spending time with people that are important to you. Social connection is so important for regulating our nervous system and for helping us feel good and feel connected and feel happy and content. So

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Emma O'Brien: if you

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Emma O'Brien: need some time with people, reach out to people, make sure you're spending time with friends. Make sure you're spending time with family. If you are someone who lives alone, and you are feeling lonely. Don't sit alone like that. Reach out to people and make sure you're spending quality time with other humans. It will

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Emma O'Brien: really be very, very good for your mental health.

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Emma O'Brien: Things like Yoga and Tai Chi and somatic work are really useful because they start to integrate body awareness with movement and breath, and the more aware you are of what's happening in your body, the more you can notice when things are out of kilter, and are not working so well, and of course getting professional help

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Emma O'Brien: sometimes that is the fastest and easiest way to get a solution to a problem is to work with someone who can help you. So like I've said, I'm a heart math practitioner. I have. There's a a 4 step process to heart math of learning the techniques. And of course it's about practicing them and seeing what shifts and seeing what changes. So don't sit alone with this.

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Emma O'Brien: Get some help. If you know you're chronically stressed all the time.

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Emma O'Brien: and it can be really easy to get help in the form of

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Emma O'Brien: anxiety pills and and and alcohol and over the counter meds. But fundamentally they don't solve the problem of why it is you're feeling stressed and how to really manage that stress response and manage the things that are causing the stress response. So nervous system regulation isn't just about going. Hey? Yeah, no, your marriage is really shit, and you don't like it, but just regulate your nervous system, and it'll all be fine. It's not about that.

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Emma O'Brien: Often a lot of the work I do is about looking at. Okay, you're chronically stressed. What's happening in your life that's making you chronically stressed. And how do we eliminate those chronic stresses and teach you to calm your nervous system and and cope with how you're feeling internally at the same time.

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Emma O'Brien: So super important work. Something I'm very passionate about. It has been a game changer for me, tapping into what's happening internally and learning to navigate the internal landscape and to see how what's happening externally for me changes when I do that, when I learn to listen to my stress response, when I learn to

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Emma O'Brien: get a handle on the anxiety, I am by nature quite an anxious person, and I have been plagued for most of my life by looping, ruminating, anxiety thoughts which are really really unpleasant. They're a massive waste of energy they're massively distracting. And it has been a kind of lifelong battle. Using these tools has been a game changer for me in being able to

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Emma O'Brien: notice when these thoughts come up it doesn't make them go away, but they come up and you can go. Oh, actually, it's that old anxiety thought again. I'm actually going to sit quietly and breathe here, and I'm going to shift myself into a more appropriate state, or I'm going to use one of my other tools like journaling, just to process through what's really coming up here.

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Emma O'Brien: And I'm going to see how I can

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Emma O'Brien: heal the root cause of it. That is what the work was, what my coaching work is about. It's not about putting a Band-aid over it, but sometimes you need some

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Emma O'Brien: some tools to help you cope with how you feel whilst you are sorting stuff out. So if this has piqued your interest, I'd love to hear from you.

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Emma O'Brien: I'd love to teach you the heart math techniques. Just pop me an email, emma@mrobrinecoach.com. And let's chat about how we could do some coaching around that you're also welcome to pop me a DM. On Instagram at MRO. Brian coach, and you can hit the send a text message button in the show notes as well, and it'll send me a message straight through to the podcast

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Emma O'Brien: so really, looking forward to hearing from you, I hope this has been helpful. If you have been practicing nervous system regulation techniques, I'd also love to hear from you. What are you doing? How is it going?

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Emma O'Brien: Just pop me a DM. On Instagram.

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Emma O'Brien: Thanks for joining me today, folks. I will see you same time next week bye, for now.