# Why You're Always Wired, Tired, and Can't Switch Off | Dr. Arielle Schwartz

An episode of [Live Well Be Well with Sarah Ann Macklin | Health, Lifestyle, Nutrition](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1508380100), 22 Apr 2026, 1 h 17 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/1033d1554/podcast/play/118838839/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-3-22%2F422599191-44100-2-206c20b51bb6e.mp3

Exciting news - pre-order my debut book https://linktr.ee/HealthySBTH?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=9db12bc6-b7d3-4df4-bc5c-260e0303792c That feeling of being utterly exhausted but somehow unable to switch off. The tight chest. The 3am wake-ups. The gut that never quite settles. Most of us have been quietly living with these signs for years, chalking them up to a busy life or just the way we are. But what if they were your body trying to tell you something far more specific? This week on Live Well Be Well, I'm sitting down with the brilliant Dr. Arielle Schwartz, somatic psychologist, certified yoga therapist, EMDR trainer, and one of the leading voices in nervous system healing and complex trauma. Arielle has this rare gift of translating some of the most intricate neuroscience into something you can actually feel in your own body. She is warm, grounded, deeply wise, and this conversation genuinely moved me. Here's What We Dive Into: - What a dysregulated nervous system actually feels like in the body - Why stress and dysregulation are not the same thing - What polyvagal theory is and why your vagus nerve matters more than you think - How the body moves through fight, flight, and freeze responses - Why ADHD may be a nervous system regulation challenge as much as a cognitive one - How to stimulate your vagus nerve using just your own hands - Why crying is one of the most healing things you can do for your nervous system - How self-compassion directly improves vagal tone - Why breathwork is the fastest nervous system reset available to all of us - What EMDR is and how it helps the brain finally let go of trauma Love, Sarah Ann 💛 *** This episode is sponsored by: DIOME: Rest deeper. Stay grounded. Rested is available now and Grounded lands later this month. 👉 Get 20% off with code SARAH20 at DIOME.CO NOWATCH: The compassionate health tracker Connecting body and mind with unique stress recovery insights so you can live fully today 15% off with code LWBW15 at https://nowatch.com/ *** The Great British Veg Out How to support your gut, energy, and hormones by eating more — not less. 👉 https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/p/the-great-british-veg-out Reset Your Health If your body feels off after stress, travel, or burnout — this is where to start. 👉 https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/s/reset-your-health-in-30-days 👉 Practical beats perfect. Here’s a free 5-recipe PDF I use to support energy and stress during busy weeks. https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahmacklin/p/download-your-free-5-recipes-to-relieve 👉 If this resonates, you can join the thousands who read The Compassionate Cure each week. https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/ *** Let’s be friends! 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahannmacklin/ 📹 Subscribe:http://www.youtube.com/@livewellbewellsarah 🐦 Twitter: https://x.com/SarahAnnMacklin 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livewellbewellpodcast 💌 Newsletter: https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/ *** Sign up to Sarah’s Compassionate Cure newsletter: Science Simplified, Health Humanised. Join thousands in exploring actionable insights that prioritise compassion, clarity, and real-life impact. https://sarahmacklin.substack.com/ *** Highlights 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:30 Signs of a Dysregulated Nervous System 00:05:00 How Dysregulation Affects Your Gut, Hormones and Immunity 00:12:00 Polyvagal Theory Explained Simply 00:17:00 The Vagus Nerve and the Mind-Body Connection 00:21:00 Fight, Flight and Freeze: The Three Nervous System Responses 00:24:00 Wired and Tired: Why You Can't Switch Off 00:29:00 ADHD and Nervous System Dysregulation 00:38:00 Somatic Healing, Yoga and Complex PTSD 00:43:00 Free Vagus Nerve Stimulation Techniques 00:49:00 Why Crying Is Good for Your Nervous System 00:53:00 How to Feel Safe in Your Own Body 00:57:00 Self-Compassion and Vagal Tone 01:01:00 Breathwork for Nervous System Regulation 01:07:00 What Is EMDR and How Does It Heal Trauma

## Transcript

[0:00] What does a dysregulated nervous system actually feel like?
[0:04] When our nervous system is dysregulated, it impacts the
[0:07] rhythms of daily. Living.
[0:09] But most of us would describe that as stress.
[0:11] So how can we define if it's stress or we're dysregulated?
[0:15] We seek medicine to deal with the consequences of the
[0:20] dysregulated nervous system, but what actually is really needed
[0:24] is. Doctor Ariel Schwartz, clinical
[0:26] psychologist, EMDR therapist and best selling author.
[0:31] Here's what your doctor never told you about stress and your
[0:33] body. There's something that I think
[0:35] many people would not have heard of that I'm about to say.
[0:38] Can you explain to me what the Poly vagal theory is?
[0:41] Poly means multiple vagal is referring to your vagus nerve.
[0:46] What we're talking about is having multiple circuits of a
[0:50] very specific nerve in your body called the vagus nerve.
[0:53] What are the other things that I could do to kind of help my
[0:56] nervous system feel regulated? One of the most potent areas
[1:01] where the vagus nerve travels close to the surface of your
[1:04] skin is in the sides of your neck, and so a little bit of
[1:08] massage goes a long. Way there's this interesting
[1:10] theory that ADHD might be a nervous system regulation thing
[1:14] and not solely in the mind. That's so true.
[1:17] An individual with ADHD is often picking up on literally hundreds
[1:23] of more details. It starts to create these kind
[1:27] of traffic jams in the circuits of the brain.
[1:30] We seek medicine to deal with the consequences of the
[1:34] dysregulated nervous system, but what actually is really needed
[1:38] is. For the last two years I have
[1:43] kept a secret from you and it's this.
[1:45] It's my new book, Healthy Shouldn't be this hard.
[1:49] And I think it is a problem that we are all feeling.
[1:52] And I was feeling it so much that I wrote a book on it.
[1:55] Now, if you've been a guest of this podcast for a while, you
[1:57] know that I am all about kindness, self compassion.
[2:01] But when I dug into the research of this, my mind exploded.
[2:06] The connection between the mind and body is so integral, but we
[2:09] completely miss out on all the conversations on health, on how
[2:13] we speak to ourselves. And that is such a driving
[2:15] factor on how our food responds to what we eat, to the choices
[2:19] that we make. And we are so overwhelmed right
[2:22] now in the $8.5 trillion industry that is the Wellness
[2:25] industry, which is predicted to be by 2027.
[2:29] So if you need a helping hand, if you want a new way to live
[2:33] and be well and buy my new book healthy shouldn't be this hard
[2:37] out on May the 28th. But you can pre-order it now.
[2:42] I'll pop the link below in the show notes.
[2:43] And I would love if you could support me on this.
[2:47] And I honestly think it will support you too.
[2:49] So I want to talk about two very important things I think today,
[2:52] which is the nervous system versus a dysregulated nervous
[2:56] system. So people might not even know
[2:58] what I'm talking about when I talk about dysregulation.
[3:00] So let's start there. What does a dysregulated nervous
[3:04] system actually feel like? Yeah.
[3:07] So when our nervous system is dysregulated, it impacts the
[3:11] rhythms of daily living. So what we start to feel is that
[3:15] there is this quality of not sleeping well, of feeling like
[3:21] it's hard to relax at the end of the day, feeling like your heart
[3:25] rate is still racing in some way or another, and that it's just
[3:30] hard to kind of downshift. Or conversely, sometimes we just
[3:35] feel like we're stuck in a kind of heaviness or malaise or
[3:38] fatigue, and it's hard to have the juice that we need to meet
[3:41] the day. Yeah.
[3:43] It's so interesting because I think people will hear that and
[3:44] go, yeah, I mean, I think probably most people listening
[3:48] to this will probably not, but most of us would describe that
[3:51] as stress. So how can we define if it's
[3:54] stress or we're dysregulated? Well, to some degree, stress is
[3:59] a form of a dysregulated nervous system.
[4:02] The challenge is that we don't want to be in that state for
[4:06] extended periods of time. Some degree of stress is
[4:09] inevitable. It's important.
[4:10] We need to be able to rise to meet a challenge and to have
[4:13] resilience to stress. But the challenge in our modern
[4:17] world is that many of us are staying in high stress states
[4:22] for extended periods of time and that begins to take a toll on
[4:26] our nervous system. It kind of conditions us into
[4:30] this dysregulated state. Do you think many people have a
[4:33] dysregulated nervous system? Unfortunately, I do, I think
[4:37] it's, you know, fairly common in in our world right now.
[4:40] And in part because just look around us, look at the news,
[4:44] look at the world that we're living in, and we are being, I
[4:48] want to say, kind of bombarded with cues of threat on a regular
[4:52] basis. Yeah.
[4:53] So I guess it's interesting because I think people will be
[4:56] listening to this maybe never heard of the term dysregulation.
[5:01] How do we know when dysregulation becomes actually,
[5:04] maybe not the words chronic, but actually quite damaging for us
[5:08] because some people might say, oh, you know, yeah, I don't
[5:11] sleep very well, or I always have a poor tummy or my heart
[5:16] beats, but I feel fine really fast or I'm tired.
[5:20] But wired is another great one. You know, people might be
[5:23] connecting to those terms that I'm saying, but what's the
[5:25] danger if they're not checking in with these like physical
[5:29] signs? Yes.
[5:31] So when our nervous system is dysregulated, it is intertwined
[5:36] with all of these other systems in our bodies, right?
[5:39] So the nervous system doesn't function on its own.
[5:42] It functions with your cardiovascular system and your
[5:45] respiratory system and your digestive system and your immune
[5:48] system. And so when we are chronically
[5:52] in some kind of nervous system dysregulation, it begins to take
[5:56] a toll on these other systems as well.
[5:59] One of which that I'll pull out for a moment is the endocrine
[6:02] system. And while these, these terms are
[6:04] kind of fancy, but really what we, what this means on a
[6:07] day-to-day level is your endocrine system navigates your
[6:11] hormones, your insulin response, your capacity for metabolism
[6:16] and, and to digest your food, and ultimately as well to sleep
[6:21] well at night. And so when we start to notice
[6:25] that we're in states of chronic stress or chronic dysregulation
[6:28] of the nervous system, it starts to show up in these other health
[6:34] challenges. And that's when we start to
[6:36] really take notice. It's often one of the reasons
[6:39] why we actually start to go to the doctor.
[6:43] We seek medicine to deal with the consequences of the
[6:47] dysregulated nervous system, but what actually is really needed
[6:52] is to attend to the underlying cause.
[6:55] Otherwise, it's a little bit like whack A mole.
[6:57] I don't know if you have this where you live, but it's a game
[7:00] of all of these things popping up and you tax that one and
[7:03] another one comes up. Exactly.
[7:05] In a sad way that kind of describes Western medicine and
[7:09] the way that we've kind of created a healthcare system in
[7:12] in America and, and in the UK and a lot of Europe.
[7:16] Very different to kind of the Eastern holistic philosophy way
[7:19] of like kind of treating down to part of the actual core disease.
[7:25] It's something I find really interesting.
[7:26] And I don't know if you've noticed this in, you know,
[7:30] people that you see or in conversations that you're having
[7:33] is, and it reminds me of a Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson where
[7:36] he talks about and stay with me, where the schools kill
[7:40] creativity. And part of that talk is about
[7:43] how when we get into the schooling system, we're kind of
[7:46] dysregulated and just kind of pulled from our minds up and
[7:50] we're not connected to the bodies.
[7:51] We kind of teach kids to sit still and listen for hours a
[7:55] day. And we've become very
[7:56] disconnected from our bodies. And that's been one of my kind
[8:01] of most connected ways of understanding what dysregulation
[8:05] is, because I think many of the times we can be very cerebral in
[8:09] our minds and very analytical when kind of always trying to
[8:12] problem solve. Well, we've kind of forgotten
[8:14] there's a whole body here giving us signs and symptoms.
[8:18] So how can we get people to kind of connect to understanding more
[8:22] about feeling in their bodies? Because for some people this
[8:24] might feel one very foreign or two, like quite terrifying.
[8:30] So how do we get people listening to feel important, to
[8:34] feel connected to their body and what that means?
[8:37] I think one of the things, and, and by the way, I know exactly
[8:40] the Ted Talk. I watched the RSA animated
[8:42] version of it, which is brilliant, honestly.
[8:45] And, and that that quality that you're describing of if I sit
[8:50] still, that is a sign of obedience and politeness and
[8:54] being a good student or being a good adult, whatever it might
[8:57] be. And the consequence of stillness
[9:01] in how it leads us to disconnect from the felt sense of the body.
[9:07] And so the question you're asking is how do we safely
[9:10] reconnect? The first thing that I want
[9:13] everyone to really understand is that that connection is already
[9:17] there. It's not something that you have
[9:20] to make happen. It's not like we somehow got
[9:23] completely cut off. This mind body connection is
[9:26] already occurring. What we're not doing is
[9:31] enhancing our awareness of it. So it's really about an
[9:34] attention practice and trusting that your body is already deeply
[9:40] wise. So for example, and we'll talk
[9:44] about this as we get even more in depth about the nervous
[9:47] system, but for example, when we look at the nervous system, your
[9:51] nervous system is attuning to your environment on your behalf
[9:56] and determining whether you're safe or if there's a threat or
[10:01] even if there's a life threat, and is basically initiating
[10:06] responses to that perception on your behalf.
[10:11] And it will do that without you even being consciously aware of
[10:15] it. So then the practice becomes
[10:18] building conscious awareness, building that perception of what
[10:24] is already happening. And we do that a little bit at a
[10:27] time. It's not like we're going to
[10:29] suddenly, you know, pull back the curtains and feel everything
[10:32] at once. That would probably be
[10:34] overwhelming for me. It would be overwhelming for
[10:36] anyone, but we can start to be aware of subtle small things
[10:41] like notice how you're breathing.
[10:43] Notice if you can sense the pace of your heart rate.
[10:48] Can you sense what's happening in your belly when you eat your
[10:52] food and whether it's easy to digest or whether you tend to
[10:57] get a little distended or bloated?
[10:59] And those are ways in to feel what's already probably kind of
[11:04] hanging out there in the background.
[11:06] I think that's such an important thing because there's a lot of
[11:09] people now that's one of our kind of biggest grossing
[11:12] episodes has always to do with gut health, because so many
[11:15] people struggle with their, with their gut in so many different,
[11:19] various ways. And it's interesting now that
[11:21] there's so much research coming out about breath work and
[11:25] meditation and things with the gut, which 10 years ago would
[11:28] have been completely laughter. And now gastroenterologists are
[11:33] prescribing this because they're saying it's so important for the
[11:37] gut microbiome. And it's interesting, you know,
[11:38] my background as a nutritionist, we obviously taught school, you
[11:42] know, these are things you got to look out for.
[11:44] But actually now it's, it's really important to be
[11:46] understanding like techniques that, that you were saying.
[11:50] And I think for many people, when they might get a gut
[11:52] symptom, they may think to themselves, what are the, what's
[11:55] the food I'm having? Or, you know, kind of the
[11:58] external metrics that they can try and tally up.
[12:02] But how important is it to recognise our, our nervous
[12:05] system in this? And I say this with a care
[12:08] behind me saying it because I think a lot of people all have
[12:10] always come to me in clinic and expected maybe just a plan for
[12:14] food. And so many times I'm trying to
[12:17] get them to understand that a lot of this can be
[12:20] dysregulation, but there seems to be still this friction of
[12:23] people kind of really connecting to what that means.
[12:27] Friction also because I think that sometimes people are
[12:30] looking for a medical answer to this physical symptom and are a
[12:35] little bit shy to see that actually there might be an
[12:38] emotional component or even a, you know, how our history has
[12:43] shaped us, how trauma may have shaped us, our developmental
[12:46] experiences, our attachment history, all of that shapes our
[12:51] nervous system. And because the nervous system
[12:53] works with all of these other systems, including our immune
[12:57] system, of course, when we have some kind of dyspegulation in
[13:02] the autonomic nervous system, it's going to show up as
[13:06] inflammation patterns or bloatedness or all of these
[13:09] symptoms that we're talking about.
[13:11] And so I think a lot of it is about building compassionate
[13:14] understanding that if we attend to our emotional well-being,
[13:19] it's going to translate to balancing out a wide variety of
[13:25] physical symptoms as well. Ariel, you just said my favorite
[13:28] word, compassion. It's what I talk about all the
[13:32] time on this show and I think it's the foundation of health in
[13:37] so many ways. And you know, I think in the UK
[13:41] we're starting to get a bit more connected to it, even though it
[13:44] makes us cringe and we're scared of that word.
[13:47] We're starting to kind of come around to it a little bit more.
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[14:44] subscribing. So before I kind of and I really
[14:47] want to get into the tools and techniques that people can do
[14:49] because there's so many so much incredible science behind this
[14:53] on what people can do. But there's something that I
[14:55] think many people would not have heard of that I'm about to say
[14:59] so, and I know that you speak about this so well.
[15:02] So I'd love for you to explain because you've just spoke about
[15:04] the autonomic nervous system and you've just said that the
[15:07] nervous system is all through our body and it's like goes into
[15:10] the immune system and cardiovascular system and you
[15:13] know, the gastro system and the endocrine system.
[15:16] But interestingly 1 area people wouldn't have heard of is the
[15:20] Poly vagal theory and understanding this.
[15:23] So can you explain to me what the polyvagal theory is?
[15:27] As if you're telling me as a friend of a coffee who has no
[15:30] idea and has never heard of this before.
[15:32] Beautiful. It's one of the things that I
[15:34] love to do is take complex science and simplify it.
[15:37] So let's do that. Yeah.
[15:40] So Poly means multiple vagal is referring to your vagus nerve.
[15:45] So right there, if we look at the word Poly vagal, what we're
[15:48] talking about is having multiple circuits of a very specific
[15:54] nerve in your body called the vagus nerve.
[15:56] And the vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve.
[15:59] We have 12 of them. But what's unique about the
[16:02] vagus nerve? And in Latin, vagus means
[16:05] wandering. What's unique here is that the
[16:08] vagus nerve is an extensive network of nerve circuits that
[16:15] run throughout your body. And the vagus nerve descends
[16:19] from your brain stem and then has all of these.
[16:23] All of this circuitry that goes around your eyes and in your
[16:28] face, around your mouth into the into the inner ear, into the
[16:33] larynx and pharynx in your throat travels down innervates
[16:36] into your heart, your lungs, travels down through your
[16:40] diaphragm and then has literally thousands of nerve endings that
[16:45] innervate into every digestive and reproductive organ, right.
[16:50] So just right there taking in this extensive network and we
[16:56] call the vagus nerve the mind body super highway of
[17:01] communication and connection. And so importantly, when we
[17:06] think about this bi directional super highway of communication,
[17:11] while there's information that's coming from the brain down to
[17:16] the body to help regulate our systems, the majority of the
[17:20] nerve communications occur from your body to your brain.
[17:27] So 80% of the traffic on this highway is going from your body
[17:33] up to your brain. And why does our Physiology
[17:37] prioritize this? Because our brains cannot
[17:41] function as an isolated machine. And you know, just using a
[17:45] little metaphor here, our brain needs the data, the information
[17:52] from the body to do the best possible job taking care of you
[17:57] in the world. So it's going to gather from
[18:00] what we call and you already mentioned about, you know, the
[18:02] gut brain axis and, and this, this wise belly brain, it's
[18:07] going to gather all of the data of what you feel at a gut level
[18:12] or changes in how you're breathing or changes in the rate
[18:16] of your heartbeat or, and this is a really interesting
[18:21] component of Poly vagal theory. It's going to gather data from
[18:24] your five senses, what you see, what you hear, right?
[18:30] What it feels like to be you, what something tastes like, it's
[18:35] going to gather all of that data.
[18:37] So for example, let's say we eat something that has gone sour or
[18:40] we, you know, drink sour milk, right?
[18:43] Your taste buds via vagus nerve and other cranial nerves are
[18:46] going to communicate and don't eat this.
[18:49] That's a sensory experience and it's a feedback to help you be
[18:53] safe in the world. But here's another example.
[18:56] And I like this one a lot because when we think about the
[18:59] gut wisdom, our digestive system doesn't just digest the food
[19:04] that we eat, but it's actually a deeply integrated emotional
[19:11] radar or compass that helps us navigate the world.
[19:15] So let's say that you go out on a date with somebody and you
[19:20] have this kind of uncomfortable feeling in your gut that says,
[19:24] I'm not so sure that's a savory character.
[19:26] I'm not so sure they're good for me.
[19:29] And going back to this example about overriding the body,
[19:33] disconnecting, so many of us in one way or another have been
[19:39] trained not to listen to the wisdom of the body, to override
[19:44] it, to push through, to second guess ourselves, to gaslight
[19:48] ourselves. I must be overreacting.
[19:51] And then we're missing the cues of our body that say, this
[19:56] doesn't feel right, something feels off.
[20:00] And listening to that helps us take much better care of
[20:04] ourselves in the world. That's such a confusing area, I
[20:07] think when it comes to relationships to navigate, to
[20:10] navigate, whether it's your head or your heart, because you know,
[20:14] your brain can be very powerful and be like, well, these are the
[20:17] things that is why you should see this person or stay with
[20:19] this person or date this person. And then your body is kind of
[20:23] giving you all these mixed signals.
[20:25] And that's, I mean, it's really interesting way to kind of like
[20:28] think about the, the polyvagal theory.
[20:29] Like how do we know really which one to trust?
[20:32] That's true. That's true.
[20:33] And we can come back around to that because I think it's such
[20:36] an interesting topic. But where I think I, I want to
[20:38] just continue to name, when we look at polyvagal theory,
[20:42] there's some key components. 1 Is that when we are sensing into
[20:48] the world, is this safe? Is there a danger out there?
[20:53] Is that a life threatening, you know, level of danger that our
[20:58] nervous systems are also equipped to protect us and that
[21:04] we have kind of three different tiers of ways of responding to
[21:09] potential threat in the world. The first tier is to utilize
[21:15] something that Doctor Steven Porges who developed Poly vagal
[21:18] theory. He refers to this as the social
[21:21] engagement system. And it's that upper circuit or
[21:25] the ventral Circuit of the vagus nerve.
[21:29] And the social engagement system is where the vagus nerve travels
[21:32] into our eyes, our ears are layering some fairings in our
[21:35] throat and all of the facial muscles.
[21:37] And so we're reading through our sense organs of the eyes and the
[21:42] ears and all of that. We're reading the cues of
[21:45] someone else's facial expressions or hearing their
[21:48] voice tone. And our vagus nerve is gathering
[21:51] that data. And we're also using our social
[21:56] engagement system to express either cues of safety and
[22:01] connection or cues of that feels scary or that doesn't feel safe.
[22:07] That's so interesting because I just saw a study that the
[22:10] Guardian published today where they said they gave a set of
[22:13] volunteers different experiences, like traumatic
[22:17] experiences, angry experiences, sad experiences, mutual
[22:20] experiences of their life. And they got another person who
[22:24] doesn't know them, observer to watch how they walk.
[22:26] And they had responded to the information that they were
[22:29] given. So if they were angry, they were
[22:32] walking quite fast. If they were sad, their
[22:34] shoulders were hunched over and without the other person
[22:38] knowing, they could already cue what emotion they were feeling,
[22:41] which it's bizarre. I only dressed up before I came
[22:43] on here not thinking it was associated.
[22:45] And you've just, it just sounds like what you've just said, the
[22:49] sensory experience. That's right.
[22:51] That's right. And what's beautiful about your
[22:54] description of this is that of course, sometimes we're
[22:56] consciously registering that data, like, oh, that person
[23:01] looks sad or that person looks angry.
[23:04] And sometimes we're not paying attention to what our senses are
[23:09] picking up, but our bodies might still be responding.
[23:14] So if you even go back to that study in the person that's
[23:16] walking having been given this information, let's say, for
[23:19] example, about something sad in their life, and that changes
[23:23] their posture. It changes how they're walking
[23:25] in the world. They might not even be
[23:28] consciously aware of how it changed how they walked.
[23:31] Nonetheless, they're still transmitting this social cue to
[23:36] another person, right? So our, our social engagement
[23:41] system, when we experience a threat out there, sometimes what
[23:45] we do is we recruit our social engagement system to try and
[23:50] manage that threat, even if we're not fully consciously
[23:54] aware of it. But it's kind of like if I take
[23:56] care of you, maybe you'll take care of me.
[24:00] Or if I take care of you, maybe I can prevent you from hurting
[24:05] me that. Makes so much sense.
[24:08] Yeah. So I said 3 tiers.
[24:11] And this is a key element of the polyvagal theory that often
[24:15] we're going to try and navigate some kind of disconnection or
[24:18] threat out there by re establishing a sense of
[24:22] connection and safety through connection with another person.
[24:27] Think about animals, right? There's safety in numbers.
[24:30] When you have a pack of animals that come together, they're
[24:33] going to appear larger to a potential predator and, you
[24:38] know, have a greater capacity within a group to fend off
[24:43] danger. Same thing for us as humans,
[24:46] right? There's safety in numbers.
[24:49] But if we cannot establish a sense of safety or connection
[24:53] with another person, then the next tier of a threat response
[24:57] comes in, and that's what we call the fight flight response.
[25:00] The sympathetic nervous system. Yeah, we're going to try and get
[25:04] away. Where that is.
[25:05] Yeah, exactly. I don't need to go into much
[25:07] description like a lot of people live there a lot of the time and
[25:13] for a long time. When I was first studying the
[25:15] nervous system, which goes back into the late 1990s, I was
[25:18] writing a master's thesis on how we navigate stress.
[25:22] And much of the literature at that time was basically looking
[25:27] at this dichotomous relationship between the sympathetic nervous
[25:30] system and our stress response and the parasympathetic nervous
[25:35] system, which got coined the relaxation response or our rest
[25:39] and digest response. And while that's a an important
[25:44] perspective in how we navigate stress, that we can come out of
[25:48] that sympathetic fight flight by accessing this ability to down
[25:52] regulate and relax, it's only a partially true story.
[25:57] And this is where the polyvagal theory really turns the light
[26:01] bulb on in when it comes to the nervous system, because some
[26:07] people downshift into relaxation, into rest and
[26:12] digest, whereas some people downshift into fatigue, into
[26:21] collapse, into despair, powerlessness, hopelessness.
[26:28] There's nothing I can do to change my situation.
[26:31] And that's the third tier in our stress response from a polybagal
[26:36] perspective. And what we're talking about is
[26:39] that when I cannot flee, I can't get out and I cannot fight back.
[26:44] Let's say I'm a kid and the danger is coming from an adult.
[26:49] I can't fight that adult. I'm just a kid.
[26:52] Let's say I'm an infant and the adult who's supposed to care for
[26:55] me is also harming me. In those states, our nervous
[27:02] system has a built in third level of survival, and that's
[27:07] what we call this feigned death or faint response.
[27:11] And that is driven by the parasympathetic nervous system,
[27:15] which immobilizes us. And yes, we will immobilize into
[27:21] sleep and rest and relaxation when we're safe.
[27:25] But the parasympathetic nervous system can also take us into
[27:29] this collapsed immobilization when there's a threat that we
[27:34] cannot escape. I attended Ted earlier this
[27:36] year, and I found myself in conversations with the founders
[27:39] of no watch. You've probably seen me wear
[27:41] something on my wrist, and lots of you have messaged me asking
[27:45] me what this is. It looks like a classic watch,
[27:48] but it's actually quietly tracking something much more
[27:50] meaningful, your autonomic nervous system.
[27:53] This is the system that governs everything from how you respond,
[27:56] from excitement to anxiety, calm to overwhelm.
[28:00] Most wearables just give you a score, but if you're anything
[28:02] like me, that score can sometimes make you feel worse,
[28:06] like you're already behind before your day even begins.
[28:10] No watch works differently. There is no judgement and there
[28:12] is no dopamine chasing dashboard.
[28:15] It simply reflects what your body is already experiencing and
[28:18] also helps you notice what it might be missing.
[28:20] It gives you minute by minute timeline of your stress
[28:23] responses and your recovery. The recovery is the most
[28:26] important part and it's the part that no one talks about and it
[28:29] is often the most revealing marker of our long term health.
[28:32] In just five days, it calibrates your body and it builds build
[28:35] your personal health fingerprint.
[28:38] You can try for free now for 30 days, and if you use the code
[28:41] LWBW, you can also get 15% off. If you want to understand your
[28:46] body not just through performance but through
[28:48] self-awareness, then this is where I'd begin.
[28:54] I'm just thinking about this for people of everyday lives and the
[28:57] ways that I think about that are breakups like heartbreak, like
[29:02] when you just feel that, you know, I think that's like
[29:04] something that is universal that we all connect to safety with
[29:09] work. Like maybe you've lost your job
[29:12] or you've lost your financial income, Even the loss of like a
[29:15] very dear friend, you know, you've had a really bad friend
[29:19] break up or or even grief. Like I'm thinking about like
[29:23] these moments where you can't self regulate.
[29:27] Is that also a point, you know, when you said that you go down
[29:30] and you downshift in your fatigue, Is there also a point
[29:33] when you're you just kind of go up and you're and the hyper
[29:36] vigilance and you can't come down from it?
[29:38] So you can either go, you can collapse or you can be so high
[29:43] that you can't. You'll guess your body's like in
[29:45] a shock mode. Is would that connect to the
[29:48] Poly vagal theory? 100%, right, Like so we can look
[29:52] at these two variations of imbalances in the autonomic
[29:56] nervous system. And one would be being stuck in
[29:58] the sympathetic system, being stuck on that vigilance,
[30:02] anxious, elevated heart rate, muscular engagement, always
[30:06] being prepared to flee or fight, right.
[30:09] And that even if we're not thinking about it that way, it
[30:13] just becomes hard, as you said, to downshift.
[30:15] It becomes hard to let go of that preparedness for action,
[30:21] and it makes us restless or vigilant, irritable even.
[30:27] And then the other side of that equation is the times when we
[30:31] feel the urge to isolate, we feel low energy.
[30:35] It's hard to motivate all of those qualities of being in more
[30:40] of a parasympathetic dominant state.
[30:42] And the third one you mentioned earlier, you talked about kind
[30:45] of wired and tired. But this quality of basically
[30:48] the way I think about it is that the sympathetic system is the
[30:51] gas pedal and the parasympathetic system is the
[30:55] brakes. And we have 1 foot on each in
[30:57] that third, you know that third pattern.
[31:01] Yeah, I think so many people connect to that Wide, wide and
[31:04] tired. You know, you get them from work
[31:05] and your head is spinning or a day with your family or whatever
[31:10] situation you find yourself in, but you just cannot sleep.
[31:13] But all you want to do is sleep. And then sometimes you might
[31:16] wake up at 3:00 AM, four AM, 5:00 AM, and you know, that kind
[31:20] of pain where you really want to relax but you can't.
[31:24] Is it something I think so many people struggle with today?
[31:27] And also that can feel very isolating because normally, you
[31:30] know, in the middle of the night you're kind of on your own.
[31:32] So again, that amplifies the feeling, I guess of the
[31:36] unsafiness that I'm I'm hearing is so connected obviously to
[31:39] feeling kind of more regulated in the nervous system.
[31:42] It's like safety. It's that safety bubble that is
[31:46] really how we get to feeling regulated.
[31:49] Bringing up something really important about all of this,
[31:52] which is that at some point, not only are we responding to the
[31:56] cues that we're getting from the external world or from other
[31:59] people, but the nervous system actually starts responding to
[32:04] the cues that we're getting from what's inside.
[32:08] So now rather than experiencing, let's say, something I saw on TV
[32:14] in the news or something that I experienced in relationship
[32:19] conflict, not only am I experiencing reactions to that,
[32:24] but actually I'm having reactions from the inside out.
[32:28] And so as soon as I feel that change in heart rate or as soon
[32:32] as I feel that that little twinge in my lower back, now the
[32:37] nervous system is receiving those experiences as threats
[32:41] themselves. And it becomes a kind of vicious
[32:45] cycle of a feedback loop on the inside where we're stuck in a
[32:50] kind of trauma response to the way that the body remembers
[32:54] stressful or threatening experiences.
[32:58] Yeah. And I think for so many, that
[32:59] can feel so confusing because we haven't got one of my favorite
[33:02] terms of the emotional granularity, which kind of means
[33:04] the form of expression of feelings to understand, except
[33:08] when we're not taught emotions at school.
[33:10] I mean, we're taught algebra, but we're not taught how we feel
[33:14] in ourselves and how to express ourselves with feelings.
[33:18] So I think when a lot of people get to that state that you talk
[33:20] about, they feel even more lost and more unsafe because they
[33:24] don't have the terminology and the vocabulary to say this is
[33:28] how I feel. And I think that's such an
[33:31] important part of, of getting to feel that safety in yourself
[33:35] again. So, and one thing I and I will
[33:38] get onto the tools because I know people are going to really
[33:40] want to know about like, OK, well, I've heard all this now.
[33:43] And they're probably thinking I might agree with this.
[33:45] And yeah, that's me we will get onto because there is, there is
[33:48] hope at the end of this tunnel. But one thing I found really
[33:51] interesting, which a friend of mine had messaged me, was she
[33:56] was saying about ADHD, and I found this really interesting
[34:00] that you know, a lot of people with ADHD describe the feeling
[34:04] of feeling chronically dysregulated.
[34:07] Now I have ADHD, so I can say from myself experience that is
[34:12] definitely something that I can feel, which is why I've become
[34:15] quite connected to understanding more about this.
[34:19] And it's like, I would say that it feels like my nervous system
[34:22] was always under threat unless I feel that I've got things in
[34:25] place that feels a lot of safety.
[34:28] So like nature or like things like somatic work, which if you
[34:31] don't know, that means it's body work.
[34:34] And then there's this interesting theory that there
[34:37] could be that people are saying that ADHD might be a nervous
[34:40] system regulation thing and not solely in the mind.
[34:45] There's so many people listening to this that have probably
[34:49] connected to someone they know who has ADHD or they might have
[34:53] ADHD themselves. So could polyvagal work with
[34:59] ADHD? Maybe even instead of
[35:01] medication, which many people are, are giving us the first
[35:03] option for ADHD. It's so true.
[35:06] So you're really bringing to mind for me an experience as a
[35:09] parent for a moment and I I'm going to just speak from that
[35:12] lens. So I am thinking of my son who's
[35:15] now 20 and but I'm, and going back in time to raising him at
[35:20] 3:00 and 4:00 and 6:00 and 12:00 and the experiences of raising
[35:25] this young boy who was so smart. I mean, the, the other thing
[35:30] that I just is so worth talking about with ADHD is that what
[35:34] we're really looking at also is extraordinary creativity,
[35:38] extraordinary capacity to both have an expanded mind and also a
[35:43] highly focused mind at times. So, so many gifts that accompany
[35:48] this. But the way that I like to think
[35:50] about it is that because the mind has the capacity for so
[35:54] much expansion, it doesn't have quite as many filters.
[35:58] And so an individual with ADHD is often picking up on literally
[36:04] hundreds of more details about what's occurring in a given
[36:09] space. Or even think about like the
[36:12] brilliance and the pacing and the speed at which you can
[36:16] process so much data. Whether it's a computer game or
[36:20] I can literally give my son any task of, of setting up a
[36:24] computer or a phone or a technology in my house and he's
[36:27] on it. He doesn't have to look at the
[36:29] instruction manual. He knows how things work and
[36:33] it's phenomenal. But it also comes with a cost
[36:37] because when your brain is processing that many data points
[36:42] that quickly, it starts to, the way I think about it is create
[36:47] these kind of traffic jams in the circuits of the brain.
[36:51] We have all of these neural networks with, you know,
[36:54] thousands of synapses and billions of connections.
[36:58] I mean, it's extraordinary when you look at the neurons of the
[37:01] brain and when you look at how much firing of those neurons is
[37:07] happening with someone with ADHD, it starts to basically
[37:11] create this mental cognitive overload.
[37:15] And this is where the body and why you said somatics has been
[37:19] really helpful. It was the same thing for him
[37:22] that when we got him grounded in his body, his mind got clear.
[37:27] Yeah. And that was extraordinary and,
[37:30] and grounding tasks for him were rhythmic tasks, rhythmic tasks
[37:36] of, you know, balancing tasks, being able to move in quickly in
[37:45] agility exercises, being able to ride a bicycle and have that
[37:52] bilateral movement of riding a bike or running.
[37:56] And that those kinds of, of activities, we would notice
[38:01] we've got a different kid on her hands.
[38:03] He can sit down after doing those activities and focus on
[38:07] homework. Brilliant, right?
[38:09] And so we ended up not going the medication route, in part
[38:13] because he got raised by a nervous system expert and a
[38:17] somatic psychologist. Incredibly lucky man.
[38:20] Right. So we got to incorporate all of
[38:25] this rhythmic movement and exercise and vagus nerve
[38:31] regulation tools. And I'll share one other tool
[38:34] that we used with him in lieu of medication that I really deeply
[38:39] value. And it was the role of
[38:42] regulating music. So there's there are protocols
[38:46] out there that Steve Porges, who developed Poly vagal theory,
[38:50] helped to create, one of which is called the Safe and Sound
[38:53] protocol. And it's music that goes into
[38:57] and stimulates the vagus nerve. And as we listen to it, it's
[39:02] basically giving the vagus nerve the cues of safety.
[39:07] And it helps bring in the filters when the brain gets
[39:12] overloaded. It's like I actually get to
[39:14] choose what to pay attention to now rather than feeling like the
[39:19] unfiltered brain. And we can talk about sensory
[39:22] processing because it's so deeply intertwined with this.
[39:24] And there's tons of research about this and I can get geeky
[39:27] on it. But basically, but basically,
[39:31] when when we don't have those filters, our sensory processing
[39:35] systems, again, there's a traffic jam.
[39:37] They're overloaded. And so grounding and rhythmic
[39:41] practices help to put filters back in place, and it lets us
[39:46] focus the mind. Yeah, I think it is.
[39:49] But so under spoken about somatic work.
[39:52] I mean, when I I've always been a fidget, but I think the thing
[39:57] that ADHD can feel for many people is this.
[40:01] And I think that's why I connect so much to dysregulation.
[40:03] It's just like overwhelming. You feel it in your body, but
[40:06] you also feel it in your mind that's going at 1000 mph.
[40:09] You're not quite sure how to shut it off, you know, And a lot
[40:12] of people think about reading and I'm like, no, I need to not
[40:15] digest any more information. And I think that's The thing is
[40:20] when I started doing more yoga, so I was somebody who was high
[40:23] intensity, lots of running, always on the go.
[40:27] And actually what I had to do was the opposite of what my
[40:31] brain wanted to do all the time, was to kind of slow it down and
[40:34] actually kind of work on that seesaw.
[40:36] So the things like yoga and I know that it's not for everyone,
[40:41] but even just like a massage or getting a foam roller and or a
[40:45] tennis ball when using that on my body, lots of different
[40:49] things, You know, I've had different devices that kind of
[40:51] kind of work with your vagus nerve and then realized I didn't
[40:53] need it because I could just breathe and hum and that
[40:56] activates my vagus nerve. But lots of like sensory body
[41:01] work is, you know, and you don't have to pay lots of money.
[41:05] You can just do it at home, but it can totally transform how you
[41:09] feel. It's kind of like a flip in your
[41:12] mind. But it's interesting because
[41:14] when I tried the medication, it just never worked for me.
[41:16] I don't think I slept for about four days.
[41:19] And that to me was just A and for some, it's amazing.
[41:23] Some people I know who are on it and it's changed their life, but
[41:26] it's not for everyone. But that's sadly normally the
[41:30] only kind of option many are given as opposed to
[41:33] understanding the nervous system.
[41:35] And that is such a big part of neurodivergency and especially
[41:40] ADHD is that your your nervous system regulation.
[41:43] So true. There's so much in everything
[41:45] you just shared, and I'm appreciating your shares as
[41:48] well. One thing that I want to kind of
[41:51] pluck out, if I may, from what you just spoke about is yoga.
[41:54] Now you, you know, know that I've been a yoga teacher for 30
[41:58] years and why I went in that direction for me was in
[42:03] relationship to growing up with a history of, I'll call it
[42:07] complex PTSD, because that's the terminology.
[42:10] And it's basically kind of the accumulation of repeated chronic
[42:15] states of not feeling safe as a child and how that also shaped
[42:21] my nervous system. But part of that story is that I
[42:26] would, I came into the world very sensitive, kind of a highly
[42:30] empathic, highly sensitive child.
[42:33] And I had experiences of being raised in one of my households,
[42:39] like my parents were divorced when I was very, very young, so
[42:41] as his own trauma. And then I had the experience in
[42:44] one of my households where I felt chronically unsafe and
[42:49] chronically misunderstood for the degree to which I was
[42:54] actually processing the world around me.
[42:57] So as a highly empathic child, I took everything in, every facial
[43:02] expression, every shift of glance, every nuance of the
[43:09] voice tone shift, every postural change.
[43:12] You were talking about that walking study.
[43:14] I've, I've read the emotions in everyone's bodies, right?
[43:18] And because I didn't know how to process all of that, what 7 year
[43:22] old really does. And at my mother's house, she
[43:25] helped, she helped give words. She helped me locate my
[43:29] emotions. My mom's a psychologist.
[43:31] And so there I had the safety to unwind and to regulate myself,
[43:37] and I felt safe enough to move in ways that helped me process.
[43:43] I also was introduced to yoga at my mother's house when I was 7.
[43:47] So all of that was very regulating.
[43:50] And unfortunately, at my father's house, I didn't have
[43:53] those tools, and I didn't feel safe to essentially draw upon
[43:57] them when I was there. One short example of that is
[44:01] that as a child, I would rock myself to sleep.
[44:04] Now I know now as a researcher on the role of vestibular into,
[44:08] you know, vestibular stimulation for a young child with trauma,
[44:12] how important that was. And that that was myself
[44:15] soothing at my mom's house to rock until I felt comfortable
[44:19] enough, relaxed enough to go to sleep.
[44:22] But at my father's house, I was told not to rock.
[44:25] And so I was, I wasn't able to utilize some of the tools that
[44:31] were deeply resourcing and regulating for my nervous
[44:35] system. And so I would get this kind of
[44:37] build up of distress and discord in my body that then shaped my
[44:44] emotions and shaped how I felt in the world and all of that.
[44:49] All right, Fast forward, I'm in college, I'm 1920 years old and
[44:57] at that point I have chronic anxiety, depressive thinking,
[45:02] I'm struggling socially. I'm I have a lot of shame that I
[45:07] feel inside of myself. And a friend of mine kind of
[45:11] drags me to a yoga class. I hadn't practiced yoga from
[45:15] when I was maybe 10 or 12 until I was 19 or 20.
[45:20] And she brings me to this yoga class.
[45:22] And by the end of the class, after conscious breathing and
[45:27] rhythmic movement and slowing down and and meditation, I felt
[45:32] sane. I felt connected.
[45:35] I felt grounded. I said I want more of that.
[45:38] I started going once a week. By the end of that year, I was
[45:41] practicing every day. By the time I was 22, I went and
[45:45] did my yoga teacher training because I knew that it was my
[45:49] medicine. Hey guys, I am very bad at
[45:52] asking for this but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask
[45:56] a huge favour. If you want to hear more diverse
[45:59] conversations from female voices such as myself, I would love if
[46:03] you could hit subscribe. We work so hard on this show to
[46:06] bring you some of the best guests in the world.
[46:09] And having a female voice sometimes gives a different
[46:11] perspective. And I really want to elevate
[46:13] more of that on this channel. So please hit subscribe if
[46:16] that's important to you as it is to me.
[46:18] It's interesting because I, I connect to that so much, but I
[46:21] also know people in my life where they are dysregulated and
[46:25] I say, you know, try some somatic work, maybe try yoga.
[46:28] And their response is, I hate yoga.
[46:29] I'm not doing it and I'm one always trying to think, is it
[46:34] because it feels so uncomfortable because you're so
[46:36] just regulated or should you just generally hate it?
[46:39] Also, if you are very stiff and on mobile, you can also find it
[46:43] quite painful. So I mean, I love that For
[46:46] people that can't connect to that, what are other tools that
[46:49] people could connect to and say, OK, well, what are the other
[46:51] things that I could do to kind of help my nervous system feel
[46:54] regulated? I love that you brought in a few
[46:58] of these tools earlier. I also have purchased several of
[47:01] the vagus nerve stimulation devices because, you know, why
[47:04] not? I'm in the field.
[47:05] I want to know what's out there and, and they work.
[47:08] And you know, you mentioned humming, right?
[47:11] And it's so fun too, because when we look at the way that
[47:15] many children naturally self regulate, they rock a hum.
[47:20] I was definitely a Hummer growing up too.
[47:22] I still am as an adult for that matter.
[47:24] Right. And they kind of stimulate areas
[47:30] of the vagus nerve like they'll play with their ears, for
[47:33] example. Well, what do we know about the
[47:35] ears? The ears are, have 100% vagal
[47:39] fibers in certain parts of the ears, the cartilage that sits in
[47:42] front of the ear, which we call the tragus or the, the area that
[47:46] surrounds the ear canal, right? There's areas of the face that
[47:51] are very high in vagus nerve circuits or fibers.
[47:56] And so we can stimulate the vagus nerve through self applied
[48:00] touch. And that's the one that I
[48:02] actually want to share as a tool here because it's, you know, I
[48:07] often kind of jokingly say, let's go get your vagus nerve
[48:10] stimulation devices. They're free.
[48:12] They're right here, right. So we, we bring these with us
[48:16] wherever we go. And one of the most kind of
[48:21] potent areas where the vagus nerve travels close to the
[48:24] surface of your skin, sitting really just about a 1/4 of an
[48:29] inch below the surface of your skin is in the sides of your
[48:32] neck. And when we have a lot of
[48:36] chronic muscular tension in the muscles of like the SEM, which
[48:41] is this kind of ropey muscle that connects between the ear
[48:45] and the jaw and, and the top of the collarbone or the scaling
[48:50] muscles of the neck. We're basically starting to kind
[48:53] of impinge upon the blood flow to the vagus nerve and to the
[48:58] brain stem. And so a little bit of massage
[49:01] goes a long way. Yeah.
[49:03] Is that C3 to C5 in the vertebrae of the neck?
[49:07] So the the vertebrae, well the that's lower the vertebrae where
[49:13] the vagus nerve travels actually right in the center of is the
[49:17] axis and the Atlas, which are C1 and C2.
[49:20] Now it doesn't hurt to basically open up C3 through C7.
[49:26] The whole spine is deeply integrated to our autonomic
[49:30] nervous system, and there's a few two ways that we get to
[49:34] this. One is that if we're going to
[49:36] get to C1 and C2, we work at the occiput.
[49:39] We work at that small area at the base of the skull, right
[49:43] where if you trace the sides of your skull, right where there's
[49:46] that kind of small divot or soft spot at the base of the skull.
[49:51] And you can use your fingertips just to create a little bit of
[49:55] circular motion right there at the base of your skull and begin
[49:59] to open up the blood flow, the connection.
[50:04] It is often an area that's kind of tender, especially if you're
[50:10] one that carries a lot of tension in your shoulders, in
[50:13] your neck. And then, yeah, me too.
[50:19] I hope everyone else is going. Me too.
[50:21] Yes, I think so. I think so.
[50:24] And then you're absolutely right that as we get into the sides of
[50:29] the neck now we're going to work more down into this lower
[50:31] cervical vertebrae. And the way that I like to work
[50:34] the SEM is if you tilt your head to the side in a little bit, a
[50:39] little bit, kind of like your chin off at an angle, you're
[50:42] going to get this ropey muscle that kind of sticks out.
[50:45] You can probably see it here, right?
[50:47] And then you just take your, your thumb and your first
[50:50] finger. And it's not a, it's never meant
[50:53] to be painful. It's just a little kind of grab,
[50:58] pinch and drag down and you can make your way down the muscle
[51:04] kind of 1 little segment at a time.
[51:05] And I like to do it several times through.
[51:07] Start at the top and just kind of grab and pull and you grab
[51:12] and pull. And if you can't see us, we're
[51:15] on YouTube and Spotify if you want to watch this video.
[51:17] So we have both me and Ariel are both massaging on X right now.
[51:23] And it feels so good. And it feels so calm.
[51:28] I should do this in every interview.
[51:30] Yeah, right. It's actually easy to do it if
[51:33] you look in the mirror because you can see it pop.
[51:35] I can imagine it's quite hard to see it, but I because I'm doing
[51:38] it on a screen where I can see myself, I can actually see it
[51:42] quite clearly. If people are finding this hard
[51:45] to navigate solely on audio, yeah.
[51:48] Yeah, it's so beautiful. And so even just a few moments,
[51:52] 30 seconds on each side and then a pause to notice.
[51:58] How do you feel now? I gave myself a good self
[52:01] massage. Yeah, but calm.
[52:04] Yeah, I do. I feel, I feel calm.
[52:07] Yeah. And then it's.
[52:08] Amazing it only took 30 seconds. Yeah, and it only takes 30
[52:13] seconds exactly, you know, and of course you can do it for
[52:15] longer. But I think what stands out for
[52:18] me is that we can stack these. Like like one of my other very
[52:23] favourites is to take your fingers like like peace signs,
[52:26] like little VS first and second finger and then in front of and
[52:31] behind your ear, massaging the hinge of your jaw.
[52:35] Now, so many of us, exactly, you know what I was going to say, me
[52:41] too, right? If we clench our jaws, we're
[52:44] going to get an accumulation of stress and emotion.
[52:50] Now, it's not uncommon when we massage these areas that we
[52:54] start to feel more. I have been teaching this
[52:57] literally to thousands and thousands of students over the
[53:00] years. And, and very often someone will
[53:04] say, I just feel like I want to cry.
[53:07] Oh, that brought up such a tenderness, right?
[53:10] Or I don't know why, but you know, it's bringing up a
[53:14] particular memory. So why is that right when we
[53:19] clamp down around our emotions and you know, it's a, it's a
[53:24] great strategy to not feel right, to clench your jaw, to
[53:30] not feel afraid, to not feel anger, to not feel vulnerable
[53:34] and sad. So when we begin to open this
[53:37] up, all right, even just kind of softening your bottom teeth from
[53:41] your top teeth, softening your tongue, right, we're opening up
[53:48] the channel, the mind body communication highway that
[53:54] allows our brains to sense with the bodies already carrying on
[53:59] our behalf. How important is it to cry for
[54:03] the release of our nervous system?
[54:05] Yeah, I love the research that shows that there's different
[54:09] kinds of tears, you know, And I think that there's healing
[54:14] tears. And I think that those healing
[54:17] tears, when we look even at like the chemical composition of
[54:21] healing tears that there is found within them, like the
[54:27] neurotransmitters and the hormones that that let us know
[54:31] that when we are feeling our emotions, feeling that
[54:37] vulnerable, tender, authentic truth of who you are, that it
[54:43] let begins to create a kind of congruence.
[54:47] And it opens up more flow for serotonin, for oxytocin, for the
[54:53] chemicals that actually need to flow through us in order for us
[54:59] to feel better in life or to truly grieve what we've lost.
[55:06] It's so deeply important for us as humans to allow our emotions,
[55:12] energy and motion, allow our emotions to go all the way
[55:16] through. Yeah, 'cause I think a lot of
[55:18] people can feel a negative response to crying.
[55:21] You know, say if they're arguing with someone, they maybe don't
[55:25] want to show their pain or they suppress it or something's
[55:30] happened and they don't, you know, crying in public feels
[55:33] nerve racking and weak. So there's lots of associations,
[55:36] like associations connected to, to tears.
[55:40] But I always think that actually, after I cry, and I say
[55:43] this from someone who's like, you know, always felt that
[55:46] pressure to not show the weakness, that actually the more
[55:50] I've learned into it, the more easy I find it to regulate.
[55:53] Yeah. So going back to the tenderness
[55:56] of this right, like when we, when we feel what's true, our
[56:03] nervous systems respond and that is the that is the thing, right?
[56:08] It's there's this bi directional piece 1 is like I open up the
[56:11] jaw or the sides of the neck or the base of my skull and I feel
[56:15] this tenderness come forward. I'm now more In Sync.
[56:20] I allow the emotional wave to move through me and my nervous
[56:23] system says, yes, please, more because there is actually enough
[56:30] safety to feel and the feeling cultivates more connection.
[56:38] When we feel connected to ourselves, that actually is
[56:42] registered by the brain as a cue of safety.
[56:46] All right, so it becomes this beautiful.
[56:49] We talked earlier about the kind of the vicious cycle where we
[56:52] can get kind of entrapped by those those threat responses.
[56:57] But now what we're speaking about is the upward spiral of
[57:00] healing. It's so interesting because I
[57:02] guess a question at the beginning could have been, you
[57:07] know, is safety the answer to a regulated nervous system?
[57:12] And yes, but I want to use a bit of a caveat around this because
[57:17] what do we know about the world that we live in?
[57:19] Is it 100% safe? Heck no, right?
[57:22] Are there plenty of cues that let us know that it's not 100%
[57:27] safe out there? Yes.
[57:29] So what we cultivate or what I will kind of kind of hold as the
[57:34] safe enough micro environments, the safe enough spaces where I
[57:40] know that now is a time that I can come out of that threat
[57:45] response because I'm with you and we're connecting.
[57:50] And I like the sound of your voice and I like the way you
[57:53] smile and we're nodding at each other.
[57:55] And so like all of that becomes this mutuality of this
[58:00] experience of connection. And it generates this kind of
[58:05] bubble that helps buffer us from all of the other stuff.
[58:12] And we all need those buffers. Not that it prevents the future
[58:17] stressors, not that it prevents the awful, horrible things that
[58:22] are happening in our world that are still happening, but that we
[58:25] have a place to go and press the pause button.
[58:29] And for me, that's a yoga class or that was going to therapy, or
[58:33] that's creating these safe environments in teaching yoga
[58:38] and in providing therapy and so forth.
[58:40] But we we can find that in nature.
[58:44] We can find that in so many spaces where we go.
[58:47] This is a safe enough space. This is where I can down
[58:51] regulate and come back to myself and it's huge.
[58:54] We need that. We do need that and I think
[58:56] throughout my 20s I searched for that, but I what I actually
[58:59] found for me really helps. And I wonder how you'll, how
[59:02] you'll see this is and I, I don't like the word self esteem
[59:05] because I think it's a really bad metric for understanding
[59:08] self because self esteem is connected to like how you pitch
[59:10] yourself against others. So if someone's got a better
[59:13] podcast than me, then my self esteem lowers.
[59:14] And if my podcast is better than someone else's, my self esteem
[59:17] is higher. But how we feel about ourselves
[59:20] generally and our self worth is maybe a better metric.
[59:24] I think that implies a huge amount of safety because I think
[59:26] there's always going to be things that are constantly
[59:28] moving on the external side of things like your relationship
[59:32] will go through hard times and you might break up when you all
[59:36] of these different situations, you know, similar with your
[59:38] parents and your family, you know there's times when they're
[59:42] there and there's times when they're not.
[59:44] Similar with friends, you might have a good friend group and
[59:46] they might move away. Similar with work, you might
[59:48] become redundant. We have lots of different
[59:51] situations that can kind of move, but actually like knowing
[59:54] your sense of self, I think is so important to creating this
[1:00:00] movement towards safety of your nervous system.
[1:00:04] If you know that you can get back to that within yourself.
[1:00:06] But do you think many people are lost with that kind of internal
[1:00:09] safety? In themselves.
[1:00:12] Yes, I think so. And I think that there's there's
[1:00:15] a a phrase that I'll kind of offer around this, which is that
[1:00:19] generally when we have had at least some experience of what we
[1:00:24] call a good Co regulating relationship, it's another
[1:00:26] polybagal term. And it basically means that I
[1:00:29] had enough experience relationally with another person
[1:00:33] whose nervous system was a source of safety for mine that
[1:00:37] they basically offered those cues of the eye contact and the
[1:00:42] warm face and the the, the voice tone and so forth that that
[1:00:47] becomes wired into me. And so maybe we got those cues
[1:00:52] in our earliest caregiver relationships or with our
[1:00:55] parents or with that good friend or in therapy.
[1:00:58] And but at some point, once we become adults, we want to be
[1:01:04] able to provide that for ourselves.
[1:01:07] Not that we are solely independent and self reliant.
[1:01:10] There are still times in which we want to be able to lean into
[1:01:13] another and borrow someone else's nervous system.
[1:01:16] We all need that. But when we're on our own and
[1:01:19] when that friend moves away or when we, you know, don't have
[1:01:23] access to that external source, it's good to know that we can
[1:01:27] become our own Co regulator, right?
[1:01:30] And one of the most beautiful ways, and this loops back to
[1:01:33] something we said earlier, is compassion.
[1:01:36] One of my favorite researchers on compassion is Paul Gilbert.
[1:01:39] He's there in the UK and he's been.
[1:01:42] On the show. Yeah, wonderful.
[1:01:44] Yeah. I think that's why I watched
[1:01:45] that episode. It's beautiful.
[1:01:46] And you know, and the ability to talk to yourself in such a
[1:01:53] loving way, to learn to speak to yourself.
[1:01:57] And there's correlations between compassion practices and higher
[1:02:02] vagal tone. So our vagus nerve literally
[1:02:04] responds to compassion practice. And one of the most potent of
[1:02:11] those practices is to learn to speak lovingly to your own inner
[1:02:15] child, right? If we think about that, we all,
[1:02:18] in some way or another, have those younger parts of us that
[1:02:22] maybe felt rejected or abandoned or hurt, wounded in some way or
[1:02:27] another. And that when we start to feel
[1:02:31] rejected, unloved, less than comparing ourselves to the other
[1:02:36] podcaster, whatever it might be, right, that we can scoop that
[1:02:41] one up and say, I've got you. I'm going to be the loving adult
[1:02:45] that you've always needed. I think it's more essential than
[1:02:48] ever in the world that we live in.
[1:02:49] I mean, the comparison and the relatability to what is going
[1:02:52] on. And I mean, even if you're not
[1:02:54] in media or entertainment or anything that's got anything to
[1:02:58] do with being in the public eye, just having Instagram or, you
[1:03:03] know, X or LinkedIn or any social platform, which the
[1:03:07] majority of our listeners will have, it makes you compare.
[1:03:12] Sometimes even podcasts make you compare.
[1:03:14] You're like, wow, I'm not doing all these things.
[1:03:16] And they're telling me I should be doing all these things for a
[1:03:18] happy, healthy life. And I feel so far from that,
[1:03:21] that you kind of spiral into this like not good enough.
[1:03:24] And it's, yeah, Paul Gilbert's been on and so has Doctor
[1:03:29] Kirsten Neff. And my, my book that I'm
[1:03:32] releasing at the moment is on self compassion because that's
[1:03:36] my biggest anchor to getting me back to a strong self worth.
[1:03:41] When all your other external metrics are moving, you've got
[1:03:44] something to kind of anchor you in.
[1:03:47] And I and I kind of look at self compassion as you kind of
[1:03:50] becoming your own parent, You're going in to look after yourself.
[1:03:53] You know, when I think that's something that many of us can
[1:03:56] forget, you know, that's why I say cooking yourself a really
[1:03:59] nice meal is an act of self respect because you do it for a
[1:04:01] child. So why wouldn't you do it for
[1:04:03] yourself? But we don't look at ourselves
[1:04:06] in that, in that respect, you know, sometimes we don't think
[1:04:08] we're deserving of the time. Why would I go and spend half an
[1:04:11] hour doing something nice for myself?
[1:04:12] And I, you know, can easily order something and it's and
[1:04:15] it's fine. But then if you flip that to
[1:04:17] someone who loves coming over, would you say the same thing?
[1:04:21] Maybe, maybe not. So I find compassion such an
[1:04:26] interesting, such an interesting antidote to kind of the world
[1:04:30] that we live in right now. Yeah, so necessary.
[1:04:34] So if I think about one other thing that we haven't touched
[1:04:37] on, well, there's two and I don't know if we can kind of
[1:04:39] like they might work together in synchronously, but it's EMDR
[1:04:43] which people are starting to really become aware of right
[1:04:46] now, which I think is really interesting and also breathwork.
[1:04:50] So I want to make sure that we touch on these two things
[1:04:53] because there's such interesting concepts to work with the
[1:04:56] nervous system. So let's first start with
[1:04:59] actually breathing because you were talking about the neck.
[1:05:01] You were talking about opening this up into the back of the
[1:05:04] neck and the sides of the neck. I can't remember the words that
[1:05:08] you use, but that was my poor description.
[1:05:12] And you were saying that you can open up the blood flow to
[1:05:14] connect to the breath. I think a lot of people when
[1:05:17] they do breath work still breathe, you know, not properly
[1:05:20] and very kind of far up into the top of their chest as opposed to
[1:05:24] their diaphragm. So how how important is breath
[1:05:27] work for working with our nervous system?
[1:05:30] So breath work is the fastest tool out there for regulating
[1:05:36] the nervous system and I'll explain very quickly why.
[1:05:40] So when we look at the tone of the vagus nerve, it's measured
[1:05:45] by a rhythmic synchronicity of the inhale and exhale in
[1:05:52] coordination with your heart rate, so that every inhalation
[1:05:56] brings in a little bit of the sympathetic nervous system.
[1:05:59] As you get more heartbeats, every exhalation starts to bring
[1:06:03] us more into parasympathetic and we get fewer heartbeats.
[1:06:07] When we breathe rhythmically, we get this coherency of that
[1:06:11] rhythm and of the heart rate, respiratory relationship.
[1:06:16] It's something that is measured as heart rate variability or
[1:06:20] respiratory sinus arrhythmia. And ideally if we can all
[1:06:26] breathe rhythmically for even just two to three minutes a day,
[1:06:30] we can start to retrain our our kind of habitual breathing
[1:06:36] patterns because some of us are over breathers where we
[1:06:39] emphasize too much of the inhalation and we have more of
[1:06:42] that sympathetic activation. Some of us are shallow breathers
[1:06:47] where we're not getting enough of that sympathetic innervation.
[1:06:51] So breathing rhythmically in, you know, generally we call this
[1:06:55] resonance frequency breathing, and it's about breathing.
[1:06:58] Inhale for about a count of five, exhale for a count of
[1:07:01] five. And you mentioned the diaphragm,
[1:07:04] such a key part to this picture why the diaphragm attaches
[1:07:09] itself to the lower rib cage. The vagus nerve travels through
[1:07:15] the diaphragm to get to all of the digestive organs.
[1:07:19] So when we have fascia, we're going to talk about fascia for a
[1:07:24] moment. It's this whole other topic but.
[1:07:26] No, we have a whole episode on it and it's been one of our
[1:07:29] highest listen to episodes. I'll link it.
[1:07:31] So when we think about the fascia, the connective tissue of
[1:07:36] the body, the diaphragm is largely fascia.
[1:07:39] And so we get what we call kind of fascia adhesions where the,
[1:07:45] the the Tasha isn't moving as much as we'd like it to.
[1:07:49] So that happens with the diaphragm.
[1:07:51] So the diaphragm gets kind of sticky and it's not moving with
[1:07:54] the breath. So it's going to inhibit the
[1:07:57] expansion capacity for our lungs.
[1:08:00] So generally when we want to expand the diaphragm with the
[1:08:05] with that rhythmic breathing, we want to imagine that we're
[1:08:08] expanding our rib cage out to the side so that the we inhale
[1:08:12] and we have this kind of breath of BREDTH, right?
[1:08:16] Like this ability to really expand and contract.
[1:08:22] And then the last part of this conscious breathing comes back
[1:08:25] to compassion. We put it all together so that
[1:08:28] we breathe rhythmically, we get diaphragmatic movement, and we
[1:08:32] focus on breathing in and out of the heart in a way that
[1:08:35] cultivates A genuine sense of warmth or appreciation.
[1:08:39] And that's this beautiful trifecta of optimal vagus nerve
[1:08:43] tone. Amazing, right?
[1:08:45] Something that we could do just a little bit every day.
[1:08:49] And even as I'm talking about it, it's hard to breathe, you
[1:08:52] know, breathe rhythmically while I talk.
[1:08:53] But just for three breaths, we'll do it together, right?
[1:08:56] To inhale and exhale, let it all out and again, inhale fully.
[1:09:09] Let it really fill. Let the diaphragm expand,
[1:09:14] exhale, contract, and one more inhale right through that heart,
[1:09:23] bringing in just one moment of joy.
[1:09:26] One thing and exhale. And you exhale through your
[1:09:35] mouth or through your nerves. I'm talking so it's coming out
[1:09:39] through my mouth, but ideally the research suggests nose.
[1:09:43] Nose breathing is lovely, but honestly you can do either.
[1:09:48] Just breathe because so many of us are inhibiting the breath.
[1:09:54] I think that the ability, if you're an over breather,
[1:09:58] switching to nose, nose breathing is going to help
[1:10:00] because you've got a smaller space to breathe through, if I
[1:10:05] want to put it simply right. And if you're a shallow
[1:10:09] breather, let yourself breathe through your mouth.
[1:10:11] Really get some more oxygen in there.
[1:10:14] Your whole your brain is going to go, Oh my gosh, this is the
[1:10:16] fuel I was missing. That's true.
[1:10:18] So I guess anyone who's maybe quite tight, like tight backs,
[1:10:21] tight necks like that might inhibit their their breathing.
[1:10:26] OK. And then I think about EMDR. Now
[1:10:28] this is something that I am a huge fan of and works in
[1:10:33] bilateral stimulation. So can you talk a little bit
[1:10:35] about how important EMDR is and what it is?
[1:10:38] Because people might go what is that?
[1:10:41] But I think it's incredible. Yeah.
[1:10:44] So I've been trained in EMDR since 2001.
[1:10:46] It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and
[1:10:49] Reprocessing. I now teach trainings in this.
[1:10:51] I love it as well. And I teach trainings on somatic
[1:10:55] EMDR. So I really bring a somatic emphasis in how we do
[1:10:59] this. But the short answer to this is
[1:11:01] that eye movement desensitization, reprocessing
[1:11:04] helps us work with traumatic memories that are not fully
[1:11:09] processed by the brain. And reprocessing means that we
[1:11:13] basically turn towards something that feels scary, feels
[1:11:17] unthinkable, feels unmanageable, and we consciously turn towards
[1:11:21] it with right time, right space, right support, right.
[1:11:25] So it's not like thinking about your traumatic memory in the
[1:11:27] middle of the night. It's about thinking it with
[1:11:30] another person who's lending their nervous system.
[1:11:32] So there's Co regulation and now I can turn towards that
[1:11:36] unthinkable event and I can think about it differently.
[1:11:40] I can challenge the beliefs that I've had about it, and I can
[1:11:45] also gain more distance from that event, which helps to
[1:11:47] desensitize the distress I feel when I think about it.
[1:11:51] One of my favorite metaphors when teaching MDR is that
[1:11:55] imagine that you are in a movie theater and that you can choose
[1:11:59] how close or far away you are from that screen.
[1:12:02] You can even choose to be in the box behind the theater.
[1:12:06] You can choose to make that screen really small.
[1:12:09] You've got choice now about how to relate to that memory.
[1:12:12] You even have the controls to turn the movie off or to turn it
[1:12:16] back on. And so when an event happens, a
[1:12:19] trauma happens. It happens to us.
[1:12:21] We have no choice, we have no control.
[1:12:23] It overwhelms us. But now we rework this in a way
[1:12:28] that lets us think about it piece by piece, change our
[1:12:31] relationship to it, and in doing so changes our expectations
[1:12:36] about the future and what's possible for us.
[1:12:38] And that's amazing. Because it works by you
[1:12:41] following either like a pen or a dot on the screen and your eyes
[1:12:45] shift from kind of left to right, left to right whilst the
[1:12:49] therapist is talking you through and brings you into that
[1:12:52] traumatic event, right? But what's happening in the
[1:12:54] brain, like what's? Because this is what completely
[1:12:58] amazes me, that this can happen and then you can just feel
[1:13:00] differently. You do feel differently and
[1:13:03] there's a variety of different ways that EMDR gets applied.
[1:13:06] Some of it, as you're saying, through eye movements, some of
[1:13:09] it through self tapping, some of it through listening to
[1:13:12] bilateral sound. So there's a variety of
[1:13:15] different theories out there about why EMDR works.
[1:13:17] Initially they thought, well, maybe it's redoing REM sleep,
[1:13:21] right? We think about rapid eye
[1:13:23] movement sleep and it's the way that the brain processes through
[1:13:28] daily events and kind of consolidated memories in the
[1:13:31] brain. That's theory number one.
[1:13:33] But the current working understanding of why EMDR works
[1:13:36] is that it does something that we call it taxes working memory.
[1:13:42] So we take a difficult event, we hold it in working memory, which
[1:13:46] is a part of the brain that is done very much in the frontal
[1:13:50] cortex. And it's basically says working
[1:13:53] memory can only hold so much information at once.
[1:13:57] So you think about a small desktop, right, a tiny desk.
[1:14:01] And we put the traumatic memory on the desk.
[1:14:03] And then we do something that we call a dual a task, dual task
[1:14:08] stimulation, where I have to do something else while also
[1:14:11] thinking about that memory. So now I'm say I'm thinking
[1:14:14] about that awful car accident, but I'm also having to focus on
[1:14:18] moving my eyes back and forth or self tap or hear that sound or
[1:14:22] hold these ulcers. And what begins to happen is
[1:14:26] that I my brain can't actually continue to focus on all of the
[1:14:31] distress linked to the memory while doing this other task.
[1:14:35] So it gives the brain a bit of a challenge.
[1:14:39] I think that is so important for anyone listening who might be
[1:14:42] suffering with PTSD. That's such a big thing to be
[1:14:45] able to give them tools that they can actually do because I
[1:14:48] know that's where EMDR is actually like a savior for so
[1:14:51] many. We've spoke through so many
[1:14:53] amazing techniques from EMDR, breathwork, tapping, massaging
[1:14:58] the neck and the opening the vagus nerve canal.
[1:15:01] I think and I hope this episode will be shared with so many
[1:15:04] people on the nervous system regulation.
[1:15:07] And I thank you so much for coming on today.
[1:15:10] The thing that I leave is with one question, and it is Ariel.
[1:15:14] What does live well be well mean to you?
[1:15:17] I knew this question was coming, of course.
[1:15:21] And you know, what really stands out for me right now is having a
[1:15:26] sense of agency. And that's a funny word, but I'm
[1:15:30] going to unpack it for just a moment.
[1:15:32] Because when we are living our fullest life, we know that we're
[1:15:37] important and we know that we have an impact.
[1:15:39] And that sense of agency basically says that not only do
[1:15:44] I have choice and ways to turn towards myself, how I talk to
[1:15:48] myself, how I carry myself in the world, how I attend to my
[1:15:51] nervous system. That helps me feel better on a
[1:15:54] day-to-day basis. But it also gives me that sense
[1:15:58] that I am going to be a contributor to making this world
[1:16:01] a better place. Whether that's for how I raise
[1:16:04] my children, how I show up for my spouse, how I show up in my
[1:16:06] workplace or for my friends or in other community spaces.
[1:16:11] And I believe that when we are carrying that sense of that
[1:16:15] positive impact that we can carry, it changes the world.
[1:16:19] I love that agency is such a powerful one to end on and it's
[1:16:23] true agency of your nervous system.
[1:16:26] Ariel, thank you so much. I'm going to link your all of
[1:16:29] your website and everything below to go and check out more.
[1:16:32] And thank you for coming on and teaching us about the nervous
[1:16:34] system. I think feel very rested after
[1:16:37] this episode so thank you. Thank you.
[1:16:40] Thank you for having me but a joy.

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