The Science of Staying Calm

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself so that you can improve your life. Been doing it for over 10 years now, so if you wanna join the train, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about the neurology and the psychology of staying calm. Let's be honest. If somebody filmed the way that you react to stress and played it back for you to see tomorrow, Would you be proud of yourself or would you think, damn, that's not who I want to be?

0:47So if your tone or your tension or your words, all of it were broadcast onto a screen for you to see and other people could see, would it match the calm, grounded version of you that you actually want to be? If not, then what needs to happen is your nervous system needs some retraining. And today we're going to do exactly that because calm is not something that you're just born with. Calm is not a personality trait. It's not something that some people have and other people just suck at. Calm is a trainable skill. And more than that, calm is your access point to your power. You have it inside of you.

1:31It's in there somewhere. It's just about learning to access it when you want it and not going down this old road of getting angry or emotional or sad or blowing up when you don't want to blow up. Because those are patterns that you learned in childhood. Calm is a pattern as well. Maybe you didn't learn that pattern in childhood. Well, you can train yourself right now from this moment forward to actually have that pattern be something that's inside of you. So let's talk about the psychology and the neurology behind staying calm in basically any situation. Not because you're trying to, you know, be like a Zen monk or anything like that, but because your freedom really lives in you being able to calm yourself and be in control of your emotions.

2:19Okay, so first off, let's talk about why you lose your shit even when you know better. Okay, let's start with the science behind all of it. because if you've ever felt like, oh, like I should have handled that better. I didn't do as well as I wanted to. I probably shouldn't have said that to her. Well, welcome to being a human. There's nothing wrong with you. It's your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do to protect you and to keep you alive. And so let me go over a very, very oversimplified explanation of your two-part brain. There's many other parts to your brain, but let me just explain to you two parts of your brain that are kind of at battle in these moments, right?

2:59So you've got your prefrontal cortex, which is the CEO of your brain. It is the logic, the strategy, the long-term thinking. And then there is the amygdala, which is your threat detection system, which is constantly scanning for danger 24-7. And it's important to know that when your brain clicks on and perceives a threat, your amygdala hijacks the entire system. Like logic just goes out of the window and blood drains from your thinking part of your brain and rushes into survival mode, which is fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And so you might have been triggered by something simple, like a coworker saying something.

3:38And that's what triggered you. But your brain is preparing to fight to the death to save your life. That's actually what's going on. Like you're perceiving a actual threat when in reality, you know, Nancy in accounting just said something to you that triggered you. But your brain's like, it's time to fight to the death, right? Your brain is just immediately sending all of the neuropeptides and the hormones to your body to be like, let's fight to the death. We have to save your life. Even though you consciously know in that moment, that potential is not going to happen in this situation. You don't have to fight the account.

4:16That's not going to happen. But this is why you will snap at someone, even though you promise yourself that you would start to stay cool, that you would work on yourself, or that you shut down completely emotionally and logically in a meeting. And then because of that, you beat yourself up afterward. Or you, you know, blow up in conflict and say the wrong thing, and then you just replay it in your head 600 times after. and you might not be able to keep your brain from spiraling even when everything's like technically fine in your external world, but your brain just spirals and worries and thinks something's wrong.

4:55You're not broken in these situations. You're not just like, oh, let's toss you to the curb. You know, it's never gonna work. You're just flooded. And the flood, this is important to understand, the flood that happens in that moment isn't even about the situation. it's not about what your co-worker said it's about how your brain interprets the situation based off of old programmings from your past so let me say it again just so i can make sure it's very clear it's not about the situation that you're currently in in the present moment when you blow up or get emotional whatever it might be it is about your brain interpreting and how it's interpreting the situation based off of your old programming from the past.

5:39And so, you know, why do some people get calm under pressure while some people unravel? Is it just the way that they were born? No. Why does one person freeze when their boss gives them feedback and then another person gets defensive? Have you ever thought about it? It's their programmings. Why does, your partner touching your phone sends you into a spiral, but if your friend touched your phone, you wouldn't care. It's because all of these are a response to stress that is based on a pattern from your past, not the present moment. It's never the situation. It's how your brain is processing and interpreting the situation and then the meaning that it is giving this situation.

6:26And so if we give it a quick breakdown, and we will be right back. And now back to the show. When you were growing up, your nervous system was shaped by the environment that you grew up in. It was shaped by everything that happened in your household, what it was like to be around your parents. It was being shaped in every single moment. And so that means that you had, like for instance, if you had a couple of examples, if you had a emotionally unpredictable parents. Maybe both of them were unpredictable, right? You probably learned to walk on eggshells or learned to over-explain yourself so that you could simply just feel safe.

7:09Maybe you learned to be the quiet kid because the house was too chaotic. And so that's just something that you learned. That is a behavioral adaptation to an environment. if you were ignored whenever your parents got upset, you might now today as an adult shut down whenever conflict arises. If love was withdrawn, your parents, whether it's consciously, but usually it's unconsciously, withdrew love from you when you made mistakes as a child, then you might have a severe case of perfectionism because your perfectionism might be your protection mechanism. And now these protective strategies, which is really what they are, they're protective strategies you learned in childhood, show up anytime that your body senses danger, even when there isn't any real danger.

8:04It's just a perceived threat from your brain. Like, do you see what I'm getting at here and what I'm trying to explain? It's not logical danger, It's felt danger. And so it's your way your body and your brain are processing it together. So it's not logical. It doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, your coworker is not going to try to fight you, but your brain is like, oh my God, something's wrong. We need to put up all of our defenses. And so that's what happens. And that's the reason why triggers exist. But let's talk about how to train your nervous system in real time when these things actually start to happen.

8:37Okay, so we need to really understand what's going on in those moments. We understand kind of like our brain's getting flooded, our body's getting flooded. What do we do when we're stuck in those actual situations? How do we go from reactive and shaken up and ready to blow up on somebody to calm and cool and grounded? How do we get ourselves from fight or flight, which is our sympathetic nervous system, into our parasympathetic nervous system, which is calm and grounded? This is where the real work begins. And yes, it is work. It's not easy. It's not fast. It's not a one-time fix-all type of thing.

9:19You're literally reprogramming your entire life's worth of patterns. A pattern that your brain and body are so used to going down that you don't even have to think about it. It's just automatic. So it's work. But believe me, this work is really worth it. I would rather put in the hard work now so that I can have a more calm life for the rest of my life. And so let's talk about the tools and strategies to do this, okay? These are the tools that I would use mid-trigger that are not just theory, okay? Tool number one, which is actually I combine two tools together in tool number one, is this. The six-second pause and anchoring to your body, okay?

10:00So the six-second pause and anchoring to your body. I like to put both of them together because I think that they should be together, okay? When your brain is spinning, don't argue with your thoughts. There's no logic anymore. That's a losing battle. What you need to do is get out of your brain and you need to get into your body. Before you react, you need to pause for six seconds. Before you do anything, your spouse does something that you've talked to them about 45 times and you don't want them to do again before you explode. Pause for six seconds. remove yourself go to the bathroom whatever it is you need to do why six seconds that's how long it takes for your fight or flight chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline to start metabolizing in your body and so remove yourself from the situation when you feel like you want to you know throw a glass or whatever it is that you do that crazy shit that happens when you go nuts right go to the bathroom remove yourself from the situation take three to six deep breaths you want to go in through the nose and then hum on the way out as long as you possibly can.

11:09Humming stimulates your vagus nerve, which tells your body we're safe now. So that's the first thing you do. Then you want to try this. You want to feel anything that you can feel, right? Because your brain is always somewhere else. Your body's always in the present moment. So you want to anchor yourself into your body. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel the temperature of the room on your skin. Put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly and watch what it feels like to have your breath go in. And then when you hum out, what the vibration feels like going through your chest cavity. In these moments of high stakes, the most powerful person in the room is the one who can pause and choose how they want to react, not the person who reacts the fastest.

11:55So once again, first thing is you're going to get six second pause and you're going to anchor yourself into your body. The next thing that you're going to do is called name it to tame it. It's from Daniel Siegel, who is a professor of psychology at UCLA. This is his tactic that he chooses and teaches. So when emotion floods the body, your emotional brain takes over. Protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, right? You need to bring your thinking brain back on, but after you end up doing the six seconds and bringing yourself back into your body. Then we need to bring our thinking brain back on.

12:32The fastest way to bring your thinking brain back on is by naming what you're feeling. And the reason why this works is because labeling emotion literally shifts activity from the amygdala, which is the fear part of your brain, to the prefrontal cortex. So you're labeling what you're feeling. So an example would be, you're going to say out loud to yourself, you know, I'm noticing my anger is rising. I feel overwhelmed and anxious. My chest is tight and I can feel heat in my face. So you're literally naming what you're feeling. You're saying what you're feeling out loud. It sounds simple. It sounds ridiculous, but this causes your brain to separate you from the emotion, which is super important.

13:22So you don't get so attached to what you're feeling. It's separating you from what you're feeling so that you don't identify with what you're feeling. So it stops you from identifying yourself as the emotion and you actually start to observe it. So you need to just, what you're doing here is you're just creating a little bit of space in your mind between you and the emotion instead of identifying with that emotion. So like a metaphor to remember is you're not the storm. You're just the one who's watching the storm. That's what we're trying to do here. Okay. And so if you want to repattern over time, so it becomes default, calm doesn't mean that you're just so you know, it doesn't mean you're never going to be triggered ever again.

14:02It means that you have, you actually learn to recover faster. Like you recognize, oh yeah, it's that pattern again. Like I don't, I don't want this to happen. And I'm not going to let it drive the car. And so you're building what's called interoceptive awareness. Interoceptive awareness is your ability to notice your inner state before it takes over. This is a superpower. Most people don't have this awareness. They have no clue what's going on in their brain, in their body, and they are just reacting. You want to build this skill within yourself, the ability to notice your inner state before everything just takes over.

14:42So here's the magic of it. The more that you practice noticing, you practice pausing, and you practice choosing how you want to feel, the more your brain rewires itself to have that be its default. Neuroplasticity is real. You can literally reshape your stress response. Once again, it's not like the first or second or third time that you do it. You have to do it over and over and over again. You're trying to change a pattern since childhood, okay? So let's end with this. what if your greatest superpower isn't found in being louder or commanding the room or being more aggressive or being faster?

15:18What if your greatest superpower is you being the calmest person in the room? Because in my mind, that's real self-mastery, being the calmest, most centered person in the room. It doesn't mean that you never get scared. It doesn't mean that you never get angry or triggered or overwhelmed, it means that you've trained your nervous system to trust that you know how to bring yourself back to center. And so the next time that you feel, you can feel it when you're about to, you're triggered, you can feel it coming on, right? You feel that heat in your chest, the spike in the thoughts, you wanting to get angry at somebody, you wanting that urge to lash out or to run away or to shut down, pause, six seconds, feel it, and then name it.

16:07And then remind yourself, I'm safe now. I'm not being threatened. I can slow down and I am going to choose how I feel. And if you do that over and over and over again, you start becoming a calmer person than you ever have been. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories. tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

16:40Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.