What to do when SH*T hits the fan

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 around neurology, psychology, early childhood development, how all of those things come together to make you who you are. And so if you're looking to learn who you are, to grow yourself, to improve yourself, to improve your life, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any more episodes. Today, I'm going to teach you what to do when shit hits the fan. And basically, I'm going to explain it with my own life, how I use this the other day.

0:41And this is kind of like an SOS plan. I think it's important for every person who's out there to create an SOS plan, which is when my day goes off the rails, I will do this. Because just because you have a bad morning or a bad moment doesn't mean that it has to be a bad day. Any day can be saved depending on how you show up in those moments. And so, you know, it's great because now that we have a newborn, I feel like I'm getting all of these, all of this great content where the universe is trying to trigger me and show me where I need to grow and get better and lessons, which is in turn creating better podcast episodes in my mind.

1:20So the other night I didn't get to bed at the normal time because the baby just decided he did not want to go to sleep. And normally what happens is we go to bed earlier and then Lauren usually wakes up twice throughout the night to feed him. Um, she pumps and then at, um, you know, five 30, she usually wakes me up and I feed him and, uh, she goes back to bed and she sees for another four or five hours. And so I usually take them in the mornings, run my morning huddles with him, with the team, all of that stuff. So the other night, Lauren woke me up or the morning, I guess, Lauren woke me up at five 30 to feed the baby.

1:54And, uh, normally what I do is I feed him and burp him. And usually I'm able to go back to sleep after, put him back to sleep. We go back to sleep in the nursery for, you know, usually another hour to an hour and a half is what I get. So I get, you know, pretty decent amounts of sleep. For some reason, the night before, he didn't want to go to sleep. So we went to bed late. The morning that I woke up at 530, he didn't want to go back to sleep after eating like he normally does. So he just wanted to party all morning. And so there was no falling back asleep for me. And he falls asleep in his bassinet.

2:25And usually the only way that he'll, you know, he'll fall asleep is if somebody's holding him and then you put him down. anytime I put him down he ended up wanting to you know cry so that I would pick him back up and hold him and so um so I was up from 5 30 on with very little sleep and I run a morning huddle with my entire team at 9 a.m and so normally what I do is I feed him right before and then he sleeps out throughout the entire thing on this day he decided hey I want to be part of the morning huddle I don't want to fall asleep this time. And at 915, I'm just going to pee on you. And so 915, I'm running the team meeting.

3:04He pees, somehow it gets out of, you know, so much it leaks out. So I'm sitting there in the morning huddle running it for, you know, 25 people. And I've got pee on my shirt for another 45 minutes. And then he just decides because he's got pee on him, he's going to start crying and he's not having a great morning. He's not. And for some reason this morning, the mute button on my Zoom is not working. So since 530, everything that could go wrong has basically gone wrong. And then, you know, my trainer gets there at 9 a.m. The person in our family is supposed to come in and watch him and be there at 10, doesn't get there till 1030.

3:43So I've got to figure out a way to go and get my work at and have him there. He's crying. He's hungry. just shit is just hitting the fan and it's all over the walls basically is the way that this morning is going and i want to tell you this just because you're having a bad morning doesn't mean that you're going to have to have a bad day and so um so i could feel myself throughout the the entire morning progressively getting more and more triggered right progressively like oh my god getting a little bit more angry a little bit more frustrated and the thing i love about life and all of us is people listen to this podcast and they're like, oh, this guy must have it all figured out.

4:20He must be perfect because he's the mindset mentor. No, that's not me. I'm a guy who's just been working on himself for 19 years and I just continue to keep having ways that God or the universe or life shows me where I'm not free, where I'm triggered so that I can figure out ways to get better at it. And the more that I learn about myself and I start to work through these things and figure out what works, I like to teach it so I can help you guys get through it as well. and I can feel my nervous system really getting all out of whack. And I want to tell you this, if you can feel it, other people around you can feel it as well.

4:53If you can feel your nervous system starting to get really unregulated, a little bit crazy, and you feel stressed, you feel anxious, whatever it might be, I guarantee you other people can feel it as well. And one of the greatest gifts that you can give this world is a regulated nervous system. People can sense it when they're around you, when your nervous system is all out of whack, when you're stressed, when you're anxious, when you're mad, when you're sad, whatever it might be. People can feel it. And they might not be able to even consciously be aware of it, but they can subconsciously sense what's going on with you, that something's not right.

5:30And they might think that it's your problem. They might think that it's something that they did wrong, but they can definitely tell when talking to you that something is wrong. and you might think that you hide it very well, but I'm just telling you, you don't. You don't. None of us do because it's not about hiding it. It's not the conscious mind kind of thing. It is the way that our bodies interact with each other. And so this morning's going on and I have a lot going on and it's about 1230, one o 'clock-ish on this day. And Lauren comes up to me and she's like, how are you doing? And I was like, it's just one of those days.

6:08And, um, and I realized in that moment in my response, I was like, that's not how I want to show up for her. And that's not how I want to show up for anybody else around me. That's not how I want to show up for my son that I'm just, you know, disconnected. So I kind of told her what was going on and just, you know, let her know. And, um, and I was like, this isn't, but I don't want to feel this way. Um, cause I don't want to show up for you this way. I also don't want to show up for our son this way because I know, you know, there's studies that prove that a baby's newborn, especially a newborn, but a baby's nervous system is learning how to operate from the nervous systems of their primary caretakers.

6:45And so if my nervous system is all out of whack, it's going to be communicating with his nervous system that is learning the world through my nervous system. You know, they basically say that there's three trimesters that a baby has. And there's a fourth trimester, which is the four months or the three months after they come out of the womb. So he's still in that period. So I'm thinking to myself, I need to regulate this shit. I need to really get it together. I need to calm myself down. And so Lauren did this thing that we do. And when we notice, and this is a tip I'm really going to give a lot of you guys, if you have children, if you have a spouse, if you have a significant other parents that you're close to, is our nervous systems regulate each other's nervous systems.

7:28and I'll actually give you some studies to prove this to you. So what she did is when we noticed that our nervous systems are not regulated the way we want them to be is we give each other a long hug. It's a belly-to-belly, at least 30-second hug. And this is something that we do to help each other regulate our nervous systems. We've been doing it for about nine years now. And a lot of times when you don't feel connected, this is good for when your nervous system's out of whack, but it's also really good for if you don't feel connected to your partner. Maybe you've had, you're both busy. You both have a whole lot of stuff going on and it doesn't feel like you're fully connecting.

8:00One of the best things you can do is to actually do a belly to belly hug for at least 30 seconds and then do deep breathing. What actually happens is your nervous system and their nervous system will start to link up and calm each other down. Your heart rates will start to link up and slow down and your breath will actually link up and slow down as well. So it activates what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you've been listening to podcasts long enough, the sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight. That's what I was on all day long when all that stuff was happening. The parasympathetic nervous system is like calm, sleep, restore, and kind of, you know, just, yeah, calm is the best way of putting it.

8:41So when you do these belly-to-belly hugs, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It synchronizes both of your heart rates. It synchronizes and slows down both of your breathing patterns. and it also releases oxytocin which is you know called the cuddle chemical it's the chemical of love and so when you do this 30 second or more which if you get nothing else from this podcast episode just do 30 second hugs with your significant others and your children more often

9:13but you know basically what happened was that all of that happened i started to calm my nervous system down this is what i do with her whenever i notice that her nervous system's out of whack. We've been doing it for a really long time at this point. And then what I did was I slid some things around. I looked at my schedule and I was like, I'm not going to have a crazy morning affect the rest of my day. I was like, I've still got a good amount of the day. And so I slid some things around in my schedule because it is that important to me to slide things around, to regulate my nervous system, to change the way that I'm showing up.

9:45So I changed some things. I slid some things around in my schedule and I did a 20 minute break. I found 20 minutes that I could slide in my schedule. And I went onto YouTube and I did breath work. And I do breath work on YouTube every single morning, at least once. And guess what? That morning, I wasn't able to do it. I was like, oh, I forgot to do this. Everything was going crazy. So it's deep inhales, deep exhales. And it's three rounds of it with, you know, breath holds and all that stuff. But with every long breath hold that you do, when you eventually breathe it back out, you hum or you om.

10:21So it's either with your mouth closed or it's with your mouth open. Why would you want to do the humming or the oming? Well, there's been many studies that have shown that the humming or the oming actually changes your internal state as well. So there's a study that investigated the impact of chanting OM, just for as long as you possibly can, they had the people who did the OM and they had people that were just a control group that did not. And the people who did the OM chanting showed significant reductions in their heart rate and perceived stress levels compared to the control group. And the repetitive sound vibrations during the chanting found to promote relaxation and a calm state of mind.

11:15Then what they did was they did MRIs, functional MRIs, to observe their brain activity while they were doing the OM chanting. And the OM showed to increase activation in areas of the brain that were emotional regulation, and they reduced the activity in the limbic system, which is linked to stress and anxiety. so they found basically that om chanting can help induce a state of calm by modulating the brain regions that were involved with stress responses so if you also get nothing else besides the 30 seconds whenever you get stressed just do a whole bunch of humming or a whole bunch of oming the vibration of the oming or the humming also stimulates what's called the vagus nervous system and the vagus nerve system, the vagus nerve, excuse me, is a critical part of the parasympathetic nervous system.

12:07And so it stimulates with the movement inside of your throat and inside of your body, it stimulates the vagus nerve, which is a really big part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the calm, cool, collected, chill side of your nervous system. So this is really important for all of us to know is that when shit hits the fan, we can still save ourselves. And so the idea is when we find ourselves in a state of stress, in a state of fight or flight, how do we bring ourselves back to calm, cool, collected? Well, this is really important for everyone to really have a plan with, is to have an SOS plan.

12:45When I notice myself feeling this way, here's how I'm going to get myself back to the state I want to be in. Because when you're in that state, you're not thinking clearly when you're that stressed out. You're not. and there's studies that show that when you're stressed out, when your emotions are high, your logic is low and it actually turns off blood flow, major amounts of blood flow to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, which is the executive functioning, the thinking parts of your brain. So you're not thinking clearly whenever you feel this way. And so you can't really say, oh, I don't have enough time.

13:21Make time. You will be better for it and you will show a better for others as well. You know, and for me, like, I'll just kind of tell you this for the rest of the day after I did that 20 minute session, and I gave myself the space, I was a different person. And everything was back to just that feeling, there's no words for it. It's just the feeling of like, it's just a deep breath, right? And the important thing for me is, is it got me back to my normal state of thinking, which is I believe personally that life, God, the universe, whatever it is out there is on my side. I believe that I will not be given more than I can handle.

14:00And when I'm in those stressed out states, I'm like, I don't know if I can handle it. I've gotten those. I don't know if you get those feelings of like, oh my God, this is just too much for me. Right. But it got me to calm, cool, collected. I could start thinking well, everything was starting to work right. And I realized like, Hey, your life is amazing. Like you've got, this is just a, just a tiny little speed bump. You will not remember this day in five years. You won't remember these little teeny tiny speed bumps in five years. And you know, I won't be given more than I can handle. And when it's a day, like it was the other day, it's, you know, it's, it's basically like life adding a couple plates on the mental barbell to help me grow and get stronger mentally.

14:42So if I trust that life, whatever it is that's out there, that's, that's kind of keeping this whole thing together is on my side, then it's not going to give me more than I can handle. So basically it's giving me this so that I can learn that I can grow, so I can mentally get stronger. So I can, I can use these things on myself and then go, you know what, this is something that I do. Maybe I should teach this in the podcast and hopefully help you guys. You know, I trust that I'm safe. I trust that everything's working out for me. And I believe there's something out there that's looking out for me.

15:10And so what happened was I did all this and it was a complete reset for me. I didn't let the first half of the day affect the back half of the day. I didn't let all those little teeny tiny things that were happening affect the back half of the day. And I started to have, it was a full reset. I was better at work. I was better around my, my team. I had great team calls. I was able to connect with my wife in between those calls and be present and not be a negative Nancy. I was able to take my son from her and be calm, cool, and collected and help him regulate his nervous system. And so I just want to bring this up for you guys to all understand, like when you start to have, like for me, I know I got to go to breath work and I've got to go to the Oming.

15:49Like that just works for me. It might work for you. It might not. But what's important is that you find what works for you and you keep it like a tool in your tool belt. So when stuff does go a little bit crazy, you can kind of bring yourself back to the state that you want to be in so that you can make the right decision so that you can be is present so that you're not affecting other people in a negative way around you and also so that you're not a negative Nancy. 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 RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R.

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17:24And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission, to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.