Why did nobody teach us this?

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast, the number one mindset podcast in the entire world. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you live in the United States or Canada and you want to receive inspirational text messages from me sporadically throughout the week, go ahead and text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, well, today's episode is going to be titled, Why Did Nobody Teach Us This? Why the hell were we never taught this? And what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about how to become a better, calmer, more centered, less triggered, less anxious version of yourself.

0:52Sound pretty good? I'm going to give you five different tips to how to be better, calmer, less anxious, more, less triggered, more centered version of yourself. And a little bit ago, I talked real quickly about self-soothing in an episode. and I got a ton of responses from people being like, can you talk more about it? Like you just kind of brushed over it. So here we are. Now we're going to talk about it today. What we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about the act of self-soothing. And so what I want you to understand is that self-soothing is something that, that I guess you could say animals naturally do, but it's kind of programmed out of us as adults.

1:33It's kind of programmed out of us as children. And as adults, we, you know, don't know how to self-soothe. We were never taught it. And the reason why we were never taught is because nobody ever, our parents didn't know this and no one ever really talked about up until recently. So self-soothing, I'll give you a good example, is a simple way of thinking is the act of being able to bring yourself back to homeostasis, back to calm, centered state after being triggered in some sort of way. It's a reset to your nervous system. So So, you know, there's a couple of things that are really interesting that I want you to understand when you look at other animals versus humans.

2:14So there's a video, there's two separate videos you can watch on YouTube if you want to. One of them is called Polar Bear Trauma. You can look it up and you can actually see there's this video of years ago. There's these guys where they're studying polar bears. And so in order to study polar bears, they have to get in a helicopter and they have to shoot it with a tranquilizer gun so they can get close to it and they can start to study it, right? And the polar bear is still awake. It's just kind of calmed down. And what's really interesting is the polar bear does this really crazy shake. Like it's basically convulsing.

2:43And the guy says, just give it a second. It'll eventually take a really deep breath and then it'll calm down. And so it's doing all this convulsing. And then it goes and takes this really deep breath, stops convulsing. And the story's taking really deep breaths and kind of calming down. and you're able to see the triggered heightened state of anxious, everything that it's feeling is basically being shake, like shooken, shook, shooken, shook out of the body, I guess you could say, shook out of the body. Then there's another video and the other video is an Impala and it's an impala who is attacked by a cheetah and it's the cheetah's got it in its grasp and then something happens off camera you can't see what it is but the cheetah ends up letting go of the impala and running away and the impala sits there on the ground for a couple minutes and then it sits up and it does the exact same thing it starts convulsing and what both of those animals are doing and just so you know the impala convulses for a little while and then stands up and runs away.

3:47Both of those animals are releasing and removing the trauma, the emotion, everything that comes from that state of holy shit, I'm about to die basically, which if you look at that chemically, that's cortisol, that's adrenaline, it's removing it from the body. And this is something that children do. Children literally do this, but we program it out of them to stop doing it. So if you ever see a child that doesn't get what they want, their emotions will go crazy and they will throw a temper tantrum. They will freak out. You know, they might freak out when you don't want them to in the middle of Target, but they freak out in some sort of way.

4:25And that is their way, a child's way of self-soothing and getting the emotion out of them so that therefore they can go back to homeostasis. The only problem is we program that out of children. And now we have adults, 25, 45 year old adults that don't know how to move emotion through their body because they were taught that it wasn't right when they were a kid. And so self-soothing is something that we know how to do. It is built into us. It's why children like pacifiers is because that's another form of self-soothing in some sort of way. So basically what it is, is it is a heightened state in some sort of way and then bringing yourself back to homeostasis.

5:04It is a reset to the nervous system. And so with our triggering, we can be triggered in many different ways. we can be our triggering can be anger it could be rage it could be sadness it could be fear it could be uh being anxious it could be depressed and the first thing i want you to understand with with all of those things the rage the anger the sadness suppression all of the things i just said there is nothing wrong with those emotions at all emotions are emotions and should never be uh should never feel like they're wrong um they should always but the thing is they should always be expressed because if they're not expressed and they are repressed, it will turn into a depression, right?

5:45Make express, not repressed. Express that is repressed turns into a depression in some sort of way. And so we're not talking about trying to bypass all the emotions that are quote unquote, society would say are bad or lower vibrational ones. They're not bad. They just are what they are, but we don't want to live there. We don't want to bring that into our natural state. The problem is when someone has anxiety and that anxiety doesn't leave them. It's all day long.

6:21You'll hear in episodes that I have coming out with a therapist, a couple different episodes coming out, and she actually talks about how anxiety is a good thing. I've had episodes about how anxiety is a good thing. But when it becomes a chronic anxiety, that's when it becomes a problem. And so we want to develop some sort of strategy to bring ourself back home and back to a place of that feeling of just calm, centered, peaceful. And, you know, I gave an example not long ago where we try to self-soothe in a way where we bring external substances, exogenous substances to ourselves where, you know, you might have a really shitty day at work and your boss was triggered you or your, your coworkers were just a bunch of little shits, right?

7:10And you come home after a really long, stressful day. And what you do is you drink wine to take the edge off. And in reality, you've got to ask yourself, why is the edge there in the first place? and is there a way that I could bring myself back to calm and centered and develop a process that doesn't require something like alcohol because a glass of wine or a cigarette or scrolling on social media or playing video games are actually forms of numbing more than anything else and because of the fact that adults were never taught how to self-soothe and so we search for external substances, exogenous substances, in order to be able to soothe us in some sort of way.

7:55And, you know, like a glass of wine, I've got nothing against wine. I love wine. I think it's great. We go to Italy. I drink wine all the time when I go to Italy. A glass of wine, although it's amazing, it's the easy way. There's no growth from being triggered and having a glass of wine to try to calm me back down. There is growth from being triggered and then figuring out a way to bring yourself back to the place that you want to be in so that you can get yourself there quicker next year, a year down the road, two years, three years, five years down the road. You know, what would be better than having a glass of wine?

8:24Maybe going for a run to get the extra energy out, the triggered energy, the same way that the polar bear and the Impala both have to remove energy from them. Instead of holding on to that energy and then numbing that energy with a glass of wine or a cigarette, whatever it might be, it's how do I take this energy in the same way that those animals did, remove the energy, going for a run to get out the extra energy. figuring out some sort of way maybe doing some push-ups maybe going into your room and screaming as loud as you possibly can into the pillow and punching the bed and just getting that energy out of you in some sort of way really what it comes down to is kind of like an adult temper tantrum because as a child that's what we we naturally knew how to do and it was programmed out of us don't go and beat somebody else up that's not what i'm saying but do it in a safe place where you're not injuring yourself, you're not injuring other people, you could go to the gym, you could figure out some sort of way to go on a long hike if you want to, to get the energy that is inside of your body out of you so that it doesn't turn into some sort of problem in the body.

9:29And then what you can do after the run, after the workout, after the screaming, whatever it is, is sit there and do a quick 15-minute guided meditation and try to bring yourself back to a calm and centered state. Maybe journal a little bit and journal about why were you triggered, what came from it. And I realize that it's a lot sexier to have a glass of wine. It's a lot easier to have a glass of wine. They're not sexy. They are harder to actually go and do this. Having a glass of wine is a lot easier and a lot sexier than deciding that you're going to go for a three-mile run. but the glass of wine doesn't change anything.

10:09You're still the same person when you sober up tomorrow and you didn't learn anything about yourself. And so you haven't grown in any sort of way. You're the exact same person mentally tomorrow as you were today which means the exact same things that triggered you today are going to trigger you tomorrow and you're going to have to go for some exogenous substance to make yourself feel better versus being able to do it in the moment and training your brain, your body, and your nervous system to soothe. And so I'm going to give you a few different examples of self-soothing. that can kind of help you in different ways, depending on what the situation is.

10:39One of them, obviously, you know, I'm going to bring this one in, it's meditation. Meditation in some sort of way. But what I prefer is conscious breathing with meditation. And so this conscious breathing can be, you know, six deep breaths, and you could do six deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. Your exhale is longer than your inhale, and you allow that to kind of get you into your meditation. It could be Wim Hof in actual real breath work and doing three rounds of it. It could also be like Wim Hof doing three rounds of breath work. And if you don't know what that is, Wim Hof is a guy.

11:14You can just go onto YouTube, type in Wim Hof breath work. You can actually do a 15, 20 minute session, do three rounds of it, and then do as many pushups as possible. All of these allow you to get out of your head and into your body and allow yourself to release some of that energy in some sort of way. And so there's definitely breath work. I do breath work at least two to three times a day. I do it every single morning for about 10 to 20 minutes in the beginning of my meditations. And then I do a meditation after it because I find that when I do breath work, I'm way more calm, I'm way more centered and my meditations end up being way better.

11:48When I don't do breath work before meditation, I usually just think about other shit that I have to get done for the day. Like it ends up being really hard sometimes. So meditation and breath work with meditation can be a really great way of self-soothing. So if you have, you know, a hardcore thing at work happens, you get fully triggered by your boss, go into your office, shut your door and go onto YouTube, type in 10 minute breath work and take 10 minutes just to recenter yourself and get yourself back to where you need to be. So that's the first one. Second thing that I really love for self-soothing as well is music.

12:22Music can really help you self-soothe. Music changes your state extremely fast. and so what I prefer is getting headphones, closing my eyes and listening. So like when I get triggered, there's two songs I've mentioned before and I wanna bring myself back to kind of a calm centered state. There's one song that's called Weightless by Marconi Union and I listened to that and like the other day, I was super triggered by something and I was on my drive home and it was like a 12 minute drive and I was triggered and I was like, I'm gonna put this song on and I listened to it for the entire 12 minutes and as I was listening, I was just deep inhales, deep exhales.

12:59I got back to my house, felt fine, felt amazing. So Weightless by Marconi Union is one. And the other one that I really love, I don't know why, is the Out of Africa theme song. Those are two that you could steal, or if you have your own song, you can do that. But music is a really great way to bring yourself back. The third one is some sort of movement. It's your pick. It can be upbeat, it can be slow movement, It could be jumping jacks. It could be pushups. It could be an entire workout. It could be dancing. It could be going for a run. It could be doing pull-ups. It could be all of those, or it could be yoga.

13:33It could be stretching. It could be moving very slowly in some sort of way. It could be literally just standing up and shaking everything for 30 seconds, exactly the same way that the polar bear and the Impala both do. It's a way of getting that cortisol and that adrenaline and that stress out of your body and being like, this does not live here and I'm not going to keep it inside of my body. It's getting yourself back into your body, removing all the stress, the anxiety, whatever it is that triggered you, the anger and taking those emotions and those hormones and pushing them out so that you can therefore get yourself back to calm.

14:10Next one, it's a really good one is actually tapping the body and tapping different parts of your body. So for me, what I prefer to do is actually standing up and literally taking my fist and smacking different parts of my body and just getting your literally your entire body. I do this at least once a day and I usually do it before I work out too. And so I literally take it and what you're doing is you're trying to get the blood flow to all parts of your body. and if you just stand up and set your timer for three minutes and you take your both your fists and just lightly or hard however you want to tap every single part of your body from your feet all the way to the top of your heads you get your ears you get the top of your head you get your neck you get your shoulders you get your every single part of your body what you'll realize is that you're actually moving energy through your body and so tapping is a really great way to do it as well and really a great way to get yourself back into your body and then the fifth one which is the fastest out of all of them is, you know, I recommended breathing in number one with, uh, with the meditation.

15:09But the fifth one is something that's called a physiological side and a physiological side. It's real interesting. Cause I used to hear my wife do these all the time. I still hear him do her, hear her do them all the time, but I never noticed another person doing them before. Uh, but it's just like a natural thing that we do like multiple times an hour and it's two quick breaths in and one longer breath out. So it's just basically that's it it's just and i heard my wife do it for years and i was like it's so crazy she always does this and then i listened to andrew huberman and he was talking about this thing called a physiological sigh and it's just basically a way for your body to release cortisol adrenaline you do this all day long and it's how your body releases extra co2 and adrenaline and you can make yourself do it on purpose so if you're just sitting there and you notice yourself stress something coming up it's just, you can do that a couple of times.

16:02You actually start to notice with the extra unneeded CO2 being released from your body, your body starts to release and be a little bit more relaxed. And so that's like the fastest way to do it if you want to, is a physiological sigh. But really what it comes down to, and the most important part that I want you to understand is this, emotion is not bad. Emotion is something that needs to be expressed. It needs to be moved out of the body. We need to release it. We need to have tools to release it. And these are all ways to release and to let yourself let go of it. There's other things that you can do to help yourself.

16:34But besides what I just said, there's, you know, smells, there's baths, there's journaling, there's building your self-awareness. There's a lot of different things, but really what it comes down to, and the point I want you to really get from today's episode is that there are ways to bring yourself from a heightened state down to a calm state. One of the, another easy way to do it, I was about to sign off, but I'll just give you another extra tip because it popped in my head, is do a workout and get yourself to a heightened state. And then in your 60-second or 90-second break, try to see how much you can calm yourself down.

17:05Like calm yourself hardcore. And so this is one tip that I got from my friend who's a body worker and breath worker, is to get yourself to a really heightened state in a workout and then try to calm yourself down as quick as possible. And then get yourself to a really heightened state and calm yourself down as quick as possible. And so sometimes what I'll do is I'll lift as heavy as I possibly can for a set, and then I'll close my eyes. And for 90 seconds, I'll close my eyes. I'll put on calm music, and I will literally just try to breathe and get myself back to as calm as possible. And then I'll get myself to an extremely heightened state again and then try to calm myself back down.

17:39And I'm basically building up the reps of heightened state to self-soothe, heightened state to self-soothe, heightened state to self-soothe, and you can use your workouts to be able to help you with this as well. So I guess I gave you six tips because that one just popped into my head as well. But really what I want you to get out of it is there is a way to bring yourself back to calm, to centered, to homeostasis. So that therefore, once you start building this up, you can get yourself back to calm and centered quicker, but you also just don't react to things as much as you used to. So that's what I got for you for today's episode.

18:08If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. and with that I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode make it your mission to make someone else's day better I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day