The nervous system regulation is not a pile of biohacks.
It's not doing the right breathwork over here, or the cold plunge over here, or taking the chamomile tea to soothe your nervous system.
Your brain and body are in a continuous conversation, determining safe or unsafe.
It's making those determinations based on emotional experiences, based on relational experiences, based on past interpretations.
This is a conversation of information, past, present, and future.
So, have you ever felt like your body was almost working against you?
Like, no matter what you tried, those nagging physical symptoms or mental roblox, it just won't go away.
Maybe you've explored all the usual remedies, diet, exercise, therapy, but nothing seemed to provide lasting relief.
What if there was an often overlooked system within you?
One largely ignored that held the keys to unlocking radiant health and a sense of agency and control, a system that, when dysregulated, also wreaked havoc on your mind and body, but when balanced, really allowed you to soar?
In today's really fascinating conversation, Jennifer Mann and Cardin Robin, co -authors of the book The Secret Language of the Body, regulate your nervous system, heal your body, free your mind.
They break down an often overlooked factor, driving chronic health issues.
Nervous system dysregulation.
So, Jennifer is a mind -body practitioner who used trauma -informed methods to completely recover from severe chronic fatigue after being bedridden for over a year.
Today, she leads a community of over 100 ,000 helping others do the same.
And Cardin is an expert in nervous system medicine, who spent 15 years combining bodywork, brain retraining, and somatic trauma therapies.
He has helped thousands globally heal from chronic pain and illness.
Together, they run the chronic fatigue school, sharing their approach for regulating the nervous system to help address chronic conditions.
In this conversation, Jennifer and Cardin peel back the curtain on the pivotal role your nervous system plays in your health.
You'll learn what nervous system dysregulation really means, why it can be at the root of so many modern ailments, and most importantly, how to start rewiring your physiology using their powerful A .I .R.
technique. So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
The work that you've been doing is interesting and very of the moment.
It seems like the phrase nervous system has become a popular part of the conversation in a way that exceeds what most of us had sort of left behind.
We thought back in eighth grade or high school when we learned these terms in bio, and nervous system dysregulation has been this term that is popping up.
I'm talking about it.
I'm seeing it all over the place.
And I'm sure it's connected in a lot of different ways to what so many of us are feeling.
But take me into sort of like the context.
When we're talking about the nervous system in general, what are we talking about?
And then when we are talking about nervous system dysregulation, what are we talking about?
Yeah, so with the nervous system, and as you said, you've been seeing it everywhere, this language has really become part of the lingua franca like really quickly.
And what I've kind of observed, you know, having done this work with thousands of people is that whereas for 20 years of my career, I've been working in the mind body space, inviting people to be more into their felt body, so that they can work with their nervous system, with their health, with their
physiology. For some reason, this nervous system language rather than saying feel your body, which is a lot of what we do when we combine this concept of feeling your body with this theoretical framework that you have this brain and nervous system that is coordinating the body and what it's doing.
People are grasping their ability to influence their body and feel what's going on inside like never before this combination of language combination of a lot of the theories of how the nervous system is impacting your mental and physical health.
And then some of the really awesome therapeutic clinical interventions that we have that like work that people try them and it's like, Whoa, that wasn't like what I've done before.
That practice actually made me feel in a way that I haven't felt before, or that practice actually moved me out of anxiety into calm.
In a way where it's like, it's, I'm not unsure about it.
Like, I know, I feel different.
And then I think that that visceralness, that tangibility of the current wave of nervous system practices and somatics is what's making this take off at such a velocity.
But when we talk about nervous system dysregulation, I'll talk about what it is.
And I think why it's really landing for people.
Our organism's number one directive evolutionarily is don't die, right?
Like avoid danger, stay safe.
And second only to avoid danger, don't die is right is seek pleasure, seek food, procreate.
That's all it's doing.
I call it the prime directive.
It's the zeros and ones safer, unsafe, safer, unsafe, safer, unsafe.
And it's this beautiful evolutionary piece of machinery for determining that safer, unsafe.
But we just so happen that as a result of modernity, culture, stress, childhood, developmental wounds and actual traumas, this brain and nervous system that was exquisitely developed to determine safety or a lack of safety, basically for millions of years, it's not equipped to deal with a lot of the adversity that it's
facing now. And it gets tipped.
It gets tipped from a very early age, basically in being a in a pervasive state of non safety.
And in that pervasive state of non safety, which it was never meant to be in all the time, it was meant to visit states of stress and survival and return to equanimity.
Like most animals in nature, right?
Animals in nature live a very harsh life, but they're not living in a constant state of crisis.
They're going about their day, something bad happens, they have stress, and then they come back down.
It's not like that for a lot of human beings.
And so people's brain and nervous systems are being put in these states of stress and survival, where all the research shows us that being chronically stuck in these states compromises the brain and nervous system's ability to maintain healthy functioning, both in terms of thought, personality, and your
physical health. And so that's where this dysregulation comes up.
And I think another reason why it's really landing is that all of a sudden, instead of there being this mysterious set of ailments that people are dealing with, or instead of feeling to blame or at fault for certain thought patterns, or depressions, or issues that they can't quote fix, or that people
have said it's all in your head.
It's like, no, this isn't all in your head, and this isn't mysterious.
These are the logical outcomes and consequences of your nervous system being trapped and stuck in a state of survival perpetually that it was really never meant to do.
And we have a way out.
That pointing to the nervous system I feel like is almost a way to address a lot of mental and physical health gaslighting that's gone on for generations.
And now you're kind of saying that there's this thing inside of you that is centrally involved in all these things that you're saying or you're struggling with.
And it's not just quote in your head.
Jen, I know when we talk about this state of dysregulation also, how do we see this actually showing up in a very lived way in people's bodies and minds and lives?
And I know for you actually, this is personal as well.
Yeah, I love that question so much.
And through Cardin's answer as well, I was just navigating my own memories in my body of when sort of the nervous system concept landed.
And I was like, oh, wow, finally, I feel validated.
So to give you some context, I was a professional ballet dancer.
And from very early on, I trained in Pilates, Feldenkrais Yoga, and then I transitioned after an injury.
So my job through various types of movement therapies and massage and body -based therapies was to help people move better and feel better.
But there was always elements that were completely missing.
You know, people would come in and feel better with these practices that I'd studied from all kinds of backgrounds.
And they had a stressful day at work and nothing would help them.
So I myself started to experience a lot of symptoms in the body.
My body started to whisper before it screamed in 2019 with signs of fatigue, exhaustion.
And I was sort of in these cycles of burnout.
I would have pain in my body, but because of my military dance perfectionism, high achieving, a star student background, I was like, pain, pain is nothing.
I'm strong. I'm good.
I'm going to keep going.
So I actually went back to school to study biomedical sciences and then physiotherapy.
And it was in my second year of physiotherapy.
One day I woke up and I was in excruciating back pain after a movement I had done in yoga.
And then I sort of crashed.
So that was the beginning of what would be longer than a year in bed.
So my nervous system was experiencing a total shutdown and overwhelm in emotional, physical, physiological signals of, you know, what Cardin was saying, unsafe and threats.
And I was just going about my day and sort of going from one doctor to another before I crashed, not getting any answers.
This is why when I learned just like this concept of the nervous system really landed, everything started to come together.
So before I crashed, I was, you know, for my physical body, physiotherapy, you know, my injuries, pain that would come and go.
And then my anxiety, a psychologist, various types of therapy.
Over the years, I also used to have a really bad stutter.
I couldn't even speak for a few years.
And so I had a lot of context, but nobody was telling me how these things were connected.
And then when I crashed, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome with something that's called POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.
So my heart was doing all sorts of things, very scary things out of what seemed like nowhere, you know, not sleeping and saw me a pain in my body and just unable to get out of bed.
And so in this period of all types of doctors sort of telling me, oh, it might've been the Epstein -Barr virus you had when you were 18, like mono, what we know as mono.
It might've been because you grew up in Africa.
Maybe you had malaria too many times.
It might be, you know, all these things.
And I just knew in my body, you know, through my studies, but also just a little bit of that intuition that Cardin was talking about, I was like, but I sort of had this, you know, ongoing anxiety, unresolved trauma in my childhood that I was trying to resolve, but just not in a way that was affecting
my body. And so, you know, my glass was too full and anything that would go inside this glass was just overflowing.
And so that's when my body shut down and, you know, to answer your questions, those signs came a few years before that.
But I don't think that as human beings, we're driven enough to solve our problems until we're very sick, until our life gets interrupted, until we're stuck in bed, until we lose our job, until we have to change.
Then I think that maybe there's more, you know, like, wow, I think I really have to change some things and learn more about this.
So I think that nervous system regulation and dysregulation, and just like more of the general holistic understanding of how the mind and body are one and are connected at all times, there's no being alive without that, helps you as a human with your emotions, but also someone who experiences anxiety,
depression, chronic symptoms, to feel validated to feel like, oh, wow, okay, there's this intelligent system in my body that has come up with various ways to adapt, to help keep me safe, but now it's just too much.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right?
Because what you're describing is, I think what so many people have experienced at different parts in their lives, which is, like, some cocktail of, quote, non -specific, you know, like, well, specific symptoms with a non -specific root cause, or at least, like, the traditional medicine looks at it and says,
well, it could have been this, it could have been that, it could be this, it could be that, we don't really know, we can't zero in, there's no test that will let me clearly identify, like, what is the thing here?
So I can give you the right, the prescription, or do you the pill, or go to the therapist, and yet, so many of us are walking around with our version of that.
And sometimes it comes, sometimes it goes, but oftentimes, it never completely goes away, and you never get an answer.
And it just becomes something that so many people just, kind of, quote, deal with or live with.
And yet, yeah, just accepting that, well, you know, maybe I'm getting older, life's just stressful, things are complicated, the world is what it is, yes, to all of that.
And at the same time, maybe we don't actually have to just succumb to these things.
And what you're describing is, there is actually this system that underlies and touches every single one of these symptoms that if we actually start to understand how it functions, and how it sometimes goes off the rails, maybe addressing that actually ripples out to speak to and ameliorate all these
different things that seem on the outside to us to be disconnected, does that land as being accurate?
Totally. And Jonathan, I haven't mentioned the best part, which I'm sure we'll unravel with, you know, various conversations on here, but I fully recovered and it didn't take years or months or, you know, even weeks, it took a few days to get me out of bed.
And then another few days for my system to come back online.
And I was walking, I was going back to the supermarket, my pain was gone.
And then, you know, it took some time for my entire system to recalibrate and learn the new normal over time.
But that's just, just the power of this work.
And it's absolutely incredible.
And it's almost like you're describing like a reboot.
Yeah. It's a lot like a reboot.
And I know a lot of people that we interact with and the folks that we educate on this work, and rightfully so, after being stuck or in pain or suffering for a very long time, hearing a statement like days or weeks to reverse months or years of symptoms can seem really incredulous.
But the way I like to contextualize this is that if you've been bringing a carpenter in to try to solve a electronics issue in your house, right?
They have probably tried really hard many, many, many times for a long time to fix your light switch, but they don't know how wiring works.
And so they get that there's a problem and they're trying the tools that they have, but they're just not suitable to it.
You get someone who's trained in the proper skill you're looking for.
In this case, the electricity, they're like, oh, ding, ding, flip.
It's back on. And the velocity when you have the right therapeutic and theoretical model to fix, I mean, sorry, to address the dysregulated or symptom model, most proper therapies when addressing an appropriate issue, work quickly.
Like antibiotics work quickly.
If you are sick with a bacterial infection, and then they're like, oh, it's a bacterial infection.
And they like the ice wasn't working and the anti -inflammatories wasn't working and the x, y and z weren't working.
But it's like, oh, here's this antibiotic.
Oh, wow. We've gotten this person back from the brink of death in under 48 hours.
Moreover, when it comes to the nervous system, the velocity at which with the nervous system can make changes, positive or negative is is stunning, right?
You can feel perfectly fine, let's say out to dinner with your friends.
But then your psychotic ex partner walks into the restaurant, and you're concerned they're going to make a scene.
And instantaneously, your heart is starting to beat fast, your breath has contracted, you might have flushed in the face, your pupils have dilated, your gut might be starting to feel nauseous, you've the speed at which your nervous system will put you into a survival response is remarkable.
And similarly, the speed at which you can get health when you regulate the nervous system out of that place and back into a place of homeostasis, the switches are remarkably fast in the opposite direction.
And I want to get into a lot of the sort of like modalities and methodologies too.
So a lot of people are walking around with some sort of GI quote issue, and that kind of comes and goes.
It's been with them for weeks, months, years sometimes, and they've tried this, they've tried that.
How do you distinguish between something like that where you've got this sort of like symptom pattern, and you need the proper medication, the proper therapy, the proper intervention for that because there's some there's some pathology that's going to identify maybe it's a like a virus, maybe it's bacteria,
maybe it's a spirit key, whatever it may be.
And there's like a thing that you can take and resolve it, versus somebody where there's nearly identical symptoms that they're dealing with.
And the root cause is really much deeper.
It's like this is a nervous system issue.
How do you know when you just need the bandaid versus like the bigger reboot?
It is a important question.
And it's also a kind of I'm going to give a yes and sort of answer, meaning whether or not you can find and justify for example, with a test or some kind of measurement that you know, you've got SIBO, right, you got small intestine bacterial overgrowth, or a pathogen in your belly, whether you can find
that or not, one, it doesn't exclude the virtue of doing nervous system work to help treat that problem.
I'm just gonna say that like right out the bat, right?
We know that eating healthy and exercising are really intelligent things to do, to, let's say, support your immune system and help protect you from getting influenza in the winter season, in addition to getting, let's say, the vaccination or whatever medication you need when you want it.
So I simply want to say that the more you're working on your nervous system, the more you are prophylactically taking care of your health to deal with like a thing that you're just described there.
But the other thing is what we see so often is an inconsistency in symptom severity from population to population, regardless of like how much of a level of, let's say, parasitic overgrowth or SIBO they have.
So you'll have you'll have people who, who really have, let's say a ton, they've been living with parasites for 20 years, they're symptom free.
And then you have people who have maybe had just a small amount of parasites for a very short amount of time, and they're presenting very, very aggressively.
And from our nervous system point of view, what we see here is a nervous system that's regulated or dysregulated, which is impacting its capacity to actually heal or not heal manage or not manage a certain kind of digestional symptom.
Moreover, when it comes to the gut in particular, the leading cause of inflammation is stress.
Nothing causes inflammatory issues more than stress.
And so someone will say, Ah, I have this infection that's causing an inflammatory response.
But remember, the leading cause of inflammation is stress.
And so that's going to be contributing.
And moreover, there's all this thing about the enteric nervous system and the gut brain connection.
If you are in a state of survival, whether that be what we call active survival, the more sympathetic approach, which is governed by anxiety, or if you're in what we call the shutdown of the passive approach to survival, the dorsal vagal pathways, we can get more into that, which is more of the lack
of energy, depression, collapse phase, both of those nervous system states, depress and undermine your gut function, because your gut is intimately tied into your nervous system.
And most people are trying to improve their gut with food and thereby improve their brain function.
And very few people are trying to improve their gut function by regulating their nervous system, which yields wonders.
So I'd say it's a yes, and you can do it while you're doing it.
But often, we have people who have failed with functional medicine and other work for a decade.
And then the moment the nervous system is addressed, it can do what it's supposed to do, which is fight off infection, control bacteria and make the gut function again.
Gen, what would you add to that?
I have two main things that I want to share.
So one is one of the first things you learn in physio school.
And I know also in medical school, when you're looking at, you know, the top causes of death in the world, in terms of your health, and there's cardiovascular diseases like stroke and heart attack type two diabetes.
And even in the medical system that you know, has to categorize you in order for you know, you to have a prognosis and a path to recovery or management.
Even in a system like that, what it boils down to is what exacerbates what causes, you know, genes, environment, sort of load the gun, but stress and trauma pull the trigger.
So the root causes and the exacerbation of stroke and cardiovascular diseases in particular heart attack, stroke type two diabetes are rooted truly rooted in stress, like with the main thing is environmental factors and lifestyle factors.
And the way that you deal with your emotions can really, in a lot of cases mitigate a lot of the genes that you've inherited and the expression of those genes.
So it's really important, you know, my my friends and family have like had it up to here with me because, you know, anything that they say, Jen, what do you think you know, I have had this migraine now for like seven years and a mistest and and, you know, often my answer is it's so great that you've
done all the tests to rule everything out.
That's very important.
But how are your stress levels like and when we talk about stress, because that was a hot topic for many years.
And now it's like nervous system, we're talking about the same thing.
What is nervous system dysregulation?
It's a constant state of stress.
So your body is producing a physiology of stress.
And imagine talking about those GI symptoms.
Imagine, you know, a day where you're really nervous, maybe you have to talk on stage.
Imagine experiencing that level of stress every day, what's happening in your body every day, you know, you have gut issues, you can't digest your food, you're nauseous, you might have your bowel is behaving differently, your mind is behaving differently.
So when you look at it at the like longevity of the experience of stress and where most of these, you know, big things are coming from, it really is all about the foundation in our body and what the health of our nervous system is around, you know, the resilience and the expression of that health throughout
our whole mind and body.
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
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Cardin, you brought up a really interesting point as well in that, you know, sometimes we can actually point to something on a scan or a diagnostic test and say like, oh, like this is outside of the reference range.
This is not right. Like, I remember reading a study a number of years back that looked at a cross section of MRIs of the lumbar spine of folks who are in their 40s and 50s.
And something 30 or 40 % of them showed some level of disc bulge or herniation.
And yet there was zero correlation with pain.
But then if somebody walks in with pain in that region, then you take this, you know, you do the scan, then you're like, oh, I can point to this thing.
Like the immediate assumption used to be, well, this is the cause.
If we fix that thing, it'll go away.
And then so many people have actually had back surgeries and interventions of that thing.
It felt exactly the same.
And I think what a lot of the, you know, the medical industry is coming out to believe in like, oh, actually the correlation between identifiable symptomology or identify pathology and symptomology is often not nearly as linear as we think.
My second point is addressing exactly that.
So, um, I had a functional medicine practitioner and this information, it was just like your study.
And for me, as someone who's very analytical and critical, and also I'm not a black and white person, I can believe X my whole life.
And then if you tell me Z I will be open and say like, tell me more.
I have no problem with changing my beliefs.
So anyway, my functional medicine practitioner at the beginning of my chronic illness journey, you know, she was, um, sure that the reason of my chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia patterns in pain was because of mold exposure and Epstein Barr virus, uh, which kept coming up in my blood tests
as, you know, very high antibodies.
And out of curiosity, I asked my husband if he could do this, the full test, the same everything that I did.
So he did the full gut dysbiosis test, which tests the function of your gut in its entirety.
And then I got him to do the mold test and I got him to do the auto -immune and all viral, like essentially the capacity of your immune system.
And we got the results back and, um, his on all counts, except for one, which was the mold were worse than mine.
His gut dysbiosis was, um, his chart.
It's like a pie chart and it's red, orange and green.
Mine had a little bit of red, a bunch of orange and a bunch of green, and his was like 80 % red.
And my functional medicine practitioner who I very much admire, cause she, she's a very open mind and, you know, she's not like just supplements and she was like, this is incredible because, you know, I actually never test people who don't have symptoms.
So this is a first for me as well.
I have never done a test run these tests as a practitioner, as a doctor on healthy, on, you know, people who don't have symptoms.
So for me, that was such a huge eye opener.
And then I asked her like, where do we go from here?
Because my husband, he doesn't even know he had mono cause he sailed through it.
You know, he must have.
And yet his Epstein bar antibodies were so high, higher than mine from there.
She kind of paused and, you know, we rerouted and then actually moved away from, from functional medicine.
But whenever Cardin and I, you know, we have, as Cardin said, we've had thousands of clients now and a lot of people in the chronic illness journey go through functional medicine.
So that's just another example of how you can get fixated on the results of, you know, an MRI, an x -ray, or a test, a marker that isn't actually the cause of your symptoms of that particular pattern that you're experiencing.
And I just, I just have to jump on it to because that's exactly right from a functional med and to bring it back to you, Jonathan.
So this is part of the research you're citing.
I keep it really close.
And this is, you know, the American journal of neuroradiology in 2015.
And so what it studied was the prevalence of things like disc degeneration, disc bulge, disc protrusion, unular fissure, facet degeneration, and et cetera, in asymptomatic patients, meaning folks that are perfectly fine, just like Jen's husband.
And it was a sample set of 3 ,300 people.
And if I hope every listener feels good about this, if you are age 40, the prevalence of disc degeneration in you with no symptoms is 68 % of adults.
60 it's so it's not pathological, folks, the MRI brings it up, but it's not pathological.
It's normal aging. If you are 40, your likelihood of at least one disc bulge if you're healthy and have no symptoms is 50 % disc profusion, 33%.
By the time you're 60, disc degeneration is 88 % disc bulge 60, and so on.
And so it's not yours use the word linear, Jonathan, Jen and I go up to say, like most people who actually look at the science and the research, the orthopedic explanations for most chronic pain are not even scientifically based.
They're just they're just wrong.
When we're dealing with acute injury, like you got tackled on the football field and you have it, you know, that's very different.
But that's another measuring stick that we use here to determine, are we dealing with more or less exclusively a biological injury or or infection that is going to complete itself?
Well, yeah, that's an acute situation.
And the body heals almost any injury, including a disc fracture in about four months.
And so if you're still experiencing chronic recurring symptoms of pain or IBS, or migraines for more than three or four months, the likelihood of that having moved purely into being or largely being a result of nervous system dysregulation, as opposed to an implicit physiological problem is extraordinarily
high. So given all of this, and given that a lot of people are like, like joining us right now, are you going to be feeling stuff?
And now they're probably going to be like raising eyebrows and being, huh, I've tried x y and z and maybe it's worked a little bit here and there.
But like, I'm still not feeling the way I want to feel.
How do we then step into the world of the nervous system and do that reboot?
I know you've certainly developed an entire methodology around that.
So take me into how we start to think about this.
I'll keep it simple because we're on a pod, right?
And we don't have the whole book in front of us and we don't have the whole course in front of us.
But the first thing I want to say, you said they've tried this, they tried that, is that a pile of biohacks.
It's not doing the right breath work over here, or the cold plunge over here, or taking the chamomile tea to soothe your nervous system.
Your brain and body are in a continuous conversation, determining what we started out talking about safe or unsafe.
It's making those determinations based on emotional experiences, based on relational experiences, based on past interpretations of environmental experiences like, you know, getting called to the principal's office or having a deadline at work to its internal perception of things.
It's like, oh, the last time I got this virus, I got really sick, I need to mount an insane defense against this, giving someone a more acute response to that infection than someone else.
This is a conversation of information, past, present and future.
That's why we call it the secret language of the body and not do this and do that.
And so we simplify it into really three crucial steps.
And we call it the air approach, which is A I R.
The first is awareness.
And that's specifically, although we do deal with the mind and thoughts, it's honing your awareness to receive the physiological neurological messages that are actually being transmitted to you from your body.
For example, when someone's experiencing pots, that is a brain and a nervous system oscillating between survival states ordering the heart to do all sorts of things that are very confused and disorganized.
We have to learn to feel either the underlying anxiety, maybe the underlying frozen threat response that goes along with that symptom.
So the first step is awareness to really start understanding what's going on neurologically in terms of survival responses under symptoms.
And then we move on to the interruption phase.
That's the eye, the brain and the body, what agenda you love to say in order for them to change, you have to change something.
They resist change, they like to go with what's worked in the past.
And so you have to start interrupting old patterns.
And then finally, there's the R, which is redesign, which is introducing and learning new responses to previously threatening stimuli, so that the body is operating within what we call the window of tolerance, an optimal zone of being able to be aroused and de aroused of going into sympathetic and parasympathetic
without oscillating into survival modes.
I love you taking me deeper into this, and you spend a lot of time in each one of these in the book.
It's a really different context as well.
We started out with that A, awareness.
One of the things we talked about early on is this notion of listening, actually listening to the nervous system.
Take me deeper into what this is, how we do it and why it's so critical.
Hmm, Jonathan, so happy we can share this with your listeners.
Why listening is so important is the awareness will come when you know what you need to interrupt.
So it's not enough to just be like, Oh, I think I'm stressed right now.
Let me redirect my energy and do something so the stress goes away.
It's like, no, but how do I know that I'm stressed and what, cause my body will show and tell me stress in, believe it or not, not the same way that your body will Jonathan, which is why I had chronic fatigue syndrome and you might have headaches or IBS or other chronic back pain.
So what we teach in the book is something called base.
And base is just this really nice acronym to help you move through certain elements of, you know, what comes from your body into your mind and ways to interpret these signals that become not so secret when you know what they are.
So base stands for breath.
And when you start to tune into like, what is my breath doing right now?
Is it shallow? Is it moving fast?
Is it slow? Is it am I holding my breath?
How many times like right now, Jonathan or in all anyone who's listening right now, why don't you just take a moment to take the deepest breath you've taken all day, just right now.
So Jonathan, what do you feel now?
I mean, just a touch more settled.
That's such great information.
So tuning into your breath, whether you, you know, a great point to start for people is, well, I don't know how I'm breathing.
It's just take a deep breath.
And so that's just a nice way to connect you with your body.
And then you're a little bit more settled.
And then there's a for action, what action does your body want to take right now?
Does it want to lie down?
Is it like right now, the action that my body wants to take is just be open and engaged.
And I feel like having an open posture, I feel at ease parts of me are a little bit nervous, like what if Jonathan asked me something I can't answer.
But generally, the actions my body wants to take her to lean in to the conversation, I don't want to run away or hide.
So that tells me my nervous system right now is balanced, it's regulated, it's not it's not looking for protection, survival, it doesn't want to fight back or run away and hide or shut down.
And then we have S for sensation.
What are the sensations that are coming up through my body right now?
So for example, right now, I can feel a bit of tingling in my hands, I noticed that I was crunching my fingers as I was talking.
And as I tuned into the sensations, I was like, oh, holding a bit of tension in my hands.
Other sensations could be, you know, just noticing a slight experience of butterfly in your belly or something that's coming like overwhelm or tightness or tension in your head.
So for people who have migraine or headaches, when you wake up in the morning and you do base, the sensations that you'll experience that are telling you, oh, you might have a headache coming on is attention coming up from your neck, just moving up.
It's not quite in your head yet, but it's this experience of tension.
And then lastly, I would say probably the most important at this point is emotion.
What emotion am I feeling right now?
And for some people, we know this is not the most tangible experience.
Like for example, my husband, when I asked him, how are you feeling right now?
His, you know, he's like, I'm fine.
But really, I'm like, I can see it all over your body.
But with practice, we can lean into, well, actually, you know, I'm feeling a little bit of, you know, just an emptiness in my chest or a bit of nervousness in my belly, a bit of actually tension, anger in my jaw.
And so it just gives us the information of the state that we're in.
So one key thing about awareness, Jonathan, is the state of your nervous system reflects the state of your physiology.
So if your physiology is dysregulated, and you have immune suppression, and you have cardiovascular issues like arrhythmias or pots, your nervous system is dysregulated.
The state of your nervous system is really what it reflects in your whole body.
It's the orchestra director of all systems.
The other day on Instagram, I read a post that said, you know, it's not all about the nervous system healing from chronic illness or, you know, unresolved trauma.
It's so much more than that, you know, there's the immune system, there's your inner child, there's your attachment style.
Then when you go in, like, what is inner child and attachment style, it's just a way to explain, it's just a framework to explain an experience of stress that has certain types of presentation, like your stress might be you shut down and you're sad, depressed.
My stress is that I get anxious and afraid and hypervigilant.
And so these key messages that we can tune into when we become aware of the language of our body are so important.
And so when I read this post, you know, it really showed me that in the thousands of people agreeing, like, yeah, it's not about the nervous system.
For me, that's really insightful, because it really shows me, you know, like what Cardin was saying, the biohacks.
And I think there is still a bit of an understanding that healing your nervous system, regulating your nervous system is about soothing yourself instantly.
Like, let's do a breathwork, let's do a meditation, let's throw some cold water on our face.
Let's go for a walk in nature.
While these might help, they're not actually attuned to your needs.
Like, what do you actually need right now?
Your body is telling you you're angry, your breath is shallow, you want to curl up in a ball, and the sensations are unpleasant.
So the needs that we need right now is not too cold plunge, which is why, you know, often those things don't work for some people and for others, you know, they do and they're soothing.
And but the long term relationship of the nervous system, mind and body is through understanding why we work the way we do through attachment styles, inner child work, the experience of our body, the experience of those traumas that still retrigger us in the present, the illnesses and the chronic experiences
of of symptoms that we feel now.
And it is all the nervous system.
It's like saying, you know, the mind and body are separate, or the nervous system has nothing to do with why you're triggered, you know, it's actually at the heart, at the root.
And when you look at it like that, just how much is possible because at the at the core of our work, Jonathan and Cardin can walk you through the next step of interruption, but at the core of our work is, you know, this, the very fundamental science of neuroplasticity.
And neuroplasticity results in bioplasticity in the body, meaning, you know, you do the work on your brain, and you have positive results in the physiology of your body.
And you know, a lot of systems and parts of your body, their health improves overall.
So this work is really amazing.
And when you know what to change, and you're aware of the state of your body, you can begin to change the state of your physiology and truly not change just your health, but like your whole life and the relationships in your life.
Yeah, I mean, that awareness piece of it, I feel like it's the piece that we just want to skip over to get to the thing that we think is like, just give me the fix.
Yeah. You know, like, I'll suffer through whatever sort of like, like short and sweet awareness thing it is like, but like, can we just get to the thing that's gonna...
Whereas, you know, it's so important to tune in to especially those subtle signals.
And so many of us live from our neck up, right?
We don't pay attention to all the sensory somatic signals that come to us.
Like, we're just...
we're trying to think our way to an answer.
Like, what do I think is happening here rather than like, what if I actually like, use that base methodology, right?
What if I actually paid attention to my breath and the other elements there?
Because that gives us the information to then move on to that second piece of the puzzle, which is like, if you're going to step into some sort of interruption, what are we actually interrupting?
How and why and where.
And so, Cardin take me there.
Oh, no, Jonathan, you're taking us there.
You know, while you're talking, and I thought about how a lot of the life hackers and business people that love this kind of content, they're obsessed with KPIs, right?
Key performance indicators.
But they probably also know, at least in the realm of business, that if you're looking at the wrong KPIs, then you can't adjust or manage your project appropriately.
And you're going to crash it, right?
So people love the KPIs of their body of like, I'm looking at my heart rate variability, and I'm looking at my weight, and I'm looking at blah, blah, you know, and it's like, I'm looking at my sleep.
And it's like, I'm glad you're measuring all that.
But to me, it's like astounding that you think that someone might think that that's more important thing to measure than their emotions.
Because your emotions are the single largest driver of your physiological state at all times.
They are, that's they're the, they're the simplest, broadest instruction that your brain uses to tell your physiology what to do.
And so really, you know, what Jen's talking about, what we're talking about with base is we want you to start being able to actually attune yourself to the data from your body, that actually has an impact, like the quality of your breath, like your emotional response, like the action posture and behaviors that tell
you whether you really want to strangle someone or run away, right?
And I want to just put it one more way in context here, like you said, we want to skip to the thing.
So someone like realizes they might have anger issues, especially in their relationship.
And they've been taught like a box of breathing technique.
It's like the next time your wife gets mad at you, just try this box breathing technique, it'll help you calm down.
They try it, by the way, it doesn't work.
But maybe it helps a little bit.
And they're like, that doesn't work.
Versus a walk you through me guys.
And this model real quick, my wife gets angry.
And even if it's not at me, she's just angry around me.
What happens in my body is that I start to restrict, my heart rate goes up.
If I really admit it to myself and let myself feel it, I feel afraid.
So I've got an emotion of fear.
I've got a physiology of a musculophilic physiology of constriction, I have an elevated heart rate and a shallow breath.
That's a stress that's now I'm going into survival mode.
Sorry, where did this come from?
It came from when I was a little boy.
And I was around the tempest of a temper from my mother.
And I had to learn how to survive that when I was a little kid.
Now, what am I going to use to survive it, I'm going to use what evolution, evolution gave me, I'm essentially going to fight it, I'm going to run away from it, or I'm going to freeze like a possum in the face of it.
It doesn't matter how I'm breathing, because my breathing that that breathing technique, right is a management technique that's based on the wrong KPIs.
What we're dealing here with is fundamental experience of fear, lack of safety, and I'm trying to deploy a survival response of either yelling at my wife's anger to protect me from how I'm feeling, or abandoning her, I'm going to get out of here, F you you're on your own, this isn't my problem, or I'm
just going to get stuck, I'm just going to go into that freeze mode.
My neurophysiology is using what it's used on the savannah to survive tigers to survive my angry wife who's a reflection of my angry mother.
You can't possibly correct that until you know that.
And that's what awareness does.
Now that we have good awareness, which is the beginning of interruption, by the way, now we move on.
Just like you said, Jonathan, instead of living above my chin, I've just gathered an enormous amount of data from what's going on from the rest of my body, which is letting me know what's really happening.
In this instance, interruption techniques, there are many kinds.
It could be breathwork in that moment.
It could be a polyvagal technique, which stimulates my vagus nerve to help me move up out of a frozen response or down out of a sympathetic response.
We also have these neuro linguistic programming techniques once called space, where it's almost like snapping your fingers to interrupt everything that's going on and creating a pause in time for you to step out of your own experience.
Any one of these interruption techniques is useful.
But again, what their purpose is to give you time to interrupt the momentum of the habitualized response, to bring your prefrontal cortex, your cognitive centers, your self regulatory mechanisms to give them a fighting chance to come back online, again, not just to do the breath work, but to do that to
bring on further capacities of the mind to help regulate the body.
And then in this moment, because I have the right data, and I have a powerful mind, and I've practiced other techniques, I can, I can be like, whoa, I don't need to deal with my wife right now, I need to deal with my own response and the misapplication of a past survival response to this situation.
Just knowing that is very regulating, by the way, again, polyvagal technique, breath technique, neuro linguistic technique, enough to keep it online.
And then I can start co regulating with myself, and start being like, we're okay.
Our wife's anger is not dangerous like it was in the past.
And although I don't know we're going to get into a redesign technique, in the work, you'll have practiced a different response in the same way that an athlete practices the kind of sport they want to play.
But they also practice the feeling of fear and adversity of something going wrong and how to pivot back into the response that they want to have.
redesign is a lot about teaching your nervous system, how to respond effectively, not in kind of a wish it could be that way sort of way, but how to respond effectively in the midst of adversity in the midst of the trigger.
And we'll be right back after word from our sponsors.
Let's bring it home with the redesign part of it.
Because you've got the awareness to sort of like get a beat on like, what's really happening here?
You've got the tools or techniques that were in that moment, once you have that beat, like, okay, so now I have a toolbox.
And I can sort of like dysfunctional state that I'm in right now.
And maybe it's a couple maybe you need to run some experiments and really see.
But then there's that there's that final piece of the puzzle, the redesign part, like, how do we create how do we repattern in a way so that we can actually start to come down out of this repeated cycle that so many of us have been living in sometimes for years or decades.
So maybe Jen, take me a little bit more into the notion of the redesigning part of this, you know, the air methodology and maybe one way that we might think about actually doing this.
Yeah. So imagine you've woken up every day of your life so far with just as far as you can remember, with just a little bit anxiety about your day.
And you're not sure why, you're not really tuned into it but you sort of dread mornings, you snooze your alarm, sometimes you like rush out the door, you don't really have a good morning routine, sometimes the idea of the morning routine like planning ahead of time gives you anxiety.
And you've done this for 30 -40 years.
And then you learn the step of awareness.
And so one day you start you wake up and instead of just being anxious and not knowing why I'm going about your day, you use base.
And then you only use base, you don't start interrupting yet, you're just like, I'm becoming aware, I'm learning what I actually need in these moments.
And then the next day you do it again and the next day again.
After a couple weeks, you're like, okay, when I wake up, I feel fear, and my body's really tight.
And no wonder, four days out of seven, I have a little bit of lower back pain or my, you know, there's pain in my shoulder blades.
And then after two weeks, you know, you learn well, okay, now that you are aware of these patterns, you're aware, you know, we didn't get into mind and body, but there's base M and base B, where you go into mind thoughts, B body, the polyvagal responses that, you know, that Cardin was illustrating earlier, the the fight
or flight or the freeze or the shutdown.
So when you're aware of that, then you know, well, in this moment, my body is doing something that has helped me adapt all these years.
But it's just I recognize right now here and now it's not helpful anymore, right?
This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.
There's nothing to fix.
But as Cardin said earlier, if you want change, you need to start changing something, right?
So now you're aware of what needs to change the interruption step, you start using those and you're right, there's a bank of them, some are a little bit more.
So let's say I'll give you one right now that you know, anyone can use it.
It's very simple. But when you're feeling like you're, you know, overthinking, and you're sort of getting ahead of yourself, and you're a little bit anxious or nervous, all I want you to do is press your palms against each other in prayer as hard as you can, and hold it for about 30 seconds.
And what this does is, you know, as if you were at the gym, you know, you're doing a push up or you're doing a squat, what this type of movement for your body does is sending blood to these muscle groups, it's pivoting your mind from survival mode, emotion mode, amygdala, hypothalamus to let's organize
this somatosensory information coming up into my brain.
So the brain like pivots and switches.
And then it starts to reorganize its priorities.
So now it's prioritizing, feeling this experience.
And so finally, your prefrontal cord, you're like, Oh, I really like this one.
Okay, so you start to do that every morning to another two weeks, you wake up, you've done base, you've done base, you've done base, now it's been a month.
And for two weeks, you've been doing interruption, you've done the hands one you've done.
And what started to happen from the first day Jonathan, is you've been redesigning your neurophysiology, your nervous system, your brain, your thoughts, and by consequence, the behaviors and actions and emotions and relationships in your life.
So redesign is both a couple of techniques that we can talk about.
However, they're, you know, a little bit more personal to someone's especially childhood experiences, because we know that a lot of our patterns in the present were born at a time where we had access to our brain and body of a five, six, seven, eight year old.
And we did the best we could.
So the people pleasers, the perfectionists, the you know, high achievers that lead to burnout, the procrastinators, you know, anger issues, control, so on and so forth.
There's nothing wrong with you.
In fact, there's a lot of positives to all of these traits and experiences, but they're born at a time and now you recognize, okay, this thing actually is really stressful.
And the people pleasing the perfectionism and like having to like manage my speak for myself as a female, I have to manage my husband's emotions and then get on a call and really please my coworkers and my colleagues and then is causing me a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress.
And I think that's why I'm getting headaches and I'm getting stomach aches.
So that's kind of like the overall map.
So the redesign happens over time.
It's this neuroplastic redirection in the brain as a consequence in the body because brain and body are one nervous system.
And then a couple of the steps that we share in our book and in our program are around inner child work, true self work.
They really work on resourcing the parts of you that are already inside you.
Like when someone says, you know, right now, part of me is really afraid of this meeting.
And there's another part of you that isn't because the other part of you is prepared is an adult and knows that there's nothing to worry about.
But there's the other part of you that's in the driver's seat that is driving your experience and is giving you the experience of stress.
So the redesign is both what happens over time through awareness and interruption.
And then these particular exercises that are not complex, that help you heal the parts of you that are still keeping you stuck.
Now, thank you for that.
And I love the dual context there.
It's like, actually, the minute that you start into the awareness part of it, like the redesign process has already begun and it continues through the interruption.
And then you have additional very specific things to dip into when you sort of like hit that final piece.
And again, to really look back and examine, it is interesting how much of the patterning that we live with on a day -to -day basis, no matter where you are in your life, was sort of encoded at such a young age.
And on the one hand, it has served us well.
We're still here. We're still alive.
We're still functioning.
That's great. Thank you for that.
And on the other hand, it's also, for so many of us, it's outlasted its usefulness.
The circumstance that it got you through when you were younger, it's not your circumstance now.
And I wonder if oftentimes we look to repeat those circumstances because it gives the part a job again and it leads us back into a place of suffering.
So it is interesting how much of what we live with now was set in place in our psyches so long ago.
And we've gotten really good at compartmentalizing and functioning and doing all the things.
And yet over time, it finds its way out in the weird little ways.
And now, as you're describing, the broader conversation is like, maybe the things you're feeling aren't about what you think they are.
Maybe it's time to explore a little bit further.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well in our conversation.
I think it's so fascinating as we think about the role of the nervous system, both functional and dysfunctional, and the notion that you both shared earlier of the fact that once we actually understand how to work with it, that sometimes things we've been dealing with for years or decades, the solution doesn't
also have to take years or decades if we reach down into this deeper level and explore the notion of the reboot rather than the patches and the hacks and all this stuff which is keep extending it.
I love that whole concept.
So as we sit here in this container and bring our conversation full circle, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life for each of you, what comes up?
I love that question because for the last year and a half, I had the most stressful and difficult year and a half my entire life.
And that's inside of knowing all the things I know and having all the nervous system deep techniques and regulation and knowing that I have.
And now that I'm coming out on the other side of it, I'm pretty vividly clear on what the good life means to me and the good life really is internally.
It's having the space, time and ability to feel comfortable in my own skin and really to maximize the room for pleasure and connection with the things and people I love.
And when there isn't that time, space or awareness and there's too much survival and too much stress, there is no space in my body for any of that much less me.
And so the good life for me is defined as having that space, time and capacity to be inside the pleasure and connection that I can feel inside myself in the things I love to do and with the people I love, like my wife and my children.
And I think right now preserving and protecting those, not only those capacities inside myself, but like logistically not letting life for the most part rob me of that because I want the good life.
I love that, Cardin.
Similarly, emotions are involved in my good life too.
And for me, I sort of see myself as this being with wings and I just need to fly through life.
There are times where my traumas and my stickiness in my childhood and, you know, there were moments where I thought, well, I think this is a life sentence.
I don't know how this is going to go away, but, and in those moments, I didn't feel like I was flying.
I felt like my wings were clipped.
I'm a passionate person.
So I like to like dive into the juice of everything in life and the open.
I grew up in many different cultures.
I grew up in Africa and traveled so much.
And for me, just learning more about everything that is to life and the color and the emotion is just so important.
So the one thing for me is like the most powerful superpower that I am learning is like nothing is too important.
Nothing is too big for me not to let go.
And so when I feel like I can let go and not hold on, you know, like ego, hurt, anger, because we all have that and we are all like, I will not let go of this point and little or big, it really affects our life and our decisions and our choices and our relationships.
And for me, it's like just letting go and really being bathed in the experience of life, sharing that with my husband and my son and my family and similar to Cardin and with wings, if that made any sense at all to anyone listening.
Thank you both so much.
Thank you, Jonathan.
Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe, but you'll also love the conversation we had with Stephen Porges about Polyvagal Theory.
You'll find a link to Stephen's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Foxx and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.
And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did, since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're
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Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
Thank you.
