The Psychology of People Who Are Always Calm | Ep. 333

0:00 If you want to be one of those people that can stay calm in any situation, how you reset your nervous system is actually one of the most important skills you can learn. I used to constantly react to everything and it made me super stressed. But after years of building businesses alongside thousands of entrepreneurs, I have noticed something which is the ones that win are not the smartest.

0:18 It's the ones that are able to stay grounded when shit hits the fan. So these are six of my tools that I've used to master my nervous system and start my days with intention. The biggest and most effective ways to be calm is through your breathing. When you control your breath, you can control your state.

0:32 I know that monetary breathing sounds basic, but it is not. It's just that a lot of people are doing it wrong. And I will tell you guys, like, I'm the biggest f**king skeptic of this sh**. When people are like, you just need to breathe. I was like, shut the f**k up. I am breathing. I'd be dead if I wasn't.

0:43 Like, I was like, please don't f**k tell me this sh**. This is dumb as f**k. And then I did it. I was like, you're dumb as f**k. They're not. Most people wait until they're anxious to start breathing exercises. But by then, your system is already hijacked. So I use breath work like a reset button throughout the day.

0:58 Between calls, mid afternoon, I'll take five minutes and just breathe. I do the pattern of like four seconds in, hold for four, eight seconds out. What this does is controlling your breathing, activates your parasympathetic nervous system, increases your vagal tone, which directly counters the stress response.

1:14 Now, the extended exhale is key because it signals to your body that you're safe, which lowers your heart rate and blood pressure. And it's fairly simple practice. So I just look up on my Spotify, a metronome 60 beats per minute. And that's like, okay, 15 minutes and I'm like, boom, I go. It even happens when like, I wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare or a stressful thought and I'll do it and it'll help me reset so I can fall back and sleep faster.

1:34 And the cool thing with this one is that you actually feel it working real time. You become less tense, your jaw will often release. A huge thing I notice is that within like two to three minutes of doing it, I start yawning, which means it's really working because it's like, oh, it's safe enough to relax now.

1:49 If you want to start doing this, the goal isn't to never feel pressure as a human. The goal is to teach your system how to come back from it faster. And so what you'll notice is as you start to learn this and as it really becomes second-atured to you, you'll start using it when you feel stressed to regulate yourself.

2:03 You'll just start breathing deeply and slowly because you know it will regulate you. You taught your body that skill. So how can you use this? The next time that you find yourself feeling tense or scattered, stop what you're doing and just do this for 60 seconds. And I promise you, if you do it consistently, even just once or twice a day, you will notice that stressful moments start to dissipate faster, because stress is really just a feeling in the body.

2:25 Like, how do you know you're stressed? You feel something in your body. If you can change that through something that's not your mind, but it's through your body, then that's great because it's like, now you've given yourself time to also change your mind. I wouldn't be so caught up in sticking to some perfect routine or doing it in some way that stresses you out more.

2:39 Do what works for you and find a time, a place, or practice that feels easy. Because it feels easier and keep doing it. If you keep doing it, you're going to get results. The next step is meditation. I know what you're thinking, but I'm going to just tell you guys right now. Probably wouldn't have guessed this, but I'm not a meditation guru.

2:55 I've only been meditating for like five months now, and I've had great results at the practice. I've meditated in the past and done it consistently at different times of my life, but recently I picked it up back up again. And I started meditating because I would wake up with a sense of urgency, because I have very full days most of the time.

3:11 And so it'll create some of like, participatory anxiety, knowing that you have like a very full day with a lot of different inferiority and activities and time. And so how do you kind of get ahead of that and stay more present in the moment? And so I said, okay, well, I don't want my day to rule me. I don't want this like the busyness of my life to rule how I feel when I wake up.

3:27 I kind of feel like what it is is like I wake up, and I'm in that Elmore Elevated state, which is natural, because the two hours before you wake up, you start raising your horizontal levels so that you will wake up. But sometimes it elevates even more, because you have other stressful things. Your bodies under more chronic stress.

3:40 What I start doing is the first thing I do when I wake up is I just start meditating. For me, what that means meditating is that I have an app where I will pick a meditation. For the first three months, I did about 30 to 40 minutes a day. And now I'm doing like 10 minutes a day, because I feel like I've gotten experienced enough that I can get into that state in a faster, like much quicker than I would in the beginning.

4:01 Now, it was not easy. I would say like the first month, I don't even think I did it right. But I thought about what I wanted long term. I was like, I really want to learn how to do this and do it in a way that's good. And so what I realized through doing it is like, it's not something that you're going to see the results from immediately.

4:15 And I think like you can feel calm immediately, but it's really something that is to train your brain to slow down and your body to slow down in moments where it wants to speed up. And so for me, when I realize like, what's the pinnacle point of my day? It's when I wake up in the morning. It's like immediate get out of bed, go, go, go.

4:30 And I was like, oh, I don't like that. I want to be more intentional. I want to like, I want to be a little bit more in control of my day or how I show up when I first wake up. That's why I just decided to do it right when I'm just already in bed. And if your cortisol is chronically elevated, then your body's on high alert, which takes your decision making, makes you feel like sh** all around.

4:47 I know that I have a lot of chronic stress in my life just by the way of which I've chosen to live my life, which I'm aware of. And so I've put different mechanisms into my day to try and combat that, to like bring me to a good baseline. So I'm not in that fight or flight. My job requires a lot of decision making.

5:03 Emotions go up, decision making goes down. And so I try to do a lot of things to regulate my emotions. It was really like, I start my day by showing my brain who's in control rather than being ruled by it. And so if you never tried it, start small, maybe do two minutes, sit, breathe, realize that you don't know what the f**k you're doing.

5:19 A bunch of stuff's gonna pop up and just like, don't worry about doing it right. The goal is not to not have thoughts. It's just to notice those things and not react to them. And what you'll see is that like the more that you practice doing this, the easier it gets. And so like, I know meditation is a tool in a buzzword that a lot of people talk about.

5:34 And I don't think it's magic by any means, but it definitely makes me feel steadier and calmer on a daily basis. The next point I have is phone boundaries. If you want to stay calm, you need to protect your mental inbox. I have gone through different phases where I've done different things with my phone.

5:51 And I will tell you now, I do not touch my phone in the bed in the morning and I pause all my notifications at night so I'm not tempted to check something when I'm trying to wind out. I try to make sure that I complete my own work before I step into other people's work. I have a lot of other people's work that I have to do and that gets put on my plate so I can move the business forward.

6:12 But I also have my work, which if I do not protect that time to do my work, their work becomes my work. And it takes my work's time and then my work gets done on the weekends for 12 hours each of my days, which I don't like doing. I have to focus on what's important, not just what is urgent or today's news for somebody else.

6:28 So do I break this? Yes, sometimes I do. I check my phone. Sometimes I stay up late on slacks and as I just won't even notice these things. Like it'll turn on to my do not disturb and then I'm like, this, turn back on. But I always notice the same thing, which is like if I do that, I'm less sharp and I'm more scattered.

6:43 If you check your phone first thing in the morning, you just go into React. You're responding to other people's requests of you. And it kind of shifts you into being in control of your day to constantly alert and reacting to other people. Because every time you scroll, you're essentially spiking your dopamine and with dopamine also cortisol follows.

6:59 And so you're kind of conditioning your brain to expect stimulation rather than focus when you want to focus on important things or when you want to wind down, that is very hard to do when you're stimulating those pieces of your brain. Something that you could do is you could try if this sounds interesting tomorrow morning.

7:13 Just before you reach for your phone, just use a notebook instead. Write down three priorities for the day, three things a matter to you, or keep your phone on do not disturb so you don't get the notifications. And the second thing you do is just pause your notifications an hour before bed. You don't need to be on call for the world 24-7.

7:29 Just an hour before bed, just turn them off. I really think that this one boundary between like your thoughts and everybody else's desires of you is like the simplest way to just protect your focus and your peace of mind. Especially if you're like me, I'm definitely like a people pleaser. Like I like to see people happy and help them be happy and then I'll be like, oh, but I'm not happy.

7:47 So like it's my responsibility to make sure I take care of myself, nobody else's. That does bring me to my next point, which is also about the phone, which is why I leave my phone on do not disturb. I don't know what people have texted me while I've been here filming. And yes, my family and friends hate it.

8:00 My dad called me and asked me to make him an emergency so he can get through because he's worried that something happens and he calls me and he can't get through. It's a whole thing with my family because they know that I don't check it. The truth is most things feel urgent but they're not actually urgent.

8:12 They're just fucking loud. Someone has an emotion and then they go to text you or slack you or whatever. It's like impulsive and that's rough. I don't like dealing with that. When my phone is like pinging and I'm letting other people steal my momentum, I'm just in this reactive mode and then I start getting resentful.

8:28 It's not just reactive, it then turns into resentment. But what's easier is if I just don't see it in the first place. And so for a lot of you who don't have the bandwidth or I would say like impulse control to resist responding, if you don't see the responses by being under not disturbed, means that you only go to check something when you're ready to check it.

8:45 And again, I'm not perfect with this. There are times where I'm going to pick something else. I'm going to take it off to not disturb. I'm going to have it off because there's something time sensitive I'm handling. But that's the exception. It's not my default. I decide when I'm gonna engage in a conversation, not when somebody wants to engage with me.

9:02 This is a really important reset because every little notification is like a tiny little stress signal. Our brains don't really know the difference between like a slack paying a text message and like a fire alarm going off. It just knows that there's something interrupting you. And I don't think it's about like disconnecting from people and being like a freaking hermit.

9:19 I think it's about keeping your focus on what matters and you being present with your life. And so for me turning on the do not disturb is a great way to do that. I don't want to make someone think I'm ghosting them, doing this, doing that. And so like I also think about how to message it in a way that's kind.

9:32 You know, we don't want to punish people by like ignoring them. We want to be kind. Which is why things like in a workplace, you have a slack and put in a way message. That's kind because then people know why you're not responding. In, you know, personal life, you can't really do that. So it's like you kind of got to let people know or make them the exception.

9:45 Either want pick two or three windows during the day when you'll check messages and put it on your calendar. Outside of that, unless you want to have like actual texting conversation, just keep your phone on do not disturb. When I work out, I wear noise canceling headphones and I do not play any music.

9:58 I have my phone on do not disturb and I just work out in silence. A lot of people do podcasts and music or something to distract them, but I'd actually found that I really like working on silence having absolutely nothing because I'm really fully engaged in what I'm doing. I've realized that it allows me to really focus on the movement.

10:15 I engage my muscles more. I breathe properly and like I'm just so much more present. I'm not thinking about other things and I really like that. So then I come out of my workout, not like I've just worked out my mind, but also like very calm. It's just a different energy when I'm doing it. It's very intentional rather than like just like, I don't know, like brute force energy.

10:32 Training in silence turns like a physical workout into almost like a mental one. You're not just strengthening your body. You're also strengthening your ability to focus, your ability to be present, your ability to stay calm under pressure. It's not really just like mindset fluff stuff. It works very similarly to the way meditation does and actually feels very meditative when you're doing it because it's being present and focused at the same time and that activates the same stress regulation systems as meditation does.

11:01 It's another way that you basically show your nervous system that you don't have to elevate no matter what's happening on the outside. I've just noticed when I do this, it has set me up for like such good days. I'm wake more calm. I'm really locked in. I feel focused. I also like to walk in silence as an alternative on days that I'm not doing that and that as well has been like very helpful for me.

11:20 Just zero stimulus. You'd be surprised. It's almost like when you get done doing something where you just have no inputs. It's like you almost feel like you took a nap. It's like sometimes people go, I need to take a nap. I'm like, are you tired or are you just like fatigued? What I would say is I would just try this.

11:33 Next workout, just don't play music. The next tool to reset is moving. I don't think that you can think your way to calm. I think that you can move your way there much more easily. Movement for me is my reset button. It's how I shift gears when my mind doesn't want to slow down. This can be during the day or it can be before bed.

11:50 I move throughout the entire day to keep my energy flowing and I have three setups. I have standing, sitting and walking and I rotate between them because when you change position, you change focus. Like sometimes I forget and I will sit for three hours straight. Like even I'll be honest, recording these videos, it's the most I sit.

12:07 I don't sit, I stand, I walk, I sit and I will all today. If I sit for too long, I get tired. But when I do move, even for five minutes, it can keep your energy up. You stay sharper and you don't get like locked into one mental mode. It's kind of the same thing like I do at night. I would go and walk then I would take a shower and then I would stretch.

12:24 I like go to a quiet place. I put something in the background. Usually like some nice jazz music and then I stretch and that's like before bed and it's like a nice transition. And so for me, I've realized that a lot of tools to change states, to reset your nervous system, to go and get prepared for something next that you're doing is to change your positioning.

12:41 This is why for me during the day when I'm working, I like to change positions a lot. And I think sometimes people just feel weird about that kind of stuff. They're like, oh, is it weird that you stand during meetings or walk? I mean, only if you think it's weird, I just don't care that much about judgment.

12:52 I care more about being healthy. I think a lot of people treat movement like something that you only do for fitness. But I see it like something that I can use to make my life better in all ways. Because when I move, I'm releasing physical tension that builds up, it's like from sitting in that go-mode all day because light movement of the body signals safety.

13:10 So there's a lot of studies shown on like people if they start walking forward and even just like looking at their surroundings will instantly reduce their anxiety and cortisol. When you stretch, when you walk or you change posture, you're telling your nervous system that I'm not trapped. I'm safe. And that one shift can like pull you out of a day of being in fight or flight.

13:26 Faster than any kind of like journaling or anything else ever could. If you just do like five minutes of walking or stretching, you can feel so much better than an hour of scrolling on your phone. Let's just say every hour, try and move for at least one minute. Stand, stretch, refill your water, go pee.

13:40 Just don't let your body and brain lock into that one position for too long. And then at night, make your movement the off switch. Whether it's like a short walk, doing some stretching, deep breathing, you will notice that your body will unwind before your mind catches up. And if you pair this with the next one, the results will be even better.

13:58 I use these tools because they help me feel and perform better, feel calmer and more clear. They are simple things that stacked up to help me build success over time. And if you like this video, do not forget to hit subscribe and watch this next video.