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SPEAKER_00Hello, friends. Welcome to the Transforming Stress with Dr. Ash. And today I have got Nicole Hope Sylvester from the Silicon Valley in California, United States. And I'm really excited to share this topic with her because what she's going to talk about with us is something which we are all struggling with, which is overwhelm, a lot of input, a lot of information coming to us from all the directions. Isn't that true? We are all feeling overwhelm and stress. Nicole has recently published a book, Calm is Power. She's passionate about her work, what she calls about teaching people stress, fluency, and body literacy. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us. And uh we met uh we met in uh in the Silicon Valley, California last uh last month, actually seems like a long time, and it was a real joy to share these ideas with you. And what I was fascinated with the work I have published about the stress management, the boiling frog, and the jacuzzi effect, and how the work you have done over the last few decades is so beautifully complementary. So, really delighted to have this conversation and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much, Dr. Ash. I am very, very excited to be here. So I can't wait for all of the fun discussions we get to have because our work and our books interlap and interplay and support each other so well that I feel like this is going to be a really valuable talk for people to listen to, especially if they're stressed and overwhelmed. And also just if they're looking to have more joy and fulfillment in life, these approaches that we talk about, I think, are just complementary to living our best lives.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Nicole. So, Nicole, would you uh share with the audience that what was your journey which brought you to this work?
SPEAKER_02Uh, my journey, I can keep it nice and brief. Essentially, um, I was I got really sick after I had my kids and sick, not in a way like, oh, we can put a name on a specific disease kind of sick, but I really started manifesting some beautiful rashes and fatigue and depression and anxiety and a million other fun things. And I sometimes like to share the symptoms so that if anyone's listening to this, they're like, oh, wait, I have that. And then they can. So I will list just a couple. I was having trouble swallowing. I had heartburn all the time, my teeth hurt, my eyes were blurry. It was really difficult for me to stay awake, all these things, and no amount of really external help was getting me to where I wanted to go because each individual, even though everyone, everyone I saw professionally was very talented and knew what they were doing, none of it would last. And that includes acupuncture, doctors, psychologists, therapists, the whole kit and caboodle nutritionists. Every time I focused on one space, it would work, but then it would, I would come back to it. And so what I realized is that there wasn't very much out there that showed the interplay of all of those different modalities, just in a very basic way. And once I understood where the body met the mind and the nervous system and our beliefs and subconscious, all of that, then suddenly you feel like you have more control over what's happening inside yourself because you know why things are happening and then you know what to do about it. So that was essentially where we landed and that knowledge. I, you know, I sat around, I'm like, God, it'd be really nice if there was a book that talked about all of this and put it together real short and concisely and easily to understand, so that so that I could have kind of mitigated a lot of that suffering, if you will, earlier. And yet, for all of us, you know, there's a journey in life we have to experience. So, you know, depends on how you want to see it. I would like to encourage people to not feel like they have to get to this maximum overwhelm, stress, disease. I can't take it any more space before they start making legitimate changes in their lives and start having a little bit of motivation to understand the physical body. And I that's the primary piece of my work right now is that we live in a body that we don't, aside from doctors like you, right? Aside from the people whose profession it is to know the body, most people don't know the body. And I think it's really weird that we grow up in a body and we're never told anything about it. And they were just like, hey, go live life, and then all of a sudden life's going sideways, and we're like, what's happening? And we're like, oh, because it's your body. So that's the big my big push in all of this is to inspire people to want to understand how they function a little bit more so they can enjoy life because you have to have your body till you're till the end of life.
SPEAKER_00What was your uh Nicole, what was your deepest realizations during this journey when you mentioned that you became felt very sick and had had all these kind of symptoms? What kind of what are the kind of deepest reflections you had?
SPEAKER_02I would offer, and I think this is a common issue these days, that mindset does not fix everything. And it did not really matter who I was seeing, whether it was a like a body doctor or a mind doctor, right? Everyone really kind of all the advice really boils down to well, you you know, discipline your way out of this problem, think happy thoughts, and focus on the good. And and that's great. That is really it's not it's not bad advice, it's great advice, and we should focus on the good. However, I I honestly experienced times where I'm like, I can't. And to be honest, it felt worse to think about good things than it did to think about bad things. Like I felt better thinking about bad things, and so I'm like, I must be missing something here, and I think that's a dilemma that so many people face is that they're like, no, I'm trying to be positive, I'm trying to think happy thoughts, I'm trying to plan out my future, or or even in the discipline space, I'm trying to eat better, I'm trying to work harder, all of these things, and then it doesn't work out, and you think you're a failure or that there's something wrong with you. And and it's because we're ignoring this massive piece of us, which is the physical body, which if it's come under enough stress and has decided that stress is the way to live safely, then that primal piece of us will run the show. So mindset is really effective once the body's calm. If we can kind of keep coming back to calm, then we turn on that mindset-like knob, if you will, and go with it and use it intentionally to move forward and to stay in that place. But I would say that in that, when you've reached these kind of low levels of stress or well, depression, or these high levels of stress, overwhelm, and burnout, mindset is the only piece of that I think we can use in the very beginning is to go, what do I, what does my body need right now to feel safe so that I can start using this to make change? And that's the primary point of my whole book is that we should be creating a relationship with our body and down regulating it through a million different tools. Pick one that works for you, just like we brush our teeth, right? Like we don't wait for cavities to go, oh, I should be brushing my, I'll start brushing my teeth now. Like we are predisposed, we're taught right it from the get-go, brush your teeth so you don't get cavities. And then when you get a cavity, you're like, uh shucks, right? But in in the way we understand our body and the way we treat our body, we don't do that. We don't take care of it, we kind of maintenance it like a rental car. And then we wait till till the cavities come or the body is screaming and yelling in pain or in stress or in disease or whatever, and then we go, Oh, I guess I'll try to do something now. And I would like to mitigate that problem and start with let's just take care of our bodies every day with some really basic, easy practices and and minimize getting to these high-level points where you know where we break down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh thank you, Nicole. So as you were mentioning, that we don't look after our bodies enough. We ignore the signals, whether they are signals of feeling tired, exhausted, whether it is brain fog, and I think partly it might be culture which also glamorizes hard work and no rest. What are your thoughts? That where should people start? Because all they have known in their life is to go go go, and the mind is not even trained to understand the signals of the of the body, and as you mentioned that uh in your work with the body literacy and the stress fluency, first of all, chronic stress is slow build-up of stress. You might have heard of the analogy of the boiling frog, the stress which builds over months and years, and many times it is outside the awareness of people as well. Would you would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_02Yes, 100% from from where you started with like we're not we're kind of culturally driven towards valuing stress as a as a value proposition for how hard we're working, and then if that is that, then we would build stress over the course of time and ignore it because we think it's cool. We think it's cool to be stressed, and I think that's the interesting piece about all of this work that you and I are doing is that we I would offer, and I say this a lot, we live in a world for the most part that is it's an epidemic of stress that is occurring right now. I think, and it's fascinating from a cultural lens because April in the United States was stress awareness month. It was stress awareness month for the entire of April, and I am on every social media platform, most of them at least, and no one said a word. And I thought, this is fascinating, right? If it's all these other, all these other awareness months, and it's you, you know, everyone's it's the cool thing to talk about, everybody's posting about it or blogging about it because it's the trendy topic for the month, and it was stress awareness month, and no one said a word. And I thought, wow, that's really telling and interesting. Um, you know, I'm definitely not gonna get stressed about it. I just think it's a fascinating concept that we that even some people that I talk to who are in the fields of like life coaching and and some people, I think even in neuroscience space, and I said, hey, it's stress awareness month, it is, and I thought, huh, it is. And and yes, what you were saying about it building is I would offer, we are not taught about our body, right? So we and if we are taught anything, it's pretty much to ignore stress because that's just part of life. And when we get to be 65 and retire, all the stress will dissipate and we'll go live joyfully on our as we tour around. And as we all have started recognizing, especially post-COVID, that's not how it works. And ultimately that progressive stress in the body builds up towards problems. I don't like to count say anything too specific, but it builds into problems. Problems in our reactivity, problems in our body's ability to fight disease, problems in our ability to think, to create, to innovate, problems because the body's too distracted trying to assess the next threat, and it doesn't have the capacity to live life, to enjoy life, to to even see life accurately. So I would agree with everything you have said.
SPEAKER_00So for somebody who is going through these kind of symptoms, feeling exhausted, tired, brain fog, where do we where do they start from uh in terms of learning this body literacy? What are what are the things that you would tell them?
SPEAKER_02The very first thing, and I actually have a fun acronym called FLOW that you can use in the moment or just as a way of understanding this whole process of shifting towards a calmer life. And the first thing of flow is feel, feel and focus on the body. If we don't pay attention to our body and we've gotten so good at not wanting to, understandably, because under years of stress or past trauma or uncomfortable situations, most people are trying to distract themselves from feeling their body, right? We sit on our phones or we watch TV shows that cause even more drama because that distracts us from the drama that's inside of us. We uh, if we watch anyone at any given moment, really, we are constantly distracting ourselves from just being in inside our body and feeling it. So the very, very first step is to practice. That's what body literacy and you know, body fluency is understanding the language of the body. I'm fluent and recognizing the signals inside myself because it makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the the the flow in the flow, the F stands for feel, the feel the sensations, feel and listen to the signals the body is telling you. Like I'm feeling tired, I'm feeling fatigued, or today I'm having cognitive fog. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02Yes, so I'm gonna feel even and even at a deeper level than that, feel our body, like everything. So it works twofold, actually. So so F is focus and feel, right? So if I'm focused on my body, something that we don't regularly do, there is so much information coming to us in any given moment. Sensations. I when's the last time you felt the tip of your nose? I mean, just focused with your attention on it because I bet your tip of your nose is not stressed out. And so when have we really paid attention to what our elbow feels like? All these little nuanced spaces in our lives that we disregard because we're in our fast-paced living, but it would give us information to so much and actually more enjoyment because our physical body is designed to be our experience, the experiencer, the input of life. That's why we have it. That's how we that's how we even experience life. If I couldn't see, I wouldn't be able to enjoy pretty things. If I, you know, smells and music, all of these things. It's giving us our life experience. And if it's good stuff, we try to focus on it. Yay, that feels great. If it's other than it's uncomfortable stuff, which is equally valuable data, we ignore it, push it aside, and there's a lot of science behind it, but ultimately that data gets stored in the body and just collects until we decide we want to deal with it or something more extreme happens. So focusing and feeling the body and becoming aware of it is the only way, the very, very first step, because you have to notice it to do anything about it. And to honor it.
SPEAKER_00And to honor it. And to honor it. So many times, many times we are our natural drive is to over supersede it. Just keep keep keep going on. Keep going on.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and I think we need in those spaces. I'm not saying never push yourself. I'm an athlete, all you know, I've done big time stuff and rock climbing and mountain biking, all these things. And there are times where when you're trying to achieve a goal, you're you know, you're you are pushing through something, and there, and there's really good data that says that that kind of discipline is valuable, but you have to know why. And you have to know what the what the repercussions are of it. So athlete, you know, I think athletes, if we all lived like athletes, our lives would be much easier because they understand athletes understand the complexity and the interplay between physical exertion and the physical body and how to heal it, right? They treat it like a temple because they want it to work for them, right? But they also understand the mind interplay of it. So they're already doing both together. Regular people, not elite athletes, or just like, ah, I'm a body. It just gets me here to there. So I'm not gonna pay too much about it. I'm gonna focus on my mind and try to manipulate my external world. But so, but our bodies have to still work just as well for us as an elite athlete. We're just not trying to push it physically to its limits. We have to know why we're doing what we're doing. We just have to be intentional about it. We have to notice, right? And then we have to be intentional. And and if for all of you who are like, what is flow? The rest of the words, I will go through it real fast just so people don't get stressed waiting for the rest of it. So, flow is focus and feel the body. So we're gonna just pay attention, just noticing what's happening in the body. We're also gonna L listen to both the body and to her thoughts as data. That's it. We're just data, we're just data storing, if you will, or filtering what's happening in my body, listening to my thoughts and listening to my body. And then the O is orienting. Now that I have this information, what do I do with it? Like, what does my body need? What does my mind need? What do I need right now to make the best next step for me? Right. And then the W stands for witness the situation, where you are, and what you're capable of doing, and then witness wonder, and then pick your what or your why. I mean, there's we could go down the W train forever. But that's intentionality, and honestly, that orienting could be a deep breath in the moment. I mean, it's so fast. What does my body need to feel calmer right now so I can witness this situation and make a better decision for my for me, whatever that is. And you can it takes about 60 seconds to run through the whole thing. You can do it before you're gonna start to write or work. You can do it for a long time, you can extend it for a long time if you realize that your body's freaking out and you need to meditate or go for a walk in nature, whatever, you know, whatever the tools are. And there's tiny tools, tapping, a million different tools that can be utilized to help calm the body. So you can turn the brain on better and go, what do I need to do right now and why? Uh so flow and and what's the point of everyone searching for flow. Flow is ease and joy and success. Success and passion and excitement. Flow is what we all love to be in, right? That's why it's called flow. And we use it in our terminology all the time. And we could have it really very frequently if we just put this knowledge together of paying attention to all the information, data that we have coming to us. I mean, it's how you kind of it's empowerment. So that's my spiel about flow.
SPEAKER_00Thank thank you, Nicole. That was a very uh useful acronym to basically get back into our body and give it that space and rest where we can think more with more clarity. Thank you for that, uh Nicole. So we spoke about the flow technique, which is a very grounding uh very grounding technique to get you also uh connected with your uh connected with your body. Now we we spoke about earlier that this is uh uh that this is a month of uh April was a month of stress awareness and not many people talk about it. Whereas we uh know that there is a pandemic or there is an epidemic of stress all around the world? This is also proved in the year-by-year study by the Gallup, which says that 70 to 80 professionals all over the world are facing signs of work-related stress. I know you work with leaders, you work with highly accomplished professionals. Why do you think that people are caught in the same cycle and they are not able to start their journey to living the life in more flow?
SPEAKER_02That's a great question, and it's an interesting, somewhat complex question. So I will attack it from a couple different angles. I think you and I already discussed about how we've created a societal norm of stress, especially, especially in the United States, right? It's a badge that we wear, right? Oh, I can't make your thing. I've got a lot of work to do. I'm so stressed out right now. This has been the hardest week ever. And then everyone's like, ooh, they're special. They must be must be doing really important things. And honestly, our subconscious mind, that behind us, peace, we've been trained to believe that. And part of my book explains all these beautiful survival beliefs we're holding in the background. Uh, I kind of refer to it like we're you're in a zebra herd, and so everybody in the zebra herd is trying to know how to stay cool and not get rejected. So you go, oh, well, if I'm stressed, that's cool because that means I'm busy and important. And you don't want to get booted out of the zebra herd because then you get picked off by a lion. So a huge piece of stress, interestingly, is just especially culturally, is that we think it's cool and we always want to be a cool person. So, because we stay in the zebra herd, and that's that's how basic we are. I mean, that's why we get stressed, because we have a animal body, nervous system that's just trying to stay alive all the time, and part of that is avoiding rejection. So you stay in the zebra herd, you stay safe. So we've almost created this, I don't know if paradigms are not the right word, but a decision almost within ourselves and culturally that being stressed is cool. So then why would you try to change it? So that's an interesting space. If we're if our if a piece of us behind the scenes thinks links stress with success, we'll say it that way, then our physical body wouldn't even want us to find ways to calm down. It would just keep distracting us and trying to, you know, oh, I should do something good for my body. No, no, no, in the background, without awareness, right? The body's like, no, no, stress is important. Stress keeps us safe, stress keeps us like successful, all of this. So every time we even try to do little tricks and tips to calm the body, we'll get distracted. And I was actually just talking to my friend about that the other day because she was trying, she's trying to get in shape and she was like, I just want to go, I want to go for a run. And when she goes to put her shoes on, all these air quotes distractions come up, and that's also part of this background awareness, that subconscious that's guiding our choices to stay however we are. So, I mean, it that's the complexity of it. On the flip side, just in our knowing, we know that if stress is an epidemic, it's because nobody thinks they can do anything about it. That's really what it is. We think it's an external problem. We think it's just part of life. The struggle is real, right? People talk about it. It's, I mean, it's embedded into our language, right? Um no pain, no gain. And and that kind of applies if you're in a physical space, right? That applies if you're a weightlifter. It doesn't apply to everyday life. Like, yes, life is going to go up and down. Yes, there will be some issues, yes, challenges can happen. We don't we don't live in them, we overcome them, we learn from them, we understand them, we learn more about ourselves so that those issues in the future aren't issues anymore because we already know what the solution is. We are our brains and our bodies are you know, we we're self-fulfilling prophecies. And it gets into all the science, even of the brain, that you know, we're looking for problems then. So it's a really interesting dynamic that occurs. And so when you get into anything, including parenting or high-level leadership or whatever, if you're not listening to the body and going, I feel uncomfortable, and then asking why you're doing what you're doing, then you're just in autopilot with all of these beliefs that are in play, these survival beliefs about what success looks like, and your nervous system's freaking out, so you stay in survival beliefs, and then you just keep going through life and go, that's what it is. And you got a bunch of friends out there saying, Yep. And you've got social media saying yep, because that's what that's what we've become grown accustomed to, not to mention the fact that we're also hanging out with other people who are stressed in their bodies, and our bodies read each other, and then we try to make sense of that data, and we're like, they're successful and they're stressed, so I must need to be stressed to be successful. So it's a really cool mind-body thing, and my whole platform is to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's all take a breather for a second and start changing this story of what success is or what living is, and start realizing that when we can get our body calm, we see life for what it really is, and we're not using these old-timey beliefs that, you know, stress isn't an external thing, because there is a space where we can train our body to be calm. It's in my book, chapter 10 or something, calm in the eye of the storm. The whole point of it is to create a body system that can stay resilient and calm enough that it doesn't matter what's happening around us, but that takes self-awareness. So complex and simplistic, we're very basic and very complex at the exact same time. So it's quite a conundrum.
SPEAKER_00No, I think uh you have uh said it very uh very aptly that uh the a lot of it has to do with the paradigms which people uh hold. When they are feeling stressed, they feel no, it's something happening in the environment which is stressing. Now, you are aware of the book The Boiling Frog, uh, in which I speak about one of the sections is on environmental management, and in the environmental management there are different skills, but if you go to the root of it, it all comes down to emotional management, and it comes down to energy management, and we are coming back to the same thing what we have been just discussing in the last half an hour, is to be aware of our body. So, coming back to what you just said, that the paradigm is that though there's a stress in the environment, actually, there might be two people in the same environment, same stressful environment. One one might be much more calmer, and the other is completely dysregulated, chaotic, and that speaks to it. That speaks about what we are discussing, that it's not just the environment. Of course, the environment, there will be challenges in the environment, is it's the nature of the game, but what we can control within ourselves, with our self-awareness, as you just mentioned, and regulating ourselves with our body getting into the flow-like state with the flow activity you you just shared, I think that is the that is the way where we can really empower ourselves and and and have a more positive state whilst we are in any kind of a stressful situation.
SPEAKER_02I agree, and just you know, fun data. If the body has trained itself over years of stress, it becomes hyper-vigilant, right? That's like even even to the point where they're seeing the correlation into autoimmune disease because just everything's a threat, right? And high levels of pain. So this threat bucket, the body's like, okay, we've gone under a lot of stress all the time. We've habituated to it because we think the body's like, it's safer to be hyper aware of everything. So I'm more attuned, like my hearing's perked up in my eyes or whatever, to you know, to the point where you can't even really enjoy life anymore. It's hyper concerned about projects that are due, etc. So if it if the body is hyper-vigilant, it's actually sending that data to keep looking for more threats. So for people who are stressed, even if there's information that's coming in that would be calm, we're only gonna look for the negative stress problems because we're trying to predict and stay safe for the next problem we're gonna meet. So it's this compounding effect, which is like what you just said, when two people can sit in the same situation and have different experiences. If one body is already naturally kind of calm, they're gonna, they're going to be seeing the situation in a different way and looking for where the things are going right. And the body that is stressed is going to be primed to only see where it's going wrong to the point where it will ignore, because we can only take in so much data into our brain in any given moment. Our brain will filter out where things are going well, because it's only looking for where it's going bad, so that you can stay ahead of it and stay safe. So, I mean, that's why calm is power, right? The calmer my body, the more solutions come. The more stressed out my body, it is one battle after another, whether those battles exist or not, or whether there are other alternatives to them. It is fascinating. And it makes sense why we would end up in these circumstances, right? Part of being alive is just survival. That's the body's job, keep us alive. You know, it's the warrior fighting for us every day. But when we have a relationship with our physical selves, that's when we do get to use mindset and to almost talk with the body and say, hey, I'm gonna do something to calm you down and then talk to you about how I'm safe right now and tell life is amazing and prime my brain and my body really to interpret life differently. So that that empowerment is endless from a state of calm, it gives you back your ability to make choice, and that is the only way we experience life is through our behaviors and how we're choosing to behave.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, when you say calm is power, the image which comes into my mind uh is of a brain. And if you see the if the the higher center of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is also known as the CEO of the brain, is much more activated, it's much more active when somebody is calm and their parasympathetic nervous system is activated. When somebody is calm, they are living at their higher centers and the prefrontal cortex is active. Whereas when somebody is in the sympathetic overdrive and they are at the level of the limbic system and amygdala and the chronic stress hormones, then also shuts down the prefrontal cortex. Also, when I say calm, I have a picture of being in a jacuzzi. Staying in a jacuzzi, you are feeling relaxed, your muscles are getting relaxed, you're getting uh pressure, and we are calm, and we're getting creative thoughts also. So, not only when you are calm, our decision making is better, but also for creativity point of view, there's a huge correlation between calmness and creativity.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, 100%. That's why I kind of when talking to businesses, like your best work from your people is going to be in a space of calm, innovation, right? Successful maneuvering, efficiency, all of that upgrades, upticks exponentially from people who feel calm at work. And, you know, it's I find it fascinating. We've just disconnected from understanding the body's play in all of this. And, you know, it makes sense when you're talking about the McDill and the prefrontal cortex, because if the body's job is to keep us alive and it's like, hey, I don't trust you, you keep putting me in harm's way, it's like you're out and we're in. It's like you don't get to be in charge anymore. And that's essentially what happens. And so that's why keeping the body calm and training it to be calm by doing intentional things, not just thinking about it, makes a huge difference. And I want to add that we wouldn't really have to do all of this extra side work and tools, except that our lifestyle has shifted so dramatically from the way our physical body was designed to live. Most of tribal living, if you want to go back, I kind of think hunter-gatherer time, our body was designed to live in that time frame. So it was designed to be in nature, to be with like 150 people, so that you knew everybody there, to you know, be concerned about wild animals, yes, but most of the time self-regulate. We would walk all the time, we would be in nature. Why did people sing? Singing and humming, downregulate the nervous system, community, co-regulation with other people who are calm, downregulates the nervous system. All of these things which were built into our daily lives. So we didn't really have to do anything intentional to downregulate or to keep our nervous system calm. But we live the farther that we move from that way of living, the more intentional we have to be about daily practices, including going in a tacuzi and chilling, right? But about daily practices that keep that remind ourselves, that remind the physical body, the nervous system, that it is safe because it's like, what are we doing out of the woods? Frankly, why are we on our phone right now when we could be in the woods walking? Walking tells the body it's calm. Balance, good vision tells the body it's calm. Smells tell the body it's calm. Sound, all of these things, bird sounds. There are some countries that actually play bird sounds on the top of the hour on public radio because they already are ahead of us and they're and they're like, hey, bird sounds tell the nervous system everything's safe because chirping birds means there's no predators outside, right? And we have not evolved from hunter-gatherer lifetime. So we're just we just put ourselves in a different situation to say, hey, body, get in line, and it's just and it's like, no, no. We'd rather be outside. At least my body would. I mean, not everybody, but technically, from fractal patterns to bird sounds, it really prefers the outdoors.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for that, Nicole. Uh now we are coming to the end of our talk, Nicole, and it's been really uh and a very informative and useful uh discussion with you. In fact, I've I've learned so many, so many new things. Now, what one shift uh in practice or mindset that you can share with the listeners that they can start today to stop living in the stressful state, stressful body states, and start living in the state you have been talking about, the calm, the jacuzzi of the jacuzzi of calm and silence. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_02So I have I'll lead you through a thing, but I I also want to invite this easy, easy, easy thing where you wouldn't even need me to talk you through it. And one of the fastest ways to start getting in calm is actually to just listen to your body. Like seriously take without trying to fight it or guide it or whatever, but just to pause for 10 seconds or 30 seconds and ask your body with all of your love, frankly, attention and appreciation, what do you need right now? And we would be surprised what it tells you. And you think, oh, it's gonna say I need food or whatever. It may just say, I need to stand up and stretch. It will tell you what it needs to do. I just need to shake, I need to stretch my legs, I need to do this. And those tiny, I need to go to the bathroom, right? All the things that we put off during the day that essentially is telling the body, like, I don't care what you have to tell me. I'm ignoring you. So that would, that's the easiest because you're essentially trying to, I would offer the body as kind of a sentient itself. So you're trying to create a real relationship with it that says, hey, it's been 50 years, but I've decided to start giving, you know, giving you some credit and attention and some lip service, if you will, or you know, mindfulness techniques. What do you need from me? And it will do the things. How frequently are we scratching our shoulder or arm, not intentionally? But we have a scratch there. It's the body saying, Hey, we got a scratch or an itch over here, let's deal with it. And we just it and we kind of just take those movements for granted. So listen to your body with intention. What do you need from me? And then just cure get curious about immediately what your body wants to do and go do it if you can. If you can't, and you're like, that, you know, my body wants to go home and go to bed. Okay, well, now let me tune in, let me guide you through something that may help for a moment to calm you down. So if you're sitting or definitely not driving, but if you're sitting down or even standing or laying down, this is huge. And it's not super magical science, it's a body scan, and it is one of the easiest things that we can implement in as little or as much time as we want to give it, you know, set a timer on your clock, but close your eyes for a moment. I will close my eyes because I want to experience it as well. And the very first thing you need to do is just notice all ten toes at the exact same time. Can you actually notice the tips of all ten toes simultaneously? And just get curious about what that sensation is and then let that sensation, whatever it is, hopefully it's a good one. If it isn't, try to shift it. Is it a warmth? Is it a cold feeling? Is it tingling? Is it just feeling your socks on your feet, whatever that is, and just follow that attention and focus into the tops and bottoms of your feet. Notice like the arch of your foot. Notice the bones across the top of your foot. Or your feet. Notice both ankles at the same time. And just notice, it's not good or bad, it's just information. Notice your heels. So much of the time our body actually, a lot of the sensations, including pain, go down when we just intentionally, thoughtfully give our attention to it. Because it's a form of communication from the body, we're acknowledging it. Move all the way up the shins and the calves, and maybe you can even notice. It's again a tingling or a heat or a coolness or a heaviness, and then notice the knees. Just breathe naturally, and then notice the tops and you know the fronts and backs of your thighs. Even notice the sides of your legs. Get curious about your hips and your glutes. Like feel your seat or feel whatever you're laying on. And allow that part of your body to get heavy. And just relax. Notice your belly, the lower back. See if your breath goes down there. See if it doesn't. See if you can bring the breath into the belly and the lower back. Notice the diaphragm. Notice the side ribs. What do you feel on the side ribs under the arms? What do you feel in the front of the chest? Does it feel tight? Can you grow the sensation of ease into the chest? Notice the back. All the way up the spine, all the way across the back ribs. Breathe into that space. See if you can take a big inhale into the side ribs, filling up the chest, the belly, and the upper back. Then exhale naturally. Notice the shoulders. Relax the shoulders if they're high, but get curious about where they were. Relax the arms, you're just noticing the biceps, you're noticing the triceps, the elbows, the forearms. What do your wrists feel like? Your palms? Your fingertips, all eight fingers and two thumbs. Then come back up to the neck and the throat. Can you feel the neck, but can you feel the throat as you swallow and as you breathe? Can you allow the body just to release as you pay attention to it? Or get curious about it? Relax the jaw. Notice the teeth, the gums, the cheeks, the ears, the nose, the eyes. Are they settled? Are they relaxed? Notice the eyebrows, the forehead, and the crown of the head. Can you just offer a space of gratitude to the body? Thank you for getting me to this moment, to this place, for all the information you've ever given me. What do I do now? What do you need from me now? Can we sit in calm? Can we pull some energy in? Notice the breath again. And even put the hand on the heart space, on that chest space. Breathe into that hand. You can take both hands if it feels better. Just breathe and notice. And again, continue to offer your body gratitude. It is always, in every moment of every single day, doing its best to keep you alive, pumping blood, breathing without you thinking, protecting you from germs, giving you valuable data so you can experience the best life possible. Trying to keep you safe. So take another big deep breath in. Breathe it out. Offer one more moment of gratitude for the physical body, for this amazing life, for this planet that can bring us so much joy and happiness. And then when you're ready, you can drop your hands, roll out your shoulders, notice if your body wants to move, gently open the eyes. And just experience this moment from a different lens. What would be best for your body right now? What would be best for you? Why do you want to do whatever you're gonna do next? And is it really that important? If it is, awesome. If it isn't, get curious about what you can do differently.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Nicole. That was really a very powerful and very relaxing uh meditation. And uh thank you for sharing that. I'm certainly feeling much more calm now. Certainly feeling much more calm. Good and um it is a beautiful space to be as we come to the end of the our session. And um any final piece of advice you would like to share with the listeners.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Having a relationship with your physical body to me is the most empowering way for us to experience life, whether you're whether your goal in life is to succeed in business or have purpose in helping others, or just to go play and have a good day, which is mine. I just want to be full of joy every day. I want to be a joy creator for people. And no matter what we are here to do, whatever your philosophy is or theory about the purpose of being human, all of that starts from how we relate to our physical body and honoring the information it gives to us and getting curious about it. So that calm space allows us to do that and kind of give our body a little treat and a little gratitude. So that's my mestick to my calm as power thing. I didn't just write it as a book title, I wrote it as a movement, a way of living and a way of understanding ourselves differently.
SPEAKER_00And we have uh demonstrated that in our session today because we know that there were some technical glitches, but we managed to stay calm and come to the end of a beautiful episode of such empowering uh advice and uh uh sharing these thoughts. Uh Nicole, if uh listeners would like to uh know more about uh your work and get your book, um Calm is Power. Any uh uh what what what uh how can they reach you?
SPEAKER_02You can go to brilliantly. My friend got me the domain name, calmistpower.com, and it has everything. Link to the book is the very first thing at the top because we live busy lives and we need to we need to access it quickly. But it also talks about other podcasts I've been on and just more of the work that I'm going to be bringing, which is actually an app pretty soon and some retreats so that people can just enjoy life, whatever you're doing. Well, you're doing it because you want to enjoy life. So that's the goal of all of this is just to have some have a good time on this, these trips around the sun. So calmispower.com, and I'm on a bunch of different social media platforms. But I just want to thank you, Dr. Ash, for the work that you're doing and the awareness that you're bringing to so many different aspects of professionalism and daily life. Your books, the way you've discussed it, which is which is so thorough and beautifully written and great, you know, images for understanding all this information because it's very basic and yet, like I said, complex for us to understand ourselves. And yet the value that comes from self-awareness and self-understanding is you know priceless, limitless. So it's been pleasant.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Nicole. Thank you so much. And uh it's been a real joy speaking to you and also meeting you in person. Uh, it's been a real joy to have you at Transforming Stress. And hopefully we'll meet again. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Yes, thank you. If you enjoyed today's episode, we'd greatly appreciate it. If you could leave a five-star review, a like, or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Your support helps us reach more people. We'd love to hear your thoughts. So don't forget to comment and share. Please be sure to check out our social media links in the description box below. We can't wait to have you with us next time as we continue this journey or stress is resilience. Remember, it's not the stress itself, but how we rise above it that defines our strength. So stay resilient and keep thriving, and we will see you next time.