#23 Nervous System Know-How for Creatives: Protect Your Most Valuable Tools

In this episode, Courtney continues her engaging conversation with Anna Gieselman, a seasoned neuromobility coach. Anna shares her profound knowledge on how creatives, especially those who rely on fine motor skills, can make simple yet effective changes to maintain their physical well-being. From understanding the nervous system’s responses to exercises targeting thoracic mobility and cranial nerves, Anna provides practical drills and exercises. Whether you're a jeweler, painter, digital artist, or sculptor, this episode promises valuable insights to help protect your most valuable creative tools. Tune in to learn actionable tips for sustaining creativity and health.

Transcript

**Courtney:** Anna is a neuro mobility coach who helps people move, feel, and function better. Especially those who have chronic [00:01:00] pain or a health issue they are struggling with.

Those who work with their hands and rely on fine motor skills and endurance. She's worked with everyone from professional athletes to creatives struggling with chronic tension. And guess what? She used to be a jeweler herself. She knows exactly what our work does to our bodies. And today we're diving into some simple shifts that can help you stay creative for the long haul.

Whether you're a jeweler, a painter, a digital artist, a sculptor, this episode is going to help you protect your most valuable, creative tools, your hands, your eyes. Your body and your brain most of us don't realize just how much strain we put on ourselves until it catches up with us. That slow buildup of tension in your neck, the eye strain, the wrist pain. Those things don't just show up overnight, they accumulate over time.

So if you want to create for years to come, you need to take care of yourself now. And Ana [00:02:00] is going to teach us some new approaches on just how to do that. All right, let's get hands on. Welcome back, Ana Gieselman. How are you?

**Anna Gieselman:** I'm great. Thank you for having me.

**Courtney:** I'm so excited. So Ana took a little side trip to Mexico. In between, we've decided we're all moving to Mexico. 

**Anna Gieselman:** Oh, it's so lovely. You know, the

are so kind and welcoming generous and laid back. It was just great. I enjoyed lots of good food relaxed on the beach a little bit and explored different cultural sites and the city. It was excellent. It was a nice three weeks. I'm kind of sad to be back 



**Courtney:** It really is a different vibe, 

Sounds beautiful. I'm glad you took that break for yourself. Okay. So Ana's going to walk us through some simple drills today. I know she's got some juicy stuff for us. things that we can do, I'm assuming on a right in the studio or a workspace 

I love these simple things that we can apply right away that don't add to our plate or add to [00:03:00] this big daunting list of things that we have to do to maintain our creative lives. so let's dive in and maybe you can guide us through what you wanted to cover today.

**Anna Gieselman:** Sure. Well, I wanted to distinguish, something that we talk about in applied neurology. which is a bottom up nervous system or a top down nervous system. in our last episode together, the drills that I taught you were all vision drills, which are higher order systems, vision and vestibular are higher order. So that's what we would call like top down drills. And the difference is say, for instance, you get in an argument with your spouse or somebody says something that, kind of lights up your nervous system and you feel yourself kicking into a little bit of fight or flight. So in that situation, some people need to move their body. Like for me, I need to go either go for a run or get up, move around, stretch, dance. I have to expel that energy through my body. Other people, That's the [00:04:00] last thing they want to do. They want to sit down on the couch, relax the body, and maybe play a video game or read a book or, look on their phone. They want to use more of their eyes and their thinking, less physical. And so the two nervous systems are very different in what they respond to. And since last week we did all top down drills. I thought this week we do some bottom up drills for people whose nervous system is more on that, train of

**Courtney:** Oh, I love it. A little something for, for all of us, or we might respond differently at different times, you know?

**Anna Gieselman:** And you can be 

**Courtney:** Okay. 

**Anna Gieselman:** you know, it's not

and white. Everybody Evolving nervous system. So you might find that there's a time in your life where you are one way, and then you kind of 

**Courtney:** Shift.

**Anna Gieselman:** So, yeah,

**Courtney:** I think I'm shifting on a, yeah, I, I feel that. I do. Cause I'm not responding to things like it's such a heightened way. I don't know. Maybe [00:05:00] talk to my husband about that one.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah, well, and,

**Courtney:** I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Right.

**Anna Gieselman:** what you and your partner are, because if you're a bottom up. And you're like, I need to, I need to step away from this conversation and go walk and move. And the other person is like, no, wait, don't leave, let's stay in this situation.

Let's talk it through. Let's think everything ten times over. that's a little bit of a mismatch. And so being able to understand each other and say, okay, I know what you need. I'm going to give you space for that. But then we need to regroup. Address

**Courtney:** Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** going on, 

**Courtney:** Yeah. Take a pause. Get your nervous system in check again. Right. Like calm yourself down.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah, definitely

**Courtney:** Yeah. I guess that's what I mean. I'm trying not to be so reactionary, instead I'm trying to respond to things with logic or compassion and just slow down. It's take a beat. instead of.

Take a breath. Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah. Yeah,

**Courtney:** Yeah. Oh, let's get into that. We need to definitely do some breath. Anna, just [00:06:00] come every time and we're going to start every episode we'll do with Anna and we'll all just calm our nervous systems down. Get ready to receive, right? 


**Anna Gieselman:** your comment of calm down a lot of people think of like, oh, your, your nervous system needs to be calm. But

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** nervous system can be both calm and active you can get stuck in too much. not even really what I would call calm, but where you're kind of, frozen and you're

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** to take action and say what you need to say and do the things. so. know, you could be in either direction, but we don't always want to be calm. We want to be adaptable and

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** to the needs of the body and the needs of other people as well.

**Courtney:** Absolutely. Would you call that the freeze? Like the F's, the fight, flight, or freeze?

**Anna Gieselman:** flop. Flop is another one.

Oh. 

Flop would show up in the world as, Not exactly lethargy, but to where you can't really take action. it's

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** hard [00:07:00] to motivate, to move, 

**Courtney:** To do anything.

**Anna Gieselman:** And like, when you

**Courtney:** Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** as an adaptive response, flop is usually like you see animals do it where they play dead and that's a flop response. And

Experienced, trauma at a very early age where they're. Not in control of their body, like a newborn or an infant, they don't

**Courtney:** Hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** to run or fight. So, the, there's a few options and one of them is to flop to just disassociate from the body, just check out kind of where flopping comes from,

can be in a sort of freeze on a flop state and still live your life just have a hard time and lots of procrastinating, lots of not wanting to, step into hard things or step into your own truth or speak your own mind. yeah.

It's one of the F responses.

**Courtney:** Those F words. I don't know if we like any of the F words. Yeah. I think I've experienced like each of those in different phases of my life, different [00:08:00] chapters and I've also witnessed. When you explain the flop, I'm like, oh, that makes total sense. I've seen it, oh, this is so much deeper than talking about wrists and hands.

, there's so much more here to it. But , okay, give us, some simple things we can do to check in with the nervous system. Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** talking bottom up now. and those are people that nervous system responds best to things through the body, like physical movements. And, most jewelers that I know have a tendency to kind of hunch over their whatever they're working on. So, I

**Courtney:** Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** of, I don't want to say bad posture, because it's not even really that.

It's just bad mechanics of where you get really involved in what you're doing, and you're looking down, your head's tilted forward, you're leaning forward, 

**Courtney:** hmm. Mm

**Anna Gieselman:** thoracic glide. The thoracic spine is basically like the upper back from the base [00:09:00] of your neck down to the base of your ribs.

That's all thoracic. And the spine, all of the spine is what we would call a joint rich area. It's tons of little joints

**Courtney:** Right.

**Anna Gieselman:** of those joints have mechanoreceptors. So when you move the joints, Your brain gets a bunch of information about what the joints are doing. since the brain is constantly looking for good quality information to determine if you're safe or not, when you give it new information and move your body in different ways that it's not used to, especially if that area has a tendency to be kind of stiff or stuck, the brain's like, Oh wow, look, you're, I haven't moved that in a while.

That's interesting. Yeah, you can get a really positive response. So I usually have people take two different assessments, one being, like in their shoulder or in their neck and then the other being in the actual rotation of the thoracic spine. that way you can feel, because a lot of times when I teach a drill in an area, like say a thoracic glide. If [00:10:00] the assessment is also in that area, people are like, Oh, well, I'm just warming up. That's like their explanation for why it worked. that's why I like to measure something else in the body that is not related to the thoracic spine, because if your brain likes the input from whatever you're doing. The entire system, the entire nervous system will respond positively. So,

if you have a sore neck, it hurts to turn your head right to left and you vibrate on your feet and your brain likes that, your next going to have less tension the next time you check it. So that's kind of what I mean, like a change can happen systemically.


**Courtney:** hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** action in a specific area.

since so many people are really stiff on their upper back, thoracic mobility can be a game changer.

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** I know not everyone's going to be watching this. So I'll do my best to talk us through it. but. it is helpful to come back and watch the video as

**Courtney:** Yep.

**Anna Gieselman:** And

**Courtney:** forget you guys, it's on [00:11:00] YouTube at the Jewelers View. 


I'll pop the link into the show notes as well for you guys. So you can, you can watch this later in the studio or at home or sitting on your couch, check that out on, at the Jewelers View on YouTube.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah. if you're driving your car, don't do these exercises. I hope that's obvious, just in

**Courtney:** Thank you for the disclaimer. 

**Anna Gieselman:** Before we do this, we have to assess. So

see how well your neck rotates. Just take a few rotations, turning right and turning left. See if 

**Courtney:** Oh, mine's tight.

**Anna Gieselman:** And if 

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** of in your mind's eye measure like, okay, it's a little bit, it's like a medium tightness to the right. Or left . So that's one, then you're going to also rotate your torso. So cross your arms across your chest, kind of like you're hugging yourself and you're going to rotate your spine right to left. So you're twisting to the right, to the left again, noticing how well do you twist, like how far do you go?

How does it feel? Is it sticky? Does it hurt [00:12:00] anywhere? . So I have some space to show you my

**Courtney:** Cool. Okay. Oh, yeah,

**Anna Gieselman:** also moving their low back. So as best as you can, you're going to try to not rock your pelvis or move your low back around.

If you happen to be watching this and you have like a yoga block, you could take the yoga block up against your back in between the chair, in the back of the chair. That way you have a little something that stops you from moving your low back, but I'm assuming most people probably don't have that. So we're going to proceed as if you don't. So for the flexion extension, you're going to take your fingertips to your sternum. That's like your breastbone, as some people call it, right, in between the breast and also a little bit above the pecs. It's [00:13:00] a hard plate of bone. So your hands are going to be there just to give you some feedback. You can take your elbows out to the side just a little bit, like a slight opening. 

. So you've got a little bit of tactile feedback about where you're going to be moving. You might have taken a yoga class before and you heard of Cat Cow. This is the same thing, except it's not the whole spine. So you're going to have your heart kind of round backwards, like your fingers are going to push into your chest. The spine between your shoulder blades pushes backwards. That's flexion.

Push your heart forward. Your fingers will move forward. That's extension. And I'm going to turn sideways so you can see me from the side. It's a

small movement, so it's not so much that your butt's tucking and your head's falling down.

It's just at the heart. So you go back with your heart, kind of like you're sucking your heart in, your fingers in. And then you push your fingers forward, heart goes forward and up. And as

[00:14:00] Back and forth with this little pump, you want to keep your shoulders relaxed, because a lot of times people will just move their shoulder blades forward and

**Courtney:** yeah,

**Anna Gieselman:** arms are just kind of hanging out, and your heart and your spine and your ribcage pushing forward and backward. Without disturbing the low back too much or without disturbing the shoulders too much. It's not that big of a movement. And

**Courtney:** okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** of want to drop in. You might even close your eyes and feel like, Do I feel this in between my shoulder blades?

Because that's where we're trying to achieve movement. Is right between the shoulder blades and that section of the spine. So then we're going to stay with this, but you're going to add a small little side bend. So imagine as if you're bending at the armpit. So you're tilting over to the right

**Courtney:** Mm hmm [00:15:00] Okay

**Anna Gieselman:** with a lateral side bend. So you've got a little pump action still in the thoracic spine at the heart in between the shoulder blades, and then you'll come all the way up and tilt over like your side bending at the other side on your armpit and then little forward and backward pump.

**Courtney:** So not a big side bend, right? We're just doing like a little tilt.

**Anna Gieselman:** the tilt is in the upper spine. So if your waistline is getting scrunched a lot, that's because you're bending at your low back. So

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** like you're trying to scrunch your armpit. That's where you're bending. It's that

**Courtney:** I see. That helps. Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** Good. And then you'll do a few more of these and backward, and then come all the way back up to center.

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** nothing and then check in with your neck again, just like we did before. So rotate your neck right to the left and see if it feels [00:16:00] better. If it's moving farther, if it's less sticky, less resistance. then

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** the rotation of your torso.

So, same thing, how far it goes. And I think it's worth saying that if you are someone who your body a lot, like you're an athlete or you're a dancer, you, like, constantly moving,

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** to do many more reps than what we just did for your brain to really perceive this as novel or interesting. So if

**Courtney:** Got it.

**Anna Gieselman:** you don't move your back that often, this can be like gold to where the brain's like, wow, I needed that. Thank you so much. And rewards you with less tension, but if you already move a lot and you do yoga and stuff,

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** it up a notch and make it harder or do more reps or, add a band for resistance to make it more meaningful to your brain.

**Courtney:** Mm. Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah, so,

**Courtney:** how would you do the band? I'm having a

I have stretch [00:17:00] bands.

**Anna Gieselman:** if you have a long enough stretch band, you can

**Courtney:** Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** it around your torso, 

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** have it either pulling behind you or pulling forward or pulling to the side so you have a thing that you're resisting trying to pull you and you're pushing against it. So

**Courtney:** see. Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** different directional poles of the band.

, I mean, hopefully it's never happened, but if someone ever punched you in the chest on the sternum, your spine would have to go back. You'd be like absorbing their punch straight in. , and then you're pushing the punch back out.

, Really, sternum, where your fingers are, should be retreating into your body, like you're kind of

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** shape, then pushing forward. And

not the end of the world if your shoulders are involved, but we're trying to target the spine.

**Courtney:** focus on the back. Yeah, on the spine. Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** Then we're going to do a lateral glide , so sitting where you are kind of on the edge of your chair, take your arms out to a [00:18:00] T. You're going to keep your butt seated.

Don't let it rock on the seat. And you're going to reach your upper body to the right and then to the left. Kind of like there's, a glass of water just outside of your reach but you can't lift off the seat. So your trunk extends laterally, reaches laterally. is the lateral glide.

So you should not feel one butt bone lightening up. Both of them stay firmly seated on the chair. And your spine goes right to left, your arms are reaching out to the right, reaching out to the left. And then we're going to add rotation. But before we do, I just want to make this clear. This is not a side bend. So you're not scrunching one side of your ribs and stretching the other, that would be like a lateral bend. This is a lateral glide. So

**Courtney:** You're just gliding. You're making it look easy.

**Anna Gieselman:** while I

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** so

**Courtney:** I got the rhythm with you now. I'm with you now.

**Anna Gieselman:** good, then we're going to add a [00:19:00] twist. So your heart's going to rotate a little to the right or to the left. Arms are still out to a T. butt stays seated and you're now reaching on a new plane. So you're kind of

**Courtney:** Mm

**Anna Gieselman:** going back

And then rotate the other way. So your heart turns. And you

**Courtney:** It feels good anyways, like a stretch.

**Anna Gieselman:** Oh, yeah, yeah. I love these

Yeah. Okay. So then come back to center. Take a breath and check

**Courtney:** All right,

**Anna Gieselman:** your neck better? So that one was more powerful for me than

**Courtney:** hmm,

**Anna Gieselman:** cat cow one. I had more range of motion in the neck right away.

**Courtney:** and then can you do, you could do the

**Anna Gieselman:** You can reassess.

**Courtney:** the hug yourself reassess.

**Anna Gieselman:** Then we're going to move on to a cranial nerve drill. So you have 12 cranial nerves. They are innervating and mostly in your brainstem. So when you work with these nerves, it gives your brainstem a little bit more activity, which is great.

I think we'll do the [00:20:00] tongue. So, you're going to use your neck as the assessment, so you're still going to stay with turning your head right to left. See how tight it is. And then hold your right hand up against your right cheek, and you're going to press your tongue inside of your cheek against the hand, the strong push of

**Courtney:** hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** and you're just going to hold it. for about 15, 20, 25 seconds. You want to get to the point where it kind of feels fatigued, fatiguing, like a workout for the tongue. And this is for the hypoglossal nerve. That is what moves the tongue around. So when you're pressing into your right cheek, it's the left side of the brain stem hypoglossal nuclei that's getting more activity. So you're going to hold that brush and

**Courtney:** Okay, I felt like I got a workout.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah. And then

**Courtney:** My tongue got a workout.

**Anna Gieselman:** Check your neck, see if it feels any [00:21:00] different.

**Courtney:** Ooh, that one was interesting. I'm feeling that one

more significantly. Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** side. So same thing. Hold your hand against your cheek. Tongue presses inside of the cheek against that resistance and hold it for 15 to 25 seconds. And it's common that one side will give you a higher payoff, than the other. So that's why I want you to assess your neck after every drill because that way you start to know like, Oh yeah, for me, when I do that on the right side, I get a better result.

The left side, nothing happens. The next time when you're feeling tight in your neck, you just go to the drills, you know, that work for you. You don't have to spend all your time doing other 

**Courtney:** Right. We're getting options right now. Yeah. Cool.

**Anna Gieselman:** How is that second

**Courtney:** Interesting. Like, really good. So, how did that connect? That's blowing my mind. 

Everything's connected. I get that. But, in a

**Anna Gieselman:** okay. 

**Courtney:** Mm. Mm

**Anna Gieselman:** in charge of everything you're [00:22:00] feeling, including muscle tension. It governs muscle tone. the feeling

**Courtney:** hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** It governs your range of motion. Like it's the chief operating system. , and your brain is constantly deciding every single second, are we safe or not?

Are we safe or not? When it thinks you're not safe, it protects you with outputs such as tension, pain, restricted range of motion. It's kind of inconvenient, but basically it's saying I don't feel safe and I want to limit what you're doing. So

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** locks you down. And then when you give your brain inputs in the language of the nervous system, which is sensory inputs, In this case, you're giving sensory input through the hypoglossal nerve. And your brain's like, Oh, wow, I needed that information or I like that. It's novel information, but it's reducing the level of threat prediction. So then your brain's like, we're a little bit safer because you gave me information that I needed. So now I can let go of some of that protective tension. I don't

**Courtney:** [00:23:00] Wow.

**Anna Gieselman:** guard so much. And the tongue for most people, it's a really high payoff area. So doing tongue presses. Circling the tongue around the teeth, even grabbing the tongue with a little cloth and gently pulling on it, 

**Courtney:** Mm.

**Anna Gieselman:** really powerful for relieving neck strain. That's how I went viral the first time on Instagram was showing people to pull their tongue and I swear, probably like 100, 000 people were

**Courtney:** Oh my gosh.

**Anna Gieselman:** did

**Courtney:** Wow.

**Anna Gieselman:** crazy. So,

Don't underestimate the power of cranial nerves and also your tongue.

**Courtney:** Interesting, right? Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** then I wanted to show you one more drill, and that would be for your cerebellum and cerebellum is this little chunk on the back of the brain. It's kind of under the main thing that you would imagine as the brain. it's really important. It's only, I think like 10 percent of the volume of the brain, but it Occupies 50 percent of the neurons,

**Courtney:** Mobility. [00:24:00] Is this the one, the right, at the base of the skull that meets, where it meets the spine? So that's where my husband, had his stroke.

**Anna Gieselman:** ah, okay.

**Courtney:** Yes. And it was so scary. They couldn't do anything about it. because they would have potentially paralyzed him to try to stop the stroke because it was attacking that, Cerebellum. Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah,

**Courtney:** So we just had to write it out. Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** the job of

It's kind of like it's constantly double checking all of the plans that your brain has. So the

**Courtney:** okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** are saying, hey, we want to reach out and grab that glass of water. we're going to go for it. Your cerebellum, it

**Courtney:** Yeah,

**Anna Gieselman:** cerebellum is working correctly, it controls your accuracy of movement.

Balance of your body and coordination. You need it for everything. You need it to [00:25:00] coordinate walking, to coordinate swallowing and, coordinate the movement of your eyes. So you're tracking things as they're happening around you and. It's so, so important. and one of the many ways to work with it is to do complex nonlinear movements. we're going to do a little hand drill and this is also a little bit of a frontal lobe drill. Cause it's, takes some processing to think about. For people who aren't watching the video, I'll do my best to talk through it, but. If you can go back and watch it, go back and watch it. So,

**Courtney:** perfect,

**Anna Gieselman:** going to take an assessment, and this time let's change it up and do a different assessment.

So, come up to standing, and stand with your feet all the way touching like they're very narrow touching together. your arms on your chest and then close your eyes and see how stable you are. 

if 

**Courtney:** Hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** super easy, which for most people it will, it'll feel like fine. Then you're going to open your eyes and just step one foot in front of the other kind of like you're standing on a balancing beam and start with [00:26:00] your eyes open and see, okay, how balanced am I now? then if you feel safe to do so, you can close your eyes see how your balance is without your vision. this is an assessment. First thing we're going to do are hand flips. So you're going to have one palm face up right out in front of you. And then your other palm top of it, kind of like you're doing a clap of your hands. But

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** like a regular clap where you're just slapping them together, one hand is going to stay still. So the bottom hand doesn't move. And the top hand is going to do an aerial little flip. These are hand flips. So the top hand, it's going to slap down, and then it's going to lift up, flip, and the back side of the fingers are going to slap down, and then lift up, flip, fingers back down, lift up, flip. So, it's a hand flip, and this

**Courtney:** Hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** simple, but you're going to go as fast as you can. So,

**Courtney:** Oh,

**Anna Gieselman:** go real [00:27:00] quick.

**Courtney:** you're way quicker than us. Sauna

**Anna Gieselman:** And at some point, it might get a little floppy and sloppy, and that's your stopping point. Okay, you're going to go to the other side, and so you're switching hands. Now the other hand is going to be the stable one, and you're going to do the aerial hand flips, and you're going to go as fast as you can. don't be surprised if one hand is not good and the other is 

on 

**Courtney:** Wow. This one's way, like, way more fluid on the left. Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah, okay, cool, good, So then we're going to do you're going to have your thumb and your pinky touching on one hand. And

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** your index finger touching on the other. And you're going to go through your fingers touching your thumb to each finger sequentially, but kind of in reverse.

, I'll talk you through the right hand first. You're touching pinky and thumb, then

**Courtney:** Mm-hmm

**Anna Gieselman:** then the middle and the thumb, [00:28:00] and then the index, right? So that makes sense? Pinky, ring, middle, index. Just a little

**Courtney:** Got it.

**Anna Gieselman:** While

**Courtney:** hmm

**Anna Gieselman:** doing that on that hand, you're going to be doing the reverse action on the other hand.

You're doing index, middle finger, ring finger, pinky. Again, that's index, middle, ring, pinky. So they're doing the same thing, but in reverse. And so you're

**Courtney:** Oh

**Anna Gieselman:** them quickly as you can. 

We've just done two cerebellum drills back to back. You're going to come back to your stance, how you were, if it was feet together. Then feet together.

**Courtney:** Mm hmm.

**Anna Gieselman:** one foot forward, step that same foot forward. going to cross your arms and then close your eyes and see if your balance is any better. 

, you know, since changes at the level of your nervous system are going to be system wide, you can also still check your neck and see. How did your brain feel about doing those complex movements

**Courtney:** Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** So if your neck

**Courtney:** [00:29:00] Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** that is a threat response. That means your brain found that activity threatening. If it feels easier, your brain liked that input into the cerebellum.

I mean, there's so many, and that's, If you want to get more for free, you can follow me on Instagram. I have a ton there, 

that's why I don't teach a lot of public classes. I just work with people one on one because everybody's nervous system is different.

some people might respond to every single drill we covered and there might be people who didn't respond to anything. They're like, nothing happened on this. This is total BS. it just depends on your nervous system. You might need higher load. you might need less, you might be super sensitive and negative feedback from these because your brain's like, Whoa, too much.

I don't like that.

**Courtney:** Okay.

**Anna Gieselman:** everybody's different. It's really powerful to start to understand your own nervous system and learn what it needs more of and what it doesn't really care about and give it more of what it needs.

**Courtney:** Yeah. trying one at a time, I think makes a lot of sense. Right. And maybe testing it a few [00:30:00] times. Very cool.


Measurements. Yeah,

**Anna Gieselman:** no idea if anything is working. So don't 

**Courtney:** right. The before assessment is absolutely essential. So they have something to compare to.

**Anna Gieselman:** Yeah.

**Courtney:** last week we talked about even just doing a push up or something for those who are more mobile 

**Anna Gieselman:** yeah.

**Courtney:** you might need a bigger measure, right?

**Anna Gieselman:** load. Yeah.

**Courtney:** A higher load measure. Okay. Yeah.

**Anna Gieselman:** If you lift weights all the time, you have high stress in your life. You probably, your brain's not going to respond to just like simple things. It's probably going to want more dynamic input. 

And if you're someone who's really compromised, chronic pain, TBI, concussion, autoimmune, then just the littlest input can be significant.

So depends on the person.

**Courtney:** All of us have something, right? Nobody's functioning perfectly on a hundred percent. There's just no such thing. We all have something

**Anna Gieselman:** And

**Courtney:** that,

**Anna Gieselman:** people who are very high functioning, like no pain. No digestive [00:31:00] problems, no anxiety. They do like high level movements. they can still improve. Their nervous system can still get better at being awesome. So

**Courtney:** right.

**Anna Gieselman:** to feel like crap and be digging yourself out of a hole. If you already feel good, you can just function better.

So it's on a spectrum of rehab to performance. 

**Courtney:** We talked about vision a little bit last week. Give us a quick, before we go, before we let you go on, I thank you so much. This is so interesting and. I want to play with it more so I can really sit with the each motion. You're making those look easy.

It's not like the finger. That's like rubbing your head and doing the patting your belly at the same time. I'm not good at that. That's interesting. So it's probably one that I should focus on maybe.

**Anna Gieselman:** another one that's pretty good. If you make a fist in

**Courtney:** Yeah. Yeah. Oh,

**Anna Gieselman:** out on the other, then you're going to be switching. So you're just going to,

**Courtney:** see, that's probably [00:32:00] I'm going to say it's easier and then it's not

**Anna Gieselman:** once you get it, once the motor map is there and your brain knows the pattern, it's super easy. So as soon as it becomes easy, you have to move on to something else. 

**Courtney:** okay, so here's our action step for the week. Thank you, Anna, so much. Pick one of the drills Anna shared today and try it for the next few days. See how it feels, just one tiny change done consistently can lead to big results, and if you want more resources like this, be sure to follow Ana at Beyond Functional on Instagram.

This is how I discovered Ana again, rediscovered her and brought her back into my orbit was her Instagram is loaded with all these great little things that you can try, like what we shared today. She's constantly sharing tips and Ana. How do we get in touch with you if we want to work one on one?

What's the best way to find you?

**Anna Gieselman:** you can go to my website beyond functional. net and just send me a little message there. You can send me a message on Instagram. Those are the two main [00:33:00] ways.

**Courtney:** Excellent. All right, friends, that's it for today. Remember, small changes add up. Take care of yourself and implement one thing from today's episode.

That's the goal, to just give you little things each week. I promise you'll feel the difference. Don't forget to check this out on YouTube where you can watch and follow along with Ana and watch me attempting to keep up. It's at the Jewelers View on YouTube. So if you want to see those drills in action, be sure to subscribe there.

I'll see you next week for another conversation to help you grow, thrive, and create with confidence until then onward and upward 

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