#36 - The Metabolic Cost of Everything

In this episode, we explore how understanding and consciously managing our metabolic energy can help us thrive amidst chaos - from geopolitical tensions to AI-driven change. Dr. Sarah Sarkis, a clinical psychologist turned executive coach, shares practical insights on how to become more intentional with our internal resource and navigate uncertainty with resilience.


Key topics:
📈The concept of metabolic budget and its influence on high performance
🪫How to treat energy as a finite resource and the importance of small investments
📈The five autonomic response patterns: urgency, withdrawal, control, overconnection to threat, and regulation
🪫Strategies for recognizing and shifting autonomic patterns towards adaptive regulation
📈The role of sleep, mindfulness, and discomfort training in sustaining energy
🪫The importance of internal self-awareness over external control in uncertain environments
📈How to future-proof your energy system by experimenting with small, intentional changes


Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction to energy as a vital wealth in uncertain times
02:20 - The metabolic budget analogy: spending energy across life domains
04:00 - How ambitious pursuits impact energy and resource allocation
06:40 - Recognizing energy overspending and regressions to the mean
08:00 - Five factors of flourishing and their energy costs
10:00 - When and how to undo energy imbalances and patterns
12:00 - What balanced energy feels like versus burnout
14:00 - The flow of sustainable performance: oscillating between flow and recovery
16:00 - Using small, consistent experiments to manage energy more effectively
20:00 - The neurochemistry of flow and the importance of strategic recovery
24:00 - The danger of persistent stress and the need for intentional pauses
30:00 - The myths around living in an 'optimal' state and embracing oscillation
35:00 - Recognizing and managing autonomic response patterns: urgency and withdrawal
40:00 - Navigating control, over-connection to threat, and emotional regulation


Quotes:
•"Everything costs something. Most especially success, achievement, curiosity, and all the markers of a deeply engaged life."
•"We think only losses are debits. We don't realize that success is a debit because it takes a ton of energy."
•"Most of us will unconsciously continue to do what is most neuroeconomically efficient."
•"We regress to the average of our best habits when the system realizes we've spent too much."
•"Today's the least stressful day of your life. Tomorrow gets more complex."
•"Anybody who tells you we can eliminate stress is selling you bullshit. You cannot. You can adapt to it."
•"Be careful what you allow to become normal."
•"You become ready by doing."
•"A team can only move as fast as the person who withdraws the most."
•"Get really comfortable being uncomfortable. The sooner you train that, the better you'll navigate uncertainty."


Stay tuned for Dr. Sarah Sarkis’ forthcoming book:
An Inside Job: Leveraging Psychology to Transform Peak Performance

More on the study from the Human Factors Lab: the benefits of a 10 minute mindfulness meditation


#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself 

Connect with Gillian: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers-ma-cfp%C2%AE-cea-997094124/?originalSubdomain=ca   
https://x.com/GillianStovelR 
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial 
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

Transcript

0:02

The Flourish Feed Podcast, a series of curiosity-driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. I'm your host, Gillian Stovel Rivers, M A C F P C E A, Senior Wealth Advisor at CIA Zante Wealth Management. Today's the last, least stressful day of your life. Tomorrow it gets more complex. The day after that, it's more complex. A year from now, it's exponentially more complex, as is your maturing system and the maturing demands coming in on that system. And so anybody who tells you we can reduce or get rid of stress is selling you bullshit. You cannot. You can adapt to it. And this the flow, the struggle section of the four-cycle flow really makes that a training ground for that. So sit in the struggle, whatever that struggle is. We talk a lot about uncertainty right now. Markets, geopolitics, AI, the pace of change. But what we don't talk about enough is the utility of that kind of stress and the cost of how we respond to it. Because whether we're aware of it or not, every reaction we have, every moment of anxiety, control, avoidance, or even overfunctioning is drawing from a finite internal resource. And what I've been increasingly interested in is the idea that our energy, our metabolic capacity, is actually one of our most important forms of wealth. So today's conversation is really about this. How do we become more intentional about what we spend energy on, especially in a world we can't control? Dr. Sarah Sarkis is a clinical psychologist who has evolved her practice beyond traditional therapy into working with executives, founders, and leadership teams, navigating high-stakes environments. She brings a unique lens, grounded in clinical training, but applied in real-world contexts, helping people understand not just what they're doing, but why their system is doing it. What stood out to me in our earlier conversation is how we think about energy almost like a budget, something we are constantly allocating, often unconsciously, and today we're going to unpack that budget, especially as it relates to how we respond to uncertainty. Dr. Sarah Sarkis, welcome to the Flourish Feet Podcast. Thank you. I want to start with this idea of metabolic budget. It's something you speak about so much, and I've always been enamored when I get to hear you speak. But we're constantly spending energy across different domains of our lives. Can you walk us through that concept in a way that helps people actually see themselves in it? Sure. This notion sort of arose as even when I was still in like what we would consider a really traditional therapeutic practice, I think a lot of times we're very disconnected from the reality that everything costs something, most especially success, achievement, curiosity, all the markers of like high-functioning, deeply engaged people, right? And the more we can understand it like a financial budget, just like we would think about debits and credits in an account that you could track, I think it helps us, or my experience has been that it helps us be more realistic about what we're asking of our body and our brain and our mind as a single unit, and also um to be intentional about what we want from it, right? So because it's going to cost us. There is no anonymous deeds, right? So that's kind of how it arose. And I think that when people start to see it this way as something that we actually have a tremendous amount of agency over, and it's actually super responsive to even sort of the smallest of gestures. This isn't just about getting everything right all the time, in terms of like, this isn't a conversation about living perfectly or living like a monk, but I think it's an evaluation of how we live and sort of seeing that, you know, we can make small investments, energetic investments, that go a long way, especially if you're if you consider yourself somebody who's like highly ambitious. That's going to cost you a lot. And when we think about the highly ambitious times of life, whether that's when you're maybe in university or grad school or you're building your career, you're raising a family maybe at the same time as you're trying to pay down debt, like all of these things happen to you. I mean, you yes, you sign up for them, but they're happening at such a rate that the possibility of reflection seems difficult unless it's very, very intentional. So, from your clinical perspective, what tends to happen when people aren't aware of how they're spending that energy? Maybe it's during those chapters. Yeah, we do we overspend. Most of us, we just overspend. We will unconsciously continue to do, do, do what comes, we call it naturally to us. It's really what's like most neuroeconomically efficient. What a great term. Yeah. I think I I've I've probably made it up, but it sort of serves, it's it gives you an idea. It's like, you know, you were talking about this before we recorded about AI, but humans are the same way. It's like we are constantly trying to cut weight in the like wrestlers, in the like economics of how much it costs just to keep these brains satisfied, right? And it's you know, it's expensive to do new things, to learn new things, to build new habits. That takes a lot of energy. And I do think really the only we will tend to regress to our average when we have when the system is sort of realizing like, oh, we've spent too much here. I need to cut weight here, I need to save energy here. And uh, we will regress to the mean, you know, the average of our best um habits. And yeah, yeah. In our framework, we talk about five factors of flourishing. The first one being positive social connections, the second one being meaning and purpose, the third one being physical and mental health, then we've got autonomy and agency, like you've talked about, and then we have achievement and growth. And what I'm thinking I'm hearing you saying is if you allocate excessive amounts of energy to one or two of those things, there's less to go to the other ones. And it's because there is an if an economic, what did you call it, a neuroeconomical efficiency that ends up creating a neural pathway of how we don't have social connections when we are in that state of life where achievement and growth is everything, or we don't have physical and mental health because we've decided that our purpose is the number one driver of everything we do every day. So is that something that you can ever undo, or does it take a bit of a hitting of the wall to be able to undo it? Tell us more about that. Yeah, that sort of depends on the person, right? So temperament style comes into play here. Certainly, there's some people for whom there's just like every lesson has to be the hard lesson, right? And then there's other people who are much more like they are they are by nature like more conservative and they're overspending their metabolic budget, right? So what wakes people up typically, so that's kind of where my crossroads came. Like now I'm sort of in this world of positive psychology and executive coaching and leadership development. But when I was in my kind of straight up private practice therapeutically, the system is sort of designed to wait till the wheels come off the bus. Like you can't come into the system until you have a diagnosis, and you can't get a diagnosis until you are really struggling. You know, you're really having. So a lot of times in my early years, it showed up as two ends of the spectrum and everything in between. If we think on one end of the spectrum is people who are totally shut down. So their procrastination has turned into avoidance. Avoidance has turned into sort of like a phobic procrastination, right? They're totally shut down. On the other end of the spectrum would be burnout. It's just like constant decades of overfunctioning and overspending that metabolic budget. And then they reach like a critical energy mass at some point, and everybody will reach it. And some of that is mediated by gender, best that I can tell. You know, midlife becomes some becomes a place for women where you'll acutely feel the overspent metabolic budget because of the relationship with declining estrogen and increasing cortisol. So it kind of like meets up with a period of time. And men, I notice it's this is anecdotal, it seems to be sort of slightly later, and they too will have a form of a midlife overspending that has its own kind of unique experience. So on that continuum, from all the way from people who are totally shut down to people who have completely sort of they're functioning, but they are riding on their the rims of their tires, you know, people will have a ton of ways that they can kind of wake up to this, right? They can realize and attune to them themselves to the realization of like, oh, this isn't gonna be sustainable. And so now, decades in or a decade in, now I sort of can catch people because I got out of the that strict therapeutic setting, which you know I love and was trained there and have great reverence for it. Now, sometimes I can catch people before the wheels have come off the bus. And that provides a whole different kind of path forward for people as well. I would say this for anybody who's listening and thinks like, that's me. Like I'm riding on the rims. I would say there's a ton you can do, and we can sort of get into that, right? We all know these there's flight, flight, freeze, right? So there's these prescribed. I'm hoping we can go through those and maybe we just talk a little bit about age, but yes, go on. Yes, exactly. And I would say that, like wherever you are on the spectrum, just start. And by the way, if you aren't on the spectrum of metabolically overspent, please start. You are then in an even better place to begin to be really mindful about the fact that I mean, literally everything costs something. We think only the hits, the losses, the failures, the times of struggle. We only think that those are the debits. We don't realize that success is a debit. Wow. Okay. It takes a ton of energy. I want to talk about the five autonomic response patterns that we identified and just go into each a little bit. But before we go there, for someone who isn't already riding on the rims, what does good feel like? Like what should what should a balanced energy system feel like? Because I kind of have to say, as someone who just turned 50, been running a business for 25 years, I'm almost launching two kids. I think I've been riding on the rims for a while, but I think I think that that's normal. And I I guess what you're helping me see is that there is a possibility of maybe starting younger with understanding your metabolic budget and what good feels like so that we don't get to these five autonomic responses. Or yeah, is there a way of knowing what good feels like? Or balanced, I should say. There is. Yeah. Oh, I yeah, we can't use the word, I don't know that we can use balanced. Okay. That's a whole side story. I don't know that there is balance. Certainly not on the road to like self-actualization, success. No, I think I'm thinking of it like a Tesla battery, you know, rather than taking it down past the 10% where you're never supposed to, and never charging above the 80 because you want to save that for later. How do you like what are some thoughts on keeping it between the 10 and the 80 so that your battery is always in good health? Sure. Yeah. Okay, so there's a few things. One thing you said that I think is really valuable for people to hear is you said for you, because it's like if you're feeling it, odds are, because like don't I sort of consider myself like I'm the average. I'm like the average, how the average person is gonna experience if I'm feeling it, probably shoulder to shoulder. There's a bunch of women that feel similar to me, right? Because we're classifying like we're we're in this body with this distribution of hormones, neurotransmitters, biologic age, et cetera, right? So you said you you only know the way you feel, and that's become that's what you feel feels normal, right? So one thing for us to always remember is like be careful what we allow to become normal, right? Like, is it truly how you know you want to feel, or is it just that it has statistically become your norm, right? And so inside those margins are huge growth, because if you can change that one degree, that's an enormous change in the felt experience of the person, okay? But for the young people who are maybe have not imprinted as many habits that you know result in this overspending, your question is basically, how do they know what feeling good feels like? Right. And I would say rather than ever having like a prescribed, like this is what feeling good feels like, although from flow, we do have a loose definition. It's like we can, it's when we it's an optimal state where we feel our best and perform our best, where there's no trade. Most of us see this conversation about uh stress optimization, about the necessity of stress, how to turn stress into something less corrosive and how to offset the corrosiveness. Most people are tuning in going, oh great. That's a dumb thing. This is uh this is a conversation about rest, right? And we sort of see it as a trade. Maybe some enlightened ones think, well, it's a necessary trade, but it's a trade for performance like we can either perform or we can recover, right? I do like that. And I do like that you brought flow into this because back to the analogy of not going below 10% but only charging to 80%. When you appreciate what it takes to oscillate in a flow lifestyle, which is that you have to spend a certain amount of your time and energy getting to that spot through a flow on rim, and then spend another amount of your time and energy recovering from it, maybe the answer lies in the habit as opposed to the feeling. Is that that's exactly right. Okay, good. Exactly. That's exactly right. So what I would say to young people is more than like putting a definition of what it is, we do have one, here's a great framework. But I would ask them to future cast, okay. You're if I was working with like a 28-year-old, right? I'd say you're 28. You are metabolically, energetically, assuming you're healthy, etc., you are just full of potential. That engine is just ready to work, okay? It has just enough aptitude to sort of get some traction, not enough to be rigid. Usually that animal is hungry, curious, and a little bit desperate to make a name for itself, right? To sort of have a stake in the ground, okay? And that's a great recipe for getting shit done. I would say this future cast, how you want to feel at 37 and 47. It's a kind of slowing them down long enough to think about that, hey, by the way, this is temporary. It feels like that's really far away and it is in the details, but you will blink three or four times and it will be in your face. 47 will be in your face quicker than you imagine, right? And you can make these very small changes. Now, the framework I what I would do if I was working with an individual or a group is I'd have them do an energy management audit. I'd have them really look at their. You have a great frameworker. I'd probably use similar ones. I might tweak it. I may even have them come up with the criteria, but I love this. The connection, meaning, health, autonomy, growth. That's a wheel. What percentage feels what where are you spending your metabolic budget? Be aware and mindful of it, right? So I'd have them sort of understand that. And then I'd have them choose my philosophy with these kinds of changes is um the smallest viable increment of change that you can do consistently. So I love to see people that are like, I'm gonna do like two hours a week of blah, blah, blah. And a small percentage will. Most of them are setting themselves up for sabotage right there. So I want them to dial it back to like at the beginning, 15 minutes a week. What can you do for that energetic repay of the debts of being a healthy, ambitious person, the deaths of exertion, and just do that consistently for a couple of months. How many months? I don't know how many months are you willing to do it. Sure, run the experiment, right? Just run the experiment. Run the experiment, exactly. And I love the notion of the flow cycle of being a great way to frame this for people because the bookends become really valuable. You know, everybody focuses on the middle, which is the release and flow, because everybody loves how that feels. And then most people neglect those bookends of struggle and recovery. And I love it because it does two things. On the struggle, it's like, hey, this is adaptive. We're today's the last, least stressful day of your life. Tomorrow it gets more complex. The day after that, it's more complex. A year from now, it's exponentially more complex, as is your maturing system and the maturing demands coming in on that system. And so anybody who tells you we can reduce or get rid of stress is selling you bullshit. You cannot, you can adapt to it. And this the flow, the the struggle section of the four-cycle flow really makes that a training ground for that. So sit in the struggle, whatever that struggle is, right? We can even double-click on that in another session. Oh, I I want to come back to it. I want to come back to it. Yeah. Yeah, great. And then the recovery, right? Which is, and this is one of the things that our friend Stephen Cotler has, you know, I took the first time I really hung out with Stephen was at Flow for Writers in 2016, might have been 2015, and it was in San Francisco. And the whole three days at the time, it was a three-day thing back when we had a concentration span as a society. It was three days, might have even been three and a half, and everything was so valuable. But literally, the thing that was the most profound to me, it was almost like a throw-off comment that he said. He's like, Oh, yeah, by the way, one thing to think about in terms of managing how expensive flow is neurochemically, because it is. Um, he was like, stop before the train reaches the station. Don't ride the concentration train all the way into the station where you're burnt and fried and you need like a cigarette and caffeine to get through the next segment of your day. He's like, stop 20 minutes before that. By the way, just engaging. If you're 25 and you're listening to this and you think, 25 minutes before, I don't even know what that feels like. That's what curiosity get to know your what does it feel like when you are 20 minutes from sort of the end going too far into focus and concentration, right? So he levels one was pull out, and then second, pull out before you reach the station. And the second thing that he said was do a recovery task immediately after flow. Now he's a fun, he's um, he's gonna say he's a fundamentalist, but he's actually. Too much of a maverick for that. But he's a he has such a commitment to process once he finds out that it's effective. Yeah. So he had suggested 30 minutes after a flow session as that recovery. For anybody who's thinking, which is like most CEOs, I don't have 30 minutes. And and youth has that same kind of like, I can't do that. Also because of rank inside companies. You may not have 30 minutes because you are a junior. And when we're talking about a recovery exercise, we're talking about going for a walk, doing some breathing, like that's what a recovery exercise. It could be, and I say it could be as little as 10 minutes. And I think the I think the research from Microsoft Human Factors Lab on the microbreaks gives strong evidence that 10 minutes or less after a high intensity concentration thing, which we're calling flow, but it could be that you had a meeting that lasted 90 minutes. You it could be these are small increments. If you can find 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes, go for first of all, please, for the love of everything necessary in life right now, don't switch and transition into emails, social media, YouTube, or any other sort of thing that's going to take you further into the wormhole of dopamine. We're trying to give the brain a recovery from just doing a very high dopamine adrenaline state of existence, right? So go for a walk, 10 minutes, sit at your desk quietly and do a five to seven minute meditation, do breath work. If you have an office, you could literally lay down and just listen to music that kind of transports you. If you're extremely extroverted and connecting with people kind of is your vibe, you could ask somebody else to go for a walk with you, but it's sans phones. You gotta take the slot machine that's inside our pockets now, modeled after the most addictive device inside of a casino. You have to take that out. And that's part of the recovery. Those little tiny things done. Let's say you did that um twice a week. You were really intentional about this kind of strategic recovery that's micro recoveries, and you chose one day or two days a week that you were intentional around one meeting. At the end of the month, you'd have accumulated six to eight pockets of recovery. Far more than you had before, big time. Yeah. And the nervous system responds to that small of a provocation. I want to talk a little bit about, we're going a tiny bit off script here, but I think it's going to be a fun thought experiment. You said a little earlier, today's the last day that your life's going to be as uncomplex as it is. Tomorrow it's going to get more complex, et cetera, et cetera. So lately, because of the business that I'm in, I've been dabbling in the concept of longevity and removing the concept of retirement because I actually think it's psychologically really unhelpful to just say, okay, you're done doing hard things, relax for 45 years. That seems very contrary to the way that we're built. And I wondered if you had any thoughts on that whole institution being kind of messed up. And if if the work that you've done with leaders and CEOs and what have you, especially those maybe who have a sudden pivot thrown at them that they didn't expect. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, the didn't expect will change it. That's the autonomy. So the leader, I have um a few, I'm working currently with a few CEOs who are in succession planning. It's really one of my favorite chapters because there's an existential and identity transition naturally at that sort of period of time and a whole mindset reevaluation, right? But it does matter if you are choosing to go and to leave, right, that is a very different nervous system than somebody who is being forced to leave. Okay, so I would manage and work and coach and collaborate with those two people very differently. But okay, so personally, and this is obviously super influenced by I was raised by an entrepreneur, my father, and my mother, who for her generation was an enormous risk taker. She herself didn't build a company, but she had this maverick belief in the man she married to go do this wild thing he was going to try to do, which then he did, you know, he in his profession. So I can't underestimate that my response is influenced by a childhood where I never once heard either of my parents ever use the R-word. He and she by proxy loved what he was building so much that there was never a discussion of that. So I I really don't want this to sound as though it's not influenced by that. And secondly, I'm raised in America where we come with this whole attitude around, you know, all the things of self-identity. So, okay, so personally, I don't think about retirement. I really don't. I think about how I can stay deeply engaged in some kind of meaningful work till I can't. Okay. And I hope that that matches up pretty close with when I'm not on earth anymore, right? Because that's kind of how my insides work. If you are somebody who much prefers the concept of retirement, and that is chosen autonomously, and there's some sort of plan for the remainder of your life where engagement, being of service, connecting, having curiosity, that that's all present because those are markers of longevity, then great. But we got to be very intentional about investing that energy because if we don't have a plan for that, that's when I see unfortunate what do you call it, like unintentional depression sort of sets in and it's very, very quiet. Depression, exactly. It's really an identity crisis. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And the depression or anxiety or sense of rudderlessness. Sometimes people will really withdraw. They have this sense of irrelevance. They really, really struggle with very real, non-vein. This isn't like, oh, what's wrong with you? You should be happy. You're retired. This is a very real, natural part of a massive identity change. A massive identity change. And I would say if you're feeling that way, it is probably a deficit in curiosity, meaning, engagement, connection with self through passions and interests, and others through community, through collaboration, right? And that the antidote isn't more time off. It's probably more meaningful time engaged in things, again, to use one of your markers that you choose autonomously. Traditional wealth management focuses on a few key moments: your first house, sending your kids to university, when you retire, and when you die. Will you have enough? Will you die with too much or too little? These are questions of a very finite nature. Our approach goes above and beyond, with the belief that wealth is not just money, but comes in at least four forms: time, money, energy, and attention. And that wealth is a wave that you can learn to ride to a life well lived. A life where you flourished, where you surpassed the finite game of having enough, to experiencing the infinite game of playing forever. Instead of just focusing on a few of life's moments, we focus on all of the moments between the 1440 minutes of each day, the energy to be harnessed from each and every sunrise, every meal, and every great night's sleep. The power of connection and meaning that all four forms of wealth, time, energy, money, and attention can access. This is what it means to flourish. So the question is: which wealth advisor is right for you? An advisor who helps you open the door to a few of life's moments or to all of them? Consider this. In the next 24 hours, you have 1,440 minutes, and it takes just a few of them to contact me at grivers at asante.com. Doing so could be one of the best investment decisions you ever make. And coming back to your idea of running the experiment with 15 minutes a week or something like that, you know, you pick your poison, but there's probably thousands of things that you could pick to try for 15 minutes a week and then snowball on that. And by the way, if you notice yourself getting hung up on what to choose, I would say probably we found sort of this point of sabotage, which is like when we say we want one thing, but our actions keep doing quite the opposite. And I really would use it sounds cheeky, but when people are stuck, sort of like, well, what should I put? What's my experiment to make? And I'm like, it doesn't matter. Right. It doesn't matter. Do something. Just just do something. Just choose any marker that you have a hunch that, oh, you know, oh, okay, this sounds like an idea, right? Just literally eeny meeny miny mo with a blindfold on. Just choose one. Experiment. Go. And experiment. It's the it's the delaying the experimentation where we continue to spend the same overspending budget. And it's just like months kind of roll by and we're like, oh yeah, I was gonna get that experiment going. It's like just start with an imperfect one and minimal viable dose. So currently, if you think to yourself, like, okay, well, you know, I'm gonna try that 10-minute experiment. They noted that it's studied through Microsoft Human Factors Lab. We can put that research in the show notes. I'm gonna do the 10-minute mindfulness, right? So choose any 10-minute mindfulness that's free on YouTube, have it teed up ahead of time. Choose one day a week and one section of the day where you're gonna do it after some sort of either meeting or exertion or heads-down time, or if you're a writer, coder, whatever, a mother, whatever you're doing, that you're spending all this energy being present and proficient at, right? So one time per week for 10 minutes consistently. And then the only other thing I would ask is that you observe, hey, how do I feel in the stretch of time after I do that mindfulness? Do I do I feel better? Do I have more energy? Do I, if I when I come home to my kids, do I feel like I have a little more bandwidth? I'm not quite as irritated. That's all meaning that the nervous system got a little kind of return on its investment. It's like a little swaddle for it. And if you do that kind of consistently for like, you know, a month, two months, minimal viable dose. And consistency is our key marker that we're looking for. So what's consistent? More days, I mean, more like more weeks than not. You did it once for 10 minutes. Doing more of it becomes easier. Yeah, and you're laying down tracks that you're you unconsciously remember the value of it without having to think hard. And by the way, you're laying down tracks is a literal term because you're actually reworking neural networks that have us an autopilot. Oh, I finish a meeting, I go straight over to my emails. When I'm done my emails, I go back to these meetings. When I'm done with this meeting, I go and do heads down time. And I rest, this is all automated. I rest at when the bell dings, right? Sure, 10 o'clock at night, or whenever I finally crap out. Yeah. So the five responses, the five autonomic response patterns, and what you were just walking through was sort of an example of one of them. But let's talk about uh the first one, urgency or overactivation. And my question here, you know, how do you see this show up in people? What if, you know, if somebody was listening to this and wasn't really sure if they were experiencing it, what does it look like? Urgency looks like self-regulation stuff, impulsivity, wanting to check things off the list, moving through things sort of quickly, but not necessarily with intentionality. And, you know, we we respond if we want to train to our weaknesses, right? If we notice that our tendency, and by the way, all of these nervous system tendencies, they're morally and ethically neutral. In one area of your life, it's a superpower, in another area, it's your saboteur. That's how they work. So this isn't about for all the perfectionists out there who's like, well, which is the best one to use? And that's all I'll use. It doesn't go like that. It's what first of all, what do you notice your nervous system responses are in various situations, right? And what where does that work for you? Tons of places that this urgency one is like enormously rewarded inside of the world. The world, yeah, not just the help. The world in general, you're right. And then there's areas where it's not helpful. So what I would say is if you are, you know, primarily dominated by this urgency feeling. I know you're not gonna like hearing this, but take a beat. Learn to sit in the discomfort of the urgency just long enough to realize a couple things. There's a a good measure from Tara Brock, who I I like her work on mindfulness, and she talks about this concept of real versus true. So with an urgency thing, I would say, is it real? Okay, most of the time it's real because we can feel urgency. It usually sits kind of right here in our kind of throat, chest, stomach area. And so it's probably real, but is it true? Most of the time we get to true, it ain't true. It's all generated on the inside, and even when it's true, you can take a beat. So it's about learning how to just be comfortable in that feeling of urgency that you're rewarded for in so many domains of your life. And same thing. It's like, well, how do I determine which ones I should respond, which ones I don't. It doesn't matter. Just choose one. Choose one. Just choose one time a week. You're gonna, first of all, the good news is you're you're gonna feel that urgency 50 times a week. Yeah. And the likelihood is if you are rewarded for it, you are gonna keep doing it. And that's totally cool, but it's about overdoing it that we're trying to avoid where because urgency is a I mean, nah, you know what? I'm gonna back up there. I don't know. I'd even resist saying overdo it. I just would say this. I would say all we're trying to do is have agency over which side of the coin is face up enough that um, and these are imperfect calculations because humans are imperfect and messy, but really we're just trying to gain like adaptive flexibility around like what we're owned by. And what I have found is everybody is owned by kind of a small handful of things that just really get them going in their own unique ways. And if we can have a little more agency over that kind of flexibility of response, and we increase our tolerance for sitting in the feeling that we want to flee from. So people that have the urgency, they're trying to flee from uncertainty. They want to make sure that we'll just decide now. Let's move this forward. They want containment and certainty. And so it becomes about training incrementally and intentionally around increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Yeah, that sounds like a risk totally worth taking because that makes you more adaptable if you can sit in a period of uncertainty, even just for a beat, as you said. Okay. That's so helpful. All right, number two, which was shutdown or withdrawal, the freezing. You know, we have the fight, the flight, the freeze. On the other hand, it's these are the people who don't lean in but they pull back. So, how do you differentiate between rest and shutting down? What's the difference there between the freeze version of the autonomic response and simply taking a break? Agency and autonomy. Rest is done the way we're talking about it, is done with agency and intentionality, avoiders, far-enged seasorophobic behavior, it has a lead up, oh, procrastination, blah, blah. And that's a fascinating thing to double-click on, which we could have a different summit on. I don't think we fully understand what procrastination is from a neurobiological standpoint. But but I will say this. So for people with this style of nervous system, a team, so two or more, so families, teams, organizations, can only move as fast as the person that withdraws the most. They become the pace car, the withdrawer, the avoider, the sort of like I just shut down. They become what holds the rest of the team at that pace. It makes sense when you think about it, right? So there's a couple of things. This is also statistically speaking the hardest. That's not really the word I want to use, but it's the style that's the most resistant to change because avoiding the demand that's coming at you, it's super effective at immediately reducing anxiety. So it's actually unhealthy, but effective. Right. So you can see why then it's hard to move them off this. Okay, so if you're the withdrawal, you're also not gonna like to hear this. There is no way around exposure, exposure, exposure. So for people that are withdrawers or shut down, it's because this minimal viable dose becomes even more important. In fact, this concept of minimal viable dose comes from my experience of working with people that had phobic disorder. Because you have to, to get somebody on an airplane who hasn't traveled in 19 years, you have to reverse engineer these tiny steps. I mean, first you have to be able to talk about an airplane, then you have to be able to go to a website that has the booking of airplanes, okay? It's tiny doses of exposure. But I would say your mantra is what is the smallest dose of exposure that I can expose myself to today and repeatedly and consistently. And here's the other thing I would say for people that shut down the unconscious limiting belief that I find most often hidden inside the sort of unspoken ticker tape of avoidance is I'm not ready. They're waiting for a cue from their body that they're ready, and there's no cue coming. So you just wait in the ready cue over and over as everybody passes you by. You have a it's a false assumption about readiness. You become ready by doing yes, and the minimum viable dose does the readiness. That's the readiness medicine. Perfect. Yeah. All right. The next one, which sounds a lot like maybe urgency and shutdown, is control, but it's different. I know. So tell me a little bit about the cost of trying to control things that are inherently uncontrollable and maybe what that looks like in a high performer. Well, it can look in a myriad of ways. It can go all the way from like the very stereotypical, like sort of you know, abusive, hard-driving bosses that are relentless to their team, relentless to themselves, to micromanaging, to much more internal, like worry and fretting and perfectionism and all kinds of things. You know, the big sell for people that kind of have this control response, the big thing you've got to get them to in the coaching or therapeutic world is the realization that it's an illusion. Even when they think they have it, it's an illusion. Also, for people that have a high drive for autonomy, which often results in what looks like a high drive. For control. There's often when you get sort of into the weeds of that, there's some healthy things. There's a real commitment to process. There's an enormous focus on outcomes, right? And these are again just like the urgency one, you get rewarded for it. Yeah. You do, you get rewarded. Whereas you can see for the procrastinator, you're almost never avoided, you're almost never rewarded for that. At best, you'll get sort of benign um neglect, but you won't get praise. Okay. So for this person, again, we can see it's always like I'm always looking for, okay, so what's the driver of this nervous system? This is white knuckling control. This is about order, it's about certainty, it's about trying to mitigate risk, both in terms of the outcome, but also social risk. These people, they don't want to fail, they don't want to be humiliated, all of that. And again, some of this is strategic surrender, is the answer. So this space where you can start to let go of control, ways in that I've sort of convinced people is that you really like you could be a super successful control-oriented leader to a certain size. But if like you're somebody who has an appetite for scale, that kind of like white knuckled control will not work. No, you just won't be able to get there. And so sometimes there's like natural, like, you know, I'm working with a team right now who were like this small company, now they're like a mid-sized company, and you can see the whole executive team in their own ways are learning how to delegate and to let go and to do a very different type of leadership influence versus like the day in and day out control. But here's the great thing about these this little crew. This crew needs just a tiny amount of momentum. And then they love, they realize that they have more control. It's like when you, if you drive in snow and your wheels start to go out of control. If you white knuckle it, you will lose control of that car. You have to let the steering wheel sort of loose in your hand. And there's a very similar type of grip that works well for control freaks who are in the midst of becoming influential leaders. What a cool thing you get to see. Like that's really neat. It's so fun. I have the best job on earth, right? Are we in full agreement of this? Yeah. They must be over the moon when they truly feel how the car corrects itself, proverbially speaking. That must be so, so amazing. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's the beauty of the nervous system. Yes. Well, that brings us to that, I think, this point before we try to tackle the last two responses, which is this is not about personality. This is about the nervous system being trained in a certain way, not personality. Like, what are your thoughts on personality versus? Yeah, I mean, I think personality matters because personality is sort of overlaid, you know, it's like the unique aspects of ourself that are overlaid on like a nervous system. So it matters in knowing ourselves. But I do think the more we take this out of the personal, like your stuff isn't because you are succeeding or failing. It's usually because we have a nervous system and a metabolic system that has to kind of make these unconscious calculations all day. Yeah. Yeah. So the last two seem quite perfect for wrapping things up in this world of AI and change and uncertainty. And there's a lot of geopolitical business going on right now, too. Overconnection to threat, as opposed to response number five, which is adaptive regulation. Overconnection to threat, especially for people who are really empathetic or very highly aware, it's like they feel like they're carrying more than their share. How can you stay informed and connected without becoming overwhelmed right now? What does that walking that line feel like? Is it is it a constant audit of how much energy this is taking? Is it is it just knowing yourself? This is the crew that when when when when you sort of were sending this through, this was the crew that I had the hardest time kind of envisioning. So tell me more about like this person, this overconnection with threat, meaning they constantly have a sense that they are air quotes in danger. Yeah, I would say they are less likely to allow themselves to be forward moving towards a goal or optimistic because they're very emotionally absorbed in what's coming at them. Great. Does that make sense? Yep. Okay, so this is about an emotional regulation process that has to take place. Most of us get to adulthood. Here's the good news most of us suffer from some kind of emotional regulation, uh, regulation issue, right? And we get to adulthood and we have huge pockets of our temperament that are actually not chronologically as mature as our age. Okay. So we have pockets of where we regress, where we have arrested development. These are technical terms. Um, and when we see pockets of dysregulation emotionally, so always being overwhelmed, over empathizing to the point of like kind of no boundary between you and other, right? When we notice this, that's you know, a pocket of sort of arrested development. And we we look at it again, morally and ethically neutral, not like, well, what's wrong with me, but more from the lens of like, oh, that's fascinating. Huh. And we kind of try to get curious about it. But generally speaking, I would say with these people, you're gonna be working tactically on boundaries. You're probably gonna be working on saying no. You are very likely somebody who has struggled with the continuum from sort of like pathological accommodating to people pleasing. Again, it was probably a superpower, it probably kept you alive in your environment. You probably had something going on in your upbringing that developed a type of adaptive hypervigilance that is no longer adaptive or it's not worth what it's gonna cost to keep it rolling, right? And so that's how I'd manage that crew right there. I'd probably start really tactically with like looking at our boundaries and looking about what happens when we over-identify, and I'd start to look at what is your relationship with no like. Yeah. And where can you strategically use a no that will give you some distance from this over-identification? Brilliant. Brilliant. The process, yeah. All right. The last one, which sounds like the goal state, is the adaptive regulation. And I think all of these four that we talked about before, you've shown us a pathway to get to the goal state from wherever we're starting from. But what does a more regulated adaptive response look like? We could either say in real life or in the face of what it is that we're looking at right now, with possible technological unemployment, with understanding that the world might be very different for our kids and their careers than it was for us and our careers, for the fact that maybe our parents and maybe we will have robots in our house that keep us alive and safe for much longer than anybody before us. How do we stay adaptive to all of these things? Do you have like, I don't know, I don't want to cheapen what you do by saying three tips, but I mean, what if you look at those things that I just like universals? Yeah, yeah, universals, yeah. Okay, so I would say a few things about this adaptive state. So, first is all of us are gonna have elements of all of these, but also if you use this as a framework to start to become curious about like, well, where is my nervous system in its default? Okay, and you'll see like one or one style will surface for you as like what you do when your back's against the wall. Okay. Now, so first is I would say everybody embodies a little bit of everything, and then we have we have probably fixed tendencies that become kind of our signature trait, okay? And I would say this notion of living in this adaptive state, get rid of it right now. That's a perfectionistic game, it's not real. You've got to love this loosely. Nobody except creepy gurus who end up on the Epstein list live in this state all the time. None of them. They have all been proven over the decades, and I won't name names, including the recent ones. They are all false gods. There is no such thing as living in an optimal state. Constantly in an adaptive state, yeah. We vacillate, we oscillate, we learn because we demonstrate, yeah. That's right. We learn, we adapt, we grow, we regress. When you look at like sort of typical development, we have these three features inside of development. And when when any one of these features is absent, it is noteworthy. We have periods of growth marked by periods of plateau marked by periods of regression. And if that cycle goes consistently over time and the trend line heads north, we're all right, right? 100%. So I say, first of all, love it loosely. Don't get all your own nonsense about living in this state or like I even hate all this language around optimal performance, all that. And like very antithetical. Those are still moments. This the state of optimal performance is a moment. And I love what you've just said because it, you know, again, coming from the business that I come from, where we're all supposedly climbing towards this place that is, you know, what you deserve now. Why on earth wouldn't you continue that oscillating forever and ever and ever? And I think that's what makes that longevity game far more palatable than okay, just relax. That is so, so helpful. Those three moments. That's right. Now, there are there are a few things I would say universally, like principles that I would say we could get used to. Okay, and we could kind of hold as both first principles of sustainable performance, if we want to call it that. One is get really comfortable being uncomfortable. The sooner you can train, that's why cold is really valuable, getting inside cold, it immediately puts us up against those elements earlier. I said everybody's owned by something. We just have these, if you're an adult, if you're high-functioning, we have these elaborate ways of pretending we aren't, both to ourselves. That's the first wool we pull over the eyes, and then to everybody else. And then we become very wedded in making sure that those parts of ourself are not seen, right? But we're all owned by something, making yourself immediately freezing cold or vulnerable in any way. I do it with leaders sometimes, but I bring art in and teams immediately. I'm not an artist, I don't know how to paint. And then I'm like, yes, we have them exactly where we want them. They are up against their own sense of like what they're capable of. Okay. So make yourself uncomfortable regularly. Don't wait to be ready. So that's just like one first principle. It will serve you really well over the long time. Okay. Then I would say the earlier you can be mindful of sleep as a foundational component to how your nervous system, well, it's a foundational component to the energy your nervous system has access to. It's like the savings account, it contributes to the savings account because we've already said the notion that you won't have stress. Well, as soon as I don't have stress, I won't feel this way, is a lie we tell ourselves to get to this unknown place where we don't have stress. So since we know that's not actually truthful, right? It becomes important that we invest in ways we can increase sort of our foundational support systems. So sleep, sleep, sleep. It oscillates. Obviously, people, you know, 50 plus need a different type of sleep and have to be more intentional than people that are younger. Obviously, if you have infants, don't listen to me. The brain is supple and forgiving, and so is the body. It's designed to sleep less when you have infants, you will recover. So, again, it's generally speaking, I would say sleep. And then the third thing I would say is if you invest in some form of mindfulness, so it can be meditation, it could be journaling, it could be breath work, it could be I mean, really any kind of process by which you are slowing down or automatic kind of everything is automated for that neuro efficiency exchange we talked about. And um, if we can get in the habit of having a practice that allows us to exercise this suite of skills called uh that's like the you know part of emotional intelligence, which is curiosity, self-awareness, and self-regulation. You're golden. You're just gonna be better off. Yeah, a hundred percent. So, what I took away from this is as much as we think it's about controlling our external environment, it's actually much more internal than that. Everything you just offered was easily done without changing where you work or how you work or the people with whom you work has so much to do with those internal shifts because becoming aware of the costs of the patterns that we were doing otherwise, that's the first step in then making those changes to the internal systems. That sounds like true autonomy. That's right. It's an inside job. Yeah, total inside job. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much for everything we shared today. This was such a blast to do with you. I wish you the most wonderful day. Thank you, Dr. Sarah Sarkis. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Join me next week on the Flourish Feed Podcast to keep exploring the infinite game. In the meantime, remember to stay curious, turn your passions into purpose, and play hard. I'm rooting for you. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovell Rivers, who was a senior wealth advisor with CI Asante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Asante Wealth Management, and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Asante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors. Please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.