You're trying to get more done.
Maybe you're an artist, uh, starting a new hobby, or just want to improve
your work productivity, but it's hard to focus, you lack energy, or
sometimes you just don't feel like it.
The answer might be embracing your nervous system's potential in the present moment.
Let me explain.
Your nervous system serves as your body's communication and control center.
It regulates automatic functions, things you don't have to think about
like breathing and heartbeat while also supporting your thinking and decision
making and your emotional regulation.
Your nervous system can have different states or potentials that change
throughout the day, moment to moment.
Understanding the different states of your nervous system can help
you to better manage your energy, focus, and even be more productive.
I'll explore these three states and how to get the most benefit from each of them.
Hey, my name is Justin Sunseri.
I am a therapist and coach that wants to help you live with more
calm, confidence, and connection without psychobabble or woo woo.
Welcome to Stuck Not Broken.
This podcast is not therapy, of course, nor is it intended to replace therapy.
I'm going to give you a very brief understanding of what
the Polyvagal Theory is.
If you've never heard this before, this is not the place to start.
I would actually go to episode 101 of my podcast.
I'll have a link in the description for you for that whole playlist.
It's a series of episodes that discusses these ideas or the
autonomic states in a lot more detail.
But basically for now, it's good enough to know that mammals can be
in one of three different states.
Basically.
It's definitely more complex and we'll touch upon that.
But basically mammals can be in a state of safety, of flight, fight, or of shutdown.
In other words, they can be in a state of connection, mobility, or immobility.
The safety state is all about connection to self, others, and environment.
The mobility state is about flight and fight.
And the immobility state shutdown is about, well, immobilizing.
It's about playing dead in the face of a life threat.
Those are the three basic states.
These states can also combine and create mixed states.
Just like if you were to combine the primary colors, they create mixed
colors like red and blue equal purple.
Same thing here.
So if you combine safety plus flight fight, that's connection plus mobility,
that results in a mixed state called play.
Safety plus shutdown, so safety plus immobility equals stillness.
That's the ability to be alone and immobile and be okay with it.
But you can also combine flight fight mobility with shutdown
immobility, resulting in freeze.
That's where you're charged up, but immobile at the same time.
So it's like having the gas on in the car, the accelerator,
plus the brake at the same time.
The wheels just, just spin.
All of these primary and mixed states come from biological pathways.
It's not just like feelings that we have floating around inside of us.
These emotions, these different thoughts that we have, all come
from the state of our body.
And we can feel these states when they're active.
It's not a random guessing game.
We can actually feel them when they're there if we're mindful enough.
And so that's what I want to talk about here is how can we notice
when they're active and get the most benefit from them while they're active.
The first one we'll start with is the safety state.
The safety state is connected to the ventral vagal
pathways from your brainstem.
The safety state is all about connection to self, others, and environment.
It's known as the social engagement system.
When this state is active, we can do things like make eye contact.
We can smile.
We can hug.
We can be close to each other.
Use gentle contacts.
If you don't have the safety state active, you can't really do those things.
Or if you do, it won't feel good.
It won't feel safe.
The safety state is active when we have safe people and safe places or safe
enough people and safe enough places.
The safety state is ideal for creativity and connection,
optimal performance, productivity.
When we have enough access to our safety state, that enables us to
accomplish a wider variety of things.
We can think critically, we can weigh pros and cons, we can map out like an
agenda on how to accomplish a project, we can work with others really well, we can
hear what they think and what they feel with empathy and share what we think and
feel and come to a shared compromise or negotiation, uh, and to meet our goals.
We could also plan out what's the right kind of colors that we want
to use to create a certain- to mix, to create a certain color in
a painting that we're doing, maybe.
We can think about what's the, what's the optimal way to edit the words
in a book to get a point across.
From safety, we have a lot of access to critical thinking, but also to the
present moment and connecting with ourselves, connecting with others.
So we have access to thought, but also to emotion as well.
So ideally when it comes to productivity, creativity, and getting
stuff done, we want to have as much access to safety as possible.
That doesn't mean that we're meditating and our eyes are closed and we're in that,
you know, cross legged meditation pose.
No, that's not what it means at all.
As long as we have enough access to safety, we can simply
focus and get stuff done.
Okay, so how do you get to your safety state?
That's the next question, and it's a good question.
There's a couple things you can do that are predictably
going to equal more safety.
What it looks like for you is not a guarantee, is not a,
there's no prescription for this.
I don't know what you should do in particular to get your safety state,
but generally there are some pretty predictable things that you can do.
Number one is to extend your exhale.
No matter what state you're in, if you can, be mindful of your
inhale, but when you exhale.
Extended a little bit longer.
When you do that, it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system.
And that's where the safety state lives.
So, extend that exhale and that'll help you to settle into
the present moment a bit more.
While you extend that exhale, I like to recommend to my clients, that's a
good time to like say something nice to yourself, or that's a good time to
remind yourself what you're working on.
When you extend your exhale, just add a little something else onto
it, like, like a kind word or two.
The other thing that can generally help and get into more safety and
to connect to the present moment is to be more mindful of your
movements and of your sensory input.
So whatever you're doing right now, be mindful of it.
You can also consciously choose to do something like go for a walk, uh, and
then be aware of, uh, the movement of the walk, but if you're painting something,
you can also be aware of the movement of your arm while you're painting of
your elbow, of your shoulder, if you're sketching something furiously or slowly,
you can be mindful of that movement.
Likewise-
and even while you're doing that, you can be mindful of the sensory input.
So what's the vibrancy, what's the color of the paint that you're using.
What's the sensory input when you're going out for a walk or exercising.
What does it feel like to flex and release?
What do you smell around you?
What do you hear?
What do you see?
All those sensory input things.
Be more mindful of those, and that can help settle into the present moment
and settle into your safety state.
Now, I don't expect you to stop what you're doing and go for a
walk in a forest or, or, or a hike.
But You can definitely include elements of nature into your daily routine.
A really easy one is to open your blinds and look outside.
Open your blinds and let natural sunlight come in.
If you can, sit by a window and look at outside while you work.
I personally love to do that.
You can have elements of nature through sound.
I personally like the sound of rain.
So while I'm working in, especially if I'm like slower paced or just really
settling into slowness and stillness, I like to have rain on in the background.
It just helps ground me.
You could also use smell.
If you have a candle that has the smell of the forest.
Yeah, it's not the forest, but you're now you're a step closer to
the sensory inputs of the forest.
The other idea is to connect with safe others.
You don't have to be best friends with everyone you work with, but
can you exchange a smile with them?
Yeah, probably.
Can you exchange some chit chat about the weekend?
I hate it personally, but there's some benefit to that.
There's benefit to seeing smiles and hearing the vocal prosody in
someone's voice when they have a, when they're in their safe enough state,
they'll do something with their voice.
It's just, just naturally.
It's the sing song quality that we have where we can go down, but also up
and we can do everything in between.
That's called vocal prosody.
And when we hear that, it automatically kicks us into our
safety state a little bit more.
So yeah, I agree- chit chatting about the weekend is painful, but there's a lot of
benefit to interacting with a safe other.
Okay.
So maybe you work by yourself and you don't interact with other people.
Well, first off, get the heck out of the house as much as you can.
And smile at somebody at Starbucks or wherever you go, or on your
walk around the block, smile at someone, say hello, hear their voice.
If you can't do that, well, you probably listen to music.
Can you hear the voice of the person who you're listening to?
Yeah.
If it's rap, if it's heavy metal, that is less than ideal cause there's
screaming and a lot of monotone voices.
Uh, if you, if you could listen to something like the Beach Boys
or Etta James, that has way more vocal prosody, and that might help
kick you into your safety state.
Likewise, on a break, when you listen to podcasts or YouTube videos like this one,
can you connect with the person's voice?
Can you hear the safety in their voice?
Can you see their face and see how that, or mindfully recognize
how that feels within you?
You don't have to have the perfect natural environment.
You don't have to have the extremely supportive and co
regulative person there with you.
There are elements of these things you can incorporate into your workday or
into your creative process to help you feel a little bit safer than before.
So how the heck do you know when you're in your safety state?
You'll feel it.
Emotionally, you'll feel it.
It feels, it can feel like calm.
It can feel like relaxation.
It can also feel like excitement and productivity.
It can feel like curiosity.
It can feel like interest.
All of these things pretty much involve you being connected to the present moment.
If you can pause and look out of your blind or outside of your
window and just take in the present moment, you're in your safety state.
If you're thinking critically and planning things out for a project,
you're in your safety state.
So feeling is one way, but as I touched upon already, thought is another way.
Thinking critically, weighing pros and cons, uh, planning
out step by step processes.
Then I'm all involves some level of safety state, and that's a really
good way to recognize it as well.
Okay, that was safety.
Now let's shift over to sympathetic activation, which you probably
know as flight or fight.
It's not that simple, but you probably know it as that.
The sympathetic state comes from the sympathetic nervous system.
And I want you to associate this not with flight or fight, but with mobility,
sympathetic nervous system and mobility.
Flight or fight is a possibility when we don't have access to literal safety.
When we're in an actually dangerous scenario, then yeah, flight or
fight becomes extremely relevant and your body will utilize that.
In that moment though, the body is not accessing its own safety state
because of the needs of the environment.
It needs to run away or be aggressive.
But when we have enough safety in the system, we can also utilize mobility
from the sympathetic nervous system.
So look at this as when we're in an actual danger, yeah, flight or fight.
When we have safety in our system, plus sympathetic, that combines
to create playfulness, creativity, productivity, motivation.
It's a lot different than flight or fight, which is about getting
away or being aggressive.
We want mobility.
We want motivation, creativity, productivity.
That's different.
The sympathetic state is really useful when it comes to productivity,
motivation and creativity.
It's great for these like short bursts of creativity or productivity, but also
just drawn out longer extended periods.
When you have those short bursts, that's probably a lot of sympathetic
flight fight coming up, or a lot of sympathetic mobility coming up that
you just use all at once, uh, probably with powerful movements, like if you're
painting, you're going to be using stronger, more forceful brushstrokes.
You might be splashing things on the canvas.
If you're sketching, you're going to be moving your hand, wrist,
elbow, and shoulder faster.
When you're creating something for work, you're going to be getting
a ton of work done all at once.
You're going to be type, type, type, typing heck of fast.
And that's, that's great.
But we also want longer drawn out periods of motivation.
And that comes from your safety state being active more along with your
sympathetic state that comes from those two things, balancing each other out.
And you'll have this, this longer period of pro productivity
that's more sustainable.
Otherwise, if you have less safety in your system, then you're going to be
having these bursts and then perhaps collapsing into a shutdown, which we'll
talk about next, but it might be like a burst of sympathetic and then shutting
down and then burst and shutting down.
A lot of good can come from that, but we want, we want to have more safety
and just draw that process out and draw out that motivation and that
productivity and that creativity.
If you don't have safety in your system, it's going to be more scattered.
Your ideas, your inspiration will kind of pop up here and there, but it's not as
predictable and you'll have less control.
I don't like using that word in a sense, but it'll feel less in control and
feel more out of control, be sporadic.
And then when it's there, you'll try and capture it and make the most out of it.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But with more safety in your system, it's It won't be as sporadic.
You'll have more intentionality over it.
So how do you intentionally use your sympathetic nervous system,
your mobility, in order to be more productive and more creative?
One option, which you're probably doing already, and look, I've been
there too, is procrastination.
The longer you wait, the more it builds up, and eventually you
just gotta get the thing done.
You just have to use your mobility.
No shame.
I've gotten through a lot of my life this way, and it definitely has its usefulness.
And some of us just say, well, that's how I get stuff done.
It is what it is.
Fine.
That's, that's an option.
You just wait around until that sympathetic energy builds so
much that you complete whatever the heck you're working on.
The other one that I recommend more is to have more structure with goals and
to funnel your energy toward a specific direction toward your goal or goals.
So instead of waiting for the deadline and then, you know, using that procrastination
energy to get the thing done, can you do a little bit each day toward that goal?
Like, yeah, you probably can.
Will you?
Well, that's, that's another discussion.
If you have more safety in your system, I think you're more likely to do that.
If you're more leaning into defensive activation, more flight fight, or more,
even more shutdown, you're probably not going to be doing that as much.
So this really comes down to how much you're practicing
being in your safety state.
And then how much of that are you bringing over to your
creative and productive process?
Okay.
So the first option is procrastination.
Second option is get a little bit done each day toward your bigger goal.
And within that second option, you can set small to medium achievements.
So there's the big goal.
Like I want to complete this painting or I want to complete
this, uh, slideshow presentation.
That's the big goal, but.
Day to day, you could have achievements that you set toward that bigger goal.
So my bigger goal is a PowerPoint presentation.
Well, I have to figure out what's the design that I like.
That's an achievement.
What font, what color am I pulled towards?
If I know that that works toward the bigger goal.
So instead of sitting down and focusing on how do I achieve my big goal,
it's more about how can I achieve my achievement, the font, the color.
Do I have enough sources?
Do I have the number of slides layout?
Have I planned how long is this going to be?
If you can start making a list of things, those achievements and knocking
them off, well, all of a sudden you're making progress toward the bigger goal.
If you don't have that and you sit down to work and all you have
is sympathetic activation, that's going to go here and there and
everywhere you're gonna be distracted.
You're going to be pulled in numerous directions, and that's an option,
but I would encourage you to set your achievement list and start knocking
those things off toward your bigger goal.
It creates this funnel.
It creates an avenue toward completing your goal.
In my mind, it's the image of Luke in the X Wing who is, uh, he's
about to blow up the Death Star, and he goes, he flies down into that
that ravine, what do you call it?
It's a funnel.
It's a tunnel.
I'm not sure what to call it.
If you're a Star Wars geek, tell me what the heck it's called.
I forget what it's called.
But he flies down into the trench.
Oh my god.
He flies down into the trench.
Before the trench, he didn't know where to go.
He's just flying out in space.
He could literally go anywhere.
But once he knows the goal, which is blowing up the Death Star through that
ventilation shaft, which is connected to the trench, he flies into the trench, he
flies through the trench and then fires his missile into the, the, uh, ventilation
shaft and blows up the Death Star, right?
So that trench funnels, ,his energy, his activation toward one specific goal.
You can do that every day and you can do that every day toward a larger goal, like
a painting or a slideshow presentation.
So while you're working, let's say you have the big goal and you have
your achievements list and you're working at it, but then you notice
you're pulled this way and that way.
I think music, when you're in a sympathetic state, is really helpful.
Again, it just kind of helps to focus your energies.
In the present moment toward a specific direction.
You could use music as a way to get up and dance out your energy,
sit down, and then focus better.
Um, but you could also use it as like a beat.
It's the rhythm to get stuff done.
I personally love listening to chill hop when I'm trying to focus,
but I'm also kind of amped up.
Chill hop has a beat, there's no vocals, it's just music.
And there's this really cool, like little sounds that are often implemented
into it, like sounds of nature.
Um, but it also has the beat and it has this lo fi crackly sound, which
I personally find really soothing.
When I have energy and chill hop, I noticed that I'm way more focused and
get way more done versus not having that.
So listen to the music that helps you focus.
Same thing.
If you're working out, you know, what music works for you to help you focus and
to help you stay down that trench, right?
You know, what music helps you do that.
For me?
Rap music does not help me whatsoever to work out.
Heavy metal music that helps me out.
You'll know that you have access to your sympathetic state because it'll feel like.
Anxiety, you might feel like anger, but that's without enough safety.
So we want mobility with safety.
So feel mindfully or look out for mindfully increased heart rates,
some muscle tension, rapid breathing.
If your thoughts are going all over the place, these are pretty good
ways of telling that you have more sympathetic activation, more mobility
in your system than you do to safety.
We just want to balance those things out.
So the first thing to do might be put music on, set an agenda
for yourself and see how it goes.
If it's still too much, get up and move, let out some of that energy and
just kind of bring it down a notch.
If you could do that, even mindfully, like if you go out for a walk to get
some energy out, mindfully do it.
Listen, look, smell all the, use your senses, smile at people, pet a dog, if
you can not a stray one, ask permission, if it's, if it belongs to somebody else.
But do these things to help your mobilization come down enough and your
safety state to come up enough to balance out, then sit down with your achievements
agenda with your bigger goal in mind and start knocking stuff off your list.
So we got safety and we got sympathetic.
Now let's look at the third primary state, which is shutdown.
Shutdown occurs when we can't be safe.
We can't run away.
We can't fight.
So the body goes into shutdown.
It collapses.
It plays dead basically in the face of a life threat.
This is a necessary component of being alive.
All of us, all organisms have some level of immobility which has helped them to
survive over generations and generations and generations, passing their genetic
material along to the next generation, which then uses it to survive and so on.
So just normalize that it's a part of you.
It's a part of me.
It's a part of all of us.
It's normal and it's okay.
And we can actually use this to our advantage in our day to day life.
I want you to view shutdown not as defeat and not as a defect.
It's a necessary component.
It is there because we need to collapse in our day to day life.
We need to collapse and we need to restore.
We need to get ready for the next day or the next project.
It's an opportunity to rest and to reconnect with ourselves and with our
environment and maybe with others.
It's an opportunity.
It's not defeat.
So you've had a wonderful day of productivity, hopefully,
or maybe a bad one, but.
You've had a day of productivity at the end of the day, you need to collapse.
You need to shut down maybe.
When you do that, it prepares you for the next day.
Think of this as a necessary component of your productivity or creativity cycle.
We have to have periods of downtime.
We have to have periods of rest and reconnection.
That's all this is.
You might spend a lot of time in shutdown and it looks like depression.
I would say it is depression.
You might spend a lot of time isolating yourself and okay, that's fine.
That's fair.
What that tells me is that you or all of us, if we're in the state,
we need to listen to our body's needs, also incorporate more elements
of safety into our daily life.
And that might just be reconnecting using our senses to the external environment.
If you have a lot of shutdown in your system, you probably
need lower stimulation.
You probably need more alone time, and you probably need to reconnect to the
external environment using your senses.
As you allow for that and give yourself true moments of recovery, not phone
binging, not food, binging, not drugs, not fake it till you make it.
I don't know.
Not none of that stuff.
When you give yourself true moments of rest and recovery, true moments
of solitude and quiet, that is more restoring than anything else.
So it's, it's okay to have that, to listen to your body's needs, to provide for it,
and then to slowly come out of shutdown.
And eventually you'll work your way into mobility, into some flight
fight or sympathetic activation.
If you have too much dorsal vagal activation or too much shutdown
activation, you'll know it because you'll feel numb, you'll
feel dissociative, you'll feel collapsed, you'll feel withdrawn.
All that tells me there's, there's too much shutdown and not enough safety.
Again, listen to your body's needs.
Plowing through work and forcing your way into exercise and
productivity and creativity.
That's, that's fine, but it only lasts for so long.
Eventually you simply burn out or you do collapse because you're not
listening to what your body needs.
Instead of searching for tons of mobility and productivity and creativity,
instead of that strive for stillness.
So we want to go from shutdown to stillness.
Stillness is the combination of shutdown plus safety.
Try to incorporate more elements of safety into your life mindfully.
And then mindfully allow yourself to be in a shutdown state.
When those two things combine, they create stillness.
From stillness, then mobilization may emerge.
I'm actually working on this right now for my, the Stucknaut Collective,
the private community and courses.
I created a course called Shutdown to Stillness, which teaches people
how to go from shutdown, combine it with safety, and then into stillness.
The next course I'm working on is called Stillness to Sympathetic, which
teaches people how to go from stillness.
And then to allow sympathetic mobility back into their system.
I think that's a really good flow for how things should go.
If you're not incorporating the safety aspect into your shutdown
and resulting in stillness, uh, I, you might be setting yourself up
for failure over and over again.
The safety aspect aspect is kind of necessary.
If you don't, then you might go from shutdown to flight fight.
To shut down to flight fight and just kind of, um, circulate, circulate
cycle back and forth between those two.
So it might feel like deep depression.
And then all of a sudden huge surges of fight activation probably might
feel like a ton of anxiety as well, but more likely there's going to be
some fight activation, irritability.
anger, maybe rage.
You're likely going to be going from depression to anger back and forth.
That's when there's too much shutdown.
There's another immobility option, which is freeze.
And again, that's shutdown plus flight fight.
Freeze is that dorsal vagal state plus flight fight.
Freeze is different.
It's not numbness and dissociation.
It could be, but there's also elements of mobility within you.
There's, there's activation.
Freeze can also feel like stress and overwhelm, like a lot of overwhelm.
It could feel like panic.
It could feel like rage.
So you need to connect with safety first which thaws the frozen
flight fight activation and then use that flight fight activation
toward creativity, productivity, exercise, whatever you want to do.
You can reduce your fear through small, manageable steps.
If you have a lot of freeze activation, then saying I'm going
to create this wonderful slideshow all at once is not realistic.
And it's probably going to reinforce your freeze because
that's, that's overwhelming, but that's too much all at once.
That's too much.
That demands too much safety and that demands too much mobility.
So instead we want to make those goals really small.
It's great to want to create that painting or to want to go to the
gym every day for 30 minutes.
That that's great, but are you going to be able to do that today and tomorrow
and then also sustain that long term?
Maybe not.
So instead of having that 30 minute goal, can you do a two minute goal
in your home of lifting a weight?
Can you have a goal of spending 30 seconds visualizing, working out?
You got to start somewhere and we want to reduce the amount
of fear as much as possible.
If you can do that, you know, do those teeny tiny goals for a week and then add
onto it, add onto the challenge by saying, well, yeah, I can visualize for 30 seconds
per day for a week going to the gym.
Can I now walk or drive myself to the gym to get out of my car, get
back in my car and drive home?
Can I do that for a week?
And then a week after that, can I go into the gym and just stand
there for a couple of minutes?
Yeah.
That sounds weird.
I know.
But you get the idea.
We want to have small steps leading to the bigger goal.
If you can accomplish the small steps, that's probably more likely from
even from freeze than it is to give yourself that unreachable, huge goal.
For shutdown.
If you have earned that collapse at the end of the day, go ahead and collapse.
Let yourself fall face first onto your bed.
In quiet and just breathe and recover from the day.
Hopefully you get the idea of these different states, how they show
up and how you can utilize them.
Now, how do we take what you know and implement it into your daily
life in a way that works for you?
I want you to streamline your efforts as much as possible.
And I want you to make it easy to navigate through these various states and to use
them in the most optimal way possible.
So if you know more often than not you need to collapse and decompress,
do you have a place to do that?
Do you have a place that is ready for you?
If not, then that might be a good place to start is to prepare for that.
If you know that you want to be more productive and that involves reading
and studying for a test maybe, is your book or your document ready to roll?
Or do you have it in a backpack which is in your closet?
Would it be more efficient for you to have that at a specific spot where you will do
the most reading because it is the most stillness inducing spot in your home?
Can you leave that paper or that book there?
waiting for you versus going through the obstacles of backpack,
closet, and across the house.
If you have more mobility in your system, do you have the agenda or the structure?
Do you have the achievement list that you can mark off as you achieve them?
And if you do, is that list easily accessible?
I personally write stuff on my, I have this big chalkboard.
I turned a, uh, closet in the office into a chalkboard and storage area,
but I use the chalkboard that has my priorities list listed and grouped to
help me structure my time, to help me knock things off of my list and then
to get my priorities done before I move on to the next things that I, I want to
accomplish, which is like way too much.
Uh, but this, this is helping me to focus my efforts.
All I have to do is look up to my left and I will see my list of things to do.
So if you have a list of things to do, is it easily accessible or
is there an obstacle in the way?
And an obstacle could even be like picking up your phone to look at your notes.
That's great.
But now you got to pick up your phone and I got to open that certain
app to look at your, your notes.
Is there an easier way to do it?
Can you put it on post it notes and stick them on your screen?
The basic idea here is if you know that you lean more into a certain state, do you
have things set up so that you can easily make use of the potentials for that state?
The other recommendation on how to optimize yourself is to practice
feeling safe every single day.
I would highly recommend you do it every day, and I don't think it has to be much.
In the Stucknaut Collective private community, I do these
things called a daily growth hub.
And every day I give a challenge out to people.
In the past couple weeks, I've been focusing on giving out really small
challenges that require no more than two minutes of mindfulness.
One of those things was pick the same spot at the same time every
day, set an alarm or timer for two minutes and do a two minutes, up
to two minutes, it could be less.
Up to two minutes mindfulness exercise where you just listen
and feel and look inward and connect with the external world.
Just some mindfulness meditative practice for two minutes.
And that was for one week.
The next week we did one where it was, you set an alarm for every day
for five days and you set that alarm for a different time every day.
When the alarm goes off, same thing.
Spend two up to two minutes.
noticing or being mindful of being mindful.
One of my alarms went off when I was in CVS.
And so I used two minutes to walk up and down the aisles and to
touch things and to smell candles and just connect the environment.
The, another alarm went off when I was at my friend's house.
We were doing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with our kids, and it was
unbelievably difficult to be mindful because we were having so much fun.
So it didn't work out that way.
at that moment, but later on that night when he and I were hanging
out, uh, chatting under the stars at his beautiful ranch in the, at
nighttime and just, you know, talking.
I use that as a time to be mindful of the absolute serenity of that moment.
I would encourage you to do something like that.
Every day.
No, it does not solve all your problems.
I know that, but it starts to create that predictability.
It starts to create a reference point for safety.
And if you can do 30 seconds, you can do two minutes.
If you could do two minutes, all of a sudden, well, now what else
can you accomplish after that?
The last recommendation I have for you in your daily life to focus on productivity
and creativity and motivation is to look inward and notice what state you're in.
Do you have more mobility or less?
Do you have more collapse or less?
Do you have more potential to connect or less?
Look inward and just, just notice for now, just notice what you have more or
less of throughout the day if you can.
And if you can do that, then you can ask yourself, what can I accomplish from this
level of activation or lack of activation?
What can I accomplish?
What's the best I can do in this moment?
Is this a time for me to collapse and be okay with it for five minutes?
Or is this a time for me to look at my, my list of achievements and
start knocking things off one by one?
Or is this a chance for me to take a break and go hug my kids and say, I
love you and then get back to work?
Thank you so much for joining me here on Stuck Not Broken.
I hope this episode has helped you to look at what your potentials are throughout
the day, and then how to apply those potentials to what you want to get
done, to what your bigger goals are day to day or even bigger goals in life.
I gave you a bunch of stuff you can work on day to day.
Um, but I also have a resource for you.
It's a free resource and to make it as simple as possible, I got to do is
click on the link in the description and you'll get that download right away.
You don't have to go anywhere else for it.
You click the link and you'll get the download.
It's my SSIEC sheet.
That stands for state sensation, impulse, emotion, and cognition.
This lays out what your polyvagal states are and what the experiences are from
those states or the potential experiences.
This can help you to get more language or to better identify what state you're in.
And then if you could do that, then you can ask yourself,
well, what can I accomplish?
What does my body need at this moment?
What can I accomplish from this state?
So click on that link and you'll get the download right away.
I have a ton of other resources.
If you want that, click on the link in the description and that'll take
you to the free member center where I've collected all that stuff for you.
Okay.
That's it again.
Thank you so much for listening and bye.
This podcast is not therapy, not intended to be therapy or
be a replacement for therapy.
Nothing in this creates or indicates a therapeutic relationship.
Please consult with your therapist or seek for one in your area if you are
experiencing mental health symptoms.
Nothing in this podcast should be construed to be specific life advice.
It is for educational and entertainment purposes only.
More resources are available in the description of this episode
and in the footer of justinlmft.
com.