In this episode
Show notes
Dealing with nervousness and overwhelm hits all of us, and Michael shares his experience and tricks on managing it.
We all get nervous from time to time, especially when we stand in front of a group of people.
While it's completely normal to feel this way, it most definitely can affect our ability to 'perform' or operate on a way that serves the room.
He also explains the basic function of the nervous system and quickly elaborates the science to apply it to real life situations. Additionally, Michael offers strategies for overcoming these moments.
The IN Movement Podcast was formerly the Going Pro Yoga Podcast — and before that, the Yoga Teacher Evolution Podcast and the Rat Race Rebellion Podcast. Same mission, evolved name.
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Hello and welcome back to the Going Pro Yoga podcast Michael here. And I'm excited to talk about today's episode because it's something we haven't done on the podcast before, which is a little shocking considering we've done 111 episodes and we haven't officially talked about the nervous system yet. One of the most important parts of your anatomy, Physiology and also just relating it to yoga.
So that's a bit shocking and surprising. However, I will say that we have spoken about it in episodes here and there, but never actually having an official episode dedicated to the nervous system. And while I'm not just gonna talk about the nervous system in the sciency way and explain that, you know, the biology and anatomy and Physiology of all that stuff, I mean, well, I'm gonna do that because that's kind of a jam. But I'm also gonna apply it to
everyday life in situations where the nervous system actually plays a role and either helping us or sometimes hindering us, slowing us down. And this has come up in recent weeks because of the many teacher trainings that have been happening over the last few weeks, basically month or so, if you've been following us on Instagram, you'll see that we've had a lot of trainings happening.
We've had empowerment yoga training happening in September, followed by expressions of power training, which is hands on adjustments and accelerated skills. And then we just finished yesterday, literally the yin Yang yoga teacher training as well.
So all these trainings, you know, we're learning their advanced trainings and we're also teaching. You get up in front of people, you say things, you share things, you teach yoga, you use your, your voice. It's basically like public speaking.
And when that happens, you know, the nerves kick in, right? We call that nervousness, or I'm feeling nervous. And that is something that I think is very common across the world for the most part, is nerves getting nervous about something. So we're going to apply it all back to that and also use the knowledge and the theory to help us understand a little bit more when we get nervous and how we can actually use that energy to shift it into something more
helpful, let's just say. So before we get into that, let's just talk about the basic function of how the nervous system works, just to officially go through that. So your nervous system composes of your brain, which is in your head, in your skull, which extends down through your spine, in the spinal cord. The spinal cord then goes down through your neck all the way down to about your sacrum area or your butt area, and the spinal cord sits within your
vertebral column or your spine, the bones of your spine. And then you have a whole bunch of other nerves that extend out from your spine, from your spinal cord, into your hands, your fingertips, your legs, your toes, your thighs, your neck, your chest, your back, your abdominals, everywhere, everywhere that's not in the center of where your spine is.
That's the overall structure of your nervous system. And there's two sections that we help to understand these structures, which is the brain and the spinal cord, which we mentioned is part of your central nervous system down the center of your body and it's the main controller.
It's like it's the center of it all, if you will. And then everything else that extends from the spinal cord. And also the brain, which is part of the spinal cord is your peripheral nervous system. Your peripheral nervous system basically means your periphery which is to the sides or outside of the centered area. Central nervous system, peripheral nervous system. So the very function of the nervous system is to use the peripheral nervous system.
All the stuff that you know is in our fingers or hands or legs or body to collect information, to collect messages, signals from the body and bring it to the brain. And we send or we we collect this information through our senses. Touch, smell, hearing, sight, taste. I think that's all of them.
If I missed one, whatever. You guys understand the five senses because you've been using them your whole life hopefully. And all this information that we're collecting, we're getting it from the environment. And when we get that information from the environment, it goes up into our spinal cord, up into our brain and then our brain processes whatever that information is the smell of something.
We like it. We don't like it. We touch something. It's hot, it's cold, it feels nice, it feels coarse or something, you know, looks cool. Something doesn't look cool. There's danger over there. There's no, you know, there's water over here.
Whatever it is, we're collecting information all the time. Consciously, yes, but also subconsciously. Subconsciously, meaning your body or your nervous system is constantly scanning everything around you all the time. And this is something that not a lot of people understand and we take for granted is it's constantly helping you all the time. So what we're familiar with is, you know, what we have control over, which is part of a different section of your nervous system.
I mean, it's ultimately the part that we can voluntarily use and we call that your somatic nervous system. So it doesn't actually have like a physical location. Your somatic nervous system is just like your skeletal muscle, the muscles that you actually have control over.
So for example, if you are collecting information from the smell in the room and you walk in and you're like, wow, this smells really nice, you know, you might kind of like move into the room and sniff around and be like, what is that?
So you're using your muscles to actually change your behavior or take action versus you walk in a room and it stinks like crap and you're like, oh God, and you leave the room. You physically use your muscles to leave the room.
Maybe you plug your nose, you cover your mouth or whatever it is, right? So you're taking action, voluntary control, and that's what your somatic nervous system is, skeletal muscle. You actually use your voluntary control over actions. And then you have all this other stuff that's happening for you in the background, and that's called your autonomic nervous system.
Again, it doesn't necessarily have a physical location, but it is something that is happening for you for the most part. And this is where our sympathetic and our parasympathetic nervous system lives. So the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system is something that probably most people are familiar with, right?
Sympathetic is the fight or flight response in our body. Parasympathetic is more of the rest, digest or rejuvenation. And that system is kind of constantly fluctuating to adapt to whatever is being received from the environment around.
So even though we're, you know, we're, we're taking action in certain ways, our body is responding to everything that's happening around us all the time, all the time, all the time. And these are things like and the muscles in your digestion for moving food through your body, your heart muscles to pump for you so you don't have to like tell them to pump for you, how convenient.
And also other things like the glands in your body. Glands are basically sacs that release hormones or certain secretions, whether it be like gastric acids for digestion or saliva for digestion or hormones to wake you up or to help you feel sleepy or to make you feel hungry.
All this stuff that's happening for you in the background, based off of what's going on in the environment around you, right? You walk into a room and you smell fresh baked cookies or muffins, you're like, hmm, all of a sudden now your body's gonna take that information of smell and it's going to probably release saliva in your mouth. And all of a sudden your mouth is going to water and you're like, Oh my God, I want that, right. So this is how your nervous
system works. It's probably not super new to you guys because, you know, we we use it every day, but we're going to expand on it a little bit more than just that. So we're going to talk mostly about the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic parasympathetic.
But the function of the nervous system overall is just constantly collecting information from the environment. And I think that's really valuable to know that it's always doing it for you. For example. Another example is if you walk into a room you know unconsciously.
Let's just say you're just, you go walk into a room, you're having a conversation with someone. Your nervous system is very aware of the surroundings in such a way that it knows subconsciously where the exits are or the entrances are of that room.
Because your nervous system is primary function, which I probably should have mentioned earlier, the primary function of your nervous system is to keep you alive. It is survival. So when you enter a room and you're just having a conversation with a friend, you automatically already know where the exits are or the entrances are, because if something happens, boom, you're going to be able to react very quickly. And your nervous system already is picking up that information for you subconsciously, right?
You don't. You're not necessarily taking a log of it consciously. Some people do, but you know, you don't have to. That's kind of my point. And the other thing that I'll say about this is because maybe some of you know this, maybe you don't.
I used to work with traumatic brain injury clients, motor vehicle accident victims, concussion clients for several years in a private clinic, actually a private company in Ottawa, Canada, and bringing back what we just talked about with the body, collecting information all the time.
When someone has a brain injury or they have a concussion or they hit their head, your brain is not, it's basically a bruise. It's kind of like with you hit your hand really hard, not your hand but maybe your thigh or your arm, and you start to bruise, you know, a bruise. You see the blue and the purple and stuff in your arm and the and the skin.
That's just, you know, some blood vessels that have have kind of popped a little bit and there's a bruise happening. Takes a bit of time for it to heal. And then, you know, all of a sudden that goes away. When we hit our head, you know, there's obviously mild and severe cases. But if we hit our head, even just in mild cases, it's often can be just like a bruise, A bruise to the brain, which might not be a huge deal.
But if we understand that the function of the brain is to interpret information that is being collected from the environment around us all the time, it's actually really important to sometimes be mindful of slowing down or allowing less stimulation so that our brain can actually heal. So this isn't really about, you know, traumatic brain injuries or concussions, but it's something that's really important because I do have people come to me who said, oh, I hit my head and I'm getting
dizzy or I'm feeling, you know, I'm getting pain in my neck or, you know, whatever. I'm feeling really tired stuff like this. And they're just like, I don't understand what's going on. And sometimes they'll just push through. So this is probably one of the most valuable things that I can share with you, which might not be relevant to you right now. But if you ever hit your head, you know, even if it's a mild thing, you don't pass out, you know, you don't black out none of that stuff.
And you're like, oh, it wasn't a concussion. I just hit my head. I would increase your awareness of like, huh. So I hit my head, my brain probably, like, bounced around in my skull a little bit. Maybe it might have bruised, maybe it didn't.
But let's be careful and mindful of how I feel after this point. Meaning you hit your head and all of a sudden, you know, maybe a couple hours later or later that night or that day, you're feeling some headaches or you're feeling, you know, whatever it might be, feeling something that's just doesn't seem right.
Listen to that because that is your body, your brain, your nervous system telling you I need to chill. Because if there is a little mini bruise on the brain, it and it's taking in all these stimulation around you, like you're going to grocery stores and you're hanging out with people or you're at a bar or whatever it is and there's lots of noise stimulation. That means that your nervous system is taking in all that information and it's working really hard to filter the stuff that's important and then
keeping the stuff that is important. But if it's got a little bruise, it's not gonna work so well and it's actually can get a little bit overwhelmed. And then that's where the pain and the headaches and the dizziness or the neck pain and the tension and all this stuff that can kind of come from. So I just think it's really important to know that. So I figured, why not plug this into this episode? It's really relevant.
And like I was saying, I had a student who recently fell doing acro yoga. Unfortunately, she landed on her head and she was telling me that she was getting headaches and stuff like that, but she was continuing her life as normal.
And I told her, I said hey, just take a couple days and just slow down, Just allow your brain to chill, allow the, you know, the bruise to heal. And the reason why I say that is because I've had situations working with traumatic brain injuries where someone just had a very mild little bump in the head, Right. This isn't to scare you.
This is to inform you, little mild bump in the head where they're in the kitchen and the cupboard opened and Boop hit them in the head. And it was like that was kind of soaring, didn't feel so good, right. And then she kind of just continued her life and she went to work and her work was a high, stimulating environment and she was pushing through and you know, she's getting headaches.
So she would take painkillers and she kept pushing through. And then all of a sudden, you know, she started to get more symptoms and more symptoms and things started to get worse. I didn't end up seeing her until like a year or so later because she didn't know what was going on.
And you know that she had to go through the, unfortunately, the medical system, which took a long time to bring her to our company. And in front of me to be able to explain to her that that moment where you hit your head, your brain was bruised. And because you kept pushing through, it's like hurting yourself and just still going anyway. You know you like spraying your wrist, but then you keep doing hand stands or something like that, you know, you're just aggravating an injury that
already is there and you need to let it heal. So Long story short, unfortunately for this client from years ago, she had problems persist for I think up to two years from a simple just like boom on the head from a cupboard in the kitchen and all I was thinking to myself, and I did tell her this as well, even though she it didn't really help her in the moment. But I was like, this all could have been avoided if you would have just taken a few days, a
week, maybe two weeks to just listen to what your body needed and just slowed down so that you didn't actually absorb all the stimulation and your brain had a chance to heal. So that's got to be one of the most important things I think every human should know about. So if you're listening to this, tell your friends, especially if you someone bumps their head, just give them a little bit of like, hey, slow down, you know, allow your body to kind of heal the stimulation.
What? Basically what I just said, it's super, super valuable and it can go a long way, right? Taking a day off for two days off or just chilling, it's kind of like an excuse to slow down, which, you know, a lot of times we need that. So hopefully, like, you can use that. Otherwise, let's go back to talking about the nervous system a little bit more, more specifically, the autonomic nervous system, So the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system.
So I know most of us already know this, but let's just assume we don't. So again, you're sympathetic, nervous system. It doesn't have a location, right? It's sympathetic is your fight or flight response. It's your adrenaline response, your stress response. This is like when you get fired up, OK, you kind of have like, I don't know, whatever, Whatever you're doing requires a lot of energy, a lot of stimulation.
So you know, the certain changes that are happening in your body, basically the blood flow will rush to your peripheral area, like your arms, your legs. Because if you're going to, like, do some Yang yoga or you're going to go for a run or you need to be very alert, maybe you're going to be playing an instrument or singing, your adrenaline is going to kick up, right, which is part of your sympathetic nervous system.
All right. So for example, your eyes might dilate, meaning they get a little bit bigger, brighter and your heart rate might increase. Your Airways start to relax, which ultimately means that they increase the amount of air that you can breathe in and out. And then some other energy efficient things like, you know, inhibiting your saliva in your mouth, inhibiting digestive juices in your stomach and inhibiting activity in your intestines for digesting food.
Because right now it doesn't make sense in those moments of sport, activity, adrenaline, to be focusing on digestion, right? So this is the part of your nervous system that's intelligently working for you in the background to make these little changes physiologically for you based off of what's happening in the environment around you.
So if you're playing a sport, it kind of does all these little changes for you. And then the parasympathetic nervous system is kind of the opposite in the sense of it's the rest in that in the digestion. So the blood circulation or the energy efficiency starts to move more towards the center of your body, your core area to try to replenish energy that was used. So now it's kind of using the efficiencies of, OK, let's reduce the pupil dilation, which
means your eyes kind of get a little bit softer, right. Your heart rate usually slows down, your Airways kind of constrict, which means they don't need to work as much. But then it'll start to stimulate your saliva in your digestive system, in your intestines and all these types of things to try to rejuvenate some energy and help you slow down and rest and heal. So both parts of these nervous system is very important for survival and it's a balance
between the two like it is in most life, balance between many things. That is what optimizes our quality of life. So when we can be balanced between our sympathetic fight or flight, adrenaline response and then also our rest digest parasympathetic nervous system, then things go really, really well.
That being said, the world we live in is very much a sympathetic world, sympathetic nervous system, world fight or flight, go, go, go do this traffic. You know, there's so much going on, a lot of deadlines, important stress, these types of things demands expectations.
So unfortunately for a lot of us, we live in this sympathetic nervous system and this is where a lot of our challenges come from, right? So finding ways in which we can rebalance and go more into our parasympathetic nervous system is really, really helpful. And you know, very simple way that we can do that is just connecting to the breath.
Probably been mentioned before, but when we connect with our breath intentionally with control, we are stimulating your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is one of the primary cranial nerves that stems from your skull or your brain, and it connects with the major organs and systems in your body like your lungs, your digestion, all that stuff.
So when we consciously breathe, we're intentionally breathing, we're taking deep breaths or even just sighing. We're stimulating this vagus nerve, which allows our nervous system find more balance, more regulation in a very simple way, increasing the activity of your parasympathetic nerves and therefore allowing us to rest a little bit more or chill or calm, right, and balances this out.
So the great thing about yoga, teaching yoga which we focus about, you know, breathing a lot or even just doing pranayama practices or just creating awareness for people about their breath, reminding people to breathe, whether it be teaching yoga or if they're, you know, a little stressed out and just take a couple breaths. These types of things help us to regulate a nervous system, which is extremely valuable, right, Especially in those public speaking, nervous type of
situations. In fact, a couple days ago when one of the students or one of the teachers I should call her student teacher was teaching in the class and she was very nervous, very, very nervous. And I just went up to her before and I said hey, you know, you're gonna do fine.
Just remember. To breathe and then also help them breathe as well. So if you ever feel like you need to take a moment to take a breath, then just use that in the class. You know, tell them to breathe. But it's really for you, right? Take a deep breath in and let it go. Like, use that wild card anytime in class, anytime you feel like you need it.
And then she did it. I when I was watching her teach afterwards, she she used it pretty regularly, but it didn't seem out of place because it's a yoga class, you know, you're breathing all the time, Intentional breathing.
Why not, right? And then at the end, she was like, that was so helpful for me. And the students probably loved it as well because they also got the regulation of their nervous system. So here's your first tip. If you're teaching yoga or teaching yoga classes and you get nervous, just cue the breath. Take a moment to take a big deep inhale and breathe it out and let it go.
It's therapeutic for the room, but especially for you. Yeah, we might do that the beginning of class, but there's no reason why you can't do that throughout. If you ever find moments where you're, you know, you're getting a little tripped up or you're forgetting your sequence, man, just go for the breath, Take a few moments, allow people to just be in that space. And then it'll also help you to regulate your nervous system so that you can kind of perform
better or just be a little bit better of a facilitator in that moment. So I think that's extremely liable, and hopefully it is for you as well. OK, so now, without going too much further into the sciency stuff, I wanna apply a little bit of this.
And you know the nervous system conversation can expand even more into this. Talking about the polyvagal theory, if you've heard of this before, the polyvagal theory is something that opens up the conversation beyond just the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system.
It kind of branches into 3 sections which is helpful to understand and learn a little bit more about balancing out your nervous system, but I consider that more of an advanced understanding or learning and you can look that stuff up if you want. If you're already ongoingproyoga.com we have a whole section on learning about the polyvagal theory so you can go check that out and basically how this works. And I'm just gonna give you a visual cuz the visual is really helpful and this is what I use
on a regular basis for myself so that I can help to regulate my own nervous system. But The thing is, is we need to start being aware and start to pay attention to where we are in our nervous system. Am I feeling anxious?
Am I feeling, you know, balanced? Am I feeling not anxious or what would we call low arousal? Right. And this is kinda the the element of the polyvagal theory. So let me explain, let me explain. I want you to visualize. You can call it a graft or basically like 3 sections, 3 sections. So if you, let's just say you're swimming in the water, you're at a particular level in the water and if you go up to a certain point, you're going to go a little bit higher, right? And when you go higher, that
would be representing becoming more excited or hyper aroused, increasing your arousal state. Arousal means, you know, excitement. It means stimulation, these types of things. And then as let's say you were to swim back down to your regular location, but then this time you actually dove a bit deeper.
You swam a bit deeper. Now as you're swimming deeper, now you're entering more of what we call the low arousal state or the hypo arousal, hypo excited state. And then you swim back up and you go to that neutral area again. So just visualize that you're kind of swimming in the water or not even swimming but just imagine like there's a something that's moving in the water and it can go up and down but whatever you know stream or channel that it's swimming in in a normal situation is it's
regulated usual location that is like the the the regulated nervous system part of your nervous system. If you swim outside of that zone, that Channel, and you go up into the hyper arousal, that's kind of what we would call the fight or flight part of your nervous system where things start to become really anxious and stressful and things are stimulating and it starts to become a little overwhelming and you know, there's a lot of things happening there.
Then there's also the hypo arousal. So if we start to go deeper again, now this is low activity in the body where you're kind of feeling almost like lazy and lethargic or depressed or disconnected, emotionally flat, these types of things. And it's important to know, obviously there's more to this whole conversation.
I'm just trying to give you a glimpse of it over a microphone, which is not easy to do. So thanks for sticking with me. Visuals are always helpful with this stuff, but basically we're more prone to, everyone's more prone to one or more of those two things. So I'm more prone to going lower. I'm more prone to being a little bit more emotionally flat, way more kind of slow and lethargic.
And that's kind of my, my typical tendency, OK. Some people are more, more, more likely to move upwardly in this hyper arousal state which is more anxious or more excited or more stimulated. You probably already know which one you are based off of me just saying that, right.
So this is our nervous system constantly fluctuating. So going up and down these little zones or these little sections or channels is which is constantly happening all the time based off of what's happening in the environment around you. So we talked before about the nervous system constantly collecting information from the environment around you and based off that information, your little swimming fish, if you will, will either go up or down or stay in the middle depending on what's going on.
Now even though we don't have a lot of control over our autonomic nervous system because it's kind of happening for us, there are things that we can do to help influence it. And that is things called either up regulating your nervous system or down regulating your nervous system.
So up regulating your nervous system means you swam too deep, things are getting a little low. Let's try to pick you back up and bring you back into the zone or you've gone out of the zone up and now things are hyper aroused, overstimulated.
And now we need to down regulate you and bring you things, bring things back down into the zone the other direction. So hopefully this visual kind of helps you understand a little bit what I'm saying. Because this is something that I think about all the time in situations where I'm feeling anxious or stressed or not myself or something's bothering me or you know, I'm not motivated or something like that. I'm kind of tuning into what's my nervous system status right now?
How is my nervous system right now? Am I feeling anxious? Am I feeling hyper stimulated or am I feeling not stimulated in kind of low energy, right. Once you can figure out where you are in particular moments, then you know how to help yourself.
Boom. This is like super valuable. If you're in the middle and you're swimming in the zone, then everything's great and you don't need to do much, you can just do whatever you want. But if you're out of balance, right, awareness is the number one thing all the time.
People say it and I would say they over say it, but it's actually so important that you can't over say how important awareness is. So being aware of your nervous system state throughout your day all the time is super valuable cuz that's how you help yourself.
And of course, there's situations where your nervous system can get so overwhelmed where you're triggered in one way or another and that you can no longer kind of find the awareness in those moments because of certain neuroscience things that are happening, which maybe at some point I'll explain that. But the point is, is before we get to those stages, it's always nice to try to just check in with ourselves, which you could be an emotional check in.
Like, how am I feeling right now? I'm feeling a little anxious or I'm feeling a little, you know, whatever it is. But if you use this analogy of the zones, it helps you to kind of at least give a a location, if you will, of like, oh, I'm out of my zone up or I'm out of my zone down. And then I can find things to help bring me up or bring me down back into my regulated state. Now there's a whole bunch of things I'm sure if you just searched and Googled and again
you know how to upgrade up regulate or down regulate your nervous system. If you have access to going pro yoga, we have a whole section on how to do that and talk about the practices that help you down regulate or up regulate.
But I'll just name a few to start. So let's just say you have gotten super stimulated anxious to some level. We would want to do things that are going to help to ground you, bring you down to down regulate ground and calming practices which could be like earthing for example, you know walking out in nature, sticking your feet on the ground with no shoes right, doing slower movements, yin yoga, meditation or mindfulness, tapping into your senses.
There's some other you know pranayama practices diaphragmatic breathing or 4 to 8 breath, these types of things that can help to down regulate your nervous system. And then if you gone the other direction where you're feeling a little bit low, which is more of me, that's what happens to me.
I kind of get in these moods sometimes where I get a little bit low and lazy and lethargic and I'm like I don't really feel motivated. I don't really want to do anything not really getting inspired in those moments. I need to up regulate my nervous system and things that I do and things that you can do is movement or action oriented based activities which could be shaking, dancing, moving the body, basically exercise right Yang based practices or Yang
based yoga. So these types of things can help to bring your nervous system more stimulated into the zone again. And there's also energizing pranayama practices like Bastrica, Breath of fire or Kapalabhati. Those are fire building or stimulating to help up regulate the nervous system.
So those are a few examples. OK, if you're in the zone, you're in the middle, then yeah, like I said, you can do whatever you want. Yin, Yang, active, calm, physical activities, everything works because you're in the zone, everything's regulated. You're your best self when you're in the middle and when you're outside of the middle, when you go more north in the higher shallow water, if you will, or the depths, you're not going to be your best self.
So ideally we're trying to swim somewhere in that middle zone, just being in that area. And anytime we fluctuate up or down, which is going to happen every day, all the time, we just need to be aware of what that is and help ourselves.
So hopefully this helps to give you an idea of how you can help yourself in situations where you're feeling nervous. Nervousness is anxiousness or a level of arousal. Arousal and not the like arousal that you might be thinking like sexual arousal even though that plays into it.
It's more so the anxiousness or the arousal of being over stimulated right to a point where it's too much and that's what the nerves is. You know, the nervousness is your body trying to protect you from something new. Getting up and speaking in front of a class, you know teaching something that you haven't done before.
Anytime you're doing something that you haven't done before, your nerves are going to kick in. And it's super normal. And often times we just need to figure out ways in which we can down regulate our nervous system in those moments which we've gone through a few ways that you can do that. But there's also one more trick that I want to share with you. Especially when you're feeling nervous, right? And I've done this a couple times or you're feeling over anxious or you know your nervous
system is just having a hard time to calm. And it seems counterintuitive. And that is when you're in those moments finding an opportunity to shake and move your body to help down regulate your nervous system. And if you're thinking like isn't that what you do when you're trying to up regulate to some level.
But the idea when we get nervous, when we can become anxious and when we're preparing or anticipating something, there's a certain amount of energy that starts to fill our body. It's almost like a it's like a stress kind of energy that just starts to get stagnant in our tissues, fascia specifically. And if you don't know much about that, listen to the fascia lecture or come to Bali and you can learn from me here. Or if you're ongoing pro yoga, you can definitely learn more about it there already.
But when we shake and move our body in these moments of high stimulation, high anxiety, high arousal, we're actually able to discharge or move or flow the energy through us so it doesn't become stuck and stagnant and start to become what I would consider like toxic, right? So if we're getting nervous and, you know, we're trying to through calming practices with breathing or we're trying to meditate and calm down in preparation, like sometimes those will work.
But if it's not working for you, you can try something else and that The thing is to just shake and move your body. So example, I've used this many times before in different situations. You know, if I'm nervous about something, I'll say, OK, I'm going to, I need to like shake this energy out of me. So I'll like, you know, jump around. I'll go in the bathroom, like jump around and shake my body and do all these things to try to like discharge the energy. And often times it helps.
And then you follow that up with a little bit of mindfulness or meditation and things can work really well. So here's a real life example. About a year ago, I was teaching in last year's Yin Yang Yoga teacher training, and I was about to teach a yoga class to the students.
And about 10 minutes, right before my class, something came up that basically stressed me out. And we don't need to go into that too much. But ultimately, this happens to us all the time, right? Right before you're about to do something important, something happens. And all of a sudden you're like, boom, Oh my God, like, how am I going to handle that after hearing it and then now needing to show up for these people?
This is just like life, right? And when I had got that information, I was like, oh, my God, like, I can't deal with that right now. I need to focus on the students in the other room. I need to support that. I need to be there for them. So knowing all this stuff but the nervous system, I was like, OK, I'm going to try to calm and regulate, breathe, meditate when it's SOT somewhere.
And I was just like, this isn't working. Like I'm feeling more anxious when I sit still, which you might be able to relate to. So this is exactly what I did. I went into the bathroom, I went into a stall, I closed the door and I just started to shake my body.
Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake my body. I was like bouncing up and down, shaking my arm, shaking my legs, shaking my head, just moving my hips. And I did this for, I don't know, a minute, maybe a minute and a half. And then I started to breathe afterward and tried to calm and ground myself after that.
And then I went into the yoga class, sat down. I said, OK, let's begin. Sit at the back of your yoga mat, cross legged position, close your eyes if you feel comfortable to do so. And now let's start to connect to our breath. And then I did a few inhales and exhales, which was for the class, but really it was for me.
And that actually allowed me to feel ready and prepared to teach the yoga class, 'cause I allowed the energy that was building in my body of the stress and anticipation of needing to deal with that thing that came my way.
And instead of it being stagnant and stuck in my body and becoming toxic, I was able to move it and discharge it through, allowed to flow and move and process a little bit, right? So a very simple trick that can be very helpful in moments where you're feeling nervous or in anticipation of something. So try it out, try it out among some of the other things that I mentioned, and hopefully that'll help you find moments in which you can help to regulate your
own nervous system. But it all starts with figuring out where am I at right now. So like I said, in different moments, we're constantly fluctuating where we are within the zone of this swimming analogy of our nervous system.
But the only way that we can actually help ourselves is knowing where we are in those moments. And that starts with awareness starting to feel into how we're noticing our state of being or a state of nervous energy, whether it be high or low, and then helping ourselves to get back to that middle zone. So hopefully this episode has been helpful for you to get a little bit more understanding about the nervous system. If you're have more questions after something like this, that's OK too, right?
More questions is always helpful because then you can expand on some of this knowledge. If you have any questions, reach out to me. I'm happy to help support you some more or send you some more resources. Simply just podcast at goingproyoga.com or if you're already following me on Instagram, just shoot me.
Adm happy to support you that way as well. Otherwise, thank you so much for listening and sticking with me for the last 35 minutes. I appreciate it. Some of these episodes usually don't go this long, but I just felt like I had a lot to share here and I just was so much important stuff. So hopefully this translated through the mic for you and it was valuable for you.
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you so much. And one more time, if you have an opportunity to give us a review on podcast or Apple Podcasts or sorry, excuse me, Spotify, I really appreciate it. Really appreciate you.
So otherwise, have a beautiful day and we'll speak to you next week. Take care.
