How to Calm Your Nervous System for Better Focus and Energy

You can own the best planner in the world, maintain a beautifully organized workspace, and set clear priorities, yet still feel like you drag yourself through wet sand. Systems and strategies fail to function if your body runs on high alert. Your nervous system state operates underneath your productivity tools and dictates whether your strategies can express themselves.

This week, episode 314 of the Positively Living® Podcast addresses the physiological layer of productivity. Learn how to transition from survival mode into a state of calm focus so you can make good decisions and execute your best work.

Key Takeaways: 

• Your nervous system scans your environment outside your conscious control and treats a full inbox or a tight deadline the same way it treats an actual physical threat .
• Fight-or-flight responses push your brain's prefrontal cortex offline, which temporarily impairs your capacity for focus, decision-making, and creative thought.
• Shift your body into parasympathetic dominance to create the space required to absorb information and think clearly .
• Signal safety to your body by make your out-breath longer than your in-breath, which directly stimulates the vagus nerve to slow your stress response .
• Combine a double inhale through your nose with a long, slow exhale through your mouth to down-regulate your system faster than traditional mindfulness meditation .
• Use physical movement like stretching, a brisk walk, or shake out your hands to release the physical energy that modern conflict leaves behind in your muscles .
• Splash cold water on your face to activate the diving reflex, or hum along to a song to stimulate the vagus nerve where it runs through your vocal cords .
• Complete a pen-and-paper mind sweep to capture random thoughts and stop the unconscious mental loops that keep your stress response active .
• Document exactly what is factually true in the current moment to ground your mind and prevent worst-case scenarios from hijack your focus .
• Develop a flexible nervous system that naturally rises to meet daily demands and returns to center quickly when a task finishes .

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Episode 79: How Your Body Responds to Stress

Ep 257 The Special Nerve That Helps With Stress

Ep 140 How to Declutter Your Mind in One Simple Step.

Ep 183 for a no fail approach to gratitude journaling

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Transcript

Lisa Zawrotny: 0:20

When caring for and calming your nervous system, it's important to consider that it isn't just physical, it's a key part of what we're doing here, where we are getting beyond the brain and we are going right to the physiological aspects, but it is cognitive too. You are listening to the Positively Living Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Zarotni, founder of Positively Productive Systems, and a productivity coach certified in positive psychology and stress management. Join me as we explore ways to live a more proactive, positive life with episodes on productivity, self-awareness, mindset, entrepreneur life, habits, and systems, simplicity, fun, and more. I understand overwhelm personally as a multi-passionate entrepreneur, wife and mom to kids and cats, and as a caregiver. I'm here to help you choose what's right for you, so you can do less, live more, and breathe easier. Sound good? Let's get to it. Welcome to the Positively Living Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa, and I'm looking forward to today's topic on a personal and professional level. What we're talking about today is a nuance of productivity I wish I'd understood better during my years in survival mode as a sandwich caregiver. If you've ever sat down to work and found that your brain simply wouldn't cooperate, keep listening. You know those moments when you're scattered, tense, maybe a little snappy, and the to-do list that seemed manageable an hour ago now feels impossible. Well, what if the problem wasn't your priorities or your planner, it's good to look at those things, but there's an underlying factor we need to talk about. See, we talk a lot about systems and habits and strategies for getting things done on the podcast, and rightly so. We need to be addressing those things to make the most of our time and our lives, but the layer underneath all of it that determines whether or not those strategies actually work needs to be highlighted, and that's what we're doing today. You know, it reminds me a little of the concept of epigenetics, the science of how environment and experience can switch genes on and off, so you can have a particular gene, but you can switch it on and off, depending upon what's going on in your life, and your productivity tools are a bit like that in the context of your nervous system. So, the tools exist, they're real, but your nervous system state is what determines whether they get to express themselves or not, whether they're going to work or not. You can have the best planner in the world, a beautifully organized workspace, and a set of clear priorities, and still feel like you are dragging yourself through wet sand, slogging through your day, if your nervous system is running on high alert, there's a reason. What matters to your nervous system matters for your productivity. Your nervous system operates largely outside your conscious control. It's always scanning your environment and responding to it, whether real or imagined threats, chronic low-grade stressors, and everything in between. It's constantly on alert, and when it senses danger, and for many of us, a full inbox, an angry email, a tight deadline - all of those can register in the same way as an actual threat. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true that physiologically we will respond to these things with a heightened stress response, and that activates the sympathetic nervous system, and you know this as fight or flight, your heart rate goes up, your breathing gets shallower, your muscles tense, and your brain's prefrontal cortex, that's the part responsible for decision making, focus, and creative thinking, all those things that you need to have on hand right in that moment, all that goes offline, and that's your system doing exactly what it's designed to do, but the timing's awkward, it can be frustrating when you need to focus properly, and that's what happens, and the problem is that most of us are living in a low-level version of that activated state way more often than we realize. The antidote is activating the parasympathetic nervous system, that's the rest and digest side. This is where calm focus lives, where creative thinking happens, where you can actually absorb information, make good decisions, and do your best work. The good news is you have more influence over getting to this point than you might think, and that's what we're going to get. To today, there's a reason why just breathe is actually good advice. One of the simplest things we can do when we're in stress response is to breathe. Breath work is a proven technique for nervous system regulation. We've covered it in earlier conversations on this podcast, and I want to bring it into a fuller picture here, because breath is one of the most direct pathways to your nervous system, and it's so simple. It's important to note that not all breathing techniques do the same thing. Some breathing patterns are energizing, increasing alertness and activating the sympathetic system when you need that, something called cyclic hyperventilation techniques, for example, are used intentionally to build energy and focus, but that's not what we're after today. When the goal is to calm, the key is in the exhale. Research from many scientists, including neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, shows that extending the exhale longer than the inhale signals safety to the nervous system. It's one of my favorite tips, and it's a great takeaway for today. It's something you can do anytime, anyplace. It works because it activates the vagus nerve and shifts the body toward parasympathetic dominance. Right, so if someone tells you breathe, take a deep breath, let it out, they're actually onto something. How you do it matters, though. Here's a few specific patterns that you can consider, one is extended exhale breathing, and this is super simple, and I recommend it all the time. I even talk people through it when we are coaching, or when we're chatting on the street, and they seem really stressed. It's so simple and quick: inhale for four counts and exhale for six to eight. Let's try it together right now, and you want to inhale through your nose and exhale out your mouth, right? So inhale through your nose for 1234, and exhale 123456, Now you can exhale for longer, but I didn't want to make it too long this time. It's the longer out breath that does the calming work. It's that simple. Another pattern to consider would be box breathing. This is where you inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four, and you keep going. It is a cyclic type of breathing. This is used widely for stress regulation and focus, and it is very popular with the Navy Seals, they use it for high stakes situations. Hopefully you're not in those, but you could still use it to your benefit. And for those who appreciate a repeat pattern and one that kind of connects, this is definitely worth trying. And the third option I'll mention today is the physiological sigh, and I really like this, because I think about situations where we naturally sigh, especially when we're frustrated, so also called the cyclic sigh, this is a double inhale through the nose, followed by a long slow exhale through the mouth sounds like this, and you could also make a sighing sound while you do that exhale as well. This is one of the fastest ways to down regulate in real time, and when you think about the natural tendency to sigh. I think that's the instinctive response to trying to do that, and then the extended exhale part of it. This technique combines the two things that we're talking about, and Stanford researchers are backing me up on this. They found it to be even more effective than mindfulness meditation at calming the nervous system. Each of these patterns is effective. I recommend picking one that feels good to you, feels accessible, feels like you can do it, and practice it before you need it. Practice it right now, and then once you're used to doing it, it's there when you need it. Another way to calm your nervous system is moving your way to regulation. Most of us know that movement helps us when we're stressed, when we move our bodies, like going for a run, walking, dancing, kickboxing, where you can pit things, right? It all works. We call it stress relief. Call it blowing off steam, but what's actually happening is nervous system regulation. When your sympathetic system activates, your body prepares for physical action. It prepares to fight, actually, so it needs to do that, right, to fight or to flee, so to hit things or to run. So it makes sense that when we do those exercises, it will help see the problem. Here is that we have this activation, the sympathetic system activates from modern stressors that don't actually require the physical action. You're sitting in a meeting, you're dealing with conflict, you're absorbing that stress, but the energy has nowhere to go, and it doesn't just dissipate, unfortunately, it stays in the body sometimes long after the stressor itself is gone. Movement is one of the most direct and effective ways to discharge it. That's good news. The better news is that it doesn't have to be intense or extended, a brisk walk, stretching, even shaking out your hands and arms for a few minutes can shift your physiological state. I did a whole episode on stress trauma and the body with Krista Bevin years ago. Episode 79 on how your body responds to stress. We covered what physical stress looks like, how to distinguish between stressors and stress itself, and nine ways to discharge it. She also spoke of tre tension and trauma releasing exercises. It's a specific technique developed by Dr. David Burchelli, which uses intentional tremoring to release deeply held tension. It sounds unusual, but if you think about people who are in shock or kind of like dealing with something and they shake, that's their body doing it for them. You can do that intentionally to release tension and trauma, and it's another kind of movement grounded in the same principle we're talking about, that the body needs to complete what the stress started. Another way to support your nervous system is by toning the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is another important piece of the nervous system puzzle, which I talked about in episode 257 The special nerve that helps with stress. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body, and it's the primary communication highway between your brain and your body. A well-regulated nervous system is closely tied to what researchers call vagal tone, how responsive and flexible your nervous system is, basically how well it can respond to the stressors, and then come back to neutral, as it were. It's a responsiveness, just like how we react to stress, and then we're able to come back to center. Higher vagal tone is associated with better emotional regulation, more resilience to stress, and better focus and cognitive performance. The good news is that vagal tone can be improved with consistent low effort practices. Now, a few that have solid research behind them include cold water exposure, and don't worry, I don't mean plunging into an ice bath, I mean splashing cold water on your face, or finishing a shower with 30 to 60 seconds of cold water, it activates the diving reflex, which directly stimulates the vagus nerve and lowers heart rate. This is one of the fastest physical interventions available to you, and also I think it's pretty good for your skin and your hair too. Another one is humming, singing, or gargling. Yes, you heard that third part right. The vagus nerve runs through the vocal cords and the back of the throat, humming a tune. Singing along to your favorite song, yes. And you wonder how I have good vagal tone. It's probably through that, because you cannot stop me from singing along to my favorite song, and if music is not your thing, even gargling with water stimulates it directly. And then the third option, slow rhythmic breathing. Yep, we're back to breathing again. It connects back to what we just covered, slow breathing around five to six breaths per minute, sometimes called resonance breathing, has been shown in multiple studies to increase heart rate variability, and that's a key marker of vagal tone. So, these work best as regular practices, of course. If you feel that stress response, if you feel like your nervous system, your nerves are shot right, and your nervous system is off. You want to apply these, but the more you can do it regularly, small doses consistently applied, otherwise known as habits, the better off you'll be. The last tool I will mention today for calming your nervous system might surprise you. When caring for and calming your nervous system, it's important to consider that it isn't just physical, it's important and a key part of what we're doing here, where we are getting beyond the brain and we are going right to the physiological aspects, but it is cognitive too, and the stories you're telling yourself, the thoughts looping on repeat, especially when you're in stress response, your nervous system is shot and you can't seem to shake it, right, the mental load you're carrying, as well as the stories you're telling yourself, even about the situation you're in, all of that winds you up, it keeps you from calming down, journaling is one of the most underused regulation tools available, likely because we don't connect it to nervous system regulation, we don't even connect it to basic stress reduction, we think of it as reflection or processing, which it absolutely is, but not necessarily as something that can help calm your body, but the research says otherwise. Psychologist James Pennebaker has spent decades studying what happens when people write about difficult experiences and emotions. His findings consistently show reductions in psychological stress, improved immune function and better cognitive clarity. Writing helps process what the brain is otherwise cycling through unconsciously. It's basically stopping the spinning out, and that has a direct calming effect. And, like other practices we've covered, this won't take long to be effective, here are a few approaches you might want to consider. One is the classic brain dump: write everything that's occupying mental space without editing or organizing, you're just getting it out of your head and onto the page, and this alone can lower the cognitive load that's keeping your system activated, especially when you're feeling overwhelmed by your deadlines, and you're spinning out, this is good to do. And if you recognize this as what I call the mind sweep, you are absolutely right. This is something that I shared in episode 140 how to declutter your mind in one simple step, and this is a resource I have been providing for years on the resources page of the Positively productive.com website, you can find a free package that is the guided mind sweep package that not only includes the PDF focus file, where it has the guided questions for you to do this mind sweep, it also has an audio file of me guiding you through the process, so you can have that with you at any time. Listen to it when you're in the car waiting for someone, and you can do a mind sweep that will quickly calm your nervous system, and it will be the basis for you to process and create proper to-do lists and other task management systems going forward. It's a win-win all around for your productivity and for your wellness. The second way you can approach journaling for nervous system regulation is doing a what's true right now check-in when anxiety or overwhelm spikes. Write down what is actually true in this moment, not what you think is going on, what you fear will happen. No hypotheticals. This is a bit like documenting a grounding exercise, you know, where you go out and you, you walk through the grass, so you pay attention to what you can feel and hear and smell and taste, and what is true in that moment. You're connecting to reality, and in this case, you're documenting it. You're not allowing worst-case scenarios to run through your brain and let those play through. You're focused on what is factual, and this engages the prefrontal cortex and helps interrupt the threat response, or the perception of the threat response. The threat response is the perception of the threat, and you are interrupting that spiral. And a third way that you can calm your nervous system through journaling is through gratitude journaling. Write down brief, specific observations about what's working, what's present right now in your life, and appreciate it. And I'm not talking about toxic positivity like everything is good. If you are spiraling out, there might be a very good reason for that. I've talked about toxic positivity multiple times on the podcast, so I'm aware of it, and I'm very much against it, and I've also explained that gratitude is not that what you're trying to do here is shift away from the threat scanning and giving your nervous system evidence that you're safe. It so it really is still about what's true and factual, and it's in the context of those things, and how you appreciate them. And you may want to check out episode 183 for a no fail approach to gratitude journaling, if that's of interest to you. The key with these is brevity and consistency, a few minutes regularly does more than an occasional marathon session. Now, if you are in the moment and you need to grab one of these tools and do it, by all means do, but as you are able, the more that you can practice these in small doses, the better off you'll be in the future. Keep collecting these in your personal toolkit. Then eventually you'll do this in a preemptive or preventative way. So the idea here is that the immediate need and the ongoing will come together. The tools we've covered can all be used reactively in the moment when you feel yourself spiking, and that's genuinely useful, and I would love it if you do that, but the bigger shift happens when regulation becomes part of your day as a regular practice, and you can do that in transitions between tasks and intentional movement breaks. Right, we've talked about buffer time and transition time between your activities, which again helps you shift from one nervous system state to the other. So, same idea, the more that you practice this intentionally, even when you don't feel that overwhelmed, the better off you'll be in the future. A brief morning or evening anchor or routine of some kind can also help. These are small insertion points that don't require carving out a lot of extra time or effort. Your nervous system is always working on your behalf. The goal isn't a perfectly calm one, it's a flexible one. You're going to respond to things, and then you want to be able to come back from that, and come back from that quickly and efficiently. These tools give your system what it needs to rise to meet the demands of your day, and return back to center, and to be grounded when it's done. And that's what makes everything else sustainable, and that's what makes the productivity techniques that you're going to apply that makes sense for you. It's going to make those work so much better. If you're looking for support that I referenced in today's episode, check out the resources page of the Positively productive.com website, especially for the Mind Sweep freebie, and look at the podcast page for show notes on the episodes referenced, and access to different places to play it, first search for Positively Living Shame-Free Productivity Conversations on any of your favorite players, and then you can search for those titles that I mentioned as well. And if this episode resonated, I'd love to hear from you, and I'd be grateful if you shared it today with someone who needs to hear it too.