It forces your body to stop rushing, calm all of its systems down, including even your thoughts. And it even helps for sleeping. I won't guarantee you perfectly sound sleep forever. If you are tossing and turning, it can help to use this method as a way to slow your thoughts down. And if you find that it's not enough for you, there is an even more extreme breathing method you can try for when you're having panic attacks. And that's to take one big deep breath in, and put your head in a sink of cold water for as long as you can hold your breath and it will forcibly calm you down as long as you don't choke which would definitely be unhelpful for calming you down but honestly when you immerse your head in water it just triggers your whole body to think a bit more rationally and calm down because usually in that situation it's not going to help you to lose your mind and you need to slow down your heart rate because you're holding your breath. So it does genuinely actually help calm you down. And breathing as a whole is such a huge and important tool that you can use at any time and know that there is a way out of your scary or angry feelings that can help you take more positive actions. And it's something I would recommend to anyone. But of course there are deeper things going on or more chronic things that we can't just fix by always breathing deeply every time, though it'll probably always give you some benefits. But it's worth looking into our life and seeing what other elements are causing a stress. In the same way that even with good breathing, if you're sitting in a loud and harshly lit room with lots of people, it's still going to be more stressful to do your work than a quiet and calm room with candles and soft music. Like, it's just a fact of life. Sure, you can be as doic and peaceful as you possibly can, and you can train yourself so that the environment you're in has less and less effect on you, but it still doesn't change the fact that it's still having an effect on you. And if someone was hitting you in the face every other second, you're just not going to get any work done, for example. However deeply you breathe. So we should look at some longer term things in our life that might be causing us more chronic stress besides people hitting us in the face every two seconds, because that's not an everyday example. Let's look at some things that are everyday. Perhaps waking up in the morning, you check your phone first thing maybe, I'm not projecting, it's just possibly something you might do. Things like email, work notifications, even social media. Well, that's a bit like slapping yourself in the face first thing. They are not things that calm you down. They put your nervous system on alert from the moment that you wake up if that's what you look at. And it's no wonder that our concentration is worse if we are wired from the moment we wake up by work demands or triggering news and strange stuff on social media. So sleeping in a room without your phone and having healthier habits around our technology is a huge stress and productivity improvement that anyone can implement. And I won't cover all the details here other than saying that polyvagal theory gives us some neuroscience behind why it's so important to be in control of our habits with technology. And I'll definitely do longer episodes on how to deal with technology. And the last episode on the art of listening to yourself and getting more distance from technology was also a good one. But there are other sources of chronic stress that comes from lifestyle factors like our jobs, relationships and health, and when we are in a more activated stress state that does have some very long-term consequences. Stress has been shown to mess with your blood sugar regulation, which over a long time period can even lead to diabetes. Stress also messes with your heart rate variability and can lead to heart problems. Stress also messes with your digestion, which not only has a short-term impact of things like IBS, but also has longer-term impact in terms of reduced nutrient uptake and increased inflammation. So before I stress you out too much about the problems of long term stress in your life, I think we've gathered that we do need to take stress seriously and that self-care isn't just about being lazy and ignoring responsibilities, but self-care done correctly is a very healthy thing that we do need to engage in. So if you find yourself feeling that your day-to life is just endlessly putting out fires, you will genuinely benefit from taking regular breaks because that can calm your nervous system down, which helps calm you down. And there's genuinely some legitimate reasons behind the saying, if you haven't got 10 minutes to meditate you need one hour. And there's a whole body of data that's growing now about the fact that we do need time to relax and turn off, get good sleep, spend time socializing, not working, all of these things are essential for a healthy human existence. So now let's look beyond our external environmental factors and start looking at our internal wiring and how that interacts with our stress levels. Some of us are truly wired to be more stressed due to our nature or due to past traumas or our attachment styles. In fact, researchers have found that individuals have a thing called vagal tone that relates to our capacity to deal with stress. Now, to remind you, the vagus nerve is the central core nerve that's connected to our three different nervous system branches that handle our different states of activation. The REST and RELAX, the DEFENCE MODE or the FREEZE MODE. Well, the VACAL TONE is the general resting state of our vagus nerve and where it's most likely to be activating us. A low vagal tone is associated with things like higher heart rate variability and shorter breathing. In studies it's been shown that people that have a lower vagal tone tend to recover much worse after an unsafe incident than people that have a higher vagal tone. And that means that after some form of triggering event, they will often get stuck in either the freeze response and be very low in activation, or they'll get stuck in hyperactivation and they'll be hypervigilant, they'll be in the fight-flight mode. And this can last for much longer than other people, and they might even flip-flop between these two states without ever getting back to the relaxed parasympathetic activation mode. But what's incredibly fascinating about this for me is that you can build yourself a higher vagal tone simply through exercising. Now why does that happen? Well, exercise over time will physically strengthen your heart and smoothen out the variability of your heart rate and reduce the resting heart rate. Remember that your heart rate and your heart rate variability are physical signs of how stressed you are. And so you can physically change your heart to make your whole body feel that it's less stressed. And in the same way that you can train your heart, by getting fitter you also train your lungs and increase your lung capacity. And that allows you to have slower, deeper breaths without consciously thinking about it. And again, that makes you feel less stressed. So for absolutely anyone it just makes sense to get fitter. And especially someone that has more problems with managing their stress and has a lower vagal tone. It's crazy how these physical changes in your body will increase your vehicle tone to be in a more relaxed state and increase your capacity to deal with stress. Which for me on the one hand I just found this completely bananas when I heard it. And on the other hand it just makes so much sense. I feel kind of dumb for not thinking about it before. Now of course there's the obvious benefits of exercise in the short term, like it gives you time to yourself to relax and think about things, you get the fielded hormones from exercising, you can eat more without feelings of guilt, you might get to spend time in nature or time socialising people. These are all such obvious and useful benefits but I'd never thought about the fact that just lowering your heart rate and increasing your lung capacity would have the same calming effect as consciously slowing down your breathing because it physically makes your body exist in like a general calmer default state, which is kind of nuts. And whilst we're talking about exercise, another benefit that perhaps isn't spoken about so much is the simple act of being stronger. Now in the same way that when you're a small child the world just looks really big like a table will tower over you, a door, all the humans around you, they're massive but the bigger that you grow the smaller the rest of the world becomes relative to you. And it's the same with strength. When you get stronger, physically, that means everything in the world becomes lighter relative to you. So opening doors, carrying your shopping or luggage, climbing the stairs, these things all become much easier the fitter and stronger you are. And the world just becomes a less difficult place to be in. And it just creates a reduced level of stress. And I find that for me, it does just create a reduced level of stress and a greater sense of autonomy moving around the world. And then, of course, the fact that you've been reliable at sticking to something, which is a nice win, and that you don't have to worry about your health because you're healthy. So lots of reasons to exercise besides some of the obvious ones and I love it when you find really useful insights into why you should do something that isn't just your teacher telling you to go do it. Because the more positive reasons you can build for yourself to go and follow a healthy habit, the better, always for me. So glad to hear there's lots of neuroscience and psychology behind why you should really incorporate a regular level of exercise into your life. But we can still go further in terms of helping ourselves when it comes to safety. I mentioned that trauma and attachment styles can have a very big impact on our neuroception and our perception of safety, and that's because they do. And as I've already said, things like a better environment, better practices around breathing and regular exercise, it's amazing how much they can do for anyone. But it still won't sort everything out, especially when it comes to things like our past traumas. Our experiences can train our wiring to assume the worst in different situations and trigger us to feel we under threat. Trauma survivors can develop very heightened neuroceptive responses that leads to things like chronic anxiety and hypersensitivity to potential threats. For example, a veteran who experienced a lot of loud explosions during combat, you might later find it very difficult to filter out background noise and that can lead them to feel overwhelming anxiety in crowded places. If parents made a child feel like they weren't enough whenever the child tried to please them, the child might grow up to feel a crushing sense of imposter syndrome at work or even in relationships.