Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to the Happy Stack Podcast, where we explore the science and strategies behind creating a happier, more fulfilling life. I'm Teriann Richards, and I partner with organizations to address the root causes of burnout, disengagement, and stress. Equipping leaders and teams with the tools they need to thrive, both organizationally and personally. Each episode we dive into practical habits, insights, and strategies to help high performers like you level up from the inside out. Let's get stacking.
[00:00:34] Have you ever had one of those days where you feel like you're basically just living on the edge? I mean, that not just mentally, but physically? Right. Like your chest feels tight, your patience is gone before the day even starts. And one text, one slight shift in a tone of somebody's voice, one little fricking problem can send you absolutely spiraling. Yeah, I mean, I feel like we've all been there before. You know, I was there last week, to be completely honest.
[00:01:06] That is not a character flaw. That is not your personality. More than likely, a lot of times, that is your nervous system sending you some signals. Here's something that I feel like I've had to learn the hard way, and I'm going to assume that most of you have had to learn the hard way as well, because nobody teaches us this stuff.
[00:01:28] Most people are not living their life. They are reacting to their life. I want to say that again. Most people are not living their life. They are reacting to all of the external influences that are happening.
[00:01:44] Because we wake up, 99.9% of us check our phones right away. We get hit with a dopamine rush, instantly, a cortisol spike, because you know there's somebody asking a question that you don't have the answer to. It's like it's instantly putting you into just complete chaos. And then we spend the rest of our day trying to keep up with that chaos.
[00:02:10] Our bodies were not built for that.
[00:02:14] We are wired for survival. Right.
[00:02:19] We're also wired to thrive.
[00:02:21] We weren't wired for constant notifications.
[00:02:25] I want to break this down for a second. Because your nervous system has two main states.
[00:02:31] Fight or flight, rest and digest.
[00:02:34] Fight or flight is survival mode. That is your body preparing to run from a fricking tiger, even if that tiger is just your overflowing inbox or an unexpected bill or a text message from somebody you don't want to be hearing from.
[00:02:50] Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure rises, your digestion shuts down, and all your energy goes towards immediate survival. And that's great if you're in danger, right? But if you live here, you start to confuse stress with purpose, stress with ambition, stress with fulfillment.
[00:03:15] And you start thinking that constant motion equals momentum. It does not.
[00:03:21] Research from Harvard Medical School shows that when people stay in chronic stress for long periods, their brain leaves literally rewires itself. The amygdala, the fear center, becomes overactive. The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for rational decision making.
[00:03:42] It takes a hike. It goes offline, which means you stop responding to life, and you start reacting to it.
[00:03:52] You yell at your kids when you're not really mad. You micromanage your team because uncertainty feels unsafe on edge. You scroll mindlessly in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night, even though you've got things to do, you're exhausted because your brain has been rewired in such a way that it's addicted to stimulation.
[00:04:14] This is you playing in survival mode.
[00:04:19] And what I've learned, both because I've done it to myself, and I still, on a very regular basis, have to check myself. I feel like there was a song back in the day, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself. Anyway, most high performers are actually just people who have learned to function in fight or flight.
[00:04:41] We have become addicted to adrenaline, and we mistake stress for significance.
[00:04:49] And the reason.
[00:04:51] The reason that we can't slow down is not because we don't want to.
[00:04:55] It is literally because your body doesn't remember how. And I mean, like, this is me preaching to you, while preaching to me like, this is the truth, right? There's a beauty of ambition and chasing goals and doing the next thing that feels like the next great thing for you. But when you have lived in reactivity for years, calm actually starts to feel uncomfortable. Right?
[00:05:23] I still remember when I closed my store back in my. I was in my 20s, so I'm 42 now.
[00:05:29] And I mean, I was working, like, 60, 70, 80 hours a week for years.
[00:05:34] And, I mean, if you've read any of my personal stories or my book, Success Takes Courage, you'd hear me talk about when I burnt out. It's actually a part of a few of my keynotes as well.
[00:05:46] And when my store finally closed and, you know, I had nothing to do and I had to sit at home and sit still, I was so uncomfortable. I was more stressed being still than I was when my entire life was blowing up around me and my health was not thriving because stillness felt foreign. It felt uncomfortable. It felt like I didn't know that. And you start to become suspicious of even that calmness, even that stillness, because it might Be safe, but it doesn't feel right.
[00:06:25] And so, you know, I remember sitting in my car one day after a keynote and my hands were shaking. I was feeling really depleted.
[00:06:37] And even though if you looked at me from the outside, it looked like everything looked great, but my body was telling me a truth that I didn't want to face.
[00:06:46] I had once again stopped thriving and I was just living in survival mode.
[00:06:54] And the scariest part, the world around us rewards the fight or flight because we get praised for being driven and ambitious. We get promoted for being resilient and gritty.
[00:07:11] But nobody ever stops to consider what's the cost to our nervous system to keep up that pace.
[00:07:21] So what I want to do here is I don't want to tell you not to be ambitious and chase those goals because, you know, hey, that's what I'm going to keep doing.
[00:07:30] What I want to do is educate you on all the things I had to learn the hard way of how to go from being reactive to responsive. And the first step, as in all steps that require change, is awareness, right? You literally cannot heal what you can't feel.
[00:07:52] So my very first piece of advice to you is to start noticing your physical cues before your mental catches up. Here's what happens to me. And this is sort of like if you research the literature, these are sort of some telltale signs that your body is in fight or flight, that you are playing in reactive mode more often.
[00:08:16] So tight jaw. Maybe you're somebody who experiences TMJ because you hold a lot of your stress in your jaw. They say a lot of people struggle with breathing fully into their belly. But one of the telltale signs of somebody who's living in fight or flight is shallow breathing.
[00:08:33] Pay attention to your resting heart rate. So rapid heart rate is typically a telltale sign. And they're so subtle, right? Like they're so subtle that you, well, it's really easy to ignore them cuz I've done it, right? But it is your body saying, I don't really feel safe right now. Like something's off, right? And my suggestion to you is the moment that you notice it, pause. Like, just take a beat, man. Don't try to fix it. Just acknowledge. This is awareness, right? So just acknowledge it.
[00:09:04] And if you can, like if no one's around, you can say to yourself, like, hand on heart, right? Like, I'm safe, I'm good, right?
[00:09:14] If you're not in a spot where you can say it out loud, you can say it to yourself, you can whisper it to Yourself. And I know that sounds small and maybe even a little ridiculous, but every time that you do that, you are literally retraining your brain to associate calm with safety instead of chaos, right?
[00:09:32] Step two, just like a thermostat, you need to rebuild your baseline, right?
[00:09:38] If your baseline is in constant overstimulation, calm is gonna feel unsafe, it's gonna feel boring, it's gonna feel foreign.
[00:09:48] So you actually have to teach your body that stillness is a productive activity, right?
[00:09:53] So that could mean for you, starting your mornings differently, right? Like put your cell phone in your kitchen or your living room and ensure that when you wake up, those first 30 minutes are for you, not for your phone.
[00:10:04] Maybe it's going for a short walk.
[00:10:07] Maybe it's listening to your breathing.
[00:10:09] Studies from Stanford's Huberman Lab show that as little as five minutes of deep breath, belly breathing a day. Five minutes, y', all, right. Can lower cortisol and increase your vagal tone, which is your nervous system's ability to regulate itself.
[00:10:29] So, like little things. There was a study years ago that said 15 minutes of a brisk walk a day helps to release hope molecules. Now, that's not the scientific term, obviously, but there are these very beautiful hormones that you have in your body that you have access to through movement, through breathing, through devices that help to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. You know, I use pulsetto all of those things help to reduce anxiety, give you more emotional control, and end result is you get better decision making, right? And then step three is create micro pauses.
[00:11:13] So a lot of people think, well, like, you know, I'm going on vacation in February. I'm gonna take two weeks off in July. That's when I'll finally get a break. You do not need a full on retreat.
[00:11:24] You just need a cadence, a rhythm that you can follow. Whether it's every 90 minutes, take a two minute nervous system break, right? Like stand up, stretch, breathe out longer than you breathe in, shake your arms out. If you're in a heated conversation, take a sip of water before you respond. That extra breath will save you so many uncomfortable conversations afterwards.
[00:11:51] It literally gives your prefrontal cortex time to come back online.
[00:11:57] And that is how, like, this is not big, big moves, right? This is small things that you can do that help you move from reaction to response.
[00:12:07] And then step four is redefine productivity.
[00:12:12] Most of us still equate being busy with being valuable, right?
[00:12:17] But neuroscience tells us something different.
[00:12:20] Your brain actually solves problems better when it's rested, right? That's Why? A lot of your best ideas come in the shower, when you're on a walk, when you're sitting in silence. I know for me, when I'm driving down the highway, it's when you stop forcing clarity and ideas and you just create space for it to arrive.
[00:12:43] This is just me saying, like, you don't need to push harder. You don't need to think harder. You just need to find ways to regulate. And I do feel like there's some common things that just work, but you gotta find the rhythm that works for you.
[00:12:55] And then the final step is reconnect to meaning.
[00:12:59] When you live in fight or flight long enough, everything becomes about getting through the fricking day. You start looking at the clock and wondering, like, when is this day just gonna end?
[00:13:11] And you stop asking yourself, why? Why am I doing this? Why is this important to me?
[00:13:19] And the purpose becomes the thing that you'll revisit or you'll look at or you'll regret when you get older and life slows down, right?
[00:13:27] But life does not slow down, right? Like, it really doesn't.
[00:13:33] We slow down. And that means we have the control today, tomorrow, and also 15 years from now.
[00:13:40] So meaning is the anchor that pulls you out of that reactivity. When you can remember what matters, you stop reacting to what doesn't.
[00:13:53] So I encourage you to ask yourself, where am I living in reaction instead of intention?
[00:14:03] What situations make my body tense before my brain even catches up?
[00:14:09] And what would my life look like if calm became my default instead of chaos?
[00:14:18] Because at the end of the day, the real measure of growth is not how much you can juggle. It is how grounded you can stay while you're juggling.
[00:14:28] You and I were not designed to live in fight or flight at all times.
[00:14:33] We were designed to be creative and innovative and live in a flow state.
[00:14:40] That's the shift from survival to stability, from reactivity to response, and from that constant alert to this embodied calm, right? The kind of calm that's active, it's not passive, right?
[00:15:00] And it's powerful. The kind that lets you lead yourself before you would ever lead anyone else.
[00:15:09] I really hope this resonated with some of you and that you take just a few of these pieces of advice, these tips, these strategies into your day to day so that you can regulate your nervous system. You can stop reacting so often and find a pathway to responding.
[00:15:31] Have a great day.
[00:15:33] Hey, thanks for listening to the Happy Stack podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who could use a little extra happiness in their life. Let's keep stacking those wins together. See you next time.
