#2142 The Nervous System Reset - Jessica Maguire

I don't know if this is appropriate to say, but anyway, Jessica Maguire rabbit Hole for the last twelve hours, eighteen hours since probably a state of lunch. It's eight in the am here and as I said to her off here before we started, straight up smarty pants. So smarty pants, welcome to the show. How are you?

personal experiences and loss and life. So I try to connect what I teach to the human experience rather than just the science, because I believe this is the most transformative work that we can do, and it you know, it's at that intersection of emotion, mental health, and physical health, and that's the space I absolutely love. So I teach people all about nervous system regulation. But I'm also a mother.

I've got a two year old daughter, which has taught me a lot about myself and my own nervous system and the power of coregulation. And that probably sums me up and my life at the moment, which is very full.

up and make a decision about something. So I think it's really about using our nervous system and it signals as a way to guide our life and live really well. And sometimes that's messy. It's definitely not about being a calm person one hundred percent.

reason about your stuff and your challenges and your fuck ups and failures and triumphs, the more people lean into you, because people connect with you, and people people relate to you and see a bit of you in them or you in them when you're talking about the challenge, the challenges that you had and probably continue to have.

just belong to me, longed to my family. So my older brother had died eight years prior to that by suicide, but I'd also lost my younger brother when I was four, and so that's probably what drew me to this work and allowed me to understand the experience that my patients had gone through. But it took me up until it took me eight years after my brother died to publicly feel ready to share his story. But a large part of that was respect for the rest of my family

as well, and for my brother. You know, it's his story too, So with the permission of my family, I did share that experience, which resonated with a lot of people, and I think it connected with them with me as not just the educator or the scientist, or the health professional or the clinician, but also the person who knew what it was like to lie awake it with insomnia. You know, I got gastro intestinal symptoms after Samdar, and then I had times where I couldn't get off the couch.

So I've been to those places as well and experienced the impacts on my nervous system. So it's still what keeps me coming back to this work over and over with such a clarity and a belief and a conviction that this is what the world needs right now.

the ocean. People go, oh, you're whatever. I go, yeah, but not really, like you're studying something so small in the overall field of psychology or whatever it is that

you're studying whatever area of research. But I've learned infinitely more building businesses, talking with audiences, teaching classes, training, I set up the first personal training center in Australia and had gyms for twenty five years, like talking to thousands of people like I did Jessica or I did over fifty thousand personal training sessions, just me, not my team, right, So fifty thousand hours of conversations like that is the longest,

biggest PhD of all time. And you just learn so much being with people and listening and hopefully not judging, but just trying to be aware and trying to empathize and understand. And all the academic stuff is great, of course, but I love that intersection of both.

but a lot of chronic illness. That's who I ended up working with, which you know, I really enjoyed it, but from a deep understanding, I always felt like I feel like I'm working with an iceberg of what's above the water, but I'd really like to get to what's underneath the water. And that was that utation of emotion

and the physical. But it led me to a lot of the work I do now, which is in understanding this process called inter reception, which is how our brain and body communicate, especially body to brain, and we also call it our eighth sensory system. So it's very much involved with instinct, maintaining homeostasis or balance between our systems.

But since at the seat of self regulation, emotional regulation, and I love now teaching that work of understanding bodily signals with accuracy, not just the pecision making, but for keeping that homeostasis and we see that changes for some people in their life through difficult situations, which that's what I was seeing in my clinics. So it was some

people were depressed, shut down. There was apathy and flatness, and it was like the volume of their signals from their body had been turned down and they couldn't hear. But then you had people who'd been through situations where they were left with like a hyper vigilance or an anxiety, and it was like the volume was cranked up on

the moment. So there was a part of me that had an intuition that there was something more in this space that I needed to work in many years before I went into that, But it was because we were separating emotions from physical symptoms, and body and brain were separate. Like people go to see one person for their brain, one person for their gut, one person for their sore shoulder, someone else for medication, and it just becomes like this disconnected way of looking at who a person is. And

I struggled with that as a clinician. I was like, there's got to be a better way to work with people who are really struggling than this, And that's what has led as well that just being very curious about how could this empower people more with either knowledge or resources that they could use themselves to help change the way that their brain and body were responding.

But anyway, I feel like for most of the evolutionary timeline of humans not I feel we didn't have a lot of the shit we currently have, right, And I think over time we've become more and more disconnected from our body, like unaware of what our body because our body is always talking, right, biofeedback and as you said in terrorception and trying to like very unscientific, But I talk about building a relationship with your body so you get to know it, because it's always trying to tell

you something, right, And when you think about like a person is one thing, not a multitude of things. But we, especially in different disciplines and research, we go, oh, over here is psychology, and then over here is like, oh, the emotional system, and then overhears the body, and then oh, there's the brain that drives all of that shit right, and then then it's like, no, dude, it's one system. It's like the human system, and nothing is operating in

complete isolation. Nothing. Everything's integrated and that, you know, it's like that old chestnut. You have a thought that something's going wrong or bad, or you're in danger, but you're not. You're safe, but your body doesn't know it because your body believes the thought. And now your heart rates up and your blood pressures up, and you're producing all these things and sympathetic nervous systems going nuts despite the fact

that there's no threat, no danger and you're safe. But because your brain and your mind isn't disconnected from physiology, that happens despite the fact that your story is untrue. And knowing that is a especially with things like and knowing this isn't solving it, but especially things like anxiety and overthinking and rumination and self regulation. It's so important to understand that I think that integrated relationship.

body is missing. But if you're working as a body based therapist, you know, using manual therapy, you might be a pilate's instructor, and you connect people with their body, then it almost feels like, well, you know, I'm missing the piece to work with thoughts and language and narrative. So I think that's a frustration that I hear all the time from our students, but we have separated this

is like, well, this is a mental health problem. But what's interesting is we know that most of the communication of the nervous system, particular when we're experiencing anxiety or when we're really depressed, it is better if we're working with that information that the brain is receiving from the body. We see that language and mindset work falls short. You know, we can't positively think our way out of those really strong loops of rumination. That's a really challenging thing to do.

So I think there's a piece where people are recognizing we need a new way of supporting ourselves or supporting others who are disregulated. And yes, there's a place for mindset work, there's a place for being positive, but that's after we've come to a more regulated place. And so I think, you know, having a bit more of a sophisticated approach to whether it's the nervous system or how we integrate the way that we work as like coaches, clinicians,

practitioners is important. And then to be able to educate our clients or our patients on that too so that they can continue to support themselves. And what I think is the most interesting piece is when we look at the science of how the body and brain operate, so much of it is done through prediction. So I've actually just come to San Diego here in the US, and I've been learning to drive on the right hand side, and I'm in the car on the right hand side now.

It was so challenging and so uncomfortable to do that. Initially, it took so much focus and I'd be walking around to the wrong side of the car having to you know, try and get in the car, and I'm on the wrong side anyway. But beside all that, eventually it became automatic and I didn't have to think about it. It was then my brain and body would predict, oh, this

is what's going to happen. And that's really the way that we can support people who are experiencing, you know, heightened levels of dysregulation or getting stuck in repeating these same patterns throughout their life, whether that's in relationships, you know, how they attach, whether it's holding themselves back from work opportunities. You know. Even like for me, that ability to put myself out there, I found that a real challenge. I'm not the person who likes to, you know, really tell

everybody the stories of my life. But I think we have the capacity to learn new things, to change ways, and that's really where our growth is at, whether that's recovering from a traumatic event or it's you know, I want to perform at my best. It still operates in the same way with the brain and the body, in the way that they work.

were just on autopilot. So I think I think if I was going to say how long it would be, I would give it another week, So that would give it six weeks that it would be in that timeframe, which kind of aligns right with neuroplasticity and how we change as well. So yeah, it was it was a really interesting experience to relearn how we do actually change.

It's digesting food, we don't necessarily feel that. But some of it will be very aware of, like butterflies in our stomach, or that sense of tightness in our chests when we're really anxious. So inter reception is the foundation of our emotions. Now there's not this one part in the brain where we have anger or one part where you know we have something else. It's actually the way that our two or more bodily signals are sending messages to the brain, and then the emotion is a whole

brain experience. So our ability to accurately interpret those signals will govern our ability to self regulate. And this could be as simple as oh, my throats drup Oh, I feel a bit spacey, I'm dehydrated. I'm going to go get a drink. We return to home stasis. But it could be something as complex as I'm miserable in my job.

I'm feeling this sense of dread or I'm feeling this sense of the truth is I don't want to do this job or whatever that might be, you know, and the action I need to take is it's time to change. So the more accuracy we can read those inter receptive signals, the more agency we have, the more we're empowered to know what it is that we want and make those decisions that really support our physical needs but also emotionally what it is that we need as well.

run the show. So this is where it's our ability to listen and maybe do something that supports ourselves before we act. That's also incredibly helpful when it comes to interception.

of what our body is telling us. But sometimes it's telling a shit that's terrifying, and that kind of navigating that because we don't like being scared. We don't like danger or threats, and you know, we don't like hard or uncomfortable. I'm generalizing here everybody, but you know, so we quite often push that away and do the metaphoric la la la, fingers in the ears I'll get to that later.

again with people changing. But sometimes there's an initial process where people have to recognize the truth, you know, of this is the reality of my situation because there has been a denial and the body, or there's messages or the inter receptive signals have been saying this isn't right anymore, or this isn't what, this isn't in line with my deepest values. And yes, we can deny for sure, but

in time the problem becomes larger and larger. But I think sometimes when we start to connect to bodily signals or there's a new awareness and we get deeper insights, some things do fall apart and there is a grieving process in that, but in time it allows us to live our life life that we are, you know, really connected to our deeper values and what's important to us. So it's not the easy path. And I you know, we hear so much about just for your feelings. Oh

my goodness, if only it was that easy. I think a lot of a lot of good decisions are made when we are able to listen to those uncomfortable signals and stay with them. You know, we can listen and stay Okay, this is the reality of my situation. I'm not going to put my fingers in my ears, but I'm also not going to rush off and try and do something else to make myself feel better in the short term. I'm going to wait until it's clear what

the decision is. And you know, we said this about we've both obviously had times with business for ourselves as clinicians or coaches, but I think for me that's been an ongoing training ground for this is our comfortable This is hard. I don't necessarily know what to do. I'm going to sit and listen, and sometimes listening means okay, you need to ask someone for help on this. You

don't know enough. So it's just having that compass that shows shows us the next step to take, and a lot of the time it's sitting with what's uncomfortable.

fat is skid in the school. But all the while, I know this is more complicated because there's emotional stuff and social stuff, but like we have the capacity to actually know what we're doing is not healthy for us, with the underlying storing being I'll start next Monday, and that story goes for thirty two years. Right. It's because at that point my thoughts is that at that point in time, you're doing the thing, but there's no major negative impact in the moment, so we just keep soldiering on.

And I'm not trying to be judgmental towards anyone's behavior here. But like even with things like cigarettes, every smoke and those they cause cancer, right, but they still smoke. And I guess there's other stuff involved there with addiction and whatnot.

But yeah, sometimes the knowledge isn't enough for people. It's like, yeah, there's this other Like the amount of people that I've spoken to about health, fitness, wellness, lifestyle, ex scize movement, nutrition, you know a lot of the big kind of hitters in the health space who then will go and do essentially nothing, And then other people I will give the exact same data information they'll go and transform their life.

And often people with not as much genetic potential or time or resources or money will create an amazing outcome because they're ready, they're ready to hear it, they're ready to do it. There's this kind of X factor in the middle there where you and I can educate, we can stand in front of whoever, or write whatever or

do whatever. But at the end of the day, the person reads your book or my book, or they hear your lecture or my lecture or whatever it is, but then they need to go do some work, do some work. Because it doesn't live in the awareness or the knowledge. Knowledge and awareness are great, but doing stuff creates movement and change and outcomes and this is where the good stuff happens. But I think, and I'll shut up after this, I feel like the work is an inhibiting factor for people.

a cognitive part of the brain. But like me learning to drive on the different side of the road, I didn't want to do it, Like my body there was dread. I didn't actually want to do it, but I had to and to live here. And you know, the part of it it where change was actually happening was when I was uncomfortable. And so if we nerd out just a little bit on this, when I talked about prediction, and the brain predicts first and then it checks if

it's right afterwards. And this is actually tied to inter reception. Right, So say a smoker has smoked for twenty years and they are so used to their nicotine being in the system, and the brain and the body adjust and that's the norm, right, that's where the baseline of where the system's at. So when we quit smoking, there creates an error. So the body's sending signals up to the brain that there's not nicotine,

and the brain's like, hang on, this isn't right. I'm supposed to have this nicotine here, so I'm not at my baseline homeostasis isn't here, So the brain will make us feel uncomfortb It's like no, no, no, no, no, no, go and do something so I can have it. This could be alcohol, This could be likes on social media, this could be you know, whatever it is that we might be using as a form of pseudoregulation, if you like. So that prediction error we can think of as this

is a bad thing. But the prediction error was what we was saying to me, hang on, you're on the wrong side of the road. This isn't right, and it felt uncomfortable. Yes, we won't really have change in patterns, in things that we do on autopilot, in the ways that we reflexively respond, like storm out of the room or tell our husband to do X y Z. It is actually in the moment where we have a deeply

compelling sensory experience that we change. So I had to experientially go and drive the car, and it felt uncomfortable, but change was happening. And I think it's like the smoker. They have to experientially go through what it's like to not smoke. You can't read about it, you can't know it. It's like if we want to learn a musical instrument, we have to do it. And then this, you know I mentioned before neuroplasticity is this ability for our neurons to change.

But I think it goes beyond that to a concept called bioplasticity, where as a whole person we change. You know, I think moving to another country. I've watched myself change in a lot of ways and I think it's great. But I also look at, you know, someone we could say plays the guitar. Now we know that the areas in their brain that represent their fingers are actually larger in people who play a musical instrument, but they also have the callouses form on their fingers, you know, that

show that as well. It's not just the brain that changes, And so much of our sense of self is formed through the patterns of our nervous system carried out by inter reception. So it's a lot of like who I am, we can get lost in these protective patterns that arise, or these reflexive patterns, rather than saying, well, the true nature of who I am is actually in those quieter moments or when there's balance between the brain and body.

But for those of us who might be experiencing difficulties and had a challenging time or had adversity in our life and learned to identify as those more protective patterns, I think that's where a lot of suffering comes. So when we can have a new experience, whether that's a relationship with somebody who is secure and grounded and solid and safe, we learn something new and our whole brain body system changes, our whole sense of person changes.

but I didn't have a choice. I had to do that. And then I did that and I didn't die, And in fact, I know more stuff and now I'm less terrified of that or things like that. And it's so it's almost this accident accidental evolution or development. I was

thinking about you and driving, right. So the thing about you and driving over there is, well, Jessica, if you're going to be over here, you and you want to be able to get around and take your kids here or there and go to meetings and turn up to gigs and do well, this is the only way, because this is how it works here. You can't drive on the wrong side of the road for a few months until you acclimatize. Now you have to do this today

or you're not going anywhere. So like, there's a bit there's a lot more mental and emotional leverage when the uncomfortable thing that you need to do isn't optional because a lot of uncomfortable things that we need to do to be a better version of us we can put off. But if you want to drive that car from A to B, you can't put that off. So that kind of puts our mind in a solution focus, aware of the problem or aware of the discomfort, but more and

a well, fuck, I just have to do this. So there's no debate, you know, there's like, well, or I'm going to get ubers for the next five years, or you know whatever. So I think, all right, let me put on my actual real deal, grown up interviewer slash podcast hat because I realized we've got an out in about fifteen and ask you a few things, as short or as long as you want. So, what does self regulation look like practically like in the real world. We've

probably coveted a bit. But because we talk about our ability to be able to manage ourselves in certain things or self regulate around certain challenges or unforeseen whatever's give us a bit of an insight into like for the person listening who wants to be able to freak out less be the calm in the chaos, A bit of equanimity, all that cool stuff. How do we self regulate? In practically.

the middle. But let's say we start to feel anxious, wound up, agitated, or angry, and there's a sense of urgency, we can say that our nervous system is mobilizing or it's moving faster. I'm sure people have recognized this before. So how we want to bring ourselves back to regulation is actually largely and I know the vegas nervous been thrown around everywhere. It's not something that we can hack, despite what we hear all the time, but it plays

a role in recovery. Now, there's a few different things that help the vagus nerve recover, and one of the best ways is through our sensory systems, which I've talked about. So to be able to sit and take a moment to connect to the sensors can be allowing our eyes to turn. The head follows and it's nice and slow and we're really focusing on the things in the room

that are like neutral well, that catch our attention. But the head turning is also a large part that will bring in vegas nerve stimulation in a way that helps

that recovery. Yes, for a lot of people, it's connecting to right, what can I feel on the contact of my body, so appropriate aceptive input from our from our hands on our body as well, So there's a lot that can bring us down and then we'll feel that discharge of mobilization, which can sometimes come as a deep breath or a yawn or our body goes, oh okay, I'm back here now. So that process typically would be like a ten to fifteen minute resource that we can use.

And it's not necessarily about I don't want to get stressed in the first place, because I think this is where we're going wrong. Like it's healthy for our nervous system to mobilize, it's absolutely it's that we can recover from that. And when we do that, it's like a bicset curl. You know, we actually get stronger at that. So we should try and do things that are challenging because it's good for now.

You're stressed, it's okay. You're sad because you're not going to be forever. And this is what humans do well. We get anxious, we get sad, we get scared, we get irrational, we get stupid, we get brilliant, we get amazing, we get all the things. You know, and it's like the moment you go that I'm anxious and that's okay, you get less anxious.

we want to be resilient people. And resilience isn't the soldier on the hill, you know, it's our ability. It's really about having more resources and tools to support us. So that's some of the best ways, and starting with our sensory systems is what allows us to come back to regulation in such a It's not about fast but in a strong way. I think where people get stuck is they get stuck in the rumination of trying to outthink it journalist mindset. Well, if it was like this,

then this should be happening. So yeah, less cognitive and more sense. Sorry, is really where that's at.

laugh at it and four don't get bothered. Right, It's like they went through the same event, but not the same experience, because the experience, the subjective experience, is created by a range of things, you know. So it's then that you go, oh, well, that's because my response isn't about that thing. My response is about how I interpret that thing. My story is about that thing, even down

to a physiological level. What's going on at a cellular level is really a byproduct of my data processing, you know, and trying to One of the things that I do, Jessica is coach speakers, not too many of these days

because I don't have much time. But seeing someone go from being ten out of ten terrified talking to four people, and a year or two or three later talking to maybe five hundred people with next to no fear, and you go, it's the same person doing the same job, you know, st not necessarily the same room, but same job, same task, same requirements, same person with the same ability, probably developed a few skills, but that thing that was

absolutely terrifying for many people become exciting and something they really look forward to. And so the thing is not so much how do I change the situation, circumstance, environment task, but how do I change me around that.

So I think the way we appraise things as you know, I shouldn't get anxious or there's something wrong with me, or I've got this mobile heading energy this is terrible. It's actually part of that interceptive experience, and so we can train ourselves to not just tolerate what's happening, but to recognize when there's healthy mobilization versus Okay, I need to take an action now because I'm starting to get

too heightened. But there's a sweet spot that we can come into, and it's actually called a play state where we have the mobilizing sympathetic energy combined with our vegus nerve keeping that in check with regulation, and that's when we can allow that to come in flexibly. We really do perform at our best.

you know, deep deep deep deep depression, all those things. Anyway, I thought you might have heard of that, but most people haven't, so I wasn't expecting it. But it's spelled ibog ai n e and it kind of almost seems and I'm very skeptical. I don't use any drugs. I don't smoke, I don't drink, so if I'm finding something fascinating, I think there's a little bit of something in it. Anyway, My next one is my next rando is the benefits of mums singing to their unborn babies.

They're really brilliant. My question, selfishly is how do you decide because there's a real kind of formula right because you can't be too long and it can't be too super short. It's got to be the right length and well produced, which they are. How do you decide what you're going to talk about on a reel?

And the place that I love to teach on is the places that are complex shades of gray and need nuance. So the fast short teaching style doesn't work for me. But my team have cut up longer pieces of content into shorter pieces and shared them as reels.

I was exhausted, but I loved putting it together. It was it was years of what I've been teaching in random places and I managed to bring it into one place, and I still get messages of how much it's helped people, so that to me is a real legacy.