Latest / Change Your Life with Dr. Amen Kaur / The 8% Battery Rule: Fix Your Nervous System Shutdown
Transcript
- 0:00By the end of this podcast, you're going to understand the exact biological reason your system flips from shutdown back into flow state or working order.
- 0:11I'm calling the 8% battery rule, and it's one of the fastest ways to stop your body sabotaging your success.
- 0:21If you feel like you're moving through molasses and you just.
- 0:26You're putting in so much energy, you're working, getting things done, but it's like your body has pulled you into what most people are now calling functional.
- 0:38Freeze.
- 0:40You aren't failing.
- 0:42Your system is trying to stop you running itself into the ground.
- 0:47The 8% battery rule isn't about resting more.
- 0:51It's about reading for signals your body is already sending you in the right order so that you can tell whether your system is stuck or coming back.
- 1:03And it's really important that we do this so that you can achieve what it is that you want.
- 1:09And I see high achievers all the time who think they're broken, they're trying to fix the wrong thing, when what is actually happening is far more mechanical than they realize.
- 1:23And if you understand this, you can get to that 100% state.
- 1:29But if you keep pushing through the 8% state, you aren't being resilient.
- 1:36You're actually teaching your body, teaching yourself to stop trusting the signals.
- 1:43And those signals are the only way you have to be able to get to that feeling rested and being able to actually achieve what it is that you want.
- 1:55So today we break that habit and we look at the first signal your body is sending you right now.
- 2:03So we're looking at those four signals, and they come in order.
- 2:07The first tells you whether anything you do is reaching you at all.
- 2:12And it will make sense as we go through this.
- 2:14Don't worry.
- 2:15The second, where the capacity is actually coming back, which is a really good indicator so that you can stop judging yourself.
- 2:24And the third is whether it's showing up across your body.
- 2:28And the fourth is whether it's holding.
- 2:32Most of the time, most of us just look at the last one.
- 2:35That's why nothing actually makes sense.
- 2:38And we feel like there might be something really wrong with us.
- 2:42But anyway, let's start signal one.
- 2:44Is anything reaching you?
- 2:47It's not that you need more rest, it's that rest can't reach you while you feel the drain is still running.
- 2:56You know, that whole phone at 8%, it goes into low battery mode.
- 3:02The screen dims and everything in the background stops.
- 3:05And the strange thing is, it holds there for hours.
- 3:09It can Just keep going.
- 3:11And it can feel almost sufficient.
- 3:13And we can think, okay, it's fine just like this.
- 3:16But what's actually happening is it's switching off everything that isn't in survival mode.
- 3:22And that's the state that we can get into.
- 3:25We're not empty, we're just held at that state.
- 3:30So the reasonable thing that we do is we might think, I'm tired, I'm gonna take a week off, or I'm gonna go to bed early, or I'm going to find some vitamins or get a blood test.
- 3:42And you might actually find that it's worked for a little while.
- 3:47You feel rested for maybe a day, and then you come back to work or after a holiday or a retreat, and then by Wednesday, you're exactly where you started.
- 4:00And you decided the problem was maybe you.
- 4:04Maybe there's something wrong with me, maybe there's something physically wrong with me, or maybe I just don't have the discipline, I'm just not motivated anymore and I don't have the right protocol.
- 4:13All these things can happen.
- 4:15I remember that I used to worry that my motivation had gone.
- 4:19I was just not feeling alive like I used to because I was running on 8% battery for years.
- 4:28And here's what was really going on underneath.
- 4:31And it's worth being really precise about this because cortisol gets really a bad name whenever we think about, oh, you've got high cortisol levels, it's really bad.
- 4:41But actually, cortisol isn't a villain.
- 4:44We do actually need.
- 4:47Has a rhythm, though, so it's meant to be the highest in the morning, which is when you have it high, you can actually get out of bed.
- 4:58So we need that.
- 4:59And then it drops through the day.
- 5:02So it might be around 3, 4 o' clock that you find that you get that slump and you need to go for that chocolate or that coffee just to get through.
- 5:11That's because the cortisol level is starting to drop.
- 5:15And by the evening it should be at its lowest.
- 5:18And that's so that you can sleep.
- 5:21So if you can picture that as a line on the chart, it starts high, it slopes down and it ends low.
- 5:28And in the morning it'll start high again.
- 5:31So it's a bit like a wave.
- 5:33When you're under pressure for years, that line goes flat, not much of a morning peak.
- 5:41So it's really hard to get up out of bed and it never really goes down at night, so it's really hard to sometimes go to sleep.
- 5:51Or you might find that you Wake up now.
- 5:54Most people think, oh, calm, flat line.
- 5:57That sounds calm, but it's not.
- 6:00Flat means your body has decided it's not safe.
- 6:05So you can't switch off, you can't relax, you can't come down to regenerate, to fill your battery up every day so that you wake up in the morning and you are 100% again.
- 6:21So much research has been done on this, on what it costs you.
- 6:26Now, here's why the week off doesn't really work.
- 6:31It's not because there's something wrong with you and you're getting too old.
- 6:36Your phone doesn't lose its charge because of what's on the screen.
- 6:41It loses it to everything that's running behind the screen that you're not even looking at, you're not even aware of.
- 6:49Sometimes we're not conscious of the things that we're thinking about.
- 6:52Maybe it's that conversation three weeks ago that we're replaying and trying to work out, what could I have done better?
- 6:59Or those emails that you haven't replied to, or you feel behind, or is that thing that you need to really get to, or the thing that your mum said to you at Christmas that you've decided that you have
- 7:11to just be fine about, or you have to forgive that person, but really deep down it's draining you.
- 7:17And here's the part that matters.
- 7:20Your body's stress response doesn't stop when the stressful thing stops.
- 7:25It stops when you stop thinking about it, when you truly let go of that emotion and those thoughts around that thing.
- 7:35That's the actual research finding.
- 7:37It's not a metaphor.
- 7:39This work was done in 2006.
- 7:43So even if your body is on that sofa and you're relaxed and you're scrolling your head, if it's in that conversation, your body will go where your head is.
- 7:56So you could be relaxing, or you could be sitting on a beautiful beach somewhere.
- 8:04And your mind, if it's with what your boss said last week, that was really rude.
- 8:10Your body is going there because your mind, your head is there.
- 8:14Which is why a lazy weekend isn't necessarily a rested one.
- 8:19If it involves decisions, logistics or other people's moods, or three hours of scrolling, you're just taking in things the whole time, but just a different input, but you're still being drained.
- 8:34So what do you do right now?
- 8:36Don't ask whether your last time off felt good.
- 8:40Ask what was Monday like?
- 8:43Do you feel like you're more tolerant?
- 8:46Are you clear?
- 8:47Are you feeling a flow?
- 8:48Are you feeling creative?
- 8:50Are things not getting done the way they used to?
- 8:54Are you more tolerant?
- 8:55Are you clear in your thinking?
- 8:57Are you more creative?
- 8:58And things are getting done much better, then the charge has reached you and it's gotta be more than just one day.
- 9:07Needing a day to recover from your time off, then you didn't get recharged.
- 9:16That drain was maybe running the whole time.
- 9:19And the worst thing is sometimes when we stop, the drain gets stronger and then no amount of rest is gonna outrun it.
- 9:29If that's your answer, then we need to look at the tab.
- 9:33Not all of them, obviously.
- 9:34There's always going to be lots of different things going on in your mind.
- 9:39But what is the one tab, the longest one, that's been open, that maybe you're slightly embarrassed about to admit?
- 9:46Maybe there's some shame, some guilt around you being in a relationship you wish you weren't in, wanting to get out of that toxic work environment, or you really want to start that business.
- 10:00Sometimes we can answer it within about four seconds and it could be that you've been taught that you're not worthy, but closing a tab can reduce that drain.
- 10:12Only one of those things changes the arithmetic in terms of the amount of energy you have.
- 10:20And today it's the second one.
- 10:22We have to close down the tabs of what is actually draining us.
- 10:27Let's look at signal number two.
- 10:29Is capacity actually coming back.
- 10:32Sometimes we think, oh, things are getting worse, I'm going crazy.
- 10:37It's not that you're going crazy or you're getting worse, it's that you're getting access, you're starting to feel.
- 10:45And once something starts to reach you, the first thing that comes back isn't energy.
- 10:51You're not going to feel charged up and ready to go and create that business.
- 10:56What happens is you start feeling and it arrives at a size that has nothing to do with what set it off.
- 11:04You might feel, really, I've just lost my confidence because someone looked that way.
- 11:10Or someone asks you, how are you feeling?
- 11:13And then before you know it, you just want to cry because someone actually asked you how you are and it just caught you off guard.
- 11:21Or someone gives you a compliment, or maybe it's the opposite, Someone actually says something that's a bit rude, and then you spend the whole drive home crying or feeling overwhelmed.
- 11:35And then you start feeling guilt and shame around the way you feel these emotions because nothing used to touch you before you were so super strong.
- 11:46And now all of a sudden, a small thing can just trigger you.
- 11:50And honestly, I've had my own version of this.
- 11:53I remember I used to go on the train to work, and I was so numb.
- 12:00Nothing used to get to me.
- 12:01And then all of a sudden, as I started to feel more, I'd find that my emotions were leaking everywhere.
- 12:08I'd start crying on the train.
- 12:10And then when I was home and I could cry in my own bedroom or something, I just felt numb again.
- 12:15So there's a part of your brain behind your forehead that actually does the difficult work.
- 12:23It plans, it decides, it looks at, where do I want to go in my future.
- 12:27And it's steady when things go wrong and it uses up a huge amount of fuel.
- 12:34But underneath that, there's another part that's really fast.
- 12:39And it's always wiring and looking out where the danger is.
- 12:42And it's cheap to run, and it's quick.
- 12:44It's the animal instinct in us.
- 12:47Us is that nervous system.
- 12:49When we're under pressure for a long time, your body plays.
- 12:55Starts paying for the cheap, fast one and stops paying for the expensive one because it's just too much.
- 13:02We don't have enough energy.
- 13:04It's not because you're broken.
- 13:05It's because we all have a certain amount of energy, and we have to budget that energy.
- 13:11So we can't just be spending all our energy when we're in survival or we're feeling overwhelmed and our amygdala is getting triggered.
- 13:22Amy Arnsten at Yale has spent her career watching that swap happen.
- 13:28What happens is if feeling things properly is expensive.
- 13:35So, for instance, grief, anger, tenderness, shame, guilt, those take up a lot of energy to actually feel when the budget is tight and we don't have enough energy.
- 13:49What we do is we don't deal with that.
- 13:52We put it off, we suppress it.
- 13:53We say, I can't deal with this.
- 13:55I'm too busy to be grieving.
- 13:58And sometimes we use that busyness not to grieve, not to feel the anger, not to feel the tenderness.
- 14:05But what happens is nothing is really cured.
- 14:08It's postponed.
- 14:10And when the pressure finally comes off, say if you get a bit of time or you have that opportunity to leave work, everything that you've postponed, all those horrible, difficult emotions come up.
- 14:26And usually they come up all at once, and it's really difficult.
- 14:30And sometimes they all come up at the wrong moment.
- 14:34So nothing broke.
- 14:36If you find that you're emotional, sometimes it feels like you broke down in the car park or you started crying or you felt like you were overwhelmed emotionally and you feel embarrassed.
- 14:50That feeling more is a Signal feeling less able to function is not if it's getting too much because sometimes these feelings can be so overwhelming and you can't get up, then please do book an appointment with your doctor.
- 15:07So what can you do right now?
- 15:09Please do think of the last time that you feel that you overreacted to something small.
- 15:16But don't ask what upset you in that instant.
- 15:20Ask what happened before.
- 15:23Maybe it happened an hour before.
- 15:26Maybe someone asked you to do something and you said yes, but actually you abandoned yourself in that moment.
- 15:34And then later that was the real thing that's really hurting you and that's why you cried.
- 15:41It's that self abandonment.
- 15:42Maybe over years it could be that's really bothering you.
- 15:47Okay, now let's look at signal three.
- 15:50Because actually, let's just go back.
- 15:52If we think about that, then we can bring more compassion and love towards ourselves.
- 15:58It's understandable, right, that we would feel that way because it's hard to just suppress our own needs over and over again.
- 16:09So now let's look at signal three.
- 16:12It's not four problems.
- 16:14It's one problem sometimes showing up in four different places in our body.
- 16:22Sleep, digestion, appetite, and sometimes our cycle.
- 16:28Not one of them, several.
- 16:30In a few weeks now, you might book a doctor's appointment for, say, sleep.
- 16:36And in the waiting room you remember, ah, I also feel bloated.
- 16:41I'm not digesting my food like I used to.
- 16:44And then on the way out, you realize that even my cycle has changed.
- 16:49Here's what's happening.
- 16:50Your body is keeping a tally not of bad things that have happened, but of adjustments it has to make every time it's adapted to something.
- 17:02For maybe you've had to deal with some stressful scenario over and over again and it's had to adapt.
- 17:10What happens is the body has to pay for that adjustment in some way.
- 17:15And that tally has a name.
- 17:18Allostatic load.
- 17:20Bruce McEwen named it in 1998 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- 17:27Which is why the things that sometimes go wrong sometimes happen together.
- 17:33And your system doesn't take on the load separately, so it doesn't put it down separately either.
- 17:42So every single time you make a decision, you can sometimes feel it in your body in four different places.
- 17:50Those four places that you can see.
- 17:53And it's the same reason, you know, your phone goes into low power mode and dims your screen.
- 18:01It stops your notifications and it slows everything down at once.
- 18:05There's not three separate faults.
- 18:08It's one instruction which is let's deal with this another time because we don't have enough energy to deal with it right now.
- 18:17And the one thing I want to be straight about this is it will explain why your symptoms have arrived together.
- 18:24It does not tell you that they're harmless.
- 18:27Okay, I'm not saying just ignore it.
- 18:30Please do go and see a doctor if you are experiencing that, because it's good to explore.
- 18:36Both of these can be true at the same time.
- 18:39So what do you do right now?
- 18:42Count how many separate things that you're quietly worrying about in the last month, everything that you're worrying about, the key things, and then just put it all down on one page.
- 18:55And it might be that there's some things about your body as well, some symptoms that you're really concerned about.
- 19:01And then go and see your doctor about those particular physical symptoms.
- 19:08You're ruling things out at least, and you're giving yourself time to look at other patterns and other separate worries so that you can then start closing down those tabs that might be affecting your physical health.
- 19:25Now let's look at signal four.
- 19:27It's not about how calm you are.
- 19:29It's about how fast you can come back.
- 19:33This is the one almost everyone gets back with.
- 19:37And it's the one that you can check without buying anything.
- 19:41Most people think the goal of this is to be calm.
- 19:45I have to be really calm, unbothered.
- 19:47Nothing gets to me.
- 19:48I'm so strong I can deal with anything.
- 19:51But think about what that actually is.
- 19:54A system that doesn't react to anything.
- 19:58It's not normal, it's not well.
- 20:00It's kind of switched off.
- 20:01It's like flatline.
- 20:03And we know right at the beginning a flat line isn't how we're supposed to operate.
- 20:08It's not a healthy system.
- 20:10That's the whole thing we need is a reaction and then a return to who we are.
- 20:18Not like stillness.
- 20:19We need to take an action to what is happening in our life so that we are making the most of opportunities.
- 20:29Think of a rubber band.
- 20:31If one, a good one, stretches when you pull it and it snaps back.
- 20:36And when you let it go, it goes far.
- 20:39It speeds up.
- 20:40A perished one, though, it doesn't really stretch.
- 20:44If it does stretch, it stays stretched and no one can pull it back and it can't go very far.
- 20:51So when your system is stuck, two things tend to happen.
- 20:55Small things tend to hit you harder than they should.
- 21:00And after they hit you, you can stay hit.
- 21:04It still goes round and round in your mind.
- 21:06And you can pretend you're okay, but it's still running and it's still taking up that battery.
- 21:12A difficult conversation, say, on Tuesday morning is still sitting with you on Thursday.
- 21:20And when it starts coming back, as in you start coming back, your reaction doesn't get smaller, it gets faster.
- 21:28Like you.
- 21:29You come back online quicker.
- 21:32So it's not that you'll never, ever feel down or depressed or get triggered, it's just that you bounce back quicker.
- 21:41You still get upset.
- 21:43You stop losing the week, though to it.
- 21:46You're not losing years or months to it.
- 21:49And there's a formal measure for this, if you like knowing these things.
- 21:53It's called the heart rate variability.
- 21:56Your heart has gaps between the beats, and they vary slightly all the time.
- 22:04And the more variation there is means the system can move and settle.
- 22:09It's more flexible.
- 22:12And that's how the regulating part of your brain is working as well.
- 22:18You're not expected to stay happy all the time, but what you are expected to is to feel all these different type of emotions and be able to bounce back to that peace, that joy, that feeling of being you.
- 22:33For instance, you've been running your whole life without noticing it.
- 22:37But what you can do right now is think about the last genuinely hard day you had.
- 22:44Not something really traumatic, just a hard day.
- 22:47How long before you felt like yourself again?
- 22:51Do you find that if you get triggered, you stay triggered for a long time and it just brings you down?
- 22:58Or do you find that if you get triggered, you might just be like, that evening, you'll be okay?
- 23:04Or does it take the rest of the week?
- 23:06Or maybe it takes a month or maybe even years.
- 23:10Now think about a hard day a year ago and ask that same question.
- 23:16If your recovery is faster, that means your range is coming back.
- 23:23That means that's a good sign.
- 23:25Whether or not anything else feels better in your life, it's the one thing that improves before the tiredness does, which is exactly why it's worth knowing about it.
- 23:38So if you're trying to move forward and you felt like such low energy for so long, if you're finding that you can bounce back quicker, that means that you're gonna then be able to start what it is that
- 23:51you want to and succeed in your life and create the life that you want to once more.
- 23:57Here's the thing.
- 23:58I actually want to leave you with two people, both exhausted, both crying at the things they feel like they're overreacting, both sleeping badly, same four signals, same week.
- 24:12The first takes a week off, and Monday is easier.
- 24:17She drops one commitment and by the second week, her mornings improve, her signals move.
- 24:23The second takes the same time off and needs a day to recover from it.
- 24:28She drops the same commitment and nothing shifts.
- 24:32Four weeks later, it's deeper that.
- 24:36That feeling of just being tired just is getting deeper and deeper.
- 24:42Nobody could have told them apart on day one.
- 24:46Not me, not a list on the Internet, not a symptom checker.
- 24:51What separated them wasn't the signals, it was whether the signals moved.
- 24:58That's the 8% battery rule.
- 25:01You're not empty, you're being held and charging, almost does nothing while you're still being drained.
- 25:10So the question was never whether you're resting enough.
- 25:14It's what's still open, what is draining your energy.
- 25:19And if you've been told you're fine by four different people while feeling like this, there may genuinely be nothing wrong with you.
- 25:29You could be physiologically fine, but still be running at 8%, because holding at 8% is exactly what a system does when it's been asked to hold it there for years.
- 25:44You don't need to read the signals perfectly.
- 25:47You need enough evidence to see what's going on.
- 25:52You can't regulate a system you haven't read yet.
- 25:56That's why these four signals are there and not five steps.
- 26:03I want to share something else, and I'll flag it clearly, because this part isn't science.
- 26:09Everything up to here was a mechanism.
- 26:11I've already given you the science.
- 26:14I personally think energy is the only real currency we have.
- 26:19Not money, not time.
- 26:20Energy is everything you have, if you just think about it.
- 26:24How do we get energy?
- 26:27We have to eat, and that's like life force energy that we're getting from the plants or from meat, whatever it is that you eat.
- 26:35And then that's giving us energy to move and even money.
- 26:41It's energy.
- 26:42It's like saving us time in doing something that we might have to do otherwise.
- 26:49So we're swapping things.
- 26:52I'll buy this so I don't have to make my own food, harvest my own food, for instance.
- 26:58Time is useless if you're at 8% and you already know that because you've had free Saturdays that you couldn't use, or you might find you have time and you're just scrolling.
- 27:11I don't think of energy as something I generate.
- 27:15I think of it as something we're all given.
- 27:18Whatever you call it.
- 27:20Maybe you believe in the creator, God, the universe, or life force energy itself.
- 27:25The belief changes one thing for me, and it's the reason I'm telling you this, if the energy is mine and I'm spending it badly, it's just inefficiency.
- 27:38If it's been given and I'm spending it badly, it's a different kind of question.
- 27:45It's not like a moral failure.
- 27:46It's not here that we need to be guilty about.
- 27:51We've been given this lifeful synergy and what am I wasting it on?
- 27:54But it's more just that we have to ask, what am I doing with it?
- 27:59More honestly, what am I creating?
- 28:03What am I putting out?
- 28:04And how am I making a difference with this energy?
- 28:09Is it becoming a better place?
- 28:12How is this of benefit?
- 28:14And here's where it meets the tabs.
- 28:17Think about all the tabs that are actually open for you right now.
- 28:21Very few of them open because of something that happened to you.
- 28:27Most of them are open because someone needed something, they might have harmed us in some way.
- 28:35For instance, we had to carry that, and maybe we carried that.
- 28:42And we were told to feel guilty about that and shame about that.
- 28:47And sometimes we have to say no to people, to being hurt, and we feel guilt and shame about that too.
- 28:55But that's all conditioning.
- 28:58Notice when these things tend to happen where we feel like, I really want to move forward, I really want to create something, I really want to build something, I really want to move forward.
- 29:12And around that time, someone comes along and wants you to spend that energy on them, and then they make you feel guilty about not doing it.
- 29:25Or if you do say no, then they make you feel guilt about it.
- 29:29And if you do say yes, then you feel guilt about it because you've let yourself down.
- 29:34I'm not saying that people are draining you deliberately.
- 29:38Maybe some of these people love you and maybe some of them genuinely need you.
- 29:44And that need is real.
- 29:46And answering it is maybe the right thing.
- 29:50But caring for someone is not a tab.
- 29:54Resenting that you never chose it is.
- 29:58It drains our energy.
- 30:01And that's okay.
- 30:02The tab isn't the obligation, it's the unmade decision.
- 30:07Feeling like you can't be yourself and express your energy in the way you want to express it in the world.
- 30:17So this week, one reflection.
- 30:19Just notice where your energy is going.
- 30:22Not your time, but your energy.
- 30:25And as you notice, hold it as given.
- 30:31It's your divine right.
- 30:34You don't have to earn this energy.
- 30:38Ask one question about each place it lands.
- 30:42Is this building something or is this just holding something up?
- 30:48Is it creating or is it draining?
- 30:53Which isn't leading to anything.
- 30:56You'll know within about four seconds.
- 30:58You can even feel it in your body.
- 31:01You always do.
- 31:03The knowing is never really the hard part, you know, deep down.
- 31:08Which brings us to what you do with what you find.
- 31:12And the order matters more than the individual steps.
- 31:16So many people start in the wrong place, and they go straight to responding differently or reconnecting with people when the system underneath hasn't come off emergency power yet.
- 31:28That's why sometimes when you try and do things, or find things and learn things, it just doesn't hold.
- 31:37I teach it in five stages.
- 31:39It's in a fixed sequence.
- 31:42And if you're interested, the free masterclass walks through all five and shows you which ones you're actually standing in.
- 31:51I'm sending you so much love.
- 31:53Till next time.