Latest / Unstoppable Success Podcast / Why High Performers Hit a Wall: How to Use Flow States to Recover & Perform at Your Peak | Brandon Day

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Why High Performers Hit a Wall: How to Use Flow States to Recover & Perform at Your Peak | Brandon Day · Unstoppable Success Podcast

0:02
Jaclyn Strominger: Hello everybody and welcome to another amazing episode of Unstoppable Success.
0:06
Jaclyn Strominger: This is a podcast where we hear from influential people, leaders, and professionals that are out there being unstoppable.
0:15
Jaclyn Strominger: And they're going to share their tips, insights on how you can be unstoppable too.
0:19
Jaclyn Strominger: I'm your host, Jaclyn Strominger, and today I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming Brandon Day to Unstoppable Success.
0:27
Jaclyn Strominger: Let me tell you a little bit about Brandon.
0:30
Jaclyn Strominger: Actually, he is a two-time national champion, former All-American linebacker.
0:35
Jaclyn Strominger: Although you don't look like you're big enough to be a linebacker, but that's another story.
0:38
Jaclyn Strominger: And someone who's been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but his story doesn't stop on the field.
0:44
Jaclyn Strominger: After years of battling chronic pain and the mental grind that comes with pushing your body to the limit, Brandon has become obsessed with understanding what drives team and performance, not just in sports, but in life and in business, making him unstoppable.
0:58
Jaclyn Strominger: So now he is a high performance coach and the founder, and I'm going to change it to the evolved athlete because what you have in there, I think, is changed.
1:07
Jaclyn Strominger: And a unique system that combines applied neuroscience and flow state coaching to help elite performers break through plateaus, eliminate pain, and unlock their peak physical and cognitive potential.
1:20
Jaclyn Strominger: And he works with athletes, business owners, and entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for good enough.
1:26
Jaclyn Strominger: That's helping make everybody unstoppable.
1:30
Jaclyn Strominger: So welcome, Brandon.
1:31
Brandon Day: Nice.
1:32
Brandon Day: Thanks, Jaclyn.
1:33
Brandon Day: It's great to be here.
1:34
Jaclyn Strominger: All right.
1:34
Jaclyn Strominger: So so I have to ask, I mean, you know, being an athlete and pushing yourself creates a level, there's a certain level of mental toughness that comes with that.
1:52
Jaclyn Strominger: And I would say at a young age.
1:55
Jaclyn Strominger: So where do you think that came for you?
1:58
Jaclyn Strominger: Because you mean you were on the cover of Sports Illustrated, your team did amazing.
2:02
Jaclyn Strominger: Where did it come from?
2:06
Brandon Day: Well, I think like you said, I think it was instilled in me as a young, uh a very young boy, even.
2:15
Brandon Day: I can remember going all the way back to just playing with my dad in the yard, playing shooting hoops, or playing some football in the yard or something, or out hitting balls, some baseball.
2:30
Brandon Day: Just this idea that you get knocked down, you get back up, you keep going.
2:35
Brandon Day: Right?
2:36
Brandon Day: You got a little a little boo-boo.
2:38
Brandon Day: That's okay.
2:38
Brandon Day: It'll be all right.
2:39
Brandon Day: Let's get up, let's keep playing.
2:41
Brandon Day: Like, I think as far back as I can remember, he was training me to overcome adversity.
2:49
Brandon Day: So I think that was huge.
2:52
Brandon Day: And then the coaches that came along the way, they were always instilling this idea of mind over matter, mental toughness.
3:01
Brandon Day: And by the way, yeah, that was a big part of my success, but also a big part of my downfall.
3:08
Brandon Day: Right?
3:10
Jaclyn Strominger: So, so about the downfall.
3:12
Jaclyn Strominger: So, I mean, I mean, you know, success, and then there's the the drop.
3:18
Brandon Day: Yeah.
3:19
Brandon Day: So part of it was that idea of, you know, instilling this idea of mental toughness, it can get confused with a less than ideal idea of pushing through pain, constantly grinding and burning yourself out, which is what happened to me eventually.
3:39
Brandon Day: I was able to keep it up pretty well as a young person, but eventually it started to catch up with me.
3:45
Brandon Day: The negative I part of that ideal of no pain, no gain, always push through, keep grinding.
3:52
Brandon Day: And that's you know, a huge part of the the hustle culture these days.
3:57
Brandon Day: And a lot of my clients that come to me, and that's that's their main problem, right?
4:01
Brandon Day: And so I experienced that firsthand.
4:03
Brandon Day: And I'm so grateful for all my success and for this miraculous thing to happen of being on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
4:18
Brandon Day: And why I'm so grateful for it is not what you might think, which is like, oh yeah, all this adoration.
4:26
Brandon Day: Everyone is like love bombing me.
4:28
Brandon Day: Like, you're so cool.
4:28
Brandon Day: You're on the phone book.
4:29
Brandon Day: I was also on the phone book in my hometown, which is pretty big deal, you know.
4:33
Jaclyn Strominger: Next would be the Wheaties box.
4:36
Brandon Day: Yeah, that's the only one I didn't get.
4:38
Brandon Day: I got the phone book and SI, but not the Wheaties box.
4:41
Brandon Day: There's still time.
4:42
Brandon Day: There's still time.
4:43
Brandon Day: But that happening to me, all that stuff was cool, but it really actually just highlighted these deep insecurities that I felt around my own worth and deserving to be on that.
4:57
Brandon Day: I always thought that I didn't really deserve it.
4:59
Brandon Day: Like it was, I was just lucky.
5:00
Brandon Day: Like so many other people worked so much harder than me that are more deserving to be on that thing.
5:05
Brandon Day: And it so it highlighted this like internal struggle that I had felt.
5:10
Brandon Day: And so what did I do except to compensate with what I knew how to do, which was just grind harder to try to cover it up with more accomplishments?
5:20
Brandon Day: And uh it just led to this, like it led to burnout.
5:24
Brandon Day: It led to burnout and more chronic pain, right?
5:28
Brandon Day: Because, you know, from a from a brain perspective, what is pain but but a signal that something's off?
5:35
Brandon Day: It's an action signal to get you to change something.
5:39
Brandon Day: And if you don't listen to it, it just gets louder and louder and louder.
5:44
Brandon Day: And so when you keep continuing to grind and grind and grind and push harder and push harder, then eventually something's gotta give.
5:54
Brandon Day: And so that's kind of that that darker side.
5:57
Brandon Day: I sometimes say that the Sports Illustrated or any major success like that, the brightest light can create the darkest shadow.
6:05
Brandon Day: So you gotta like it, it it forced me to deal with that stuff, which is why I'm so grateful for all of it.
6:12
Brandon Day: Every every aspect, the good, the bad, the ugly.
6:16
Brandon Day: It was all really just a catalyst for me to go on as a journey that has brought me to where I am now, running this business with the tools and techniques that I took, you know, going on 20 years now to sift through and make a lot of mistakes and kind of you know, beat to my own drum and find my own path and discover these techniques that are just not, they're not super mainstream yet, but they made all the difference for me.
6:47
Brandon Day: And so if it had not been for that earlier success and then the subsequent kind of sh spiral downward, I wouldn't have been able to go on this journey.
7:00
Brandon Day: So yeah, nothing but gratitude from me.
7:03
Jaclyn Strominger: No, well, I love that, and and it's true, like there's sometimes success, and I think a lot of people feel this way.
7:11
Jaclyn Strominger: They get to a certain point in their career, they might be the CEO of a company, and you're and you think, imposter syndrome, like why meet like how?
7:19
Jaclyn Strominger: Like how how did I get, you know, how?
7:22
Jaclyn Strominger: And uh so many people have that, and it comes out in so many different ways.
7:26
Jaclyn Strominger: So I'm curious now.
7:28
Jaclyn Strominger: So with what you're doing, I mean, obviously pain and finding ways to relieve pain, but you just mentioned there are some things that are not necessarily mainstream that are that maybe becoming mainstream that have helped you recover and and do do you better.
7:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:45
Jaclyn Strominger: So what are some of those?
7:48
Brandon Day: Yeah, there's there's really two huge, huge turning points in my journey.
7:53
Brandon Day: Because, you know, with with the start of my journey, which was the big peak, the success and the sports illustrated cover, national championships, and all that, when college football ended for me, I really didn't have a lot planned.
8:07
Brandon Day: I was just riding the ride, and it was a great time.
8:10
Brandon Day: So I wasn't worrying about the future.
8:11
Brandon Day: I'll figure it out.
8:12
Brandon Day: I always do.
8:14
Brandon Day: So I was kind of left.
8:16
Brandon Day: What I didn't realize was gonna happen was that I was gonna lose not just the game, but much more.
8:23
Brandon Day: I was gonna lose my identity as an athlete and a winner and a big success.
8:32
Brandon Day: Like all that was wrapped up in my identity as a football player, as an athlete, as a success, all just kind of like ripped away.
8:41
Brandon Day: If you went from the top of the ladder to the bottom of the heap, right?
8:45
Brandon Day: And I didn't really plan for that, and I didn't have anything lined up job-wise, except that I knew I didn't really want to go down the chosen path.
8:55
Brandon Day: Like I had all these friends going into like medical device sales or going to PT school or or going to get their MDE, whatever.
9:04
Brandon Day: I was just like, man, I just don't, it just doesn't feel like me at the moment.
9:07
Brandon Day: So I was really lost, and it was pretty instant.
9:11
Brandon Day: And the thing about football in America is you don't really get to go play pickup games after you're done.
9:16
Brandon Day: You're done, you're done.
9:17
Brandon Day: Right?
9:18
Brandon Day: At least not tackle, like you go play flag football, but it's just not quite the same, you know?
9:23
Brandon Day: So I also lost access to a big stress relief and a big outlet for some, you know, underlying anger issues that I'd been hanging around with that were very easily dealt with on a football field, right?
9:42
Brandon Day: But more than anything, what I learned many years later was that I lost access to this incredibly enjoyable and healing state of consciousness called flow states.
9:54
Brandon Day: And it was just ripped right away from me.
9:57
Brandon Day: And I had no idea what I had really lost, and I had no idea how to get back there with that consistency that I had had almost daily.
10:07
Brandon Day: So I was kind of up, you know, the creek without a paddle.
10:14
Brandon Day: And I got into making films as an actor and then a producer, and that was wonderful, incredible experience, lasted for a few years.
10:21
Brandon Day: But then I was kind of I was kind of just like wandering around in there.
10:25
Brandon Day: And during that time, I was dealing with a lot of chronic pain, chronic physical pain from many years, you know, having a car accident every day.
10:32
Brandon Day: So when I got done with the film stuff, I was at a really low point in my mental health.
10:39
Brandon Day: Substance abuse was higher because I was self-medicating for the chronic pain and for this loss of identity, for me thinking and kind of seeing myself as the guy on the cover Sports Illustrated and expecting to be at that level of success always, because that's what other people expected of me, or so I thought.
10:59
Brandon Day: You know, the guy at the you know, bottom of the heap, was just such a cognitive dissonance that it just like created like a swarm of mental health issues that I again masked with with booze and cannabis and whatever else.
11:23
Brandon Day: And so I kind of hit a rock bottom and decided that this is not really ideal for me right now.
11:32
Brandon Day: I think I'm I think I'm built for something a little more than this.
11:36
Brandon Day: So let's go maybe make a change and try to find something new.
11:40
Brandon Day: So I just kind of started my journey and did what I knew best, which was I studied pre-physical therapy and I kind of knew how to work out, you know, from football.
11:49
Brandon Day: So I'm like, I'll just try to start exercising again.
11:52
Brandon Day: Let's just take it one step at a time.
11:54
Brandon Day: And that led me down the road of becoming a personal trainer just to make some extra cash.
11:58
Brandon Day: Started working with people that were in pain as well, and like helping them a little bit here and there.
12:04
Brandon Day: I had a guy freshly diagnosed with Parkinson's and like talk about imposter syndrome.
12:10
Brandon Day: I was like, I can't somebody want to take the reins here.
12:14
Brandon Day: I can't work with this guy.
12:15
Brandon Day: Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna screw him up worse or something.
12:19
Brandon Day: And I had a wonderful mentor, which is a theme for me.
12:22
Brandon Day: Incredible mentors at the perfect time, right?
12:25
Brandon Day: And he said, like most of the best mentors do, stop it.
12:33
Brandon Day: You're fine.
12:34
Brandon Day: You know what you're doing, just go do it.
12:37
Brandon Day: It's like, okay.
12:39
Brandon Day: His confidence in me gave me enough confidence to go and try.
12:42
Brandon Day: And I helped him out a lot, and so that was kind of like wow, okay, this is cool.
12:48
Brandon Day: I like helping people.
12:49
Brandon Day: So I went down that path.
12:50
Brandon Day: I got a master's degree in kinesiology.
12:52
Brandon Day: I studied all the traditional methods of helping people, what I would call below-the-neck methods.
12:57
Brandon Day: And some of them would help, and I'd get pretty good results with clients and stuff.
13:01
Brandon Day: But I personally was still dealing with chronic pain every single day.
13:04
Brandon Day: And I get a little bit of relief, and then it would always come back.
13:07
Brandon Day: So I'm like, there's something's something is not right.
13:09
Brandon Day: There's a missing piece somewhere.
13:11
Brandon Day: The first missing piece was I discovered the work of a guy named Stephen Cotler.
13:16
Brandon Day: I read his first book on flow called The Rise of Superman, where he followed action adventure sport athletes around for many, many years, just documenting how they were accomplishing impossible feats like over and over and over again.
13:30
Brandon Day: And what was driving them to do these like crazy things, you know?
13:36
Brandon Day: And like Alex Honnelt, if you're familiar with him, climbing up Yosemite with no ropes, right?
13:42
Brandon Day: Free soloing.
13:43
Brandon Day: And like, why?
13:45
Brandon Day: Why are you putting yourself in in such danger?
13:48
Brandon Day: And the short answer is because it's access to flow states, which is the optimal state of consciousness where we feel and perform our best.
13:57
Brandon Day: This was the biggest light bulb moment in the world.
13:59
Brandon Day: I was like, that's it.
14:01
Brandon Day: That's what I've been missing, that's what I need to get back to.
14:05
Brandon Day: And so I shifted my mindset into instead of thinking about making more money, instead of thinking about going out and winning another championship in something, just focus on finding flow.
14:17
Brandon Day: And as I tell my clients, like when you focus on that as the goal, then the outcome that you're looking for oftentimes will just take care of itself.
14:25
Brandon Day: Because now you're focusing on the process.
14:27
Brandon Day: Now you're focusing on being present because flow requires all of you in the present moment.
14:34
Brandon Day: Distractions like pain will pull you out of it and they will block your access to flow, which I think is what a lot of people, in my experience, what a lot of people are struggling with, whether they're business leaders or high-level athletes, or even, you know, we talk about what I define an athlete is, but basically it's everyone.
14:55
Brandon Day: Everyone's an athlete, right?
14:56
Brandon Day: You're an athlete, I'm an athlete.
14:57
Brandon Day: Some people are more mathletes, but they're all have the same mindset and they all need to be trained and think about it the same way.
15:07
Brandon Day: So it doesn't matter who it is, like we all perform better when we have our focus and attention dialed into the present moment, so much so that everything else goes away.
15:17
Brandon Day: That's where we elevate ourselves to the next level and we reach our state of peak performance, which is a flow state.
15:23
Brandon Day: So I found that out.
15:26
Brandon Day: Boom, just hit me like a ton of bricks, and I made everything about like finding flow in all the things that I do.
15:33
Brandon Day: And then a few years later, which that that really changed a lot for me and finding more meaning in my life, getting back to okay, finding where my my identity kind of sits.
15:45
Brandon Day: I'm still an athlete, right?
15:47
Brandon Day: But now I just have these different sports.
15:49
Brandon Day: Like now I'm my main sport is just trying to keep up with my 18-month-old triplets.
15:55
Brandon Day: Because oh my god.
15:57
Brandon Day: Yeah, that's like running a marathon every friggin' day.
16:00
Jaclyn Strominger: It's oh my god, yeah.
16:01
Jaclyn Strominger: Triplets, I can't even imagine.
16:04
Brandon Day: Yeah.
16:05
Brandon Day: So that's what training is about for me.
16:08
Brandon Day: That's my sport at the moment, you know, my my golf game, my pickleball game, my hiking, all of that is is secondary and tertiary.
16:17
Brandon Day: It's not the primary priority right now.
16:19
Brandon Day: It's, you know, just keeping up with them and also building a business to support our lifestyle.
16:25
Brandon Day: So, and that's everybody I work with.
16:27
Brandon Day: It's like you may have been a competitive athlete in this thing, but now your priorities have probably shifted, right?
16:35
Brandon Day: But everyone benefits from making flow the goal and training like an athlete in your physical training and also in your brain training, which is the applied neurology aspect, which was the second major breakthrough in my own personal journey, was meeting my mentors very serendipitously at a wedding that I was officiating, and then joining their inaugural mentorship in applied neurology like two weeks later.
17:05
Brandon Day: And that just like opened the door.
17:07
Brandon Day: My chronic pain, once I started the study of applied neurology and understanding that number one, pain is always an output from your brain.
17:14
Brandon Day: And when you know that, then anything can affect anything, right?
17:19
Brandon Day: I learned that a few tools that just got rid of my pain instantly, and it would come back.
17:27
Brandon Day: But I had tools now.
17:28
Brandon Day: I had tools to get rid of that pain instantly, right?
17:32
Brandon Day: And to start to change and rewire my brain so that it didn't no longer choose pain as the signal to get my attention.
17:41
Brandon Day: And then you just get more access to flow states when you know how to set up the conditions correctly, and so boom, get out of pain, get more access to flow, and then your life just kind of accelerates in a positive direction.
17:54
Jaclyn Strominger: You know, it's it's quite interesting because you know, so many there's so many different parts here.
18:00
Jaclyn Strominger: You know, there's so many people right now who are get distracted.
18:07
Jaclyn Strominger: And so whether it's pain or a text or something, right?
18:12
Jaclyn Strominger: They get out of concentration.
18:15
Jaclyn Strominger: So you know they're not in that flow, right?
18:20
Jaclyn Strominger: There's always there's a disruptor happening.
18:23
Jaclyn Strominger: So how are you helping people get out of it?
18:24
Jaclyn Strominger: I mean, how do you keep you know, saying you know?
18:28
Brandon Day: Yeah.
18:29
Brandon Day: Great question because it's I think it's more important now than ever before to build the awareness, and that's the key, really, more than anything else, is just the mindfulness and the awareness that you're being distracted and that your attention is constantly being battled for by so many outside forces, and that your brain is wired to go after that novelty and go after that dopamine spike, that's what it's wired for.
19:08
Brandon Day: So, in a sense, your brain is actually fighting against you as well.
19:12
Brandon Day: But awareness sometimes alone can be curative in this.
19:18
Brandon Day: If you can be more mindful and more aware of that and where those attention grabbers are hiding, then you might find yourself in more flow, just with that simple thing right there.
19:29
Brandon Day: But then we can take that many, many steps further, and we can set up our environment so as to block distractions so we get more flow.
19:38
Brandon Day: We can play with the flow triggers so we can make sure that everything that we do has very clear goals.
19:46
Brandon Day: We know exactly what success looks like.
19:48
Brandon Day: We have immediate feedback so we know whether or not we're hitting those goals, and we have a challenge level that is dialed in to just outside of our current skill level.
19:59
Brandon Day: So we have to push ourselves, we have to stay completely focused on the goal and know what that goal is, and we have to get immediate feedback.
20:09
Brandon Day: Those are like the top triggers, and this is why sports are so rich with flow states because they're all like built in.
20:18
Brandon Day: Like you either the goal is to hit the ball, you either hit it or you don't, right?
20:23
Brandon Day: Right.
20:24
Brandon Day: And if you're playing with somebody that is maybe a little bit better than you, you're more likely to get into flow.
20:31
Brandon Day: That's why we always say you always want to be like punching up.
20:35
Brandon Day: That's how you get better.
20:37
unknown: Right.
20:38
Brandon Day: Because that's how you access more flow states.
20:39
Brandon Day: And you can take these principles in sports and apply them to anything in life, including doing the dishes, folding your laundry.
20:48
Brandon Day: Right?
20:49
Brandon Day: There's areas of our life that we don't think about this at all, and we just end up staying completely distracted and checked out.
20:55
Brandon Day: But really, they're ripe for creating presence and flow.
21:02
Brandon Day: And the the sweet thing about flow is that flow begets flow.
21:06
Brandon Day: So when you get it in other areas, then you're more likely to get it in the areas that you really want it, like your work, like your relationships, like your sports, your athletic endeavors, whatever that may be.
21:20
Jaclyn Strominger: You know, it's so it's interesting because you know, you know, I think of I think of how much athletics and and moving play such a huge importance in in our lives.
21:35
Jaclyn Strominger: Right.
21:36
Jaclyn Strominger: You know, one of my really good friends started a company um and it was all about helping kids move before school.
21:42
Jaclyn Strominger: Right?
21:44
Jaclyn Strominger: Right.
21:45
Jaclyn Strominger: So it gets those kids already in a state of of their mind moving open to learning because they've just moved their bodies, right?
21:56
Jaclyn Strominger: It's been documented, you know, start your day.
21:59
Jaclyn Strominger: With physical activity or some kind of movement to get your brain going so it's ready to you know take charge of the day.
22:09
Jaclyn Strominger: And I'm healing what you're saying, and it's you know, getting into that that state of flow where you're working, you know, you gotta get your mind there.
22:19
Jaclyn Strominger: And a lot of times, and you as you shared, being an athlete because you've moved your body helps you get there.
22:27
Jaclyn Strominger: And because you've got that small little goal, right?
22:31
Jaclyn Strominger: It might be, you know, whether you're trying to hit a golf ball or you're trying to you know get a basket in the basketball, you know, you play basketball.
22:41
Jaclyn Strominger: I mean you we need to get our brains ready for that, and then you know, you see it happen.
22:47
Jaclyn Strominger: Like people just they they become so unconscious about with what they're doing in their actions while they're doing their you know sport that they don't even realize that they've just done a three, you know what I mean?
23:04
Jaclyn Strominger: It just it becomes it's like they're just going.
23:08
Brandon Day: Yeah.
23:09
Brandon Day: And you hit on something that's super important that most people miss, which is a lot of the things that we're trying to do in our daily lives, whether it's a complex skill in a sport or a complex task in our work, or just having like a meaningful conversation.
23:31
Brandon Day: If we talk about kids, like going straight from bed to breakfast to school is like it's a big jump that's missing a lot of pieces.
23:43
Brandon Day: And what I actually mean by that is that all of that stuff that we're trying to do, the complex skills, the engaging with our schoolwork and stuff like that, requires our frontal lobe.
23:56
Brandon Day: This is the new big part of the brain in the front, right here, that does all our executive function, concentration, complex tasks, voluntary movement, right?
24:06
Brandon Day: All of that comes from up here.
24:08
Brandon Day: But the brain, and this is where the applied neurology kind of broke open a lot of the stuff for me and my clients is understanding that that's not how the brain works.
24:20
Brandon Day: The brain needs to get blood flow and fuel.
24:23
Brandon Day: Say, let's take the blood flow example, like comes from your heart.
24:27
Brandon Day: It's got to go up through the back, through the brain stem, which is where all of our automatic functions live, like heart rate and breathing.
24:34
Brandon Day: That's pretty important.
24:35
Brandon Day: We need resources there first, right?
24:38
Brandon Day: Right.
24:38
Brandon Day: And then to the top of the brain, and then from the back of the brain to the front.
24:42
Brandon Day: So the frontal lobe up here is the last place to get the blood flow and the activation and the resources in order to do those tasks.
24:53
Brandon Day: So when we start to dry go straight at that, and we don't have proper fuel and resources there, it's not gonna work very well.
25:03
Brandon Day: Right?
25:04
Speaker 1: Right, right.
25:05
Brandon Day: Like it's no wonder all these kids have ADHD, it's because like their brain is just totally disconnected.
25:10
Brandon Day: So my mentor coined this framework he calls the ladder framework, which is just kind of stepping your way up to frontal lobe training at the very top.
25:19
Brandon Day: That's what we want.
25:20
Brandon Day: And I I put flow states up there at the top, by the way, because this is the same ladder that we want to climb.
25:26
Brandon Day: And that's giving, we need our nervous system regulated first.
25:30
Brandon Day: We need good fuel and resources, so oxygen and glucose, good nutrition, hydration.
25:35
Brandon Day: Then we need movement, and that's what fills in the back of the brain.
25:41
Brandon Day: Movement, both of our body, our head, so our inner ear is waking up, and our eyes.
25:50
Brandon Day: Those are three big systems that activate the back of the brain.
25:54
Brandon Day: Then we can go and work on the front of the brain.
25:58
Brandon Day: And so this is just a neuroscientific way of describing exactly what you're saying: like go move before you go into some like complex task or something where you really have to have a cognitive load put on you and you have to think.
26:11
Brandon Day: Go move your body first.
26:14
Jaclyn Strominger: Right.
26:14
Jaclyn Strominger: It's it's crazy.
26:15
Jaclyn Strominger: It's it's so important.
26:16
Jaclyn Strominger: Movement is so important.
26:17
Jaclyn Strominger: So now I want to talk about something, you know, obviously pain, pain management.
26:21
Jaclyn Strominger: So using your mind to get to overcome pain.
26:25
Jaclyn Strominger: We were kidding around beforehand before we started recording, and I said, I think that Tiger Woods actually probably needs to have a conversation with you because he's obviously must be in some kind of pain where he keeps getting into car accidents.
26:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
26:40
Jaclyn Strominger: So so how are you working with your, you know, like the everyday, you know, almost like the everyday athlete, for example, on pain.
26:49
Jaclyn Strominger: You know, I'm I'm thinking about even like students, like, you know, I'll I'll use my son, for example, walking the golf course, right?
26:58
Jaclyn Strominger: Because he's uh he's played basketball in golf.
27:01
Jaclyn Strominger: And the bag, he's carrying the bag for 18 holes, and it sits in the wrong place.
27:06
Jaclyn Strominger: He ends up pulling a muscle on his leg.
27:08
Jaclyn Strominger: And he's now, you know, then he can't, he literally has to stretch, he can't play for a few days.
27:13
Jaclyn Strominger: So, how do you work with people to get that mental anguish out so they can keep performing?
27:21
Brandon Day: That's a great question, and there's a lot of nuance in that.
27:25
Brandon Day: But I'll approach it kind of high level from two angles because you have you mentioned the mental anguish and the mindset kind of part of it, right?
27:37
Brandon Day: Both with your son and like being held out from the sport.
27:41
Brandon Day: That sucks.
27:42
Brandon Day: It it's it's not fun when you have to sit out and like recover and rehab and heal.
27:48
Brandon Day: You want to get out there and play.
27:50
Brandon Day: And then you've got like the Tiger Woods example, where there's there's a lot of pressure involved, and that's a whole different ball game, right?
28:01
Brandon Day: But from a mindset part of it, you got to understand, and again, sometimes awareness is enough to be curative in this respect, that when you're aware of what pain actually is, which it's just a signal from your brain to change something or to take some kind of action.
28:25
Brandon Day: Okay.
28:26
Brandon Day: In the case of a pulled muscle, that signal is to stop, stop what you're doing, slow down, so we don't make this worse.
28:36
Brandon Day: Yeah.
28:37
Brandon Day: And in a very acute sense, that's very important.
28:40
Brandon Day: We need that, otherwise, we'd tear that thing right off the bone, and then we're unable to move at all.
28:47
Brandon Day: So it's a very important signal, and it should not be ignored.
28:52
Brandon Day: So the problem becomes okay, in an acute phase, and you still have to go play your sport like it's the championship game.
29:04
Brandon Day: All right, so we might actually try to work with your brain to try to turn down that signal at the risk of injuring you more.
29:11
Brandon Day: It's priorities at that point, right?
29:14
Brandon Day: But most of what I'm working with, and I see is chronic pain from injuries long gone and long healed that are still hanging around.
29:27
Brandon Day: And there's no really rhyme or reason for it that they can think of.
29:30
Brandon Day: It's like this stupid knee.
29:32
Brandon Day: Like every time I go out running, it just starts to hurt like two miles in, five miles in.
29:38
Brandon Day: Or like I get vertigo when I get up in the morning.
29:42
Brandon Day: What the heck is that about?
29:43
Brandon Day: Or, you know, I got this stupid tendinitis and it just keeps coming back.
29:48
Brandon Day: Those types of chronic pains oftentimes are not due to injury.
29:54
Brandon Day: And in the Tiger Woods example, like he's had old injuries, but he might still have some pain hanging around, and especially at that level of athleticism, you're putting your body under a lot of stress over time.
30:05
Brandon Day: You can develop chronic pains.
30:07
Brandon Day: And if you don't understand why the brain is giving you that pain and deal with the actual threat, then it just hangs around and it becomes a state of mental annoyance at the very least, but it can block your flow states and it can become like a real liability to his livelihood.
30:26
Brandon Day: And so a lot of times, what then some people will reach for is some kind of self-medication.
30:32
Brandon Day: Could be part of the reason why there's alcohol involved and maybe some risky behavior that leads to car crashes.
30:43
Brandon Day: I don't know.
30:44
Brandon Day: I wasn't with him.
30:46
Speaker 1: Right, right.
30:47
Brandon Day: But it's your own experience, by the way, of my own destructive behaviors and what it was doing.
30:55
Brandon Day: It was just masking pain, whether it was mental pain or physical pain.
31:00
Brandon Day: But again, understanding why the brain's giving you pain is is paramount.
31:05
Brandon Day: And then what I do is we go, we go find the threat.
31:08
Brandon Day: We got to go find the reason that your brain feels unsafe in the world.
31:13
Brandon Day: And a lot of times with athletes, that is something going on above the neck.
31:19
Brandon Day: And when I say above the mech, I don't, I actually don't mean your mindset.
31:22
Brandon Day: Because mindset is also an output from your brain, like positive thinking.
31:28
Brandon Day: Try to have positive thinking when you're in deep, deep pain.
31:31
Brandon Day: It doesn't work very well, right?
31:33
Brandon Day: But if we can change the inputs, if we can make I call it your baby brain naturally because I got a bunch of babies around me all the time, but they don't have frontal lobes to like inhibit that area, they're just like purely on emotion.
31:48
Speaker 1: Right.
31:49
Brandon Day: I feel hungry, give me food.
31:53
Brandon Day: If I can calm that baby brain in your son in Tiger Woods, in you in me, then I have a way better chance of using this frontal lobe and making good decisions and getting into flow states.
32:05
Brandon Day: Because if we're stuck in survival, there's no way to mindset my way out of that.
32:11
Brandon Day: So, we what do we do to calm a baby?
32:15
Brandon Day: You rock it, you soothe it, you give it some humming, you make it feel safe.
32:22
Speaker 1: Right.
32:22
Brandon Day: Same thing with an adult.
32:24
Brandon Day: So if I can work above the neck to give it better vestibular function so it feels more grounded to the earth, if I can fix your breathing so you're calmer, if I can move your body in ways that makes your brain feel more safe to move around the world, if I can fix your eyes so that they're actually moving better and working together instead of like wonky, which is so common by the way, then I can remove some of the threat, and your brain doesn't give you pain anymore.
32:58
Brandon Day: It doesn't need to.
32:59
Brandon Day: So that's the first step.
33:01
Brandon Day: And then we just chase flow states from there.
33:04
Jaclyn Strominger: Oh my god.
33:05
Jaclyn Strominger: Oh I think it's so fascinating because there's so many people that we know that have that are either in that are that living with chronic pain, they have so many things, or you know, in some cases have have experienced what you what you've experienced, which maybe not to the same level, but they've had this great success young, and then what, right?
33:30
Jaclyn Strominger: It's the then like how do I keep going?
33:32
Jaclyn Strominger: So I love what you're doing.
33:34
Jaclyn Strominger: How can our listeners find more about what you're doing and maybe tap into all the greatness that you're offering?
33:43
Brandon Day: Yeah, so right now I'm really keen on the 21-day program, 21-day breakout program that I've put together, which is kind of my way of taking what I do with my one-on-one clients, which is very individual and precise, and offering it to a bigger audience.
34:05
Brandon Day: So taking the the best of the best tools from applied neurology and pain relief in order to get somebody out of pain and into momentum to chase flow states.
34:18
Brandon Day: So that's what the 21 Days is built on quick, actionable, like daily things that you can do, boom, boom, boom, to get you into momentum.
34:28
Brandon Day: I'm loving that program right now, and it's it's kicking ass.
34:34
Brandon Day: People are loving it.
34:35
Brandon Day: So that's that's the easiest and best way to get started.
34:38
Brandon Day: And then, of course, you know, you can head to my website at evolvedathlet.coach, check out that program, check out other ways that you can work with me by joining my free community, or you can just check me out on Instagram at I am Brandon Day, one word, to see what I'm up to over there.
34:54
Brandon Day: Those are my top spots that I hang out.
34:57
Jaclyn Strominger: That's awesome.
34:57
Jaclyn Strominger: And so the 21-day challenge, is that free or paid?
35:02
Brandon Day: That's paid.
35:03
Brandon Day: Yeah.
35:03
Brandon Day: Okay.
35:04
Brandon Day: You can join the free community, and there's a and on my website as well, there's a free like pain relief switch tool.
35:12
Brandon Day: It's like a quick 10-minute, like top three neuro drills that do the most to get somebody out of pain.
35:21
Brandon Day: So that's a great place to start if you want to just experience what neuro can do before you jump into the full-on program.
35:29
Brandon Day: Awesome.
35:30
Jaclyn Strominger: Well, listeners, do me the favor, go and connect with Brandon.
35:34
Jaclyn Strominger: He's absolutely amazing.
35:35
Jaclyn Strominger: And what he's doing is just fantastic and life-changing.
35:41
Jaclyn Strominger: Do me another favor and hit subscribe and share this episode with other people that you know could use to hear Brandon.
35:49
Jaclyn Strominger: And lastly, go to his free community.
35:52
Jaclyn Strominger: I'm gonna put all of the links into the show notes, but go to the community and connect there and then take advantage of his 21-day challenge.
35:59
Jaclyn Strominger: I mean, it's so important.
36:01
Jaclyn Strominger: And Brandon, thank you so much for being a guest on Unstoppable Success and listeners.
36:06
Jaclyn Strominger: Thank you for listening.
36:08
Jaclyn Strominger: And I appreciate it.