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Heal Your Nervous System by Giving Up Control · Bye Bye Panic

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that if I wanted to heal my nervous system, I was going to need to give up control.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had to learn to just let things happen.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I know that this is so difficult when you're dealing with intense physical sensations, the scary thoughts, the bizarre emotions, because we begin controlling how we feel 24-7.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I used to think if I gave up control, things were going to get way worse, but I'm here to tell you.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: that giving up control is the missing key to your healing.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in this video, I want to share with you why giving up control is so hard, especially for a stress nervous system.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And don't worry, I'm going to share with you exactly how you can give up control in a way that hues your nervous system without putting yourself at risk.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's jump right in.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Point number one, admit defeat.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a part of you, deep down, that knows that trying to control is only making things worse.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you do it anyway.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why you do it is because control works in every other aspect of your life.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It works in your business, it might work in your relationships, your finances, your education, but control is not going to work with healing your nervous system.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as somebody who helps people overcome their symptoms, going back to living, control is literally the skill that builds my entire company, right?
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Controlling outcomes, how people are progressing, what things need to adjust, are people healing and are we getting predictable results?
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that is all based on control.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's no surprise that my brain assumes, well, if it works really well with helping people with nervous system healing, it should work well with the nervous system in itself.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that strategy doesn't work.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because an overprotective nervous system is not a company problem.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't respond with more control.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, adding more control adds more pressure to your nervous system.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when you add more pressure to your nervous system, your nervous system becomes more stressed.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: See, you've gotten really good at the skill of controlling.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in this aspect, it's about learning a new skill.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about learning to let things go.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like you have a hammer, right?
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And imagine you have this really good skill of protecting, which is like your hammer, and that's the only skill you have.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, what you're gonna notice is that any problem you're gonna find, you're gonna treat it like it's a nail.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every problem when it comes to building anything or whatever it is, you're just going to try to use it as a nail.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when it comes to nervous system healing, it's more like utilizing a screwdriver.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's recognizing when to use the hammer and when to use the screwdriver.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do you do here?
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, a really important framework that will help you in this is to stop reacting to every sensation like it's an emergency.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when a racing heart shows up, a scary thought fires or like a bizarre feeling shows up out of nowhere.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of treating it like an emergency, something you need to fix right away, you just label it as discomfort, not an emergency.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So whatever sensations discomfort, thoughts you're feeling, you
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: you just label it as discomfort.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're just feeling uncomfortable right now.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But whenever you start treating these symptoms and sensations as something that's dangerous and there's something that's an emergency, well that emergency creates a sense of urgency.
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll notice that you're treating every sensation every feeling as an emergency.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And whenever you treat it like an emergency, you're trying to get things fixed fast.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're using the skill of, hey, there's a problem in my business or in certain aspect of my life.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me treat it as an emergency so I can get it fixed fast and you're applying it here.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: but that's adding just more pressure.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the reframe needs to be instead of treating it as an emergency, just treating it as uncomfortable.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And look, this is difficult in itself.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Feeling the discomfort is very challenging, especially when you're so used to avoiding and resisting the feeling, just sitting there and feeling the discomfort can feel quite overwhelming.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this is where you might be asking, okay, Sean, but how do I like stop the discomfort or at least how do I get better at the discomfort?
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this leads me to point two, which is to open your window.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is going to feel very confronting, but your intolerance to feeling discomfort is leading to more discomfort.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so whenever you're feeling that uncomfortable sensation, you start doing things to try to feel better in the moment.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's watching a YouTube video.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's reaching out to a safety person.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's going on your phone and doom scrolling or you just go into analysis mode and fix it mode.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've gotten so good at avoiding discomfort that you've forgotten that discomfort is survivable.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Discomfort is just discomfort.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody's gonna die from it.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I know a part of you might think that this is being insensitive, but I truly understand what you're going through because I went through it myself.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: but what's happening is not that the discomfort is overwhelming is that you have overdeveloped the muscle of avoiding discomfort and the muscle for tolerating discomfort has deteriorated.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's atrophied.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've gotten so good at avoidance that it's become like this knee-jerk reaction.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: feeling the discomfort takes a lot of conscious energy.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very difficult.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And whenever you do feel it, your window of tolerance to it is so narrow.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's so small that it feels like you're climbing Mount Everest.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Any amount of discomfort just feels so overwhelming.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I realized this, it all made sense because I had got so good at avoiding discomfort that I began having anxiety about anxiety.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I was at my worst, I wasn't able to focus on anything else besides how I
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And not only did I feel anxiety, but I felt so tired all the time because I got so good at running away from my feelings that it actually felt like I was running a real life marathon.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so if you're experiencing the same thing, the key here is to expand your window of tolerance to discomfort.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's to let yourself get better at feeling uncomfortable.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So step one, label it as discomfort, number two, sit in the discomfort.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you sit with the discomfort, your nervous system starts processing those feelings and your nervous system actually starts to become stronger.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's able to feel the discomfort better.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here's the kicker.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: As your nervous system gets better, I'm feeling the discomfort, your nervous system turns off protection mode.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It goes into safety.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is how the uncomfortable sensations, the feelings, the symptoms, that's how they end up going away.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not through controlling more,
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's through letting your nervous system sit in the discomfort, let it process itself out, and your nervous system relaxes on its own.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here is the biggest mistake people make whenever they're sitting in that window of tolerance and sitting in discomfort.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: they judge how they feel in the middle of it.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, a couple of months ago, I was traveling to Whistler, Canada.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember I was on like this suspension bridge.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember walking through that suspension bridge.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I noticed that the bridge felt the most wobbly in the middle.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't wobbly on either side of the mountain.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the most wobbly in the middle.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the same way as healing your nervous system,
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't judge a transition by how you feel in the middle of it.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when you're expanding your window of tolerance and giving up control, your job is not to have total clarity in the moment.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not to feel completely sturdy in the middle of it.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it's recognizing that while you're going through this transition, as you're expanding your window of tolerance, it's gonna feel wobbly.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: your job is to stay present and open enough to receive the next steps.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the mistake many people do and something I made was that during that transition I started judging myself.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I started thinking oh my god, I feel so uncomfortable.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, this is I'm going backwards.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, I'm back to square one.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I need to let this go.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was just judging too fast because I was in the middle
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's recognizing you're going to feel a little bit wobbly.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your role is just to expand your window of tolerance.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, one thing that I also want to mention is that the window of tolerance isn't just with discomfort.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's also with feeling good.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because if you've been on this journey, you'll also recognize that moments of feeling good as you get to do this and you get better at this, you will have moments of feeling good.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And moments of feeling good are so rare and fleeting for you from the past that feeling good is going to feel weird too.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your window of tolerance to feeling good to feeling joy to feeling peace will also be at very low.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in the same way, you want to not just expand your window of tolerance discomfort, but also your window of tolerance to feeling good.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not, oh my god, I'm feeling so good.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What did I do so I can keep doing it again?
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or why am I feeling so good?
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does this mean I'm heading in the right direction or the wrong direction?
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just, when you feel good, just sit with it.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to have a rhyme or reason.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just sit with the feelings of feeling good.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your nervous system is going to scream at you in these moments.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's going to say, hey, this is not normal.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is weirdly uncomfortable because this is not familiar.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's okay.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's part of expanding your window of tolerance.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, as you're expanding your window of tolerance, you're gonna have moments and think, hey, Sean, how do I know if I'm heading the wrong direction?
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What if there is an emergency, right?
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What if there is something wrong?
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, this leads me to point three, which is just go into the unknown.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this point, I want you to realize that the only way to know is through experience.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there were two parts of my life that felt like a very spiritual journey for me.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were several others, but these two are like the main highlights.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was when I was going through the anxiety recovery, the healing journey of my chronic symptoms.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I really didn't know if it was going to work.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I felt like this was my last lifeline and all I could just do was just surrender to this and then just see what happens.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when you do that it's a very spiritual process because you kind of give up control.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And ironically the second part of my life came almost a decade later which when I began helping people.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: through, you know, the nervous system healing and all that stuff.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I let go of my corporate job and just said, hey, look, I'm going to commit to this.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I decided to commit to this, I didn't know how things were going to pan out.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know how I was going to have people work with me.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know and what kind of capacity that I was going to be able to help people.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for the first year, it was actually very challenging.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very hard for
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, somebody just finds somebody on the internet and be like, yeah, I want to work with that guy, like there's natural skepticism, like is this guy legit?
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is he like actually someone that can help me?
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I didn't know how to solve that problem.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And turns out the answer to that problem was something you might have heard of, it's called YouTube.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I wasn't able to really get clients, my main focus was, okay, I have all this knowledge, I have this info, I know I'm really good at this.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me just give it out for free.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me just give out all this content on YouTube.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And within a couple of months, I mean, people were just reaching out wanting to work because, you know, the trust was built.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they understood that I knew the mechanics of what was happening.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when I was going through this process of helping people, I didn't know YouTube was the answer.
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had no intentions of ever creating a YouTube channel.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was somebody that didn't even like having videos of myself.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was the guy that would always prefer to take photos of people.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: If someone said, hey, can someone take a photo?
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would raise my hand, because I didn't even feel comfortable being in the camera.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the point is, is that I could have never predicted this, this all happened in the unknown, and it actually happened better than what I was expecting.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The point is this, everything good that has ever happened in your life has happened in the unknown.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could have never predicted it.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could have never said, okay, I want this, and you know what happened.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything that happened in your life required you to go into the unknown.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the same way, in this healing journey, it's about going into the unknown as well.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why faith is so important.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: People think that the opposite of anxiety is peace.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's calm.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The opposite of anxiety is trust.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you have trust, calmness comes on its own.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Peace comes on its own.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: All these things come on its own, but it doesn't happen until you go into the unknown and see for yourself.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you might be thinking, yes, Sean, all the best things happen in the unknown, but so do all the bad things, right?
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I want to tell you, that's your anxiety talking.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about all the things that you thought were going wrong, right?
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you want to hear doctors or you talk, you know, talk to your people and turn out it wasn't, right?
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That sense of urgency was there when there was nothing wrong.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about all the complications you added just because you thought it was a worst case scenario.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is your anxiety talk.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you listen to your anxiety long enough, you will resent your own life because you refuse to be brave enough to step into the unknown.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can watch these videos.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can intellectually understand what I'm talking about.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the only way to know is to go into the unknown and see for yourself and give up any judgment of what happens in the middle or in the transition.
• 14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wait and see what happens and see your life unfold on its own.