Autonomic Nervous System and Recovery

Yeah so look the default mode for humans is a parasympathetic state That where you supposed to be the majority of the time But without a sympathetic state you don have a reason to adapt. So this is why we train. We don't have that in our lives anymore. We're not hunting or gathering or fighting off saber-toothed tigers or other people anymore, right? So, you know, that hour you have, you know, whether it's three, five, seven days a week, that's your time to go and push yourself into that. But unfortunately, you know, over the last 20, 20 years or so, you know, we've got the internet, social media and career, career, career. People are away from like family. It's all about career and like killing yourself to try to provide a better life for your family and trying to get ahead and comparing yourself to everyone else. So we live in this toxic, weird, artificial state that now we have to do things to counteract what we're doing to ourselves with things like career and toxic relationships and living in, you know, a place like Sydney, which is like hustle bustle and noisy and EMF and all this stuff. So that's what people aren't aren't understanding. When you look at now, it's 2018, right? And we're training like people trained in the 60s and 70s, like really high volume and cutting the calories, but we can't train like that anymore. Unless if you go to, you know, move to Southern California, and you're able to sit on the beach or move to San Diego and all you do all day is train and eat and sleep and shit, then you're probably pretty good. But that's not realistic for the majority of the people, especially for the jump on stage, because that's not going to pay your bills. You still have to have a job and all this other stuff and manage your social media and manage all the other stuff in your life. So people have an issue just doing nothing. In the past, we could just sit under a tree and watch the grass grow And for whatever reason, we can't do that anymore because you're going to sit under the tree and you're going to search social media or think of something else. And people have a really hard time relaxing. And we had a lot of clients where the first thing we tell them to do is you need to take a fucking holiday. You need to take a holiday and you need to leave your computer and your phone at home and just go to the beach. And I'm the worst at this. But you just go to Fiji or you go somewhere and you just sit on the beach and you do fuck all but get drunk, I don't know, wank and do whatever else you do on vacation, have sex or whatever. So, you know, and do absolutely nothing. But the problem is, as you can see, you go off on holiday and you feel great. Your HRV climbs, you're able to get like rest, relaxation. You could probably drink 20 beers a day and get leaner by doing that. And but then you've got to come back to reality at some point. So what I like is I like teaching people visualization, right? So like really, really hammering and getting a mental image of where you were on that beach or on a mountain or whatever. And instead of just meditating, try to take yourself back to that spot. We find that works really good for people because people are in a meditation now, but they're doing a lot of guided meditation, which I love, but they're just trying to sit there and they think that meditation is sitting there thinking about nothing, but that's not actually technically true. Visualization works a lot better in conjunction with the meditation to bring you back and bring your stress levels back down. Yeah, because the visualization actually triggers an emotional response. if you're clear enough with the visualization, you can pick yourself back at that beach or whatever it is and notice all of the sights and sounds and the smells and things that you experience. Feet up, sunset in the background. Grass thongs on. Sand in your crotch. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. And it does trigger an emotional response. And if you do it a few times, you can call on it quickly in a stressful situation or in between meetings or whatever. You can just go back there, bring it up, feel the wellness and move on. Yeah, absolutely. so for our listeners that um okay we sort of painted a picture that most of us are probably uh and and for our listeners that aren't aware quick overview of sympathetic parasympathetic for them okay so we've got your autonomic nervous system which basically what people refer to as fight or flight and then you know rest and restore where i like the fucking and feeding that's what i like for parasympathetic yeah and um you know we're supposed that the sympathetic state is there for survival. We're not supposed to live in at 24, 365, right? But that's what people are doing. So when you get in a fight or flight state, your body's wanting to make fast energy. So the oxidation rates of sugar and fat kind of go down and you get stuck in what's called fast glycolysis, where you're making a lot of really fast energy, but you're not making a whole lot of it really quickly. And so you get to the point where if this happens for a long enough time, people start getting really fatigued. They start getting mitochondrial issues and the mitochondria start to get dysfunctional, they start to die off, and then you start having a harder and harder time actually processing your foods and making testosterone and making female sex hormones and making thyroid and making all this stuff that you need, right? So, and you see it when people diet for a long time, all their hormones crash. That's a completely normal, natural thing, especially if you're doing it to the point where you're getting to a natural level of leanness, that is expected. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, okay, a really, really good synopsis of everything going on there how do they know whether they spending too much time in the other than a general look you probably are