How-Elite-Gymnasts-Regulate-Their-Emotions.txt

How Elite Gymnasts Regulate Their Emotions
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All right. So, in this video, I just want to riff on emotional regulation. I was a competitive gymnast for 16 years, and I spent 10 years competing at the national level. Gymnastics is a really interesting sport because you need to have an incredible amount of control. Messing up is a huge deal. Like if you miss a shot in basketball or you miss a pass in soccer, yes, there are consequences. But when you mess up in gymnastics and you miss the bar, a steel bar is coming into your face or you're flying onto the ground in an awkward angle. So regulating yourself physiologically, emotionally is really important. 

And so this video is going to be super helpful for you whether or not you are preparing for some kind of big pitch or presentation or whether you're just dealing with high conflict situations and you need to bring yourself in so that you can use your rational brain, your prefrontal cortex. This is going to be relevant because what I've learned is that having done competitive athletics and then having gone to Stanford, done YC, worked in Silicon Valley and, you know, the tech scene for 15 plus years, a lot of smart people think that their brain is somehow disconnected from their body like they're just a floating pair of eyeballs, brains and hands and the rest of this is just doing nothing, which is crazy. I mean, it's actually crazy to think about. If you think about it for more than 2 seconds, it's obvious that that's not true. 

And I get it. Now, we have a lot more people who are doing stuff in the health sector, drinking AG1 or doing Blueprint from Brian Johnson. So, people are starting to understand that your body is important, but also that your brain and your body are connected. And I think that emotional regulation, physiological regulation is one of the most important skills, most highly underrated skills you can have because no one can stop you. If you're on tilt, if you're crashing out and you're starting to say stuff or do stuff or make these decisions, no one knows. There's not a sign on top of your head that says like, "I'm not okay anymore. I'm being flooded out of control." That doesn't exist. And so you can do a lot of damage to yourself, to other people around you, to your company if you can't dial it in and actually retain your rational control when it matters.

So let's go over the basics. The basics are you need to sleep enough, you need to eat well, and stay hydrated. That seems so obvious, but I think with the 996 attitude, with the let's go hard, let's, you know, stay up late and get things done or let's get up even super early in the morning if that's not really your rhythm. All of those things affect you. You know, sleep is a place for memory consolidation. It's clearing out plaque and all kinds of like things that live inside your brain. It's sort of like when your brain does its like trash recycling for lack of a better word. And if you don't get enough sleep, you're just not going to have that experience. Like it becomes harder and harder to regulate yourself emotionally if you're not getting enough sleep. 

Same with eating. We all know the term hangry. Snickers has this whole commercial. You're not yourself when you're hungry. Why did they make that commercial? Because it's universally understood that you become a totally different kind of person when you haven't had enough food to eat. So you know, actually fueling your body with good things is a really important long-term thing. 

And then of course, exercise, movement, those are things that are going to keep your body sort of healthy. It's going to actually give you good experience going through especially if you do high-intensity exercise like I'm not saying you have to go and become a CrossFit fanatic, but if you are able to do some sprint work or able to do some mix in a little bit of high-intensity like not just yoga, not just sort of going for walks or you know easy bike rides, but like working in some intense activity is really powerful because you teach your body that like you can be in this highly activated state, your heart rate's really high and you can kind of bring it back down and you can also I think practice being more mentally in control even when your body is physiologically flooded, which is you know its own skill, its own thing that you have to practice doing. 

But those are all sort of like baseline things, things that take time to do. You're not going to just feel better tomorrow if you work out today, right? Like this is a long-term investment. So, what are you going to do if you feel like you are, you know, getting ready for something and you're getting kind of sweaty palms or you're just like not able to sit still or your mind is racing?

Breathing. I know there's a lot of conversation about breath work these days. It doesn't have to be complicated. Whether you want to do, you know, box breathing, four count, or you do the five, six, seven, whatever. It doesn't, the count doesn't really matter. It's just about the idea that when you take a deep breath and then breathe out and like kind of use your diaphragm, your abs when you're blowing it out, it actually activates a nerve in your body called the vagus nerve which kind of triggers your parasympathetic nervous system which is the opposite. So one is like fight or flight. That's sympathetic nervous system. That's adrenaline and cortisol. And then parasympathetic is rest and digest. It is sort of vasodilation. You know it is like you are in a safe place. The deep breathing does that. 

You know I the thing I always remember is that you know when you when you do gymnastics there are times where you are you crash and you hurt yourself and you know you're just like on the floor and you know I remember being a kid just being on the floor and you like you want to cry. You're like shouting out. You're like, "Ah," you know, you're grabbing your knee or you're grabbing your neck or you're just like laying there and or maybe you get the wind knocked out of you and you're just like and somewhere someone a coach will yell out "breathe." I know this is not the same thing as dealing with most of the day-to-day life of being a founder, but that idea of taking a deep breath, breathing through the pain, that's what brings you back under control. So, no matter what, when you feel like you're losing control, slow down. Slow down and you will feel more calm. Okay. So breathing, do not forget breathing. If you get one thing from this video it is breathing. 

Another thing you can do if you are taking a break and is what's called progressive muscle relaxation. So you lean you can do this in a chair. I mean it's probably easiest to do sitting down. You close your eyes, you breathe and then you kind of imagine relaxing each part of your body. It can help to flex. So you can start with your right leg. You can stick your right leg up and like flex really hard, pull it back, kind of like squeeze all the muscles here and then relax cuz you'll get tired. You know, you'll feel some lactic acid and then it kind of fades out. And you do it over here. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. And then you let it go. And then you like do your abs, do your arm, your fist, fist, face like it feels maybe a little silly, but it is not silly at all. It is not dumb if it is going to put your brain in the right place because it is when you are activated that you are going to be super dumb. You're going to be super dumb. 

And so progressive muscle relaxation, this is like a physiological thing. It is forcing the adrenaline to go somewhere. Forcing the blood to go somewhere to do something. Your body is primed to go do something. So if you don't go for a walk, if you don't go for a run, if you don't, you know, do some jumping jacks, at least do this sort of muscle relaxation that kind of tells your body like, "Okay, we did something. We did something and now we can calm the fuck down." So that's another technique. 

Music is another one. Music is so stupidly powerful, right? You put your headphones in. Ideally, you have noise cancelling headphones. You see every athlete before a game, they all have headphones. They all are listening to music and they're listening to different kinds of music, right? When you are trying to use music to regulate, you want to be listening to music that you are very familiar with, music that you know by heart, that is like not cognitively challenging. This is not the time to do your Spotify discover weekly playlist. This is about the stuff that you know you go back to again and again that you feel familiar with. You feel happy. You feel relaxed, you feel calm, you just feel joyous, uplifting, upbeat. Just not like too hardcore, not too action-packed because you know then you're going back to the sympathetic nervous system activation, right? We're we are here to hear something that you know that you feel familiar with that makes you feel good. Safety. We're feeling safe. We're okay. We're in a good safe place, right? Close your eyes, you know, put the headphones on, you know, just listen to the song and just try to feel your body, feel the music, right? Just get into it. 

That's the other thing, like your mind is racing, your thoughts are all over the place. Get into one specific thing and ideally something that's not even using your visual cortex, right? You close your eyes, all of a sudden all that visual stimulation, all those sensations are gone and you just got your physical body and the music. So those are some great techniques. You know, take care of your body, move your body, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, music, progressive muscle relaxation. 

This is a biological transition. You have to understand that we are first and foremost biological emotional limbic brain creatures. And our prefrontal cortex. All that thinking, all that magical stuff that invented every single freaking thing in our society came at the very end of our evolutionary pathway. It is the final step. And so all the other stuff is much more well regulated. It's been around for a really long time. And we have to work with that. That is the underlying you know operating system fundamental technical architecture that all of our you know fancy stuff is sitting on top of. So when this stops working you have to go back and address things at the root level and that is in your physical body. The healthier you can be, the more you can regulate your breathing. Understand when your heart rate gets too high. Understand how to downregulate, how to calm down, relax. The sooner you can get back to having great ideas, having great conversations, persuading people, connecting with people, and doing everything you need to do for your business.