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“There’s nothing more important to your performance than sleep, and I don’t care how you measure your performance….nothing breaks you faster than sleep deprivation”

– Dr. Parsley, former Navy Seal

 

Neuro Nidra to Rescue Sleep 

Not sleeping well isn’t just painful, it’s damaging and frustrating. Before having our kid, I was a sleeping machine. Then, being on call for a tiny human night after night disrupted my sleep for years. I became a different person; snappy, exhausted, and overwhelmed by simple things. We need sleep; not just to feel good but to function and live well. According to Doc Parsley, Naval Special Warfare’s expert on Sleep Medicine, sleeping 6 instead of 8 hours each night for 11 nights in a row has the same effect as being awake for 24 hours straight, and cognitively compares to having a blood alcohol level of .08-.1. No one wants to live impaired and unable to let go into the gift of sleep. 

I recovered by diving into Yoga Nidra, and it remains my secret weapon against insomnia. Nidra is a passive, guided practice that brings your brain and body into slow-wave states of conscious sleep and deep repair. “Neuro Nidra” is my fusion of this yogic practice with principles from modern neuroscience. Now I help people practice Neuro Nidra who struggle due to shift work, caregiving, unresolved trauma or nervous system dysregulation. It’s easier than meditation, and you can practice it without ever rolling out a yoga mat or saying “OM….”. 

Nidra in the Tree of Yoga

Yoga has several different areas of study beyond the typically-thought of poses, breathwork, or meditation. You don’t have to dedicate your life to yoga’s path to use any of these tools. They have been handed down by human beings studying human nature for melinia into practices that can help anyone.

Yoga emerged thousands of years ago when the indigenous Rishi of India were studying how human beings can optimize and heal through skills that work with nature. Patanjali captured the ‘sutras’, or threads of knowledge, from the Rishi into writing sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 4rth century CE. He outlined eight components of progressive study that are rooted in principles, not dogma or religion. Yoga is designed to be tested and to evolve with our ongoing engagement. B.K.S. Iyengar famously helped bring yoga to the West and described these eight limbs in his book, The Tree of Yoga. Using the tree analogy, we can look at where Nidra fits in a helpful progression of skills.

The roots and trunk of the tree are universal principles you can study about human nature in relationship to community and self. These are called the “Yama” and “Niyama” and include ten principles such as non-grasping, benevolent truth, moderation, self-discipline, and surrender. Again, there is no religious dogma here, these principles are meant for personal inquiry. Try stealing, lying, and bingeing and see how that goes. We get to define how these principles fit in our real lives through trial and error.

The branches on the tree are the bendy, twisty shapes of yoga poses called “Asanas”. The leaves are naturally the breath, or “Pranayama”. The bark represents “Pratyahara”; the practice of withdrawing the senses to develop control over reactivity. The sap running from the roots through to the whole tree represents “Dharana” which means concentration; the ability to harness sustained connection through the entire body. The flower of the tree is “Dhyana” or meditation, and the fruit from all of these efforts is “Samadhi”; the end of our illusion of separation from nature; enlightenment.

If you’ve tried meditation to help with sleeplessness and found it difficult without clear rewards, that’s because meditation is hard. The Tree of Yoga shows us why; values, movement, breathwork, sensory control and concentration skills were designed to come before meditation. For example, if you don’t move much or breathe well, during meditation the body will be in pain and the mind will be distracted. We can’t force a flower to bloom. We can create the right conditions to support it, and watch it unfold.

All parts of the tree are connected. Breathwork, for example, can be used anytime. It can be the single point of focus to help enter meditation, but a rich pranayama practice involves complex patterns of breathing that can be harmful if someone has not first learned how to read the body’s cues and work skillfully with the nervous system. We can gain these skills from any conscious movement practice that engages nasal breathing. Healthy green leaves grow when the branches can spread in many directions with ease, strength, and flexibility. 

Yoga Nidra is in the bark, Pratyahara. These practices protect us from sensory overload and train us to stop seeking stimulus for distraction or pleasure. Think of Nidra and the bark as an insulated container inside of which you become attuned to your inner needs before reacting to the sensations outside of you. Healthy, thick bark develops with the branches and leaves, before the flower of meditation. In a modern life designed to over-stimulate the senses, Nidra is a gift. This doesn’t mean you can’t skip ahead to meditation, it just means Nidra is a lot easier. Having a breathwork and movement practice will make it easier still. All you have to do is protect your space from the outside world, lie down and listen to guided instruction for 20 minutes to reap Nidra’s rewards.

Why Does Nidra Work?

In Nidra, the body rests in stillness flat on your back like a kid in the grass staring at clouds. The brain is given something to do in a guided rotation of consciousness through parts of the body. This tricks the mind from spinning in thoughts that keep you restless.

By mapping parts of the body in 1 to 3-second cues, the brain drops into alpha, theta, and delta wave-dominance. These slow, parasympathetic brain waves are the opposite of the thinking and doing states that fester in our daily lives. Slow oscillations allow for dreaming, memory, intuition, and cognitive repair. Being semi-awake is part of why it trains us to deactivate stress in general. This is not real sleep. When asleep, you aren’t conscious of your rest. In the Nidra state, you fade in and out of perceptive hearing, but you are aware. This means these states can become part of your waking consciousness. For sleep issues, this is critical to passively train states of consciousness associated with allowing sleep to happen. Because you’re semi-conscious during Nidra, you learn the sensations associated with replenishing systems, restoring vital energy, and disrupting the vicious circle of sleepless anxiety.

Beyond the brain, the body learns in Nidra how to sense and be without doing. This is super important. Why? Because most of the body’s learning and activities during daily life involve movement, pain, or disconnection as the feedback mechanisms. We workout, work, tick through tasks, eat, and rest by consuming media on screens and books. We try to meditate and feel stuck. We have no bark or protection, and feel exposed, raw, and drained. We fall asleep exhausted and wake up hypervigilant with stress hormones cycling through our blood. If you have high sympathetic tone or low arousal conditions, over time parts of the body store non-specific tension and sensory amnesia as a protective mechanism. This means you carry tension or disconnection in the body all day, and a vicious cycle of restless detachment and reactivity ensues.

In Nidra we layer up with bark-like protection from interruptions and passively cultivate awareness of our physical body without sensory input from movement or touch. Tension melts, and areas cut off from consciousness are remapped and reconnected without external sensory input. With practice, Nidra can disrupt unwanted patterns of physical tension, compensation or sensory-motor amnesia. Basically, you remember how to be physically aware without stress activation to embody your rested ready state more fully. This means when it’s time to sleep at night, you haven’t been repeating physical stress patterns as much, and can allow yourself to reset and rest.

How Can You Start?

If all you do is set up a space where you manage for all potential interruptions and push play on a yoga nidra download, you are in business. You don’t have to go to a special training, have a yoga practice or find religion. 

To rescue lost sleep, yogic sages have said that 20 minutes of Nidra can mimic 2-4 hours of deep sleep. The recipe for that in modern research shows that slow wave sleep states can require up to 4 hours to cycle into 20 minutes of slow wave sleep when you are sleep deprived. This is because you repay debts of the lighter sleep stages of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) first when you are depleted at the expense of deeper slow wave or Delta sleep. REM sleep is prioritized to process emotions and memory. Delta deep sleep takes time to access and happen after functional maintenance is covered. With practice, 20 minutes of Nidra can help you regain the benefits of deep sleep regardless of how many hours you logged the night before. 

It has been shown that regular Nidra practitioners access Delta dominance in the brain, usually associated with super slow wave sleep, during wakefulness. This means a human being can be completely alert and functioning while allowing deep repairs to take place on the entire body. Rested readiness at its finest.

Use Nidra anytime of day, including morning, to balance your system and recover lost sleep. Use it if you wake up in the middle of the night and don’t know how to fall back asleep. Most people I work with who struggle with chronic insomnia or dysregulation during the day find that three, 20-minute sessions of Neuro Nidra* each week restores them to the kind of energy they forgot was possible.

 

*To learn more about the guidance and stages of practice, check out our Neuro Nidra webinars and downloads. Emily Hightower created Neuro Nidra to infuse ancient yogic knowledge with modern neuroplasticity principles. She can help you implement the practice for deep recovery to elevate your game.

 

1 Swami Satyananda Saraswati  2009 reprint of Yoga Nidra

The edge of your yard is marked by a fence; an imaginary line drawn by humans. Birds, foxes, deer, squirrels, bees, and weeds have no sense of these boundaries.  They come and go based on less-visible edges drawn needs around food, safety, competition and reproduction. These realities of survival shape their boundaries every day.  Contrary to common perception we are Nature and Mother Nature doesn’t work in straight lines. Like the natural boundaries of plants and animals your stress-tolerance is like a territory in the wild. The boundaries shrink or expand based on how you  manage the survival physiology that drives much of your behavior. 

A term coined by Dr. Daniel Seigel, Window of Tolerance defines the terrain where you can manage stress well. The upper boundary marks your threat response in the sympathetic nervous system and the lower edge marks your rest and repair response in the parasympathetic nervous system.

When you’re living in the window, you experience a range of conditions in the nervous systems including focused arousal, flow state, rested readiness, learning, passive attention, sex, deep sleep, and recovery. Ideally,  this range is as broad as possible. This means you can recover deeply and respond well to challenges without losing access to the resources of your higher brain.

The higher the upper edge, the more emotional and physical strain we can handle without anxiety. The lower the bottom edge, the richer our garden of resources for creating and repairing systems and the harder it is for us to stagnate in depression. It’s common to go over the edges into the margins of dysregulation. With practice, you can read your state using cues in your physiology to navigate the edge, and widen our territory. You can learn from the edge, and adapt to reality. If you become complacent your territory shrinks.

 

The inability to read your body’s cues at the upper edge of the window is like an elk who can’t smell a predator in the wind making it vulnerable to the coming threat. If instead you use your senses, you’ll notice the danger, and move to better territory. This is done by regulating breath and body mechanics to migrate back to tolerance. Miss the cues and get eaten by panic. If you become chronic in avoiding our physiology at this edge, you narrow your territory and become hypervigilant even when no danger is present. You see wolves everywhere and even the most luscious grass is unsatisfying. 

Ignore your physiology in the lower margins of our window of tolerance and important cues about depletion and depression will be missed.This is similar to how birds tend to their nests. Expand this lower edge by recovering intentionally to nourish our stores. Deactivating practices like deep sleep, yoga nidra, meditation, restorative breath, or forest bathing immerse you in supple, intelligent states of repair. This widens your tolerance to stress by helping you stash away resources in our territory for future use.

Checking out isn’t an option. All of nature lives by these simple rules; attend to the body’s needs, engage with survival and recovery to make yourself resilient and capable. If we ignore the edges by rarely exercising or not nourishing our bodies well, the edges of our window of tolerance start creeping inward. Our range of responsiveness narrows to stress and opportunity. 

If you are reading and regulating state well, you know when to recover and when to add strain. You’re likely sleeping deeply, breathing intentionally to create regulated and efficient energy systems, eating real food, moving and recovering well, and your territory is vast. A sharp word, spilled coffee, and unexpected opportunities are easy to manage. Ignore the cues and disengage with your own physiology, and you will pay the price set by Nature’s law.

Chronic stress is really chronic mismanaged physiology, and the lifestyle diseases that prosper in humanity are the result. Culturally, we are being devoured by narrow windows of stress tolerance; like birds without a nest, waiting for someone to bring us a worm. Increased vulnerability to stress is not because the stress is too much. We become vulnerable when we forget to claim the territory of tolerance in our physiology.

Stress is everywhere. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. What you do, or don’t do, in response to stress is the key. It is unmanaged stress where the issue lies.

By nature, our body is designed to survive and to do so in the most efficient way possible; to use the least amount of energy. If our body is not energy efficient, in times of low energy availability, there will be a problem.

Exercise includes all forms of physical activity from going for a brisk walk to a structured training session and even manual labor. There is no denying that exercise is a stressor. It is stress that triggers the body to adapt. Your body’s primary function is survival. By stressing the tissues, organs, and systems of the body through exercise, they adapt by getting stronger and more efficient so the next time they are stressed they can respond in the most energy-efficient manner possible.

However, dose matters. Too little stress and your body won’t get sufficient stimulus to adapt positively. Too much stress and your body will adapt in ways that may not be of your choosing. Your heart may pump faster as a result of chronically elevated stress hormones and your blood vessels constrict causing blood pressure to rise. Respiration may increase causing respiratory alkalosis and your liver may excrete more glucose to prepare you for the flight or fight that never comes putting you at risk of Type 2 Diabetes.

Once upon a time, stress was associated with physical activity. Humans worked the land and traveled the plains, kids ran around playing hide and seek or play fighting and we occasionally found ourselves facing off or running from predators or enemies.

We may have experienced high levels of acute stress and the resultant fight, flight, freeze responses, but importantly, we also experienced physical activity along with it. All of these activities involved an elevation of our heart rate, increased respiration, the release of stress hormones like adrenaline, cortisol and norepinephrine and afterward, a release of those feel-good endorphins. 

Importantly, our bodies got to express movement and physical exertion associated with the stress response.

Today, we experience the same physiological responses; elevated heart rate, increased respiratory rate and the release of stress hormones, often without physical activity. Instead of playing hide and seek, we play video games or scroll social media. Instead of working the land, we sit at a desk under fluorescent lights. Instead of facing off with predators, we engage in Twitter arguments.

We get the same physiological fight, flight, freeze responses as our ancestors, but critically without the same expression of movement and physical exertion.   

There are consequences to this lack of physical activity; disease, dysregulation and physical and mental ill-health.

Personally, if I sit in a classroom or office all day, by the evening I am restless, irritated and I feel mentally exhausted. Do that for a few days and I feel mentally and physically spent. I will crave physical activity and movement. It’s in my nature as it is in yours.

When you exercise, you get the all-important physical activity your body needs to help it process and deal with the physiological responses to stress; the things nature gave you to protect and serve you on the understanding that you would continue to maintain a high level of physical activity.

Generally speaking, we no longer move as much as we once did, so we have to rely on more formal methods of physical activity like structured training sessions as well as being mindful of getting as much regular daily movement as we can.

The SH//FT General Human Preparedness (GHP) program is one way you can use exercise to stave off the negative effects of stress from work, relationships…. life.

The GHP program is specifically designed to give you just the right dose of stress to stimulate the adaptations you need to develop and maintain a solid foundation of fitness; to be a generally prepared human.

While structured training sessions are a fantastic way to manage stress, that’s not all there is. Brisk walking is an often overlooked simple form of exercise that can have a dramatic effect on how you think and feel.

The physiological benefits are many. Brisk walking can,

• -improve cardiac health.
• -prevent weight gain.
• -reduce risk of cancer and chronic disease.
• -improve endurance, circulation, and posture.

 

Psychologically, brisk walks can,

• -increase creative output.
• -boost joviality, vigor, attentiveness and self-confidence.
• -reduce rumination of negative experiences.
• -improve memory and prevent the deterioration of brain tissue as we age.
• -relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression.

 

Brisk walking has the added bonus of getting you outside and off your butt, along with opening up your field of view and getting you into natural light; proven ways of improving relaxation and regulating your circadian rhythm.

Some of the most successful and famous people in the world were known to take long walks at least once a day. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and polymath conducted his lectures while walking the grounds of his school in Athens. Charles Darwin even had a gravel track installed in the grounds of his home. He would walk laps of the track, the number of which depending on the difficulty of the problem he was grappling with.

“Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

 

Whether your exercise takes the form of a session of Yoga, slamming iron or simply going for a brisk walk it is essential to your health and well-being. You will experience stress whether you like it or not and one of the keys to managing your stress is regular exercise. Get your heart pumping, breathe a bit more and move your body each and every day in order to manage the stress of modern life. It’s in your nature.

The ideal is unnatural naturalness or natural unnaturalness. I mean it is a combination of both.
I mean here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony.
Not if you have one to the extreme, you’ll be very unscientific.
If you have another to the extreme, you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man
No longer a human being.
It is a successful combination of both.

-Bruce Lee

The greatest superpower and the greatest weakness of humankind is our tremendous capacity for adaptation. Humans can get accustomed to and find a workaround for damn near anything. Our ability to accept the normalcy of any situation and fall into a rhythm of habit and automaticity is a double-edged blade that if not carefully wielded mostly cuts ourselves.

On one hand, our capacity for auto-coping can be a positive trait. Could you imagine every time you had to make some slight change in behavior you had to have an accompanying conscious thought? Not very energy efficient. On the other hand, so much of we do is without direct input from our conscious mind that it can be quite easy to arrive at “how did I get here?” moments. This is a fundamental disconnection from the concept of action and consequence.

For the last 20 years as a manual therapist, coach, and teacher it has been remarkable to bear close witness to the incredible power of human adaptability. I have worked with elite military personnel who had so much compounding movement dysfunction it was a wonder how they could operate at such a high level and accomplish missions with the highest of stakes. On the other end of the spectrum and much earlier in my career, I performed therapy with obese clients with such an array of metabolic problems that I wondered how they even walked into my office that day. It’s truly amazing what the human body can get accustomed to and keep moving forward.

Over the course of my career then I began to take notice of a simple and indelible fact; Nature finds a way. That the solving of problems to propagate forward motion (literally and figuratively) is what the entire system is designed to do and most of that adaptation happens without our conscious knowledge or input. Our physiology is constantly shifting in accordance with the messages we send; consciously or not. Even if you didn’t do that thing “on-purpose” every choice, every behavior compounds towards an adaptive tipping point that can suddenly seem as though, “it came out of nowhere”. There is in effect, no NOT ADAPTING.

Whether or not an adaptation or a set of adaptations is positive is simply a matter of temporality. All adaptations have their origin in one simple idea — a problem needs to be solved. I suppose it’s possible to say that an adaptation is largely positive if it solves the problem at hand but then the question becomes, how many more problems does it create as a consequence? Coping mechanisms, by example, are psychological adaptations that help protect us from psychological stress — some are good, like the development of a sense of humor, and some not so good like compulsive behavioral disorders. What’s the difference? The number of additional problems that are potentially created downstream.

So then, it behooves us to develop an awareness of the direction our adaptive “choices” are taking us and to answer the question — is this where I want to go? It’s like navigating a ship with a heading, there are checkpoints charted along the way to be sure the ship stays on course. The principle of adaptive checkpoints is applicable to nearly infinite layers of the human experience but easiest to see and feel in the realm of the physical. In human performance, a vast array of metrics are used to determine these checkpoints; on the performance side force, speed, acceleration, and agility are used and on the “recovery” side resting heart rate and heart rate variability let athletes and coaches know if they are on the right track.

While these checkpoints can be incredibly helpful it’s important that we do not get stuck on the checkpoints and the droll minutia of data analytics. We currently live in a cultural climate where we can measure more than ever before. The upside to this kind of data collection is that we can quantify if we are making meaningful changes. Conversely, though it’s a serious mistake to think that our means of data collection are free from flaw and the failure to realize that any data, however accurate the collection itself — still has to pass through the psychological filter of the human reading it. It is very important to realize that “science” is a process of investigation, discovery, and validation and does not represent the whole TRUTH as it were. Only Mother Nature and Father Time hold all of the cards.

Over time the combination of internal feel and external checkpoints can flow together into what is commonly referred to as — awareness. Learning to broadly apply this understanding, I would argue, is the deepest of practices the end of which is seen only in death. “Feel” is in effect, the sum of all sensory input flowing through our filter. Learning to feel deeply is important if we are to contribute to the trajectory of our adaptation(s) but not without some data to corroborate our internal narrative. The subjective and objective dance of adaptability metrics creates an elegant system of checks and balances that can help us achieve more significant levels of awareness into how our own behavior shapes our reality.

Adaptation is not a law of Nature it is THE law of Nature. The question here is what is your level of participation in your own adaptation? Living a life of conscious adaptation means actively participating in the trajectory of your own development, but not so much that you become “a mechanical man, no longer a human being.” Instead, learning to ride the crests and troughs can yield a beautifully imperfect state of natural unnaturalness.

Disclaimer; certain conditions require medications, talk to a doctor about your options.

Symptoms are uncomfortable by nature, designed to make us pay attention. They are signals from an intelligent, self-sensing, self-healing body and learning to listen can help us truly heal and perform better than ever.

Let’s say you eat a berry that causes you to vomit. Rather than learn not to pick that kind again, the Western approach tends to treat symptoms as problems to be fixed or talked through. If we could, we would create a pill that makes us able to eat the berry without vomiting rather than live without something we feel entitled to enjoy, or we would go to talk therapy to understand what it is about our past that makes us unable to enjoy the berry. In the end, the fruit is still toxic, and we should probably pick something else.

Learning to trust that those symptoms are signals helps us detect problems earlier, heal the root cause of illness and trauma, and make leaps in our performance. If we suppress these internal messages, we can exacerbate underlying problems and narrow our options over time. 

 

Medicating Our Way Out

Anxiety is a natural response to stress. This deep psycho-emotional mechanism is a signal that our stress response is firing and should be listened to. The medications prescribed for anxiety can keep us from flipping our lid, but don’t teach us the skill of calming ourselves down. 

Medication can fail, cause side effects, and dull our senses. We start to miss important cues and can’t feel the edge until we’re right on it. When we use the voluntary breath to calm anxiety, we gain situational awareness and agency over our bodies. 

Breath research shows voluntary breath to be our most effective intrinsic tool to master the nervous system. With breath, we rewire our brains to better assess the needs creating the symptom, and solve problems creatively. With practice, we become in tune with our bodies to know where we are on a spectrum of arousal, gaining abilities to navigate our state before anxiety can grip us. 

Our collective anxiety is stemming from issues we can solve if we regulate through it. Imagine what we can do if we face these problems as self-regulated masters of our bodies? We can be calm, smart, creative, active participants in changing our healthcare, policing practices, and economic options. But not if we’re numbing and narrowing options in reactivity to it all. 

 

Talk Therapy

Psychology is great for excavating material from the past and understanding things about ourselves and the world. Talk therapy alone, however, can leave us stuck in the story, justifying our discomfort. We analyze ourselves for having symptoms and miss the process of healing in the body, where the symptoms live. 

The body holds our memories of suffering and can be an uncomfortable place. When traumatic memories surface, the body recalls how it survived and goes into fight, flight, or freeze reactions. The past is suddenly present. This makes associated places, smells, and situations difficult to move through in daily life. When the survival mechanisms start their process, we tend to stay reactive and run from the body to the mind to talk about it. We’ve practiced rationalizing the pain. That’s the moment to stop fondling the analysis and breathe into the body’s reactions. We can participate with physiology through breath and embodied practices to regulate state. This trains the body to restore resources when activated by the trauma. Instead of repeated reactivation and self-judgment, we carve empowered associations with the triggers. 

Getting the brain reconnected to the body in this way allows us to learn from experiences without feeling victimized by them. We can bring in the mind’s analysis once we’ve resolved the physiology in the moment. Through this approach, we shift from asking ‘why did this happen to me’ to ‘how did this happen for me?’

 

Trusting the Signals

Rather than dull the symptoms, sensitivity should be the goal. The more we can engage with our internal cues, the more we can fine-tune the instrument of the body. Rather than a numbing dependency, the side effects of sensitive responsiveness to signals are presence, learning, and adaptation. With practice, you create lifestyle changes to meet your unique needs. You build confidence and trust in the body that helps widen your tolerance to stress.

We are self-sensing and have bodies that heal, minds that recover. Healing requires active participation with techniques that guide us into the body, not away from it. The moment a symptom disrupts life, we can breathe. Take ownership of the body and agency over options. Pain is not the same as suffering, and the messages inside the pain can guide us toward actions that will help us feel better and optimize our lives. 

 

*https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-use-therapeutic.htm

**https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/alcohol-sales-on-the-rise-during-covid-19-pandemic/ar-BB125vA3

Freedom exists in those willing to understand it. 

 

Currently we struggle deeply to witness our history, and tell it through the lens of all those who experienced it. This creates a separation of not only facts but an inability to understand empathy. Empathy is humanity’s greatest solution, and even the greatest war fighters and generals need to understand empathy or they risk losing the ability to understand their enemies and potentially, their next moves. We avoid the painful facts of our history for its counterpart, suffering. 

Modern life has created some rather fantastic ways of being whatever it is we may want to though! With an internet filled with more education and research than any one person could ever digest in a lifetime. A social experience that provides an opportunity to share and listen to anyone, anywhere in the world. The ability to move to the opposite side of the planet and still stay connected to our families. We can create and shop for any sort of food choice we may have in most parts of the world. Modern medicines that have wiped out plagues, and disease that ravaged society. Advances that could not have even been dreamed of. So why do we struggle so hard? 

One of the most detailed accounts of American History was done on what is truly the last frontier, The Great Plains, many of the Indigenous Peoples that lived there, and the culture of The Comanche Indians. This was broken down even further to the final stand of its half breed leader Quannah Parker; the son of Cynthia Ann Parker. The Comanche (Quahadi) were the last of what is considered one of the greatest warrior cultures this continent or planet had to offer. The importance here is in an almost impossibility to living that was done on purpose by a culture of human beings. This is all documented with one of the most detailed bibliographies I’ve ever seen in S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. 

The Comanche have never been matched in terms of ability on a horse, their ability to hunt off horseback, fight off that horse and they were still brutally good on foot. They were thriving in a world that demanded survival, and although they are considered as barbaric in some respects as the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, what they were capable of in covering ground, fighting, environmental exposure, and ability to thrive in a world European settlers had no idea how to navigate was unheard of and feared. They would be the final solution in the genocide of The Native American people. A hard fact we struggle to teach today by breezing through our poor decisions as a nation. Many of the ideas and ways of life could easily have been learned about and progressed on for environmental issues, and even health, something that is now showing us lessons we needed to learn. 

Our current educational system is one that totes intellectualism as the foundation of a society that grows more bankrupt by the second in not only it’s own financial debt, but its denial of cultural dismissal. Men and women immortalized for monopolizing a system we become indebted to through consumerism and our own misunderstanding of responsibility. We have a system that has weight on a medical establishment that has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with the business of addiction. Well meaning people jump into Medical school ready to help people suffering, and are beaten to a pulp by the business of medicine. We’ve sacrificed our health, as comfort and convenience erode at our ability to understand basic physiological problems that show up in our inability to simply sleep without a narcotic or alcohol, or basic human movement. Things as simple as going for a daily walk to improve basic aerobic function can’t be met. Our desire for now, and more has exceeded our ability to listen and learn. 

Education should never stop, and it should not be met with restrictions as to which direction we choose to go. The idea of a certificate meaning I’m creditable, is laughable, and yet we all get in line. Our education is one of specialization and laudation of institutions. Human beings are generalists, and damn good ones. The ability to critically think without the ability to move or function at our highest potential is the equivalent of a gun with no ammunition. It certainly is scary, and shouldn’t be pointed at anyone, but ultimately worthless, and all bark. Not to mention those of us who don’t know that it is an empty gun becoming obedient to the system and person yielding that unloaded weapon. 

Today the lack of skin-in-the-game for the intellectual is astounding. We hold professionals on pedestals that they couldn’t lift themselves on, nor survive a single day of hard labor at the bottom floor of their own industries on, and yet they suffer as many do today from diseases that are the byproduct of simply not moving enough, and sticking too much in their mouths; anxiety, depression, obesity, metabolic disorders all directly related to the inactivity of the modern “genius”. We are a culture of save me, and zero responsibility, and a little more than 100 years ago most people refused to let anything or anyone “cure them” of their way of life. 

 

 

SH//FT was born out of decades of experience in the field of human performance.  While in search of best practices in training and recovery we found that at a fundamental level people are disconnected from the forces of nature that determine the outcomes they desire.  Over the years our approach evolved from focusing on athletic performance alone to the broader process that applies to the evolution of anybody looking to improve their own quality of life; the process of stress and adaptation.  

If we ultimately wish to harness this process it is essential that we become connected to the way we experience stress and whether or not we benefit from our behavior as a result.  At SH//FT our purpose is to help you uncover the tools given to you by Nature and take the reigns of our ability to make stress into our superpower.

 

 

This powerful quote from Viktor Frankl inspired the central piece of our logo.  The // in the SH//FT represents the space between stimulus and response.  The place where we can choose how stress affects us.  Where we can choose how to take part in our own evolution. 

Our progression through CrossFit Endurance, then PowerSpeedEndurance and the Art of Breath has led to the culmination of a lifestyle and a philosophy that transcends sport and performance.

In the realm of human performance cycles of stress and outcome are more obvious and arrive faster.  This presents a unique opportunity to see how a large variety of people and more importantly patterns shift our reactions to the stressors we encounter; planned or not.

Over time our experience has been distilled to bring a unified approach to the optimized human and help you on your journey to be the best you possible.  Underlying the best practices in this realm was the principle of connection.  

At SH//FT our purpose is to help you discover how you connect to your own internal resources and leverage them to enhance performance and live a healthier and happier life.

We’re all at home a lot more than we were before. Don’t lose your sanity!

1) Go for a walk, run, ride, swim in the ocean/lake/river or a hike. If you’re not self-isolated, in lockdown/quarantine, there are plenty of things you can do outside that don’t involve close personal contact. Plus, sun and fresh air are essential for your health.

2) Don’t sit on the couch. Sit on the floor. I guarantee you’ll move more.

3) Make yourself a standing desk. Use boxes, books, stacks of toilet paper…. whatever you have available to get what you’re working on to a useable height.

4) Fill a back pack or duffle bag with anything heavy, books, bricks, bottles of water, small children (jokes! 🤣). Lift said back pack/duffle bag filled with heavy things. Take it from the ground to overhead. Squat it. Lunge with it. Row it. Drag it across the floor. Hold a plank and drag it from side to side. Hold it to your chest then get down and back up again. Move it any which way you can.

5) Move yourself in as many different ways as you can. Try to accumulate 10,000 steps a day. Yes, even if you’re stuck at home. There was a guy in Spain, I think, who completed a Marathon on his balcony! Walk in place while watching TV if you have to. Do squats, burpees, lunges, step ups, push ups, dining table rows, handstands against a wall, door frame pull ups (if you AND it are strong!)… there are many different ways to move yourself. There are no rules. You’re only limited by your imagination. Hit Google, You Tube or the Shift video library for inspo.

6) Do some mobility or stability work. You know the stuff you suck at? The things you’ve been avoiding? Those rehab exercises you should have done? Do them! Now is the perfect time.

7) Your gains won’t disappear overnight. Strength and aerobic efficiency will hang around for quite a while. Power will diminish the quickest over a few weeks, so be sure to include some jumps, hops, change of direction (think, Heidens / Speed Skaters, Shuttle Runs, Dot Drill etc) and throws into your training where possible.

8) Do some Intermittent Hypoxic Training. You know the Pulmonary Warm Ups we do? Use them as a workout. Just add a few more sets. Make up your own. Do some work, exhale, hold, keep working. Recover your breath or simply take X breaths. Rinse and repeat.

9) Do some Static Apnea Tables. Check out the videos here and here that take you through how to set these up. Start with CO2 tables and do those for a minimum of 3x week (preferably everyday, but no more than once per day) for 6-weeks before switching to O2 tables. You can create your own tables using the instructions in the videos or simply use one of the many Apps available. I use one called STAmina.

In times like these it’s very easy to say, “nope, I’m not going to bother.” But staying active is important for your physical AND mental health.

When the Zombies come, are you going to be ready? #jokingnotjoking

I’ve worked from home for quite a few years now. While it definitely has benefits and sure beats the 20-years of shift work I did, it’s not the #laptoplifestyle many think it is.

The most difficult aspects I’ve found are learning how to create a distinction between work and home, and having a routine that enhances productivity.

Here are 10 things I’ve found help me minimize stress and stay productive.

1. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning.
2. Have a morning routine. Mine used to involve a swim at the local pool, a sauna + breath work and a coffee while I journaled and read. Now it’s a beach swim, meditation, read and journal over coffee. Similar but different. If the rules change, or I deem it no longer safe to head to the beach, it will change again.
3. Shower and get dressed – business casual is fine. Pajamas are not. Pants off Friday is a thing.
4. Set and stick to regular work hours.
5. Set up a dedicated workspace (if possible)
6. Use a timer. I use the free version of an App on my laptop called Be Focused. I have it set for 25-min work periods with 5-min breaks. After every 4th work period is a longer, 15-min break. During your break, move. Get outside if possible. Get some sun. A 5-min movement flow is perfect, or go for a walk if that’s an option. We are nature. We need nature. We need movement.
7. Keep your usual meal times.
8. Break for lunch and eat it away from the dedicated workspace you’ve set up.
9. Stay hydrated.
10. Experiment with different exercise times. Find what works best for you. You may have been a before work exerciser, but now you have some flexibility, you may find mid-morning works best for you. N=1. Be the experiment.

This is a follow-on article to “Understanding the Condition of Yourself“.

What do we mean by that? How do we manage our State?

The good news is you’re probably already doing it. At least to a point.

Whenever you get angry or frustrated, and you take a few breaths and talk yourself down, you’re managing your State. Whenever you hit a training session and decide to back the weight off a little so you can maintain technique, you’re managing your State. Whenever you get an early night because you’ve had a hectic day, you’re managing your State.

It’s easy, right?

Unfortunately, not always. As easy as it is to do, it’s just as easy to fall into the trap of failing to pay attention, ignoring the warning signs and instead of choosing our response and managing our state we simply react to what’s going on. We’ve all been there, right?

Recently, my partner and I went to an outdoor festival/concert kind of thing that started on a Sunday afternoon and went until 10pm. Then there was getting out of the venue and a 35 minute drive home. In bed just after 11pm. Not bad.

Problem is, I’m someone who is usually tucked up in bed by 9pm. That’s after doing my pre-bed routine and gradually winding down for sleep.

Unfortunately, my post festival pre-bed routine involved beer, dodgy food and loud music. Needless to say I slept terribly. I still got up at 5am Monday and hit the pool for my regular swim, and sauna. But I was very aware that I needed some recovery time, and I was not going to smash Monday out of the park as far as performance goes.

I kept the swim easy, very low volume and my Sauna was only 10 minutes. Less than half of  what I normally spend in there. I knew my body didn’t need the extra stress. I had a nutrient dense breakfast, drank plenty of water, did some gentle movement flow work around midday and had a short afternoon nap. Then I got an early night.

If I didn’t have the awareness around my state management (AND the lifestyle flexibility) to have a low-stress day I would have found myself come Tuesday having to do some damage control to get my State back to something resembling my normal. Burning the candle at both ends may be ok for a few days, but no one gets a state management free pass.

Fortunately, I have a job and a personal situation that allows for some flexibility in regard to managing my stress. It hasn’t always been that way. Shift work for 20-years, 3 kids under 5, a big mortgage etc. Let’s just say I’ve got some idea of what a lack of lifestyle flexibility is like. I get it.

But, there are still things we can all do to manage our State.

It starts with self-awareness; identifying your weak points and then deliberately practicing how to intercept and choose a response that will help, rather than harm.

Some areas you can delve into that may help.

Breath work

Learning to use your breath as a tool in managing your state is a simple and readily accessible strategy that can have a huge impact. Breath work can be a deep rabbit hole, but it doesn’t have to be. Simply start by bringing an awareness to your breath as you go about your everyday life. Try to breathe through your nose as much as possible. When it comes to training, aim to stay in control of your breath regardless of how intense the session is.

Sleep

There are mountains of research that shows only bad things happen (technical term) when you don’t get sufficient, restorative sleep. Also, when you’re tired, it can be so much harder to choose a helpful response. A pre-bed routine is a must. It can be as short; 5 minutes, or as long; 1-hour plus, as you like. The important thing is that you’re doing something consistently to signal to your body and brain that it’s time to wind down. Anyone who has had kids knows the importance of a pre-bedtime routine when it comes to babies and toddlers. We adults are no different in that regard.

Nutrition

The things we consume give our body messages; release this hormone, suppress this one. Send help to this area… When we consume nutrient-dense foods in quantities that support our energy needs, we are positively managing our state. When we grab whatever we can find to stuff in our pie-hole we are reacting to primitive signals that may negatively impact our state. Most people could do with eating more vegetables. That’s probably a good place to start; at least 5 serves a day.

Exercise/Movement

We are designed to move. If you’ve ever done a long-haul flight you’ll know the feeling of getting off the plane at the other end feeling pretty damn rough. It’s not just the jet-lag or the sucking in of recycled farts. It has a lot to do with sitting on your butt for so long. Sit in an artificially lit office for 8-hours a day? Not much different. There’s a reason you feel exhausted after a day at work, even though you’ve hardly moved. All that sitting around negatively impacts on our state. Exercise and movement are the antidotes. Do it outside for extra credit points.

Connection/Relationships

We are pack animals. We’re not designed to be by ourselves. Mess up in days gone by and a common punishment was exclusion from the tribe. We thrive on human connection. That can come from family, work colleagues, the people you chat to at the gym, a community group, a sporting team… what it’s not is followers on social media. Sitting at home scrolling or hitting like is not connection. While social media can help us to connect with others, the connection really occurs when we’re spending time with people, having great conversations, sharing our thoughts. These days, this can be one of the more difficult components of state management. It’s easy to disengage and spend our lives disconnected. I know it’s a tough one for me.

Meaning/Purpose

Without getting too esoteric or woo-woo, when I say meaning and purpose I’m talking about having something to work towards. Floating aimlessly through life is a really good way to negatively impact your state. It’s amazing what setting a goal, finding some focus and having a purpose can do for your state.

Conclusion

This article isn’t intended to overwhelm. Moreso, I’d like to provoke some thought on your behalf about what step, or steps, you may be able to take to help you improve your state management and improve your well-being. To inspire you to take a step, no matter how small.

My advice, start with one thing. Make it a small thing that you can work on doing consistently. When you have consistency, you’re getting in the reps, add something else.

It’s the small things, done consistently, that lead to massive change.