Unleash the Peak Performer Within You (eBook)

Unlocking Your Body’s Elite Performance

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

—William James,
America’s first psychologist

The Autonomic Nervous System—Why Dogs Don’t Get Ulcers but People Do

Have you ever wondered why your dog can just shake off the stress of someone knocking at your door and fall back asleep but the argument you had with your spouse keeps you up at night? It has to do with the fact that animals are instinctual and one with their environment. They respond to the stress, deal with it, then return to recovery or resting state.

As humans, we have the unique feature of consciousness. Not only can we assess a threat and deal with it, but we can also filter the stress and put a label on it, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not. We can make the choice to hold on or move on; we can decide to worry about the future and create anticipatory stress. This ability to create a story in our mind is a subject that you really want to understand in order to know how to implement changes in your life. Failure to learn how to manage your stress leads to chronic disease, which works against your desire and ability to perform at an elite level.

The beginning of your journey to decode performance starts with understanding the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). This is critical because extensive research has validated the notion that an imbalanced ANS leads to chronic disease, impaired cognitive function, and suppressed immune response. In other words, an imbalanced ANS is interference that prevents the performance you desire.

The ANS is a network of cells that controls the body’s internal state. It regulates and supports many different internal processes, often outside of a person’s conscious awareness, to maintain internal balance, which is referred to as homeostasis. Hence, it’s your external monitoring system, measuring and sensing what you are facing, in order to keep you in balance with your environment.

Let’s start with some basic anatomy. Your nervous system consists of two main aspects:

• The central nervous system: This consists of the brain and spinal cord.
• The peripheral nervous system: This contains all of the neurons outside of the central nervous system.

The ANS is part of the peripheral nervous system and influences the activity of many different organs, including the stomach, heart, and lungs.

Within the ANS, there are two subsystems that work in opposition to help you maintain balance:

• The sympathetic nervous system (SNS): The SNS generally prepares your body to react to something in its environment. For example, the SNS may increase heart rate to help you to prepare to escape from danger. It’s responsible for the classic fight, flight, or fright response. Some have also used the analogy of the SNS as our gas pedal.
• The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS): The PNS mostly regulates your body functions while at rest. It’s responsible for how you rest, digest, and restore. The PNS is analogous to the car’s breaks within our body.

Your ANS is concerned with the concept of homeostasis or a state of balance necessary to support health. Allostasis is when you’re imbalanced and your ANS is seeking to bring you back into balance by activating one of the two branches.

Here is a partial list of what homeostasis regulates:

• Body temperature
• Heart rate
• Respiration rate
• Metabolism
• Glucose levels
• Digestion
• Blood acidity levels
• Water and electrolytes

Stress

Earlier in the book statistics indicated that 77% of Americans experience regular physical symptoms from stress while 73% experience psychological symptoms. Let’s begin with a definition of stress that’s simple to understand.

“Stress is a brain and body response aimed at promoting adaptation on the face of real or imagined threats to a person’s homeostasis.”

—Dr. Bruce McEwen,
professor of neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University

Professor McEwen goes on to define stress as good, tolerable, or toxic.

Good stress is when you have a job interview, a speech, or a performance. Your body adapts to meet the challenge and when the challenge is over, you return to homeostasis.

Tolerable stress comes from loss of some sort. A relationship is lost, a death occurs, or you lose your job. The stress response is activated, stays activated, or is turned on and off over a period of time. Tolerable stress can lead to some emotional dysregulation, immune system suppression, and damage to the body. In this case, even though you experience a loss, you have the resources to be resilient and you can resolve the loss, minimizing the psychological and physiological consequences of the stress.

Toxic stress is also characterized by something bad happening, however, the difference is that you don’t have the resources to be resilient and you feel like you have no control. This lack of adaptive resources leads to chronic physiological dysregulation, and when stress is ongoing or chronic, it leads to allostatic load or “overload.” This makes it so your body struggles to create an adaptive response. Toxic stress leads to chronic disease, impaired cognitive function, immune system suppression, and impaired performance. Chronic, untreated imbalances in autonomic function can also lead to fatal outcomes.

When you face stress, your ANS prepares your body for action through the “fight or flight” response. If the body perceives a threat in the environment, the sympathetic branch of the ANS reacts by:

• Elevating your heart rate
• Expanding the airways to make breathing easier
• Releasing stored energy
• Increasing strength in the muscles
• Slowing digestion and other bodily processes that are less important

These changes prepare the body to respond appropriately to a threat in the environment. But herein lies a problem: Humans are unique in how we perceive stress because not only do we react to real stress, but we can also create it in our minds.

Humans can activate the sympathetic branch of their ANS from real or imagined work stress, financial concerns, or relationship problems. The fight-or-flight response is activated every time we ruminate about the past or worry about the future.

When the stress response is chronically activated from these perceived threats, it begins to do real damage to our bodies. Chronic disease including heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension are all linked to ANS imbalances. To quote Dr. Bruce McEwen, “Allodynamic adaptation has a price, and the cost of this adaptation is called allostatic load—the wear and tear on the body and brain.”

How we filter stressful events and manage day-to-day stress has a significant impact on the “price” we pay for said stress. The stress response is meant to be an adaptive or healthy mechanism to protect you, but when you fail to manage stress properly over the long-term, this protective mechanism then turns into a maladaptive or destructive force in your life.

If your ANS is chronically imbalanced, it will hinder you from becoming an elite performer. Imbalances in your ANS will war against your ability to concentrate because it lowers your cognitive function, preventing you from absorbing new information and applying it in novel ways.

Given the evidence that failing to manage stress literally will kill you, learning the tools in this book to balance your ANS is a core skill of an elite performer. To decode your own performance, you must learn to balance on demand, which allows your ANS to reduce interference and enter the zone more frequently.

Great visions take time. Focused work that is valued by the market that will enable you to thrive through the Great Restructuring requires years of consistent learning, good use of time, and your ability to achieve flow and produce preeminent work.

When you can operate with clarity and focus around your central organizing idea and stack days’, weeks’, months’, and years’ worth of productive work, you can do the impossible. The key to seeing your vision through is not dying prematurely or being compromised in your ability to exert energy toward your goals.

Chronic disease, impaired cognitive function, and low energy are your enemies. Balance your ANS so it works for you rather than against you.

The next piece of the puzzle in learning how to manage stress and keep your ANS balanced is understanding heart rate variability.

Heart Rate Variability

“Have you ever wondered what the health impact of a stressful day was? Will you perform well during your long run tomorrow morning? Is there anything you can do today that would improve your ability to have a better day moving forward? Heart rate variability may be the best answer.”

—Dr. Marcello Campos,
MD and author of the Harvard Health Blog

One of my good friends, Dr. Tim Royer, has a great analogy to start the conversation of heart rate variability (HRV). When I was under his care to overcome burnout, he explained the value of HRV in terms I could understand.

He said, “HRV is like a rubber band; when...