59. How I Stay Calm in High-Pressure Moments

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: Welcome to The Authentic Path. I'm your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, Harvard-trained physician and healer. I integrate science and ancestral wisdom to support you in creating the success you desire in all areas of your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. I'm so excited to have you here. Today's episode is going to be incredibly simple, but honestly, it's one of the most powerful practices that I use consistently in my own life. use it every time I'm driving into a shift, before I'm going to speak on a big stage, before I'm going to walk into any sort of high moment. And I'm going to walk you through it step by step ⁓ What are we covering today? We're going to cover the science behind why this actually works, ⁓ all the energetics and spiritual side of the practice as well. And the best part about this is that it does not require a two hour morning routine or waking up at 4 a.m. or pretending you have this like new level of discipline that you might not have just yet. It just takes a couple of intentional minutes and a willingness to practice. Most of us are walking around and we are not living as intentionally as we want to live. We are instead living this life that is a little bit more reactive. And by that I mean we have these routines where we wake up, we grab our phone, ⁓ we start looking through the news or emails from the night before, and we start absorbing stress as soon as we wake up in the morning. We're rushing into the day. And we wonder why we feel dysregulated or depleted or a little bit anxious. We wonder why we're feeling disconnected. And here's the thing that your nervous system doesn't just magically organize itself. Your mind doesn't accidentally just become focused and your energy will not unconsciously ground itself. All of these things require practice. And that's what we're doing today. We're going to learn how to consciously create the kind of day and ultimately the kind of life you want to live, you want to experience. I call this a grounding ritual. Let me just talk about what grounding is a moment. Grounding is the process of regulating and stabilizing your nervous system. Energetically, I often describe it as neutralizing excess energy, like if you're grounding a wire, for example. The reason why is because many of us are walking around carrying sort of this mental stimulation or overstimulation, ⁓ even kind of like an emotional residue. It could feel like stress or hyper urgency. It could feel like pressure or anxiety. And for those of you that are consider yourself an HSP, highly sensitive person or very empathic, sometimes you're taking on other people's energy. And then we attempt to lead or perform or create from that state of mind. grounding brings you back to a of emotional neutrality ⁓ or back to your. ⁓ authentic energy back to yourself, back into your body, back into the present moment. And what I have seen for many high functioning, high achievers is that grounding, once you start to practice it more and more, you realize it's not necessarily optional anymore because success without grounding will become dysregulation. But success with grounding becomes very intentional and aligned. And you start noticing that you're making choices and decisions. from your inner sage, from your inner wise person. And that starts to feel very lovely. And that's why these grounding rituals really matter. Okay, so this I call the drive-in ritual. And I started this practice when I was working in an emergency department that was super tough to work in already. It was already a tough department to work in. And then COVID came. And in the beginning, the early months of COVID as an ER doc, It was really scary. We didn't know what we were running into. We didn't know what we were going to bring home to our families. And I remember this one very specific night. I living in California in the Bay ⁓ I was working in San Francisco, ⁓ and was driving into an overnight shift. And I remember very specifically, I was on the bridge to drive across the bridge into San Francisco. ⁓ It was night, it was, it was a night shift. So it was dark outside and it was the first couple of weeks of COVID. And I remember there was this big fog over the bridge and I'm driving in and I'm like, Holy smokes. Isn't this like the perfect image of my life right now? It's dark, it's scary, it's foggy. I don't know what I'm driving into. There's so much uncertainty and it brought down a lot of fear. And that's when I realized I needed a ritual to ground myself because I was choosing to continue to practice medicine, to continue to be an ER doc during this time. And I wanted to do it in a way that felt aligned and didn't feel like it was draining my energy. So that's where this came from. And I realized it was so effective that I started doing it on my way into the department, on my way home from the hospital. And then I started doing it for a bunch of other things. If I was going to speak on a big stage, I would do it before that. If I was going to walk into a kind of high stress meeting, I would do it before that. And then I started teaching all my clients to do it because it was so effective. And that's what I'm teaching you today. And again, the point of this is to figure out where you can start practicing it, if it makes sense for you. So first step in the ritual ⁓ is say that you are driving, for example, you get into your car, you're about to drive. Let's say you're driving to work. And the very first thing you want to do is not turn on the radio. Don't turn anything on. Be with yourself. Be with the moment. Practice mindfulness. The first thing you do when you're practicing mindfulness with this ritual is you're going to ground your energy and relax your nervous system by practicing something called four by four breathing, also known as box breathing. Super, super popular, very common because it works so well. It's so effective. So the easiest way to think about this is to imagine four sides of a box. And with every side of the box, you do something different. For the first side, you inhale for four seconds, then you hold your breath for four seconds, then you exhale for four seconds, and then you hold your breath for four seconds. So four seconds inhale, hold your breath for four, exhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four. Now, what is happening here physiologically in your body is, you are regulating your nervous system by turning on your parasympathetic nervous system. Now that is the relaxation response of your body and it's what causes you to feel calm and relaxed as opposed to your sympathetic nervous system, which is what causes you to be hyper energetic or anxious or hyper regulated. So you do four by four breathing and you need probably to do it for about, I'd say 20 seconds or so. So you do a couple rounds of four by four breaths. So maybe one or two rounds of four by four breathing. So you breathe in, you hold your breath, you breathe out, and you want to breathe out nice and slow because the exhalation is actually what turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. So you breathe out nice and slow, and then you hold your breath again. And what you will notice after you do one to two rounds of four by four breathing, you'll notice that your body feels much more calm. you'll notice that you are feeling a little bit more regulated. And what research shows is that this controlled slow breathing, especially the slow exhalation, because it's turning on your parasympathetic nervous system, it's also lowering your stress hormones. So it lowers your cortisol levels. It reduces any sense of hyper regulation or anxiety. It improves your emotional regulation and your focus. ⁓ automatically doing just that by itself is already going to enhance your cognitive performance under any type of stress. This is why elite athletes practice this, military professionals practice this. I practice this even before like when I'm going to run a code in the emergency department, I practice four by four breathing. So when you get in your car before you turn anything on, don't turn on the music, don't turn on a podcast, you do around a four by four breathing as you start to drive into work. so after you're done with four by four breathing and you feel calm and relaxed ⁓ centered, step two is you do a gratitude practice. So after the breath work, you move into gratitude. ⁓ I know when we think about gratitude, a lot of people start to think of toxic positivity. ⁓ that's not at all what I mean here. ⁓ is not about pretending that things don't exist or that things aren't hard. When I was practicing gratitude, driving into my shift, I wasn't pretending that I wasn't scared or that this wasn't like, like I wasn't like anxious or I wasn't pretending any of that. I wasn't pretending things weren't hard. But what gratitude does is it trains the brain to also notice what's good. Because what's happening in the brain is that we have a negativity bias. That's the way the human brain is wired. It's the reason why we are so resilient. because we can notice the negative around us, things that are scary, and we can make sure that we protect ourselves from that. It's why five to one, the brain will notice something negative, something scary, and hold onto that like it's Velcro, but when it's something good or positive, it just rolls right off like it's Teflon. And so a gratitude practice allows us to train our brain to also notice what is good. And this matters because what we wanna do We want to train our brain to not always be in a state of hypervigilance or chronic stress. We want to train our brain to also notice the positive. so you do the breath work and then you do three simple gratitude statements. ⁓ the gratitude statements can be super simple. They don't need to be gigantic. They just need to be specific. So you don't want to say something like, I'm grateful for my life. You want to say something a little bit. like much more specific. For example, maybe you're drinking a great cup of coffee. I'm grateful for this coffee. Or I'm grateful, this is what I used to say when I would drive into the ER. I'm so grateful that I get to help somebody today at my work. I'm so grateful that my job allows me to help others. ⁓ You can say, I'm so grateful for the text somebody sent me today, or I'm so grateful that the sun feels so good on my skin. Again, it doesn't matter what the gratitude statement is for, it just needs to be specific. And if you're going to do this regularly, you want to use different gratitude statements every time. That trains your brain to start looking for different things to be grateful for instead of always assuming you're going to choose these big non-specific things. So what we have seen happen scientifically is that when you start regularly practicing gratitude, it starts increasing your feel-good hormones. Yes, dopamine, but also serotonin. And serotonin is important because Dopamine has this short-lived experience in your body where there's a spike, but there's immediate decrease, but serotonin is longer lasting in your body. So that's what we want. We want to practice things that increase our serotonin in our body because serotonin lasts, that feel-good feelings of serotonin last longer. Serotonin is also the basis of a lot of current antidepressants. They're called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. they increase the levels of serotonin in our bodies because we know that's what causes us to feel better longer. Gratitude also does a bunch of other really awesome things, which is why we ask you to practice it. One thing also, by the way, that gratitude does just energetically, we are able to measure the energetic resonance of different emotional patterns in our body. And what we have seen is energetically, when you measure gratitude, your resonance, your frequency in your body of the energy is, it raises up really, really high. So the frequency of gratitude is really high and it's really beautiful. And then you, that's why you feel so good. Serotonin is flowing through your body and you're resonating at a higher frequency, which is why we practice gratitude. Okay, so you do the four by four breathing. It should take you about 20, 30 seconds. You do the three gratitude statements. Again, maybe another 30 seconds or so. And then you set an intention. intentionality is incredibly powerful. ⁓ honestly, I feel like it's a, it's like a little secret superpower that I have. I teach it to everybody, so it's not that secret, ⁓ but you don't know about it, it feels like magic So what intentionality does, if you set an intention, for example, ⁓ like you say, my intention is, and you say your intention. It primes your premotor cortex, which is the part of your brain that does stuff. It primes your premotor cortex to do what you say you're going to do. Now, intentionality is one of those things, just like gratitude, that's been practiced for centuries outside of the Western world. But you know, you know the Western world. We love to study things with signs to see what's actually happening and how things are actually working. And sometimes science can actually measure how things are having an effect, but not always, because I think science is way behind what we're actually seeing and experiencing in the real world and what folks have been practicing for thousands and thousands of years. I don't think science has caught up yet. Anyway, intentionality is incredibly powerful and it really works. And all you need to do set intention. ⁓ So example, I'm driving into the ER and ⁓ I do my four by four breathing. my gratitude statements and then I would say my intention for my shift today is to have a calm, productive and effective shift. Done. You can do if then statements. example, if it's starting to get crazy bananas in the ER, I will, then I will. So if this happens, then I will, then I will call my body, call my mind and try to figure out how I can control the flow of the department. So I do this also if I'm gonna speak on stage. So I'd set my intention. My intention is to connect with the audience and be my most authentic self, for example. If I start to feel nervous, I'll take a deep breath and remind myself that it's okay to feel nervous. It doesn't mean anything's gone wrong. So you set an intention. And again, intentionality is so powerful. Do not take my word for it. I promise you it's true. Just go practice it for yourself. And just notice the more specific your intention, the more directed your energy will be. It's really, really powerful. And I'm not going to go too much into the data and science behind intentionality because it's super deep and I'll create a whole nother podcast on it later. ⁓ but just know that it's available to you. So I use this ritual when I am driving in to something, but I also use it if I'm driving home. So when I would drive home from the hospital, I would do the same thing. I would do the four by four breathing again, calm my body, my gratitude statements. And then I would set an intention for when I would get home because I wanted to leave the stress and all of that stuff of work. I didn't want to bring it inside of my, into my home, into my, to the energy of my home, my family, my kids. So I would say, I'm so grateful for that shift. I'm so grateful that I get to now spend time with my family. And my intention is to leave that stress at work or my intention is to connect with my kids. So just notice what's available to you. ⁓ And that's friends. That's simple and it's so effective. And I just invite all of you to try it, to practice it. So if you ⁓ taking anything from podcast, ⁓ I want you just realize that your life is shaped by what you repeatedly practice, not what you occasionally practice, but what you choose to practice over and over again. ⁓ And transformation is often far less complicated than we make it. It's these small, tiny, intentional moments that we practice consistently. So I hope you're able to use what I taught you today to practice being a little bit more grounded, more present, more intentional. And of course, if you want any practice doing this on a very individualized level, I work one-on-one with clients and I would love to support you. You can schedule a coaching consult. The link to schedule is below. 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