Master Your Stress Response: Rewire Your Nervous System and Take Back Control

Most of the time, you’re not reacting to what’s happening, you’re reacting from what’s already been wired into you.

In this episode of the iAlpha Project, Pedro breaks down how the subconscious mind and nervous system shape your response to stress, often without you even realising it. These patterns aren’t random, they’re learned, repeated, and reinforced over time.

This conversation goes deeper into what’s actually happening beneath the surface and how to start interrupting those automatic reactions. Through practical tools like breathing techniques, awareness training, and simple reframing strategies, you’ll learn how to regulate your nervous system in real time.

The focus isn’t on controlling everything around you, it’s on learning how to feel safe without needing control. When you can bring yourself back to a calm and neutral state, your decision-making improves, your reactions shift, and you stop feeding the same cycles.

If you’ve ever caught yourself reacting in ways that don’t reflect who you want to be, this episode will give you a clearer path forward.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

We often find ourselves in stages of our lives where we actually do try and make a difference and change our habits, our mindsets, and the things we do, and we get on a roll just for things to go right back to the way they are. It's like this hamster wheel cycle. Start, stop, and then you reset and then you repeat, start, and then you stop, and then you reset and you repeat. And you just somehow can't seem to just get going. And it's like you get going and something happens and stops you, and we just somehow can't run away from the stress. We get hard on ourselves and we think it's our mindset, it's things that we're doing, but we need to also understand that it's not just us, it's a nervous system, it's it's an automated response. And how does this exist? This exists because of our past experiences or belief systems that we have, uh, traumas that we've gone through, similarities in life that have created us anxiety or have been difficult. You know, this type of stress creates an automatic response for our natural survival. So more often than not, when we start moving along, we just can't seem to detach from the stress. And it's that coping mechanisms that will actually force us into more of a lockdown. These are all things that happen at a subconscious level, and what we're doing is we're kind of attacking at a conscious level. We're consciously trying to change something, but our default patterns underneath, they're the ones that just keep resurfacing when stress takes over. And it's very easy to go into that subconscious state when we go into a survival instinct. So sometimes it isn't your lack of discipline or your lack of consistency. It's the fact that we tend to be working on the surface level and need to regulate on the inside. And this is pretty much what this episode is about: realizing that you're trying to think your way out of something, but that your body is kind of controlling. The first step in all of this is kind of just to break the illusion, become aware of what's actually happening, the moment it's happening, without going into too much detail. Like I like to use the analogy movie, which I've I've seen and read in many books as well, and it makes a lot of sense to me in um The Until it's all they talk about this as well, as well as the power of now. It's kind of like watching yourself watch a movie. So the story you tell yourself of your life. So just imagine how many movies have you watched where sometimes we just get a little too invested emotionally, and we have to remind ourselves this is just a movie. Whether it's emotional, like there's always these traumatic events, and we just have to remind us it's just a movie. And the moment we do that, we kind of take us a step back, we relax a little, we're able to approach the problem. The same thing that we need to look into ourselves is like stopping ourselves, realizing, hold on, we're just going into a story here. It's an old belief system, it's a pattern response. It's not going to help take in the situation as it is. And a lot of times when we catch ourselves in those moments at the conscious level, we go, oh fuck, I'm stuck here. I need more discipline, I need more motivation, I need to find my drive again, I need to figure out what's going on. And again, it's it's it's just stop, hold on. Can you see you going into the pattern? Take a step back. That's the first step, it's just that awareness. But obviously, the pain body is still active, so we're still having these sensations, this anxiety, this gut feeling, itching us to get going or nervousness about getting going. You know, and that's the fight or flight response. You know, we're we're we're reactive, we're we're responsive. Everything is everything is rushed, we're anxious. And really what we want to be is we want to be a place of allowing, so we want to be calm. Mutual. Mutual is the right word. We don't want to be indifferent, we just want to be in mutual. And we want to be in a place of openness and awareness. You know, once we're in this place of openness and awareness, we can get more clarity. And it's you are not gonna get the right answers when your brain is fuzzled and in panic and in fear. The information that you get and the solutions that you can come up with, they're not gonna come around clearly and they're not gonna be in from a positive energy. So the first step is just to get ourselves to that calm, regulated state. At least better than what we were before. Just remember, no one can respond quite well if our bodies feel under threat, if our minds feel under threat, if our ego is under threat. So the first thing to do is just calm down. Very simply put, is if we don't feel safe, we can't have the right awareness of what's going on. And our subconscious is trying to make us feel safe. But it's coming in from an old programming and it's trying to create the safety externally. So, how does this show up in everyday life? You know, at the gym, I could argue that I I've had this experience lots of times where I'm constantly chasing the intensity, I'm consciously trying to push harder. Every session has to be the be-all and break-all session, every session has to outperform the previous session. There's so much time focused on my goals and not necessarily the other things that are improving, or a lot of time spent on criticisms or if I have an injury, it's the frustration that the injury causes in the delay of my progression. So my focus is entirely on just chasing that, and it comes from a place of like fear, am I gonna reach my goals? And to failure, I'm not doing what I said I was gonna do. My moods are getting the best of me, so now I don't feel like training, and I have to put in more energy just to motivate myself to go. And then I feel like I'm lacking motivation with that. Can you see how it just kind of spirals? The same thing in relationships. You know, we want safety in a relationship, we want to feel safe in a relationship, but more often than not, our belief systems and other things create assumptions. So we actually become reactive. A situation that we feel uncomfortable with, our brain tells us, yeah, it's wrong, it's nervousness, and we're using alth'ex experiences to justify that thought. And rather than approaching a situation with openness and understanding, we're already coming with a preconceived idea about what's going on. And worse than that, we're actually already reacting as if that was truth. So again, that doesn't help what we want to achieve as well as the partner. You know, uh even if we have difficult discussions and we have that energy, everything that we have, it becomes a reactive process rather than a response. A response, yeah, response requires a pause, requires us to listen. It requires no attachment to an outcome. It requires a neutrality, not an indifference. An indifference means I don't care whether the relationship succeeds or doesn't. It it requires a neutrality where I'm neutral that regardless of what happens in this context, the outcome of it is going to be good. There's going to be a lesson learned, awareness built, and improvement in closenesses and connectivity with my partner. So at the end of the day, my goal is the benefit of it. And I understand that in order for me to make the right choices in this situation, I need to be responsive, not reactive. I could often kill catch myself trying to figure out the other person's intentions, the uh why they were behaving their way, or the reason behind them. And rather than listening, I was just coming up with, no, no, no, no, this is the way I think about it. And then I'm not looking at other options available to me from in order for me to progress with that. Let's just look at everyday life. Like, do we have this sensation of like we constantly have to be doing something? We we can't just sit still, and if there's too much calmness, we should be proactive. Um, this thing that we kind of always have to prepare for the future. If the future is secure, then we can feel safe in the now. There's constant pressure that we put on ourselves. So we can't actually be in a relaxed state to allow self-introspection, uh, analysis of self, like what are my belief systems, what aren't my belief systems, what is the truth to me. There's a lot of things that we define relationships by or connections by based on what we've been taught, but not necessarily what we believe in. Do my actions display what I'm wanting? All that self-analysis, well, they don't, because obviously I'm coming from a reactive state, and a reactive state is just trying to get me out of that fear moment of time where a responsive state is looking at the bigger picture and being comfortable in the uncomfortable so I can learn my lesson. So this all gets a little bit confusing and too much, but keeping it to the simplest form and understanding that it's our conscious reaction. So once we become aware of it, we've seen where it shows up, so how do we actually manage it? On a personal level, my condition has actually taught me to handle this a little bit better. There were times that I was had to wait for 24 to 48 hours to literally get a life or death answer that I was waiting on a search and whether a surgery was going to be possible or impossible, whether my tumors were uh a lot more severe, that were life-threatening from a time perspective as opposed to what they were, there was nothing I could do but actually kind of just accept and relinquish myself to the moment. And I found that the more I tried to come up with solutions and the the more I realized it wasn't in my control. So I was going through all this anxiety. And even being a dad, you know, like realizing that I only had a certain amount of time left. But once I was able to calm down, accept the reality of my situation, it actually allowed me to prepare better for life. It allowed me to accept and flow in an easier way. Uh to kind of just say some things are meant to happen that way. Some I have to look at what is it that I'm wanting from this and how I can best navigate myself in the situation. And becoming aware of the fact that my my pain body, my ego cell was trying to help me escape what felt unsafe, I then started to realize that the calmer I felt in it that the easier I could come up with solutions. And the more positive my mindset was when I applied those solutions, which always led to a better outcome. One thing is like in my condition, realizing that there's not everything I can control, I can only control myself, but it was also this timeline that we put on ourselves about the expectancy of a result. I couldn't really control on how things sped up. But I also realized the harder I tried, sometimes the more resistance I created. Where in being karma allowed things to slow down. And as things slowed down, they actually progressed quicker. So you get to your destination faster just by slowing down now. And I'm sure that makes sense in a lot of ways. It's very hard to apply. But with my condition personally, was sitting down and realizing, all right, what is actually happening here? What can I learn from this and how can this lesson apply to other aspects of my life? So it it it really slowed me down to think about it rather than worrying about taking action straight away. Your reality will remain the same, just your perception shifts, and it shifts from like a performance-based approach to a perception-based approach. Rather than jumping straight to action, we look at first, like calming down, we're aware of the situation, then looking at clarity of the situation. What is my perception of it? Why does that exist? And does it serve me, or what can I do to make it better? And what works for me is a really easy trick is just go straight to the breathing. The moment I realize I'm getting lost in my emotion, my pain bodies come up, I'm becoming more reactive, I'm getting more defensive. I can actually pick it energetically. And the moment that happens, what I often do is I just breathe. And I find uh my focus goes into, you know, right now I want to find a solution. I don't want to feel like this, breathe. And I do the four-second rule one. It's it's very easy. It's hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four, breathe in for four, hold for four, and just keep repeating that cycle. There's obviously more energy release if you breathe out for longer, so you can easily do the four-second hold, six second exhale, four to six second hold, four-second inhale, four second hold, six second exhale, just by doing that. And just by thinking of the numbers cutting in your head. After one cycle, I'm legitimately calmer. After three or four, I feel a lot better. If you find you haven't dropped, you can just keep doing that until you're calmer. This is not about running away or escaping, it's about calming the brain so we can approach it clearer. And that, in my essence, doing that with my kids, I actually realized I went from being a protector to being a um a preparer. Like rather than protecting them, I turned it into preparing them for the future. Rather than trying to control their environment, I was actually more present in their environment. I allowed things to flow easier. And I was in that way I was able to observe and enjoy and be in the moment a lot more, as opposed to letting my ego as a dad jump in and rush to be that good father and rush to hit those targets and rush to make sure that their life was perfect. It allowed me to be more mindful and flow with them a lot better and create a better relationship with them. Because now they are also more evolved in understanding themselves and their reactive processes and the choices they make. Always remember that we have emotional control. Other people can trigger our emotions, but we have total emotional control. So once we grasp that and we can actually take accountability for that, it's up to us to take the steps that we need to in order to control our emotions. Realizing no situation will ever be as bad as our negative reaction to it. And um being in that fear state, guaranteed it's only going to get worse from this. Calm ourselves down because even just a 1% karma is still gonna be better than being upset. So the more we can reduce that in that moment, the better options we come up with moving forward. So once we've got the breathing downpact, what's a real good practical reset that allows us to change this and make this work for us? What would be the steps that we can do? There's a podcast that I've just did with Alexandro Ribero. He's uh an energy specialist and he works with um calming down the nervous system. Check out that podcast, guys, you'll get a lot of it. Hit him up. But one of the main things we discussed is a very simple process. The first things we look at is number one, catch the awareness. That's the anxiety you feel, the pressure there you feel, the stresses, the um the eagerness to get moving, the fear of something not working out, or the consequences of something happening. Once that happens, don't engage the story. Just focus on the trigger. What was it that triggered that feeling? Recognize the trigger and pause the movie. Just say, well, this is where this is where it happened. We pause it, we're gonna step back. And we've realized the trigger. We've got rid of the story that created the trigger, there's the trigger. Then we breathe and we do the method of breathing. That we spoke about this four-second hold, six-second release, four second hold, four second inhale, four second hold, and we repeat that cycle. We do that for as long as we need, and we just calm down. We've noticed the trigger, we've got rid of the story, we have the sensation physically. And then bring yourself to reality. Where am I at this moment? What am I doing at this moment? This very moment. What is my purpose? Yes, you're having a discussion, you're triggered right now, but at this moment, you're present. That's allowing us to do is to settle down and become more mindful. And then we reframe it. Let's reframe the whole thing. Remember, emotion and reality are intertwined. Our emotion is created by our reality, and our reality is only a perception that we've given it. So you say to yourself, this is just a movie, and I don't need to project this forward. So we just reframe it to saying, hold on, this is just a situation. It's just a movie. And then you focus on the response. Ask yourself, what would be benefit my higher self now? What would be more aligned into my goals and my dreams and the person I want to become with the opportunity that I have to give a response now in the situation? How would I like this to go? Sometimes you'll get an answer. You would want to express your view, you want to reiterate something, or sometimes you actually don't have a response. And that also means like it's because you don't require one. It means you're just meant to sit in clarity and just become aware of it. The core principle is not to focus on that emotion. Even if we feel anxiety or fear, we don't want to focus on that. Jealousy, we don't want to focus on it. The moment we focus on it, even just trying to get rid of it is giving it attention. So trying to ignore something is using energy that's connected to something. So just stop. You become aware of it, detach from that, detach from the story that created it, and just go back into understanding it's there, stop. How do I want to respond to this? And sometimes that clarity just comes in from understanding why it's there in the first place. A lot of it is the old belief systems. So it's understanding, guys, that you're not your mind, you're not your emotions or your thoughts. Those are just responses. And the problem isn't always you. You don't, it's not that you don't have the consistency or the discipline. It's just that you're attacking it at a conscious level. And what you want to and what you want to do is those five steps. Number one, be aware of it when it approaches. Number two, go straight into your breathing. Don't give it any more attention. Just become aware of what is happening, go straight into your breathing. Number three, bring yourself back to the environment, bring yourself down to the now, get yourself out that story, bring yourself into the present moment. Number four, you want to reframe it. You want to say, all right, how can I adjust this? How does this better serve me? Why is it this way? And reframe by telling yourself it's just a movie. And then number five is choose your response. And whether the response is get more clarity, your response needs to be more in alignment about your higher self rather than in alignment with the emotion. The key shift to all of this, once you practice this, you'll start to find that you can actually learn to feel safe without needing to control certain things or control outcomes. And remember that whatever you're going through and you experience, that's normal human behavior. What I've just described is the work that we need to do in order to become better within ourselves and create better versions of our own movies. Share this with someone that you think will get some help out of this. And I truly hope you got something out of it.