Nervous System Mastery for Entrepreneurs

Written by: Matt Codde • June 13, 2023

Image Source: https://unsplash.com/@docusign

The life of an entrepreneur is filled with challenges, risks, and a constant pursuit of the next level of success.

And while sometimes we are able to see the ways our business impacts our stress levels and our mental health….

…Often times we are unaware of the internal stress that we carry around and how it makes us less effective at growing our business, and optimally leading our lives.

When we are experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety, the mind will often reflect these levels and we will experience an increase in fearful, worrisome, and insecure thoughts racing through our mind, which can produce more stress and anxiety in the body.

As you will learn in this article, this can create a vicious cycle where one can live in a state of chronic stress and anxiety.

And the hard truth is that the decisions that you make from states of fear or insecurity are unlikely to get you the results that you want in business or in life.

In this article, I want to show you how your nervous system works and how to develop your mastery over it so that you can operate from powerful and productive states, which ultimately improves all aspects of your business and life.

Understanding The Nervous System

The first and most important thing to understand is that the nervous system's primary job is to keep you safe.

That is the number one function of the nervous system.

You can think of your nervous system like a giant communication system, constantly allowing all the different parts of your body to talk to each other to make sure you stay safe. The nervous system is divided into two main parts: the sympathetic nervous system, which activates your body to respond to potential threats, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows and calms your body down. In fact, the parasympathetic nervous system actually divides into two different functions for the body which we will discuss a little later.

When your nervous system is confident that you are safe, your body naturally begins returning to internal balance (or homeostasis). Which in turn allows you to experience an open and mindful state where you are present to consciously engage in whatever you are doing.

Now if you are like most entrepreneurs, you probably wear many different hats for your business.

Some Days your business requires you to be creative, somedays to be very productive, and some days to engage, interact with, and connect with people. The fact is running a business can be a lot

So when it comes to achieving success in your business, it is important that you engage in whatever you are doing for your business — from an internal state of safety, as it will almost always create the best outcomes.

Therefore, in order to have the best success in business we need to be aware of the internal state you are operating from as much as possible, and to the best of our ability try to operate from a sense of safety as much as possible.

Your “Internal Stop Light”

To keep it simple, to understand how your nervous system works let’s use the analogy of an Upside Down Stop Light. This is primarily drawn from Dr. Stephen Porges and his work on Polyvagal Theory.

When the nervous system enters a certain state our experiences, perceptions, and feelings about the world will generally change are correspond to that state. So when we are in Green (Safety), we will usually have “Green” thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of the environment and our surroundings.

When we are in Yellow (Danger / Fight or Flight), we will usually have “Yellow” thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of the environment and our surroundings.

And when we are in Red (Freeze/Shut Down), we have “Red” thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.

Let’s do a quick breakdown of the common experiences in each state.

🟢 Green/Safety:

When your nervous system is in green you will naturally engage in the present moment and in an open and peaceful state. You may feel in “flow state” or harmony. You may feel emotions such as joy, love, happiness. You will feel connected socially to people in your life.

This is where you will interact best with others and with situations, which makes sense because you will feel safe to do so.

This is also generally where you can access flow states to do your best work, create your best content, and foster deeper connections with clients and your team.

This state is activated by the parasympathetic nervous system and referred to as Ventral Vagal.

🟡 Yellow/ Danger/ Fight or Flight:

The Yellow state is activated by the sympathetic nervous system and will put you in a mobilized state, often referred to as your Fight or Flight response. You will enter this state when you system perceives a threat or challenge.

In this state you will experience feelings like anxiety, anger, worry, and fear and generally feel compelled to fight or flee the perceived threat or challenge.

You're likely going to take more action....but it will be from lower state of consciousness which will negatively impact your decisions and likely won't produce the best possible outcomes.

🔴 Red State: Freeze/ Shutdown

The Red state is a Freeze state which is also generated by the parasympathetic nervous system. It is essentially a last resort of your nervous system to handle a threat or challenge.

In this state means you will feel frozen, shutdown, or immobilized in response to something (internal or external)... think of a time when you felt paralysis by analysis.

In this state you will experience things like sadness, loneliness, hopelessness, and depression.

Each of these Green, Yellow, and Red states "activate" within a certain area of the body and correspond with specific emotional experiences.

So you can generally identify what state you are in simply from checking in where you feel the energy in your body.

When you are in Green you will notice more energy in your face and be able to direct your attention safely towards your environment.

When you are in Yellow you will notice more energy in your chest.

When you are in Red you will notice more energy in your gut.

The area in which your nervous system is activated will pull resources away from other parts of your body.

If you think about it practically…

This is exactly why you find it hard to think and communicate effectively when you are in a Fight, Flight, or Freeze state

In those states, it also becomes harder to connect and empathize with other people because your nervous system is focused on your own safety. The majority of your internal resources are focused inwards to protect yourself from the perceived threat.

Similar to when a few programs eat up all of your computer’s processing power, you don’t have the internal bandwidth to perform any higher level functions to the best of your ability.

Now let me clarify something really quick. None of these states are bad. They all serve specific purposes and we cycle between the Green, Yellow, and Red states everyday. For instance, when you workout you enter into Yellow, when you sleep you enter into Red.

Now, after coaching many entrepreneurs, I have found that most entrepreneurs spend the majority of their time running their business from the Yellow state.

And if you spend a lot of time in Yellow your nervous system will often move to Red.

Now as you can probably attest from personal; experience, when you are operating in Yellow and Red states too much it usually ends up causing even more problems for all aspects of your life, your relationships, and your business.

Now as you can probably attest from personal; experience, when you are operating in Yellow and Red states too much it usually ends up causing even more problems for all aspects of your life, your relationships, and your business.

So in this article I aim to help you accomplish the following:

1. To help you develop an internal awareness of where you are operating from internally (Green, yellow or Red)

2. To show you how your own mind can put you in Yellow and if you aren’t careful keep you in Yellow.

3. And to show you how you can help your nervous system shift back into Green through changing your behaviors.

Reason being is by operating more from a Green state, I believe you will achieve the most success and experience the most joy along the way.

Believe it or not, you can actually choose to let go of the belief that your business needs to be a stressful experience.

Stress & The Psychological Stress Spectrum

Speaking of stress, let's talk about stress for a minute

Stress is something that we all experience in life.

Stress is simply our body's response to a perceived challenge or demand. It is just our body shifting into Yellow.

When a stressor is detected your body activates the stress response or the sympathetic nervous systems (Yellow) automatically in order to help you address the real or perceived threat.

Now, according to Dr. Robert Sapolski in his book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers, there are three main types of stressors we experience in life:

1. Sudden Acute Physical Danger

   An example of a sudden acute physical danger could be a lion running at you. This is a real danger that is happening right now. Your body would initiate the stress response and attempt to fight off or flee from the lion.

2. Long Term Physical Challenges

   An example of long-term stress could be stuck on a deserted island or being in some form of chronic pain. Your body would produce the stress response in an attempt to help navigate the physical challenges of this experience.

3. Psychological Stress

   An example of this could be that your mind produces a “What if” thought about some future or past based event like “What if my plane crashes” and your body initiates the stress response in an attempt to resolve the futuristic threat.

   For most of us, especially as entrepreneurs, psychological stress is the primary type of stress that we experience in our business.

   This is rather unique experience to human beings where you witness your mind's ability to come up with various potential bad futuristic scenarios… and your body literally responds to them as if they are a real present danger.

Buy investing your energy and attention into these "What if" thoughts, you actually will activate the nervous system in the same way as an acute stress or danger would.

When you pause and look at it objectively, it is actually pretty amazing how your creative mind in powerful enough to activate different areas of our body and our nervous system.

If you don’t believe me, we can use a pretty universal example:

Consider how your body can become physically aroused “just” by engaging your attention on a sexual fantasy in your mind.

Same principle.

Now in Western society, when our body’s sympathetic nervous system (Yellow) is activated and there is no present danger, we call this anxiety.

And most medical professionals are quick to categorize and label these experiences of psychological stress or anxiety, into specific and separate “disorders”. You may have even had some of these labels placed on you in your own life.

But for right now let's suspend all labels and judgments and instead I invite you to think about psychological stress or anxiety as existing on a spectrum that can vary in both symptoms and intensity within the Yellow section of your nervous system.

This is not about diagnosing yourself or taking on labels. This is simply about understanding that our goal is to operate from a Green state as much as possible in our business and life.

And because we all experience psychological stress to some degree, especially as entrepreneurs, it’s just about understanding what you are experiencing and how to shift out of it and get your nervous system back to Green.

So moving from left to right in the chart we will discuss some common manifestations of psychological stress and anxiety that people experience.

General Anxiety: is when you experience persistent and excessive worry about a number of different things. People with GAD may anticipate disaster and may be overly concerned about money, health, family, work, or other issues.

Social Anxiety: is when you experience intense anxiety or fear of being judged, negatively evaluated, or rejected in a social or performance situation.

Phobias: are when you experience seemingly excessive and unreasonable fears in the presence of, or in anticipation of, a specific object, place, or situation.

OCD: is when you experience intrusive and unwanted thoughts, images, or urges that cause distress or anxiety and engage in compulsive behaviors that ease your distress or anxiety or suppress the thoughts.

Panic Attacks/Panic Disorder: is when you experience spontaneous, out-of-the-blue panic attacks and become very preoccupied with the fear of a recurring panic attack.

PTSD: is developed after experiencing or witnessing a perceived life-threatening event, like combat, a natural disaster, a car accident, or sexual assault.

Derealization or Depersonalization: is when you repeatedly have the feeling that you're observing yourself from outside your body or you have a sense that things around you aren't real, or both.

To put simply, we all experience psychological stress in our life. The problem is, as you will learn below, if we respond incorrectly behaviorally to different manifestations of psychological stress and anxiety, we can get stuck in loops that perpetuates us in a state of stress and keeps our sympathetic nervous system activated.

Therefore it is not psychological stress or anxiety that’s the problem or even the thoughts that pop up that cause us stress, the problem comes when we get stuck in a loop.

The Anxiety Loop (AKA The Real Problem)

Here’s a very important principle. How you understand a problem is going to determine how you attempt to solve the problem, which will in turn, determine the results you will get.

It is important to understand that psychological stress or anxiety is not a problem. It is a normal experience. So are the thoughts that accompany these feeling states. We should not set goals or expectations of never experiencing thoughts or feelings that are uncomfortable. That’s a silly idea.

However, psychological stress can become a problem when we get stuck in it. And if we’re stuck in an anxious loop we can remain stuck in yellow (our sympathetic nervous system) for a long time.

Therefore, we must understand that if you are experiencing anything mentioned above we must address it as a loop problem, not a thought or feeling problem.

How the Loop Works

Let’s see how the psychological stress/anxiety loop works from a high-level perspective. The psychological stress loop is made up of four key components:

1. Intrusive or What if thoughts

2. Uncomfortable Feelings

3. Safety Behaviors

4. Temporary Relief

These elements, when activated together, create a loop, as you can see above. When broken down, here’s what the loop looks like: an intrusive or unwanted thought occurs, which activates the sympathetic nervous system and generates uncomfortable feelings.

This uncomfortable feeling drives you to engage in a safe behavior, something you do (mentally or physically) to avoid, check, cope, control, or reassure yourself in order to neutralize the uncomfortable feeling or feared situation/object/person.

This safety behavior makes the discomfort go away, but only temporarily. Since, the safety behavior produces a temporary feeling of relief, it paradoxically reinforces and strengthens the belief that the thought was a “real threat”.

Now on the surface it seems like engaging in safety behaviors is a good thing because it helps us shift back to a Green state and regain homeostasis, even if it just for a few moments.

But at the same time….

….we just demonstrated to the nervous system and falsely conditioned our brains to believe two things.

First we confirmed that the thought that activated our stress response was a real threat and should be perceived in the future as a real danger because we took action to do something about it.

And second, we confirmed that the behavior we did to regulate ourselves actually kept us safe.

Therefore, in the future if we encounter that threat our brain is going to encourage us to engage in the same behavior again because your brain indirectly learns it protected you by producing that thought.

So shortly after the period of relief, another fearful thought will generally pop up again.

This may be the same intrusive thought as before, or a different one entirely. The new thought triggers more uncomfortable feelings, which lead to you performing another safety behavior.

And the loop keeps spinning.

And these loops are what keep the sympathetic nervous system activated for an indefinite period of time.

In fact, it worsens the fight or flight response with each revolution around the loop.

Breaking out of the Loop

The Psychological Stress/Anxiety Loop has four essential pieces that work together.

The mental part involves the intrusive thoughts, what-if thinking, and scary ideas that pop in your head and cause distress.

The emotional part is the body’s response to the thoughts, in this case, feelings of stress and anxiety.

The behavioral part is ALL the different (mental and physical) behaviors you engage in to “keep yourself safe.”

The Relief is the shift in your nervous system as a result of the safety behavior

All of these must be in place for the loop to spin and by breaking one part of the loop it can no longer spin.

Now you can’t always control your thoughts...and you can’t always control your feelings...

but you CAN control your behavior!

So we must shift our entire focus to removing all of the behaviors that feed the loop.

This is the entire idea behind Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP).

The main principle behind ERP is that if we sit with anxiety and don’t engage in the safety behaviors, our brain and body realize that the triggering situation is not actually dangerous, and the level of discomfort from thought of feared situations will eventually dissolve through a phenomenon called habituation.

By law, our bodies will eventually burn out from remaining in this heightened state of stress, and over time we go into a state of exhaustion, and our bodies automatically recover to a neutral state.

If we engage in safety behaviors it will reduce the anxiety at a quicker rate, but will also reinforce the original feared thought or idea and strengthen the loop.

When we forgo the safety behavior, the anxiety will last longer, but will ultimately break the Loop and rewire the brain to operate in a healthier way through something called neuroplasticity.

Identifying Safety Behaviors

Safety behaviors are physical or mental behaviors we engage in as a reaction to psychological stress.

Some examples of physical behaviors might include:

• Avoiding things that trigger you (people, places, situations, etc.)

• Seeking Reassurance about your fears

• Repetitive checking behaviors (checking bank balances over and over)

• Drinking Alcohol to cope with feelings

• Micromanaging employees

However, like I mentioned above, the majority of the safety behaviors that we engage in are our minds. Here are some common Mental Safety Behaviors:

• Mental Analyzing

• Mental Rumination

• Mental Checking

• Mental Reviewing

• Mental Distraction

• Thought Suppression

• Thought Replacing

Really anything that we do to try to get rid of "bad" or unwanted thoughts or feelings is likely a safety behavior of some variety.

These ways of resisting what we feel indirectly validates that we really are in danger. This strengthens the loop and drives us into Yellow states more and more frequently.

And that means that more of our actions and choices will be made from fear.

And the reality is that running a business from fear will have some pretty costly (immediate and long term) consequences on your health, business, and life.

One of the main problems is that most entrepreneurs are usually so outwardly focused on their business, so they try to change things in their environment in order to feel safe internally. As a result they are not as inwardly aware of what state they’re operating from which generally keeps them in Yellow and Red.

Which is why I believe the most successful entrepreneurs come to learn that our primary work should be to bringing ourselves into a Green state first…then our external work will naturally reflect that.

This is really what most people mean when they say things like, “success begins within”.

The Triple-A Response™: A Solution for Helping You Get to Green and Making Better Business Decisions

Okay, so by now you understand that psychological stress manifests in certain loops. And when you get stuck in the loop, you are engaging in safety behaviors (mental and physical) to neutralize thoughts and feelings.

These safety behaviors offer short-term relief but keep you stuck in the loop over the long term. So the best way to break the loop is by stopping all your safety behaviors, which will break the loop and shift your nervous system back into the Green

But, as you’ve probably experienced in your life, telling someone to stop unhealthy behaviors, especially behaviors that offer temporary relief, isn’t very effective advice.

If it was, I would simply tell everyone who wrestles with alcohol dependency to “stop drinking.”

That’s where the Triple-A Response™ comes in. The Triple-A Response™ is a solution-focused method that provides a clear path to anchor into and the exact steps to perform every time unwanted thoughts and uncomfortable feelings surface.

The critical distinction between what you’re been doing and what The Triple-A Response™ teaches is that the Triple-A Response™ directs you toward what to do rather than what not to do.

And while the difference may sound trivial, I assure you it’s not.

​​The Triple-A Response™ has three straightforward steps:

1. Agree and disengage the mind

2. Allow the feelings to surface in your body

3. Attack the fear

Moving to a solution-focused approach means switching your thinking to “what should I do?” rather than “what should I not do.”

And when you focus on bringing positivity into your life, you eliminate the negative.

When you follow this approach, your safety behaviors (mental and physical) begin to dissipate as a secondary effect.

Eventually, you’ll start to notice that your intrusive thoughts and anxious feelings fade as well. It’s about working smarter, not harder. This is the effect of applying the Triple-A Response™.

Like most things….this is all easier said than done. And it involves reorienting your relationship to your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors (especially all the mental ones).

This is the best way that I know of to produce a deep internal sense of safety and security.

Doing this will also help you access greater flow states and depth of presence in your life, work, and relationships.

As business owners, some of the most important work we can do is to focus inwardly to make sure we're making choices that are in alignment.

When we are in Yellow or Red states, it is difficult to tune in with yourself. You’re more likely to makes decisions from fear or scarcity or pain.

The best way I know to do all of this is to start implementing The Triple-A Response™.

It will help you create a habit that actually breaks the psychological stress and anxiety loops and allow your nervous system to shift back into green.

And The more we operate from a Green state, the healthier are business is going to be and the healthier we're going to be as individuals.

And ultimately, our business needs us to be at our best in order for it to be its best.

If you want to learn more about The Triple-A Response™, please check out the book From Stuck To Unstuck.

If you are interested in potentially working together to implement this in your own business and life simply contact me on through my website.

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