Body · 38 episodes
Nervous System Regulation for entrepreneurs
Every guest who talks about nervous system regulation on this show converges on the same underlying claim: the body registers threat and stress long before the conscious mind names it, and most entrepreneurial burnout traces back to a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight rather than a lack of willpower or knowledge. Cortisol that never tapers off, breath that never deepens, decisions made from a body in alarm — these show up as bad judgment, exhaustion, and health problems that look unrelated but aren't.
Where the conversations diverge is on mechanism and method. Some guests point to hard physiology — heart rate variability, cortisol timing, CO2 tolerance, VO2 max — and argue you should measure your way out of dysregulation. Others work through breath, sound, touch, or somatic sensation, arguing the body has its own intelligence that bypasses the analyzing mind entirely. A few go further into energy work, intention, and consciousness research. None of this is contradictory so much as layered: breathwork shows up in nearly every conversation as the fastest, cheapest lever, while HRV and cortisol tracking show up as the way to confirm it's working.
The other consistent thread is that dysregulation isn't just uncomfortable, it's expensive. A dysregulated founder makes worse decisions, burns out teams, and mistakes chronic activation for drive. Regulating the nervous system isn't self-care bolted onto the business — several guests treat it as the actual infrastructure the business runs on.
What holds across every conversation
- •Use a physiological sigh (double inhale, long exhale) or 5-5-7 breathing before high-stakes moments — it works faster than counting-based techniques and requires no executive function.
- •Track sleep latency, cortisol timing, fasting glucose variability, and heart rate variability as early-warning signs of chronic stress before it becomes burnout.
- •Deliberate breath holds and cold exposure train the amygdala's threat response, building tolerance for the anxiety of pitches, negotiations, and public visibility.
- •Fix your wake time before you try to fix your bedtime — it's the one circadian lever you actually control, and it anchors everything else.
- •Don't trust how 'thick-skinned' you feel — untreated stress and unprocessed emotion accumulate silently for years regardless of how well you're masking it.
- •Treat physical inputs (movement, breath, cold, sunlight) as compounding, not additive — small consistent doses outperform occasional intense resets.
Breath as the fastest lever
Across disciplines, breath comes up as the single most accessible tool for shifting nervous system state in minutes, not months.
“There's a physiological sigh where it's just like you breathe in and then you breathe in another 20% and then sigh it out. And it just chills out the nervous system surprisingly quickly. And it doesn't require counting or executive function like box breathing.”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 29:55· listen →
“My favorite regimen because it's very easy and simple, I have 2 of them that I use in my practice, is the 5-5-7 breathing. And, that's in for 5, hold for 5, out for 7, 3 times, 3 times a day is how I usually start people.”
From Survival to Strength: Breathwork & Resilience · 24:30· listen →
“You'll notice that your resting heart rate— it's measurable— your resting heart rate will drop by about 10 points after doing 2, 3 minutes of this breathing, which is like amazing if you think about it. It's faster than taking a Xanax.”
Dr. Mao Shing Ni on Energy, Qi, and Longevity Secrets · 33:53· listen →
“The breath is the steering wheel of the nervous system... it literally is grabbing your nervous system by the steering wheel and guiding it in the direction you want it to go in. So if I need more focus, there's a breath for that. If I need more strength, there's a breath for that.”
The Doctor of the Future Is You with Sachin Patel · 37:26· listen →
“3 minutes of deep breathing, strong, and you have to focus on it a bit, it can't be very passive, followed by a maximal voluntary breath hold increased circulating human growth hormone in the blood by up to 550% a half hour after that was done.”
Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance · 37:45· listen →
Why fight-or-flight misfires today
The stress response was built for acute physical danger; guests explain why it now fires constantly over email, traffic, and money, and what that costs.
“Fight or flight is for we're in danger. Like, fight or flight is tiger chasing me and I'm gonna die. Like, that's what fight or flight is for. Fight or flight is not for everyday living. And that's why we're seeing the high amounts of anxiety.”
From Survival to Strength: Breathwork & Resilience · 16:46· listen →
“So somebody honks their horn at you in traffic, you have a test at school that you're stressing out about, you're fighting with your spouse, right? It takes nothing to make that fight-or-flight response go.”
From Survival to Strength: Breathwork & Resilience · 18:26· listen →
“Money is the number one cause of stress, especially that low-grade, back-of-the-mind, always there, always thinking about it, that kind of stress. It really keeps your body in a fight-or-flight state all the time. And when you're in that fight-or-flight state, your body is not in regeneration mode.”
Money Stress, Scarcity & Abundance with Scarlett Stanhope · 33:35· listen →
“The lion chases the giraffe and the giraffe is running away and gets away. They immediately do this huge body shake and then they go back into rest and digest.”
Burnout as a Mirror: Karenna Soto on Somatic Healing · 25:16· listen →
Measuring the state you're in
You can't manage what you don't track — several guests point to specific biomarkers that reveal chronic dysregulation before it becomes a crisis.
“I always look for what I call the 4 Horsemen of executive burnout. So the first one is sleep latency extending beyond 25 minutes... The second one is cortisol staying elevated after 10... There's also how your fasting glucose is going to vary during the day... The last thing is your heart rate variability when you sleep.”
Dr. Emilie Laplagne: Functional Medicine for Entrepreneurs · 16:23· listen →
“It's the Sleep Foundation that has a study that says that every single night of poor sleep can reduce cognitive performance the next day by 25%. And it's the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.05%.”
Dr. Emilie Laplagne: Functional Medicine for Entrepreneurs · 34:38· listen →
“So we call it heart coherence, heart-brain coherence, and there's been over 500 research papers now published on it since it was first published in the American Journal of Cardiology by independent researchers. So it's, it's a real key state for us to get a handle on our moods, emotions, and our health and well-being.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 2:26· listen →
“High-performance states, you don't want everybody around the board table just in this relaxed state. You want them present, aware, accessing all their faculties. That's what coherence provides, is that presence.”
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience · 20:37· listen →
“I would see these blips throughout the day in the glucose monitor that were in the normal range, but that it wasn't associated with food... there are cortisol pops to increase glucose... So it wasn't that I am super chill... I was completely unaware of the physical impact that was happening on my body.”
The ROI of Health and Fitness for Entrepreneurs · 12:40· listen →
Hormetic stress builds capacity
Deliberate, controlled stressors — cold, breath holds, heavy training — teach the nervous system to adapt rather than just endure, with effects that carry over into boardrooms.
“The idea of hormetic stress is consciously and intentionally inducing stressors in order to make adaptations. If you think about it in simple terms, it's what happens when you really strength train. When you lift weights, you're inducing a stressor to the muscles and to the fascia. There's a bit of inflammation because of that, and then you get stronger.”
Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance · 23:27· listen →
“That decision to stand in cold water for 10 to 30 seconds at the end of a shower is something the body resists. And everybody with ADHD who's struggling to get organized in life can benefit from an intentional practice of something that kind of sucks a little.”
The EDGE Framework for Longevity With Sandy Martin · 44:10· listen →
“We grow from the challenge, we grow from the response to the challenge. Like with exercise, I explain to people it's like seeds and soil. The exercise is just the seeds. The soil is what makes it grow.”
Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs with Eric D'Agati · 8:17· listen →
“Most people unfortunately kind of are living at the simmering 7, especially entrepreneurs. They're constantly at this simmering 7 or 8. They never really get to 10, and they also never get down to 0, and so they kind of burn out because they're revving at this high RPMs.”
Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs with Eric D'Agati · 21:03· listen →
The body as decision-making input
Multiple guests argue the body sends more signal to the brain than the reverse, making somatic awareness — not just cognitive reframing — the more reliable path to regulation and clear decisions.
“One thing broadly, our body knows, our body knows what we need. Our body has tremendous wisdom. The body knows how to heal itself. The body has all kinds of extraordinary abilities, which science is just beginning to understand, right? So the body is a tremendous source of wisdom and knowledge.”
Somatic Mindfulness for Entrepreneurs with Fleet Maull · 22:38· listen →
“Our behaviors and our thoughts are actually a response to our nervous system state. So if my nervous system, if my body is going into this state of stress or anxiety, and I'm feeling all that activation... that's going to impact how I'm thinking about a situation and therefore how I'm behaving in a situation.”
Somatic Therapy for Entrepreneurs with Chelsea Horton · 3:15· listen →
“I say that intuition is actually somatic intelligence. It's like your body's ability to attune and be present with a situation. And it's like the wisdom that comes before your mind can even make sense of it.”
Somatic Therapy for Entrepreneurs with Chelsea Horton · 33:59· listen →
“The goal is to open up the pipe and let that thing finally move through us. And when it does, it can be a little bit uncomfortable in the moment. But as you start getting used to this feeling of processing your emotions, it can actually feel really good.”
Emotional Healing for Entrepreneurs w/ Benjy Sherer · 26:42· listen →
“People who don't want to use that, they can do simple things like humming. And if they put their hand on their chest or on their solar plexus, and they hum, you're actually accessing that vagus nerve and helping it to very deliberately relax.”
Integrative Medicine for Entrepreneurs with Carolyn McAuliffe · 16:16· listen →
Sleep and daily rhythm as the substrate
Regulation isn't only about acute technique — sleep timing, circadian consistency, and how you interpret your own recovery data quietly set the baseline for everything else.
“First, accept that acute sleep loss is physiological rather than pathological. It's your axis that's doing its job. Your cortisol is elevated. Your arousal system is in high gear. The worst thing you can do in a high stress sprint is then add performance anxiety on top of that.”
Sleep Data, AI & Orthosomnia With Dr. Elie Gottlieb · 32:55· listen →
“Your wake time is in your control. You got an alarm for that. So you can't force yourself to fall asleep at the same time every day, but you can force yourself to wake up at the same time every day. This is your sort of circadian anchor.”
Sleep Data, AI & Orthosomnia With Dr. Elie Gottlieb · 33:50· listen →
“The group that was told that they slept poorly, their cognition went, it was quite poor, right? They felt, they thought they were told that they're sleeping poorly. So their cognition matched that. The other group that was told that they were sleeping well, the opposite happened.”
Sleep Data, AI & Orthosomnia With Dr. Elie Gottlieb · 16:20· listen →
“There's not much difference from you biologically than, if we think about it, than a plant, right? A plant needs water, it needs sunlight, it needs nutrients from the soil... But if I give it more water and I tell the plant, listen, I'm going to give you extra water this week, but I'm going to put you in a dark closet. How's that going to work out? There's no amount of water that you can give a plant to make up for a lack of sunlight.”
The Doctor of the Future Is You with Sachin Patel · 15:44· listen →
The companion guide
Reading about nervous system regulation is one thing. Changing it is another.
John’s companion guide turns what these conversations cover into something you can actually work through.
More moments worth hearing
Everything else these conversations turned up on this subject.
“Usually they come because they are, they know the stuff, they've done the courses, they've done the marketing course and the business course and that kind of stuff, but it's just not clicking for them, there's a piece missing. And usually that piece is building ADHD processes to actually help unlock all of the information that they've learned.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 2:56
“Are you making what you need to be making to support the life and the people and everything that you wanna support? If not, where is the bottleneck? Look at your business. You know, where is— if you think about the theory of constraints, it's like, where is the piece that if you, you know, doubled everything, your business would break? And often, they're the bottleneck.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 12:22
“Initially, when I started working with people, there was this idea of things like rejection sensitivity dysphoria and the idea that people with ADHD struggled with it, but there was no research on it that you could find, no academic research. But now it is coming to a head.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 17:19
“The thing I love to tell people is you'll probably already working almost as hard as you can work. A lot of times people will come to me and they'll say, I just need to white-knuckle it. I read this book about dopamine detoxing and I've decided I just need to go harder.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 25:51
“So it's not about working harder, it's not about white-knuckling it, that's not gonna get you where you need to go. It's about understanding how your brain works and building the processes that are actually fun and work better, which is a crazy combination, but it's It's the whole wearing glasses that don't match your prescription sucks. It's not helping you and you're not getting more done. It's like, it's the same concept.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 26:35
“I dump some things down on the paper. There's no theme to it. It's really just whatever's top of mind. And I found that to be super helpful. Never been a great meditator, but the past couple years I've been trying. It's gotten better. I found breathwork a little bit more accessible to me, especially in terms of getting into what they call heart-brain coherence, which is a really great way to self-regulate.”
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential · 20:03
“It's like, it's not an attention disorder, it's performance disorder, right? We know what to do. We have trouble doing what we know. And part of that is our ADHD brains make it really hard to decide stuff and prioritize stuff because everything's equally important and equally urgent.”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 14:48
“ADHD brains get in naturally get into motion with only 2 stimuli, right? And that is intense interest or urgent consequence. And in between that, I call that the dopamine desert, right?”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 12:58
“It's not that I couldn't finish an email. I couldn't finish the first sentence of an email. And you know, I realized later it's because, yeah, I was in crisis the whole time during that stretch and ADHD brains do really well in crisis. Like, we can rise to that occasion.”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 7:35
“I don't think of it as a disorder. I just think it's a different brain type. And like nobody thinks twice about supporting, like if your vision isn't quite where you want it to be, you wear glasses or you get LASIK or you wear contacts. And why should ADHD be any different?”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 11:57
“I always know when it's a traditional productivity kind of tip or system when they go, okay, first dump everything out of your brain. Then prioritize everything and then make a list of your to-dos. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, back up the bus.”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 33:19
“This thing just took 3 months and 20 minutes— 3 months to procrastinate, 20 minutes to actually do it— like, but I did it, right? Then they keep doing that each day, all of a sudden that trust starts to come back to themselves.”
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August · 25:44
“Burnout isn't about doing too much. It's doing what's not true for you for too long. And so alignment feels different, right? There's still effort, but there's clarity of direction and growth.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 0:00
“Your soul should be the chief of the energy that your soul's leading from, because most people, have you noticed, lead from the outside and then address strategy, as opposed to the inside and out.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 5:43
“What's fascinating is we all avoid those discomforting topics because they're not comfortable for us, or they're what we actually came to learn, but we avoid them.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 9:19
“Deserving isn't earned, it's remembered, right? And so nobody in that room cares about you. Nobody in that room thinks about you. They're thinking the same thing whoever this person is thinking. They're thinking the same thing. What if they find out?”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 26:32
“Anxiety tells me when they show up is that they're either living in the past or the future. They're not present right now.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 31:20
“I can have a crappy day and go get a massage and feel good for 24 hours, and the next day, if I did not address that crappy whatever's going on inside of me, it's back. So I can do things to feel good, but they're not solving the internal.”
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout · 45:15
“I believe every single human being has the beautiful power within them to transform, to come home to themselves, as I like to say. And so my role is really to provide the safety, the love, the education, and the tools that people need in order to kind of cross that bridge into self-transformation.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 2:25
“Everything is a choice. Truly, everything is a choice to wake up, to say yes, to say no.”
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban · 6:12
Every episode on nervous system regulation
38 conversations, oldest to newest.
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential
ADHD entrepreneurs usually already know business fundamentals but lack ADHD-specific processes that make that knowledge actionable.
ADHD Entrepreneur Focus Formula with Steve August
ADHD is a performance disorder, not an attention disorder—people know what to do but struggle to actually do it.
Become the CEO of Your Soul: Daune M. Thompson on Burnout
Burnout comes from doing what's not true for you for too long, not from doing too much.
Cognitive & Embodied Awareness with Carissa Karban
Living safely and checking boxes for success often leads to burnout rather than fulfillment.
Alex Canavan: Building Community Without Burnout
A dance background instilled discipline, self-accountability, and the ability to perform even when things go wrong, which translates directly into entrepreneurship.
Burnout as a Mirror: Karenna Soto on Somatic Healing
Burnout is not just physical exhaustion but a mirror showing where you're dishonoring your unique capacity or abandoning parts of yourself.
Jordan Harcourt-Hughes: Intuition, Resonance & Creativity
Entrepreneurs over-rely on logical, scheduled thinking and need to balance it with intuitive, embodied ways of knowing.
Emotional Healing for Entrepreneurs w/ Benjy Sherer
Trauma is the wound as it exists right now, not the past event, so healing means addressing current defense mechanisms rather than re-analyzing history.
Emotional Intelligence & Manifestation with Randy Lyman
Business success without emotional awareness leaves entrepreneurs unfulfilled, even after reaching high levels of financial achievement.
Phil Neil: Emotional Mastery & Entrepreneurial Reinvention
Three emotions—uncertainty, fear, and unworthiness—derail entrepreneurial decision-making and push founders into a 'shadow' failure zone.
Dr. Emilie Laplagne: Functional Medicine for Entrepreneurs
Traditional Western medicine is siloed and reactive, treating symptoms after disease develops, while functional medicine looks at the whole body and root causes.
Lindsay Mastrogiavanni: Spiritual Entrepreneurship & Mediumship
Conscious entrepreneurship means building a business grounded in your why, mission, vision, and values rather than external expectations.
From Survival to Strength: Breathwork & Resilience
Chronic fight-or-flight activation undermines decision-making, creativity, and healing, and simple breathing techniques can reliably interrupt it.
Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance
Pain is an output created by the brain's processing of threat signals, not an input from the injured body part, so changing sensory information can change pain perception.
Integrative Medicine for Entrepreneurs with Carolyn McAuliffe
Integrative medicine combines conventional evidence-based care with alternative approaches like acupuncture, massage, and nutrition, while functional medicine seeks root causes rather than just treating symptoms.
Dr. Deborah Rozman: Heart-Brain Coherence for Resilience
Heart rate variability patterns shift between jagged (stress) and smooth coherent waveforms (positive emotion), and this coherence synchronizes the heart and brain to improve clarity, intuition, and executive function.
Dr. Jax Black: Redefining Success Through Joy
Joy, not deficits or trauma, is our natural born state, and fear of judgment or failure is taught by others rather than innate.
Money Stress, Scarcity & Abundance with Scarlett Stanhope
More income doesn't resolve money stress because the problem is an unconscious, emotional relationship with money, not the amount earned.
Dr. Mao Shing Ni on Energy, Qi, and Longevity Secrets
Energy, not time or intelligence, is the entrepreneur's true currency, produced through mitochondrial ATP, regulated by the nervous system, and channeled as qi in Chinese medicine.
Somatic Mindfulness for Entrepreneurs with Fleet Maull
A daily mindfulness practice as short as 12 minutes creates the mental gap needed to respond consciously instead of reacting from old conditioning.
Sound Therapy & Cymatics for Entrepreneur Health
Cymatics is the science of making sound visible through mediums like water, sand, or powder, where pleasing sounds form organized geometric patterns and dissonant sounds create chaotic ones.
Fitness for Busy Entrepreneurs with Eric D'Agati
Physical health works cumulatively like compound interest, not through occasional intense bursts, so consistency beats intensity.
The Clarity Map: Lynn Mull on Purpose and Alignment
Career transitions away from toxic, high-pressure environments often take years and require deliberate financial and emotional planning, not a sudden leap.
The Doctor of the Future Is You with Sachin Patel
The healthcare system only measures disease markers, not the circadian rhythm, nervous system state, and rest/recovery patterns that actually determine health.
The EDGE Framework for Longevity With Sandy Martin
Toxic mold exposure can cause severe brain dysfunction that mimics other conditions and is often misdiagnosed by conventional doctors.
Psychedelics for Entrepreneurs: Scott Omelianuk on Growth
Successful entrepreneurs tend to dance at the edge of the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) without going over it.
Hypnotherapy for Imposter Syndrome With Christina L. Woods
Imposter syndrome and other performance blocks often come from a mismatch between a person's internal sense of self and their external achievements.
Bart Foster: Business Outside and the Power of Nature
Conducting business outdoors and walking shoulder-to-shoulder makes people calmer, more authentic, and more vulnerable, leading to deeper connections than coffee or lunch meetings.
Joy vs Happiness: Shari Alyse on Finding Light in Pain
Joy is an internal, constant state distinct from happiness, which is external and fleeting.
The ROI of Health and Fitness for Entrepreneurs
Exercise and nutrition act like a natural 'smart drug,' boosting decision-making, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility for leaders.
Cymatics & Sound Healing: John Stuart Reid Explains
Sound is not actually a wave but a spherical, pulsating bubble of energy, and cymatics makes this energy visible by imprinting it onto membranes like water.
Conscious Leadership Through Psychedelic Journeys
Psilocybin mushroom journeys can act as a 'house cleaning mechanism' that releases habitual patterns and unresolved grief, trauma, or depression.
Consciousness, Intention & Healing with Caroline Cory
Controlled experiments filmed for Superhuman showed human intention measurably changing DNA electrical conductivity and the pH of water.
Don Estes: How Words and Waveforms Shape Reality
Waveforms have three components—frequency, phase, and amplitude—and phase, which is usually ignored in sound therapy, actually determines the shape and geometry of a wave.
Sleep Data, AI & Orthosomnia With Dr. Elie Gottlieb
AI models like Sleep FM can predict risk for over 130 health conditions from a single night of sleep data, and consumer wearables are moving toward similar predictive screening capability.
Ashley Black: Necessity, Near-Death & High Vibration Living
Ashley Black's chronic childhood illness and a near-fatal infection directly led her to invent the Fascia Blaster and build a $200 million company.
Introducing The Total Entrepreneur: Mind, Body, Spirit
Entrepreneurial stress and disconnection are more intense today, making mind-body-spirit balance more critical than ever.
Somatic Therapy for Entrepreneurs with Chelsea Horton
Somatic therapy addresses emotions by working through the body's sensations rather than only intellectualizing feelings through the mind.