Body · 42 episodes
Nervous System Regulation for entrepreneurs
Ask different guests what regulates the nervous system and you get the same answer wearing different clothes: breath, heart rhythm, and body awareness come up again and again as the actual levers, not mindset or willpower. The science has caught up to practices that used to sound soft — heart rate variability, vagal tone, coherence — and multiple guests point to the same mechanism: your physiology talks to your brain more than your brain talks to it.
Where it gets interesting is the disagreement over what counts as a stressor worth regulating against. Some guests focus on internal noise — unresolved emotion, trauma stored in the body, scarcity beliefs — while others point to physical inputs most entrepreneurs never think about: EMF exposure, mold, processed food, even the design of a sleep tracker app creating anxiety about sleep itself. Nobody here thinks regulation is one technique. It's a stack.
The throughline: your nervous system doesn't know the difference between a tiger and a Slack notification, and entrepreneurs live in a state of low-grade, chronic activation that the body was never built for. Every guest, from the sound healers to the breathwork coaches to the integrative doctors, is really offering a different door into the same room — getting out of fight-or-flight long enough to think clearly.
What holds across every conversation
- •A 3-minute strong breathing sequence followed by a maximal breath hold can raise circulating growth hormone by up to 550% — a free, drug-free lever most entrepreneurs ignore.
- •Simple paced breathing (like 5-5-7 or in-for-5-hold-5-out-7) can drop resting heart rate by about 10 points within minutes, faster than most people expect from a non-pharmaceutical tool.
- •Humming, with a hand on the chest or solar plexus, directly stimulates the vagus nerve — a near-zero-effort regulation technique you can do at a desk.
- •Stop charging your phone or sleeping with wireless earbuds near your head; several guests tie nighttime EMF exposure to disrupted sleep architecture and sympathetic activation.
- •Being told your sleep was bad can hurt your cognitive performance the next day independent of how you actually slept — be careful how much weight you give sleep-tracker scores.
- •Coherence isn't the same as being relaxed — you can be coherent at high arousal (a pitch, a sports performance) or low arousal; the goal is organized signal, not low heart rate.
Heart Coherence and HRV
The measurable link between heart rhythm patterns and brain function, and why coherence — not just calm — is the real target.
“I recently started working with the HeartMath Institute on heart coherence. And so that has been really helpful for me. I can meditate for 10 minutes now. I usually do it first thing in the morning so I can set an attention. And that's been amazing for me. I've actually seen my heart rate variability improve. I'm sleeping better.”
Why Entrepreneurs Need a Holistic Approach - An Introduction · 7:01 · 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.”
Leading with Heart: The Science of Coherence and Emotiona... · 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.”
Leading with Heart: The Science of Coherence and Emotiona... · 20:37 · listen →
“You do influence it unconsciously, you know? And I think one of the best examples to illustrate that, though, well, the physiology is the heart with every beat is putting out electromagnetic field. And your feelings and moods are vibrating as frequencies through that field.”
Leading with Heart: The Science of Coherence and Emotiona... · 26:54 · 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.”
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni · 33:53 · listen →
Breath as a Direct Control Panel
Breathwork recurs across nearly every episode on this topic as the fastest, most portable lever available for shifting physiological state.
“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.”
How to Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance wit... · 37:45 · listen →
“The reason we don't take breathwork seriously is because we call it breathwork when in fact it's respiratory physiology. And if we could just understand that it's respiratory physiology and this is real and not woo, people would get more out of it perhaps.”
How to Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance wit... · 45:27 · 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: Healing, Resilience & the Powe... · 24:30 · listen →
“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 →
Vagal Tone and the Body's Brakes
The vagus nerve as the physical mechanism behind calm, and simple, free ways to engage it on purpose.
“So I describe it as an old-fashioned sled with rudders that have gone down a slippery snow hill, you know, 100 times. The 101st time you go down, it's going to go down the same path.”
Integrative Medicine Approaches for Entrepreneurial Healt... · 15:39 · 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 Approaches for Entrepreneurial Healt... · 16:16 · listen →
“Anything below 70 decibels is really not optimal for this effect... once you get between the range of 70 and 85 decibels, that's the optimal range that we've come to call the Goldilocks zone... at 110 decibels, it killed all of the red blood cells within 20 minutes. Every single red blood cell was dead.”
The Science of Sound: Healing Through Cymatics with John ... · 43:48 · listen →
“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: Healing, Resilience & the Powe... · 16:46 · listen →
Where Stress Actually Lives: The Body
Trauma and chronic stress aren't stored as memory alone — they're stored as sensation, and somatic approaches work where talk therapy alone stalls.
“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.”
Your Body Keeps the Score With Chelsea Horton · 3:15 · listen →
“We're responding to a present moment situation through the lens of a past experience. So, if growing up, every time I got a B on a report card, my parents punished me or criticized me, or I was only praised when I was perfect and achieved the most, I'm carrying that story from childhood in my body.”
Your Body Keeps the Score With Chelsea Horton · 11:12 · listen →
“So people can live— these thick-skinned people can be living with unhealthy defense mechanisms, taking their anger out on their family, walking around with stress all day, every day, not feeling and living and enjoying their lives in all sorts of ways. And it's not until something finally snaps.”
Emotional Healing for Entrepreneurs with Benjy Sherer · 17:34 · 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: A Mirror to Self-Discovery with Karenna Soto · 25:16 · listen →
“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 101 with Dr. Fleet Maull · 22:38 · listen →
Hormetic Stress: Training the System on Purpose
Deliberate, controlled stressors — cold, breath holds, sauna — build the same adaptive capacity entrepreneurs need under unpredictable pressure.
“So humans love hormetic stress is what makes us human. Going all the way back anthropologically, we would have went through times of not a whole lot of food and times of probably a surplus of food and sometimes too hot and too cold. And the thing at its root function that really allowed us to survive was being able to adapt to those stressors.”
How to Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance wit... · 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 →
“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.”
Stay Fit for your Business with Eric D’Agati · 21:03 · listen →
Hidden Stressors: Environment, Sleep, and Tech
Some of the biggest hits to nervous system regulation aren't emotional at all — they're environmental, and often invisible.
“Your body is an electrical system. And, when you have this man-made radiation that literally couples with your very gentle delicate electrical system, You get all sorts of interruption. And charging your phone next to your bedhead is one of the biggest mistakes that people can possibly make in their health journey.”
Why You Sleep and Wake Up Exhausted with Nathan Siles · 1:54 · listen →
“So, the AirPods while you're sleeping are the same situation as people using vagal nerve stimulators while they're going to bed or there's all these sleep masks that play little visuals for you or sweet dreams meditations or all these things, they have a biological cost.”
Why You Sleep and Wake Up Exhausted with Nathan Siles · 16:38 · 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.”
What Your Sleep Data Says About Your Brain and Body With ... · 16:20 · listen →
“They're creating incoherence. The incoherence keeps us addicted to the screen. Give me that next hit. I'm familiar with agitation. Give me more agitation. And then that is what is getting us farther and farther from who we are as people. How do we connect with others? It is creating this incoherence in our whole lives to have that poison right in the palm of our hand.”
The EDGE Framework for Longevity With Sandy Martin · 0:00 · 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 with ... · 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 with ... · 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 with ... · 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 with ... · 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 with ... · 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 with ... · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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 With Daune M. Thompson · 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.”
Building Bridges Between Cognitive and Embodied Awareness... · 2:25
“Everything is a choice. Truly, everything is a choice to wake up, to say yes, to say no.”
Building Bridges Between Cognitive and Embodied Awareness... · 6:12
Every episode on nervous system regulation
43 conversations, oldest to newest.
ADHD and Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Your Potential with ...
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 With Daune M. Thompson
Burnout comes from doing what's not true for you for too long, not from doing too much.
Building Bridges Between Cognitive and Embodied Awareness...
Living safely and checking boxes for success often leads to burnout rather than fulfillment.
Building Community Without Burning Out: Leadership, Disci...
A dance background instilled discipline, self-accountability, and the ability to perform even when things go wrong, which translates directly into entrepreneurship.
Burnout: A Mirror to Self-Discovery with Karenna Soto
Burnout is not just physical exhaustion but a mirror showing where you're dishonoring your unique capacity or abandoning parts of yourself.
Embracing Intuition and Creative Resonance with Jordan Ha...
Entrepreneurs over-rely on logical, scheduled thinking and need to balance it with intuitive, embodied ways of knowing.
Emotional Healing for Entrepreneurs with 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 in Entrepreneurship with Randy Lyman
Business success without emotional awareness leaves entrepreneurs unfulfilled, even after reaching high levels of financial achievement.
Emotional Mastery, Reinvention & the Inner Game of Entrep...
Three emotions—uncertainty, fear, and unworthiness—derail entrepreneurial decision-making and push founders into a 'shadow' failure zone.
Enhancing Entrepreneurial Health and Performance with Dr....
Traditional Western medicine is siloed and reactive, treating symptoms after disease develops, while functional medicine looks at the whole body and root causes.
Fix Leaky Gut Naturally with Dr. Sulaiman Bharwani
The gut microbiome communicates bidirectionally with the brain via the vagus nerve and influences sleep, mood, decision-making, and chronic disease risk.
From Corporate Life to Spiritual Entrepreneurship with Li...
Conscious entrepreneurship means building a business grounded in your why, mission, vision, and values rather than external expectations.
From Survival to Strength: Healing, Resilience & the Powe...
Chronic fight-or-flight activation undermines decision-making, creativity, and healing, and simple breathing techniques can reliably interrupt it.
How to Reset Your Nervous System for Peak Performance wit...
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 Approaches for Entrepreneurial Healt...
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.
Leading with Heart: The Science of Coherence and Emotiona...
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.
Leading with Joy and Redefining Success with Dr. Jax Black
Joy, not deficits or trauma, is our natural born state, and fear of judgment or failure is taught by others rather than innate.
Overcoming Money Stress and Fear with Scarlett Stanhope
More income doesn't resolve money stress because the problem is an unconscious, emotional relationship with money, not the amount earned.
Proactive Health for Entrepreneurs with Dr. Lynn Anderson
Health rests on three pillars—sleep, nutrition, and movement—and it takes roughly 120 days to replace an old habit with a new one, both cellularly and mentally.
Secrets of Energy and Longevity with Dr. Mao Shing Ni
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 101 with Dr. 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 and Healing Frequencies for Entrepreneurs w...
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.
Stay Fit for your Business with Eric D’Agati
Physical health works cumulatively like compound interest, not through occasional intense bursts, so consistency beats intensity.
The Clarity Map: Tools for Growth, Connection, and Purpos...
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.
The Entrepreneurial Edge: Branding, Resilience & Psychede...
Successful entrepreneurs tend to dance at the edge of the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) without going over it.
The Hidden Beliefs Blocking Your Success With Christina L...
Imposter syndrome and other performance blocks often come from a mismatch between a person's internal sense of self and their external achievements.
The Power of Doing Business Outside with Bart Foster
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.
The Power of Joy: Finding Light Through Adversity with Sh...
Joy is an internal, constant state distinct from happiness, which is external and fleeting.
The Power of Personal Branding for Entrepreneurial Succes...
Personal branding works best when framed as generous knowledge-sharing rather than self-promotion, which removes much of the anxiety around it.
The ROI of Health and Fitness for Entrepreneurs with Timo...
Exercise and nutrition act like a natural 'smart drug,' boosting decision-making, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility for leaders.
The Science of Sound: Healing Through Cymatics with John ...
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.
The Spiritual Is Scientific with Rev. Tony Senf
The body is an effect of the mind and spirit, so entrepreneurs should prioritize source and spirit first for real effectiveness.
Unlocking Conscious Leadership With The Journeymen Collec...
Psilocybin mushroom journeys can act as a 'house cleaning mechanism' that releases habitual patterns and unresolved grief, trauma, or depression.
Unlocking the Matrix: The Science of Consciousness with C...
Controlled experiments filmed for Superhuman showed human intention measurably changing DNA electrical conductivity and the pH of water.
What You Say Shapes Your Reality With Don Estes
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.
What Your Sleep Data Says About Your Brain and Body With ...
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.
When Necessity Breeds Invention with Ashley Black
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.
Why Entrepreneurs Need a Holistic Approach - An Introduction
Entrepreneurial stress and disconnection are more intense today, making mind-body-spirit balance more critical than ever.
Why You Sleep and Wake Up Exhausted with Nathan Siles
Cell phones, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth devices emit pulsed non-ionizing radiofrequency radiation that couples with the body's bioelectric system and disrupts deep, restorative sleep.
Your Body Keeps the Score With Chelsea Horton
Somatic therapy addresses emotions by working through the body's sensations rather than only intellectualizing feelings through the mind.