Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - Burnout, Cortisol and Chronic Stress: Nahid De Belgonne Explains How to Reset Your Body

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

What does chronic stress actually do to your body — and how can you start to feel better? In this episode of Just As Well, Claire Sanderson speaks to Nahid De Belgonne, founder of The Human Method, about nervous system dysregulation, burnout, cortisol overload and why so many women feel constantly overwhelmed. Nahid explains how stress can show up emotionally through irritability, impatience and reactivity, and physically through poor sleep, gut issues, inflammation, skin flare-ups and exhaustion. She also shares practical tools to help calm the body, including movement, breathwork and simple techniques to release stress before it builds up. In this conversation, they cover: - What a dysregulated nervous system actually is - Why modern life keeps us in survival mode - The emotional and physical signs of chronic stress - How cortisol affects the body - Why high-achieving women are particularly vulnerable to burnout - Practical ways to regulate your nervous system every day If you’ve been feeling frazzled, reactive, exhausted or like you can never properly switch off, this episode is for you. Subscribe to Just As Well for more conversations on women’s health, wellness and how to feel better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor,

free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Don't miss the Devil Wears product to in theaters. Street, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blount and Stanley Tucci are back. In light of the recent scandal, I'm here to restore your credibility. I did not hire you, and all I need to do is buy my time until you fail. On May 1st, icons. I'm going to make something of this job.

Rain. The bridges I burn. Night my way. Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2. Indeed is May 1st.

Directed by David Frankel. Hi, I'm Claire Sanderson. And Claire has just recorded an episode of Just As Well. I had to miss this one, so I'm going to listen to it with you guys. I'm excited. Who was it? It was Nahid de Beljean. She is the founder of the human method,

and she helps women overcome dysregulated nervous systems. Now, we all live under a constant state of stress, chronic stress, and it manifests in so many negative ways in our life, and it can be physically or mentally. So physically it can manifest in, tummy ache, headaches and in the real sort of extreme measures, heart attacks, but mentally it can manifest in short tempers, lack of patient and being very reactive at home and losing your temper with your children and your partners.

So she helps women, high-achieving women, regulate their nervous systems and find the tools to be able to navigate life and not to become or not. overwhelmed with life's pressures. And I believe there was some like physical demonstrations. One of the ladies on the team said, Claire's just been rolling around in that studio. Well, yes, I asked her for practical tips that we could, people listening could take away.

So I won't tell you what she said. You should listen to find out. But one of them involved getting on the floor. Now I didn't get on the floor during the recording, I must say, because the cameras wouldn't have been able to pick that up. But the producer later filmed it on her phone. and I think we should maybe post it on socials when the episode comes out because let's just say it looked a little bit peculiar. It looks like I was maybe doing something else on the floor not rocking.

Oh, okay. Yeah, ha ha, he-he. But it's what we should be doing to help disregulate ourselves when our cortisol rises. What Nahed says is when you feel cortisol rising in your body, get rid of it. And in current society, we don't. We lay cortisol on top of cortisol on top of cortisol until it becomes too much and we become overwhelmed and all the negative symptoms develop. So we need to get rid of it before it becomes a problem. Well, I look forward to listening with you guys.

And as always, please do like and subscribe. Please share this podcast far on wide. We've had some amazing guests so far. And we've often topped the charts as well when it comes to health and wellness. You guys have got us to number one. We cannot thank you enough. Let's keep it going with Just as well. Thanks a lot.

Nahid de Beljean, welcome to Just as well. Hello, how are you today? I'm very well, thank you. Very rainy London, but, you know, it's a Friday for us now, isn't it? So we're at the end of our working week. Nice way to end it. Yes, and you've travelled in from Kent this morning. I have, yeah.

So you live down by the seaside. I do. I live by the sea, and I have been there for about five years, almost. So it was a post-COVID. Ah, I need some space. Yeah. You're one of those. I was one of those, yes. I'm ready to come back now.

Ready to come back to London. There's a lot of people doing that. Yeah, I think after a bit you realise actually I really love the culture and the diversity and the options and choices and young people dressing out. You know, all the excitement of the city. I'm from the city and I think I need to be back in the city. Yeah, you tried it. It was lovely. I wrote my book there, so great. So it served a purpose. You're ready to come back to the big lights. I am. Well, thank you so much for coming in today. If you can briefly, in introduce yourself and tell us what you do and what has brought you to come on just as well. Of course. So I am a somatic movement educator as well as an author and what that means is that I help

people to rewire their brain through movement because that's how we learn. We learn through experience and so typically I'll help high functioning women who are their nervous systems are completely exhausted but they wouldn't identify themselves as dysregulated and I help them to listen to the signals from their body, to rebuild internal safety, and to shift from a pace of survival to self-trust. So you have created the human method to help people get back. How would you... So get back, I would say that it's about getting back to your internal rhythms again, because I think we're on such survival mode in the sort of culture that we live in. So it's kind of being back to your fully human condition again so that you are functioning well.

So briefly, tell us what the human method entails and then we obviously will go into more detail a bit later. So the human method was born out of me trialing and testing on lots of clients in my studio. I used to have studios in central London for about 13 years. And because everybody was just so frazzled and they were so exhausted and they were so hyper-vigilant that what they were normally doing just wasn't really landing and I wanted to get underneath the bonnet and look at nervous system dysregulation because that's what they were suffering from why do you feel people feel constantly on the edge you know everyone you speak to

seems frazzled at the moment what what societally is happening to cause us to be in this state of disarray in our nervous system well your body already knows that So the world is in chaos. The systems that are out there that we thought were there to protect us, aren't protecting us at all. Social media, technology is really fast. The pace that we live in is really fast. And we're always on. We're constantly hypervigilant and that's taking its toll.

So we're living under chronic stress? We're living under chronic pressure, chronic stress and there seems to be no let up. And even, you know, our downtime is spent scrolling, doom scrolling or being on Netflix or, you know, it's constant. stimulation into the system and not enough of getting rid of that and having some downtime for repair. Because we carry mini computers in our handbags and pockets now with our smartphones. I'm guilty of looking at my work emails last thing at night, first thing in the morning. If I'm watching my children play sport on a Saturday, it's almost like muscle memory. I'm on my phone.

There's never a period of decompression. And I'm not alone in that. No, you're not. You're not. And you know, and you know that it's not the thing that's giving you rest, but it's really addictive because there's a lot of money being invested in keeping you addicted to your phone because it makes money, you know? And so there's no time to let your brain rest.

How your brain works is that it toggles between external sensory processing and internal reflection. So your brain's going out and coming in and going out and coming in. And there's no coming in for any of us. We're just constantly stimulated throughout the day. And that's going to have an effect on your system. And I'm seeing it with children as well. So I have a teenager and a 10-year-old. And the teenager especially can get quite angry if we take the phone off him.

Snapchat is the communication platform of choice for that age demographic at the moment. Yes. So if he's putting his nervous system under stress at this age, God knows what's going to happen in the future. Yeah, absolutely. You know, his disposition could escalate and could it lead to problems for him in the future? Well, I think what he's probably doing

is revving up his whole system, as are you, when you're on your phone. So you kind of have to look at the environment in the whole house. If you're on your phone a lot and he's watching that, he's getting his cues from that. So it's not a blame thing. But, you know, it comes from where do kids learn this, you know, this behaviour.

And I know there's lots of outside influence as well. a good way to look at it is, you know, having rules around not having your phones at the table, having certain times that you do, being at doors a lot to counter being, you know, taking all the stimulation in. It revs up your whole nervous system. So your baseline, instead of being calm, it starts from up here. And then when on top of that, something else happens to you, like it's something very challenging. You're already up here. So, you know, that's why we feel completely impatient, intolerant and out of control. So these are the early warning. So these are the early warning signs that your nervous system is overwhelmed where you struggle to regulate your emotions,

maybe you have low patience and your temperament is dysregulated? What other signs are there that someone is overwhelmed? So it's not being fully present. As you say, impatience, intolerance, being really snappy, perhaps with your partner or your kids, because dealing with human beings is messy, you know, they're not like technology, are there? They're not like deadlines. It's kind of like all the messiness of other people's emotions. And I think particularly for women, we're such a container for all the emotions of our family, perhaps of our team, that it's a big load to carry. So then when you are faced with something that's a real emergency or urgency,

that's, you know, when everything starts to kind of blow up because you just can't take anymore. So it's about my work is to do with kind of building capacity. And that means allowing yourself to come away. So it's not about rest, it's about release. Because what you're describing is working mothers all over, that the load is become unmanageable. And I find myself being too reactive with my kids, with my husband, throw the perimenopause in and, you know, it's a quadrant of chaos.

But it can threaten relationships. It can threaten the harmony at home, threaten marriages, threaten you professionally if you're struggling to manage your emotions in work. Yeah, absolutely. And so that needs to be dealt with. It's not something that happens to you. It's something that you've unwittingly trained yourself into. So you can also train yourself out of it. That's a good news. So, you know, on anyone kind of hearing that, if that is you, I wouldn't want anyone to kind of berate themselves about that. It's just that we live in a culture that really rewards productivity and speed and that isn't how we function so we're actually going against our biology so once you start

working with your biology it becomes really easy to manage and I'm a real example of that so I used to suffer from chronic stress and anxiety and I've burnt out several times and now you know everyone says I'm one of the calmest people that they know and I remember you know my husband said to me often says to me in big crisis he's like you're so calm I'm like yeah I am and I genuinely am you just have a very serene presence about you, I have to say, yeah. You probably wouldn't have said that about 35 years ago. So take us through your experience then. What happened to you?

So I come from quite a volatile house. No one meant it to be that. But my parents were stressed. They came over here in the 60s. They came into London. And it was, you know, quite a hostile environment. They had good jobs. They had some sort of community.

But they didn't have a family network. And if they weren't working, it was a disaster, of course. because they didn't have family wealth. And so that made them very stressed and anxious. And blessed them, no one had taught them to self-soothe. So they didn't know how to pass it on. So the house was quite, yeah, extremely volatile. And I had chronic anxiety so much so that I couldn't get on the tube.

I used to walk everywhere. I used to have panic attacks. And I've had a life of kind of seeking lots of different things. But what I did know from a very early age was that movement helped to dissipate my emotion. So all those emotions that built up inside me had no one to talk to about them. I didn't really have language for them. It felt normal. But I had a real understanding that if I moved, it would help to kind of lower that level of stress.

And so I started running when I first left home. I wanted to leave home, so I was kind of planning how to do it. I started kickboxing when I left my first husband. I started yoga when I left a very stressy job in technology without any plans. And so I understood that movement really helped, but I didn't quite understand how and why at the time. Are there physical manifestations of a dysregulated nervous system? And what are the repercussions if it is left completely unaddressed?

And they don't discover movement or something like the human method, which will come on to. Yeah. So, yes, I mean, you'll know it, won't you? So the physical manifestations of a dysregulated nervous system are, you might not be able to sleep. You might be, have gut issues. Yeah. eye ache.

Yeah. Or IBS. Yeah, I see quite a lot of people with IBS and kind of unexplained gut issues. You might have skin flare-ups, internal inflammation, all those sort of things, autoimmune diseases. You know, there can be all sorts of things, poor skin, brittle hair, all the physical manifestations of a system not functioning well. So there's that. And the repercussions of that are that all chronic states start from small niggles that are that are left. that are left unattended.

So it has quite a huge repercussion. I'm seeing women in their 40s and 50s who've had strokes and heart attacks. Wow. Because for my personal experience, I suffer with rosacea, which for those who may not be aware is a condition where my skin becomes inflamed

and can become very red all over my cheeks and down under my chin here. And it can get to the point of being sore to touch and it can sometimes get very dry and but it absolutely gets worse during periods of stress. Stress is one of the triggers. Along with heat and if my immune system is compromised, but I think my immune system becomes compromised when I'm stressed.

Yeah. That's so common. That's just so common in the people I see. I have one client who had sciatica every time she was stressed and it would just fell her completely. And it's completely linked to her stress. It didn't happen when she felt relaxed, which, to be fair, wasn't very often to begin with. Because I've tried so many things to help my rosacea and nothing has helped.

Tell me what you've tried. Oh, every, well, not every, many treatments, you know, injectables, lasers. I've tried red light masks because that's supposed to be great for it. It just made it worse. I've tried to eliminate dairy. You know, I've, you name it, and I've given it a go over the years. being the editor of woman's health, I get access to a lot of information and a lot of treatments, etc. And nothing helps it.

The only thing that probably helps it is if I'm on a holiday for two weeks and I've been able to switch off from work. But even then I can't switch off, if I'm honest, but dial down work, which tells you everything you need to know that it's linked to stress. Yeah, it's a lifestyle, isn't it? It's a lifestyle that you're in. And also, don't forget that the environment you're in is fast. you're never here, you're always planning in the future. So that not being fully present, you know, my advice to you would be in your downtime, try and do as many things as you possibly can where you're fully present.

And that could actually be very simple things like going out for walks, you know, instead of sitting and watching television, which I'm sure you don't really do that often. But going for, you know, going for long walks and being out in nature, that's incredibly regulating. So you could do something simple like that. When I go on these long walks, I'm always listening to podcasts, doing research for this podcast or if I'm watching TV I'm walking on the treadmill that there's because I've got a treadmill at home I'm so time poor I'm always trying to multitask you know I there's I'm very

rarely just surrendering to a lovely countryside walk despite the fact I live in the countryside I live on the south downs um lovely yeah yeah and that Claire is the problem isn't it we're all doing too much all of the time and there's no downtime for your brain so it sounds like the human method would help me. So let's dig into exactly what the human method is and step by step what you do with your clients, which a lot of them are high achieving women, which I would describe myself as one of those. What do you do to help these women overcome this dysregulated nervous system? So that human method is all about movement for regulation, not movement as exercise. So once I understood the nervous system, that's what I teach. And so that's the distinction between that and

what I was teaching before, which was yoga and breathwork and so on. And with all of those other practices, they're really mindset driven. They're like a top down. You know, even when one is doing yoga in the world that we live in, it's all about performance, outward performance, doing a really perfect downward dog or a pigeon pose or whatever it is. And what you would do with me is I would look at your patterns. So I would guide you through small movements and I'd be able to decipher your movement patterns into whatever was going on for you. So, for instance, anxiety, I mean, everyone presents in a different way. But if someone's anxious, they might have a particular pattern.

And that could be that their chest is really tight, and they're holding themselves like that. And what that's doing is it's tightening your chest muscles, and then your head comes forward as well. I know. And then your head comes forward. And then your head comes forward. And that's weight bearing on your organs.

So now your lungs aren't moving freely and easily. And that's going to have an impact on your nervous system because your brain now thinks that you're under threat. So unwittingly, through our daily habits, we are training the brain to be under threat, to feel under threat all of the time. So I would look, I'm really interested in how your bones move through you because if you have any place that the bones aren't moving well,

it'll tell me about the constriction of soft tissue. And why that's important is that when anything happens to you, before you make sense of it with your brain, your body responds first. And I'll give you an example. Have you ever had that scenario where you're talking to somebody, you're whispering to someone, and you feel someone's listening in? You haven't turned around to look at them, but you feel a presence and someone's listening. So your voice goes quieter and you huddle in closer to your friend. Well, it's a bit like that. Your body senses, presence, it senses.

there's danger, that's its job. Yep. And that's your response to get out of danger, to do something with that information. And then your brain makes sense of it by saying, what is this like based on your experience and present moment sensation. So you're not actually meeting anything in the moment. Your brain just goes, what is this like?

Is it danger, is it not? And then it either course corrects or it confirms your response. And what that means is if you had, I'm always using the mother scenario. I apologise, but that was my kind of case. But if you had a mother who was very, very stressed, and they talked to you with a particular pitch, you know, my shoulders used to go up.

So if I hear my, even when I pick up the phone to my mum, bless her, you know, my shoulders kind of tense, and I have to breathe and kind of do a lot of work to kind of let that go. So your body responds first. So that's why I always look to the body first. I'm looking at how your bones move, and then I'm looking at how you accommodate your full breathing. So looking at the way my bones move, do you have someone stand up and do movements or you assessing me as I'm sat here?

So I will be getting you on the floor and it's all online. You don't have to look at the screen. I'm watching you. And I will give you certain movements to do. And I'll say to you, Claire, did you notice that your left hip isn't moving there at all? because how your system works is it's a bit like a fishing net the nervous system if you have a pull on one part of you it's going to influence everything else yeah so it's a little bit like you know when people wear a handbag on one side and then your shoulder goes up to hold the strap and then that's going to influence the other side as well and your nervous system will detect that as alarm because you're not well organized yeah so there's something going on here that it's checked out of it thinks that's your habit so that's what it's job because you've trained it to do that unwittingly. And that's going to have an influence in how you breathe. Maybe you're not breathing into this side. So your brain is constantly detecting what's working well and what isn't working well, where there's some sort of dysfunction and it will compensate for that. So now all your energy

is going to keep you upright rather than doing all the other things that you want to do in life. And then to the breathing side of things, again, is that breathing practice that you do with someone or are you assessing me as you're looking at me now? So all the movements that we do will facilitate lower breathing. Most of us are breathing up in here. When you breathe up in here, this is where your kind of go, go, go response of your nervous system. The nerves for that is in the upper lungs.

And the nerves for your rest repair is in the lower lungs. We're all breathing up here. And when you breathe up here, you're just training your brain to be anxious, stressed and dysregulated. But when you breathe lower, you're going to be training your brain that you're at rest, you're safe, and you're repairing. Yeah. So I would teach you to do that, but not just straight by going there, but actually facilitating

this ease and this kind of tension-free body, as tension-free as you can be, to allow the breath to happen naturally. There's a difference. We're not imposing breathing on the system, and we're not imposing good posture because that's a nonsense, it's not static. This is body up, so it's bottom up to the brain rather than top down, which is brain to the body. And we now understand, you know, with scans and everything,

that there's more signals coming from your body to the brain than there is the other way around. So the old paradigm was, you know, we were a brain with a body. We actually understand we're a body with a brain. So you've established that a patient's body is not moving effectively, efficiently, and you've isolated areas where they're not moving properly. What's the next step with your clients to try and rectify the state they're in? So it's a three-month program.

I walk people through. And in the first month, I'm teaching you how it feels for your system to be safe, not for you thinking you're safe, but your system to believe that you're safe. So we introduce comfort to the system because we all walk around in discomfort. We normalise it. So that's the first month. In the second month, we're looking at. that emotional kind of intelligence or integrity so that you, when you feel angry or impatient,

instead of thinking you're deficient in some way and berating yourself, you can get curious about that. Yeah? So say if it's, you know, one of your children not listening to you, is it because you rush them? Is it because you're always rushing them? And they don't feel seen and heard and kind of given some space and time? Do you know what I mean? There's a whole reason that we rush people through things or we we immediately react in a certain way so it's getting really curious about why do you do that and i'll give you an example of that i had a client recently and she's sort of in her 30s and she works in quite busy environment and industry and she is incredibly intelligent very clever but she really gets very stuttery and red in the face when she has to present

she knows everything and there's no reason for it one would think and when you're you're you dig a little bit deeper, the reason was because her father used to bully her, intimidate her, make her feel stupid. And so any time that she spoke out loud, she'd just get really embarrassed about it. So what we were doing, we were looking at how she moves. And any time I gave her something new to do, she'd get very frustrated because she couldn't do it. And so it's creating this really safe space where there's no consequence to you getting it wrong. And then that builds your confidence because then you understand how you can strategise to get it right because movement is a strategy you know but it sounds like there's an element of counselling going on here as well because

you needed to dig deep into that woman's history and psyche to establish the root cause yeah of so actually yes and no so i'm not with love i'm actually not that interested in people's history because what i'm interested in is how they move and whether I knew that about her or not, it kind of doesn't matter. What I was observing was that she doesn't like to make mistakes. And so it was helping her to be much easier about making mistakes and then learning from that.

Because the only way to learn is to make mistakes. Yeah, and then process that learning. So it's actually when you're not doing anything that you're in learning mode. So you can see why filling out all your time with learning, learning, learning, is just going to exhaust you. So one of the women who works on women's health with me, Nikki Osmond, she's the editor of woman's health, she's been working with you because she noticed that her nervous system was dysregulated. She described to me that come October every year she's at burnout.

And I know that she's been spending time with you. And she described to me this morning that for the first time in genuinely years, she can read a fiction book. again, whereas she'd got herself into such a heightened state of stress, she couldn't relax and surrender into a fiction book. I can so relate to this because I read a lot, but I read science. Books about women's hell, women's physiology, I'm a bit of a science geek. I love learning, but the only time I can read a fiction book is if I'm on a sun lounger with a pinocleader in hand somewhere hot.

But I've not worked with you, and a lot of people here listen to me, listening today or watching today are not going to be able to do that either. So what practical tips can you give me and the people listening that they can do on their own at home to help regulate their nervous system? Sure. Well, I think the very first thing that I would start introducing into your life is to move your stress out of you. It's not a run. It's not exercise. What it means is that when you start to feel, you know, something rising up, maybe you have a deadline, then get rid of that stress out of the system. So say if you've delivered your deadline, don't then go on to the next project because you're just ramping up your stress throughout the day.

Get rid of it somehow. So rocking on the floor is a great way to get rid of stress. Or you could do it standing where you just shake it out and it puts music on and just shake that stress out. Because the most appropriate thing to do with cortisol, which is one of their stress hormones, is to move it out of the body. But what we do is we sit and we just get more and more stress. So there's a rise of cortisol in the body and we're not doing anything with it. So once upon a time, our threats were physical and you'd run. You know, you saw it and you'd run because that's the point of cortisol. It's to give you your like, you know, get up and go and do something with it. But we're sitting down, we let it rise and then we, you know, there's no release of that.

And then on top of that, we might then do a really hard run. So I'm not suggesting exercise is bad at all. But sometimes if you're already stressed, that's going to ramp up your stress level. levels. So it's kind of getting out the system with something really simple for about one or two minutes. So that's the very first thing I'd say is understand that the most appropriate thing to do with cortisol is get it out the system. The second one is breathe slower. So I teach everyone a very simple, six seconds in, six seconds out. So that's 12 seconds. Times up by five, it gives you a minute. Yeah. So you're breathing five breaths per minute. And all the research shows us that anything between five and seven breaths per minute is the most is the optimal pace of breathing and then in the UK I think we're

breathing something like between 18 and 22 breaths per minute so you can see how we're clock you know overclocking the system so that's immediately going to send you into overdrive so breathe slower and get the cortisol out of your body it's like an already sense that I lack patience to such an intense degree yes that I would give up after 30 seconds I am someone that just thrives on being on the go and I would struggle to sit there and regulate my breathing even for a minute. So you're my ideal client. All my clients are exactly like you. They're high achieving, but they know that it's not right.

It's not sustainable. Yep. And I think it's a shame that, you know, we go on holiday and that's the only time we get to release because we don't have this information and we don't know how to act. access it. So I bet I could show you how to sit down for 30 seconds. But my actual thing is, you don't have to sit and meditate. It's not about that. We are dynamic moving organisms. We are made to move. That's how the brain. And one of the theories is that the brain developed to help us organize complex and social organization and moving, as in the hunter-gatherer tribes. You know, that's how the brain developed. And so movement is so regulatory. So I could get you to

breathe because I'd give you some gentle movement with that and you'd feel good. Such as what would be the gentleman? Okay so I could get you to lie on the floor something really easy lie in the floor with your knees bent have your hands on your belly so you're sensing your breathing it's not a cognitive thing like I must breathe and be silent you're actually sensing the belly moving in and out six seconds in six seconds out and then really slowly I'd get you to keep your pelvis on the floor like a rolling pin and then very slowly roll it forwards for your inhale and roll it backwards for your exhale. And just so it's sensation, new sensation that's being fed into the system.

And then what that does is it helps your brain shift its focus from anxiety, panic, stress to this new thing because it's really interested in novelty to this new movement and this new thinking for breathing with the movement, which is again very regulatory. But because you're not just doing it, you're sensing it with. what you feel on the floor and your sensing it through your hands on your belly, you have the external body soothing the internal body, and the internal body soothing the external body. So it's this kind of biofeedback, and I think you could do that for 30 seconds.

So you don't stay still. I actually find stillness is an impossible task in the culture we live in. So if you think about meditation, where did it spring from? Monasteries of men with no children, no mortgage. They clean together, they cook together, they are disciplined because men are obedient. You know, they like a bit of discipline so that they can sit for hours because they've moved around all day long, which prepares your joints for sitting. Yeah.

Now look at our culture. We're sitting all day long. We're completely collapsed. Brains wired. The body's completely tired because it's just trying to stay up in the same, you know, same kind of fixed state all of the time. There's no movement. There's no kind of expansion and contraction, which is. is what the body wants to do. And then you ask people to meditate, well, of course you're going

to think, oh my hips, all my shopping list, my blow-dry appointment. Do you do you mean? Of course it's impossible because what you can't have is a tired, collapsed body and a restful mind, and you can't have a wired mind and a restful body. They're the same thing. So it's kind of meeting yourself where you are. How often should you do the practices you describe the six-second breath, that laying on the floor? Is that a daily thing? multiple times a day? Yeah, multiple times a day. So I would, I teach all my clients to start two minutes every day in the morning, breathing six in six out. And then slowly, over a few months, three months, build it up to 20 minutes. 20 minutes is a sweet spot. So in the morning.

If you can't do that seated still, do it with some quiet movement. And in terms of, and what that does, so it's kind of important to know why you're doing, what that does is after you've slept for a night, hopefully your brain's had some rest, so that when you get up, you haven't had all the stuff that we have to face, you know, in our day to try and then bring your baseline down. You've got a nice calm baseline. What the breathing will do at this pace over time is that it will keep reducing your baseline of your nervous system. And then with the movement, do it throughout the day. It only needs to be a minute, you know, a minute, two minutes. Just notice like, oh, God, you know, I can feel my shoulders come up. Let me come and shake it all out.

So your body is giving you signals. What I teach you to do is listen to them. Listen to them and then start to take the appropriate action. And this is something we could do with our children, our partners. Shall I tell you what? It's so great because women always put themselves at the bottom of the list, don't they? But here's the beauty of this work is that once you regulate yourself,

you are non-verbally regulating everybody else in your household. So your children will have a different response to you. your partner will have a different response to you without you even saying anything. Plus you could get your kids curious about, you know, what you're doing. I often say, you know, that what I teach is giving women a chance to say or the permission to say to everyone. I haven't got the answer now. I'm going to go away and regulate and then I'll come back and we will talk about it. Because there's no reason you should have the answer for everything straight away or the solution.

And I'll tell you how that's worked with the client. She's got ADHD. She's just got divorced. very messy and she's got twins one of the daughters has got ADHD the whole house is reactive constantly reactive I've been working for her for four weeks but even after the very first session she is completely different she can regulate herself she's never been able to she had the calmest Christmas ever her children are responding to her beautifully they're getting very curious about what she's doing and she's teaching them things as well so it's beautiful you know it has a ripple

because how do you want to relate to all the people in your life? Do you want to always to be a fast shouting match, you know, fast speed thing? Or do you actually want to enjoy your children growing up and your relationship with your partner? That is kind of your choice. And what is she doing? She's getting rid of the cortisol. She's doing the six second breathing.

Yes. And lots of other regulatory things that I've taught her. So everyone's a little bit different because they'll all have different patterns. So what we're also looking at is is kind of building your window of choice. It used to be called the window of tolerance. That tolerance feels like something you've got to put up with. Whereas having a window of choice, I think, is much more hopeful and open.

And what she, you know, she, we looked at, what are the first signs that happen in your body before you hit a wall? Because there'll be clues that we have groomed ourselves to not listen to anymore. And it might be that your breath gets really shallow. Okay, get on the floor. do some rocking, let that out, do some breathing. It might be that, you know, you find that you're really clenching your fists. Okay, let's do something about that.

Or you clench your jaw. I clenched my jaw. So that's a real problem, you know, people clenching their jaw. And when you do that, that can often need a migraines and so on. Plus, again, it sends your head forwards and you have the impact in the internal body. So then we can look at exercises to release the jaw. And you start educating yourself. It's so empowering because you're educating.

yourself and being in better relationship with yourself. So that instead of just thinking, this is just me, this is my identity, you are kind of exploring going, well, where did I learn to do that? And do I need to do that now. Now the thing about the patterns one goes into is once upon a time, that would have really helped you. So it was a good thing. But now as an adult, you probably don't need it, you know?

So let's let go of those things that you're wasting your energy on. And you could use that energy instead for dreaming and hoping and, you know, create a and all the good stuff that we should have access to. Are there behaviours that would slow down the recovery of your nervous system or conversely speed up? So I probably wouldn't say speed up, but I'd say enhance. Yeah, so there's lots of things you can do to encourage better function. And to notice is actually a really powerful thing. It sounds like quite a small thing.

but actually understanding what the signals from your body mean is great. So it's a pausing, it's a listening in, and the slower breathing, and the thinking about yourself as a human being and not somebody who's just producing and problem solving all the time. So it's a shift of perception that will naturally occur. So what would help it along, of course, is the noticing the signals from your body because they're clues to your real state. You know, often people say, I'm fine, and you look at them,

You just think, I can see that you're not. Yeah. You know? Like, where is that coming from? And it's coming from us wanting to be tough and wanting to be strong and wanting to kind of push through. But actually, if you listen to the signals from your body, you're more likely to take appropriate action. So you're tending to yourself. You're being in better relationship.

And the things that can hinder your progress through this is pretty much all the things we're subjected to in our culture. It's speed. productivity, all the things that are championed. At this age, I kind of realize more and more that the culture we all live in is very anti-human. You know, working five days a week if you have children is insane, isn't it? You've got two. I know, but we do it. But it's, it's, why do we put up with it? It's 51% of the population of women. I don't quite get it. So just having more kind of human processes and human systems in place, how can you do that? Well, lots of women that I work with. are in leadership roles so it can start with them. I was, you know, even saying to Nikki,

well, you know, you're in the perfect environment to just get up and be weird. Who's going to say anything? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And it has a ripple effect because if you in a leadership role kind of take ownership of your emotional health,

what a great message. But again, you know, do it, try it, because if you are well regulated, then everybody around you will be well regulated. You know, and I've kind of seen that the friends I have now are days are completely different to the friends I had 35 years ago because I'm not that manic, anxious person anymore. Do you know what to me?

Aside from walking the walk as a leader, which is what you've just described, are there other ways workplaces can better support their staff's nervous systems? Four day week. Wouldn't that be nice? I mean, you know what? It's not all about self-optimisation. It's not all about the self.

I'm so passionate that when we talk about wellness, we're talking about community wellness and societal wellness, because you can't have one without the other. Because otherwise you're just fighting everything all the time. And you get to this age, and then you have perimenopause and all the rest of it. And actually, that's a really powerful time, because quite a lot of women just think, I don't want to be part of that system.

I'm going to set up my own thing. Or I'm going to leave the course. world because it is, you know, men don't even like it. So yeah, four day weeks, please. That would be lovely. If there's one message that you want listeners to take away from this conversation, what is it? It is. You have one beautiful life. Don't waste it by giving your time and your attention away to others. And on that note, what a lovely way to wrap up just as well. But before I let you go, I do have some quickfire fun question. for you. So Gemma, who would normally be here and does send her apologies, she and I are

stacking up our dinner invitations, inviting ourselves round to the homes of our guests for supper. What are you going to cook us? I would cook you seafood pangue. Lovely. Although I am allergic to mollusks. So you have to, you have to give the mollusks out, but unless you want me to, yeah, be ill in your house. Which I wouldn't want you. That doesn't sound like a very nice to the pot. Apart from the mollus, I'm all over there. So thank you. You're going to a desert island for a year, an entire 12 months and you can take one item. What would it be? A red lipstick? Nice. A very glamorous. Very glamorous. It's completely rubbish and impractical. But yeah, red lipstick.

Yeah, we've had all sorts to that question. We've never read lipstick. Love it, a bit of glamour. Why not? Coffee or wine? Coffee. Nice, yes. What's the last thing that made you belly laugh? Oh, it was probably someone's awful, patful. It's probably a bit cruel, isn't it? Someone's awful prepful work came up on Instagram that just made me giggle. And finally, what one thing, a practical thing that people can do today to make themselves feel a little bit better? One practical thing that you can do today is start rocking on the floor. Get your stress out.

I'm going to start rocking later and get my kiss to do it. Well, Nahed, thank you so much for coming into Jess as well. We've learnt loads. And where can people find more information about yourself and the human method? So you can follow me on Instagram, which is at the Human Method UK. I'm on Substack at Nahita Belgium and I've got a website which is called thehuman method.com.uk. Wonderful. Thank you for coming in today. Thanks so much.

Thank you.