The Mindset Mentor - Emotional Reset: How to Go from Triggered to Calm

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Need to get out of your head and back into your calm, happy state? I’ll walk you through how to go from feeling triggered to feeling centered. Whether it’s anxiety, anger, or just a tough day at work, these self-soothing tools will help you reset your nervous system, express emotions in a healthy way, and build long-term resilience. Skip the wine and quick fixes—let’s grow together and find peace within. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you want to accomplish your 2025 New Year's resolutions, you can download my free ebook at goals2025.com. I will teach you exactly how to set, to plan, and to accomplish each one of your goals for this next year and beyond. Once again, if you want to get it for free, it is goals2025.com. Today, we're going to be talking about how to get yourself from a triggered state to calm, peaceful, happy state. And I'm going to talk about how to become a better, calmer, more centered, less triggered, less anxious version of yourself. If you happen to be a more

triggered or more anxious or angry type person, you don't have to be that way forever. Those are learned traits. It's not just something that's naturally built into your circuitry. You might be a little bit more angry than a normal person, might be a little bit more anxious, but it doesn't mean you can't be less. And so I'm going to go through five different tips we're going to go through today. And on the last episode that I just covered with you guys was about surviving the holidays, which is basically like how to basically work through being triggered by people who you're in relationships with or that you love or that are in your family. But today I want to talk about how to go deeper into self-soothing when you find yourself triggered. This is going to help you with the holidays,

but really this is going to help you anytime that you're triggered in some sort of way. And when you look at self-soothing, it's interesting to me because self-soothing is something that we do naturally as babies. And so a baby, if you look at a baby who is crying, a lot of times they will suck their thumbs and that makes them feel soothed in some sort of way. Some babies or young toddlers like to have a blanket or a stuffed animal that soothes them in some sort of way. And so, or they have a pacifier. So it is natural for us to know how to self-soothe.

But when you look at self-soothing, we're really not taught how to self-soothe as an adult. We, you know, some people try to self-soothe by biting their fingernails, but rarely do you see a 45-year-old man sucking on his thumb or carrying his blanket around. Doesn't mean that we still don't need to learn how to self-soothe. And when you look at self-soothing, it's just basically the way I see it is the act of being able to bring yourself back to homeostasis, bringing yourself back to calm, centered, happy state, which I believe is a natural state

for a human. It's just there's a lot of things that get in the way of that natural state. And so when we're triggered in some sort of way, we need to see how we can get ourselves back to the calm and centered state. It is a reset to the nervous system when your nervous system gets triggered or heightened in some sort of way. And triggering can mean many different things as I talk about it. It can mean that you're angry. It can mean that you have rage. It can mean sadness. It could be anxious. It could be depressed. It could be emotional in some sort of way. And I want you to understand that all of those emotions, first off, I want you to understand there's nothing wrong with those emotions. We can look at the feeling of anxiety and say,

oh, that is a wrong emotion or something wrong with it. I shouldn't ever feel anxiety. Well, anxiety being felt all of the time, chronic anxiety is something that needs to be worked through. But anxiety is a natural feeling for a human. So if you're walking through a dark alley and you hear a sound, you should feel anxious. It is a protection mechanism for you. Anger is not something that should be running the show, but it is also a protection mechanism when you need it. And so there's nothing wrong with those emotions. Emotions are emotions, and they should be felt and they should be expressed. So we're not talking about in this episode how to bypass all of your emotions that are seen as, you know, quote unquote bad emotions or quote unquote the lower vibrational ones. I'm

not talking about bypassing them and act like they don't exist. I'm talking about learning how to work with them and learning how to express them so that they don't stay inside of your body. Because they're not bad, they just are what they are. And so we just don't want to live there. We don't want to live in the feeling of sadness. We don't want to live in the feeling of anxiety. We don't want to live in the feeling of anger. We don't want to live there. We want to bring ourselves, as I like to call it, back home. Back home, calm, center state. How quickly can we be triggered and then bring ourselves back home? And it's one of these things where if you work at it long enough, it might be like you're triggered and you get pissed off about something and then you're pissed off for the next seven hours. And that might be normal for you.

And you work on yourself for a little while and maybe six months down the road, you're triggered and then you're pissed off for an hour. Well, that's an improvement. And then keep working on yourself. And later on down the road, you're triggered. And now you're only pissed off for 15 minutes and you bring yourself back home. And then eventually you get to the point where hopefully you're triggered. You notice that you're triggered. You immediately bring yourself back home as fast as you can. And so I want you to understand this is really important because a few episodes ago, I gave the example of numbing by using external things. It could be like a glass of wine, for instance, right? After a long, stressful day. Maybe your boss, he was an a-hole. He triggered you. Your coworkers were little shits, whatever it was, right? hole. He triggered you. Your coworkers were little shits, whatever it was, right? And you come home and you're like, oh my God, it was just such a crazy day. And you go for a glass of wine. That glass of wine is essentially a form of numbing. There is something that you're feeling and you're

trying not to feel it. And most adults, because we were never taught how to self-soothe, like I don't really, I don't know if I've ever even heard somebody else really talk about self-soothing. I'm sure that they do. But since I've had a child, I've noticed, oh my God, self-soothing is something that he knows how to do. He knows how to soothe himself. It's naturally built into him. And I know some adults that don't know how to soothe themselves as well as my son does. And so we're not taught this. And so what do we do? We search for external substances. And a glass of wine, like I have no problem with a glass of wine. I love wine. I think it's great. Although it's amazing, it is in these types of situations, the easy way out, right? Like if you're just

having a glass of wine because you want to enjoy a glass of wine and conversation with friends, I have no problem with it. But if you are feeling a heightened emotion and you don't want to feel it, so you reach for something else, that's the easy way out. And the problem with that is that there's no growth that comes from it. You don't grow from just going to an external substance. And so what would be better? Trying to figure out some sort of way to work through it without needing something else. So it might be going for a run and being with your thoughts and getting out extra energy. It might be doing a 20-minute guided meditation and breath work to learn to take you from that heightened emotion to calm and centered and to learn how to go from heightened emotion to soothed. It might be journaling and expressing your thoughts. It might be screaming into a pillow.

I don't know. It's any of those things. It could be many different things, but it's really about what really works for you. I understand that wine is way sexier than journaling or way sexier than doing a 20-minute guided breath work. They're not really all that sexy. They are harder. You know, a glass of wine, it's sexy, it's easy, but it doesn't change anything and you don't learn anything. You don't become better from it. So next time you're triggered, you're naturally going to want what? To go back to that glass of wine versus next time you're triggered, having a tool in your tool belt to make you calm and centered. And if you go to that glass of wine, or you go to a cigarette, or you go to whatever, making yourself whiskey on the rocks, you have

not grown. You're in the exact same place mentally tomorrow as you were today. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so let me give you some examples of how to actually do some self-soothing and how you can actually help yourself. And these are all things that I do at different times whenever I need them, because I noticed for myself, like, I don't like when I get myself into a anxious or worried or angry state, and I don't want to live there. I want to figure out how to just let the emotions run through me, get out of me, and then get myself back to calm and center. So the first one, which should be very obvious to everybody, is doing some form of meditation or breathwork. I prefer breathwork. I prefer conscious breathing first and then some form of meditation. So, you

know, it could be because my mind tends to go all over the place during meditation. Like I think about what I have to do for work and then stuff I've got to do for the family and all these things that are going on. When I do breath work and then meditate, I tend to notice that I'm already in a calmer state. And so it could be something as simple as just six deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth, usually four in through the nose, eight seconds out through the mouth, and then just sitting there. And it could be a guided meditation. It could be putting on a 15 minute song from YouTube or from Spotify. It could be doing Wim Hoff, which you can go onto YouTube and you can literally just listen to Wim Hoff and he'll take you through breath work, three different rounds of it. It could be, I've actually done it before

and I was taught this is to do Wim Hoff where you do the three rounds of breath work and then hold your breath at the top and then do as many pushups as you do the three rounds of breath work and then hold your breath at the top and then do as many pushups as you possibly can. And the reason why this works really well is because it's kind of like a nervous system reset. And so all of these are just basically designed to get you out of your head, back into your body. Because when you're in your head, that's when you're triggered and you're all over the place. When you're in your body, you're here, you're in the present moment. Your body is here in this moment. Your brain is almost always somewhere else. And so that's the first thing is to try those out. Another thing that's really good is also music.

Music is one of my favorite things to do as well. So I can just, I'll put on headphones sometimes. I'll close my eyes. There's a song that is called Weightless by Marconi Union. I found it years ago because I read an article saying that it's somehow the most calming song ever created. Works really well. And so whenever I find myself, you know, triggered in some sort of way, pissed off, stressed out about having too much to do, whatever it might be, I'll put that on.

And usually I'll listen to it two, three, four, five times. And I notice I'm much more calm by listening to it. Another thing that's always really calmed me when I was younger and I ran my first sales office for a franchise and I would be really triggered in some sort of way or a sales rep wouldn't do what they're supposed to or one of my employees didn't show up

and I would be triggered. I would go into my office, I'd put on my headphones and I would put on the song that is the Out of Africa theme song. And it calms me, I don't know why. I think it's because it's my grandma's when I was younger, she used to always play it. And it was always just a very calming, you know, orchestra song. And so I used to put that on all the time. For you, it's kind of like, what is the music that just kind of calms you down and brings you back

to your center? That's what I want you to figure out. That's number two. The third thing you can do is you can try some movement. And this could be your pick. It could be upbeat. It could be slow. It could be just deciding that you're going to go for a walk. It could be going for a jog. It could be going through a run. It could be running through, you know, a trail if you wanted to and do trail running. It could be jumping jacks. It could be pushups. It could be an entire workout. It could, or it could be something like yoga, slow yoga. It could be stretching. It could be standing up and just shaking it all off, which is one of the things that I do a lot, which is just small hops. Just get your whole body just kind of moving. The idea, once again, get out of your head. It's like that phrase, when you're in your head, you're dead. When you're in your head, you're not

really thinking well, which is what's funny. When you're here and you're present and you're centered in your body, you usually make better actions. You usually make better decisions. You do better things. And so some form of movement to allow your body to move that emotion through. You have a lot of energy in your body when you're triggered or in a heightened state. And most people were taught in childhood not to express that. And children are really good at expressing their emotions. They're really good at having a temper tantrum when something's going on. That is a child self-soothing and expressing to get the emotion out of their body. But eventually we're taught not to do that. So if you need to have an adult temper tantrum in a safe space completely

by yourself, do it. I don't care. It's completely fine. You could do some form of movement. You could do many different things. And so the idea is you're feeling this rise in energy. How do you let it flow out of your body versus just gripping onto it and not letting it out, which is, like I said, what most of us are taught to do in childhood. So that's number three. Number four, which is another part of getting into the body, is called tapping. And so tapping, what you do is you can do it with your hand open, you can do it with a closed fist, and it's just tapping all areas of your body and getting your blood flowing. So I prefer standing up, moving the body around, lightly smacking all the muscles in my body for two to five minutes. And, you know, I started my calves and I work on

my calves and I go to my quads and I go to my hips and I go to my torso and then I go to each arm. I go to my neck, my head. I get as much of my back as I can reach. And basically what it is, is once again, getting back into the body and just getting some form of movement in your body, getting the blood flow rushing and allowing yourself to work through the energy in some sort of way. So that's number four is doing tapping. I love doing tapping. Once again, you could do it as hard or as light as you want to. It could be open hand. It could be closed fist. I usually do closed fist and I don't

hit myself extremely hard, but it's enough to kind of wake myself up, to bring myself here, to get myself out of my head, into my body, all of that. And FYI, you can do all of these at one time if you want to, or one right after another. You can do movement with music and tapping and all of that stuff if you really want to. So that's the fourth one. Number five is to do a physiological sigh, which is a type of breath. And so a physiological sigh is a way that you can get excess carbon dioxide out of your body. And you do a physiological sigh all day long, and I'll show you how to do it. But it's the way the body releases unneeded extra carbon dioxide. And it's funny because I notice when my son is asleep, he does it all of the time.

My dog does it all of the time. And then I've become aware after finding out what physiological sigh was, I do it all the time as well. What's really interesting about it, that's just kind of a really, really odd thing that I've noticed. Sometimes I'll notice myself do a physiological sigh. And then while I'm holding my son when he's asleep, he'll do it immediately after me. And then there's been times before, and I'm not even kidding you, that our tiny little shih tzu bear will be next to us and he'll do a physiological sigh. And so it's like my energy in doing the physiological sigh actually makes them do the physiological sigh. And so it's like my energy in doing the physiological sigh actually

makes them do the physiological sigh in some sort of way. I don't know how it works. It's just this weird thing that happens. But a physiological sigh is just two quick breaths in, one breath out. So it's basically just like, notice you do it like every 15 minutes on average. And what it does is it just helps you release carbon dioxide. So if you're noticing I'm kind of stressed, okay, let's just do a few physiological sighs. It's kind of like hip hip hooray. I just realized hip hip hooray. That's kind of what it is. But you just do it a few times. And if you do it right now, you actually start to notice your body starts to relax a little bit more. There's many different things that you could do to help yourself self-soothe. You could use smells if you want to. You could take a bath if you want to. You

could do essential oils. You could do journaling and you could build your awareness around it. But you just have to realize that it's just a way of saying, okay, this feeling that I'm feeling, I don't have to get wrapped up in it. And I can be in charge of letting myself get back down to calm and centered. I can be the I, the calm that is in the center of the massive storm, which is essentially what we're all trying to work towards and trying to get better towards. So try it out for your emotional reset during the holidays, but also through any other day. That's how you go from triggered to calm. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode.

Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.