15. 4 ways to build unshakable strength: a gym for your nervous system
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 15 | 17 February 2025
Notes
As the going gets tough, we could all use a bit of mental health strengthening and a boost to our capacity to absorb shock.
In this episode of Rewired for Good, we dive into simple daily ways to build our inner strength and augment our shock absorption capacity. Just like you can take your body to the gym and read books to grow your intellect, you can do these daily exercises to grow your nervous system fitness levels.
In this episode you'll find out:
why building your nervous system's strength is one of the most important forms of self-care
4 simple ways to build your nervous system's muscles, daily and with almost no time investment
2 pro tips to take all this to the next level
Small little daily moves that can lead to massive transformation in every aspect of your life.
Transcript
Hello my spectacular humanitarian friend.
How are you? How many curveballs has life thrown at you in the past days? 3? 10? 168? Now how many did you dodge and how many did you knock right back out of the park? How many did you catch and squeeze under the sheer strength of your mighty knuckles?
From my end, I gotta confess, I've had not the best time at all. Many fronts in my life are messing with me.
Family, health, work, they're not going exactly the way I'd like them to and I've had moments when my brain wanted to throw a tantrum. My dad is in the hospital.
There was a massive family drama. I was only a spectator in that but boy some moments felt like I was in Gladiator. "Are you not entertained?"
My immune system is still on freaking strike and it's like the fifth month in a row and I've been dragging myself through life physically.
Lots of exhausting travel somehow related to my dad's illness.
And I'm managing a lawsuit against the previous owner of my home that I just moved into.
And someone who works for me has been severely underperforming and I've been picking up a lot of slack on that front...
So you know it's been a lot, and these are only some of the things I've been facing so yeah it's been a lot of fun!
And you know I've been seeing and talking to a lot of friends and catching up and over and over again when I was telling them about the beautiful treats that life has been serving me these past few months. People who know me very well and have known me for a long time kept telling me "I don't know how you do it" because I was kind of like feeling a bit like I was whining when I was telling them these things -- genuinely I haven't been exactly enjoying the piling up of the curveballs -- and my friends were all unanimously like "no no you don't understand if I was dealing with 20% of the crap that you're having to handle these days I'd need psychiatric help like literally I'd be unable to get out of bed".
They said all kinds of very kind and supportive things to me but the dominating reaction was "I don't know how you do it" so I thought that was an interesting question actually: How to become someone who can handle all kinds of crap and keep going... especially now that we are going through job cuts, projects interrupted, widespread worry and uncertainty, multiple shocks all around.
I've seen some heated debates online, aid workers turning on each other, sometimes a lot of depressive reactions in our humanitarian forums on Facebook on LinkedIn and elsewhere. I realize a lot of you have to return to your homes, some of you to your parents homes... which you know might come with some seriously complex emotions... zero visibility on what's to come financially and professionally.
And then of course there's all the personal stuff too that you might be facing, right? With your partner, with your mom, with your sister, with your colleague, with your kid. If you're dating, that can feel hard.
There's of course the health that can sometimes fail you it seems everyone is sick lately and of course. There's the financial and admin and logistical complications with taxes, bills, insurance, plumbing issues, to handle all around.
So in addition to the humanitarian existential crisis that we're all going through and that is making us very worried for the 300 million crisis survivors across the world and for our own personal professional destinies there's all this stuff that we have to face as normal human beings on the planet because, well, there's no pause button for that.
Life sometimes can be a lot to take. And our brains, our nervous systems, our entire bodies are being constantly triggered and because I don't know that it's going to get better in the short or medium term, I thought we could all use a little roadmap on how to become strong enough to sustain the pressure and hold the distance.
When I started my five-month rodeo, I didn't think it was going to last so long but here I am, and the truth is, as much as I've been hating it I haven't been really missing a beat or dropping the ball on anything major.
In fact, I've continued to be able to over perform and over deliver on a lot of things: I've been fully present for friends and family when they needed me, I've continued to have a social life, I've taken care of myself through serious illness advocating for myself relentlessly with health care providers, I started a new job in a new organization completely foreign to me, I've taken tests and done job interviews got several offers, joined several humanitarian rosters, I continue to coach aid workers very diligently and I started doing some pro bono sessions for those of us who are directly affected by the current funding issues, I launched this podcast, I have managed to keep it going from my hospital bed, I continue to work out somehow, and I even did a research paper for a four-month course on humanitarian diplomacy with a colleague on a very touchy topic that I'm kind of proud of and that got a really good grade.
And all of this in spite of serious physical limitations and heavy emotional punches that I've been receiving throughout, including quite a bit of survivor's guilt from my latest frontline deployment... so I wanted to share with you the ways that are allowing me to be strong and keep going through the storms so that, you too, can carry on and not let the big waves throw you overboard.
So this is an episode about strength building so that you can discover your true hidden capacity. You can call it "resilience"... I won't call it that because that word to me is a bit of a pet peeve, I kind of hate it, I know we use it a lot in our sector but I find it tremendously condescending and belittling in many ways and so in my humble opinion we should avoid using that word but anyway...
This episode is an invitation to join me in the magnificent process of building the strength of your brain, of your nervous system, and of your general capacity to take life's poop balloons.
Just like you may have the conviction that working out regularly at the gym lifting weights or doing cardio or resistance training or Zumba or yoga whatever it is that you're into is good for your body and your heart and your hip mobility...
... Just like you believe probably that going to school and taking courses and reading books and playing Sudoku or crossword puzzles is beneficial for your intellect your memory and your mental capacity...
... I want you to know that you get to build up the tolerance and the strength of your nervous system too so that when life throws you curveballs, heartbreaks, job loss, any sort of setback really, you can absorb, not get too destabilized and keep meeting a stronger version of you.
I realize a lot of you might cringe at my proposal and want to stop listening right now but hear me out please because this could change you and your life for the better in ways that you can't even begin to imagine today.
I want to ask you this: who would you be, what would your life look like if, when life hands you lemons you regularly chose deliberately to leave the sugar in the cupboard, not make lemonade and take a big fat bite of the lemon as it is instead with all of its sourness and acidity? Because to make lemonade you need access to some sugar or some sort of sweetener, right, and life doesn't always come with a guarantee of access to sweeteners.
Who would you be, what would your life look like if, when a path of least resistance is open to you you frequently chose intentionally the path of most resistance? The steeper hill? The longer windier path? So that, when life doesn't offer you another option than the steep hill, you know you have what it takes to climb it.
Choosing the harder option when you could instead choose an easier one gives you three key benefits in my opinion:
One, you get to become familiar with your natural reactions to hardship and notice if you're the kind of person who prefers to escape (flee), fight or do nothing (freeze). You get to recognize what that reaction feels like in your body. It raises your level of self-awareness, which is of course -- needless to say -- the first step to identifying your triggers, your kryptonite, and it's of course the first step to learning to manage what scares you or shakes you.
The second benefit is, of course, you get to discover your current ability to handle unpleasant uncomfortable things.
And the third benefit is you get to train yourself and raise that current ability to handle tough stuff and reach your full capacity potential for shock absorption.
In this episode, I'll give you a list of ways that you can build your own capacity to absorb shock from very little easy actions to a bit more substantive stuff.
But before I go there, I want to issue a bit of a clarification: This is not in any way a call to become a tougher, harsher, more impermeable-to-emotions human being. It's not a call to brace, or flex, or round your back, or show muscle pretending that the crappy sides of life don't exist for you or for other people. I'm not telling you to become a tough cowboy. This is not an invitation to become a tough jerk.
Being strong won't stop you from being compassionate and kind. On the contrary: the more hardship you put yourself through, the more compassionate you can become to understand other people going through tough times.
I'm inviting you to loosen up, open up, and expose yourself to physical and emotional discomfort, on purpose, often. If you go through it, if you don't avoid it, if you don't numb it, if you experience it fully, there is a version of you waiting to meet you on the other side of that strength-building that will blow your mind with what you're capable of taking and achieving.
There are countless studies all over the world that demonstrate that the most successful people (quote-unquote successful because of course you will have your own criteria for what success is and I have my own but whatever definition of success you want to give), the most successful people are those who faced a lot of adversity in their lives... like really heavy stuff.
And so please take a minute to consider what your life would be like today if thanks to this nervous system strength building that I'm proposing here you lived with the knowledge that you have what it takes to run towards what scares you instead of avoiding it.
If instead of eating chips and watching TV shows, you had the difficult conversation with your estranged parent or that friend with whom you had a fight a few months ago.
If, when given negative feedback, you took it full on and did the painful reckoning work required to learn from it with humility rather than discard it and discredit it and ignore it.
If instead of breaking up and forgetting this person you care about, you accepted to do what is needed to solve your issues.
If instead of numbing your pain with alcohol, drugs, easy sex, anxiolytics, you faced the causes of your anxiety or unhappiness and did whatever it takes to address those head-on.
If instead of giving up on finding love because you've been so disappointed by the dating scene, you showed up on the dating apps twice as committed to be yourself and twice as committed to add beauty to that space.
We can all easily see the cost of facing our crap: there's pain, disappointment, sadness, effort, potential failure, potential rejection... the list goes on.
But how often do you spend time thinking about the cost of not facing your crap and of running in the opposite direction? I'll tell you: you're missing out on who you really are and on what you're capable of and on how much of what you desire is actually accessible to you.
To me that's incredibly expensive.
Now at this point of the podcast you might be like "F*** you Yas, life is hard enough as it is and I don't see the need to add more chosen hardship to my daily life by putting my nervous system through daily workouts, I struggle enough as it is."
And if you are thinking that, of course, it's a very good point: I want to tell you I'm not suggesting anything radically brutal here you'll see my little daily tactics for building my shock absorption capacity, for building my nervous system strength are very gentle. Actually they feel to me like the ultimate form of self-care. It's not easy, it's not pleasant, but it's not brutal... like your average workout at the gym! Lifting weights for your brain and for your nervous system.
This is what I do every day inside my coaching practice with the humanitarians I coach and their results from endorsing this idea that you can and should regularly build the strength of your nervous system are amazing: they're creating the relationships they want, they are increasing their impact at work, they're putting the pieces of their lives together on their own terms, not based on fear but based on what they really want in life, because they have built that confidence that they can take the hard parts of the process.
So I'll give you some tactics on how to build your shock absorption capacity and your nervous system strength that you can use on your own no matter where you are and no matter what you have access to, at any given time.
These tactics may seem like nothing to you but you've got to remember negative emotions, which are the reason we are afraid to take big steps in life, are nothing other than an unpleasant sensation in your body.
Some people call it vibration. Factually, it's a combination of electric signals hormones and neurotransmitters flowing through your organs and your limbs. Nothing more. That's what we call fear, disappointment, stress, anxiety, and they all feel awful, yes, but that's all they are, physical discomfort.
Try it now: think of something you're very ashamed of or very angry about or very sad about and monitor what happens in your body. Notice the changes in your limbs and organs: that's all negative emotion is and the more you increase your capacity to sustain the discomfort, the more you can play big in life, and these simple exercises can help you build your belief in your capacity to take it.
So practice number one, beginner level, is: finish every single one of your showers with 30 to 60 seconds of cold water. Those of you listening in Norway might hate me more for this than those of you listening from a tropical country, but besides the fact that the science is very clear (it's excellent for your skin circulation and brain) it is also an incredible way to observe how much you want it to stop and to build your capacity to just stand there, take it, and not interfere, not run away, not close the faucet.
Practice two that I highly recommend, a tiny bit more advanced, is to sit perfectly still with your eyes closed for 3, 10 or 20 minutes. Put a timer on and observe all the times you want to scratch an itch or cough or swallow your saliva or adjust your posture, and then don't do any of it: sit perfectly still, just notice it and don't intervene don't do anything to make it go away. Start with three minutes and slowly build up to ten minutes or more whenever you feel ready.
Practice three, a bit more advanced still, ninja level three I'd say, is to pick something physical to do every day and systematically counter your brain's objections when they come. So, for example, if you decide that your thing will be to walk for 10 minutes every day one day your brain is going to say you're "too tired", another time "it's too cold", another time "you're too sick", some other day "you have too much work", another day it'll find that "it's too dark" or "it's raining" or "it's too hot" or "it's too early" or "it's too late" or "it's been a hard day".
Your brain is infinitely creative for reasons to avoid pain, save effort and seek pleasure. It's called the motivational triad -- avoid pain, save effort, seek pleasure -- those are the three things the brain cares about most, it's a magnificent mechanism that has kept us alive through the millennia, and when you challenge that motivational triad, your very well-functioning brain will have all kinds of objections.
Watch it come up with all the reasons to not do what you wanted to do and then obey your original plan anyway by answering your brain this sentence "thank you: it being hard is precisely the reason to do it".
You know where you're at in life, maybe your physical activity will have to be less intense than a 10-minute walk or more intense than a 10-minute walk, you know you.
But it has to feel a little bit hard so you can benefit from overcoming that little level of hard every day and build your self-confidence.
Practice number four is to pick a thing that scares you and then break it down into five to ten micro-actions to expose your nervous system and to do it frequently. For example, if you really want to find a life partner but dating scares the crap out of you because you're afraid of rejection and heartbreak, list five-ten things you an do, like ask someone you like at the office to grab a coffee with you, or get on a dating app, build your profile, start a conversation online, tell your friends to hook you up, go to work-related events, and parties, and talk to strangers.
Or if you're scared of speaking in public, you can put a little reel on your social networks, you can make a point of giving your opinion, or asking a question in the next meeting, or you can make a five-minute presentation to your team.
These are all things that my coachees have been working through and it works: expose yourself, find out you're stronger than you thought, rinse, and repeat.
That's it. Do these daily, one of these, all four of these, you choose, either way, it won't take much of your time and I swear that it will change how you engage with feeling like crap due to life's lemons, because again all negative emotion is, is a discomfort in your body.
Sometimes it feels unbearable, I know I feel it regularly too, believe you me, and that's why I'm offering you these ways to increase your confidence that you can bear it, even when it feels unbearable, so you don't have to escape it and so you can meet the next best stronger version of you.
I have two pro tips that I want to give you. As you do this I recommend you document your achievements: you can use a journal, or collect pebbles in a jar with every one of your outings, or you can put a poster up on a wall with pins, or you can use a habit tracking app, whatever excites you more. The point is to have a little reward system so your dopamine is activated and you benefit from that too. Dopamine, simply put, is the main reason we do anything difficult in life, it's for the reward of the difficult thing, so cultivating that dopamine creation carefully like this can be extremely valuable.
And pro tip number two, while you put yourself through these nervous system strength building exercises is, I want you to be very aware that you don't have to like it, actually you're not supposed to. When I go for a run and I get to an intersection and I purposely choose the uphill road instead of the flat or the downhill -- which happens a lot because I live in a mountainous area -- I don't enjoy it. I hate the hill and I hate every second of my cold showers too. But that's the whole point, so if you don't enjoy it you're doing it right, and if you start to enjoy it then you get to raise the level of difficulty by making the physical discomfort longer or more intense.
Again this offer is, by definition, unpleasant: I realize this will not win "most popular proposal of the year award" but, to me, it is really one of the most refined and elevated forms of self-care.
You believe in the benefits of exercising your body, you believe in the benefits of exercising your intellect, I invite you to believe in the benefits of exercising your nervous system.
This knowledge and this confidence that I can take the physical discomfort of negative emotion and be the master of my own nervous system is why I could prep two marathons while living in a tented camp in the Sahel, where the temperatures frequently reach 50 degrees Celsius (that's 120+ Fahrenheit) and with no space to run or train whatsoever.
It's why I was able to give up on a work contract that I had until 2051 with the dreamiest benefits in the world the minute I felt it wasn't aligned with what I wanted anymore.
It's why I was able to open and successfully run a restaurant for two years in one of the world's most competitive markets -- that's Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for those of you who know New York City.
It's why I was able to have the emotional courage to reconnect with my mother who left very harshly multiple times over the course of my life.
It's the strength of my nervous system that has allowed me to not let the killing of several friends and colleagues in the field go unnoticed and that allowed me to fight for their memories and rights even when the system wanted them forgotten and threatened me if I didn't knock it off (I'll tell you more about that).
And it's this shock absorption capacity that has kept me going strong, thinking clearly, when I was at my worst emotionally because I was sexually harassed in the office or because I was going through a tough breakup or whatever else was going on.
Take the lemons, my friend, bite into them, grow your capacity to handle the sour aspects of life, go meet the stronger version of you that awaits on the other side of that sourness.
Thank you for listening once again.
I stand with you through all the storms.
I'll talk to you soon. Until then, take the best possible care of yourself.