Morning Energy & Mood Calibration

A daily energy and mood calibration practice. This breathwork practice helps you to understand your energy and mood levels throughout the day, how and when to recharge. and also the root cause of any fatigue or lower mood states.

Transcript

So this is the calibration,

The energy calibration exercise to assess your mood states on a daily basis.

Okay.

You want to plan your day a week around your energy level so that you can access your optimal performance and know when you need to rest and recharge.

This is another breathing exercise which I suggest you do every morning when you wake up.

You can do this at any time of day and I do it especially when I'm feeling a little bit agitated,

When I know my energy's off so I sit and breathe and connect to what's bothering me.

In fact I sit and I meditate and go be on the superficial to find out actually what's going on,

What the trigger was and therefore how I can really suppress,

Not suppress,

But just let those feelings of agitation disappear,

Understand what the trigger was and then work through that and then move on and so I get back into a high mood state for the rest of the day.

As you know breathing exercises will help you calm down your central nervous system so that you can tap into how you feel,

How much energy you have and whether you need to relax further before you start your day or whatever task or activity it is and how coherent your mind and your heart are and what emotional state you want to access.

So this exercise as you know you can do a lot of these exercise sitting or lying down.

Sitting works better as we don't really want to fall asleep though if you do don't worry it just means that your body's probably telling you you need more rest but ideally we want to do this exercise and if you're doing it when you've woken up hopefully you don't need to go back to sleep.

So when you wake and of course you can do this at any time of the day particularly as you get better and better and more aware of what's going on in your body and your environment around you you know you may just be about to go into a presentation for you know what something doesn't feel right so I'm just gonna go and sit and reflect and I'm gonna do this practice see where I'm at when that presentation in 20 minutes time or half an hour time or an hour's time I'll be much better at that.

So but generally try and do this at the beginning particularly if you're already agitated and you know you're in that state where you you're not getting much cognitive clarity then do this when you wake up.

So what you do is you you wake up and you ask yourself you say to yourself how do I feel energetically most of us know how we we think we know how we feel okay what emotions what thoughts do you have are you feeling energized or depleted are we is our mood state like a six above or is a five and below and so you just literally make a little note on your on your phone or whatever it happens to be just like you know write the number down okay and then what I want you to do because that's superficial that's just like an instant feeling this is where I'm at okay we're gonna measure that out of ten obviously ten being the most positive zero one being the most negative or least supportive okay and I'm just gonna go through you the mood states very quickly now so these are the mood states and their equivalent scale it's not medical advice I'm not a doctor I'm not a psychologist I'm not a neuroscientist if you need medical support then you've obviously gone to your physician this is just a practice which is very useful to understand where we are at today how we feel what our energy levels are so it's a practice which says how you feeling what may have caused that and what to do to prepare for your days this practice is you know I've developed this for myself and the people I teach but these are variations of practices which have also been taught for thousands of years I also have a daily meditation practice and I use this technique as part of that at the beginning of my practice just to ensure that my meditation is really a useful practice I'm spending my time wisely so some days I might think I'm okay when I tap into my feelings I realized that I've got some work to do so ideally you want to be existing in a state of harmony of coherence and alignment not disconnection okay so high emotions higher emotions are emotional state would be passion love joy excitement adventure happiness vitality gratitude enthusiasm this is when you have a score of six out of ten in your in your mood state lower emotions so five and below anger fear rage anxiety hate desperation resentment sadness these are all lower mood states we will have both okay we're human beings so you're gonna go from one to the other but we want to spend more time in the upper mood states and less time in the lower mood states and when we are in the lower mood states we want to understand exactly what that means and why we're there and just a quick point I promise you I don't have to say this but I'm gonna say it anyway if you're taking stimulants alcohol drugs caffeine okay that is not a mood state which is a natural mood state that is a mood state which is influenced by by something that you have taken or ingested to stimulate you into that high mood state so I don't count that as being a high mood so that has been a chemically induced mood state which is not what we're after because you can't sustain that okay if you want to have a glass of wine or beer that's entirely up to you taking drugs is not something I would ever actively encourage and this is given to you by your physician but they're putting you into a state which is not controlled by you okay it's controlled by an outside influence so we don't count those if you're flying high because of a stimulant that is not a high mood state that's a false mood state okay so we take your initial check you can do it eyes open or closed as you get better practice with this you'll probably do it with your eyes open so you've managed to stay awake and you become a real observer you're sort of in a semi-conscious state but at the moment you could do that with your eyes closed if you wanted to okay so we want to relax our mind soften our mind we want to be sitting ideally with our hips our shoulders over our hips and I want you to take eight deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth we've done this before from the depths of your belly right up to the tips of your shoulder so hold for a second and so this breath is rhythmic this rhythmic you can spend the same amount of time you can count as you inhale one two three four five or whatever happen to be so you can feel the stretch at the top of your lungs which are right up here right under your shoulders and then so we're gonna do that eight times in hold for a second release and what you're going to experience the end of the eighth breath you can continue to breathe normally what you're going to experience is a feeling in your body whether it's a tightness in your legs or in your anxiety in your solar plexus it could be form it could be warmth it could be gratitude you might feel joy and ecstasy that's wonderful but whatever that feeling is note and write that feeling and then take that measurement again because that those a breast is gonna settle your system down we come out of our heads during the energy out of our head into our body it's going to give you a much more balanced and accurate guide to what is actually happening in your body at that particular time so write your score again can you feel any agitation vibration anger frustration any blockage in your body make a note where it is in general how you feel and then the score if you're five out of ten or below you're going to need to take some time now before you start your day to recharge and work through those emotions like what's caused it meditation breath work out excellent exercises to restore harmony and calm so here's an example of the benefits of that calibration exercise so this is hypothetical say you wake up at six o'clock you start a breath you organize yourself you're feeling okay you may be a six okay you start your breathing exercise and you realize you feel tired you're irritable with a heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach around your your sort of practice is a bit of anxiety there so you're not a six you thought you are yeah I feel okay do the breath of more no something's not quite run or feeling that great maybe I'm a four or five so I'm now in the lower mood state well that means I've got less energy I'm depleted energetically and I'm feeling agitated so if you do nothing further and you can stay or don't work what do you think's gonna happen so quickly little irritations and stresses pop up and if you're commuting perhaps someone coughed near you or if you're not committing you do just opening a bunch of emails or your husband or your wife or children or so the dogs barking something's gone these little things are gonna agitate you more and more there's an exercise which you can do to layer into this if you want to which is you imagine this placid Alpine Lake but in some days you can try throw a boulder into that lake and you get in a tiny little ripple because you want a really good mood state you know so it's a big event happens which would normally really rattle you but today no nice and gentle another day a tiny little pebble you drop it and boom you get a tsunami so that tells you that your mood state is actually really suppressed and something tiny is really rattling you okay so let's just an example so but imagine if you start your day at a four out of ten so I said this is so this happens okay it's four out of ten you get a call you get to work or you're at work your home in your home office you get a call from them so your boss saying a suppliers orders late and it's not going to come today throwing one of your clients logistics into chaos because it needs to arrive today because they've got a project and needs to be completed so you know you're you're a four out of ten so you're not feeling great you're frustrated you irritable so you overate you send a really fiery email to the supplier who's now reluctant to work with you again you've got a really long day and you're exhausted the end of the day you leave work you have an argument with friend or a loved one when you get home because again you're in a low mood state and energy is suppressed not really surprising as if you've been in a low mood stood all day you've got no reserves you've got no method of coping with everyday stress as it impacts on you there's no harmony there's no coherence there's no regulation of your heart and mind so you go to bed and of course what's gonna happen is your busy mind is gonna fire up and you can have those negative thoughts which is just gonna keep on playing out in your head making sleep difficult maybe you have a few glasses wine another stimulant to make you feel better and that stimulant might raise your mood or may lower your mood the cycle repeats itself not much fun is it you're gonna wake up the next day going through the same practice now imagine that that had happened and you actually practice your breath work exercise so you recognize your energy slow and that you need to recharge so okay so you say to myself right I'm feeling off so I need to work out why I'm feeling half and I also need to work out how I'm gonna recharge the batteries okay so you might go to the gym you might spend some time on your own you might do some go for a slow walk you might do some yoga you might meditate whatever practice works for you to restore energy into your body okay you also realize maybe that actually you woke up and you're off because in this example your Todd is you had a really busy busy weekend helping a friend out and that friend wasn't really grateful and didn't really say thank you to you and that slightly irritated you and also before that you'd had a really busy week and you were exhausted by Friday night and actually you do enjoy your job but some days and some weeks are just busy okay so you don't have as much energy as you would normally do so you ended the week exhausted where otherwise you would spend but the next week so I'm gonna be like that for you for your work doesn't need to be like that if it's like that consistently we have to look at whether it's the right environment for you okay so you're exhausted on the Friday night maybe you've been traveling whatever you've been doing and so you've got very little energy on Saturday morning and then you've got to go and help a friend because you promised them and they're very needy and they're not very grateful and so Sunday night again you're even more tired you've had no time to recalibrate no time to recharge your batteries and you're gonna go to work the next day so what that tells us is the supplier who caused a problem at work had very little to do with your explosion and your fiery email that you sent off in fact if you wind back to what happened last week you took on too much you didn't restore your energy then you gave away even more to your ungrateful friend so there's no judgment around that it's just a question of noting it journeying and making better choices we want to try and unpack the reasons why these episodes of flaring up what's happened by it what thought process is going through our head to trigger these reactions don't just have a knee-jerk reaction it must be this we need to wind it back and say well where was I if I if I was to recalibrate myself or calibrate lastly where was it all it could be that it's a continuous feeling so the reason for feeling off can sometimes be as simple as just having a negative thought which causes you stress something that's worrying you so you're not present at all with the people around you your mind is wandering you snap because someone said or did something which you perceived as an attack of course you did because your mood state was low and the underlying state of your heart your brain was not equipped to deal with it rationally and there's absolutely no point whatsoever in beating yourself up mentally you just take a note of it learn for it and then move on so now you have a much better understanding of where your energy and mood state is at each day so you can prepare to recharge and rest and of course you can recharge in a number of different ways as I said you can do meditation if you want that that works for you works very well for me works very well for many people in fact and the yoga is a really nice restorative exercise well because you can't think when you're doing yoga it's just a nice flowing practice you can exercise and you could go for a slow walk I suggest exercising slowly when you're in a low mood state to restore energy not going out and exercising really heavily because when you're exercising heavily and hard you're pushing hard your immune system is actually quite suppressed for a few hours after you do that if you're doing consistently and your energy is depleted you're gonna catch more colds and coughs and flus and things like that so you could you know quality of sleep is very important sleep is good but quality of sleep the timing of your sleep is really important you really want to be asleep between 12 and 4 or you know realistically 12 and 4 a.

M.

The best time to sleep that's the way that you're when your brain is really wired to restore being in stillness being in nature good nutrition clean nutrition clean hydration water not stimulants again very good ways to restore energy you can go visit wellness center have a massage have a therapeutic massage any of these breathwork exercises whatever works for you the idea is all of these practice designed to release stress and restore energy into your body you're going to know what works best for you and when you restore then you have you can face much bigger challenges and you can exercise harder so if you're somebody who likes to go for a fast run great don't go for that fast run unless you have the energy to do it so remember that as I said after vigor exercise your immune system is going to be suppressed so a couple of other things I want to just throw into this as well first of all use this exercise particularly also on a Friday night so when you come back from work or your business or career whatever it is you do particularly working Monday to Friday ask yourself on the way home on a Friday night how do I feel how much energy do I have am I still enthusiastic about life and work in business or not now we know there are going to be some weeks where they're just very busy okay you know there are some days where I work 16 or 17 hours a day in my own business and I need to take some time out and that's just a I just know that I've got to commit to a really busy period of time and so that can be quite exhausting sometimes okay that's okay provided it's not consistent so ask yourself you know on that Friday night how do I feel how do I feel am I still enthused and you know energized but what am I doing how much vitality how much how much tasks that I set myself on Monday if I completed why how have why have I done it why haven't I done it don't be judgmental about that if generally out of ten you're always six and above otherwise you know what's been a big been a good week but I've really enjoyed my work great but if consistently you are coming back at the weekend exhausted from your work that there's no energy no vitality then you need to be journaling this and being aware of what is going on what is causing that what have I done which is depleting me and that's because you go out all night long or you watch TV to two o'clock in the morning it's probably got nothing to do with your job maybe maybe you just not fulfilled so you're trying to find an outside influence that's gonna deplete your energy right so you need to really journal what it is you're doing in the day because that will tell you factually what is going on okay if you start just thinking about it you're going to skip the things which are really causing you harm because we don't you tend not to confront the things which hurt us we tried to take the path of least resistance okay and when you are going through these changes what I suggest you do is you always need to if you're going to go and do something so here's an example say we talk about this friend of mine who was good there's the client of mine who was going to go to this event this sports event with his friends and it was you know Friday night and he was tired after a week's work and I say okay well that's fine if you ask yourself do I have the energy the physical energy and emotional energy to go and spend time with my friends or my family whatever it happens to be do I have the physical emotional energy yes or no the answer is no can I do something to create that energy for me before I go and do that yes or no if the answer is no can I restore energy after that event and the answer is no then you're not gonna do it the answer is no before you do it you've got to be really careful because you might well be quite fractious in a lower mood state and you maybe not going to enjoy that event as much as otherwise what we're looking to do is saying can I restore energy yes how am I gonna do it go and do that before and you know just go and have a sleep for 30 minutes for gonna do some meditation go for a walk just recalibrate get yourself into a higher mood state before you go and experience that and if that event is gonna deplete you and maybe not for a negative reason it's just something that requires a lot of emotional energy even though you enjoy it then make sure that when you finished it you go and have time and space to recalibrate and recharge again otherwise you know you start life with a battery which is full it's never gonna be 100% again it's only gonna get to 99% it's really like your mobile phone okay if your mobile phone is on 8% you're not gonna schedule a one-hour call or try and record a video because simply there is no battery left we don't want that for you okay you need to manage your energy really wisely your physical and emotional energy wisely so that you can perform the tasks now to issue one with enthusiasm thank you for listening and sending you love and kindness and remember always be kind to yourself