Blessings, greetings, and welcome. You've made it to Take Action Tuesday. Yes, it's Take Action Tuesday, and yes, you're here. So glad you dropped by to spend a little time with me, Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board certified psychiatrist. I work in high performance, but more than that, I am your teammate in this game. This game we call life. And together, we're going for the win. We're going for the win today. We find ourselves in a series called The Inner Edge. We're coming out of another series that was all about breaking the barrier. And we came out of another series that was about holding the line. If you haven't heard those, it would be cool to go back and check them out. So, yeah, in yesterday's talk and yesterday's connection that we had, we established a foundational understanding with each other around this idea of the inner edge. That you don't rise to the occasion, you default to your conditioning. Absolutely. So today we're gonna go a little deeper because if everyone spikes under pressure, the question is what separates the steady ones from the shaken ones? Yeah. And you know what separates them? You know what separates the steady from the shaken? It's not whether they activate, it's how quickly they return to baseline. And the inner edge today takes on a new meaning for us. The inner edge that we spoke about yesterday as something you have to be aware of, today I'm calling it recovery speed. Because what separates the steady from the shaking is not whether they're activating, it's whether they're returning. Because we're all gonna get activated. The stress is gonna trigger us. The question is, can we come back to baseline? Because when pressure hits, as we said yesterday, your nervous system mobilizes automatically. It's not asking you for permission, it's not asking me for permission. The amygdala, the brain's threat detection center, flags a potential threat before our conscious reasoning can even form a sentence. Before we could say, boo, that amygdala has already fired and is already taking us down a road where our heart rate shifts, your breath can shorten, your muscles tighten. You think about when you walk into a room and they say surprise is a surprise party. Before you can say what's going on, your body has already reacted. There's an intelligence in the body and it doesn't ask for permission. And this amygdala, this brain survival center is something that you and I have to pay attention to because that surge is human. Right? That surge is human. So, look, some people, when the surge happens in their body, they stay there for a long time. The thoughts start replaying, and the body stays in this very upregulated, braced kind of thing. Others come back to baseline really quick because that's not their personality. They've practiced it. You know, they like we said before, the the guys and the gals who are in the fourth quarter and who have the ball and who the team depends on, they're the ones that come back to baseline faster when stress hits. You ever meet those kind of people? They're always kind of calm and they always seem to be able to handle the stress well. That's practice, my friend. That's brain work. Their neural systems are conditioned to be like that. And you and I have the same opportunity. You see, when people are like that and they can handle stress and they can really be good decision makers and they can win games for you and make good decisions in the fourth quarter at the end near the goal line, their neural systems return to baseline fast. And the prefrontal cortex, remember that the brain's CEO, it helps them stay steady when the emotions are all swirling around them. We talked yesterday about the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, remember? Helping you to stay steady, and we talked about the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, helping you to reassess and to figure out if something's dangerous or not. Who cares where the prefrontal cortex, whether it's ventral or dorsal, we just need to know that there's a command center in our brain, in addition to the threat center, the prefrontal cortex, and it helps us make decisions and stay steady. You want your prefrontal cortex functional when the stress hits and not to only have the amygdala running. Now, don't get me wrong, you need that amygdala so you can identify the threat, but you want to make good decisions, especially if it's not really a threat. The amygdala is not going to differentiate too much, it's just going to fire and tell you run or fight. There's a third region in the brain that we talked about yesterday, and then the brain lecture part is over, trust me, called the insula. Every one of us has an insula, I-N-S-U-L-A. We talk about it here on the sweet spot because it's the part of your brain that lets you know what is happening inside your body, and so you don't freak out, like, why is this happening? It's a monitor, it's an internal safety cop. It lets you know what's going on. When these networks are running, and the ACC is in there too, when these networks are running, right? And they and they're they're optimal, you are regulated. But when they're fatigued, when you're not sleeping, when you're under a lot of stress, when you're under a lot of just heavy, heavy conflicts and you feel threatened, you know what happens? They spaz. So this is where you have to have the right identity. Remember yesterday we talked about that? That you have to know who you are in the middle of stress. You have to know who you are when you're facing a conflict. Not just what you do, but who you are. Because your identity is quietly there in the background. If your identity is built around intensity, then calming down feels like you're backing down. If your identity includes steadiness and balance, then when you return to your baseline, you feel strong. It's all in how you think about it. So you have to have control over you because if you don't have control over you, you're gonna be tossed to and fro like a ship on the ocean when a storm comes, right? Marcus Aurelius, the stoic uh philosopher writer, once said this you have power over your mind, not outside events. When you realize this, you will find strength. That's the quote: you will have power over your mind when you realize that you don't control outside events. Your strength comes from this understanding, this recognition. That's how you recover. You come back to the understanding that hey, I got power over one thing: my amygdala, my prefrontal cortex, my anterior cingulogyrus, and my insula. Okay, that's my brain. Okay, I got power over these suckers. Alright, so you have power over your mind, not over outside events. Your strength comes from that. You're gonna you don't you don't get all crazy about things you can't control. You control the controllables, we've been saying it, and that's about recovery too. Absolutely. Yeah. So you've got to know what you tell yourself in those moments, how you speak to yourself, you've got to know what kind of identity you're walking in today. Take action Tuesday. In the Dhammapada, which is a Buddhist teaching, they have a phrase that I like. It says, better a thousand hollow words is one word that brings better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace. You can say yep, yep, yep, yep, all you want. If it's not bringing you peace, if it's not bringing you stability, if it's not bringing you steadiness, and it's only perpetuating anxiety and stress, get out of that conversation. Because it's only when you speak peace over yourself, only when you say something like peace, be still to yourself, is your regulation gonna come? Is your control gonna come? Is your PFC, your prefrontal cortex, gonna come back online? Because if you can't speak peace, you're gonna be speaking the other opposite of that, which is war, which is stress, which is anxiety. You gotta have a place where you're like, you know what? I'm choosing peace today. That's my action. Today is Take Action Tuesday. You know what I'm choosing? Peace. You know what that means? When you cut me off on the road, I'm not gonna react. I'm gonna just let that be. When you say something to me that makes no sense to me or is it could typically piss me off, I'm actually choosing peace today. That's my action. My prefrontal cortex is gonna stay online. I'm not going amygdala on you right now. Hey, I think I just coined a new term. I'm going amygdala. All right. So, yeah, yeah, even in the message Bible, it says moderation is better than muscle, self-control better than political power. That's the message Bible interpretation in Proverbs 16. That moderation is better than muscle and self-control better than political power. Ancient language for nervous system mastery. Yeah. There are some performers I work with, like in stage performance, who say things like, you know, Doc, it's not the big performance that worries me. It's when those little moments come and I make a tiny mistake and it sticks with me for the entire performance. Yeah. Their edge gets triggered in those moments. And the edge lives in those little tiny seconds after a disruption. It can be a disruption anywhere, it could be in the hospital, hallway, it could be in the kitchen, it could be in the portion, it could be anywhere. Anywhere that you have an environment where there are people and there are interactions and there's a potential for uh uh conflict, the edge will come up. You will have to know what your edge is, and you will have to understand the things can activate you, but you do not have to just react. You can respond because you can put a pause in there and you don't have to speedily react, you can think about what it is you're gonna do. Because you have power over your mind. So before you correct, before you defend, before you send that mean text message, take a pause. Before you take action this Tuesday, take a second and check in with yourself. Check in with your prefrontal cortex, check in with your amygdala. Who's talking to you right now? Drop your shoulders, take a deep breath. Inhale and then a long exhale. You know why that's important? It resets your nervous system and it gives you a chance to think things through. If you unclench your jaw, unhunt your shoulders, take a deep breath in, hold, and then slowly let it out. You'll be surprised what you're doing to your entire system. You'll be activating the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system, and boy, you let the waves pass before you decide. You're not avoiding pressure. This is not about avoiding the pressure, you're just training how you're going to return to baseline. You want to train how you return to baseline. And the more you repeat this, the more cohesive you will become when stress hits you. Because you'll be the kind of person that doesn't just react. You take a minute, you think this through, you determine what do you want. Yeah, the person blowing the horn behind you wants you to speed up, but what do you need here? Yeah, that person said something that was offensive, but do they get to control your emotions or do you? That's the kind of thing that I'm talking about here for take action Tuesday. That's where we are. You're in the sweet spot. If this made sense to you today, this idea that this edge that you have is under your control and that you're gonna determine what kind of response or reaction you're gonna have because you're gonna put a pause in there. You're not gonna go with the default amygdala response, right? You're gonna recover, you're gonna get back to baseline. Once you get back to baseline, then you can take the shot. Once you get back to baseline, then you can make the tackle. Once you get back to baseline in real time, then you can defend the goal. Whatever it is you do, move the pucker around. Whatever it is that you do, get back to the to work in the kitchen, wherever you are. Come back to baseline. Don't let things pull you too far to the right or to the left today on Take Action Tuesday. You take action by taking control of who you are and knowing your identity and who you are. And I'll see you tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow for you know what? Win it all Wednesday. That's right. We're on the journey, we're on the journey. Love and blessings. Please share this with somebody who needs it and subscribe if you haven't. It's completely free. So for science, for soul, for success, protect your inner edge.