End Stress By Learning to Self-Regulate Your Nervous System with Mental Strength Coach Siamon Emery - The Energy Blueprint (2024)

In this episode, I’m speaking with my close friend, and a coach of mine, Mental Strength Coach Siamon Emery.

Siamon has a powerful personal story that begins in an extremely stressful and traumatic environment with heroin-addicted parents, and then moves into his own personal transformation later in life, and then finding his calling as a Mental Strength Coach helping others to build resiliency and mental strength with his unique methodology of what he calls “building inner resources” and learning to self-regulate your own nervous system consciously.

His work has benefitted me tremendously (as I’ve been coached by him in recent months) and I hope this podcast will positively impact your and your family’s health too.

In this podcast, Siamon and I discuss:

• His origins growing up in Australia with severely drug-addicted parents, how this left him “never feeling safe,” and how this childhood shaped his journey to doing the work he does now to help people build resilience and mental strength
• How Siamon has helped me with my own ability to regulate my nervous system in stress- and fear-inducing situations
• My lessons from 20 years of surfing and having to move through years of intense fears
• Why the body rather than the mind is the key to regulating one’s nervous system and building resilience.
• “Top-down” vs. “Bottom-up” approaches, and why it’s critical to understand the difference
• The thinkers that have inspired Siamon’s methods, like Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, Bessel van der Kolk, and Stephen Porges
• How Polyvagal theory helps us understand the goal of regulating the nervous system
• Why Siamon is less interested in the story of your story of your traumas and hardships, and more interested in “when it felt good to be you”
• Why building “inner resources” is the key to resilience and mental strength
• Siamon’s body-centric approach to building strength in the mind
• Why it’s key to “lock in” the times you felt safe, loved, seen, and held
• Why approaching the things you fear (as opposed to avoiding them) and moving to the edge of your comfort zone is so important to building mental strength and resilience. (And how these moments can act like a “gymnasium for the nervous system”)
• Why the central task of building resilience revolved around taking conscious control of regulating your own nervous system, through the body
• Why 80% of Fortune 500 CEOs (and over 94% of female CEOs) are former athletes
• The distinction between “healing trauma” vs. “building resilience and mental strength”
• Why I love the quote “whatever one can be, one must be” and how it relates to the process of building mental strength
• Why it’s so critical for us to develop the ability to regulate our nervous system without doing anything – i.e. without needing to distract ourselves with certain behaviors or using substances

Ari Whitten: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint Podcast. I have a very special guest for you today. It is my good friend, Siamon. Siamon Emery from Australia. Interestingly enough, I met him maybe six or eight months ago at this point in Costa Rica. We’ll tell the story as we get into this podcast. Basically, he happened to be moving to Nosara, Costa Rica, which is where I was living.

He was from a specific town in Australia that I was interested in moving to, Noosa, Australia. Through a mutual friend, we connected. Basically, I was picking his brain. He was very generous and sharing lots of helpful information about his hometown in Australia. We became friends and surfing buddies. He became a mental coach of mine because he’s a much more experienced surfer and a better surfer.

He became a coach to me as we were surfing together, basically helping me to train my mind for surfing, which is something we’ll talk more about as we get into this. Surfing and the applications of this type of training actually extend way beyond that specific application. That’s just one sort of avenue that this can be explored in. As it stands at this moment, as we are speaking, I’m in Australia and Siamon’s in Costa Rica. [laughs] Interestingly enough. Siamon’s in the place I’ve been living for the last few years.

Now, I’m in his homeland. Here we are doing this podcast. He’s been helping me on this journey I’m on with my family here, exploring his homeland and giving me lots of helpful information and tips on where to go and what to do and what to explore. We decided to do this podcast. I decided to do this podcast to share Siamon’s wisdom with all of you and his expertise in this area of this unique application of basically training for resilience, training for mental strength.

We’ll hear more about what exactly that means and how it works and what the applications and the benefits are. What I want to express to you is Siamon has been personally, for me, very, very enormously helpful in my own life because surfing is something that really challenges you mentally. It pushes your fear triggers. Everybody has a limit of what size waves and what types of conditions put them into a dysregulated state, put them into a state where they start to panic and they start to lose control of their mind.

Siamon has really helped me expand that limit and be more comfortable in bigger waves and more dangerous conditions, scarier conditions. As I started to speak with him and learn from him more and more, I basically said, “Hey, I need to get you on the podcast so you can share some of this information and share your work with my audience.” Without giving you divulging any more about what we’re going to get into, let me welcome you to the show, Siamon. Thanks so much for coming on and doing this. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to get into this with you.

Siamon Emery: Yes, thanks so much, Ari. Me too. It was a very interesting connection. I really enjoyed the comments that the conversations we were having when you were here. It’s great to be here and I look forward to going a bit deeper into some of the stuff that we’ve been talking about previously.

Ari: Awesome. Let’s do it. First of all, I would love to start off with your personal story and have you talk about how you got into doing the work that you now do because you have a very unique personal background that led you into doing this work. Let’s start there.

Siamon: Okay. 1976, in an inner city suburb of Sydney, I was born into a family of a heroin-addicted mother and father. I was born into a very dysregulated place, unable to really even just provide basic necessities and basic services like food and clothing and to that level. For five years, we were living in a constant state of change and a constant state of not safe. When I say “not safe,” I mean more to the point of like it was never a regular.

Nothing about my life was regular. It was all full of constant change. My ability to actually regulate my own nervous system in that place was severely, severely undermined because of the inability for my parents to help me to co-regulate through their ability to regulate their own nervous systems. They were using substances. The ups and downs of that life meant that when they had the substance, everybody was very happy and very calm.

When we didn’t have the substance, it was a completely out of control, not safe. I’ll keep saying “safe” because that’s how I’m identifying with it. Not a safe place to be as a child at all. That really played out until I was about five or six. Then my mother decided at that age that she’d had enough of that lifestyle and decided to try out. She did that by leaving the country. She left and went to India and Pakistan to do some soul-searching of her own.

Ari: Not only leaving the country, but leaving you, leaving her kids.

Siamon: That’s exactly right. I have a vivid memory. Actually, it was an Air India flight. I still have the Taj Mahal on the sides of the windows. I had little Taj Mahals painted on there and I can still remember that as a 47-year-old man now. I vividly remember the distress of even her leaving. Not only was it inconsistent in the love, it was also unreliable. Then my father having inability at all to have any kind of ability to actually just be an adult in any way, shape, or form. He was just purely driven by his addiction.

Then I was sent to live with my grandparents and my father lived with them as well. It was my father and my grandparents in the same house. Over time, he became more and more deeper into his addiction. My grandparents were becoming more and more distressed of his inability to actually perform any basic tasks. He then ended up actually starting to steal from family and from friends and from them. As a way for them to try and help their son to do the right thing, they used to stick me with him.

When I was a six and seven-year-old boy, when he would go out of the house on the weekends when I wasn’t at school, they used to tell him to take me with him. All that really invariably ended up doing was I was in a space where we were going to steal something. Then from that stealing, we were going to go to the pawn brokers at the pawn shop to get money so he could buy the drugs. That was the whole week, the whole life of the weekend. Then from that space, he was basically using, then we’d find a place to use the drugs. Then I would have to hold him as a five and six-year-old little boy to try and get him home and get him onto the train and take care of his own, just to take care of him.

It was highly distressing at all times. Not only then, because not only was I just disregarded by my mother, I was also used as a pawn in my father’s family to try and keep him on some form of level thinking or taking some kind of responsibility, which he never did. It all come to a head when I was 10 and the grandmother died, my grandmother, his mother died, and then my grandfather realizing that he couldn’t take care of this whole situation. Then I had to leave. That’s when I finally moved back into my mother’s place. My mother took me back in and we moved to the coast. We moved to the beach when I was 10 years old.

Ari: Was she still addicted to heroin or–

Siamon: No, so she’d come back. She’d been back. She left for two years. She’d been back for three years. She was in and out of my life still. She was still working things out and still just being quite pretty dysfunctional and not nothing really sustainably regular. I had to live with her because she obviously hadn’t prepared for me to come with her. She had no ability to actually be a decent parent either. The only one good thing she did do is we actually moved to the beach. At 10 years of age, I took up surfing. She saw the love. It was actually where you are right now in Byron Bay where I vividly remember my first wave.

Ari: Wow.

Siamon: As a 10-year-old boy, I still absolutely have every memory of it in this space. For me at that place, then I found something that was consistent in my life that I could control, that I didn’t need anybody else to take me to. I didn’t need anybody else’s permission. This could be all me. I didn’t have to involve anybody else in it because everybody else in my life up until that moment were totally unreliable and didn’t follow through any promises that they had said. I could hold on to this space.

Going down that same thought process, by the time I turned 15, we were still living together. It would become so untenable because I’d become so angry as a young man as we do as teenagers. She had really no ability still at that time to actually care for me properly that she chose to ask me to leave the house. At 15 years of age, I moved into an emergency youth hostel, which, again, luckily, was near the beach.

For me, for that whole time, the beach was always my regulated space where I could go and feel safe and where I could take care of what I needed to in that moment. Finally, understanding at that time that I was actually on my own and nobody really cared for me at that moment and sitting in this house full of these delinquent teenagers that I never actually saw myself as one. I always thought, “This is not who I am,” and just fundamentally having a breakdown and going, “I don’t know what to do.”

I’ve done everything I can as a young man being brought into this world. I don’t know my next move. From this point on is where the story really changes. It changed to the point where my uncle comes to the emergency youth hostel where I’m at. He receives me and takes me. He takes me in and he becomes the first true role model, male role model, strong male role model in my life. That was when really everything started to shift and change.

Then I went back to school because he gave me the stability actually to be regular and be a normal person, which was really amazing for the first time. Then I went back to school and I finished my schooling and then I decided that, “You know what? I actually just want to surf.” Directly after finishing school, I went surfing. I bought a nice van. I tricked it out with all the racks and stuff for all my surfboards. I decided that I was going to go surfing for the next three years and see if I can make this as an actual profession because this was my first true love.

This is what I really desired to do. Whilst I never really did make it as a professional, what I did do was give myself just the space, just to be me, and just to explore everything without anybody else, without any other external influences on me. Just to travel all throughout Australia and surfing and going to different towns and really just being free from anybody else’s ability to dysregulate me or to control whatever I needed to express in that moment. Then I realized at some point that just living in a van and traveling around Australia wasn’t really going to cut it as a career.

[laughter]

Siamon: I looked around at all of my contemporaries and went, “Well, what are all these guys doing?” “He’s a contractor. He’s a trade and this guy’s a carpenter.” I’m like, “Well, why don’t I just do carpentry?” All the guys that I’d surfed with, when the waves were good, nobody worked in the trade space. I was like, “Okay, cool.” I ended up taking on a trade and it took me five years to finish that trade, which was actually a blessing in disguise. Because what had happened over the years obviously of having non-stable primary parenting figures in my life was that inability to regulate myself was still so present, but it was below cognition. I couldn’t understand why.

I would take a job on. I would stay there for eight or nine months and then I would just start not to feel safe. Then I would shut down and then I would self-sabotage in that space. Then I’d get fired from that job. Then I would go to another job for years. I’d have three months off and go surfing and come back into regulation and go, “Oh, crap, I need to go and get some money again. Okay, cool. Why don’t we just find another job?” Because being in a trade and having a carpentry trade was really easy.

I could get a job anywhere in Australia, so then I would just pick up work again for the next six or eight months and then get to the point at the same going, “Oh, these guys are idiots, so I have nothing in common with these people. I hate this stuff. I’m out of here. You guys are out,” so I’d leave or get fired. That was pretty much a recurring theme for 10 years from the age of about 20 to 30 until I decided that it was their problem and everybody else’s problem why I couldn’t find a decent-enough position.

I’m going to start my own company. I’m going to do the business thing and get what we call a principal contractor’s license or the builder’s license and be the guy who makes all the decisions. Because then if I make all the decisions, I won’t have to listen to anybody else. As you can imagine, after two or three failed attempts at becoming a builder because I wasn’t able to listen to anybody else and I was fully driven by my survival drive, I decided that, actually, it was me.

Something was definitely severely wrong. I needed to acknowledge the childhood that I had, the adolescence that I had, and the young man that I’d grown into. I’d realized that all the diversionary tactics that I’d put into, which was surfing was one obviously as well, but it was a really healthy one. There’s also some really unhealthy ones there with the substance abuses. Not that I ever used anything that was anywhere near to the level of what my parents did, but alcohol, I never used marijuana.

I think I used amphetamines once or twice, but it was mainly alcohol. It was that deadening down of the nervous system, getting that dopamine, and then just getting that whole nervous system regulation from the alcohol. Understanding that all of those coping mechanisms and all of that story was really creating the man that I was looking back in the mirror every time I looked into the mirror. It was not a good look and I didn’t like what I saw.

Ari: I remember the first time you told me your story. My initial reaction was, “Geez, I’m never going to complain about my childhood ever again.” I have absolutely nothing to complain about because it just does not compare to the severity of what you went through as a child. Just hearing your story was, in a way, helpful and healing for me to deal with whatever little gripes I had about my childhood and my parents because I was like, “Wow, I had it really good.” It’s amazing that humans can even survive and be functional adults, having a childhood like the kind of what you went through.

Now, you’re an adult. You’ve gone through work. You’ve gone through exploring a potential as a professional surfer, getting jobs, failing at jobs, starting your own business. How does this story transition? You’ve now talked about this personal reckoning that you had to do to go through to recognize that it was you. It was your own psychology, your own way of being in the world that was at the root cause of what you were experiencing. How does this story shift to doing the work that you now do?

Siamon: Well, it really shifted with two things actually. It shifted with a significant relationship breakdown was the first episode. That followed pretty quickly with a business breakdown as well. Not that we went bankrupt, but the business just made no money. Then all of a sudden, I was just in my mid-to-late 30s. This was a person who I thought I was going to marry and we were going to have a future together.

We bought a block of land and we were building and then had a company that I thought was pretty solid. Within a space of six months, it all just disappeared. Then we’re going into a really, really deeply depressed state and not really recognizing from that state how I’d gotten there. It was like I’d played the game as far as I was concerned. As far as everybody else was concerned, I’d gotten the job. I have a career. I have this beautiful person who I think is going to be staying with me in the rest of this life.

Then within the space of a very short amount of time, it all just disappears. Then I look, honestly, at the whole situation and go, “What’s the common denominator in this situation?” Well, it’s me. Okay. Well, if it’s me, let’s really start to delve into what that means. Basically, it started first off with just a lot of talk therapy. I started just going to a normal therapist, a normal psychologist twice a week just for 12 weeks just to talk out what was going on for me in that moment.

Not really shifting any internal space, but really it was actually quite good just to have somebody to talk to, just to sit there and listen to the whole story for the first time. The first time I told the whole story right from beginning to end like I just told you. Just having the ability to express it was great. Noting that there was no real progress from it, I was still very depressed. I was still really not having not much direction about which way I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

Then through my own personal understanding and just through reading and just through coming across, I started down the process of, “Okay, what about some breath work and some ice bathing and see if we can get some trauma?” We started to look into more trauma-informed practices because I realized that I had capital-T trauma, not little t, but capital-T trauma. Then I started talking about that and going to the different understandings of how that was treated.

Ice baths, saunas, breath work, sound baths, EMDR also with the eye movement. Then it moved on to EFT, so emotional freedom tapping. Neuro-linguistic programming, the NLP stuff. Anything that I could see that would going to be, actually, a functional benefit to me, I was feet first in. Because by that stage, you’ve got to understand, I had such an appetite to heal because I realized how much power punch pain had been in my childhood and in my adolescence and in my young adult life that I was really ready to let go of that story.

I knew internally that there was a space that this story didn’t belong to me. There was another story to be told, but I was focusing too much on this story because this is what was happening in my life in this moment. This is where I could only have the focus. I was conscious about like, I just need to get to a space where I can hold space for that bit of trauma. Then I can start really developing into this man that I want to be.

Then that also looked like the psychedelic range as well. Using ayahuasca, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT. Again, having profound insights in the moment, but none of it really sticking, just going, “Wow, that was amazing.” When I’m on it, I feel good. Well, that’s really wild experience. Then within a short period of time, the deficient feeling it always had because of my experiences came back pretty hard with a vengeance.

Then I sunk into a really deep depression again at 40, 41. I’m just not understanding that I’m more– sorry, not that I understand, but understanding that I didn’t know where to turn. I thought in my mind, “I’d done everything.” This was also whilst I was running triathlons, running, cycling, swimming, doing multiple surfing lots, keeping my diet healthy, doing all the things that we would classically deem to be living a healthy lifestyle, which promoting good health and good mental health.

None of it still actually being of any kind of benefits still. You would get small gains, but nothing was ever long-lasting. As soon as I felt like I was getting into that depressed state again, I’d jump on my bike and do 120, 100-mile ride, or I’d swim for 3 kilometers or I’d do a 6-mile run. That was the way. It was just another coping strategy. It was still just another avoidance tactic. I could see that happening.

I realized that this was not something that was either going to be able to support me in the long term because, at some point, I’m not going to be able to run anymore. At some point, I’m not going to be able to ride my bike. At some point in the future, I’m going to have to sit with this. Then that’s when I came across, basically, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Dr. Stephen Porges.

That was the most life-changing– I remember listening to my very first podcast from Dr. Gabor Maté talking about how pain expresses in the body and how it shows up in different areas and different responses. It was just a light bulb moment and then listen to Peter Levine with a felt sense of safety and understanding how the body creates safety much more. It was a bottom-up approach much more than a top-down where I was working top-down.

Then having it all reaffirmed and then finally reading Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory and then understanding to the full extent of what I was working with and then finally putting all of those systems together in my own practice. For the first time in 40-odd years, I was completely still, completely safe in my own body that I could ever remember. Everything just shut down, everything. Nothing was up here and nothing was outside of me. Everything was inside of me and I had control over all of it.

It almost brings a tear to my eye now because you’ve got to understand, Ari, 40 years of dysregulation, 40 years of believing that you’re not enough, 40 years of believing that you’re deficient in some way, shape, or form because your parents chose to do something else other than take care of their number one priority. I was angry as well. Then finally just getting to that space of safety with nothing else other than my own ability to regulate. Nothing external to me. No money, no women, no relationship. No money, no cars, nothing external to me. It was all developed internally from my own self. It was the best day of my life.

Ari: Beautiful. I know this already firsthand because I’ve done many sessions with you. I know your methods. I know how you’ve combined the work, the paradigms, the physiological mechanisms of many of the thinkers you just mentioned and the research that relates to this. I’d like for you to present a picture of what is the core of the work that you do with people. How do you help?

I know from talking to you, from working with you that feeling safe in the body and this bottom-up process as opposed to top-down process as you just described is at the core of this. For people who may not be familiar with those terms, for people who aren’t familiar with Stephen Porges’ work or Gabor Maté’s work or the other thinkers that you mentioned there, Bessel– sorry, I always forget how to pronounce– I only know–

Siamon: Bessel van der Kolk.

Ari: Van der Kolk, yes.

Siamon: Peter Levine.

Ari: Peter Levine, yes. Tell people how it is that you’ve taken principles from them or just describe the core of what it is that you do and what is the core benefit from that.

Siamon: Actually, if we just break it down to its essential process, well, exactly what I’m doing is it’s a form of reparenting. It’s what we’re doing. It’s a form of understanding that through listening to Dr. Gabor Maté, understanding that there’s an unhealed part of you that still needs to be seen, felt, and heard, and then realizing that through Peter Levine’s process, then we’ll just come back to Gabor Maté first is to step it up.

Sorry, I’ve just got to put it into steps again because it happens so easily for me. I have to make sure I’m cognitively saying what I’m saying. Using Dr. Gabor Maté’s understanding of how we need to reparent or heal ourselves is I virtually have to not create, but I like to help people to find a space in their body or a time in their life when they were happy, when they were safe, when they were loved, when they were seen.

Basically, that looks like just sitting somebody quietly in their chair. We do this all online. Just to a quick body scan check-in like a small meditation, like a mindful meditation for about five or seven minutes, and a little bit of in-and-out breath for two minutes. Then I just basically ask people. When was the last time that they felt loved, they felt saved, and they felt seen? I’m just asking that question through what Dr. Gabo Maté was saying.

There’s an unhealed aspect of you that’s going to go on and be feel safe at some point from that time in your life. If you can remember a time in your life when you were five and you were on your father’s lap while he was reading you a book and you feel safe and you feel loved and you feel encapsulated in that love, then I ask you the question of where in the body do you feel that. I get you to identify it.

Not only just the time, but I get you to identify the feeling. Because in my experience with working this way, it’s like the body doesn’t have the actual concept of past, present, or future. The body’s understanding of how it interprets what’s happening in this moment is how it feels. If I can get your body feeling safe from a time in the past, it can bring you to a state of regulation so quickly and so calmly that you will be so surprised [chuckles] about how your whole– I’ve witnessed people’s shoulders drop down.

I’ve witnessed people’s shins come into their chest just by remembering when it was safe to be there, when they were loved, and when they were seen. Then what Stephen Porges’ work looks like then basically is polyvagal theory. Polyvagal theory is dorsal vagal, ventral vagal. Dorsal-vagal high tone, but dorsal-vagal low tone, which those two tones are. One is rest-and-digest, which is the low tone. The high tone is the fight-or-flight.

Usually, we’re only ever in these two states if we’ve never really been taught how to regulate our nervous system through co-regulation of a parent or a primary caregiver who had the ability to hold a safe nervous system. If we didn’t have anybody in our life that looks like that, then all we could do is basically go from a dorsal-vagal high tone, which was fight-or-flight, to a dorsal-vagal low tone, which is rest-and-digest. That’s how we usually recover.

Rest-and-digest doesn’t look like engaging. Rest-and-digest looks like retreating and to recover. We go into war with whatever we do during the day. During the day, we get in our cars. We drink our coffee. We go to work. Then the way we recover from that day is we come back in and we come back into our home. We go into a dorsal-vagal low tone, which we have to rest and digest.

We have to retreat from our environment. What we’re able to do now with the practice that I use is we go into a ventral-vagal state, which is a connected and conversive state where you actually feel connected to the people around you. You’re able to actually converse and feel regulated through co-regulation of all the people around you if that sums it up in a sense, I guess.

Ari: Yes, it does. That was beautifully explained. The essence of that, you’re taking from multiple different models and paradigms here to try to create a conceptual framework to explain what you’re trying to do. The core of it is essentially helping people feel safe in their body, understanding that what goes on in the mind is very much driven by the body. We have this kind of paradigm that has dominated psychology and psychiatry for a very long time now that mind and body are separate.

Even if we can acknowledge, “Yes, okay. Well, we know they’re connected,” but for the most part, people think of them as largely separate and distinct and mind-stuff psychology, emotions as its own mind category through which we should try to affect it and address it and modulate it through mind-mediated stuff, through psychotherapeutic methods that address the mind or through a brain-centric model that says that what goes on in the mind is a product of neurochemicals and neurocircuitry in the brain.

Let’s take these drugs that modulate this chemistry in the brain. What you do is a very body-centric process where there really isn’t this distinction between mind and body. In fact, not only is there not really a distinction there, but this paradigm conceptualizes the body and what goes on in your physical body and how you feel in your physical body as a major determinant of what goes on in the mind and the emotions. Is that correct? Would you agree with how I explained that?

Siamon: Absolutely agree. That doesn’t mean we’re still not working with the neurochemicals either. We’re still working with the limbic system, but we’re just coming at the limbic system from a different way. Rather than using drugs or using antidepressants to manage that space, which is that overactive space, we’re using the body’s own ability to regulate to manage that space.

If you haven’t been taught it or if you don’t know it, given not many people necessarily would coming from a trauma space, then all you’ve ever been known is actually just to have a top-down experience. It’s like you have to control your thoughts where, actually, it’s the exact inverse of what we’ve been told is actually we want to control our bodily reactions first, which then control our thoughts and have the ability to control our thoughts.

If I’m sitting here like I was just before I come on this podcast, I get a little bit dysregulated. I’m like, “Oh, okay, a bit of a podcast. Let’s try this.” I just witnessed that feeling, allowed it to be there, didn’t get worried about it, and then just sat with the felt sense and then remember the time when I was safe, pulled in what it feels like to feel safe in the body, and sat with the memory of safety in the body. Pretty quickly, within 30 seconds, I was back down into a regulator’s weight, and then we started this podcast. It’s still definitely a process, but that process is completely inverse to what classical psychology tells us.

Ari: I know this firsthand from working with you because, as you said, you’re a surfer. I’m a surfer. A large part of the time you and I have spent together is in the water surfing together. Given that you are a much better and more experienced surfer than I am and much better at– Oh, that was beautiful. I just saw a humpback whale jump out of the water.

Siamon: [laughs]

Ari: Sorry. A little bit of distraction here.

Siamon: That’s okay.

Ari: My eyes off the ocean. One of the things that you were able to notice in me very quickly as we were surfing together is when the waves got big, you start to see subtle changes in my eyes and my behavior that said, “Oh, I can see you’re brushing up against the limit of where you can stay regulated.” As surfers, we all have that limit. We have different personal limits of where we reach that threshold.

For somebody new to surfing, maybe that limit is a two to three-foot wave feels really intense and really scary. For Kai Lenny or Laird Hamilton or some big-wave surfer, maybe they can stay perfectly regulated in giant waves at Jaws in Maui. Everybody’s got it. Everybody’s got a point at which they are in conditions that make them completely lose it and lose their ability to stay in control of what’s going on physically and mentally where they start to panic, where they start to go, “I might be on the verge of dying here. This might be it for me.”

I’ve had a handful of experiences like that surfing. I think because I’ve had some experiences where I have been near-drowning, I have it in my head that, “Oh, that can happen again.” That’s a fear of mine, right? I know I can get to that place. Again, I know what that feels like. Surfing is also something that, for me, is uniquely triggering, you could say, in the sense that it sets off my internal physiological alarms pretty easily. I think for a couple of reasons, one is a collective reason that I think a large part of the population has, which is we all saw the movie Jaws when we were kids.

Siamon: [laughs]

Ari: I think one of the worst things that ever happened to humanity was that movie because it made just hundreds of millions or, maybe at this point, many billions of people fearful of the ocean, fearful to enter the ocean, to go for a swim, fearful of– I’m entering this dark abyss where these evil monsters lurk and are coming to get– If I’m on the surface, there’s a great white that’s going to be coming to the surface to eat me any second.

I remember having a lot of those thoughts as a kid. I remember the ocean being a very scary place from the time I was a little kid because I think I saw that movie at way too young of an age. I wish I never saw it [chuckles] as I think is the case for a large portion of humanity at this point. There’s probably a large portion of humanity that has never established a relationship with the ocean because it’s such a scary place for them.

Beyond that, a more personal reason for me is that when I was in my early 20s about 20 years ago when I started surfing, one of the first surfing movies that I saw, I believe it was Step Into Liquid. There was a scene with some guys in my hometown in San Diego with Rob Machado and another guy. I forget the guy’s name, but it was this aspiring pro-surfer. He had an accident. He describes this accident of basically going down a steep wave and getting pitched as has happened to all of us many, many times.

Steep wave, you drop, you go head first. He went right into a shallow reef head first, spinal cord injury, paralyzed for life. I saw that very early on in my surfing. It made a very strong mark in my mind where that became a really intense fear of mine. This idea of any time I enter the wave, if it’s too steep, if it’s too shallow, if I go head first and I hit my head straight into the ground, I can be paralyzed for life any second.

Between the fear of sharks that I had from childhood and then that, surfing became this very scary thing for me. Even small waves would be relatively scary for me just because I was so dysregulated that that fear of going head first into the ground was so intense. I was out there, also just sitting on my board on the lookout for sharks, thinking sharks could come get me any second.

It took me years to even just move beyond those fears where I could be in the ocean, even in small waves, just to be in a relaxed place where I wasn’t seeing this as a really scary environment where I was going to meet my end any second. Some people listening to this might be wondering, “Well, if you had so much fear, why did you keep going? Why did you keep surfing?” The answer to that is I was drawn and still am and have always been drawn to approach things that I fear, drawn to establish a relationship with and gain mastery over the things that I fear.

It became a playground. It became a gym to explore these fears and try to develop more courage to conquer them, to gain more control and more mastery over them. This was like, “Okay, we’re going surfing. We’re going on a mission. This is scary. This is going to be intense, but this is an opportunity to push myself to grow stronger, to become more courageous.” Roughly, 20 years later, surfing is still very much that for me. The relationship with the ocean is still very much that dynamic with me. It’s just that I’ve progressively expanded that threshold to much higher, higher levels than what it was 20 years ago.

Of course, it’s still there. You and I have been out on days where the waves get big. You’ve seen me get to that point of brushing up against that space where, “Okay, I’m getting close to my limit. This is pretty scary. How do I stay calm?” You’ve helped me. You’ve been out there with me in those moments, not just sitting here when we’re at our computers in our home safe, but in the scary environment, helping me learn how to regulate my nervous system and my mental and physiological reactions in that stressful, risky, scary, dysregulating place.

These are different animals too, which maybe you can speak to. Just the nature of like, “Okay, it’s one thing to learn how to regulate your nervous system again, just sitting quietly, comfortably in the safety of your own living room or bedroom.” It’s another animal to put yourself in an environment that totally triggers you and dysregulates you. Now, we’re learning how to regulate ourselves in that space.

Siamon: Building robustness is what we’re doing. We’re not actually what I like to call a robust nervous system. We’re in a really good regulated state until we actually put ourselves into that space of, “Okay. Now, I’m on the edge.” This is the edge of my comfort. This is the edge where I believe that I think I can regulate to. If we’re there, I don’t want to take this next step because I don’t know what that’s going to look like.

That looks like to me, to my body’s response is death. Our whole body’s experience basically is to keep us alive. That’s the whole survival drive. The whole drive was below cognition. That’s completely there always to say, “Okay, yes. That’s okay, but you’re definitely not doing that.” You’re not doing that because I’m going to give you a flush of all of these wonderful hormones of adrenaline and cortisol to say, “No, you’re not going to regulate. We’re going to downregulate that prefrontal cortex. We’re going to upregulate the amygdala. The limbic system is going to come into play.”

Then you’re going to have no ability to have any rational thought whatsoever. The first thing you’re going to do is look for safety. I remember that time when we were in the water. I said to me, I was like, “Oh, here come the sets.” Okay, it wasn’t big for me, but it was potentially big for you. I witnessed you actually look at me with a sense of fear and then turn around and start to paddle the other way, which puts you in more danger, because what you’d actually ended up doing rather than sitting and witnessing and going, “Hey, all I need to do is just paddle out and I’ll be fine–“

Ari: I paddled for the first wave of the set. The one that was a bit smaller than the waves behind it.

Siamon: Yes, but if you had missed that wave, then the wave that was coming–

Ari: I think I did. I think I did miss that wave.

Siamon: You may have missed that wave, so then that puts you right in the impact zone for those bigger waves. Rational thought would say, “I’m not going to get that. I’ve just got to go as hard as I can to get out the back. The closer I get to it, the less danger I’m in.” Rational. Survival says, “I just need to get out of here whichever way I can get out of here.” You can see when we put ourselves in those spaces, our survival drive will always take over our ability to actually have cognitive thought because it’s about keeping us safe.

Especially if we haven’t understood what regulation potentially can look like, then we’re always going to be looking at the survival drive to run our show in everyday life. Putting you in that place, me sitting there with you also being able to co-regulate. If you’re in my presence, even when we’re on the call here like this, we’re going to be regulating nervous systems. We’re going to be checking in.

I’m going to be checking in with my body. If I feel a bit nervous, then you may feel safe. Despite the tone of your voice and the look on your face, you’ll start to make me feel a bit safer in my body just by being regulated. If I’m out there sitting with you and I look at you and I look safe, feel safe, and whole space of safety in my body, you by default feel safe at the same time. That gives you a more of a capacity to actually start to put your toes on the edge a bit more and start to down-regulate those systems of stress.

[crosstalk]

Ari: Just being out there with you as compared to being by myself in the same circ*mstance gave me a model to see, “Okay, how does somebody who is calm in this environment of what are scary waves for me, how does someone who is at ease in this situation, who knows with full confidence that they’re safe, that they can handle this, they’re not in any danger?” Just observing that, being in the presence of that gave me a model to go, “Okay, I can do that too. I can start to move in that direction and I can be at ease. I can trust that I’m safe and that I can handle this.”

I’ve handled similar situations hundreds of times before. “Okay, this one might be pushing the limits into a scary place where I’ve had problems before, but let’s see if I can handle it.” Just being with you, being able to co-regulate with you in that way and have you be able to say, ‘Just look at me and just breathe. You got it. Bring your awareness into your body. Trust that you’re safe,” was enormously helpful. That’s something that I’ve been applying in my surfing and outside of my surfing in other areas of my life all the time since I learned how to do that from you.

Siamon: We’re building a resource, Ari. When I say that we go to a time when you were safe, loved, seen, held, anything you choose to feel in that moment. If we can lock that and when we identify where that sensation is in the body, then we can start to feel into that sensation. Basically, that sensation is giving our body the permission to feel safe, giving our body the permission to feel loved and to feel seen.

As we do that, as I said to you, we can down-regulate all of those hormones of stress, and then we can up-regulate serotonin and oxytocin as well, and then up-regulate the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. Then we can actually have some really good rational thought and we can actually be really more present with what we need to be. We will not always just in the space that we need to either run away or shut down. Once we do that and once we have a specific anchor we can do, it doesn’t work for surfing, it works for all aspects in our life, anything we want to choose to confront. That was the whole reason for me coming to Costa Rica. I just decided if I’m going to honestly teach people how to regulate their nervous system, I’m going to put myself right on the edge of where I would like to be. I’ve sold basically everything I owned and then I took three surfboards and a backpack and jumped on a flight to Costa Rica where I’d never been before, had really no desire to go to, knew nobody, knew nothing of the area and just went, let’s just see how this goes.

Through the whole process, making sure I was staying regulated, making sure I was using my full capacity of rational thought and rational thinking and also just being aware that this is also a dysregulating place as well. Sometimes allowing that dysregulation place to be there as well because it might have to be there for that moment. I might have to be a bit hypervigilant because I’m not too sure about these people. Not having fearful about going to a dysregulated place either because then once we use that because dysregulation is there for a reason, that hypervigilance is there for a reason.

Sometimes we need to turn those systems on to survive. The ability to turn them on and off when we need them is really what builds the capacity for us to really have robust, sort of an anti-fragile capacity of like, just let’s just go. Let’s just try this. Let’s just see what it looks like. It’ll be fine. If it’s not fine, well, that’s okay too, because then we’ve got the capacity to hold it with using those resources.

Ari: Yes, I like the way you just described it because I think it’s important to talk about this as a skillset that you can cultivate, as a capacity that you can cultivate to be able to be in control of what’s happening to you instead of victim of what’s happening to you. Instead of just the recipient of it, where your body is dysregulated and you’re being victimized by whatever is happening to you, but to build some agency and some ability to be able to toggle the switches of your own nervous system and say, okay, I’m noticing that I’m getting into a dysregulated state here.

How do I bring myself back into harmony, back into balance? I think it’s important for people to understand that is a skill. That is a capacity that you literally build into your nervous system and into your brain to be able to do that, to be able to self-regulate in a conscious way. It’s not something that just happens automatically. It’s something that you have to practice and train at to become better at.

Siamon: It definitely is. We had primary caregivers who also had the inability to actually regulate their own nervous systems. We inherited their nervous systems just by default. By through co-regulation for spending the vast amount of our time with our primary caregivers, we inherited for survival reasons, because they survived to be old age and reproduce. That means their nervous systems work for them. Our nervous systems will align to that so we can survive to the same state to reproduce. That’s a basic threat level that we’re looking at. If you’ve never been taught what regulation looks or feels like, then you don’t even know what it is.

I remember specifically this one time working with a client who had three businesses going on at once and was also trying to have a baby and was in the middle of building a house. She was full noise. She was full gas. She was saying, “I’m just really dysregulated all the time, I just need to have a safe place sometime.” I’m like, “Sure, let’s work together.” We worked for two sessions and then after the second session, she canceled the rest of our sessions because it was so alien for her to operate from a safe place.

She’d always operated from a really dysregulated masculine place, like having to achieve and having to get things done. Whereas a regulated place looks like just being a little bit feminine and relaxing and allowing things to happen a bit more. She just left, she said this was so alien to her, it felt so discomforting. Once you really understand what a regulated nervous system feels like, a lot of my clients for the first time will sleep for 12 hours that night. They’ll have extended hours of sleep. They’ll lack what they would term motivation in that point.

They’ll feel a bit lazy because what’s actually happened is that their natural state, which is what we’re born into this world to experience, which is a fully regulated place. They’re finally at a place where they’re fully regulated and it’s so alien to them that it feels not like something that they actually want in their life. It’s very interesting. Having that capacity to actually witness that and not be a victim, where it’s true is true, and not be a victim to your circ*mstances and actually take control and allow all aspects of your life, allow the dysregulation to be there, allow the fear to be there sometimes too.

Because the fear is a good lesson. Sometimes you need to feel the fear. The classic line of feel the fear and do it anyway, well sometimes it’s feel the fear and I don’t want to do a bloody well thing. The fear can be a good barometer for where you’re at in your life too. It’s not as if we’re trying to create a space where you’re avoiding your space, avoiding being dysregulated. It’s about not having fear to go to a dysregulated place because that’s where the growth lies. Having going into a space which is uncomfortable, which is unfamiliar, which is foreign is where all the growth is.

It’s where your ability then to actually continue to show up for yourself and not be the victim and put yourself in these situations and hold yourself in safety and hold yourself in full ability to have full cognition about your process and about your choices creates, like I said, such a robust space where your fears are less and less as you get older, which is sort of the inverse of what would normally happen, right? In a classic sense is as you get older, your world gets smaller and smaller and your fears get larger and larger because of your inability to regulate a lot of space or to allow different things to show up in your life.

What we’re doing is we’re trying to get as much exposure as we possibly can as we get older to different dysregulating spaces to build robustness when eventually pretty much nothing will faze us. We’ll go dysregulated, that’s fine, I need it too. Then I’ll come back into regulation when I have to and then we’ll go into this next thing and that thing and that’s a life fully lived to me. For me, as a child, the last thing I wanted was inconsistency and non-permanentness. I wanted permanent. Everything needed to be permanent and everything needed to be the same every freaking day.

As I got older, I needed to buy coffee from the same coffee shop, I needed to buy the same brand of car, I needed to have the same hats, I needed everything the same, I needed to have the same type of house. As a child, my dream as a child was a suburban home with a normal family. I always thought as a child as I got into adult years that that’s what the dream is, that’s where you’re regulated. If I’ve got one of those, if I’ve got a suburban home with a wife and some kids, then that’s it, I’ve got it made because that’s where regulation lies, that’s where I’m safe.

It turns out it’s not the truth, but in my case, so they were all the understandings that I took. I’ve systematically one by one confronted all of those belief systems through building robustness and resilience just by having the capacity to go, okay, I’m not the victim to my circ*mstances. I could easily, look, you’ve heard my story. In my cases, most of the time, the outcome for my life looks like jail, addiction or death. I refuse to let any of that define me and I kept showing up and trying to do the best I could at every moment I could, even if that looked like doing the wrong thing, it was still something I thought it was bettering myself at.

Now having the capacity to really put my toes on the edge and to really seek volatility a lot of the time and to watch my nervous system regulate and to allow myself to seek out instability is liberating. I feel liberated every time. Every day I wake up here, I’m liberated to my choices. I can go home at any time I want. I can also stay here at any time I want. Each choice is valid, it’s fine.

Ari: There’s a lot of research that shows that the psychologically healthy, the mentally healthiest among us tend to approach rather than avoid things that they fear. I think that speaks to what you’re just describing there, entering into a relationship where you’re not living your life constantly trying to avoid and escape triggering situations and environments and things that you’re afraid of. It’s about, okay, I need to approach these to gain mastery over them so that I can live my fullest life so that I can become who I’m supposed to become so that I can do what I’m here to do.

I’ve seen that play out in so many people’s lives. I’ve seen so many times people are just in a constant cycle of trying to avoid and escape things that they fear, trying to find their way through life constantly without ever having to make contact with things that they fear. First of all, I applaud you for doing that full on. For going, okay, this is what I fear. If I’m going to do this work, I need to walk the walk and make sure I build this capacity in myself.

Now, I want to ask you a couple of questions. One is, you’ve talked about building robustness in the nervous system. We’ve talked a lot about surfing, our mutual love for surfing, but there’s a lot of people listening to this that are not surfers that maybe don’t do any exhilarating, extreme risky activity. Maybe they don’t connect with that example so much. I also, I’m going to have a few pieces here in this mix of this question, and then I’ll have you make sense of it. The other piece is the distinction between building robustness versus healing trauma, right?

We’re working on healing trauma, or we’re working on what you’ve referred to as building robustness of the nervous system, which I think is more of the context of what we’re getting at when we’re talking about the surfing examples and the work that benefited me is more about building robustness than healing trauma necessarily. Explain to people this distinction between how would this work apply, or what’s the distinction between doing this work in order to heal bad stuff, in order to heal trauma versus doing this work to build anti-fragility and to build robustness in the nervous system. Take people through that distinction. What are the benefits of the work that you do for regular people, for non-surfers, people who don’t engage in any activity like that?

Siamon: Well, basically the two, I would say robustness and resiliency. Resiliency is what we would term recovering from a traumatic experience or a traumatic loss. Resiliency is having the power actually to pull yourself out of a victim mindset, or a victim mentality, or a belief that you’re not worthy of healing. That’s what I would say resiliency is. We go through these really traumatic experiences in our life. We come to a space where we no longer know how to deal with them. Then we look at it and go, well, this is just who I am.

Then what I come in and do is we create a really good anchor for you, a really good resource for you to lean into, to remember the times when not only was it– because in the work I do, unless you’re willing to, I want to hear it all about whatever bad things happen to you, whatever the trauma was that happened to you. Whilst I do validate it and I don’t ever think that it’s something that should be taken lightly, but what I found throughout all of my own healing and all of the therapists that I work with was everybody just wanted to focus on hearing my story.

Oh, what’s your story? Tell me your story. I gave them the story that I just gave you. About, oh, and this is, and why was me, parents of this and such as that, and this is our experience and that experience and sort of everybody, and then you get the required, oh, that’s really sad. I feel really bad for you. You get some validation in that space too. That’s understanding. What I’m really more concerned with is like, hey, tell me when it was really good to be you. I know all about this. I know all this other stuff. You’ve told that story probably hundreds of times to people.

Through resiliency, I want to know, hey, when was it awesome to be you? Tell me when that time you were really valued. Tell me when that time you felt so much love and connection. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get you to refocus your thought processes basically from a traumatic space into a resiliency space of going, hey, that did happen to me, but also all of these other things happened to me also. As we say through Hebb’s postulate, the neurons that fire together, wire together. If we’re always thinking about the trauma, then we’re obviously always engaging in a sympathetic nervous system response.

You’re always in a fight or flight, even unconsciously. Even if we talk about it, it’s still going to bring a bodily response into it. What I’m trying to say is, let’s turn that around and let’s just say, hey, tell me the times when you received some really good oxytocin or some really good serotonin or these other drugs, not drugs, but these other hormones of safety and hormones of love because let’s talk about those ones and let’s identify how it feels in the body with those ones.

That’s what I would term resiliency is when we pull you out of that system where you identify as one person and we put you into another space where you can actually see it, that’s just a story that you’re telling yourself and the other story about how good it is to be you is exactly the same story and you get to choose which story you want to tell. I always tell how much of an amazing surfer I am and how much of a great therapist I can be to a lot of people to myself. I don’t tell anybody else. I just say it to myself. I reiterate to the self, to that aspect of me that sometimes wants a bit of reassurance.

It’s through that and through the felt sense of just feeling into what it feels like to be, hey, you’re a really good surfer. Hey, that person really loves you. Hey, wow, and you’ve got your children love you and so, okay, let’s just sit with that. We refocus the energy into a different space and then that in turn obviously changes how our whole brain chemistry in my own experience, through them being able to go, oh, that’s right. It’s not a fear state. I’m actually a really good guy and always was.

At that time, I needed to pay attention to that because that was really scary and that could because me harm or I could die from any of those really dysregulating places, but that’s over now. We don’t need to hear about that anymore. You survived. You’re here. Talk to me about the other stuff. That’s what I would term resiliency in the trauma space. Now moving it into the robust space, it’s like, we’re going to go and actively talk about what you want to do. What do you want to do?

Oh, I want to surf some big waves where there’s potentially some sharks or let’s just say it in another space. I want to change positions, but this position over here is going to give me less money in the beginning, but I’m going to have to work potentially a bit harder, but it has this much level of growth over here. I’m really worried and I’m really concerned it’s not going to be what it needed to be, or it is really what I need it to be and I’m just fearful to make the change because I don’t know. It’s just too much change in one go is too much.

From that space, it’s almost the same process. We just talk about when it was great to be you, we really get in there and we really anchor in the feeling of safety in the body, the felt sense of safety, the felt sense of love, the felt sense of regulation and then we work on a specific target. When we work on a robust nervous system, we’re working at a specific target usually. We’re working at like for you, like I said, if it’s somebody who wants to change careers, if it’s somebody who wants to confront a subject that they’re really passionate about, but they have a lot of fear around, then we work through that.

In the same space, we also start to talk about the fear as well. We bring this fear up. That’s when I do want to know about your fear in a robust space. Let’s talk about that fear. Let’s give it all the noise it needs. Let’s give it all the oxygen it needs to get it fully birthed into this world and then let’s see where the reality of that fear is and that nervous system response that you’re currently going through because 99.9% of the time, it’s based in a survival drive that we can easily put in place, put methods in place to actually resource that survival drive and bring it back to completion and then you can make a really clear thought about what direction you’re going in.

Ari: There’s a quote that I love. It’s one of my favorite quotes of all time. It’s from Abraham Maslow. He said, whatever one can be, one must be. Basically, it is an expression of the tenet that in order to be fully realized, fully mentally healthy, fully content human beings, we have to be striving towards fulfilling our highest potentials. We have to be working towards the highest expression of ourselves and doing the work that we’re here to do in the world, offering the greatest value that we are capable of potentially and that process can be scary.

It causes us to constantly brush up against the things we fear, brush up against obstacles, and doing that work on an ongoing basis requires robustness. It requires not just resiliency and the capacity to bounce back from difficulty, but it requires robustness to be able to handle the demands and the fears and anxieties and triggers that we will inevitably encounter in the process of doing that work. They go hand in hand. There is no living to one’s highest potential without obstacles, without fears and anxieties.

You can’t just do it all easily and effortlessly. If you are, if your life is just ease and effortlessness, then you’re probably not living up to your fullest potentials. You’re probably not actually striving to develop yourself into that. In that sense, I think this requires courage. This requires mental toughness, and this requires robustness of the nervous system to be able to pursue this. I think this is something, so just going back to the fact that we’ve talked about surfing, this is just one little expression of this principle in life.

Surfing is an avenue that for me and for you maybe, has an avenue that we can practice something that’s fun, but part of the reason that it’s fun is brushing up against, certainly for me, things that I fear and having the opportunity to conquer my fears, to push myself and to grow stronger as a result of continually and systematically engaging in that progressive effort. That’s just one little avenue. In life more broadly, I’m certainly trying to do the same thing. In the work that I do, I’ve been writing a book for the last year and putting lots of novel ideas out, and I’m going to put this book into the world.

Maybe the book’s going to be criticized by certain people, and I’m going to get people’s negative feedback and people who don’t like it for this or that reason. I’m trying to develop my own knowledge, develop myself as a teacher to produce work that’s of value to the world. In that process, there’s lots of obstacles, there’s lots of fears, there’s lots of anxieties that come up. For me, and I think that’s a principle that extends to all of us in our own lives to try to live to our fullest potentials.

I think this work that you’re doing has a much broader practical application, really to all of us to learn this skillset of how to, as we said earlier, toggle the switches of our own nervous system to become not only more resilient, but more anti-fragile, more robust, to be able to take on bigger and bigger challenges to move in the direction towards fulfilling our highest potentials.

Siamon: Agreed, absolutely, totally agreed. Even just going back to the surfing reference, even just having the capacity of building the capacity of your nervous system to sit in those dysregulation places, that still will actually follow you into your day-to-day life as well. It’s not that it happens there and then it stays there, that ability to regulate there. You pull that space into whatever, you use that ability, that resource then to pull it into whatever the next target that you’re looking at that’s going to be dysregulated for you. As you said, we build a capacity.

Ari: It’s a training ground. It’s like a gymnasium for the nervous system to be able to transform that time. It’s not just surfing, it’s training for the nervous system. It’s an opportunity to practice that skillset and cultivate more of it.

Siamon: Yes, absolutely. Doing anything that’s going to put you in a dysregulated place by choice and then growing the capacity for yourself to regulate yourself in that normally dysregulating place, regardless of what it is, will have flow-on effects to your everyday life. As you say, high-level operators, people who operate in such high stress and high demand areas who are able to do that efficiently.

Most of the time in the rest of their lives, they’re very successful in other areas as well because they carry that through. Pro-level sports people and high-level operators in the military, all those types of people are able to hold their ability to sit through stressful situations, extremely stressful situations, and then take that ability into the rest of their life as well and hold the same nervous system state, the same capacity.

Ari: I was just writing for a section in my upcoming book on mental toughness. This is a chapter where I cover mental toughness and courage. There’s a whole bunch of really interesting research showing, first of all, courage is strongly linked to academic success, business success, relationship success, mental health, so many different well-being overall in life and other measures, metrics of life success. This metric of courage is strongly linked to that, which is really interesting because almost nobody–

We all think of courage as this more of like a fixed personality trait or maybe this mysterious nebulous psychological construct, but most people don’t talk about it as a skill, as a capacity that we can consciously cultivate, which is really what we’ve talked about here a lot in this podcast so far. Personally, I think we should be talking much more about courage and we should be thinking much more about consciously cultivating it.

One of the other things that’s really interesting in this discussion of mental toughness and courage, mental toughness is analogous to what you’ve described as robustness of the nervous system, is one interesting data point I just stumbled across yesterday, actually, is over 80% of Fortune 500 CEOs are former athletes. Among women who are, I think it’s what they call, I forget the term, it’s like C-tier CEOs, which is like the highest level of CEOs that you can be. Forgive me if I might be getting the term right, but it’s something like that. I think it’s C-tier, if I remember correctly. Which it sounds like it should be A-tier, but whatever this term was, C-tier, it’s the highest tier-

Siamon: C-tier is– yes, I know.

Ari: -of female CEOs, it was like 94% had a background as being an athlete, and it was over 65% of them were even collegiate athletes. Just this shockingly high percentage of high-level CEOs who had a background doing physically and mentally demanding things. Participating in competitive sports where you have to rush up against high pressure, fear-inducing, anxiety-inducing situations, and you learn–

Siamon: And work with the body at the same time.

Ari: That’s right. I thought the percentages were, I figured there would be some correlation, but I didn’t [crosstalk] that it would be that strong.

Siamon: Yes, well, to make sense with what we just said. Every person is going to put themselves in a stressful environment by choice, because they love to do it in any sporting field. It’s going to build the robustness in their nervous system to actually take that into the professional field, off the field and into the professional environment as well, in any space. Without any shadow of a doubt, that’s completely clear, that once you actually have the capacity to actually go into a dysregulated space by choice, come back into regulation, and then keep brushing up against all of those spaces, all the time of fear. The biggest thing is having a non-knowing of the outcome.

I don’t know what’s going to happen here. I don’t know what the future looks like. That was always the biggest fear. If you could create a capacity for me, anyway. Once we create a capacity of that robustness where it doesn’t matter what it looks like, I’m always going to be safe. I’m always going to win. That’s what these operators say. It’s like, it doesn’t matter what this is going to look like. I’m going to win eventually. That’s the mindset that people will take into it.

Ari: Yes.

Siamon: You can see why with those CEOs then, that this is truly exactly all they think about is like, it doesn’t matter what it looks like. I can go to the depths of my own ability to hold a nervous system state, but I’m going to win.

Ari: Right. There’s another thing that you and I have talked about in person that I don’t think we’ve touched on at all in this podcast, which is the ability to regulate oneself without distraction. Without external resources, without doing something to regulate, and there’s different ways that someone might choose to regulate their nervous system. Some of which are much healthier than others and vice versa.

Some of which are extremely unhealthy, but you’re really big on the idea of having the capacity to regulate one’s nervous system essentially without doing anything, without any external resource, without any external distraction, without “doing something”. Can you tell people what you mean by that and why you think it’s so important?

Siamon: In the early days when I first understood what the felt sense of safety meant as a process and as an ability to regulate myself, it looked like basically I had to sit for days at a time because normally if I was using– normally I would go for a surf, that would regulate me. I would go to my favorite coffee shop, that would regulate me. Normally I would get on my bike and like I said, do that 100-mile run, ride or train for a triathlon, that would regulate me. A bit of phone time, that would regulate me.

I had all of these coping mechanisms which on the surface don’t actually look to be anything nefarious at all. It’s actually a general really positive coping mechanism. The key lies with what I just said. There’s still a coping mechanism. Let’s say that you go to a place where you can’t ride your bike, you can’t go for a surf, there’s no coffee, you name it, whatever you used in that moment and you have to sit in this completely alien place. Almost everybody who will go to that place will say, I don’t want to be here anymore, I want to leave. I can’t get my coffee.

Ari: I just want to briefly add to the mix. Most of what you just listed off are relatively healthy or somewhat benign ways of distracting and regulating oneself. I would say much more commonly, people are reaching for their phone compulsively and compulsively checking their social media and going on Facebook and going on Instagram and going on TikTok and just browsing or checking the news or going on the TV and watching TV shows compulsively or even checking their email compulsively. Most of us in the modern world are much more distracted by those kinds of things than we are necessarily doing the hundred mile bike rides and going to the gym or lifting weights and that sort of thing.

Siamon: Yes. I chose to reference that because, to me, what you’ve just come up with there is everybody pretty much will know is that we all disassociate in some way, shape or form to our screens, and through just distracting ourselves through little tasks, manual tasks. I was right framing it in a way that even if you would do all these things that would be termed as positive coping mechanisms, look, it’s still all a distraction, it’s still all a coping mechanism. Let’s just strip back completely and just go back as a caveman. We have nothing. We don’t even have fire.

How do we regulate that space? If we’ve got nothing external to us and nor do we have another person to co-regulate with, we’re just there on our own, in this little cave on our own. We’re scared cold. That’s by actually pulling out, by having the resiliency and most of the robustness is that whatever state you’re in and whatever mode you’re in or whatever area you’re in, you always have a resource to come back to and that resource is always going to be generated from within you, not something without you.

If we can generate that resource, when we generate that resource, not if, when we generate that resource of safety because everybody, I find it with everybody, when we generate that source of safety and then we lock it into the body, it’s like a muscle. We’ve got to go to the gym with that body and so like I’ll reference to the point when I first started doing it, I literally stayed in my house listening to some beautiful music for the first couple of days and holding that sense of safety in my body and sitting with that aspect of myself that had never felt safe.

For me to lock it in, I let go of everything around me and I said, okay, I’ve just got to sit here for like I would say three or four days, like I’m going to take a couple of days off work and do this and then it ended up being seven days and I didn’t get out of bed for four of them. I got out of bed to eat and I went back to bed and it was such a blissful space because I was able to control that thought that I should get up now and just go for this. No, we’re just going to sit here.

No, I love you enough to allow you just to sit here. I was having that dialogue with my body, creating a dialogue with my body again that’s been so pushed aside, that’s been not listened to at all. When you’re distracting yourself, you’re actually denying a part of yourself, you’re denying an aspect of yourself that wants to be heard. You’re denying an aspect of yourself that wants to be listened to, that wants to feel safe and you’re just giving it. It’s like you would say that when you see a young child who feels unsafe, when your own children would feel unsafe, do they want a toy?

Do they want the screen? Do they want a food item? No, they want their dad’s arms. They want to come in and co-regulate with their father who feels safe. If you frame it, that’s how I frame it in my own mind. It’s like, I’m the parent to those aspects. I’m the father and the mother for those aspects of my body that feel unsafe. Whenever they call to me to say that I am unsafe, I stop what I’m doing and I sit with myself.

Now, it only takes maybe two or three minutes. I’m going to sit there because they’re so trusting of me. That aspect of my body is so trusting of me that I’m always going to be there for it, that it no longer has control. It now allows me to live the life that I choose rather than it takes control through the fear base of going, no, we’re not doing this. This is too unsafe. Does that make sense?

Ari: Yes, beautifully explained. I’ve experienced this in my own life through working with you, and this was a revelation for me because I certainly do a lot of distraction, when I start to feel tense, when I start to feel anxious about stuff, working out, going for a walk, typically for me, it’s exercise or even just doing some bit of movement. That’s my way of dealing with it.

One of the challenges you issued to me is being able to bring myself back into a state of regulation without doing anything just through that resource. That was, at first, mentally a revelation for me, but then I practiced it and started to experience it, and actually realized, oh, it’s actually more effective to do it this way, to learn how to just do nothing, to bring myself back into regulation by “doing nothing” but really, you’re doing something but it’s all in–

Siamon: Oh no, you’re doing it.

Ari: You’re not outwardly having to do something. You can control it internally while still sitting in your chair and that’s when I realized wow, this is powerful and it’s been really powerful for me in my own life to be able to cultivate that skill which I’m very grateful for you for teaching me.

Siamon: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Ari: Siamon, I would love to chat with you for another hour or two and we often do in our personal calls as buddies, we chat for long periods of time and we talk–

Siamon: Mostly about the surf.

Ari: We share different research, talk about surf, talk about brain stuff.

Siamon: Yes definitely.

Ari: I think we should wrap it up and I would love for you to let people know where they can contact with you, how they can start services with you, or if they’re interested in exploring, trying things out with you, how they can do that.

Siamon: The easiest place would be just to go straight to my webpage. Then you can book a free 30-minute investigation call just to see if it’s something that you’re still interested in and getting to know me a little bit more. Then we can move on to, we have coaching packages, and I have mentoring packages as well. I’m also finalizing the dates for a retreat, a seminar.

We haven’t decided on three or five day yet, just to go deeply into immersing into the whole space completely as a collective, as a unit, where we can all co-regulate together and understand how to really lock in that felt sense of safety. That’s another option as well that will be coming up. First and foremost, I would say, get in touch through the webpage, which I’m sure you’ll put a link to it somewhere on this. I also have an Instagram as well. I’m not too active on Instagram, but the best place is actually the webpage.

Ari: Okay. Let’s tell people where that is because some people will be watching this on YouTube where they can go to the comments. The video description below will have a link to your website there, but let’s tell people verbally what it is. It’s your name and Siamon is spelled uniquely.

Siamon: Yes, you’re a bigger product of the ’70s and a hippie mother, obviously, so you had to spell it a little bit differently. It’s S-I-A for Adam, M-O-N, E-M for Mark, E-R-Y.com.

Ari: It’s like Simon Emery, but it’s Siamon.

Siamon: Yes, it’s phonetically pronounced Siamon.

Ari: S-I-A-M-O-N.

Siamon: Yes, it’s phonetically pronounced Siamon.com.

Ari: People can go there and then you’ve got a free 30-minute consult that they can explore if it’s a good fit to work with you and then from there they can–

Siamon: Sure. If they feel comfortable to work with me, yes, absolutely. Then from there, we can funnel them into different aspects of whatever they choose from whatever they feel would fit for them.

Ari: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’m glad we finally made this happen.

Siamon: Yes, me too, Ari, me too. It’s been awesome.

Ari: Yes, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you again for the work that you do, and for working with me personally. Obviously, we have a relationship as friends and surfing buddies and we chit chat and you’re also sort of my Australian travel agent advising me on where to go and what to do here.

Siamon: Yes, definitely.

Ari: Also, you’ve become a coach of mine and I’ve paid you for coaching services and it’s been enormously beneficial in my own life. I’m very grateful for having you stumble into my life and vice versa for me stumbling into your life some six or eight months now. It’s been just a beautiful relationship and friendship to get to know you better and to be coached by you. I’m very grateful for it.

Siamon: You’re most welcome, Ari. I look forward to furthering our friendship and maybe testing our nervous systems a bit more as we get a bit older. Sure.

Ari: Likewise. Hopefully in Australia sometime soon, you take me to your local spots and we’ll do some surfing here.

Siamon: Definitely. Thank you, brother.

Ari: Likewise, brother. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Siamon: Cheers, man.

Get your free 30 min consult here: https://siamonemery.com/