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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
It is very frequent that when we are having a big emotion, a big feeling, it is related to the current content that we're experiencing in our lives, but it is exacerbated by, enhanced by something from our past because it reminds our nervous system of something it has experienced before. And our nervous system goes into alert and says, hey, this is a threat. You need to respond accordingly. Welcome to Plenti. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level.
Kate Northrup:Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty. Let's go fill our cups.
Kate Northrup:Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrup or anyone who works within the Kate Northrup brand.
Kate Northrup:Welcome back to Plenti. We are on episode 3 of a 7 part series where I am walking you through the what you need to know and what you need to do to take your relationship with money to the next level. And today, we're talking about the next piece in our conversation around the nervous system and money and how to actually update your nervous system set point so that experiencing abundance becomes automatic. Now the thing about so much personal growth that I don't like is that personal development talks a lot about mindset, and how in order to change your reality and to transform you, you need to change your mindset. It is a vast misunderstanding of the way we're wired to say that you just can change your thoughts and then that will change your reality.
Kate Northrup:It's leaving out a massive piece of the puzzle and that massive piece of the puzzle is the nervous system. So the brief overview, we talked about it in episode 2 of this series, so go back to the episode from last week if you wanna really dig deep into the nervous system, ancestral trauma, collective trauma, why we get stuck in these nervous system set points, and we can't expand beyond that level of abundance and receivership. But today, I wanna just explain one thing. Here's what happens. We have experiences that happened to us or happened to our ancestors or happened to the collective, to people we identify with, who we're witnessing, and then our bodies gather information.
Kate Northrup:Our nervous system gather gathers information, and it stores away this information about what is a threat in the world because our nervous system is trying to keep us safe, and basically keep us surviving. And those experiences, those nervous system imprints, those body memories then create our emotions. Our emotions are a direct result of our nervous system, which is includes the vagus nerve, includes the central channel, includes our brain, includes all the nerve endings all around our entire body, and those nerve those nerves communicate through electricity. So nerve synapse synapses, nerves firing together, information traveling from our brain to our bodies, from our bodies to our brain, by the way, 80% of the information is going from our bodies to our brain. So 80% of the communication is body to brain, 20% of the communication is brain to body.
Kate Northrup:So do you see why only trying to change your thoughts and focusing on mindset as your starting point for transformation is leaving out 80% of what's available in terms of updating our entire system to help us to live our most expansive lives. It's a problem, which is why I'm out here banging the drum about the nervous system, because I really want folks to understand that if they're focused on mindset alone, they are missing out on at least 80% of their transformational capacity. So what we know is nervous system imprints create our emotional experience. So our nervous system leads to our emotions. Our emotions are an entire physiological cocktail of sensation that lives in our body, so our nervous system is very intimately linked with our emotions.
Kate Northrup:Now, our emotions, whether we're feeling sad, excited, happy, fearful, angry, you know, joyful, content, whatever we're feeling, anxious, so those emotions are sensations in the body, and then our brain comes in with thoughts to make sense of, and quite frankly, make stories of and make meaning of the sensation in our body. So, that's our thoughts. Our thoughts are the meaning we make of the emotional sensation that we're experiencing in our body because when you think about it, all anger is, is like if I feel angry, I usually feel a tightness in my chest, and then I label that as anger. But actually that tightness in my chest is just a sensation, and then my brain comes in and labels it as anger because it's a collection of sensation that I have experienced before around a particular trigger of an experience that triggers usually something from my past. It is very frequent that when we are having a big emotion, a big feeling, it is related to the current content that we're experiencing in our lives, but it is exacerbated by, enhanced by something from our past because it reminds our nervous system of something it has experienced before, and our nervous system goes into alert and says, hey, this is a threat.
Kate Northrup:You need to respond accordingly. And so, it sends out a physiological cocktail of sensation, which then we label as emotion, which then we create meaning out of, and that's where our thoughts come from. Now, thoughts repeated over and over again, then create beliefs. Our beliefs are also intertwined with our nervous system. Our nervous system is essentially the foundational substrate of what we believe is possible for us.
Kate Northrup:Our ability to create lives we dream of is dependent upon what our nervous system feels is safe and available, and that is going to be dependent on our past experience or our ability to update our nervous system. So then we have so nervous system set points then lead to emotional experiences then lead to thoughts and beliefs, which lead to, of course, our behavior. We make decisions and we act based on all of those three things that I mentioned before, nervous system, emotions, thoughts, beliefs. Right? What's going on in our mind?
Kate Northrup:And then, we behave. Then we then we, go into the sales pitch at our live event, and we either knock it out of the park or we do a terrible job. That all has to do with everything before nervous system, emotion, thoughts, and beliefs. And then of course, our behavior creates our results. Now, some degree of our frequency and our whole energetic beingness also impacts our results because we are impacting our external world on the quantum level.
Kate Northrup:Meaning, there's 3 d reality and there's the, like, I do this and then this happens, but there's also an energetic reality where if I am operating in a particular expansive frequency and a and a belief and a trust that I am safe and provided for, that sets off a whole sequence of events in the external world that are not exclusively dependent on my 3 d input behavior in the physical world. So that's a whole other thing. But what's really important to know about the nervous system is we update our nervous system set point through signaling to our bodies that we are safe. So there's a few layers here, and this is something that we practice and we have community around, and we have group behavior and understanding around, which helps it to become automatic through mirror neurons and coregulation. This is something we practice in my program, relaxed money, and you'll wanna make sure you're keeping an eye out for when enrollment begins for that, which is coming up.
Kate Northrup:I'll talk about it more at the end of this episode. So how do we then update our nervous system set points? So here's what's important to know. Our nervous system has what is called a few it's a few interchangeable terms. One of them is called a range of regulation.
Kate Northrup:It's also called our range of tolerance. It's also called our range of capacity, and it is also called our range of resonance. All 4 of those terms mean the same thing, and it is our ability to respond to what life is bringing to us with consciousness and agency. Meaning, we are engaged consciously in a response as opposed to in an unconscious reaction. So our range of capacity is our ability to experience life and stay regulated.
Kate Northrup:What does regulated mean? It means that our bodies feel safe. And so our job, if we wanna update our nervous system, is to learn how to signal to our body that we are safe, when we are experiencing something in the world or we're experiencing a trigger of something in the past that has sent us out of our range of regulation or our range of capacity. What are the signs that you're outside your range of capacity? Well, signs of being dysregulated could be a number of things, but here are the common ones.
Kate Northrup:You feel anxious, you feel overwhelmed, you feel like you're not in your body, you have trouble staying focused, you have trouble being present, you feel like you're taking a ton of action, but it's disjointed, it's disorganized, and it's not leading to results, or you have trouble taking action in the first place. You're more in a hypo response. So when we get out of our range of regulation or our range of capacity, we go into either a hyper response, hyper response, hyper like, or we go into a hypo response. So, hyper is I am reacting to what life is bringing to me through fight or flight. So, through basically, I am getting into action because my nervous system is telling me that I am not safe, and so I am getting busy to do something about that.
Kate Northrup:If we were animals living in the savannah in Africa, and, I was an antelope, and I was being chased by a lion, what would happen is my nervous system would go into a sympathetic nervous system response which would be in the hyper, in this case, the hyper end of the spectrum, and it would send me into an antelope can't fight a line, so it would send me into flight. Evolutionarily speaking, that makes sense. The antelope can run. That's its tool. So I would then run away from the lion.
Kate Northrup:And then if I outrun the lion, and the lion did not catch me, who knows what might have happened to the lion along the way, but let's say I outrun the lion, what will happen in the antelope's body is it shakes. Why does it do that? It involuntarily shakes because that is the way of the nervous system to update the antelope that it is now safe. The shaking is the metabolism of all the stress hormones, the adrenaline in the body, and it allows all of those stress hormones to be metabolized and cleared out so that the antelope's body knows it is now safe, there's not an immediate threat, and it can go back to munching grass or sleeping or procreating or doing whatever, the rest and digest response, which is the parasympathetic. We have a sympathetic dominant society.
Kate Northrup:Sympathetic dominance means we are more frequently in fight or flight or freeze or fawn. Now, on the other end, hypo, there is freeze or fawn. Now, let's pretend you're another kind of animal in the savannah, and there's a lion, and your best tool is to play dead because maybe a lion won't attack you if it thinks that you are a dead rotten animal. Right? It thinks you're not alive.
Kate Northrup:Maybe then that meat is unsafe to eat. So, for some bodies, they will go into a freeze response, which is on the hypo end of the of being out of your range of capacity. So you'll notice this in your life, you may be more of a hypo dominant person because you get really overwhelmed when life brings stresses to your door. You have trouble taking action. You have trouble prioritizing.
Kate Northrup:You get into bed and pull up the covers and can't can't stop watching Netflix. You just, like, can't take action. So on the hyper end, we have our anxious people. On the hypo end, we have our depressed people. This is not a judgment.
Kate Northrup:This is just to understand what is going on in your body. What we need to know is that when we find ourselves numbing, when we find ourselves in people pleasing behavior, that's a fun response, by the way, when we find ourselves, basically feeling unsafe and feeling out of control in our physiology or in our behavior, we are dys regulated. And so many things that the personal development world tells you, you can overcome with mindset, you cannot. We cannot talk our bodies out of the way they feel. We can only feel our bodies into healing.
Kate Northrup:We cannot talk our bodies out of the way that they feel. We can only feel our way into healing. A feeling can only be healed by feeling. A feeling cannot be healed by thinking. Our behavior is caused by a feeling.
Kate Northrup:We are completely illogical beings. Our nervous systems are not based on logic, they are based on energy. Our nervous systems communicate through electric impulses. What does that mean? Our entire bodies are running through energy, through essentially light, being communicated from synapse to neuron, to neuron, to synapse, and our entire whole selves are animated through that.
Kate Northrup:Our heart is beating based on an electric pulse. When someone flatlines, do you know how they get the heart pumping again? They shock it with what? Electricity. What is that?
Kate Northrup:Energy. So our entire lives are based on the unseen world, and the unseen world of energy, of the way things feel, is our nervous system. So we need to understand going into hyper response. We need to understand hyporesponse. We need to understand when we are dysregulated, when we are out of our range of tolerance, our range of capacity, our range of regulation, our range of resonance.
Kate Northrup:And the whole name of the game is to learn to signal safety when we are dysregulated so that our body can be updated and say, oh, actually, I am safe. I don't need to go into an unconscious triggered response, and now I can update my capacity to experience this part of life while still remaining conscious, present, and aligned. That's essentially what we are doing here. Now there are different kinds of experiences that will send us out of regulation that'll dysregulate us. Some of those are really stressful experiences that are negative, and some of those are stressful experiences that are positive.
Kate Northrup:Here's where this is really important when it comes to your money, because everything we've talked about so far really applies to any part of your area of your life that you're wanting to heal, whether it's your health, your romantic relationships, your ability to experience pleasure, your ability to experience power, confidence, regulated parenting, all it all applies. It all is the same thing. When it comes to money, we have to understand this. Our nervous system determines that anything that is unfamiliar is unsafe. The vast majority of our financial goals are something that we have not experienced before.
Kate Northrup:So according to our nervous system, every goal and desire that we have, let's say you wanna have, you know, 5 figure months or even 6 figure months or you wanna drive a certain kind of car, or you wanna build up a certain amount of savings so that you can invest and work towards your freedom number. We want to have a whole suite of Airbnbs, whatever you want to have, right? Those are very likely things that you have not experienced before. And in many cases, your financial desires and goals are also things that people in your lineage and people in your collective environment have also not experienced before. So so as you move towards achieving your financial goals, your nervous system is going to freak out by design, because it is trying to keep you in the range of what it determines is safe, and what your nervous system determines is safe is that which is familiar, that which is familiar based on your ancestral DNA lineage, based on your collective programming, and based on your own lived experience.
Kate Northrup:So how are we supposed to expand? How are we supposed to be able to experience what we desire to experience when most of our money goals, most of our desires are beyond what our nervous system thinks is safe, and our nervous system is gonna do everything it can to keep us dysregulated, to prevent us from going beyond what it has experienced before. That is a real conundrum, right? I mean, then we're gonna be stuck forever in the limited range of what our nervous system sees as familiar, and therefore safe. Well, the good news is there are a 1000000 different ways to work with our bodies to signal safety, both when we're having stressful things happen to us that are negative, and when we're having stressful things happen to us that are positive.
Kate Northrup:So the whole idea is learn to signal safety so that you can expand your range of capacity, And your range of capacity, your range of regulation is a tuning fork. Our ability to feel safe and whole in any moment or to return to that place of safety and wholeness is our ability to magnetize our dreams to us. Everything we desire is available right now, and it has our name on it, but the unlock, the way we activate our receptor site to actually call it in, to actually remove the block between what we want and our current lived experience is to feel safe. So for the purposes of today, I'm gonna teach you a quick and easy tool that you can turn to to signal safety in your body when you notice you are outside your range of regulation and you are dysregulated. So perhaps you are about to do your 1st discovery call to hopefully book your 1st coaching client, and you're freaking out.
Kate Northrup:Right? And maybe you have butterflies in your stomach and you're experiencing an entire cocktail of physiological chemicals that are signaling to your body that you are unsafe. Well, you're actually moving in the direction of your dreams, and so you know you're not actually unsafe. You're not being chased by a tiger. There's no immediate threat, but your physiology, your body is is experiencing, it is experiencing an imprint like there is a threat.
Kate Northrup:And so your job, so that discovery calls begin to feel just normal and part of your daily expansive life and rocking those discovery calls and having a really high conversion rate becomes your normal default behavior. The key is, 1st, signaling safety. So I'll teach you havening. So havening is a practice if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see me. But if you're listening on the on the, podcast listening app, you can just I'll just describe it.
Kate Northrup:All you do is you take your 2 hands and rub them slowly over each other, and as you do that, put your attention on the experience of what it feels like both to be one hand touching the other, so what it feels like to touch your skin and be the one hand touching the other hand. You can also run your hand up your arm and include your forearms in this or include your upper arms or even your shoulders, and you're just slowly running your hands over your own body. Now, as you are noticing what it feels like for the one hand to touch the skin on the other hand around the arm, Also, put your see what you see, this is a little mind bender, but it's really good for your brain and amazing for your nervous system. Notice too what it feels like to be the hand or the arm that's being touched. So the idea here is to put your attention on the sensory experience of being the toucher and the touchy at the same time, and just notice what that feels like.
Kate Northrup:Notice what happens in your physiology. Notice what happens to your breath as you put your attention on the feeling of slowly rubbing your hands over each other. I personally notice that the present moment comes more into focus. I notice a deepening in my breath. I notice that I'm just more aware of what it feels like to be in my body in this present moment.
Kate Northrup:Now there's many, many different ways to activate your senses and put your attention on your 5 senses to essentially signal to your body that you are safe. What is the mechanism going on here for my fellow science nerds? The mechanism is this, if you were being chased by a tiger, you would not have the capacity to stop and slowly run your hands over each other and be present in your body to feel your skin, You would be running. And so doing a practice like havening actually signals to your body, there's no threat here. Hi, hello, all is well, all is calm.
Kate Northrup:We have capacity and time and space right now to sit here and rub our hands slowly over each other. And that tells your body that you're safe. Every time you experience a stressful scenario, whether it's positive stress or negative stress, and you signal to your body that you are safe, you have automatically updated your nervous system to expand its range of resonance, to expand its range of capacity. So now, discovery calls or sales calls over time, as you regulate your nervous system, while you're engaging in a new behavior, over time, that new behavior becomes normalized in your system, and it now enters your range of capacity. And now you can get really, really good at it because your mind and your body aren't completely freaking out.
Kate Northrup:You are actually whole and present and able to put your full attention on the other person you are talking to, which is one of the greatest secrets to sales. So that was your practice for today. We had an amazing lesson on the nervous system. We went deeper into how to signal safety in your body, why that matters, and for the next episode, we are going to get into even more practical ways that you can work with your body and also with the material world to make the most of the money you already have, and to feel even more powerful in your earning potential and in your wealth stewarding potential. So I can't wait to see you for that episode.
Kate Northrup:If you enjoyed this, if you found it helpful, go ahead and share it on social, tag me at Kate Northrop, leave a rating, leave a review, text a friend, make sure you've subscribed so that you get access to all 7 episodes in this incredibly special series, and I will see you for the next episode. Woohoo. You made it to the end of an episode of plenty.
Kate Northrup:Don't you feel expanded already?
Kate Northrup:So if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review. Subscribe to the podcast, text a friend and let them know they need to listen in.
Kate Northrup:That helps us spread the word so more people can experience plenty together. And if you want to ease your path to creating wealth, I created a money break through guide for you where I interviewed over 20 of my high earning women friends, and I asked them what their biggest money breakthrough guide was, and the responses were so mind blowing and helpful, I knew I needed to pass them along to you.
Kate Northrup:This is
Kate Northrup:the kind of thing that is often only shared behind closed doors, but now you can access it totally for free. So head over to kate northrup.comforward/breakthroughs and get the guide. Again, that's kate northrup.com forward slash breakthroughs. And I'll see you next time for plenty.