Strengthen Your Recovery Capital Through Nervous System Regulation (Mini-Series Episode 4)

In Episode Four of the Recovery Return on Investment series, Jeanne Foot explores one of the most overlooked, yet essential foundations of sustainable recovery and personal growth: nervous system regulation.

In a world that keeps us overstimulated, rushed, and disconnected from ourselves, many of us are operating in a chronic state of dysregulation without even realizing it. Jeanne breaks down why dysregulation quietly undermines clarity, decision-making, emotional resilience, and long-term wellbeing,  and how learning to regulate your nervous system strengthens recovery capital in every area of life.

This episode invites you to slow down, get curious, and reconnect with the innate wisdom of your body. Jeanne explains why willpower and “thinking your way out” of challenges doesn’t work when the nervous system is hijacked, and how emotional wellness, somatic awareness, and daily practices create a powerful reserve you can draw from when life gets hard.

In this episode, you’ll explore:

• What nervous system regulation actually is and why most of us are dysregulated
• How chronic stress and emotional overload impact judgment, health, and recovery
• The connection between trauma, the body, and subconscious survival responses
• Why intuition becomes inaccessible when we’re in fight, flight, or freeze
• The concept of your “window of tolerance” and how to return to center
• How unresolved stress becomes dis-ease in the body over time
• Why self-care is not indulgent; it’s mandatory
• The power of daily practices in building recovery and health capital
• Simple tools for grounding, self-regulation, and emotional awareness
• How listening to your body strengthens resilience, clarity, and inner wisdom
  
  

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jeanne Foot

What is Naturally High?

On Naturally High you’ll receive transformational tools and hear inspirational stories that will guide you into holistically healing trauma in every corner of your life. You deserve to invoke your inner healer. I'm so glad you're here!

Jeanne: [00:00:06] Hello everybody, and welcome to Episode Four out of our Recovery Return on Investment series and How to Raise Your Recovery Capital Through the Assets of Sobriety. So today we're going to focus on how do we build recovery capital and how do we optimize our self through nervous system regulation and emotional wellness? So what are we really talking about? We're talking about how to become more whole, how to become more integrated so that we optimize in how we operate in every facet of our life, whether it's through relationships, whether it's through our own understanding of who we are and what is good for us and what isn't. We can go anywhere with this. So we're going to try and keep it simple. So strengthen your recovery capital through nervous system regulation. So you may even start to wonder, like why are we even discussing this? Why is this important? Well, it's important really, because when you're dysregulated, there's absolutely no way you can think clearly or even have any discernment or good judgment, so that if you start to make decisions from this place, you probably will make poor decisions. And this is what happens to us when we don't understand how we work. We make a lot of decisions and we do things that are on automatic pilot. And I spoke about that in, I think, the last episode where we're just kind of in our car hydroplaning through the road and not even on it.
Jeanne: [00:01:26] We're over it. We're just speeding so fast. Like everything is automatic. We're doing always more than one thing at a time. So we're really not intentional, focused with whatever it is that is going on if our attention is split in two. It's that simple. It's split in two. So we want to empower you, want to give you some tools and resources so you can understand how to emotionally regulate in the most optimal way when something isn't going well for you. And that's okay. So we're welcoming all parts of ourselves here because there's no judgment, there's no good or bad and whatever you're welcoming forward or you're trying to understand or embrace is just really feedback. So there's no judgment, so there's no failure if that's what it's about. It's really about welcoming all the parts of you because they all have purpose, and when we welcome them, we actually ultimately integrate them into our wholeness, into the fiber of who we really are, and we become well. And the world looks different for us and our results look different, our relationships are different, and everything is really, it’s easy. That's what it can be. Change and growth and personal development can be easy. Some of it is painful, there's no question. And it's painful when we really don't understand it. And we're starting to pathologize it because that's what we think we are. We're not good people, you know, we've done all these things and, you know, that's just humanity, that's just human nature.
Jeanne: [00:02:50] And the more you recognize that you're really no different than someone else other than your actual individual nuances that make you you, but as a species, we are creatures of habit. We're going to operate and look very similar. Just the plot's different, the characters are different, the storyline may be different. But the actual process of what we go through and how we struggle with our own recklessness and our own imperfection, I would say about, you know, our temptations and desires. And we get to welcome all of it here. So this is why I love this stuff. It's really, really exciting. And especially when you put it to test to see how it works for you, this is where it really starts to make you feel like, wow. Yeah. So this is why I say always be your own science experiment because you can't lose here. So if you're a nonbeliever of everything I'm saying okay, that's great. So put it to test, see what happens for you. And if you follow some of these recommendations and resources and tools that we're giving you to resource you with, I think you'll find that your life would just be infinitely better in a very short period of time. And if for some reason it doesn't, that's okay too, because you haven't lost anything. You've only gained something. I'm hoping that you'll gain something out of it and you haven't really lost anything.
Jeanne: [00:04:08] Maybe just in time, but we all waste time, so that's not such a big one, is it? Even though it is. So I want to talk about why dysregulation is an issue. Because when we're dysregulated, which I believe in this modern 21st century, I think most of us really are dysregulated. Like there is so much information coming at us. And the more efficient we become with technology, the more the world has sped up. And it really has come to a point where it's just coming at us everywhere. And it's not just for us, it's for our partners, our children, our families, and the people we interact with so that we're all competing for this crazy small bit of time. And I say that because you don't really understand yourself if you're buzzing around all over the place trying to just keep up. So what that does to us. It has a physiological assault on our body, just like if we're under stressors mentally or emotionally that will have a physiological stress in our body. And they've proven that with research that people, children with ACE, adverse childhood experiences, anyone who has experienced. I'm not sure of the number. So is it... Adverse Childhood Experiences is a study done by Kaiser Permanente. And they did the study of certain things that happened to children as a standard questionnaire before the age of 18.
Jeanne: [00:05:27] Like if they have a parent who was imprisoned or substance abuse issues, or were they ever shamed or bullied or whatever these questions are, and there's probably not a personal life who doesn't have one. And ultimately emotional issues. But what they found out is if you had, I think 3 or 5, I think it's five. If you had five or more adverse experiences as a young child, it can cut your lifespan by 10%. You're more likely to have cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other major illnesses onset. So this is a big freaking deal. And not everybody's paying attention. We've learned to work from our neck up for most of our life. That's how we're taught. We're taught to think. We're not taught to feel. And feeling is a very big part of this. So because there's so much intel in our feelings, in fact, our heart has its own neurons and neurons means it has its own brain, brain circuitry. That means they have 40,000 neurons in your heart. Do you know how much information that is? So when people say I'm lovesick or I'm heartbroken, you know what that physiology of that person will look like. It would be someone who's mostly immobile, frozen, shut down, slumped over. It's very real. And then if you take the opposite of someone very much in love or who's just won a major goal, let's say athletic goal or whatever it may be, their stance, how they're looking, how they speak, everything about them reflects that too.
Jeanne: [00:06:58] So physiology is important. And when we are dysregulated from outside stressors, the physiology is going to go haywire. So for somebody like myself, I worked from neck up, as I said. So my brain was thinking I could think my way out of things. But eventually thinking your way out isn't going to work for especially trauma in particular, because we've talked about this before, but the body holds cellular memory. What that means is the body is holding the somatic response of what that felt like to be scared, or to be frightened or be terrified or whatever that may be. It doesn't remember the necessary, the actual event or circumstance that supported that somatic response, but it remembers feeling like, you know, I can't do this, or they're terrified and they're frozen or whatever that may be for the individual. So when we remember somatic responses, what happens is we don't get hijacked logically, but we get hijacked emotionally to that time, and which is why we feel immobilized. So obviously, when you're dysregulated completely and your heart's pounding and your mind’s spinning and various things are happening to you, you're not going to be able to think clearly. So therefore, try and find your phone when you're in a rush, try and look for your keys. Try and solve a problem with two or more things going on at the same time.
Jeanne: [00:08:23] It just doesn't work because our brain shuts off into its primal, prehistoric programming. When we were cavemen and we used to have to survive by running from someone, our predators if we were being attacked. And that means that would be a flood of cortisol, a flood of adrenaline all going into us. And then we would be able to run and mobilize and move. Well, if that is, there's no need to physically get up and run, so a lot of this stuff that's going on for us is really emotional. And what I mean by that is that we feel like we're rigid and stuck or we can't stop, on the flip side of that, for whatever reason. And so for us to switch into a more neutral gear, it's kind of impossible. And so that's why if we could just neutralize and come back to the centers of swinging this way or swinging that way from one end to one end, for those of you who can't see me, basically the far extremes of the tip, we want to be in the center, because that's where our window of tolerance is. That's where our zone of genius is, because when we're feeling kind of regulated, not kind of, when we are feeling regulated, we're not feeling frightened and that we're being hunted down, then we can actually think clearly, and then wisdom can come to us. And it comes.
Jeanne: [00:09:47] And I spoke about this in the other series because it really is true. It literally drops out of thin air if you're conscious and open to receiving it. You'll get these incredible insights. I call them popcorn kernels of insights that just come to you. You go, oh my God, I never thought of that. Like an answer will come to you, a name will come to you, whatever it may be. That's how it works. So that's a beautiful part of it. What I'm saying about this adrenaline, if it's not being used in the modern day and age. So we're scared. We're terrified. Our body's pumping all these chemicals. We can't think straight. We're totally… Our heart's pounding, we're nervous, we're dysregulated, and we don't run and burn it off. It comes out in dis-ease. So which is a precursor to disease. So how does it come out? It comes out in hypertension. It may come out in weight gain. It may come out in not sleeping at night, like there's various physical conditions that will come with that. But you know, the medical system does us a disservice because we're not asking these questions when we go to a doctor, or doctors aren't asking these questions like, how is your drinking? Or what other stresses are going on in your life? But maybe somebody just lost their job. That's a huge one. There's a huge amount of depression and shame that would come with that.
Jeanne: [00:11:01] Even though it's not, may not be anybody's fault, it may be just circumstantial. It is what it is. And yet we don't talk about these things. They're taboo. So if we're not talking about them, then we're not looking at the person as a whole, which means parts will work well and parts don't. And we just stay stuck in the same pattern and we're spinning. Best analogy I can think of, for those of you who are, you know, grew up in the 70s, Fred Flintstone, the Flintstones, we’re running on the spot trying to get away and like, going nowhere. That's exactly what happens to all of us. So one of the things you can do is, the reason this is so important, because you want to tap into the innate wisdom within us. We have innate wisdom and intuitive knowing that we know what is good for us. But we've learned to discount this voice because we've been conditioned to do so. So I'm going to pose a question to everyone out there, and I want you to answer, when was the last time you didn't listen to your intuition, but you wish you had of? So when is a time where you needed to make a decision and you had a gut feeling about something and you thought you should go for it, but you didn't. Would you have been right, had you? And I can almost bet the answer is yes for all of you.
Jeanne: [00:12:15] I don't know if there's anybody who says no, and if so, I'm welcome to chat. But if you're saying yes, we're discounting some valuable information and intel that's coming from our essence of who we really are, our true self, like, not the person with the name, not the person with the job, not the person with the history. The truest part of you, your heart centered self is the one who's answering these questions. And what's happening is actually you maybe silencing that voice. And so I really encourage you to listen to that voice. And I have a little sneaky trick. If the voice feels really loud and like right in your ear. It's probably ego if it feels like a kind of knowing, and it keeps coming at you and keeps coming at you, it probably has more to do with your intuition. So there's a little tip for you. And this journey is not for the faint-hearted. Like it's so much easier to be ignorant and checked out. It's so much easier to really not care. And you know, some of us are awakened for whatever reason, and some of us awaken at different times, and maybe some of us never awaken. And I think that's more rare. But I do think, well, I'm giving more, more clout than maybe needed here or warranted, I should say. The reason being is because not everybody wakes up.
Jeanne: [00:13:41] And if you're sitting and you're listening here to me today, you're one of those enlightened people because you would never be listening to me unless you were an enlightened person. So it wouldn't matter to you. It wouldn't matter what I say. So therefore, you would be doing something else with your time. So I am grateful for you. It feels a privilege to fellow journey with you, and it is my utmost honour to ease someone's pathway through my knowledge, through my lived experience, my professional training, and whatever I bring to the table as an elder at the stage of my game. But it is a privilege to fellow journey with you. So my greatest wish for you guys is to be equipped with tools and resources that make it easier for you when you get stuck and to be able to, you know, become resilient through these like glips and tests of life because we get these mini tests, oh my goodness, every single moment of our life practically. And the journey requires a brutal self-inquiry. Like I always say, brutal honesty is, I don't think, even to this day I wonder how honest I'm really being about things, like, could I be more honest to myself? And when I say that, I think about making excuses for myself. Am I really doing my best or is there something I can do better? So I'm always a student of life, so I believe there's always something I can do better.
Jeanne: [00:15:03] But if I want to be in the process of making excuses for myself, then I'm really fighting for my own limitations. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying, no, I really can't do that. So I'm just going to keep it at that. So this is why it does require this self-inquiry, self-forgiveness. It requires self-compassion. That's the biggest thing that changed my life, is to quieten the inner critic, have some compassion and understanding for why she would show up, but at the same time recognize that she's not needed anymore, and to let that part of me go. And knowing that as humans we are imperfect. That's like, if we could really talk about that one out loud, that would be incredible. I never knew that until Brené Brown actually talked about how everybody questions their worthiness. Really think about that. We all wear these veneers and faces and we say we're good. It's just like an automatic program response to say we're good rather than what are we feeling? So build an emotional toolbox for increased self-awareness is really an opportunity to learn and grow and understand yourself and self-regulate, and really give yourself some resources that help you manage everyday stressors and grounding you through incredibly challenging times. Because that is life. Life has some peaks and valleys, and when we're in the valley, we need extra resources, extra support, even allowances with ourselves of what we think we can do in a certain period of time through challenging times, you know? So I'm not even going to go into that because I think you guys understand that.
Jeanne: [00:16:45] So putting yourself first is mandatory for self-care. We tend to take care of our external body, our body, like we brush our teeth every day. We shower most days. Like every day I do. I shower twice a day. But that's not the point. We shower most days on a regular basis. We do these things on a regular basis, whether we like them or not, and that's the whole thing. And self-care is really no different if you don't take a stand for you, I will for now, but you guys have to take a stand for yourself. So for what I mean by that, you have to recognize that self-care, not getting my hair done. It's really being able to go to a yoga class, being able to give myself time to meditate, to go to bed early, to stretch my body, acupuncture, whatever it is that I need. But incorporating that into a regular part of my routine as much as I would anything else like my work. And I think too many people think that certain self-care is okay and necessary. The other parts I'm talking about is more self-indulgent. At least that's what I thought for when I was, like, struggling with that. Can I give myself time? Like I felt like in order to be valued, I had to work myself to death.
Jeanne: [00:17:52] Well, because when I did, it was very productive if you're bringing in revenue or you're successful in school or whatever it is. So we were rewarded for those things. We got attention. And so suddenly recognizing that you're just inherently worthy because you were born. And that's a story within itself. Because to get here is quite the miracle as it is. And we're not going to talk about that now. But you are a miracle. Each and every one of us who's here listening to and being alive and just taking up space on this planet. So yes, it is important that we recognize that we have to put some reserve and strengthen our recovery and strengthen our health, because if we don't have health equity and capital, and if we don't have recovery capital by reserves for these challenging times, we will fall because we're human. So what does that look like? So for me, it started with creating a daily practice. So a daily practice is yours. And it doesn't look a certain way. And there's many different tools you can get. And you can start with spending some time. Every morning you dedicate 15, 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, whatever it is. And I'm just saying that because the more you get into it, the more you're going to want to spend more time in daily practice.
Jeanne: [00:19:16] But typically 15 to 30 minutes is a really reasonable daily practice. It could be reading, it could be a writing prompt, it could be journaling. It could be self-reflection. It could be body scanning, it could be breathing, it could be yoga. It could be a daily reflection out of a book that's dated for just for today. It can be anything. The point is, what you want to do is dedicate a time and a space for you to be with you. That's what this is. The goal is not what you did when you get there, the goal is just to get there. That's the goal. No other goal. Get your butt to the mat or get your butt into your like little sacred space, and then you're going to do your thing. Now, the reason this is so important is if we just wake up and grab our phone and grab our coffee and out the door we go, we end up melding into other people's frequencies and energies, and we don't know what we want. We don't know what's important anymore. We've lost our self before we start, so we really need to check in with ourselves and anchor ourselves into our own day so that we really can be intentional with our day so we can get to where we want to go. Right? Like, that's a really big part of this is why we would do what we do.
Jeanne: [00:20:36] It's the truest meaning of self-care, and it's not a superficial one. And it should never be, you know, something that you feel that you can't afford to do because you can't afford to go to yoga, all the more reason for us to go to yoga. And I don't mean afford from a cost perspective, I mean from time. We have to make time for ourselves if we want to understand ourselves and if we want to know ourselves, and we want to be the truest, highest version and most ethical and integrated and holistic part of ourselves, we have to be able to be with ourselves, answer our own invitation. So the practice will change over time, and it can change from day to day. It can be different things. For me, it's different all the time. Sometimes I'm anchored more in Kundalini, which I'm not right now. It’s not a season for Kundalini for me. It's really a season for peak performance and mind development because I really have done so much other healing work, and I see this is an area where I'm not good at. I'm really not good in my thinking still, my thinking is still a problem in my own life, and so I want to be able to really hone that a bit better and understand myself so that I can correct the behaviours for optimal well-being, really. And who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want all the goodness? You see, one of the things that happens is when we give ourselves this time, especially if we're upset over something, we come back to neutral or if we just burned ourselves out, which I feel very similar, that I'm close to the edge and I don't need to be over the edge to recognize it's going to be harder to come back to me from a health perspective and give ourselves well deserved time.
Jeanne: [00:22:22] If you don't do these things, we'll be forced to do these things, number one, that's what I believe. But when we do do these things, we get the opportunity to be neutral and we go, oh my God, like all the answers are right there for us, and they're in plain daylight for the taking. And so this is why we do this. Now I'm going to give you a sample of tools. Some of the things you can do in a daily practice. And they’re no way exhaustive. These are just some very basic tools that people can do. And you may want to start with asking yourself, what do I need today? So for me, I pretty well know that maybe like Kundalini is not cutting it right now. So it's more about study, reflection, what am I feeling, and really going into body somatics and body scan. So body scan is another thing you can do. You top yourself head to toe and you just go, where is it? You know, just observe what is true for you.
Jeanne: [00:23:17] Is there heat? Is there tension? Is there pain? Whatever that may be for you. So that's what body scanning is. Breathwork techniques are super powerful, can change state. They can calm us immediately by doing different breathing techniques like this. Breath of fire. There's adenostra I believe is called alternate nostril breathing. I'm thinking that this is way too long to tell you what to do in terms of tools because there's so much there's EFT tapping, there's body scanning, alternate nostril breathing. It's just so much. So like we don't need to do that now. So what I think would be really helpful is maybe I'll put a toolkit together that you guys can pick up on some basic tools, or you can message me for what you feel like your issue is. And then I will then somewhat like give you a protocol that I think that would be helpful for that. So once we incorporate these tools into our life as part of our routine, you start to understand that you've got a comprehensive toolbox. So maybe a playlist to calm down. I did that the other day. I was feeling crazy, like I just had too many thoughts coming at me, and I did vinyl beats and it really worked. That's what I needed. It brought me back to neutral. So much better. And you know how I knew that? My breath just started expanding and it was really, really amazing.
Jeanne: [00:24:46] So these tools give you the ability to self-regulate, think clearly, respond to stress in healthier and more productive ways so there's less conflict in your life, there's less depression in your life, and you're just typically more resilient. And then you start visualizing like, where am I going to go now? Because now that I can have anything, now that I understand myself, what do I really want to do with my life? Now, I just want to preface this is not a once and done. We don't do this once and we're over. This is why we're in practice. We practice. We come back to ourselves daily. We come back to our own self-inquiry. We're a different version of ourselves each day, and by that we then become a different person. And then we have different results, and we have different desires and goals and values. And that's okay. If they change, we tend to think it's not okay if they change. Like if we signed up for something that we have to do that for the rest of our life. No, it's okay to change your mind and it's okay to have a healthy discussion around that. That's another good one. Communication. Communication series about what does a healthy discussion look like? But we get to do all these things. And when we come from a place of our own truth, and this is what it feels like for me and this is what I need for me, our results are just exponential in every area of our life.
Jeanne: [00:26:00] It's just phenomenal. So as I said to you earlier, I invite you to be your own science experiment and see for yourself. Test your own hypothesis. What is it that you really want? What are you subscribing to without really thinking about it? And what do you need to say no to? And what do you need to say yes to? And I'd love to hear your comments. So, as usual, I'm here for you. I'd love to hear what's resonating, what's not, what you want more of. And I am going to leave you now until next time and stay Naturally High. And we'll be back with episode five in our five part series. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Naturally High. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or reach out to me through the links in the show notes. Together, we're changing the way the world approaches mental health, addiction, and trauma. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a rating for Naturally High on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. For more inspiration and resources, follow me on Instagram @theRecovery_concierge, or visit the Recovery Concierge.com. Stay empowered, keep rising, and I'll see you in the next episode.