Small Internal Pivots That Can Calm Your Nervous System Today

Speaker 1 · 0:00Thank you for listening to our Mindfulness Exercises podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I'm really happy to speak with Dr. Elisha Goldstein. His name is on some of the more popular mindfulness books out there that I'll share with you soon, but he has impacted millions of lives around the world with mindfulness and emotional intelligence. So it's an honor to have you on the show today. Elisha is a clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher, speaker, author, longtime contributor to the field of mindfulness-based emotional healing. He's the founder of the Emotional Longevity Experience and the host of the Emotional Longevity Podcast, where he explores how emotional health shapes our stress, relationships, happiness, and long-term well-being. He's the author and co-author of several very important books. And today we're going to be exploring his new book called Tiny Shifts: How Emotional Health Transforms Stress, Relationships, and Longevity. In this new work, Elisha offers a grounded science-backed approach to emotional steadiness, showing how small internal shifts practiced in real life can help us calm the nervous system, interrupt stress cycles, respond more wisely in our relationships, and strengthen resilience over time. Elisha, thank you so much for being here. It's a true honor to welcome you to our podcast.

Speaker 2 · 1:43Thank you, Sean.

Speaker 1 · 1:45I want to talk about the 4R method from recognize into what you call release. And then the third is refocus, fourth is reinforce. Would the release part be most connected with lengthening or longevity?

Speaker 2 · 2:06It's not the most connected. Well, we can segue into that in a moment, but certainly you can imagine, just to take a second with that, that if you're walking around with a low-grade chronic stress, which I think a lot of us are nowadays, we don't even notice it. It's kind of the water we swim in. It's the humorous parable of the two fish swimming in a body water, and it's two young fish, and this older fish comes up to them and says, Hey boys, how's the water? And they look at each other a little confused. They continue on and say, What the hell is water? So here we are, we're swimming in this low-grade chronic stress of being pinged and prodded by our minds anyway. What's stress? Huh? What's stress?

Speaker 1 · 2:42Is that a joke? Yeah, just the what's water?

Speaker 2 · 2:45Oh, what's stress? Okay.

Speaker 1 · 2:47What do you mean, stress?

Speaker 2 · 2:49Right. Yeah, what exactly? A lot of us are feeling this way, and we just feel kind of exhausted at the end of the day, and we wonder why. So we're wired to conserve energy. We need energy to live and survive. And our body is like a car, so in a lot of ways. And if you imagine that you got a car and you park it in the driveway, and you're just putting your foot on the gas, just halfway, but you just don't really lift it very much. It's just going just constantly revving your engine. If you do that, you're gonna wear and tear your car down faster than the guy or girl who can take his or her foot off the pedal at times. And maybe they go fast at other times, but they take it off the pedal at times, and they go get it repaired when they need to, and you know, whatever. So the release is lowering your heart rate so your body doesn't have to work so hard. It's taking the tension away from your body again, conserving more energy so you're not getting that same wear and tear on your body, you're not aging as fast. I mean, it's not anything that's just in my book that shows that chronic stress over time actually literally ages our bodies. That's a very well-known thing. So if we're learning how to have that emotional awareness and release the energy that's being poured to battle the stress that's there to hold the stress, yeah, and we're gonna save some minutes and hours and years of our lives doing that. That's just the release piece. The refocus is also a way to support our health, longevity, and happiness. Because once we recognize and we release, now we can choose a response that's gonna take a hold. That might not be that bag of potato chips that's there, that might not be that extra Netflix show, that might not be another sleepless night because my mind won't shut off. That might not be that choice to I'm just kind of tired. I think I'm just not gonna exercise again today. It might not be those choices that are most connected with our health and longevity. I mean, that's our sleep, nutrition, and exercise are like the three pillars that most money goes into to study health and longevity. And the one that gets the least amount is our emotional health. I mean, stress gets a lot of attention, but our emotional reactivity is how we get a hold of our stress, to have that awareness of it. Literally, when we choose to make connection with people versus disconnection with them, that's biological protection. We know that feeling connected is connected with long health and longevity. That's Robert Waldinger's work at a Harvard. And yeah, we make choices. We make

Speaker 2 · 5:18choices that support the length of living longer or healthier longer.

Speaker 1 · 5:21Do you know that Arby's came out with a half-pound roast beef sandwich recently? It's like really big.

Speaker 2 · 5:30Big out there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 5:31I don't even know how many miles from where we live, there's but we have a lot of other things that are it's really good at helping people cope with life. Unhealthy, but very effective for the short term. I want to dive into your podcast a little bit. It's called the Emotional Longevity Podcast. Discover the secret to living longer, healthier, and happier. You have interviews with a lot of the who's who of the wellness world and some teachings. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the purpose of that podcast, what you cover, and I just want to dive into a little bit more about that phrase emotional longevity. So I think that it's a juicy concept that marries things together in a really fascinating way.

Speaker 2 · 6:22I started getting really into the longevity space, interested in it anyway, probably when I was like turning the quarter of 50. And how old are you now? 51, so probably like 49, like 48, something like that. And I started listening and reading more works around health and longevity. And that's when I started to understand that a lot of it was focused mostly on exercise, nutrition, and sleep. And there was a physician out there who's now been messed up in the Epstein files. And so his name's been taken out. But anyway, he had this book called Cult Out Live that did like very, very well, sold probably millions of copies. And he has this whole story in there of how getting into the meat of what's real and what's not real with all this health and longevity research out there and what you should believe and not believe and what really matters. And it came down to what really matters was was your exercise more than anything else. But then about two-thirds of the way through the book, and this is a spoiler alert, he talks about how his life was such a mess. He would like turn tables over in his house, he would have this huge anger outburst issue, he would like yell at his colleagues and he had just he was just like massively stressed, and he found himself going inpatient somewhere as a result of it. And he got like many therapists on the way, Esther Perell and others. And it was there that he realized that here's the guy that's like one of the most advanced physicians in that field of health and longevity. And he basically said, like, at the end of the day, the cornerstone is emotional health. Because if you're doing all this stuff and you're miserable, what's the point? And then also your stress is wrecking all of the work that you're doing with your sleep, nutrition, and exercise. That was a really powerful aha for me. And actually, it was a sort of an inspiration story that led to tiny shifts on the connection between emotional health and longevity. And so emotional longevity, it means two things. It means having emotional health for the long run. And then it also means the connection between emotional health and longevity. That's the very definition of that term. So my podcast, we kind of explore ways to bring more inner strength into our emotional world, greater emotional awareness, things that we're doing that are harming us on our own. I bring on, like you, I bring on different people that help us better understand the connection between our emotional world and our happiness and our health, and hopefully just kind of practical ways to integrate it. And I use that term very intentionally because probably in my mid-20s, I just had this moment where I realized like I'm just not gonna do

Speaker 2 · 8:50anything anymore unless I see the tangible reason to do it. I'm not gonna do it just because someone told me to do it. And I have to see how it translates. And I think ultimately that's how I began to practice more, and that's how I began to teach from that place.

Speaker 1 · 9:04You've been writing about emotions and emotional health for so long. And by the way, I want to just put a plug out there for increasing your emotional vocabulary, like you talked about earlier. And there's like lists of emotions and maps of emotions and wheels of emotions online. You can go on Google images or School and search for all these different lists and maps and print them out and share them with people and randomly at different parts of the day, like what emotion am I feeling now or now or now, and how nuanced can I get instead of just recycling the same four emotions of fine and sad or good over and over, but trying to get as nuanced as possible. So you've been writing about emotions and practicing emotional awareness and emotional regulation and emotional intelligence for so long. I liked what you said earlier about how you wanted to call this book Life Can Be This Simple, and that Rick Hansen read the book and said, you know, this is deceptively simple. A lot of the practice is simple. Recognizing, releasing, refocusing, reinforcing. I'm wondering though, like the Buddha talked about happiness, levels of happiness and said that the highest happiness is peace. The sense of peace. And we've been talking about emotional health and emotional awareness and simplicity. Can you maybe talk about your own experience of what peace feels like when you feel most peaceful and what those ingredients of peace are for you in your life?

Speaker 2 · 11:04It reminds me of a technolon quote: peace in yourself, peace in the world. For me, being

Speaker 2 · 11:10with and being curious about what's here within me is a path towards feeling that sense of equanimity, which feels like peace to me, because there's no battling going on in that moment. There's nothing to do. I'm not needing to solve any problems. I'm just allowing whatever is here, whatever feeling is here in my body, whether it's attention or a sadness or whatever thoughts, be they comfortable or uncomfortable, demonic or fantasizing or whatever they might be. There's just this experience of just being. And I think being is peace. I think when you settle into being, there's this sense of peace because there's no battle. To me, I think that's it. So it's in my practice. So here would be a tiny shift. This is how we would do this. We would kind of like doesn't mean you get somewhere. You're just more in the driver's seat of moving in the direction you want to go. So if I was feeling however I was feeling in the day and it was kind of uncomfortable or edgy or whatever, I'd say I might recognize that. I might take a breath, recognize and say edginess and notice it in wherever it is in my body. And I might release by lowering my shoulders or taking a breath or just softening my body slightly, feeling my feet on the floor. And then I might ask myself a question. This would be the refocus. What would be something that I could do that would enhance my sense of peace in the next few minutes? That might be putting my phone down. I might be laying on the couch and just putting my hands on my heart. That might be just seeing if I can sit down and close my eyes and let the sunshine splash on my face. I could be choosing in this relationship that I'm in in the moment not to get in the argument.

Speaker 1 · 12:56Or to fight with reality.

Speaker 2 · 12:57Yeah, or to fight with reality. That could be being in traffic and choosing to put on something that feels with a more peaceful vibe. These could be small choices, these little emotional pivots that happen because you were able to interrupt the loop that was happened through that recognition. You were able to adjust the reactivity that was happening, the physiological reactivity that was happening in your body to balance out a little bit more so that you can ask a different question. Our mind, I speaking of AI, I have this little kind of joke in here in the book that's like we have artificial intelligence and there's ways to access our natural intelligence, the NI of it all. And that's the same way. We ask

Speaker 2 · 13:35artificial intelligence a question, gives us an answer. We can ask our brain a question, it's going to give us an answer, you know, consciously or unconsciously. And so that question of like, what would be something I could do in the next few minutes that would enhance my sense of peace, you're instantly redirecting your mind, but you're not doing it from a tense place. You've created a little bit more space in the release just for 10 seconds. So you can ask that question so you can get a little bit more strength towards whatever that answer is. Then I'll say this if you do feel a little bit more at peace, a little bit more, we're not looking again. We'll totally borrow. Dan Harris is 10% happier for a second. And so if you get a little bit more, then here's what most people miss. So I'll say this, Sean. Most people miss in their practice of trying to work on themselves and get better. They're actually not bad at the recognizing the refocus because that's pretty common. They don't maybe know all the different ways of refocusing, these asking questions, these different ways of doing things that can help with the refocus. But the release piece and the reinforce piece. So the release piece is critical because it allows for the refocus to actually happen better. But the reinforce is like after we feel that piece, we want to lock it into our memory. We want our brain to remember it so that it can bring it up naturally the next time. And the more repetition we have with that, the more naturally it's going to happen. That's just implicit memory or procedural memory. And so one way of doing that is by taking a moment to acknowledge the shift. So you take a moment and you say, like, I do feel a little bit more ease in my body, a little bit more peace. Where do I feel? How do I know that? I feel it on my shoulders. Okay, so you might take a moment and to spot that feeling, to acknowledge the feeling, to take a breath in, realize that's part of your experience too. You are somebody who can also feel more peace. And that's a way of reinforcing it. You can close your eyes and take a snapshot, like a picture in your mind. And that's a way of committing it to memory. So you can either do that somatically with your body, like I just said, or you can take a snapshot in your mind, or you can just verbally acknowledge it to yourself. All these are different ways of committing it to memory. You can write it down if you want to for a moment, but that reinforce is to do one of these things that help commit it to memory a little bit more so that your brain will more naturally remember it the next time, strengthening the experience.

Speaker 1 · 15:45I get your emails.

Speaker 1 · 15:47I know you have a daily practice that you're inviting people on. And you have a free starter bundle for people to download online

Speaker 1 · 16:00at elisha goldstein.com. The links will be in the show notes. Elisha, thanks again for being here.

Speaker 2 · 16:06Thank you, Sean.