For our final week of the Men’s CNS group Payton was leading us home. Her talk this week began with a brief recap and then dived into further exploration about how our mental state can impact both our body and mind. Critical to this was her emphasis on the importance of maintaining and developing the ability to adopt a “wise state”. Something that’s central to our ability to maintain this wise state is how we assess and determine the safety of the environment we find ourselves in and how the safety of the environment signals whether or not this is a space to conserve or potentially expend energy. Building off this idea, Payton dismantled the idea of willpower being enough to overcome hurdles imposed by unsafe environments and mental blocks. In this way, desiring to “push thought” or simply “grit our teeth” was not only counterintuitive, but also potentially detrimental to our ability to engage in effective and efficient work.
Following that, Payton spoke on and taught us about how we can do a daily nervous system check to help us be able to “name and tame” the telltale signs of dysregulation. When it came to naming the signs of dysregulation, this process largely encompasses taking a moment to examine oneself and, in the context of what we know about our own abilities and capacities, understand your relative mental state in the moment. This process is characterized by questions such as “How much are you able to give or need in a given moment?”, “how does that compare to other situations where the circumstances are different?”, and “how does the place that I’m in affect me?”. Once we’re able to name, we can begin to tame which, as Payton describes it, can be done through a combination of and nuanced use of upshifting and downshifting tools. Before moving on from this discussion, Payton outlined some more proactive tools that we can use to try and regulate ourselves such that, eventually, we’re able to build up habits and have less of a need to utilize this naming and taming.
Bringing this all together, Payton ended with outlining a rough 24-hr “blueprint” for regulation of one’s CNS that integrated plans of attack for both behavioural, and nutritional interventions that can help us optimize regulation based around the time of day. One thing that I really loved about this was how Payton emphasized that this was a template we are free to tweak and tune to our needs and wants. It was less of a hard and fast set of rules and more of a set of goals to try and achieve. The exact details of how we achieved those details were left to our own devices and capabilities.
After the main content had concluded, we had one of our best discussion sessions yet as myself and some of the other attendees had the chance to really pick Payton’s brain on some of the key concepts outlined throughout the presentation and the Men’s CNS group as a whole. It was a lovely way to close out the group and left things on a very high point as it were. And on that note, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these posts and I hope to be able to write for you again in some of the other groups that we’ve got on the docket for the months to come!