Summary
Joe presents practical tools for reducing stress, organized into two categories: downregulation techniques (immediate relief) and addressing the inner critic (root cause). He demonstrates several nervous system downregulation methods — humming, feeling textures, attention on feet, listening to silence — and explains they work by shifting attention to sensory experience. He categorizes these into breath-based (box breathing, 5.5-second breathing) and sensation-based (“coming to your senses”).
However, Joe warns that downregulation alone can become avoidance — it doesn’t resolve the underlying stressor. The deeper work is recognizing that the biggest cause of stress is the internal critic: the repetitious voice delivering 50-60,000 mostly critical thoughts per day. He offers two key insights: first, the critical voice can almost completely go away; second, the voice isn’t yours — it sounds like a parent, teacher, or other authority figure from your past. Recognizing this opens up new ways to relate to it: you can challenge it, welcome it with compassion, or simply stop believing it. The video includes two exercises: narrating your thoughts aloud for five minutes, then identifying where each critical thought was learned.
Key Concepts
- Downregulation is useful but not resolution
- The inner critic is not your voice
- The inner critic can be related to in multiple ways
- Breath regulates the nervous system
Key Quotes
“If you had a boss who was hanging out and just like right over your shoulder, no, don’t type that way. No, type this way. Are you doing enough? You have to do this other thing, too. And just hitting you like that 60,000 times a day. It would be so stressful.”
“The voice in your head that’s critical sounds a lot like somebody — your mom or your dad or your grandmother or a teacher in fifth grade.”
“You can downregulate yourself completely into almost like a drugged stupor where you’re not actually addressing issues. It becomes an act of avoidance.”
“It’s really nice to get into the pattern of doing these things when a certain thing triggers it — the same way that you would do coffee.”
“Even if it’s ‘you can do this, you can do this, you can do this,’ that’s assuming that you actually can’t do it and you need a pep talk, which is another form of criticism.”
Transcript
If you want immediate tricks to reduce your stress right now, this is a great video to watch. In this video, I sit with a woman and we talk about the tricks to immediately get less stressed and how to dismantle the inner critic that inevitably makes that stress come back. And along the way, you’ll be invited to do some experiments. There’s dozens of ways to reduce stress right now. I mean, for instance, hum. Let’s take a minute and we’ll just hum for a second. I mean, that’s just one of the most silly but simple ways to do it. It stimulates the vagus nerve, so that reduces stress. But also, you’ll notice that the brain stopped a lot of what it was doing while you were humming. That’s a simple one. Another easy way to reduce stress is to just take your hand, put it on anything and feel the texture. Move your hand and feel the texture. Yeah, you can see that, right? You can put all of your attention on the bottom of your feet. You just keep as much of your attention as possible on the bottom of your feet. You can take a moment and listen to the words that I’m saying, but instead of listening to my words, listen to the silence that’s around my words in between my words, the higher frequencies, the lower frequencies that are all silent right now. And pay attention to those. Boom. Immediately. So, what this is called in nervous system language is downregulating your nervous system. There is literally an infinite number of ways to do it. And the problem is often is that you can downregulate yourself out of stress, but it doesn’t actually handle the underlying issues. But it’s really useful, super useful. You don’t want to not use this tool. There’s a lot of times where that downregulation is absolutely necessary, but you can start downregulating yourself completely into almost like a drugged stuper where you’re not actually addressing issues. It becomes an act of avoidance, but it’s a really important tool. And so there’s literally infinite forms of this. And they come in about three categories. One is breath. There’s a five and a half second breath or six breath which is just breathing in for six seconds, breathing out for six seconds or five and a half seconds. This is like a super simple one. There’s box breathing, that’s another one. There’s humming, that’s another one. There’s putting all of your attention on the way that the breath feels going in and out of your nose. All of these things can help you downregulate, can help you sleep, can help you prepare for sleep. And so they’re incredibly useful. Another one that’s not breath related is sensation related, which is how do I feel the senses? It’s I call coming to your senses. So here’s a quick lesson for coming to your senses. And this is something that you can do anywhere at any time. And it’s just great to do when you’re stressed. So, just take a deep breath. Make a little sound on your exhale. And your job is just to put your attention on the sensations on the outside of your body. Now, if you need to, you can just put your hand and rub it on your leg and just pay attention to where it feels on your fingertips and your leg, your pants or skirt. Or you can wiggle your toes and notice how the soles of your feet and your soles of your toes feel against the bottom of your shoe or the floor. Or you can just feel how the air feels on your skin. Or you can put your hands together and just rub your thumbs together slowly. And you’ll notice that already your nervous system is more calm already. Everything is less stressful. It took about a minute. And all that’s required is that you slow down and feel the sensations on the outside of your body. You can even create them. You just have to feel them and then boom, things are calmer. Slowly feel the sensations. So, it’s really nice to get into the pattern of doing these things when a certain thing triggers it. the same way that you would do coffee, right? You wake up in the morning and you walk past the coffee place, you smell the coffee, you go in and you get the coffee. It’s like, “Oh, I’m I know that I get frustrated when I call up the help desk and the person, you know, doesn’t understand me and they never help me out.” So, as I’m dialing, I’m just these little tricks to downregulate yourself. The thing to watch out for, like I said, is that it can also be an act of avoidance, right? So, what I’ve noticed, I was working with a CEO the other day and they were working on getting angry at meetings. They didn’t want to be getting angry at meetings or frustrated. And this is a CEO who does not show the frustration. So, he may be frustrated, but it’s not like he’s yelling or abusive, but it throws him all day. And so, he’s like, I don’t want to be frustrated. So, we were learning some of these down reggulation techniques and he’s like, “Oh, that’s great. I’m Nope. Frustration’s back and and it’s cuz he wasn’t using it as a way to get rid of the frustration.” He could do that and then it becomes even more dangerous. But what he noticed is the the natural thing which is the underlying issue isn’t going to get resolved by downregulating. Downregulating might help you find a solution. It might it might help you take the right action. It might help you get into a a greater sense of yourself, a more space to be able to take the action that’s going to most benefit you. But it isn’t the action that’s going to actually take care of the stressor. It isn’t seeing through the thought. So for you to really understand and see through the thoughts that you’re having, the first thing you have to do is be aware of the thoughts that you’re having. And that’s what this exercise is about. So for five minutes you’re going to narrate out loud every thought that you have in your head. Now you can record this which will be useful so you can hear it in the future or you can not record it and record it later if you’d like. But you can just talk out loud every thought that you have. And so maybe your thought is I need to get to work. Maybe your thought is I should stop watching YouTube videos. Maybe your thought is you should be prettier. Maybe your thought is I need to do the dishes. Whatever your thought is, it doesn’t matter. Your job is to just say whatever thought you have out loud. Every thought you have out loud for the next five minutes. That’s it. And you’ll start to be aware of how you’re talking to yourself and how quickly you’re talking to yourself. It’s best to use the tone and quality of the voice that is speaking. So you’re not speaking in a different tone than what you hear. You’re speaking in the exact same tone as what you hear. Okay, go ahead and get started. One of the biggest, if not the biggest cause of stress in the system is the internal critic. That is the repetitious voice in your head that keeps on criticizing you all the time. And I think it was a Mayo Clinic, maybe it was a Cleveland Clinic that has something on the web that says that we have 50 to 60,000 thoughts a day, right? And most of them aren’t novel. They’re not, oh, here’s how to invent electricity, you know, or oh, here’s what I should do around AI for my business. Most of them are you should do this, you should do this, or why aren’t you why haven’t you lost weight, why haven’t you lost weight or you have to quit drinking or just a repetition of criticism that’s happening. Even if it’s you can do this, you can do this, you can do this, that’s assuming that you actually can’t do it and you need a pep talk, which is another form of criticism. So the the voice in the head is just this internal stack of criticism. The other way to think about it, it is an internal stack of attack is just whack whack whack whack whack. And that is stressful. If you had a boss who was hanging out and just like right over your shoulder, no, don’t type that way. No, type this way. Are you doing enough? You have to do this other thing, too. And just hitting you like that 60,000 times a day. It would be so stressful. You would be, “Oh, please.” You’d kill him, kill yourself, kill, you know, it’d just be horrible. But we’re living with that all the time. And and that’s abusive. And if you can really see the abuse of that, you can understand why there’s just so much stress in life. And you’ll notice that people who have different voices in their head have different levels of stress in their life for sure. So there’s a couple questions about, well, how do I address that? And the first one though is just to know that it’s possible for that critical voice in the head to almost completely go away or just be very silent. Another thing that you can do that’s really useful is to realize that the voice isn’t yours. You will notice that the voice in your head that’s critical sounds a lot like somebody, your mom or your dad or your grandmother or a teacher in fifth grade or whatever that is. But wherever it comes from, you’ll get this thing about you’ll see, oh, this isn’t mine. this is talking to me. I don’t have to believe it. And that’s the second thing you can do about the critical voice in your head is you start to realize that if it was a politician, you were you would be an acolyte. You’d be the person who listens to the politician goes, “Yeah, everything that guy says. Yeah. Yeah. I believe all of that. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can realize, oh, I can have a different relationship with it. What it says isn’t true. what it says is just a a repeating pattern of something that somebody else believed in my past and then that gives you this framework of oh I have a whole another set of options about how to relate to it. So critical voice speaks and you can say, “Yeah, that’s true.” Or you can say, “Hey, that’s a pretty crappy way to manage me. Could you try another way?” Or you could say, “Oh, I see that you love me and that you’re caring for me, but not like that.” Or you could say, “Yeah, I see that you’re really scared and I’m going to be right here with you.” You can respond to the voice in the head in lots of different ways to reduce that stress. So, here’s an exercise you can take with you. You’re going to do the exact same experiment you did before where you are speaking all the things the voice in your head says out loud. This time you’re definitely going to record it and then you are going to have that written up on a document using AI or you’re going to write it yourself. And then next to each one of the things you say you’re going to write down where you learned it from. particularly the critical ones. Where did you learn that you weren’t pretty enough? Where did you learn that you needed to work harder? Where did you learn that you messed up at the last conversation? Like, where did you learn those things? And you’re just going to write down who gave you this critical voice in the head. If you found this video helpful, please subscribe. And if you want more tools for reducing stress, you can go here or click on the link below.