Does your heart start to race before calls with opposing counsel? Before meetings with certain clients or partners? How about before a hearing or trial?

There's nothing wrong with that natural reaction, AND it doesn't always serve us in the moment. Whenever our nervous system gets activated—when it starts kicking into a "fight or flight" response, also known as "sympathetic" arousal—we're often tempted to try and talk ourselves down, to reason or persuade our systems to be calm. That's usually only helpful to a point, because it's a feat of evolutionary design that when our nervous systems get activated, the rational thinking part of our brain starts to go offline. A more effective approach to settling nerves is to work directly with your nervous system, using techniques to tap into our "ventral vagal" circuitry. Different types of breathwork, cold therapy, and even humming can be helpful here, in terms of "lighting up" those calming pathways in our brain. (You can learn more about the vagus nerve and why it does what it does here.)