How to Reset Your Nervous System for $0

If you wake up overwhelmed, overstimulated, or already absorbing the emotions of everyone around you… this episode is your reset.

Amanda shares the five free morning practices she personally uses before 8 AM to regulate her nervous system, align her energy, and stay grounded as an intuitive, athlete, engineer, and mother.

These practices blend the best of both worlds:
 — Science: circadian biology, HRV, vagal tone, nitric oxide, lymphatic flow
 — Spirit: energy field alignment, dawn portals, gratitude frequency, aura clearing

In this episode:
 • The sunrise ritual that balances cortisol + clears your energetic field
 • Amanda’s morning prayer (and why it instantly increases HRV)
 • How to use your HRV score without letting it rule your day
 • The breath practice that changes your biochemistry in 30 seconds
 • Why a simple body scrub is both lymphatic therapy and aura cleansing

Free tools mentioned:
 • Episode 13 – The 3 Breaths Practice
•  Oxygen Advantage Book 
• Oxygen Advantage App
• Welltory App 

Paid Tools mentioned:
 • Maria Yraceburu’s Calendar
• Morpheus Training System 
• Whoop
• Oura Ring
• Apple Watch 
• Garmin Watch
• Polar Strap 

Work with Amanda:
 • Body Scan Sessions
• Intuitive Coaching
• Free Resources

--

Watch Gutsy Chick Podcast on YouTube!

Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Gutsy Chick Quiz to find out how your type A, high achieving mindset might be holding you back from healing your chronic health issue: https://gutsychickquiz.com

Transcript

0:01

What if you could reset your entire nervous system in the time it takes to drink your coffee for $0 and actually feel your body settle your energy clear and your mind come back online? That's what these five morning practices do for me and. I didn't learn them from some billionaire that said, this is what you need to do every morning to succeed. I didn't use fancy gadgets that someone said, oh, this is the thing you must have, or some big wellness routine. I figured them out because I'm a mom. I was tired of waking up, stressed, already buzzing with everyone else's energy and feeling like my day was running me before it even started. These are things that help me calm my system fast, things any sensitive body can feel working in real time. By the end of this episode, you'll know how to use light breath in intention, awareness, and simple sensation to regulate both your physiology and your energy field in under 30 minutes without spending a single dollar. Let's get into the five free resets I do before 8:00 AM. Welcome back to the Gutsy Chick Podcast, where science meets spirit and your sensitive body becomes your cosmic superpower. I'm Amanda Smith, engineer athlete medical intuitive, and your favorite SCH translator for why your body does weird things. My morning routine was built. Healing, healing, burnout, healing, adrenal dysregulation, healing. That feeling of waking up already overwhelmed, and I needed that routine to be quick and easy to remember because I have a kid to wake up every morning and get ready every morning. These five things brought me back into my body. Tried and true. Over years. Number one, observe the sunrise, the original circadian reset, take zero minutes and cost $0. Every morning, I either step outside or stand by my window and watch the sky shift from almost dark to the moment the sun hits the horizon and rises. I do this because natural light sets the cortisol awakening response. Your natural, healthy morning cortisol spike that sets up your hormones for the entire day, and the next night it regulates your circadian rhythms. The blue yellow light wavelengths hit Mela melanin spin receptors. I didn't say that right at all. MELANOPSIN receptors in your eyes and that signals your sapr charismatic nucleus, which is your circadian Glock. All that said, it regulates energy. Focused digestion and the sleep depth 16 hours later, that one's huge. You guys, if you regulate to the sunrise, whether you wake up with the sun or you wake up before the sun, or you wake up after the sun, get in those early morning light so that you can sleep really well the next night. Yeah. It protects melatonin for the entire day. Cortisol spikes in the morning, melatonin's really low, and then at night those shift. Cortisol goes down, melatonin goes up, and it triggers our body to go into that sleep state. So if we look at the light, it protects the melatonin for the entire day. It anchors you into your body. Immediately when I see the sun, and this is whether I woke up with it before it, after it, when I'm looking at the sun rising, I, I just drop right in to my body and go, oh, okay. Yeah, I'm here in this body right now. And that signal safety for your nervous system puts you into a rest digest state. And for those of you who wake up in that energy state where it's like, oh my gosh, the day has already taken a hold of me, which is where I used to be dropping your cortisol in the morning, helping it de like, no. Okay, it's time to start trickling down throughout the day. That brings you into that rest digest state. Such a game changer for me. And then this reduces stress reactivity and stabilizes your nervous system rhythms, so you're, you're less likely to snap first thing in the morning or sometime in the afternoon. Here's the woo behind this. Dawn is an energetic portal. Ooh, there goes my mic. It's a daily rebirth. If you can harness that kind of thinking, that, thinking that, oh my gosh, I woke up again today. That's an opportunity. A moment to go. Okay. It's a moment of rebirth. The transition from dark to light mirrors your own shift from subconscious. It's a conscious state. Subconscious is dream state Conscious, obviously is where we're at right now watching this YouTube video or listening to this audio. Yeah, as a sun rises, your field expands your aura reorganizes. That layer that's outside of your body that Joe Dispenza keeps proving over and over again that reorganizes. Brilliant. That's not just woo, that's science and the light shifts can help you witness different parts of yourself you might have never connected with before. That's the thing that I'm starting to get to now, where I've been doing this practice for years and I've gotten to a place where I'm recognizing as the sun rises, there's little shifts in when it rises and what colors are showing up. Give me a signal to think about, oh yeah, or, oh, and pink happens to be my favorite color on the sunrise, and that one's right before the sun hits the horizon. If you stick around for the full shift from dark into light, which is a little over a half hour process, you get to tap into nature's awakening, which taps into your primal self. Nature's Awakening has a bunch of sounds. The ones that I tend to tap into, 'cause I live in suburbia, are the birds. They're. Unbelievably silent until that first light hits the tip of the trees in the area, and then you just start to hear beep, beep, and, and then it's game on. After that, then the squirrels are running and, and the rabbits are scurrying everywhere, trying to stay hidden, but you tap into your primal self when nature wakes up too. I have done this one for years. My daughter is 11 and every day we have done this. We wake with the sun, our bodies have sunk completely up with our circadian rhythms, relative sun to sunrise. And lemme tell you, it gets really tricky right around now where we're heading into the winter solstice, the longest nights of the year. Sun is waking. Right around seven 15, which means we're awake around seven, which is exactly the time we have to be up in order to get her to school on time. But the closer we get to December 21st, it gets a little tricky and I'm okay with that because our bodies need to continue to sink with those circadian rhythms to keep us healthy, happy, and in sync with nature and nature's timing. I did a phenomenal episode. I'm still very, very proud of the patriarchs clock. Uh, two or three episodes ago, go check that one out so you can hear more about cyclic timing and not being ran by patriarchs clock. That linear, masculine energy of okay, time to go to work, must get up and go. Watching the sun come up is the simplest free nervous system reset we have on earth. Our cells. Remember this ritual? Even if your schedule forgot, our ancestors did this without thinking its primal regulation number two. Morning prayer. This is heart coherence and energetic alignment. As I'm watching the sunrise, I'm also saying at the same time to help conserve that time 'cause I only have a short window to get this in. Thank you for another good day. Sacred parents. I learned this one from Maria y Baru, and I absolutely love it. And then we also add in an affirmation after that, which affirmations can be prayer if you wanna connect the dots like that. Affirmation is tied to the energy of that day. And Maria y Baru on y baru.org link in the show notes, she has a phenomenal calendar that has every single day's energy. And if you tap into that and come up with your own affirmation, mm, that energy is meah. Perfection. I've been doing that practice now for a couple of months, and I absolutely love it because she gives me the prompt. I go and figure out what my affirmation is, and it starts with the gratitude piece. So here's the science. Gratitude activates the prefrontal cortex front of the brain and increases your HRV your heart rate variability within seconds without touching a device. No money, no need. Gratitude plus reverence drops you out of sympathetic cortisol activation and into heart coherence. HeartMath is a institute that I absolutely love. Show notes will have an a mention of HeartMath and their website. They have a tool that you can use to do heart coherence with a bunch of other people all across the globe. It's brilliant. Something I highly recommend, but not something I do in my morning routine. Speaking in tension out loud, regulates the vagus nerve via the vocal cord vibration, so that vocal cord vibration vibrates the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is part of your parasympathetic nervous system. It drops you back into rest digest. Just by speaking intention, then prayer creates that coherence we were just talking about between your emotional brain and your logical brain. As an engineer, I used to be so much in that logical brain that I had a hard time dropping into my emotional brain, and what that probably looked like to my coworkers was I was highly emotional all the time because I was learning how to express myself. But this prayer creates that coherence. Simple, easy, and now you, you know, if you've been listening to the Gutsy Chick podcast or spirit of an athlete, or I'm about to change it to the cosmic body shenanigans, then, you know, I definitely express more emotions nowadays. All right, here's the woo behind this. The term sacred parents calls in your divine lineage. Cosmic mother and cosmic father. So in Maria Y Bar's tradition, cosmic mother is earth and cosmic father is sky. Usin is sky, Kinson, dehi is earth. Creating that relationship, honoring them, recognizing them in that moment. And really feeling into sacred parents has that universal paternal and maternal parental energy your soul recognizes. Your soul recognizes it. You were raised with a mom and a dad or a guardian of some sort. You may or may not have had a good relationship with them, but building this relationship with Earth, mother and Sky Father. Hmm. That's been a game changer for me. I had great parents, loved me dearly, and this new relationship in my adulthood, ugh. Yes, it was one I needed. Prayer sets your energetic frequency for the day and aligns your field with guidance, protection, and soul purpose. You are connecting in to that spiritual side of yourself and saying, I need this guidance. Bring it on. Protect me. That's what Godfather does, and guide me on my sole purpose. So many of my clients are saying to me, I don't know what my purpose is. When you get to midlife and you don't know what your purpose is. Y it, it, it can be a struggle. It can be a very real struggle because you recognize I'm headed toward death. I am more toward death than I am birth. And I don't know why I'm here. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. And that creates chaos. So this prayer, this such, such a simple thank you for another good day. Sacred parents, that prayer. Aligns you with your soul purpose, automagically. And then this prayer also reminds you your spirit. You have spirit and you're not alone. And that's also huge. It instantly calms your energetic body. It puts you in that parasympathetic rest digest state, which is so, so big for so many people. And why This is part of my morning routine. This isn't religious, it's relational and orientational. It reconnects me to the forces that walk with me. It's something bigger than my to-do List. Number three, the HRV Check-in. This one's data and discernment, not diagnosis. I. This is the one that's not so much a nervous system reset, but a compass. Do you need an HRV check to regular regulate your nervous system? No, absolutely not. But does it help me understand where my system is starting that day? Absolutely. So I use my HRV score as a little nudge. If it's low, I adjust expectations. I slow my pace, I add more breath work, and if it's higher, I know my system has more capacity. It's an awareness tool that informs the resets that I'm going to use throughout the day, or. In one of these five resets. In fact, the last one that you're gonna learn about and you need to know there are free tools for this. So an app that I discovered, oh, several years ago, probably back in 2017, is Well, Tory, you'll see this app down in the, the show notes. It's free. They have a paid version. Use the free version. It's good enough. Um, this one, all you have to have is a smartphone with a camera and a flashlight. You stick your fingers on the camera and flashlight, cover them up, and then it takes your pulse and then gives you your HRV score. Personally, I use a tool called Morpheus. Uh, this tool, again, I've had this one since like 2017 or 2018. One of my coaches recommended it. It's a one-off purchase. It's not like the Ora ring or. A bunch of those other tools like Whoop, that you have to pay a monthly subscription for this one. You buy it once, it's yours forever. Love that fact. I'm a big fan of lifetime deals, so I don't have to keep track of those monthly expenditures. Something that stresses me out. This tool, you put it on in the morning, you're either using your own, uh, heart rate monitor, strap or watch. You can sync up apple or a ring, all of those other tools to Morpheus, and then it gets, it gives you your HRV score. The key to doing the HRV score and oh. The paid versions, whoop or a Ring, Garmin, uh, apple Watch, Hume and Polar, they all have HRV in them. So if you have those tools, I would highly, highly recommend using those first thing in the morning. This is, I sit up, I'm watching the sunrise, I said my prayer, and I am getting my HRV score while I'm sitting there watching the sunrise again, stack these things and it makes it so much simpler. The key is consistency. When you do it, how you do it, the posture you're in when you do it, uh, and then what you're using to measure it. Because each one of those tools that I just mentioned has a different data set they use to determine the HRV score. So just be consistent with which one you're using. I have used Morpheus for years and years and years. I know that my HRV score used to be in the teens and now it's in the seventies and eighties. My heart has gotten healthier in the last several years, which is awesome to see because I was very concerned for a very long time. I. Wow. The science HRV measures the flexibility and adaptability of your autonomic nervous system. Autonomic nervous system means automatic nervous system, your breath, your heart, your lungs. All of these things are controlled auto magically in your body. That's part of your autonomic nervous system. That's what it's monitoring, and it's monitoring monitor. I'm gonna get that word out. It's monitoring. How much capacity you have for a life any given day. Low HRV means you are in sympathetic activation, you're in survival mode. Tens, twenties, lower than that thirties is actually pushing it. Two, those are low scores. High HRV means you have better emotional resilience. You can handle the, the emotions coming at you and the emotions coming outta you. You have better decision making, you have better recovery. This one's huge for me because I'm a power lifter and you have better stress response. All good things. So HRV scores, like I mentioned, seventies, eighties, and up. Those are great. HRV scores. There's the middle of the road also where you're somewhere between 30 and 60. Those are where you've really gotta discern. Okay, here's the woo behind HRV. HRV mirrors your energetic capacity for the day, how much your field can hold. So for some people, we've learned about spoons and how many spoons we have on any given day. And when our HRV score is high, we have more spoons. More spoons to use. Think of like eating more spoons the better if you have a big meal in front of you. Low HRV days tend to align with astrological shifts, lunar phases, and collective emotional spikes, as well as solar cosmic energies. I noticed that my lower scores, so like this morning's HRV score was 68. I had a huge workout last night and I also didn't sleep well. We have a full moon that is a super moon that is the closest to the earth that it will be for the next 17 years and Full Moon. We're also going through some solar flare activity. So all of those played into my HRV score dropping slightly. Now I'm on that hairy edge of needing to do a little more recovery in order for my HRV score to bounce back. I also could use better night's sleep. The other piece of the woo is your intuition. Weather report is what this thing is. Today's energy is softer. Move accordingly. That's the energy that you're getting off of this. So HRV isn't my boss, it's my spiritual physiological check-in. That's how I use this as part of my nervous system reset. I. Number four, the breath practice. I use two tools in the morning. One of them is the Ox Oxygen Advantage app. The other one is the Three Breath Reset, which happens to be episode 13. You can go check that out if you want to learn how to do three breaths. Melissa Seaman was my teacher in the three breast practice, and I'll give you a couple of notes on it here. So let's connect the dots. If Sunrise is the external reset breath work is the internal. Oxygen Advantage is a book and an app, and I love, love, love the fact that they finally came out with the app. It'll be in the show notes. The book teaches you all the tools that are used in the app, why you would use them, the science behind it, all of the, the information that I know you guys like the app, puts it all in. Play. The app, all you have to do is every morning after you have your HRV score, you put that into the app and then it prompts you to do certain. Breath practices throughout the day and night, and it'll show you, you know, this one's great for morning. This one's great for morning and night. This one's great for all day long. Or only do this one in the morning. Only do this one at night. The science behind breath work is so cool you guys, so, so unbelievably. Cool. I'll get to that in a second. I do wanna share episode 13, this, this had the three breaths practices in it. It's four sets of breathing and you're doing three breaths per set, so 12 breaths total. The first set, you're going to fill the center of your body with light. The second set, you're gonna move that white light to the extents of your physical body. The third set you clean and heal your energetic bubble, that aura level I was talking about earlier. And then the fourth set, you're going to expand that white light to the extents of your energetic bubble. There's also a really, really fast way to do it. But first, figure out how to do it this way because breath it's so powerful. Nasal breathing increases nitric oxide. Nitric oxide relaxes blood vessels and blood vessels that are relaxed. Lower stress reactivity breathe to reduce your stress and your stress response. When you're in a crazy situation, you sigh right before you respond. You just put yourself into a much calmer, cooler, and less reactive place. Lengthened exhales. Activate the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. That rest, digest place longer. Exhales, activate it. Automagically I. Breath resets your CO2 tolerance, which stabilizes anxiety and emotional overwhelm. CO2 matters. I know that we've been taught that CO2 is something we want to expel from our body and it needs to go, no, we actually wanna use it to our advantage. That is what the Ex Oxygen Advantage book will teach you. Breathing properly, which means almost always out of in and out of your nose because your nose can regulate temperature and things moving in and out of your airways by those little hairs that exist in there. Breathing properly stimulates the diaphragm also where the vagus nerve passes through to all of your organs below the diaphragm. Which also helps you access rest, digest. That vagus nerve is the key to rest, digest, and again, if you breathe properly, you can actually lose weight by dropping cortisol, weight gain, controlling your appetite naturally, and boosting your metabolism. You learn all of that in the Oxygen Advantage book. It's so cool. Yeah, you can lose weight by breathing properly. Hmm. The Woo behind this breath is your life force. This is your Qi, your prana, your spirits. That one I'd never heard before, but thank you Chad, GPT, for dropping that one in. This is your energy, your qi, your prana. Those are your energy in your body and different systems. Harness breath. If you do a yoga practice, pranayama, you're working with your prana. If you do Qigong or some sort of, uh, movement practice like that, you are working with your qi. Those are the same things. Conscious breathing pulls your soul fully into your body. Especially after sleep or stress. Hence why this is one of my wake up tools. If you're gonna build your own practice for morning, which I highly recommend that you do, and we'll get to this also. Breath has to be a part of it. It has to be a part of it because it helps exhale and release stagnant energy. It helps bring in rest, digest, right first thing in the morning. It puts you into that sweet spot of not wanting to rip other people's heads off. Breath is the most direct way to realign your body and clear emotional residue. Emotional residue. Yeah, it lingers from day to day and you can just blow it away with your breath. So breath is the only part of your autonomic nervous system. You can consciously control. Your breath sends the memo. We're safe, we're present, and we're in the body. Something you absolutely wanna do first thing in the morning. Number five, ah, this one is, is kind of a dealer's choice, but the one that I choose every single morning for the last. Year and a half is the body scrub. This is physical sensation to activate the peripheral nervous system, not the parasympathetic nervous system, but it does that too. But this is for the PNS, the peripheral nervous system. This is the last thing I do to reset my nervous system before

8: 28:31

00 AM It's the body scrub. It looks like you're taking a shower. With your clothes on, you scrub from your feet up to your head, touching every part of your body. Don't miss a spot 'cause we want your body to know where it's at in space. I do this without getting in the shower with my pajamas on still while I'm sitting there watching the sunrise after I've taken my HRV score to wake up my PNS. So the science, you're stimulating lymphatic flow first thing in the morning. Your lymph has become stagnant overnight. You have hopefully been still most of the night on a horizontal plane and. When we wake up, gravity changes, we get vertical, and now we need to stimulate the lymph in our body. I have had struggles with my lymphatic system for my entire life, probably, and it's finally getting into a better control, and part of that is because of this body scrub lymph. Active and flowing decreases inflammation boosts the detox pathways. You want your detox pathways to be open like your armpits. That's a detox pathway. This activates superficial nerve endings that calm the sympathetic system. You're touching every part of your body. Nerves are where you touch, and when you touch, you activate the peripheral nervous system in your brain. Now your body knows where it's at in space and actually moves better. Thank you Barrett Smith for teaching that that one to me two or three years ago. He was one of the first episodes of this podcast. Go check that one out. If you wanna learn more from him on the nervous system and what he does for people in the world. I truly appreciate what he taught me. As we add friction to our body, we increase the vagal tone and sensory grounding. Vagal tone. You've already learned about the vagus nerve. It's super important to activate this, so it brings us into that parasympathetic rest digest state. Vagal tone is part of your vagus nerve. It is the frequency that your vagus nerve moves at, and the higher vagal tone, the better you are at quickly getting into a parasympathetic state. And then the last thing it does it, it helps integrate your body map. Your brain knows, like I've said a couple of times, where you are and it reassures you you're safe. That's the reason we wanna know where our body is at in space. It also prevents us from running into furniture or doors or walls. Those of us who have A DHD tend to have this problem, and this would help prevent you from doing those things. Here's the woo scrubbing, clear, stagnant, or sticky energy off the skin's field. Your first energetic boundary. It's not your first energetic boundary. It's the last one before it gets into your body. The other energetic boundaries are your ORIC level, which we've already talked about. The next Woo piece, it resets your aura after a night of dreaming in that subconscious state where you often process emotions that aren't yours. That's right. A lot of what your dreams are, if you remember your dreams, can be other people's could also be yours. If you set the intention before you go to sleep, that you want to dream about yourself in some state or clear out something of yours. Yeah. We'll get into that another episode. This one's an energetic, I'm back in my body ritual. Yeah. You already know. You, you heard the body loves to be acknowledged crazily enough. It's the tactile devotion. You are touching each part of your body saying, oh, I, I feel you. I see you. Most of you, there's parts you can't see very well unless you have a mirror and I like you. It creates a different energy with your relationship to your body and that that's been huge for me. Also, the recognition that as we age, our body still changes. It's not just, oh yeah, we got to this height and now our body's not gonna change anymore. So where it's at right now, today, I love you body. It gets me into my body faster than caffeine could. I don't do coffee, but tea, it's like brushing off everyone else's energy before the world ever even gets to me before my daughter wakes up, but before I have to go to work, any of those things, it's so fabulous. So you've learned the five resets that cost $0.

And can be done before 8: 33:41

00 AM or for me before 7:00 AM and they regulate your nervous system and ground your sensitive body. So important. So let's rehash them. My five are sunrise to regulate circadian rhythms and do some Dawn patrol number two, morning prayer. Thank you for another good day. Sacred parents. This is HRV, physiology and Divine Alignment. Number three, the HRV check. This is the Autonomic Insights and Energetic Weather Report. Number four, my breath practice for vagus nerve stimulation and soul embodiment. And number five is my body scrub, the lymphatic health regulator and Aura Clearing. No supplements, no fancy gadgets, just earth breath intention and sensation. If. You are going to try to build your own version of this. I highly, highly, highly recommend, including number one, the sun. Number two, prayer or affirmation. Number three, your HRV check. Because that actually gives you data on how your day is going to be. Number four, breath work. And then number five, some movement practice that gets you into your body. There are several that you can do. Uh, my favorite is the body scrub. You can also do some, um, arm swings or tapping or. So many, so, so, so many options. You can look up nervous system regulation on Google or chat EBT, and they will give you a bunch of options if you try even one of these tomorrow. Tell me which one you believe will be the biggest impact for you. And if you want deeper nervous system, decoding personalized to your sensitive body, grab a body scan. The link is in the show notes. Here's to a steadier. More grounded, more aligned. You see you next week. Yay. You made it to the end of the episode. Good job. Now go share this with your friends. Go like, subscribe, leave me a review. Let me know that you like what's happening here on the Gutsy Chick Podcast. And if you're a female high performer with mysterious chronic health condition. Go check out the gutsy chick quiz so you can find out what might be holding you back from healing. And if you want more on what I do with my clients and my blog and any podcast that I've been a guest on, go to body whisper healing.com. Thanks for listening.