Sound, Rhythm, and a Needed Pause

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Sound, Rhythm, and a Needed Pause

The podcast takes a short, intentional pause while sharing a simple sound based tool to support nervous system regulation and reset.

Lauren offers a gentle reminder that pausing is not a disruption, but a necessary part of regulation and sustainable leadership. As the podcast takes a short break, she encourages listeners to consider where they, too, might need to slow down and create space for reset.

She shares a simple, accessible tool using sound based regulation like binaural beats or isochronic tones to help shift the nervous system from chaos to calm in just a few minutes. With an emphasis on both reactive and preventative use, the invitation is to build small, intentional moments of steadiness into daily life, supporting a more grounded and regulated way of showing up.


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Transcript:

Lauren Spigelmyer: Hey everyone, it's been, I think what, two weeks now since we have sent out a new episode. So, I'm back on here to talk about a quick reset. We're talk a little bit about sound and rhythmic support in relationship with the nervous system. And then I'm gonna introduce what are some next steps for us and the podcast and what we're gonna be doing moving forward. So, I'll just start off by saying that Five Ives is gonna take a... pause on the podcast just for a bit. But before doing so, I'm going to share I'd say like one practical tool, but it's kind of like a couple practical tools wrapped into one, that you can use immediately if you are in leadership, if you are on frontline, but something to down-regulate your nervous system really fast, both reactively and preventatively. So, sound-based regulation supports, and I think like an alternative for those of you that are like It's your therapist or people are telling you, maybe not therapist, friends, whoever, like take some deep breaths, do some meditation. Like, don't know, work for all of us, because a lot of us are too dysregulated to even feel like we can access this, those things. So, this will give you an alternative that might be easier to access or more fun or just a better fit for you.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so, here's, like, the breakdown. There are some things going on in the background of not necessarily Five Ives, but my own personal life, that's preventing me from being, like, as present as I'd like to be at the moment, at least for like the next two months. So, I'm gonna take a pause from the podcast from recording new content, but you all have oodles of episodes on the podcast hosting platform, whether it's whatever you listen to it on, Apple Play or Spotify or whatever. If you listen through our website, you can go back. If you don't listen to our website, you can go check it out on our website. There's a podcast page. It's got hundreds of episodes on there about all these topic areas. And before the podcast was hosted on our Five Ives page, it was actually hosted on thebehaviorhub.com. So just thebehaviorhub.com. There's a podcast page and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of episodes on there. That was a little bit more geared towards education, the field of education, but still really relevant to anyone who has kids at home, works with kids in any form. So, you can also pop over there and see all of those old episodes and all of the old episodes are on any of the podcast players that you all have access to. But we are just going to pause for a little bit, take a short break, not recording new content, not full stop, just a pause. And if you're, if you've been listening for a while, probably talk about pauses a lot and breaks and resetting and nervous system regulation. So, pauses don't think this is like an interruption. It's just a part of getting back to regulation and a place that feels like you can produce from like a clear mind. So, before we take our pause for a couple of weeks and we're going to readjust to this summer and see where we're at this summer and see how and what it looks like moving forward with the podcast. But again, you still have tons of old content that you can recycle back up. But we felt it important to leave you with something small and practical before we step back for just a little bit.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, we're gonna talk about one of what I feel like is the most underutilized regulation tools, which is sound. So specifically, I'm gonna talk about something called, you might have heard, binaural beats. Binaural beats have been around for a little while, but they've been kind of recycling up. Like, I saw the, if you're familiar with the Calm app, a meditation app. is doing this series. They're trying to get parents to, I guess, be in like a study where they're eliding binaural beats for regulation of parents in responding to kids' behaviors, which I thought was so interesting. And then the one that might be newer to you is isochronic tones. And I'll talk about what each one is, but I will also keep it really simple because even hearing that, like, binaural beats, isochronic tones, probably like, oh my gosh, this is going to be so sciencey and so heavy. I can't listen to this. I promise I'll break it down. I'll keep it really short. It'll be really easy and I think you'll really enjoy it. So, essentially our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment and honestly what they're looking for, what they're, what it is looking for, what it's scanning for is safety, is patterning, is rhythm. Like the nervous system loves rhythm. Rhythm is regulating. So, it's looking for patterns in the form of, or creating a rhythm. It's looking for safety and often that come in rhythms too. But even think about, like, how you breathe. That's rhythmic. Your heart rate, that's rhythmic. A lot of movement that we do, walking, that's rhythmic. It's not by chance that biologically a lot of things that we do or that exist in, like even cycles, like think about like circadian rhythms and like your sleep cycle is like, all of those things are rhythmic. Rhythm is regulating. So, one of the fastest ways to influence your internal regulation state or dysregulated state is through external rhythm or regulation. So, this is where Isochronic tones, binaural beats come in.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, let me kind of break down what these are first and then we'll talk about how to use them. Binaural beats. If you've heard of these before, they're just two slightly different tones that play in each of your ears. So, if they're two different types of tones or two different, like, beats of tones, you would need headphones because you would need to hear the... the different tones in each of your ears. If you were just listening to like a, I mean, you can play by an all beats probably on like a speaker, but it won't have the same effect because you need the headphones to play the different tones in each of your ears. A speaker can't play two different tones in your ears. But what happens is your brain processes the difference in the tones and begins to follow that frequency. So, it's almost like a pattern disruptor. It's like chaos, madness, my brain is going wild. And it hears these tones. and it starts to like adjust to them and it disrupts the madness going on inside your brain. I like binaural beats but I don't like the restriction of having to have headphones and I don't mind wearing headphones, I just don't always have them with me. So, my preference is actually isochronic tones. These are evenly spaced pulses of sound and it's often in the form of beats like steady beats. and they play on anything. So, you can do headphones or not headphones, speaker, not speaker, phone, whatever it is. But it's basically, both are designed to take you from like a busy mind, crazy mind, chaotic mind to a very focused state. So if you want focus, that's gonna work for you. Or if you're really tense or defensive, it's gonna move you towards a calm state. If you're feeling scattered and disorganized, it's gonna help to ground you and steady you a bit. That's, I think those things are people, anybody wants that, whether you're... You're working or a stay athome mom, you're dealing with kids, you're dealing with adults, like whatever, whoever, whatever, everybody wants those things. So, the biggest thing is they can be reactionary. So, like you can feel chaotic and then use them to down regulate, or you can know that like a chaotic period in your life is coming up or create chaotic like time in your day is coming up and you preventatively use them to like pre-regulate so that you don't get dysregulated. That's the ultimate goal, like, recognizing that you're dysregulated and needing something to regulate.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, great. we at least are self-aware enough to know that we're dysregulated and we need something to regulate, awesome. But like level up from that is, I know this period of time is gonna cause me dysregulation, so I'm gonna pre-regulate to keep my temperature emotionally down before I even go into that thing so that I don't get as dysregulated, if at all dysregulated in the thing. Like. Monday morning, maybe your inbox like always stresses you out. Maybe it's a big meeting you have on a certain day, whatever it may be. Maybe it's like annual review, quarterly review. You these are all work-based things. If you're talking about home-based things, it could be your morning. Maybe mornings with kids feel chaotic. So how can you initially reactively use it and then eventually preventatively use it? The biggest thing is you have to make it super practical. So anybody can use it, leaders, people on frontline staff, teams of people in meetings, before meetings, during meetings, after meetings. You don't necessarily need like a full routine to utilize it. You just need a small snippet of time. I would say even like one to three minutes, three minutes, two, three minutes, probably the sweet spot, five minutes even better. But even if you just do it for one minute, that's enough time to start to down regulate you. I'd say two or three minutes is more of like an ideal time period. But here's the... like practical part of it. If it feels like a lot of work to get to it or to access it or to do it, you probably won't utilize it. So one, it is helpful to pair it with a routine that already exists. So, like, if you do something before meetings, like, integrate this before the meeting. Ah, If you come to work on Monday morning and, like, whatever you do before you open your inbox, like integrate this before you open your inbox. If the mornings are tough, try and set your alarm for five minutes earlier and do this before the kids get up. But the biggest thing is you have to have it like set in place before you're utilizing it, like, I just use Spotify. Just search Spotify for isochronic tones. I saved a few tracks or I saved a few playlists and that's what I use because I know that when I need it or when I'm preventatively using it, I can just bring up my Spotify app. I can go to my library and I click on it. Sometimes I like to also put things on my phone that's ,like, it's in my like Windows tab. Like, it's in my web browsing tab so I can just like go click on the web browser and bring it up in as few clicks as possible. You don't have to go digging for this or go finding it. But I think one of the things I really love about it versus like breath work is like if you're utilizing breath work, one, I have to, like, actively do something with this. You're you're not necessarily actively doing something. You're somewhat passively. I don't even say passive. You're listening. So, I like that it feels like already less resistance, less work to if I'm doing breath work that I don't remember how to do, I do, like, look it up or bring up the video or whatever it is for this. All I have to do is just like bring up the track and hit play. So, it's an easier lift for me. I don't have as much resistance to this as I would to like meditation or um breath work. For some reason, just the rhythm is like instantly regulating for me and it's such an easy thing to access, but make sure you do have it. pre-planned, like, go into Spotify or whatever music, Apple music, whatever you use and search it or search a YouTube track or whatever it is and like save it or make it very easily accessible so you don't have to take multiple steps in the moment to get to it. The biggest thing is while you're doing it, because it's going to come from a device of some sort, don't multitask, don't text, don't email, don't just, no scrolling, just sit and be present. Maybe close your eyes, breathe when thoughts come in, let them go back out and just focus on the rhythm. Like just even as 30 seconds, like just allow your body to zone out, to just take a break. It's about giving your nervous system this, like, a disruptor that resets the pattern so the pattern that we are following isn't chronic and constant stress. Like, disrupt the pattern, go in this direction, down regulate instead of staying stressed and just going up, up, up, up. Most of us are trying to like think our way into regulation. That's the problem is we need to focus on something in our body to downregulate. And the nervous system does really well with like sensory-based music, hearing, auditory. Those things are sensory-based. So, this gives us something that's repetitive, something that's predictable, something that's easy, something that's somewhat passive, that we can activate our sensory system and shift the pattern.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay. I would say if you are a leader, this matters even more than frontline staff. mean frontline staff, want them to be regulated to work with whoever they're working with. But for leaders, when you enter a room, your emotional state impacts that whole room. So, even if your staff is regulated and utilizing this, if you're not, your potentially dysregulated state is going to on some level, dysregulate your team. It's really important for leaders to think about how can I use this and shift my state a bit. It's not about being perfectly calm all the time. It's just small shifts towards steadiness, groundedness. And that changes how you show up. I mean, it changes your tone. It changes your pacing. It changes your clarity of thought. It changes your problem solving. Like when you are downregulated and you are in your thinking brain and you're not in your emotional brain. All those things change and people are paying attention, at least on a subconscious level, to your pacing, to your tone, to your clarity, to your problem solving, to your leadership, to your state, all those things. What I like about it is it doesn't take like an hour to do it. I'm like, go to a health spa. I just need to turn on my ice chronic tones. Just a few intentional minutes to down-regulate.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Okay, so I'm gonna challenge you to right now pause and either go save some isochronic tone playlists or binaural beat playlists go to YouTube go to Spotify go to Apple music or whatever the heck it is that you use. Someday Jessica and I will eventually put some isochronic tones and binaural beats on our YouTube channel, but we're not there yet. So, as we take a short pause from producing new podcast content, I want to encourage you to take your own pause and not necessarily step away from what you're doing because you probably don't have the opportunity or chance to do that but in building in small moments of regulation like this using ice chronic tones or binaural beats or something else that works for you. But small pauses throughout your day, throughout your week, throughout your month, throughout your life where your nervous system isn't just reacting, but it actually has a chance to like pattern shift and recalibrate and know that we will be back soon to let you know about our next steps. And when we return, we will continue building on this nervous system and regulatory and staff sustainability work. Helping you lead. Helping you work, helping you live from a more regulated, steady, clarity-filled place. Until then, hope you can slow it down a little bit. Slow down your mind, slow down your body, slow down your brain. And I encourage you to take care of your nervous system. And I hope to see y'all, hear from y'all, be back with y'all really soon.


Categories: : Regulation Strategies

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