Julie Hutchinson
Appearances
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
80% of primary care doctor visits are related to stress, irritable bowel syndrome, arrhythmias, anxiety, heart palpitations, all that stuff. So the key is how do I start self-regulating? Because you have a lot of young entrepreneurs that work with you and they're driven.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And so subconsciously, all we have to do is think a thought, stimulus, and then the response of the body. And when that happens, we get the jolt of energy. And before you know it, you become addicted to it. And you're addicted to a life you don't even like anymore.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And you build your level of resilience. Yeah. It's like you've been there, you've handled it, you know it wasn't the end of the world.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Yeah. And I think when we have those experiences, because they say resilience is a capacity to prepare for and recover in the face of adversity.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I can't believe this person broke up with me.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Let go of it.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, it starts with our thoughts. So the mindset is really key. But the other thing that I think a lot of people don't talk about is how the body stores what you think. Because the language of the body is emotion. The language of the brain is thoughts. So it's thoughts and emotions go together. You've got to get those in sync.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And yeah, I was just talking to somebody last night in our mastermind group who said, I only get three hours of sleep a night, three to four. And I'm like, how do you do it? Oh, I've always done it. And I thought, you're young. You know, eventually it's going to catch up. Sleep is key. Yeah.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And what we notice is that a lot of people that are stressed out, once they get to bedtime, they've been going, going, going all day and they're exhausted, but they can't fall asleep. Hmm. Part of the reason that they can't fall asleep is because especially as entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, you're making decisions all day. Your brain is in what we call a high beta brainwave.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And when you're thinking, thinking, thinking, the natural progression in sleep is to go from beta to alpha to theta into delta. If you're trying to fall asleep and you're trying to solve problems or you forgot to do something and then the body is feeling anxiety or worry or overwhelmed, you're in this state and then the body's like, I can't sleep.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I'm designed to keep you alive and I feel a threat just by your thought alone. So you may fall asleep out of exhaustion, but oftentimes what I hear people say is, I'll wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I can't get back to sleep.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And then they go right back into the high beta brainwaves and it is virtually impossible to fall asleep because you've got to go down into the alpha, into the theta and wire the brain.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Great way to say it. And for all the athletes out there, if you start tracking your workouts, if you work out in the morning, notice how strong you are after a good night's sleep versus how weak you are after a terrible night's sleep. It will drastically affect how much you can lift. I've noticed that.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, you know what's interesting about what you said about sleep is I know you as a very, very high energy person. Like, I've never seen you slow down, really. And I was asking myself yesterday, I mean, you're just going, going, going, and your energy is so high. I was like, how does he do it? Well... The answer lies in your sleep, right? That's a big piece of it in your mindset.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, I think the main shift is because so many of us are so driven. A lot of CEOs and high performers are type A personalities. And we have this mindset that if we just do more, we're going to achieve more. But we're not managing our energy in the process. And so what happens is we just go, go, go, go until we burn out.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Research has just shown, I mean, that is where our brains recharge. It's like the cleaning process. We go and we clean our brain, we clean our body. What we don't process during the day, we process at night. Sleep is so important.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Yeah, well, since we're on the sleep topic, it's been such a key point to a lot of people that I work with. We just launched a sleep course. We just launched it.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
We're actually just launching it tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And we did it because so many people are having trouble sleeping. We talk about the brain waves. We talk about the nervous system. It's what a lot of the other sleep experts are not talking about. They're talking about supplements and other things. We're talking about the internal state.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And so if you want to learn more about us, check us out on coreperformance.us. You can email me julieh at coreperformance.us. We can get you the link for that sleep course. We're going to have it on our LinkedIn, my LinkedIn profile on Instagram. And then do you want me to talk about some of the other stuff that we do? Okay. So we have something called the Resilient Transformation Academy.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
It's for leaders and executives to learn how to get out of that survival overwhelmed state. Everybody gets a biofeedback device on their phone. We give you data interpretation of your biofeedback. We tell you where your nervous system is, and we build you out a personalized roadmap to get you from survival state to flow state. And so you get all kinds of stuff.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
You get group calls that we have with all the other executives. You get one-on-one transformation coaching, access to our membership website and your biofeedback device and your personalized roadmap to get you from point A to point B. We guarantee the results, but here's the catch. It's not for everybody. There's an interview process. We got to know that we're a right fit.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And we don't take just anybody because our results are so high. We're committed to getting results for people that are committed to doing it.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
It's work. It's not going to happen by magic. So that's our first course. Then the second course is all about the neuroscience of change. And that is our mastermind. And then we have a longer program called Becoming Supernatural. And it's based on the quantum field. It's based on learning how to access the quantum field and consciousness.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And you're learning how to create versus going to do, do, do, do all the time. Yeah. You're creating and learning the state of being and holding particular frequencies. And that's the key because we're nearly 100% energy. And so we teach people how to embody those frequencies.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
When you start to learn the self-regulation techniques that I'm going to teach you today is you can be driven, but you can also find that flow state. We've all been in the zone, but I ask people, well, how do you get in the zone? What we teach you is scientifically how to get in the zone anytime, anywhere.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And then when we burn out, we're like, well, that's just part of being a CEO or a high performer. It's just kind of expected energy. And in reality, that's the old way of doing it. The new way of doing it is start managing your energy instead of managing your time.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I don't think I have. Is that is that what it's called? The Ant-Man movie?
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, it's something that you just said a minute ago, and I'm going to touch on that, and then I'll build onto it from there. You said, I never had that problem, but Rudy, you're still pretty young.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Oh, exactly.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I'll just tell you a quick story. So I have a client who is in their late 50s and he was telling me, well, I have high blood pressure, but my life is great. I don't have a lot of stress. I have this great job. I'm a Vistage coach and I'm a consultant for other people. My family life is great. And I said, well, how was your life the last 25 years?
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And he said, I was running companies and I was selling them and I was stressed out. And I said, well, that's the challenge is that you spend so many years being stressed out, but now you have this really great life.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
But you wired your nervous system for go, go, go, go, otherwise known as fight or flight. And when you wire your nervous system like that, it's going to break down eventually because what we see is 80% of primary care doctor visits are related to stress. Mm-hmm. irritable bowel syndrome, arrhythmias, anxiety, heart palpitations, all that stuff.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And so if we've been running, running, running at that pace for a long time, we're going to start breaking down. So the key is how do I start self-regulating? Because you have a lot of young entrepreneurs that work with you and they're driven. When you start to learn the self-regulation techniques that I'm going to teach you today is you can be driven, but you can also find that flow state.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And when you can do that, you're managing the internal chemistry of the body that helps you remain healthy in the state of flow, helps your brain work better, and helps everything function better.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
You're an athlete. I'm an athlete. Probably a lot of people that are listening to this are athletes. We've all been in the zone, but I ask people, well, how do you get in the zone? And they usually say, oh, I slept good the night before. I had a good meal or something like that. What we teach you is scientifically how to get in the zone anytime, anywhere.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And when you can do that, you're managing the internal chemistry of the body that helps you remain healthy in the state of flow, helps your brain work better and helps everything function better.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Yeah. Great. Great question. So I was a driven person and I was just I kept climbing the corporate ladder. And then at one point I end up I was a fifth employee of a company in Austin, Texas, by the name of Sonio Solutions. We were a creative services agency.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
We bootstrapped the company, and we said, we're not going out for any funding, and we're going to work with the biggest clients in the world. And at that time, it was IBM, 3M, Dell, Hewlett-Packard. I joined the team, fifth employee of the company, and our goal, being one of Inc. 's 5,000 fastest companies, we did it. And we did it in three years.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And it all sounds great and I had a great life and I had a great car and a boat and a house and threw parties all the time, but inside I was breaking down. And when I went to the doctor, the doctor said, your adrenal glands are shot, your cortisol, stress hormone, cortisol levels are through the roof. And here's the traditional way of dealing with it, which a lot of us know is taking medications.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I didn't want to take medications. I already had a pretty good diet. And I started to just figure out my way. I became a yoga instructor. I became a living food chef. I was a living food raw foodist for five years thinking that was going to fix it. But when I went to IBM's headquarters, I couldn't strike a downward dog or eat an apple and expect my stress to go away.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I had to find something different. That's when I discovered biohacking. And when I discovered biohacking, I went for HRV biohacking because the heart is the master switch inside the body. 90% of the information is sent to the heart, from the heart to the brain, and 10% is sent down through the vagus nerve.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
So if your heart is beating like this because you're under pressure all the time, it's sending a signal to the brain that tells the brain, danger, danger, I'm in fight or flight. So you're living in that. And then the prefrontal cortex, which is where we make our decisions, we call this the CEO of the brain, it shuts down. So we can't think as clearly.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Because when you're in stress, it's not a time to solve problems or get creative. Right. And so when I started to learn how to biohack and I could go give big presentations at IBM's headquarters or Dell's headquarters to big vice presidents of the company, if I felt nervous, I could start biohacking, connect on a deeper level.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I'm like, I'm regulating my nervous system on the fly and nobody knows I'm doing it. My sales went through the roof. My relationships got better. I started sleeping through the night. I felt better. I'm like, why isn't anybody else teaching this? So that's how I got into it.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, first one is awareness. And I say that because our bodies and brain operate like a computer and they are a record of the past. And so our brain is a storage and recognition system. So what we think about, we fire and wire neurons in the brain, what we feel, what we experience, we carry that inside of our bodies. Now, what science has shown is that 80% of our thoughts are negative.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Can't, I don't want to, it's too hard. Do you know what percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts as yesterday and the day before and the day before? Any idea?
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, and I will say this because I do know this about you, Rudy. You grew up with Olympians as parents. So not a lot of us have Olympians as parents. And if you're an Olympian, you're probably going to have some pretty good thoughts, right? However, most of us grow up in doubt and fear. Childhood. It's since childhood. It's indoctrinated into us.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
It's indoctrinated in whether, you know, if you go to a Catholic school, you're taught that you're a sinner, right? And you're taught that we're not powerful beyond all measure. And we compare ourselves to other people. You know, it's like, I'm not good enough because that person is better than me. And so the thoughts, I mean, look at our language. I can't, I don't want to, it's too hard, whatever.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Why did that person do it to me? I'm a victim. It's just kind of in consciousness.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
I think it's the whole world.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Yeah, because you've got to unwire the thoughts. If we're like a computer, it's kind of like programming, right? We have to break those habits. We have to break those thoughts. And the cool thing about it is what we teach is neuroplasticity. Because neuroplasticity, you can change your brain at any age. It doesn't matter how old you are.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
You just have to have the conscious awareness of what you're thinking. And when you think thoughts, we talk about firing and wiring. You're firing and wiring neurons. And the more you fire and wire them, they get down in the subconscious. And unless we become aware of what's happening in the subconscious, like I'm scared or a lot of people are doing social media, but they don't want to be seen.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
You've got to break those thoughts. I'm comfortable being seen. It's okay for me to be seen. And when you break, we call it pruning negative thoughts. You literally can unwire old patterns that you've been thinking and feeling for a long time. Now, the language of the brain is the thoughts. The language of the body is feelings. They go hand in hand.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
We can break those habits that we've been accustomed to. We can rewire, refire new positive thoughts and new positive emotions.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
They say the gut is the second brain. We haven't gotten into that yet. But I always say yet because... You never know where we're going to go growing and expanding.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
Well, when you first learn it, you want to learn it with your eyes closed because we want to take our stimulus off the outside world because it's kind of hard to feel it if you have all the stimulus. So what we teach people is, first of all, where you put your attention is where you put your energy.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
So when you can shift your attention to your heart, that's the key because the heart is the master switch of the body. So you shift your attention to your heart and you start to do some breathing techniques. And when you start doing this, what we call heart-focused breathing, you can change the pattern of the heart from like an erratic pattern to a smooth, what we call a coherent pattern.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
So heart-focused breathing is the very first thing that we teach people. When you become aware of that and you can move it into a coherent state, Then we bring in emotions. And the reason that we bring in emotions is because a lot of our emotions are operating on the subconscious level. Doubt, fear, shame, guilt over past stuff that we've done.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
When you can shift those emotions to higher frequency emotions, love, peace, joy, calm. Then we start to shift how the nervous system is feeling and bringing it into what we call a state of coherence. Now, here's the tricky thing about that. I mean, that's the basic technique that we teach. But the tricky thing about it is... We can get addicted to stress. We can get addicted to emotions.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
So for those people that are listening, you might want to think about, like, have I been worried about finances for more than a year? Do I have guilt or shame over a past decision? Maybe I'm angry at somebody from a divorce or a relationship. If you've been feeling those emotions... For six months or longer, you very well could be addicted to those emotions because the body gets addicted to it.
Living The Red Life
Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
And then it gets addicted to the chemical state of the rush of adrenaline that's coming through the adrenal glands and the cortisol. And you get that jolt of energy and the body feels alive and awake. It's like having an afternoon monster drink or a Red Bull or something. And then the body's like, I got to have more of that because it feels good.