How to Shift Between Focus & Recovery States on Command

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. I’ve spent years learning to shift my own nervous system intentionally. So, when I found someone that mapped that exact skill, I had to get him on. My guest says you run on 2 modes, one where ideas arrive and you can see the whole board, and the other where you lock onto a target and you build. He teaches you how to move between them on command.

Nick Urban [00:01:17]:
Hess Adnani spent a decade building companies across Europe, and he says the deciding factor in his wins was the intentional state he worked from. Hess, welcome to the show.

Hess Adnani [00:01:29]:
Thank you for having me on, Nick. I think with the intro that you gave about me, I think I need to bring you on board.

Nick Urban [00:01:39]:
Take me into organic technology like I’m someone who’s never heard of it. What is it and what does it let someone do?

Hess Adnani [00:01:47]:
All right, so organic technology, this is something that I organically came across. So, When us entrepreneurs in general, we’re busy with what we’re doing. We’re not really looking internally that much. We’re looking mostly externally of what we need to do. What is our task list? What is our to-do list? What’s urgent? What fire we have to put out? So we sometimes forget about our internal state. And I did that for many, many years. I was just hustling, hustling without really checking up on myself. To see how I am.

Hess Adnani [00:02:24]:
So, recently, for the past few years, I’ve been looking internally more often because I realized that once you shift stuff internally within your system, then things automatically change in your external world. And it’s fascinating. For first time that I was testing these kind of concepts and practices out, it was so fascinating how fast your external world readjusts to what you’re changing internally. And I just had to study it. I just had to go through it and see how everything works within my internal system. And, this is where organic technology came out, the concept. It was when I knew that there are different dials within your own mind and brain and there are different dials within your nervous system. And usually, when you’re looking into these concepts, they’re separated.

Hess Adnani [00:03:22]:
You know, people talk about nervous system, sympathetic, parasympathetic states, and they work with the nervous system on their, on its own. And then some people talk about the state of mind, your task-positive network and default mode network. So that stays a topic of its own. However, I always found them connected to each other. I found them that they correlate and they work with each other to define your true state, internal state. And this happened actually when I was traveling through Central America. I was going from Mexico and I ended up in Costa Rica. I went to every country by land.

Hess Adnani [00:04:11]:
And what was happening, because my environment was changing rapidly, was that In every place I was going to, I noticed how the environment I was in was changing my internal state and how I feel and how I breathe, how I sound like, how I think. Everything was changing with my environment changing. And then something clicked in my mind. I was like, okay, the nervous system and your mind, the state of being of your mind, are connected. So I let that be. That was the beginning of the year. I let it be and I just let it rest and I didn’t do anything about it until beginning of summer, like May. I was walking to the gym and just this image of this X and Y-axis chart just popped in front of me and was like, hey, how about The y-axis is your nervous system state and the x-axis is your mind state.

Hess Adnani [00:05:15]:
And you put them together and then create quadrants. And those quadrants are your states of being. And then you can move between the quadrants to have different experience internally and externally. And this is what you mentioned at the beginning, the wise mode and the doer’s mode. So the wise mode being your parasympathetic default mode network quadrant on the x-axis moving to the left and y-axis moving downwards. And your doer mode is when you’re on the sympathetic nervous system state and on the task-positive network. So that is the quadrant that you mentioned. And yeah, and I just put them together and then I started practicing with different activations, I’ll call them.

Hess Adnani [00:06:05]:
So they’re like different practices that move you around the map, the X and Y-axis map, which I call the human operating system map. So intentionally you can change your entire internal state of being so that your external state can reflect and mirror your internal state.

Nick Urban [00:06:28]:
So you have a system where you break down the desirable states and you have a quadrant system so it’s easy to visualize figure out with an assessment that you’ve built, for example, where you currently are, how do you go about determining, you know what, I’m in the right state right this minute, or you know what, actually, I’d be better served if I was in a different state right now?

Hess Adnani [00:06:48]:
So, I’ll give you 2 pieces of information there, right? So, the first piece is that once you work with the system, or you just work in general, not with my system, with any nervous system regulation system or any state of mind practices, you’ll notice that your body and your mind behaves in a certain way that signals where you’re staying. So, for example, if you look at the nervous system, which is a more visible system that you can play around with, for example, myself, if I’m in parasympathetic mode, I notice that I talk in a deeper voice. I don’t twitch. I don’t move. I don’t have sudden moves. I walk slower. I talk slower. So these are my signals of where I am on the map, on the nervous system state.

Hess Adnani [00:07:49]:
I’m on the parasympathetic. If I notice that my voice is getting on a higher pitch, my legs keep shaking and I’m restless and I’m like, talking faster and really not finishing my sentences, going like that, then I know I’m at the sympathetic, high open sympathetic, and I need to regulate it down. So after, when you’re practicing with your states of being, you create your own signals and you know where you stand. But at the beginning, when you’re new to this, I created an assessment that you can take and And it can locate you where you are on a map so that you can quickly get to know where you are. But after, when you’re practicing a little bit, it gets easier to do it without an assessment. Just know where you are and where you want to be. So that was the first piece of information. The second piece is that depending on what’s happening in your life, you can actually decide and intentionally move to a state that you want to be.

Hess Adnani [00:08:52]:
And, that’s a powerful part of this practice because you take control of your life, of your state of being, and instead of getting dictated from your mind and your body of how you are on daily basis, you can actually be in a state that you desire to be. So, if you want to get stuff done, you can shift to the doer’s mode and get things done. And, if you just want to innovate, be creative, come up with ideas, Reflect, retreat. You can intentionally move to the wise mode and do that. But a secret there is that you can’t camp on these quadrants, otherwise weird things happen in your life, right? So you always go to a quadrant, you do what you need to do, either activate something or retreat and recover, but you always have to come back to the center. Where you’re not radically into a parasympathetic or sympathetic state or a task-positive or default network, default mode network state. So that is the 2 points I wanted to mention.

Nick Urban [00:10:03]:
Now, the task-positive and the default mode network state, what are those for people who’ve never heard of them?

Hess Adnani [00:10:10]:
Okay. So the task-positive is, it all relates to your brain. It all relates to your mind, right? The nervous system is your body. So put that aside for a second. It’s all about your mind. It’s when you focus on something. So the task positive is when you’re completely focused. Think of it like archery, when you’re like really focused at the aim that you wanna shoot and your mind is directed into that goal.

Hess Adnani [00:10:38]:
So that’s when your brain is at the task positive state network. The default mode network is when your attention completely opens up. You’re not focused on anything. You’re taking as much information as possible into your system, and there’s no goal. Think of it as receiving and executing. So, in the task positive, you’re executing. So, it’s an outward energy, it’s an outward attention. And in a default mode network, you’re actually receiving.

Hess Adnani [00:11:13]:
So, you can also, first time I put this together, I called it feminine and masculine. So, masculine would be the task-positive network, feminine would be the default mode network. But then people started confusing it with gender. So, I put that aside and I called it something else. But that’s how it is. It’s directed and open.

Nick Urban [00:11:35]:
Give me the before and after of this for you specifically. What did a hard day look like for you? Before you had the map that you’ve now built and now after that you have it established?

Hess Adnani [00:11:47]:
A hard day felt like I’m out of control. Not that being in control is that good, but it felt like things are happening to me that I have no control of. It felt that there is an external force that is affecting me, which I have no idea Why and how. And it felt like I’m getting bounced around like a ball between my days. And every day that I was waking up, I felt a little bit more tired than the day before. And each of these things that I just told you either relates to your nervous system, which is your body or your mind. And then sometimes Some of your superpowers, some of my superpowers felt like it’s not available on the go, on demand. So when I wanted to focus and really be like in doing a task and focus and laser focus and getting things done and going through, for example, my task list, I didn’t have that available to me.

Hess Adnani [00:12:56]:
I didn’t have that focus available. Or for example, I would wanted, just wanted to take a weekend off and just relax and just recover. I could not do that. My mind was, you know, it was so like nervous about getting things done and not letting me relax and recover the way I wanted for the weekend. So I wouldn’t be able to. So again, when I was coming back to work and when I was coming back to doing stuff that I was doing, everything felt heavier. Everything felt that It’s being forced and it’s not my volunteer, it’s not my decision and not my desire to do what I’m doing on a daily basis. However, when I figured this out, which again, when I say I figured it out, I have moments that I totally get lost again.

Hess Adnani [00:13:49]:
We’re humans, we make errors. So when I figured out and Understood that, hey, I can intentionally change states. And for example, with a couple of breathing exercises, visualization, or just humming, eye movements, whatever, tapping your body, all these exercises, you can shift your state, then things get a little bit easier. And you can intentionally move your state of being and be…

Nick Urban [00:14:21]:
So for various different activities and things people do on a regular basis, for example, we can take this interview right now. What are the different states that it would be desirable? Like, for example, where in the spectrum would I want to be right now for our interview?

Hess Adnani [00:14:36]:
So I would say your state and my state are, should be different because you, you need to keep the conversation going on the topic. and moving it forward and directing it somewhere. So you should be more towards your task-positive state of being of your mind. And I, as someone that is sharing the information, should be as open as possible so that I can, some people call it download, some people call it be creative and innovative so that I can get messages and deliver it to you and your audience. So I should be more towards my default mode network. As for the nervous system, your body, I would say both of us, it’s a good idea for both of us to be either in the middle or a little bit lower to the parasympathetic so that our messages don’t get distorted by an activated nervous system. Because once your nervous system is activated, you’re in a fight-flight, fight- mode, and that’s not a good place to communicate with the others.

Nick Urban [00:15:50]:
Yeah.

Hess Adnani [00:15:50]:
It would be on your parasympathetic state that you can really connect and communicate with people. So I would say if I stay on the regulated doer mode, wise mode, and then you stay at the regulated doer mode, that would be a good spot for both of us to be.

Nick Urban [00:16:11]:
Perfect. So if someone else is listening to this, perhaps they’re not in the middle of an interview right now. How do they figure out where it is that they belong? Because after you break it down, it might seem a little more clear, but in the absence of that, if I want to accomplish a to-do list, probably not going to want to be in the default mode network state as much as I would on the task-oriented side. But then what about other activities, other components of daily life?

Hess Adnani [00:16:35]:
You could, I mean, as I said, if you start practicing this, you get a hang of it. And you understand a little bit more about your own system. And that’s a beautiful thing to have, to get to know your own system and regulate and intentionally change your own state of being. That’s beautiful. I would say if I figure out to do that every day, every hour of the day, then I’m successful on this incarnation. But it just, you gotta break it down into like, if you don’t know how to, and if it’s a beginning for you, then you break it down into like your body and your mind, right? So if you look at the nervous system, if you’re at the sympathetic, you’re at the flight, fight and flight mode up there. You feel, back in the old times when we’re getting chased by animals, we would go to the sympathetic nervous system state. Escape, fight, whatever what we had to do, and then come back down and go to parasympathetics so we could recover and retreat and, you know, go back to normal.

Hess Adnani [00:17:51]:
So you can relate that to your daily life. Is this not that you’re getting chased by animals? You can say, all right, how is my body’s activity required by these activities at this moment? Do I need to run or do I need to sit down? Do I need to be alert? Like, for example, if you’re at the airport, you don’t wanna be in the parasympathetic because you’re gonna lose your flight. Like that kind of guesses, like what state do I need to be in my body? So that’s your nervous system. Then you evaluate Through being directed or being open? Do I need to be focusing on something and kind of ignore the rest of the things happening around me? Or do I need to be opening my awareness so that I can get all the information around me into my system, but not actually focusing individually on anything? So that’s, you can find an example for that as well of… How you can tell. So if you put these 2 together, then you can understand if you wanna be in the doer mode or the wise mode, because this is when your body and mind comes together.

Nick Urban [00:19:09]:
Is there rationale to spend more time in any particular one of those? For example, are most people stuck for most of their day in one of those quadrants, or is it very dynamic and varies too much by the individual?

Hess Adnani [00:19:23]:
It’s not a good idea, as I said, to camp in any of the quadrants because there are side effects that happen. So for example, if you stay too much in the doer mode, then you burn out. And that’s something very common with everybody nowadays happening because our society wants us, promotes us to be in the doer mode. They define success by you being in the doer mode all the time and not burn out. Yeah. But it’s impossible because you will burn out. So, and at the same time, if you stay in the wise mode for too long, then you feel like nothing gets materialized in your world. Nothing gets done.

Hess Adnani [00:20:06]:
And then you start stalling, you start getting a little bit agitated sometimes that nothing happens in your life and et cetera, et cetera. So that’s, you know, you get overwhelmed sometimes as well. So it’s not a good idea to stay there neither. And there are examples. So for example, if I mean, the easiest one would be like if you go to a… among entrepreneurs, among people that love Alex Hormozi, which I really like him too, but for when it’s needed, not all the time. It’s among that community, there’s a lot of burnout because people are stuck in the doer mode. And at the same time, for example, Recently, I was in Guatemala, in San Marcos, by Lake Atitlán, and it’s a very active spiritual and conscious community over there. And there’s a lot of practices like sound healing, yoga, ecstatic dances, stuff that are more towards the more wise mode.

Hess Adnani [00:21:13]:
And it’s great. I felt amazing because it was shifting my system, nervous system down. However, after a month, month and a half staying there, I was like, I need to get out of here.

Nick Urban [00:21:23]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Hess Adnani [00:21:24]:
It is like, I wanna do stuff, but my environment doesn’t allow me because my environment is within the wise mode. And that’s another thing I wanna mention is that you can intentionally move between the quadrants or your environment will move you as well. So if you hang out with entrepreneurs, most probably you’re automatically shifted towards The doer mode. And if you hang out at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, you’re automatically shifted down to the wise mode.

Nick Urban [00:21:58]:
Yeah. And so we’ve talked primarily so far about a short time horizon of a day. You want to oscillate between those throughout the day, depending on what’s going on. There’s other time horizons. You mentioned that you were in Guatemala at that spiritual retreat lake. For a month, that’s a longer time horizon than a day. Does it make sense to spend more time in one of those quadrants for a longer period of time and then to be able to go back and shift into the other? Because the other time horizon that we haven’t discussed yet is also where you’re naturally predisposed to staying. Like, what is your… what’s your default? What’s your baseline?

Hess Adnani [00:22:39]:
So you have smaller waves that you go through and you have bigger waves. So it’s like a shorter timeframe and longer timeframe. Like during the day you have a day and a night, but then you’re going through seasons, which is a longer term. And you can do, you can have different timeframes for being in different quadrants. So the reason that I intentionally decided to stay at the lake was that end of 2025 was a really, really active active period in my career, in the projects that I was doing, in the companies that I was running. So it was really, it was a lot asked from me on that period and I was burning out and I couldn’t do anything about it because I just had to do it. Sometimes you don’t have the option. I mean, you always have the options, but sometimes you don’t wanna have the options.

Hess Adnani [00:23:37]:
I didn’t see an option to get out of that. I was like, this is something that I wanna do. This is something I’m preparing for a long time. And I’m doing it and I want to finish it and I’m going to push the pedals until it’s done. But once it was done, I was like, okay, now I want to go somewhere and really relax and really retreat and recover. And because I spent several months being in the doer mode, then I decided to balance that out to being several months in Guatemala, for example, and Central America in general. I went Atitlán. I went to Ometepe in Nicaragua as well.

Hess Adnani [00:24:15]:
It’s a very, very chill island. However, that didn’t mean that every day I was entirely in the wise mode. I was still doing some work during the day, shifting to the wise mode a little bit, but I was intentionally staying… sorry, shifting to doers mode, but I was intentionally staying in the wise mode most of the time so that I can really, you know, bring that default state of my being down to where I want it to be.

Nick Urban [00:24:44]:
Yeah. I mean, that seems like there’s a lot of fascination with recovery these days. It’s the counterbalancing force to performance. In order to perform well over the long time span, you need to also recover well. So for someone who’s already aware of the importance of recovery, what extra dimension does this add to that topic?

Hess Adnani [00:25:01]:
There is, okay, something that popped in my brain right now in my mind is that Not all recovery periods are the same, right? For example, back in my old times, I was, my nervous system was activated. And even if I was going to recover for the weekend, because I was up there, I wasn’t able to recover. Although I was not doing anything. My system was pushing the pedals. So that’s something that I didn’t know before, that there is a quality of recovery. And the best you can do is that you lower your nervous system. Your nervous system usually plays a huge role in recovery and your mind. So you just deactivate your nervous system first and then spend time on recovery.

Hess Adnani [00:26:02]:
So, the solution that I found back in the time, the hack that I found was go to the spiritual retreats, go to the yoga retreats, go camp in the nature. So, I was creating an environment that would do that for me, would bring my nervous system level down. And, that was something, the hack that I figured out without even knowing any of this I just knew that when I go to that retreat, I feel great. Yeah. Then later on I found out, I was like, oh my God, you know, that was the environment that was bringing me down. But then now you can sit at home and intentionally change your state and recover fully for a couple of days if you want to, just by doing the exercises to lower the activity of your nervous system. I hope that answers your question.

Nick Urban [00:26:53]:
Yeah. So entrepreneurs notoriously have a difficult time doing that very thing, the unwinding, the relaxing, the actually shutting It’s like, okay, yeah, I’m gonna go relax. And it’s being on vacation, pulling out the phone, cranking out 1,000 emails in a day on vacation, and then getting an hour or two to actually relax. How are you able to navigate that? What made that less of an issue for you where you could actually, yes, still be in the task-positive direction a bit, but then also really having a net effect of recovering?

Hess Adnani [00:27:25]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:27:25]:
And regenerating.

Hess Adnani [00:27:28]:
So basically what I care about is how much yield come out of my work. And if I’m not recovered properly, then I spend more time getting the least amount of outcome of my work. And that is just, doesn’t make sense. And that’s even worse because you’re spending more and more and more and more hours Getting less and less and less and less outcomes. So what I see recovery is not that I’m losing time. That’s what a lot of us entrepreneurs get wrong, that recovery is losing time and losing productive time. But think of it like that. You’re hustling for 2 weeks, and then after 2 weeks of hustling, if you hustle more, your productivity level Goes down to 50%.

Hess Adnani [00:28:20]:
If you push another week, it will go down to 40, it will go down 30, 20. But if you take 2 or 3 days off and recover properly with your nervous system state lowered, with going to the wise mode, then when you go back to work, you’re back to 80%, you’re back to 90%. So, in the longer term, your outcome having breaks and recovery Will be more than if you hustled all that period. So once you lock that in, lock that belief in, and you have enough evidence that shows you that this happens if you do recovery, then it becomes a no-brainer. Then it’s like, it’s just a waste of time if you just keep hustling. At the end of the day is how much outcome comes out of you. And not only that is when you are too much in the task-positive mode and focused, what happens to you? You’re here, right? So you’re missing all the other things around you. And I’ll go a little bit metaphysical here.

Hess Adnani [00:29:28]:
Your universe communicates with you through messages, but the messages come through signals, but the signals are very subtle. So if you’re like that on your task, if you’re in a task-positive mode and your system is heightened, that means you’re in a doer’s mode. You don’t see any of these messages. You don’t see any of these signals. And what do these signals give you is shortcuts to where you wanna be, right? So a signal, I’ll give you an example. You’re driving in on the highway, there’s an advertising billboard. There’s a word on that advertising billboard that will trigger a thought in your brain that will give you a very efficient solution to a problem that you’re having on that day. But if you’re on task-positive, high-alert nervous system, you will miss that.

Hess Adnani [00:30:20]:
Or even when you read it, your brain is not open enough to be connecting different part of your brain to connect that word with the problem that you have or come up with an idea that can solve the problem, right? So this is also where recovery comes in. It kind of like, it opens you up. And not only that, when you come back to work, you’re more productive than before and you’re getting more things done. When you were in the recovery mode, you most probably came up with 3 ideas That will shortcut you into solving problems faster and growing faster. So it comes together. So if you have all of this in front of you and you’re given a choice of, hey, you can actually work this way that you find shortcuts, you work faster, whatever, with your recoveries, or just traditionally hustle. Which one would you choose?

Nick Urban [00:31:29]:
There’s a bit of a trap here. When I sit down to meditate, or sometimes when I’m doing nothing, intentionally scheduling some boredom in the calendar, at that moment, as soon as I begin, then a great idea, a flash of insight comes to me, and there’s a temptation that I have to actually dive in, to see it through, to start building it, to make sure that I like flesh it out fully and it feels like a trap to me because at that point I take myself out of the open state and I put myself into the task state, the doer state. What do you think about that? How do you make sure you don’t miss those signals? And at the same time, you actually are able to get the most out of them.

Hess Adnani [00:32:18]:
Right. So I do have the same thing as you have, right? So I have a very active mind, which sometimes is great. Like, oh my God, it’s my best friend, my best ally in life. But sometimes, you know, it bothers you. So I sometimes look at my brain as like a monkey. And a lot of the meditators and, you know, gurus also talk about the monkey. So, you got to satisfy, you shouldn’t fight your system. You should satisfy your system by tricking it.

Hess Adnani [00:32:52]:
So, what I do in these kind of states that I’m in a recovery mode, but I don’t want to get into the doer’s mode, but I have great ideas that is pumping me up to go do it, is I actually related it to a fear of forgetting. So, what I do is I write it down. I write it down for the next time that I’m in the doer mode. And that pleasure that it gives you, that satisfaction that, hey, it is materialized in a text format in your notebook that will be done later, then it kind of like, it goes out of your mind. You offload that on the paper and you let it be. Same as when you’re meditating, You get thoughts and you get loops. If you have a notebook next to you and just write that thing that came to your mind, it stays on the paper. I can guarantee you that it stays on the paper.

Hess Adnani [00:33:50]:
Try it next time. Just write it down. Just whatever thought that it says, write it down and say, I’m going to attend that later. And really attend it later. Be honest. Be like, follow up with yourself, like attend it later. But have this trust in yourself that once you write it down, you will attend it later. And that helps you completely offload that thought or that desire to be active and take it outta your way and you can go back to recovery.

Nick Urban [00:34:20]:
The other thing that I’m curious about is how you go about determining when you’re becoming less efficient and less productive, because you might be putting in more hours, but you’re getting less done. I think if people had a good way of understanding like in quantifying their performance, it’d be a much easier decision to make because for certain occupations, professions, there are pretty easy benchmarks. You can see like, how many deals am I closing? Okay, that’s going down. Probably a good time to step back. Or like how many cold calls people answering, whatever it is. But a lot of professions will not have clear metrics like that. So it makes understanding when efficiency is going down When you’re putting in more hours and getting less and less yield out of each of those hours, more difficult to understand.

Hess Adnani [00:35:05]:
I would say just checking with yourself of how you’re feeling at that moment. So have these little check-ins. How do I feel? Do I feel overwhelmed? Do I feel frustrated? That’s a pretty good signal that I should, that my productivity is gonna be much lower than when I’m fresh. And I don’t know if you know Bashar. He’s pretty popular on social medias as well. What he says is that one of the best indicators of state of being in your life and the path that you are following is when you’re excited about it. So always follow what excites you, that, and keep that feeling of excitement. As your due diligence of your moments.

Hess Adnani [00:35:56]:
So once you lose that excitement, most partly your productivity will lower as well. Once you start feeling frustrated, agitated, short-tempered, overwhelmed, maybe physically sometimes you feel it, maybe your attention just, you’re doing something on a computer and then you jump on your phone and then you just, Go to the fridge to eat something, you come back, when you’re like all over the place having some like ADHD kind of symptoms, even if you don’t have ADHD, if you have this kind of things, it usually shows that you’re just overwhelmed and you just need a break. You need either a short break or a longer break depending of your state of being when you come back from your break. So if you come back from a break and you still feel the same, either that was not a high-quality break or recovery, or it wasn’t that it was not long enough for you.

Nick Urban [00:36:58]:
In one of our previous conversations, you told me that when you’re speaking on stages, you don’t necessarily just go through and break down in detail all of the states to people first. You walk them through Things they can do. What happens in the rooms that you’re speaking when you’re taking people through this methodology and framework?

Hess Adnani [00:37:18]:
So what I do is, first of all, obviously talk about the concept very short at the beginning. Then I actually bring them to the middle state, to the center. I have this, I call everything that I do with them, I call them activations. So I have this activation which regulates both your mind and your body to go to the middle. And, I call it an invisible jacket. You got to catch me on stage to know exactly what it is. But, through this activation, we actually create an invisible jacket, which is a regulated state of being. And, whenever they need to regulate, they just remember that invisible jacket, they wear it, and they go back to the regulated state.

Nick Urban [00:38:02]:
To help people understand what an invisible jacket is, what is it you’re actually doing with them?

Hess Adnani [00:38:07]:
Okay. So, it’s… all right, I’ll give you a very short form of it. So, it’s usually when people feel something through memory, they embody that feeling at that moment once the memory is repeating. So, what I do is it’s similar to NLP as well. So, that’s… NLP is more physical. You put anchors on your body. That’s different. But what I do is like I take them through some Familiar great feelings.

Hess Adnani [00:38:37]:
So, I take them through an amazing feeling when they’re in the doer mode and an amazing feeling when they’re in the wise mode, and I merge them together. And I tell them that whatever they feel in their body, I want them to imagine that it goes through a jacket, it becomes a jacket. And then I ask them to put the jacket on, and I ask them to literally feel that the jacket is on them. Right? It’s manipulating your own system. And like every person will create a mental image or a physical sensational image of that jacket. And whenever I tell them to put it back on, or if they’re on their own to practice that and put it back on, they actually remembering the same feelings of the states. So what does that do is brings them right in the middle. So for example, sometimes I ask them, depends on the audience.

Hess Adnani [00:39:34]:
If it’s entrepreneurs, I usually take them through memories that relate to entrepreneurship, for example. So for the last one I did was at a startup event in Armenia, which I asked them to imagine waking up in the morning knowing 100% that That day is going to be great, with no certainty. They’re going to be working with amazing people. They’re going to work on the project that they like. They know that they’re going to get results. There’s no doubt. And da da da da da da. I take them through that waking up, which is you know for the wise mode because the wise mode is very open to receive and feels good receiving.

Hess Adnani [00:40:22]:
And then I tell them, okay. Keep that memory. And then I’m like, okay, you’re going to sleep at night and you’ve done your best. Best result came out. You executed well. You’re so satisfied, um, and content out of everything you’ve done. You’ve done your best and it just feels very, very good to just end the night, end the day. with that knowingness.

Hess Adnani [00:40:52]:
And what is that? That is a doer mode. You’ve done what you perfectly what you wanted to do. And that’s just that feeling of completion is you can physically sense it. And then I tell them, take those 2 feelings, put it into a jacket, look at the jacket. How’s it look like to you? Wear it. How’s it feel to you? And then whenever you wanna regulate, that’s what you need to do. That you can do.

Nick Urban [00:41:16]:
So it’s almost like a form of active visualization where you’re pairing it with an internal sense, an internal feeling, and then you create an association, the jackets, and then you can call on that association, those jackets, whenever you want during the waking hours to enter those modes on command.

Hess Adnani [00:41:37]:
Yeah, that’s related to them. If you talk to artists, You have to find out what are these perfect feeling of their state of being. If you’re talking to, I don’t know, to musicians, different things. So that’s what I do. So first I introduce the concept, then I regulate them like that. Then I take them to the wise mode by, let me think of how I do it. So I do body weight sensation. So when you are in the wise mode, you have more awareness of your body from your chest, lower, lower part of your body from chest down.

Hess Adnani [00:42:27]:
So if you really take your awareness to a lower part of your body, you automatically Start going down to the wise mode. So I invite them to like really focus on lowering down. And then I tell them to visualize there is a root growing out of your spine, going to the earth, branching out. Then I tell them, I help them with breathing. So breathing also can help with changing your state. So I take them through breathing, then I take them through visualization. And then I get practical. I’m like, okay, what is, find one thing right now in your life that you need answers, that you have not figured out what to do.

Hess Adnani [00:43:13]:
Yeah. And then I tell them to create it into an energy ball and then send it out in a space and believe that the answer will come back to them. All that practicality. And then we come back. Then I go to the doer’s mode and I have music back. I have a certain frequency playing at the background of the music. It’s not music, it’s sound. So I have a frequency sound playing at the background, which promotes a lower nervous system state and helping them to calm down.

Hess Adnani [00:43:53]:
So, it’s sound is… I use all the senses. So, it’s sound, breathing, visualization, activation, and then body awareness. So, it’s like kind of give them all a little bit of all. And then, I go to the other side. So, the music completely changes. There’s drums playing in the music. We do some breath of fire to heighten the nervous system. And then, oh, I actually do words activation.

Hess Adnani [00:44:22]:
So I throw words that listening to the sound of these words also activates you to that state. So if you, because language is powerful, when we’re talking, when we use the words that comes out of our mouth is powerful. So for example, when I’m working with the doer’s mode, then I’m saying like execution, planning, goals, road, target, and these words activate different things in your mind and puts you into, takes you to the positive task network. So it’s like all of it is manipulation of your mind and body that you can do to yourself so that you can change your state of being and not be stuck in one place. And yeah, like I had people falling asleep, During the wise mode because they needed recovery so bad that within a 20-minute practice of the wise mode, they just get knocked out. You know, like I get all kind of, all kind of stories when I do the keynote. And then we had, last time I did it, we had like people staying after the keynote for an hour, just curious as like they had first-time sensations in the lives of these states. And, they were just curious and talking and asking and all that.

Hess Adnani [00:45:44]:
So, it was great. That’s what I do in the keynotes.

Nick Urban [00:45:46]:
It’d be very fascinating to see what biological physiological changes are occurring. Is there a massive spike in heart rate variability when people are downregulating and going into the wise mode?

Hess Adnani [00:45:56]:
I would love to measure that. I don’t have the equipment to do that, but once I theoretically and practically shape this entire thing, which by the time that this podcast comes out in October-ish or whatever, it will be looking much better because I’ve been finding new things recently which I need to readjust what I’ve already built. So once I get these practical practices out and the theory out and solid, then I would love to partner with a lab and measure this, like take them through an activation and see what happens to your mind and body.

Nick Urban [00:46:33]:
Hmm. I’m curious, do you know if people, depending on the way they absorb information best, say they’re visual, auditory, or kinesthetic dominant, do they respond best to those types of state-changing cues?

Hess Adnani [00:46:51]:
I don’t have an answer to that, but to be safe when I run the keynotes, I try to Use as diverse methods as possible. So some people are good with imagination, some people are not. Some people are good with their ears, maybe they’re musicians and they’re very active with their hearing. Some people might be more body aware. Some people might be more sensitive to words and more logical. And it depends. So I just throw out what I believe will catch the majority. And I do get people sometimes, some few people that leave the room.

Hess Adnani [00:47:35]:
They connect, they absolutely don’t connect with the practices and that’s fine. It’s, you know, every practice, every theory, every way of doing things, you know, relates to some people and it doesn’t relate to some others.

Nick Urban [00:47:50]:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m just thinking about all the different ways. How do you know Whether you can do something minor, like say just taking a 5-minute break and just laying down and relaxing, and that will be enough versus you need the full force of all of those at the same time to take you into the right level of wise mode.

Hess Adnani [00:48:09]:
Do it gradually. Like do something in a smaller timeframe. See how you feel. Like your body doesn’t lie to you. Like, do it, see how you feel. Do you feel excited to move on with your day? Great. You’ve done what you had to do. It was 1 minute.

Hess Adnani [00:48:27]:
No problem. Good for you. You’ve done it in 1 minute. If you come out again, like, agitated and frustrated, then, you know, take that as a signal. Your body and your mind don’t lie, especially your body doesn’t lie. It’s your best indicator. Like, this body of ours is so Intelligent is the best indicator. It can be your best diagnosis system.

Hess Adnani [00:48:53]:
Like you’re eating shit, you get spot outta your skin. Boom. You, your shape changes, your energy level changes. You walk with your shoulders down, you know, you’re, everything is, is there for you to catch. And also your mind, your mind is Your awareness also gets messages, as I said, from your surrounding of where you need to go, what you need to do, comes in a form of thoughts, comes in a form of synchronicity, messages, sound, visual, all sorts.

Nick Urban [00:49:30]:
Yeah. It’s tragic to me that the modern health landscape looks at wearables as the only tool we have, like that and blood. Okay. Quarterly or annual blood work as like the 2 windows into what’s going on internally when we are getting so much information on a constant basis from our body in terms of symptoms, by the very words that we’re choosing to use, by like our habits and behaviors, the color of our tongue, the whites of our eyes. There’s like so much information that we’re just completely discarding, and then we act surprised when we get a diagnosis way down the line, but really the body’s been telling us indications via symptoms and other things for usually long periods before that ever happens.

Hess Adnani [00:50:15]:
And the regular diagnosis is great too. Like we’ve got, we advance amazingly in medicine. And it’s amazing to, it’s really good idea for you to get regulated diagnosed of your blood tests, of your hormones, et cetera, et cetera. Some stuff are much more subtle. to measure, to see. But yeah, you just know it. Your body knows everything, your mind knows everything. You just know it.

Hess Adnani [00:50:47]:
Even myself, until a few years ago, I was asleep. I was not paying attention to what my state of being is telling me. I was not paying attention to the picture, to the to what I see in the mirror. Do I see some… a healthy person in the mirror or not? That’s like your best indication. Look at the mirror. Do you feel good or do you feel bad? Bad? Problem. Good? Very good. You’re doing whatever.

Hess Adnani [00:51:16]:
It’s like so simple, you know? But because we’re so, like, our lives are built in such a stimulating way that our attention are always taken away from us. As people say, as you hear everywhere, attention is currency. And it is built, our world, our communities are built in a way to take our attention outwards towards whatever direction that they want to direct us to. So that outwards movement really prevents us from looking inwards. Because whatever that you need in life, you already have it, is within you, right? All you just need to shift the attention back to yourself and you have all the answers. You have everything you need. Everything’s provided to you at any time. You just need to see the signals, see the diagnosis that your body gives you.

Nick Urban [00:52:18]:
Exactly. And that’s the thing. Like, you can have the most advanced blood labs and you probably won’t be able to correlate, you know what, these chips I had yesterday are the reasons that I have acne today. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, but your body is giving you feedback constantly on lifestyle. And very few things are genetics. Sure, certain things are, but the majority of the time it’s lifestyle related and we can control lifestyle and we can get in touch with what’s going on internally. And that makes everything work better. For people who come to you and say, how do I know what’s going on internally? You’re speaking about it like it’s some easy thing.

Nick Urban [00:52:52]:
And you mentioned previously that you weren’t aware of that. And years ago, I wasn’t aware of it either. How did you start to figure out what was going on internally?

Hess Adnani [00:53:02]:
I’ll give you a funny example. So, I was, till a few days ago, I was in Georgia, the country, and I just like something about that country didn’t go well with my system. The food didn’t go well with my system, the weather. It’s just like not, I was not myself over there. How do I know it? Oh my God. When I was going to the toilet, the smells coming outta me was ridiculously bad. Like I could not stand my own smell. I could not stand my own sweat, smell of my sweat.

Hess Adnani [00:53:38]:
Yeah, it’s just, I, I, I was like, oh my God, I’ve never smelled this bad.

Nick Urban [00:53:43]:
Hmm.

Hess Adnani [00:53:44]:
And, and you’re obviously, your poop tells a lot about what’s happening in your life, in daily life, like just observing, smelling, and looking. You can, you can tell a lot of, of what you’re eating and how that those things are, you know, affecting your body. So I immediately knew something’s up. There’s something in their nutrition. in their food that does not go well with my system. And yeah, and it’s just that very simple things. You can, as you said, look at your eyes, color of your eyes, quality of your skin, quality of your poop, color of your pee, your energy level, your sleeping cycles. I was sleeping 11 hours in Georgia.

Hess Adnani [00:54:32]:
Crazy. I just couldn’t get up. I couldn’t wake up. I, and then I’m back here and I’m back to being 8 hours, like within a day I was, I’m, I’m, I’m back to being 8 hours of sleep. So there’s like everything that happens within your natural cycles, your, the things that you do on daily basis. going to the toilet, sleeping, your energy levels, your hormone levels, of your moods. I think these are perfect indications of…

Nick Urban [00:55:06]:
Yeah.

Hess Adnani [00:55:07]:
Of the most important things about your health. There are other things that you need to get tested and find out, of course, but I would say it’s an 80/20 rule. With the 20% poop, pee, whatever, you can find out 80% of your Health.

Nick Urban [00:55:25]:
Yeah, exactly. Because also if you’re doing an annual blood test, that’s 364 days that you’re going unmonitored. And so that’s helpful. It’s really good to have that data, but at the same time, your body’s giving you feedback every single day constantly. So it’s, you don’t want to overlook the things that you’re, you’ve access to and that are completely free at the same time.

Hess Adnani [00:55:46]:
I agree.

Nick Urban [00:55:47]:
Well, Hess, if people want to check out your assessment that you built, We didn’t even talk about my results, but if they want to look at what their current result is, get the answer there, and then also understand better what their default state is, where do you want to send them for that?

Hess Adnani [00:56:02]:
All right. Before doing that, I want to do a quick activation with you right now.

Nick Urban [00:56:07]:
Okay, let’s do it.

Hess Adnani [00:56:07]:
And then we’ll see how it feels. It will bring your… it will shift you a little bit to parasympathetic.

Nick Urban [00:56:13]:
Okay.

Hess Adnani [00:56:13]:
Right? So it’s about your body. So, I want you to look to the left, all the way to the left. Like turn my head? No, no, no, no. Your head stays still. And then with your eyeballs, just, just go look to the left and just hum for 15 seconds. Go like, eyes open, look to the left. All right, now look to the right and do the same thing. Then look up and do the same thing as much as you can.

Hess Adnani [00:57:17]:
And now just stop and close your eyes. Observe. How do you feel?

Nick Urban [00:57:24]:
I feel clear, like settled, calmer. Kind of like I’m sinking into a couch. Not quite that dramatic, but that idea.

Hess Adnani [00:57:43]:
Yeah. All right. It was such a short time that you did that.

Nick Urban [00:57:47]:
Yeah.

Hess Adnani [00:57:47]:
So these are all signs of parasympathetic state. So if you feel your body weight low on more lower of your lower than your, your body, your body parts, that’s a very parasympathetic state.

Nick Urban [00:58:01]:
I feel more weight in, in my feet right, right now too.

Hess Adnani [00:58:05]:
Yeah. And you know what’s fascinating here? So initially, as I said, I called these states feminine and masculine states instead of wise mode and doer’s mode. Yeah. Wise mode, feminine, and then doer’s mode, masculine. If you practice with, um, the spiritual community, they always say Mother Earth With this triangle that is facing down, and then Father Sky with the triangle facing up, right? When you’re in a wise mode, you literally feel your body weight lower. And when you’re in a doer mode, you literally feel your body, your body weight going upwards as if someone’s pulling you from your head. If you’re really on a Yeah. Sympathetic mode, and you have a good body awareness, is as if someone’s pulling you up.

Hess Adnani [00:59:01]:
And it’s fascinating for me that none of these are coincidences. There’s, there’s a relationship between science, spirituality, consciousness, sometimes religion. Like, there’s connection between all of them. And sometimes you feel like all of them are Talking the same thing but different languages. Yeah. All right. So you can find that out through my website. I’m sure that you put it somewhere, the link.

Hess Adnani [00:59:35]:
So if you just go to my website, hesadnani.com, on the header of the website, you will find organic technology and then everything is just explained there. First of all, you can visually see the Human Operating System map, and then you can take the free assessments. You can see the library. I have a library of activations. For example, what you’ve done now, what we’ve done together is part of one of the activations, and the activations are categorized by which direction on the map will move you, how long it will take, and if you can do that in public or private. you have to do it in private. Sometimes, you know, some of the activations are, it will be weird if you do it in the public. So you can find it out through that link, through my website.

Nick Urban [01:00:24]:
Perfect. I’ll put that in the show notes for this episode. Hess, for people who have made it this far, any final thoughts for them?

Hess Adnani [01:00:32]:
I say the same thing I said on the last podcast that I was at is your external world is the reflection of your internal world. So if something is repeating in your external world that is bothering you and you seem to not find a solution how to solve that issue in your external world, how about seeing what type of reflection, where is it reflecting from? What type of reflection is it? Go inwards and… see if you can tweak some stuff internally and just wait until the external is resolved. And you got to give it a little bit of time until it reflects back to the external. So I’ll give you an example. It’s like I was meeting certain people when I was back in my dating, back in my 20s, and when I was dating, usually I was dating women with what we call daddy’s issues, right? And I was like, why? What’s happening? Like, how is this happening? And I was always fascinated until I figured out I have daddy’s issue.

Nick Urban [01:01:58]:
Right.

Hess Adnani [01:01:59]:
So I, not It was a reflection, but opposite. Usually it’s opposite things happening. It’s the same thing, but opposite reflection. And I just went on a journey of a year, journey of resolving whatever that thing was. And guess what? I never met anyone with the same profile again that was bothering me.

Nick Urban [01:02:22]:
Wow.

Hess Adnani [01:02:23]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:02:24]:
Thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure hosting you and hearing some of your stories and exploring the map that you created.

Hess Adnani [01:02:31]:
You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me on your, on your podcast. And then, yeah, hopefully we, we meet in person sometime soon. Yes. Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:02:42]:
Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.