Complimentary Nervous System Rescue Guide

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Welcome to Your First Step Towards Reclaiming Calm, Balance, and Vitality.

In this guide, you’ll get a taste of the transformative practices in The Calm Code - an on-demand somatic healing course, designed to help high performers like you recover from burnout and thrive without sacrificing your well-being. In these pages, you’ll learn about your nervous system, discover simple yet effective techniques to regulate stress, and take a challenge to start recharging today.

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Understanding Burnout & Your Nervous System

Burnout isn’t just about exhaustion. It’s your body’s response to prolonged stress. When your nervous system is pushed into overdrive, it eventually crashes. Here’s a quick overview of how your body responds to stress:

1. Sympathetic Activation (Fight or Flight)
   This is your body’s survival mode. When you’re in overdrive, your heart races, your breath shortens, and your mind goes into high alert. The pressure is on, and you feel like you can’t stop. It’s designed for short bursts when faced with danger. 
2. Dorsal Vagal Shutdown (Freeze)
   This state is a protective shutdown. You feel numb, disconnected, and exhausted. It's the body's way of coping when it’s been running too hard, for too long.
3. Ventral Vagal Regulation (Rest & Digest)
   This is your natural state of calm. When you’re in this mode, you feel grounded, present, and at ease. Your body is relaxed and content, your thoughts are clear and creative - you can perform at your highest level.

Your Practice

Take a moment to reflect:

• How often do you feel in “overdrive” (sympathetic)?
• Do you notice moments when you’re feeling detached or numbed out (dorsal vagal)?
• Can you recall times when you felt calm and grounded (ventral vagal)? 

Track these moments to become more aware of your nervous system states and identify your default state(s).

Take a Burnout Awareness Quiz

Do you often experience these?

1. I wake up feeling anxious or on edge.

Yes / No

2. I often feel numb or disconnected from myself

Yes / No

3. I crash hard after pushing through long periods of effort

Yes / No

4. I have trouble relaxing, even when I’m not working

Yes / No

5. I feel responsible for everyone’s needs but my own

Yes / No

6. I feel like I can’t stop or slow down

Yes / No

For every ‘Yes’ answer, add 1 point.

Total Score:

• 1 Temporary dysregulation
• 2-3 You’re burnout. You should do something immediately
• 4-6 Your health & performance have been compromised

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Regulation Techniques to Begin Your Healing

Now that you know your body’s stress responses, let’s work on getting you back to a balanced state. In the Calm Code course, we teach you tools to regulate in the moment and build resilience. Here are two practices you can use immediately:

1. Box Breathing:
   Box breathing is one of the simplest and most powerful tools for calming your nervous system.
   
   • Sit or lie down in a comfortable position.
     
   • Breathe in deeply for a count of 4, allowing your belly to expand.
     
   • Hold your breath for 4 counts.
     
   • Exhale slowly for a count of 6, releasing all the tension.
     
   • Hold your breath again for 4 counts
     
   • Repeat for 3-5 minutes.

This anchors your nervous system back into a calm state.

2. The Anchor Practice:
   The Anchor practice helps your body to quickly feel safe, and calm.
   
   • Stand or sit comfortably. Close your eyes if it feels right.
     
   • Imagine a place (real or imagined) where you feel safe and happy, touch a physical part of your body (e.g. self-hug, touching a hand/arm, or one hand on heart, other on belly) that makes you feel supported, loved or comforted - this is different for everyone; find experiment to find what’s your “anchor”.
     
   • Breathe deeply while touching your body part in that visualized safe place.
     
   • Take a few moments to center yourself before moving on.

This is a quick reset when emotions feel overwhelming. 

Your Challenge:
Practice one of these techniques when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Notice how it helps you feel more connected and calm.

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Rewriting Survival Patterns for Lasting Change

Burnout recovery is more than just moment-to-moment regulation—it’s about shifting your underlying survival patterns (the repeated behaviors you developed in stressful situations, often from early life). If you’ve been using perfectionism, people-pleasing, or overachievement as coping mechanisms, it’s time to rewrite those habits.

In The Calm Code, you’ll learn to:

• Recognize your personal survival patterns and where they come from.
  
• Rewire your nervous system to respond to stress with calm and resilience.
  
• Build new, sustainable routines that support your nervous system and prevent burnout for good.
  

Your Reflection:
Reflect on one survival pattern you tend to fall into (e.g., overworking, perfectionism, saying “yes” when you mean “no”).  

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The Calm Code Course: What’s Next?

This mini-guide is just the beginning. The Calm Code offers a step-by-step system to help you recover from burnout, reset your nervous system, and learn to perform at your highest level without sacrificing your well-being. With video lessons, complimentary workbooks and guided audio practices, you’ll learn how to:

• Build a personalized nervous system regulation routine that keeps you balanced.
  
• Set burnout-proof boundaries that protect your energy.
  
• Thrive, not just survive, in your high-performance life.
  

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Your Instructor Profile

Jessy Zhao, M.Ed., Nervous System Coach & Educator

As a former high-achiever who lived life in overdrive, Jessy understands the price of success when it's built on stress, overextension, and a dysregulated nervous system. While succeeding and appearing to "have it all", she felt drained, unsatisfied, and resentful.

Her studies and own experience with frequent burnout made her realize: our performance, leadership, and capacity for joy are deeply connected to the state of our nervous system—and to the unhealed stories we carry from childhood. Many of us live in our heads, while emotional trauma gets stuck in our bodies, unable to find a way out.

Today, Jessy supports high-performing professionals who feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or stuck at a breaking point. She combines somatic tools, regulation practices, and holistic trauma healing—especially around early-life wounds and attachment imprints—to help clients return to their center.

Nervous system work isn’t just about managing stress. It's not just about relaxation techniques. It's also very different from talk therapy or mindset work. It’s about gently unraveling the deeper layers that drive burnout: chronic people-pleasing, hyper-independence, internalized pressure to prove, and the fear of rest or failure. These patterns often began in childhood—and they don’t have to define you.

Jessy helps individuals reconnect with their bodies, rewire their stress responses, and lead from a place of grounded safety. So they can thrive—not just professionally, but emotionally, spiritually, and somatically.

This is where ambition meets embodiment. Where rest is power. Where the inner child finally feels safe to succeed.

This is leadership from the inside out.