The Inner Wealth Podcast

Ep203. When Your Nervous System Is the New Success Metric—and Peace Is Your Real Currency.

• Mike Kitko

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In this episode, Mike opens the portal to a deeper understanding of how your nervous system influences every aspect of your life and business. He shares how survival-based programming, triggered by things like money, safety, and uncertainty, keeps visionary leaders stuck in emotional overdrive. Through powerful insights and real-life stories, Mike reveals how to shift from sympathetic fight-or-flight responses into the parasympathetic nervous system — the frequency of peace, presence, and creation. This is a call to emotional mastery and inner sovereignty, especially for those building purpose-driven lives.

Key Takeaways

  1. You Experience Life Through Energy, Not Events
    The nervous system is the filter for your reality — how you feel determines how you perceive.
  2. Survival Mode Is a Trauma Loop, Not a Truth
    Most people react to outdated danger patterns even when they’re safe and supported.
  3. Money Doesn’t Regulate Safety — You Do
    Arbitrary bank account “safety numbers” trigger unnecessary fight-or-flight responses.
  4. Mastery Means Detaching Emotion from Outcome
    Building your life or business to soothe emotions leads to self-sabotage and burnout.
  5. Creation Mode Requires Emotional Sovereignty
    True wealth begins when you choose peace over panic — when you shift from reaction to creation.

Notable Quotes

  • “You don't experience the outside world. You experience life through your central nervous system.”
  • “The reason for running a business is not to manage your body. We're here to manage our body separately from our business.”
  • “Most people are bouncing from thing to thing… looking for that emotion, looking for that circumstance that's finally going to bring them to peace.”
  • “Just because your bank account goes down does not mean that your body needs to go into fight or flight.”
  • ““Running your life, running your business in survival mode is trying to keep your emotions in check, trying to be OK.”


Music Credit: "What's Left of Me" by Wes Hoffman & Friends

Join the Revolution
This episode is a wake-up call for every visionary still building from survival mode. If your nervous system feels like it’s running the show — triggered by numbers, chasing peace through outcomes — it’s time to reclaim your inner authority. Join me for a conversation about disentangling your body from your business, mastering your emotional state, and making calm your new currency.

Want to Go Deeper?
Visit www.innerwealthglobal.com and explore tools, programs, and offerings that guide you back to your aligned life. It’s time to live from the inside out.

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Mike Kitko is an executive self-mastery coach, speaker and author. He found external success through powerful titles, incomes, and material possessions. He ultimately fell into depression, toxic abuse of alcohol, and the near collapse of his family before he began a journey of internal happiness and success.

Speaker 1:

Do you ever wake up feeling like there's something missing in your life? Do you ever feel the need to escape your business? Are you running your life or is your life running you? I'm Mike Kitko and I'll help you design and create a life so authentic and aligned with who you really are that you'll get excited just to wake up. I'll help you create real wealth, success and freedom from the inside out.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day. We're going to talk about something today that we haven't talked about in quite a while on these episodes, and that's the difference between living in survival mode and living in creation mode. And the reason I'm going back to this today is on the Inner Wealth Mastermind business call today, we had a really really deep, meaningful conversation about one of our students that's building his business in survival mode and he's building his business to protect, to shield, to soothe his emotions. And I know that sounds really really weird, but you know, when you see it, when you see it clearly, you can't not see it, but there's a lot of people building businesses based on their emotions, based on these lower level emotions, the avoidance. Building a business based on avoidance. All of these emotions and all of these feelings, all these internal states, they're all survival mode and I really want to help you today understand the difference between living in survival mode and living in creation mode. All right, but first we're going to have a little bit of a physiology conversation, a little bit of physiology education.

Speaker 1:

You experience life through your central nervous system. You don't really experience life in the outside world. You don't experience the outside world. You experience life through your central nervous system. All of these, the five senses that you have, all feed your central nervous system and turn on and off different things. Some people are living with their central nervous system full of fear and some people are living with their central into courage and just things that advance joy and peace and love. And you feel these things in your body. These are results of your central nervous system.

Speaker 1:

And in the central nervous system there's two kind of parts of the nervous system. There's a parasympathetic nervous system and there's the sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is is it was designed to be your default state. It's joy, it's peace, it's love, it's bliss, it's calm, it's enjoyment, it's fulfillment, it's freedom. That's, when you're in those states, your parasympathetic nervous system is on. When you're living through your sympathetic nervous system, you are living through fight or flight, fear, doubt, worry, anxiety, depression, pain, suffering. When you're experiencing these things, when you're feeling these things, you are literally living through your sympathetic nervous system. Now there's two purposes, two different purposes, for these.

Speaker 1:

The parasympathetic nervous system is just for the enjoyment of being alive. When you're enjoying being alive, you're living through your parasympathetic nervous system and you just get to be. You enjoy being. That's when you are fully immersed in your human beingness. And when your sympathetic nervous system is on, it's because you're in fight or flight, it's because there's some kind of survival element that your central nervous system is trying to anchor to. It's expecting danger. It's expecting some kind of, it's trying to avoid some kind of outcome, some circumstance, and your sympathetic nervous system is. When.

Speaker 1:

I say your parasympathetic nervous system was intended to be your default state. Your sympathetic nervous system is meant to be on for very short periods of time in heightened danger and then shut off, to be returned back to the parasympathetic nervous system. And when used effectively, when there's danger, your sympathetic nervous system turns on. It floods you with cortisol and adrenaline and all of these freaking hormones of fight or flight and then, after the danger ends, your body dissolves. All those hormones dissolve in your body and your body returns back to a place of absence of cortisol and adrenaline and returns back into the parasympathetic nervous system where it can return to enjoying life. So, in other words, the parasympathetic nervous system is about being a human being and the other is about a human doing. It's what am I doing to? To get out of dodge right, to get out of, to get out of danger. It's like doing this. It's more about doing this than it is being this and in a parasympathetic nervous system is about stillness. It's about internal stillness and internal clarity, internal kind kind of like an internal harmony, where a sympathetic nervous system is about getting as much disruptive energy inside of you so that you can avoid some circumstance.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I hope this is making sense and now I'm setting the stage because if you really really watch society and if you pay attention, most of society is living from their sympathetic nervous system. We live in a a very, very, uh, agitated world. Uh, in an anxiety induced world. Everything is like hyper vigilance. There's so much stimulation. Everyone's bouncing from most people not everyone, but most people are bouncing from thing to thing, looking for that outcome, looking for that feeling, looking for that emotion, looking for that circumstance that's finally going to bring them the peace. And what they're really looking for is to return back to their parasympathetic nervous system and they're looking for a result in the external world to give them that peace and that joy that their parasympathetic nervous system can only give them. But they've been wired by life, through life, through their lives, to remain steadfast in their sympathetic nervous system and they never give themselves time to jump back into their parasympathetic nervous system, for that to turn on, for them to enjoy a quality life just as a human being, not because of what they're doing and not because of a circumstance.

Speaker 1:

Now, one of our students talked about their bank account and what happens in our bank account is we have there's three levels there's a survival level in our bank account, there's a safety level in our bank account and then there's a wealth level in our bank account. Now, wealth level what I mean is that's what's going to give you freedom, right? And our survival number is literally just a number that we need the currency, the income, the money that we need to just maintain life, and I'm talking about your basic needs, right Oxygen, water, nutrition, exercise and rest, like just the basic needs of life, so they're fulfilled and so that you can have like, so that your survival is not in jeopardy. If that makes sense, you have all the basic essentials to just being alive. That's your survival number. If you look at this we live in.

Speaker 1:

Most of this podcast has been listened to in six continents, in 84 countries, almost 1500 cities around the world, and if you look at where where this is being listened to the most or downloaded the most, it's mostly in countries where survival mode is is not really a thing. That have listened and downloaded are coming from areas where it's modern and there's technology and that's why they can download this podcast and their essential needs are not in jeopardy or in doubt. All right, so that's your survival number, your safety number. I would say your central nervous system is wired for a safety number and what that means is if your financial accumulation or your net worth or your income goes below, if these levels drop below that safety number, your central nervous system is going to kick up and it's going to alert danger.

Speaker 1:

Have you ever had that experience? Have you ever had the experience where you look at your bank account and suddenly you've got like fear in your body. That was the financial set point, that was that safety number being tripped and that was your sympathetic nervous system turning on. You are just operating in your parasympathetic nervous system. A second ago Now you're operating in your sympathetic nervous system and it's all because you looked at a bank account and it was below the level of your safety number, so it fired your central nervous system on in your sympathetic nervous system. It fired it on and now you're on high alert. Now you've got adrenaline and now you've got cortisol flying through your body. Now you've got adrenaline and now you've got cortisol flying through your body.

Speaker 1:

And usually in this situation what happens is as a response to all of these survival hormones flying through your body. What happens? Most people go into action to try to attain something to alleviate the fear and the stress that that is caused by their sympathetic nervous system. And then that last number is your wealth number. And if you ever pay attention, most people like when they don't really ever get to their wealth number. They just keep moving it. The what? The number is not intentional. The number number is just some subjective number that they've laid out there that they feel like they'll be okay if they have that number. But because their safety number keeps elevating higher and higher and higher, their wealth number keeps elevating higher and higher and even though, like maybe, last year you had a thousand dollars and this year you have a million, now your safety number is 950,000. And even though you had a thousand dollars last year and you have $950,000 this year, that million goes to 949,000. And suddenly your central nervous system kicks on, your sympathetic nervous system kicks on, and you've got cortisol and you're flooded with these hormones and adrenaline is running through your body because that arbitrary safety number that you put in has anchored into your central nervous system and it's become your new safe.

Speaker 1:

And ultimately, what happens, especially here in the first world? What happens is we keep raising that safety number and we keep raising that wealth number and we never really achieve harmony and balance in our central nervous system and we keep trying to fix it. And what I mean by that is we keep trying to fix that triggering in our nervous system through attaining more money and we never, ever, really get there. And even though last year you needed a thousand dollars to feel safe, this year you need nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars, because you tasted a million and now you're afraid for it to go back down to one thousand. So now your, your sympathetic nervous system, trips at $949,000, even though it's just an arbitrary trip point, but your body is wired. You've wired your body through your expectations and through your beliefs and through your perceptions and through your preferences. You've wired your central nervous system to only feel safe above $950,000 in your bank account.

Speaker 1:

I hope this is making sense and this is why, over time, as especially with the business owners and the business leaders that I work with, as they grow, as their business grows, as their net worth grows, as their income grows, they still stay in the same fight and flight mode, because they never allow that sympathetic nervous system to kick on and stay on. They just keep raising their safety numbers and their wealth numbers and their nervous system keeps responding to these new levels they're setting, responding to these new levels they're setting. So what happened on today's call which was beautiful was that this business owner was talking about how the income they just made a shift in their life. They just kind of changed careers, changed vocations, jumped from one thing to another. There's going to be like a little bit of a lull, the expectation, but there was. There was going to be a lull in income in in their life because of this transition.

Speaker 1:

And as they watch their bank account go down, their their sympathetic nervous system is kicking on and and he knew he was going to be in this transition. He knew he was gonna. He was gonna have a period of time where his net worth would probably go down or there would be a little, a little lag. He knew it. But his, his nervous system is alerting him for fight, flight, freeze response, sympathetic nervous systems turning on, even though he has net worth, even though he has assets, even though he has investments, even though he has net worth, even though he has assets, even though he has investments, even though he has equity stashed away in places, even though he has all the resources he needs. As he watches his bank account number go down, his body's responding with an alarm, an alert.

Speaker 1:

And on this call I got the opportunity to call a timeout and say listen, this is a business call. We are running businesses, but the goal of running a business isn't to manage the emotions in your body. The reason for running a business is not to manage your body. We're here to manage our body separately from our business. We manage our business to grow and in this situation of this student, there's a transition from vocation. There's a little bit of a pause. The net worth is going down a little bit, the income is going down a little bit, the bank account's going down a little bit, but there's still plenty.

Speaker 1:

You're not anywhere near survival mode, but now your sympathetic nervous system's kicking on and you're trying to do stuff to increase the pace and the rate of the income, getting the income to go back on because your body doesn't feel good to be in, because you haven't managed your body. You're still managing your business through your body or your body through your business. They're entangled and in the inner wealth mastermind. We're not about managing our business through our body or our body through our business. We're here to manage our body separately and our business separately, to learn how to separate them, to learn how, when our business goes down, our body is still okay, is still okay that when our income goes down, our body is still okay, that when our net worth goes down, our body is still okay.

Speaker 1:

And if you've ever experienced anybody who self-sabotages, that when our results go up, we still remain okay in our body. We don't trip our self-sabotage limits, our upper limits, when our net worth goes up. We don't trip our upper limits when our savings, when our bank account, when our whatever, whatever, when it goes up. And there are cycles where it will go up so that your self-sabotage levels, your upper limits, your upper trigger point, so it doesn't go off either, so you don't fall. You don't fall into survival mode just because your income goes down and you don't trip an upper limit because your income goes up. And these are natural human tendencies and typically we manage our business and our body to be in this toxic dance of managing like I've got these feelings, so I got to work harder. I don't like what I'm feeling about my finances, so I'm going to work harder. Instead, you start to realize when you're in premature survival mode and you manage the emotions in your body to move, to shift yourself from the sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic nervous system, to shift yourself from survival mode into creation mode. That you naturally know how and instinctually.

Speaker 1:

There's a great book called the Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman and he talks about how you master your inner world. My new book Inner World, outer World. It's exactly what I'm teaching is you master your inner world so that you don't have to force any outcomes in your external world to be okay. In your inner world you separate these two. You manage your body separately from your business, these two, you manage your body separately from your business. And when you manage your body and you learn to manage your body and you don't run your business because of your body, through your body, you don't manage your finances through your body. You don't manage anything outside of you through your body. It allows you to manage that thing more powerfully, more effectively, more clearly and in a state of creation mode, not survival mode.

Speaker 1:

Running your life, running your business in survival mode is trying to keep your emotions in check, trying to be okay, trying to feel valuable, trying to feel worthy, trying to feel secure, trying to feel successful. These are all states of survival mode. You're trying to attain a feeling in your body through an external circumstance, because the absence of that might trip your nervous system and put you in premature survival mode and you don't know how to manage that. So then you go out and you don't know how to deal with it. So you go out in the external world and you look to chase circumstances and you look to attain outcomes in the hope, in the possibility of kicking that sympathetic nervous system back over to the parasympathetic nervous system. And in creation mode we master the art of living in our parasympathetic nervous system. Naturally we learn how, when we're in our sympathetic nervous system and there's no danger in the world, how to naturally shift back into the parasympathetic nervous system through breathing, through releasing, through shadow work, through letting go, through meditation, through mindfulness activities, through journaling, and you shift that inner state by getting clear about what it's telling you, by getting clear about what the reality is that you're living in and managing your body, to naturally shift from survival mode to creation mode, from sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system, the creation mode from sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system.

Speaker 1:

But in the Inner Wealth Mastermind we have calls dedicated to learning how to manage your body. We also have a call to learning how to manage and master your business. But there's times where both of those areas of focus converge and it's up to us to separate them, to learn how to manage our body separately from our business. Just because your bank account goes down does not mean that your body needs to go into fight or flight. Just because your net worth goes down doesn't mean that your body needs to go into fight or flight. Just because your bank account doesn't meet your preference does not mean your body needs to go into fight or flight. Just because your bank account doesn't meet your preference Does not mean your body needs to go into fight or flight, especially when you're resource rich. But you have an expectation and your nervous system is built around something even higher Than your survival needs. And if you keep raising that safety number, then you'll always stay in fight or flight mode, and you're never meant to stay in fight or flight mode for long stretches of time. And when we master our body, we learn how to naturally move from one state to another. And then, and only then, can we really master the art of building a business for the sake of building a business instead of building a business for our own emotional needs, our survival-based needs.

Speaker 1:

Guys, I hope this helps. It's been a powerful day, it's been a powerful message if you, if you're sitting, if you're sitting still. This morning I was sitting still and I was practicing some stillness and all of a sudden, since I'm still, I started to feel inside of my body unsafe. I had sat for a long period of time and my body started feeling unsafe and I started feeling triggers and I got to feel where my body was shifting into survival mode for no reason whatsoever. And I got the opportunity to clear that. And that's what happens when you learn to master the signals that are inside of your body Is that when there's premature survival mode, your body goes into fight or flight mode prematurely. Or when you're not in danger and your body's telling you you're in danger or there's future danger, then you know how to master the art of moving back into the peaceful part of your nervous system from the chaotic and the stressful.

Speaker 1:

Hope this helps. I love you, I appreciate you. Thanks for your listenership, your viewership, and I'm just going to keep coming back and I'm just going to keep talking about. This central nervous system thing has been a key theme and I have a feeling we're going to keep revisiting this over and over, because you only experience your life. You only experience life through your central nervous system, not in the world itself, not in the world itself, and if it's not peaceful in there, then you haven't mastered the art of knowing how to master your body instead of rearrange your circumstances, so your body can be okay. We'll keep returning. I hope you do too. If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to wwwinnerwealthglobalcom for more tools and resources.