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Stop optimizing. Start elevating

You're always behind.

Behind the inbox. Behind the task list. Behind the goals you set. Behind the person you think you should be.

Most high performers live in a constant state of incompleteness.

They postpone peace until the project is done, the system is built, the metrics hit.

But the list never ends. The mind never stops. The finish line keeps moving.

This belief traps your nervous system in survival mode.

Always slightly rushed. Always mentally braced. Always one step behind your own life.

The body is tight. The mind is noisy. The breath is shallow.

You think the answer is more productivity, more focus, more effort. But if you think like this, every day will feel like a struggle.

Instead, focus on your inner state. Your state of being.

When your system is coherent, life flows. When it's chaotic, life feels heavy.

Most people are trying to optimize a low-frequency system. That's like tuning a broken instrument instead of repairing it.

What you need to do is to raise your baseline state and elevate your frequency. Then everything else gets easier.

This isn't mysticism or pseudo-science.. It's physiology, psychology, and consciousness working together.

What "baseline state" actually means

Your baseline state is the coherence of your system.

The way your nervous system holds you. The way emotional energy moves through you. The quality of your thoughts. The depth of your alignment with what matters.

Low frequency feels like contraction.

The body collapses inward. Breath shortens. Thoughts accelerate. Your entire field tightens.

High frequency feels like expansion.

Your chest opens. Your breath deepens. Your mind quiets. Awareness becomes clearer.

You feel the difference everywhere:

Low frequency: Heavy. Rushed. Scattered. Tight. Reactive. Defensive. Over-efforting.

High frequency: Light. Steady. Clear. Spacious. Creative. Connected. Moving with ease.

You feel it in your breathing, your decisions, your relationships, your creativity, your pace.

Your whole life reorganizes around your internal frequency.

A higher baseline doesn't make life perfect. It makes you more capable of meeting life with clarity and grace.

The real problem: you're stuck in survival mode

Most people live in a low-grade survival state without realizing it.

Your body thinks it's under threat. Your nervous system is overstimulated. Your energy is dense.

This isn't your fault. It's your environment.

Screens all day. Shallow breathing. Processed food. Poor sleep. Constant stimulation. No space. No silence.

Your system adapts by contracting. It becomes defensive instead of open.

And when you're contracted, everything is harder.

Decisions feel heavy. Relationships feel tense. Work feels like grinding. Creativity disappears.

You're not lazy. You're not broken.

You're just running a low-voltage system.

The good news? You can raise your baseline. And when you do, everything shifts.

The four layers of elevation

Your baseline state is shaped by four layers: body, heart, mind, soul.

You need to have a vision for how you envision yourself across each of these 4 layers.

If you can’t see your highest self in each one, you’ll continue to be stuck where you are.

Set the bar high. Allow yourself to transform. See yourself as physically vibrant and energetic, emotionally calm and empathetic, mentally clear, creative, and focused, and spiritually living fully in alignment with who you are and what truly matters deep down.

Here's how to elevate each one.

Layer 1: The body – purify the physical layer

Your body is an electrical system.

Every cell carries voltage. Your heart emits an electromagnetic field measurable several feet away. Your mitochondria are literal energy generators.

When your body is depleted, inflamed, dehydrated, or sleep-deprived, that voltage drops. Your frequency drops with it.

You become heavier, slower, more contracted.

Raising physical frequency means restoring biological coherence.

If the instrument is out of tune, from being sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and hunched over screens all day, nothing else works.

How to elevate the body:

Breathe fully. Shallow chest breathing traps you in fight-or-flight. Five slow belly breaths where you exhale longer than you inhale shifts you to calm in under 30 seconds.

Hydrate and mineralize. Your cells run on electrical charge. Electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium) conduct that charge. A dehydrated body is a low-voltage system.

Move daily. Not for looks. For energy flow. Yoga, walking, running, strength work—anything that moves breath through muscle removes stagnation.

Sleep and sunlight. Circadian alignment recenters you to your innate human rhythm. Rather than fighting your body, you live in alignment with it.

Eat real food. Fresh vegetables, fruits, whole foods, omega-3 rich fish. These improve mitochondrial function.

What this looks like: Wake with sunlight. Walk for 20 minutes. Breathe deeply before meetings. Drink water with a pinch of sea salt. Sleep in alignment with your chronotype (natural 24 hour rhythm). Your body will thank you by lifting your baseline.



Layer 2: The heart – clean the emotional field

Emotion isn't a psychological concept. It's a neurochemical wave.

Cortisol. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Serotonin.

When emotions get blocked, your sympathetic nervous system stays activated. Your body interprets unprocessed emotion as threat. The result? Chronic fight, flight, or freeze, even when nothing's actually wrong.

Your system becomes dense. Your breath shortens. Your heart rate variability drops. The nervous system becomes defensive instead of open.

Raising emotional frequency means increasing emotional fluidity: the ability to let waves rise, crest, move, and dissolve.

Dense emotions aren't "bad." They're just slow-moving frequencies.

How to elevate the heart:

Name what you feel. "Sadness." "Resentment." "Fear." Naming reduces the amygdala's grip and allows processing.

Let emotions complete their arc. Cry, shake, journal, breathe, walk—anything that lets the wave move. Emotion is meant to flow through you, not define you.

Forgive, repeatedly. Forgiveness isn't saying "it was fine." It's saying, "I release the energetic contraction this memory still holds." The charge around the past is what keeps frequency low.

Choose gratitude. Gratitude elevates frequency instantly because it pulls attention from absence to presence. It widens your bandwidth.

What this looks like: Next time you feel triggered, pause. Name the emotion. Don't suppress it. Don't act on it. Just feel it. Breathe with it. Let it complete. Watch how fast your system recalibrates.



Layer 3: The mind – clarify your inner signal

Your brain filters over 11 million bits of information per second.

Your frequency depends on which bits it selects.

When the mind is overstimulated, rumination increases. The mind becomes a closed loop.

And when the mind loops, frequency drops.

Mental expansion requires mental spaciousness. Silence. Slower thinking. Selective input.

Moments where the mind is not processing but perceiving.

A quiet mind is a high-frequency mind.

Your mind broadcasts a frequency. Thought is vibration.

Low-quality thoughts such as mindless rumination, comparison, pessimism lower your signal. They close your chest, tighten your breath, and create micro-contractions all day long.

How to elevate the mind:

Meditate. Not to "empty your mind," but to stop believing every thought you think. The observer's neutrality is a higher frequency than the mind's noise.

Guard your mental diet. News, negativity, gossip, doomscrolling - these lower frequency faster than anything. Choose insight, art, beauty, depth.

Speak consciously. Words carry frequency. Before speaking, ask: "Does this uplift, clarify, or connect?" If not, it drains you.

Simplify. Mental clutter scatters energy. Fewer goals, fewer apps, fewer open loops, fewer commitments. A clean mind is a high-frequency mind.

What this looks like: Delete three apps this week. Block an hour tomorrow for silence, with no input, no output, but just being. Before you speak today, pause and ask: "Does this add or subtract?" Watch how much mental space opens up.



Layer 4: The soul – connect with your highest self

This is the highest layer, and the one with the least language and the deepest impact.

Spiritual energy is your alignment with truth. With love. With your deeper nature. With the intelligence that moves through life itself.

When you're misaligned - forcing outcomes, gripping to ego, making decisions from fear - your frequency collapses. Your field narrows. Your awareness contracts.

Raising spiritual frequency is about releasing the contraction around who you think you must be and relaxing into who you already are.

It's the shift from protection to openness. From control to trust. From fear-driven intention to truth-driven intention.

When your spirit aligns, everything rises with it, including your thoughts, your actions, your relationships, your creativity, your presence.

Spiritual energy isn't religion. It's alignment with Truth, with Love, with Life itself.

How to elevate the soul:

Act from love rather than fear. Before any decision, ask: "Is this love speaking or fear?" One expands. The other contracts. Let this become your compass.

Align intention and action. Integrity is high frequency. Dishonesty collapses frequency instantly because it fragments your inner world. When what you think, say, and do are aligned, your field becomes coherent.

Serve something larger. Service turns personal energy into universal energy. When you act from contribution rather than ego, your frequency rises effortlessly.

Connect with nature. Trees, mountains, oceans, sky. Nature is pure coherence. It entrains your system back into calm expansion.

What this looks like: Before your next big decision, sit for five minutes and ask: "Is this fear or love speaking?" Then act from the answer. Spend 10 minutes this week in nature without your phone. Just look at the sky. Feel how small you are. Notice how your problems shrink when you remember you're part of something bigger.

Spiritual alignment creates the highest frequency because it removes the ego's contraction.

How to measure your baseline state

High frequency feels like: lightness, clarity, synchronicity, spontaneous compassion, creative ideas, forward movement, easy laughter.

Low frequency feels like: heaviness, irritability, overwhelm, confusion, emotional numbness, chronic fatigue, everything feels like effort.

Don't chase perfection. Track the trend.

Are you living more often from expansion or contraction? From open-heartedness or tightness? From presence or pressure?

That's the real measure.

The shift: from optimization to elevation

Most people spend their lives optimizing a low-frequency system.

Better routines. Better habits. Better tools.

But if your baseline is low, optimization only gets you incremental gains.

You're still playing the wrong game.

The real work is elevation. Raising your baseline frequency across all four layers.

When you do, you don't work harder. You work from a higher state.

Decisions get clearer. Relationships get easier. Creativity flows. Energy compounds.

You're not achieving more. You're accessing more of what's already there.

A higher baseline isn't something you create. It's something you uncover.

It's the essence beneath the noise.

And the more you live from that state, the more life starts meeting you there—with more ease, more clarity, more flow, more synchronicity, more alignment.

Your next move

Pick one layer. Just one.

Body. Heart. Mind. Soul.

Choose the one that feels most contracted right now.

Then pick one practice from that layer.

Do it today. Not next week. Today.

Track how you feel after. Notice the shift.

Then do it again tomorrow.

Don't try to fix everything. Start where it hurts most.

When you raise your baseline, you don't escape life.

You meet it from a higher state.

And from that state, everything becomes easier.

About the author Nicolai Nielsen

I am the bestselling author of 3 books, former McKinsey Academy Associate Partner, and the founder of Potential Academy.

My mission is to raise global consciousness through education and inspiration.

© Nicolai Nielsen 2025