Kimberly Snyder Shares Practical Tips to Move Past Nervousness and Access Peace in Your Everyday Life

If there’s anyone who knows how to relieve stress and anxiety in their everyday life, it’s Kimberly Snyder. The celebrity holistic nutritionist is renowned for her plant-based approach with a generous dollop of love and kindness (if you haven’t read The Beauty Detox Solution, it’s time to get on that train!). From supportive supplements to her famous glowing green smoothie, we’ve looked to Snyder for guidance across the spectrum of health and wellness for years, both physical and spiritual. So, we were hardly surprised when we learned of her latest book, You Are More Than You Think You Are: Practical Enlightenment for Everyday Life that brings all of these tenants together.

For this tome, Snyder wanted to help support others on their journey by sharing what has helped her the most. “That has always been my guiding light,” she tells me. “In my past books and work, I’ve shared about different aspects of lifestyle, like nutrition and diet yet in this book, I am sharing for the first time my full playbook for truly living your best life and reaching your fullest potential in all areas—creating vitality, confidence, abundance, outrageous love, peace, and more.” The inspiration for this book happened when she was 34 weeks pregnant with her second son, Moses. “I was looking to slow down, but it was such a clear download that I had to act on it,” she recalls. “I wrote a sample chapter and presented it to my publisher, and signed my book deal three days before giving birth. It was clear to me that this book, and all the ancient teachings and practices it contains, wanted to birth into the world at this time.” 

With several best-selling books, celebrity clientele, a successful supplements line, and two beautiful children, it’s not surprising to learn that Synder is often asked how she’s able to do it all. “What you’ll read about in this book is going to teach you exactly how I was able to access my true self and then apply what I learned to create all the best stuff in my life,” she notes. “Once I realized that I was more than I ever thought I was, I was able to create my dream life—and you can too.”

Read on for more inspiring words of wisdom from Snyder along with an exclusive excerpt from the book with tips on how to move past nervousness and access peace and calm in your everyday life.

How does the timing of this book launch tie in with the state of the world right now? 

When I look around, I see that the teachings in this book are needed more than ever. There’s more anxiety, confusion, and discontent in the world than perhaps ever before. Additionally, with people’s attention spans where they are, and with most of us getting our information and seeking answers in the news and social media, I felt like these real treasures, buried in dense books and texts that are not part of the news cycle, would pass most everyone by and I just couldn’t let that happen.

That is why I’ve gone through thousands of pages of texts to present core teachings in a form that will be accessible and useful to you. I wanted to dig deep to present you with the real jewels of these teachings, which are not only useful but truly life-changing.

You’ll discover that you embody attributes that give you a lot of power to enact change and create a blissful, exciting, deeply fulfilling and epic life. You just have to learn to access these qualities, which you will learn in each chapter of this book.

It’s not about “getting” any of these qualities, or enlightenment, but discovering that you already are them, and letting them come forward.

Moving Past Nervousness

Yogananda goes on to say that “Nervousness is the disease of civilization.” And this was decades before the current anxiety epidemic of modern society! It’s very depleting to overload your nerves by constantly reacting to stimuli in the outside world all day, every day, which is loud, erratic, insane, and grabbing for your attention. If you put too much attention into the ever-shifting outer world, your energy accordingly becomes ever-shifting and restless. You become like the lake with rocks tossed into it, day in and day out.

Your sympathetic nervous systems starts to go into overdrive, signaling to your adrenals to fire up, go into
fight-or-flight mode, and secrete stress hormones like cortisol. Your body gets further imbalanced and inflamed, as this should not be your normal resting state. Uneasiness, confusion, and restlessness abound. These are all signs that you are definitely veering off the enlightenment path!

Instead, when you are calm, your energy can flow back into your central nervous system in your spine. Like an electrical circuit, when you turn your energy back in, it doesn’t get depleted or used up. Instead, it builds in capacity. And that energy can be used to perceive new breakthrough solutions and ideas, as well as boost your vitality. We become shepherds over our own energy, carefully pointing it in the right direction. The more we stay peaceful, the less we become agitated by what’s going on outside of ourselves—positive or negative—and our overactive minds start to settle down.

The center of anything is where things are most stable. It’s a place of concentrated force, a place of strength. It is the place of pure potentiality where anything is possible. Just like the sun, which beams its powerful light and heat in all directions, it is from your peaceful center that the presence and energy of the True Self radiates. Be like the sun. Shine forth.

Practical Tips for Accessing Peace in Your Life

First, make up your mind to be more peaceful.

It may sound basic, but intention is everything. First, you have to make a clear decision about what you want to create in your life. To find your center, as Yogananda says, “Make up your mind to be calm no matter what happens.” Don’t worry, the “no matter what happens” part is a work in progress for all of us, because to be honest, a lot of things can still make me feel less than calm (you know, screaming kids at 4 a.m., a virus that deletes all your e-mails . . .), but I still see progress. And what’s important is committing to this intention. Right now, just decide to be calm as much as possible. You can even use the phrase “Be peace” as a mantra you can say throughout the day.

Stay centered and surrendered.

Spiritually speaking, trust means that if you do your best right now in the present moment, your life will unfold as it is meant to. Buddha taught that the only way “not to be assailed by past and future” is to be mindfully present moment to moment in your life, without attachment to the outcome of your actions. Life is ever-changing, but if you can show up in the now and just be, you will feel free no matter what happens. In this way, trust helps you to stay less attached to things having to be a certain way. So stay present, which is where your power is rooted.

Take notice of how powerful you feel when you are being calm and in your center.

Sometimes we flit about our day without noticing what we are feeling. Today, pay attention to your body and how it feels during the day. Maybe traffic makes your heart race, or you notice a tightness in your shoulders before a scheduled Zoom call with your boss. Pay attention. You don’t have to write anything down. Just take notice. It’s like tuning in to more awareness about how certain foods make you feel after you eat them. Also, notice how your body feels when you are mentally peaceful. In this case, your goal is to become more aware of your states of being as
you move through your day.

Speak kindly.

Yogananda says, “Another major cause of nervousness is unkind speech. Never gossip or talk against others.” The more you get too entangled in the drama of daily life, the more you get distracted from focusing on
your center.

So worry less and comment less on what other people are doing. It just takes away from your power when you focus on it. It’s yet another way to distort your attention and energy. Consciously avoid gossip magazines, angry news websites, and negative conversations from your life, and notice how much clearer you start to feel. Kindness is a beautiful quality that will help you feel centered.

Batch your time spent on media and social media into pockets of defined times.

It could be, say, from 8–8:30 a.m., midday at 12–12:30, and at 6–7:00 p.m. It’s up to you. Decide the times you are going to go in and explore. The rest of the time you stay off of it. That way, you have space to go back to your center during the day instead of continually having alerts going off that interrupt your flow to show you what’s going on with everybody else’s lives. It’s great to connect with the community! But you can do it in a more deliberate way that allows you to know what’s going on out there when you need to, and yet stay calm and centered within.

Schedule less so you have more downtime.

Packing so much into each day that we’re constantly running from one thing to the next is not conducive to calmness. It’s conducive to anxiety! Ironically, you will be more productive as you slow down because you can put more of your full energy into one thing at a time, with gaps to recenter yourself.

We’ve all experienced this or something similar: you are running late for a meeting, and you look all around for your car keys. You start to panic a little and start looking in the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom. You don’t find them. You panic a little more and go back and look in the same places again because maybe you missed something.

Finally, you come to a stop, take a breath, and whisper a short prayer to yourself: Please help me find these freakin’ keys, or I’m going to explode! Something in you suggests that your keys are in your pocket. And so they are. Turns
out, a touch of stillness in the midst of your little freak-out is where you found what you were looking for.

This article was adapted from the book, You are More than You Think You Are: Practical Enlightenment for Everyday Life by Kimberly Snyder (Hay House, 2022). Available everywhere books are sold.