Befriending Your Nervous System: How to Help Yourself Regulate
Your body works so hard to keep you alive, and much of what it does happens outside of your conscious awareness. Thank goodness you don’t have to use your attention to make your heart beat or your digestive system work. Your body takes over these essential functions, allowing you the opportunity to pay attention to things like finding food, exploring your surroundings, connecting with the people around you, or reading Anna Grace Drage’s blog on polyvagal theory.
I’d like to spend some time today fully fleshing out and helping you to befriend your entire autonomic nervous system. Autonomic means involuntary or unconscious - also thought of as automatic. Your body is going to do these things without your active input, although your active input absolutely has an impact. The three levels of activation are dorsal (immobile), sympathetic (mobile) and ventral vagal (socially connected). We access these different levels of our nervous systems with regularity and, when healthy, with flexibility. When we have trauma, our bodies struggle with returning to a state of regulation and tend to stay in the state that has been most effective for us in surviving. In some people, this looks like depression or chronic fatigue; in others, it looks like rage, panic or frantic energy. We might drop down into immobilization, move up the ladder into mobilization, but not be able to effectively organize our energy to get us back to socially connected. This results in dropping back down into collapse and a sort of ping pong effect. This is not bipolar disorder or mood swings, but the body’s response to different stimuli.
Outside your conscious awareness, your body and brain scan for cues of safety and danger from inside and outside the body and between yourself and other people. When danger is detected, you become mobilized. If the mobilization is not effective in eliminating the threat, you become immobilized to preserve your life for as long as possible. If we apply this to non-survival scenarios, you might experience an urge to flee when things at work become heated or you might become withdrawn when interpreting social rejection from the cues around you. When in ventral vagal state, also known as the socially connected state, we are able to experience the full range of emotions while remaining safe, appropriately connected to others and ourselves. One major tenet of polyvagal theory is that the ventral portion of the vagus nerve modulates the sympathetic system and the dorsal vagus. This ability to modulate leads to a state of regulation. However, the experience of being well-regulated does not necessarily mean that you actively experience joy all the time. Rather, you experience the full emotional spectrum and are able to make active choices. Dysregulation occurs in varying levels of intensity and for many different reasons. When you can track and map your nervous system, you become more able to intervene with your own body and emotions.
So how can we use our own bodies to help ourselves out of a dysregulated, disconnected, and a self-protective state? Firstly with recognition, leading to mapping, leading to intervention, resulting in change, which then needs to be integrated and shaped. Underlying all of it is the principle that your nervous system is your friend, working diligently to keep you going. The body can absolutely learn that the world is a dangerous place, requiring constant, intense vigilance or full retreat. This can be learned from both acute (generally meaning a single, intense incident) or chronic (generally meaning lower intensity but higher frequency) painful learning moments. This protective learning means we can wind up with traumatic stress symptoms without ever having been to war or in a car crash. People are often surprised at the intensity of symptoms that can result from betrayal or emotional abuse. Remember those safety/danger cues? When our relationships become dangerous places, we are essentially deprived of an emotional limb. Often, the way we deal with our fear and pain result in us becoming emotionally unsafe for others, and the pain gets traded back and forth. One way out of this is to begin tracking, then mapping, your own regulation. Just the experience of identifying what level of activation can improve your regulation.
First, tracking
Have you ever been in a situation where it seemed like everything was moving at the wrong speed, either too fast or too slow, or somehow, bizarrely, both? One thing that can be amazingly helpful is breaking these moments down into smaller pieces. With these smaller pieces, we then have choices of where to intervene. Recently, I’ve been using Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor theory to slow these moments down. She notes that there are five basic building blocks of the present moment:
Cognitions - these are the parts of your experience that can be put into words, sometimes referred to as beliefs.
Emotions - a physiological and psychological state, based on circumstances, mood, or relationship with others.
Five senses - any images, tastes, smells, touch, or sounds- the experience is generated internally and my response to say, the smell of cinnamon might be very different from yours.
Movement - a big movement such as leaving the room or a small movement such as the corners of your lips turning down.
Body sensation - cues inside your body, like your heart rate increasing or your stomach clenching, that give you information about how you’re feeling.
If I can give myself enough pause to observe what is happening inside me, I immediately slow down my decision making and reaction time. I start to consider what I choose, rather than following my instinctive, possibly less effective, modes of behaving. When I’m more active in my choices, I’m less likely to enter a shame spiral. Without shame spiraling, I am less inclined to numb or avoid the shame using painful coping mechanisms. I am more likely to engage in self-compassion and treat myself as though I am someone I care about. When I treat myself this way, I more easily access my ventral vagal, socially connected state.
Next, mapping
Now that we have our major landmarks of internal experience because you’ve been working to identify what is happening in your daily life, you’re more familiar with where your mind, heart, and body go and what they do. Now we have more of a personalized hierarchy. This is typically where we would want to start mapping the different levels of nervous system activation. What is it like at different levels of dysregulation? What does it feel like in your body and your emotions, what does it sound like in your head, what movements does your body want to make or sensations happen when you are at these different levels? It can be useful to track them using the visual of a ladder, with the ventral vagal state at the top, sympathetic state in the middle, and dorsal vagal state at the bottom.
Finally, Intervention
You already use a million tiny resources to get you through your day. The deep breath you take before you answer a phone call from your boss, the way you bite your lip to stop yourself from saying something unkind to your mom, straightening your spine when you need to have a hard conversation, leaning your forehead against your steering wheel until you have the energy to go inside - these are all tiny ways your body is resourcing itself. Way to go body! There are also likely areas where you engage in old learned habits which actually interfere with safe connections. For example, if you grew up in a home where apologies were forced, you might have an internal association between apologizing and shame. If your response to the shame is to hide, you might look at the floor and mumble your apologies when you are in the wrong as an adult. If your response to the shame is to become angrily defensive, your apologies might come from a rigid body and consistently be followed by the word ‘but’. Either way, the person you’re apologizing to might not be able to hear the genuine remorse you’re experiencing. And you continue to experience the painful emotions that come along with the apology and the old story you and your body are telling. In this example, what would it be like to drop your shoulders and level your chin when you offer your apology? What might it help you learn? How might that learning continue to impact you and those around you?
Your body holds so much wisdom and has kept you as safe as it possibly could for a very, very long time. Even when our bodies seemingly betray us, like when tears fill your eyes when your heart is filled with rage, they are doing their absolute utmost to let you survive and keep you safe physically, emotionally, and relationally. If it was dangerous for you to stand tall as a child, maybe you learned to be small. If it was dangerous to look vulnerable, maybe you learned to look scary or unafraid even if you were afraid. When framed in this way, you will probably find (maybe with some therapeutic support) that you figured out how to survive in the most effective way possible at the time. Today, you get to make more choices. This doesn’t mean throwing away all the learning that you’ve done throughout your life about keeping yourself safe. However, it does give you the opportunity to honor the learning, play around with what feels actually resourcing and what feels de-resourcing, and experiment with something different- relaxing when you might typically tense up or straightening and grounding when you need to set a boundary or make a request.
Often, we find ourselves in need of containment and centering. Feeling the physical container of the body helps us know where we begin and end. One way to ground is through really noticing your feet on the floor when you’re sitting or standing. Notice the weight of your feet, the stillness of the floor underneath them. After noticing this for a few moments, check in on the building blocks from earlier: what’s happening in the rest of your body, your heart, your mind? Another useful exercise is to place one hand on your forehead and the other on your heart, and take several deep, slow breaths. Continue this until you feel a small shift internally. Once you notice this shift, move your hand from your forehead to your belly, and breathe until you again feel a shift. What else helps you become aware of your container? What helps you feel more solid in yourself?
These practices help to begin the process of shaping your nervous system in new ways, after which the new learning needs to be integrated into your life to become more automatic. This leads to a new, opened ability to connect with yourself, other people, and the world around you with flexibility and support from inside. If you are interested in learning more about how this plays out in your life, maybe it’s time to find someone to do some somatic work with in the future.
Looking for other ways shape your nervous system? To find out more about our approach or to connect with a therapist that is right for you, contact us for a free phone consultation. Our team of therapists are licensed, experienced, and specifically trained in treating attachment wounds, trauma, addiction, and relationships.
About the Author
Morgan Hanley is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapist (EMDR), and Couples therapist trained in Gottman Method, Level 2. Morgan works with clients to heal attachment wounds, family dynamics, and intimate relationships as each system relates to complex trauma responses.