Mental Health: Regulating Your Nervous System
“Your thoughts and emotions are like the weather and you are the sky.”
Our thoughts and emotions are temporary states of being that flow in, through, and out of us as we experience life. Often times we don't even know where they came from. (Why the heck am I thinking about that again? That has nothing to do with what's happening.)
Our thoughts and emotions are often reactionary and can be remanents of long passed experiences. This does not however make them any less true or overwhelming. It is our job to use our Mind (or Self) and our Body to consciously regulate our nervous system and look towards our emotions and thoughts as trail guides back to wounds that still need healing. Over time we can learn to shift and change our perspective and watch our thoughts and emotions without getting attached to them.
Look Towards our emotions and thoughts as trail guides back to wounds that still need healing
How and Why does all this happen?
As we go through life we develop beliefs based on our experiences. These beliefs about how the world works can be positive, negative, or neutral. For example, you might absolutely love dogs because you grew up playing with a wonderful puppy or you might be absolutely terrified of dogs because of a traumatic experience with one. Or you might not really have any formative memories with a dog and not really care either way. This happens throughout our lives with every situation and experience we have. Our brain’s main job is to detect threats and come up with solutions for the problem.
When we grow up in a nurturing, supportive environment we develop confidence, self-assurance, agency, trust, safety, and so much more. If we are disconnected from safe guardians who reassure us and reflect positive emotional regulation, when we experience detrimental things we often form negative beliefs about the world around us. Such as “it is not safe to express myself,” I can't trust other people," “If I'm perfect then I won't get in trouble,” and so on and so forth. These subconscious beliefs form as a protective mechanism, especially when we're children learning how to navigate the world. But as we grow older they often no longer serve us and in fact set us back.
As adults, our brains are fully developed and we can start to go back in and rewrite the programming we experienced throughout our lifetimes.
We are not our thoughts, but The Observer of life as it unfolds
Rewriting the Programming
In order to rewrite your programming, you MUST first feel safe enough to do so. Remember our beliefs and behaviors are created as defense mechanisms that WORKED to help us survive as we navigated the world we lived. Now that you’re older, these beliefs and behaviors aren’t always serving us. In order to do the reprogramming your first job is learning to regulate your nervous system so that you can become aware of what’s going on in the background and then work towards feeling safe enough to do this work. Below are some of my own personal favorites, these have formed the basis of feeling safe and learning to detach myself from my emotions, and behaviors, and be able to re-establish healthy beliefs and behaviors.
One last thing before I share, this is SO important to know…. life cycles through lessons over and over again. And each time around you get new lessons and chances to practice what you learned the last time around. At the end of the blog, I will give you some extra tips to help you accomplish healing faster. All of these overlap with each other, this allows them to compound and build upon each other to increase healing.
The Sacred Pause and Mindfulness
Break the cycle of reactivity by instilling even just a short pause between the triggering event, your reaction, and eventually your response can help you create time to choose a different response. This is like learning to hold your breath underwater. At first, it’s really scary and you feel the need to come up for air really quickly, but over time you can practice holding for longer and longer.
Containment
Containment is the practice of shelving trigger responses or emotions until you are ready to process them. It can be used to separate out your response from the actual situation at hand or it can be used to put a memory that’s too much to handle in safe holding until you have the proper support. This comes with a pact with yourself that you will address this when the time is right. This practice can be such a lifesaver! It has helped me realize some of the things I was carrying weren’t mine at all.
Balancing Sugar and Hormones
Our physical body and its health are directly tied to our mental health. Food = Mood. When we eat a diet that shoots our blood sugar up and then crashes, we will absolutely release stress hormones, get HANGRY, and struggle with emotional upset. Our blood sugar balance is directly tied to cortisol (one of our stress hormones) release, which in turn steals building materials and energy from making our other hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc. This in turn causes us to struggle with hormone imbalance and we all know how “crazy” our hormones can make us feel. Eating a diet that has a balance of protein, fat, and fiber will regulate blood sugar and help keep you sane.
Somatic Exercises
Somatics has many branches, but the main idea behind it is that we are affected and shaped by our environment and our health is in relationship not only with what we do internally, but also relationsionally. Somatics often uses the body as a guide to the rest of the system and this is an absolutely powerful tool. Our bodies are tangible and easy to recognize when things are off. Plus using our bodies as a tool for regulation can help adjust our mood very quickly. Body scans are a huge part of my healing work. I check to see how my body is responding to the situation at hand. Am I relaxed and open, are my shoulder creeping up to my ears, are my fists or jaw clenching, how’s my heart rate? When I find things that are holding tension it’s often a sign of my suppressing something. This is where I tune in and ask what this part needs of me or if that part can relax. Speak to your body as if it were a child. Give yourself the care you needed.
Therapy using Parts Work (Internal Family Systems) and EMDR
Therapy is such a hot topic nowadays and for good reason. I’m a huge proponent of Somatic-based therapies that integrate the body into the process of healing. Our body shapes itself to our environment. Our genes are turned on and off based on our experiences, and we form parts as protective mechanisms in response to our experiences. We often get trapped in muscle memory patterns that cause pain because we suppress our anger or emotional reactions. Parts Work from the IFS system is a practice that helps us integrate all the wounded parts of us back into a functioning system. It’s been incredible just having the language of parts work in my everyday life. It has allowed me to separate my Self from the parts that take over my system when I go into a stress response, and through doing this I can help those parts calm and relieve the stress, anxiety, anger, etc that they are holding. EMDR is another absolutely amazing tool! Again it helps us regulate and calm down our nervous system response by bringing both sides of the brain together to solve a problem. I highly recommend finding a therapist who is trained in either or both of these modalities. My therapist has been instrumental in helping me regulate and manage my system and in doing so healing from so much.
Grounding
Grounding is a practice where you gather your energy back to you. Again this can be done in so many ways, but here are a few of my favorites. Physically getting in contact with the earth. Imagining all my energy is coming back to me from everywhere else and stating “I call all my energy back to me.” Shaking to release pent-up energy. I start with my feet, then legs, hips, belly, shoulders, arms, hands, and gentle head, then at the top blow the air out through my mouth and bend in half to let everything hang. Stomping. A few deep breaths. Sitting with a cup of tea. Stretching. anything that brings me back to the present.
Yoga
Yoga is the practice of yoking or uniting your mind, body, and spirit. The whole point of the physical postures is to align and attend to your physical body and release excess energy so that you can meditate and take the lessons from the physical practice to the rest of your life. Yoga can teach you to be more flexible, more patient, more grounded, more trusting, more calm, understanding, and more. Because as you develop these skills with your physical body, your mind reflects those lessons elsewhere.
Guided Imagery and Meditation
This. This is such an incredible tool. Guided imagery and meditation literally change the structure of your brain. You do not need to sit in lotus posture to accomplish meditation. There are so many; just start with something simple like counting your breath, going for mindful walks, etc. Guided Imagery can be so helpful for healing because it speaks directly to the right brain where our emotions, creativity, etc all originate. The right side of the brain doesn’t really do language, it speaks in symbolism. When you use guided imagery you tap into the unspoken parts that need healing. The parts before language or working memory can develop or the parts that haven’t had a chance to speak. I’ve watched tight knots disappear with NO effort with guided meditations and released some serious pain from my past using imagery and containment.
Community
Connection is the key to healing. We are social creatures. We need a community for survival. Rejection was and is death for humans. It’s built into our DNA. Without a caring guardian, we can’t survive and we definitely cannot become well without the love and connection from a caring supportive family. Everyone has experienced a loss of connection. Whether it’s from death, cultural distortion of what community should look like, a breakup, loss of friendship, lockdowns, etc, we’ve all experienced it. This triggers in us great distress because again rejection = death, especially when we were surviving in the wilderness as tribes, clans, etc. This need hasn’t gone anywhere just because most of us live in cities surrounded by thousands of people. In fact, It’s more important now than ever to find or create a community. Go on meet-ups or Facebook groups and find people who are hosting gatherings that interest you. Join a group exercise class, take an art class, go to a women’s circle, or invite friends over for a potluck dinner. Community support creates healing through safety, connection, and holding space. Being seen, heard, believed, and understood is healing. When you are in connection with others you literally release oxytocin (the bonding hormone), which cancels out our stress response. Which in turn, allows our body to switch on the healing systems in our body.
Bodywork and Energy Healing
Bodywork and Energy Healing is all about holding space for you to heal. Bodywork can bring attention to areas that are sneakily holding tension, helps you release oxytocin, calms stress, improves immunity, helps with sleep, and so much more. Energy work helps reset the energy body. We are all energy at the base level. Each cell is made of molecules and atoms that have energetic imprints. I pick up on this when I’m working with people very often. These imprints can be from injuries (physical, mental, or emotional), from blocks in energy flow, and more. When we work with the energy we can adjust the flow of energy and help reset the system. It can sound Woo, but people have been practicing energy work or frequency medicine for thousands of years with sound, light, color, imagery, and more. You know more than you think you know. I always like to give this example… You know how you can tell when someone is in a bad mood without even having to look at them or how sometimes you randomly start thinking about someone and then later they message you? That’s part of what we’re working with when we do energy work. But this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
“This is not a fight, but a dance.”
Here are my extra tips for you….
Work with an experienced practitioner to hold space for you and Incorporate play and movement. We learn exponentially faster when we incorporate movement and play into the process. Make it a game. Pretend your trigger is the person who you’re playing freeze tag with. Oh, time to pause! Laugh at yourself. Dance. Draw. Whatever you can to make it more light-hearted. And when you have a safe person to do this work with you’ll have someone who can zoom out and point to something you might be missing, reassure you when you’re stuck in negative self-talk, or help remind you to ground when you’re nervous system is getting activated.
If you want to experience some of this work I highly suggest booking a Somatic Reintegration Session. During these sessions I combine several of the tools I discussed above to help shift your energy and body towards healing, removing blocks, and resetting the system at a deep level. Plus, we’ll talk about what to do from here and how to incorporate support systems like plant medicine in an easy way.
Our body, mind, and spirit are such a complex system. We ebb and flow as life changes in order to keep surviving. It’s time you commit to working with your system to heal. This is not a fight but a dance. Your body, mind, and spirit have such power. More than you can imagine when you teach them to work together.
If you’re interested in working together fill out the form below.
