External Regulation: From the outside in
Transcript
Welcome back to our series on self regulation. Today we are working in to this idea of external regulation of the nervous system. Last time we talked about safe self regulation, and what’s going on in the body as it’s trying to regulate or balance the different states and how the overlap between the somatic or voluntary sides of our NS and autonomic or involuntary/reflexive offer us some pathways to help us with that balance.
External regulation happens through that somatic side of our nervous system. In other words we introduce something outside of ourselves to affect our internal state and there are a lot of different categories, some are more socially acceptable than others as you’ll see. But before we get into them I’d like to encourage you, just for today, to let go of any judgement you might have about any of them. The body doesn’t see anything we do as good or bad or right or wrong, all of that is meaning that we color into our actions after the fact. The body and NS is just looking for efficient ways to help you survive in any given moment. As with anything that people do there are always positive and negative consequences. But just for now let’s just look at the process of external regulation with some objectivity so we can get a better understanding of it.
So let’s start working IN with some types of external regulation.
Everything we come into contact with no matter what it is is going to have some kind of effect on the nervous system, whether we notice it or not. Whatever our state is if we’re awake we’re in constant fluctuation.
Today we’ll talk about 3 different kinds of external regulation Chemical, Physical and Mental and as you’ll see often there’s some overlap as always when we work with the body it’s never about one thing. Everything is connected and affects everything else in some way. Whether we understand that pathway yet or not, doesn't really matter, we just need to understand that we are really complex and connected beings.
Chemical External Regulation
So we're gonna start with chemical external regulation. And there's a lot of different things that fall under this category.
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The first is food. And I want to talk about this first because nutrition is one of our pillars of resilience, and it's a very powerful way for us to communicate with our nervous system. How we eat, what we eat, and our eating patterns over our lifetime can really have a big influence on how we feel. A.n that's because we have so many neuro connections in our gut.
Have you ever heard the term comfort food? Well, that's a real thing. Foods that are very high in carbohydrates trigger our dopamine pathways. Both dopamine and serotonin play really important roles in how we feel and how we see the world. So a little side bar on dopamine and serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is all about how we feel pleasure in the moment in the here and now, and dopamine is our neurotransmitter or hormone have motivation and drive towards pleasure. And so both of those things work in concert.
Now, when we eat, what we eat, and why we eat become really, really important here, as well as what it is that we are feeding ourselves. Of course the nervous system is going to pay attention to how we are nourishing our body just for survival right. We need to get proper nutrition in order to be able to support just our physical body, And that definitely is in an important piece to our overall stress response. But when we eat, specifically, high carbohydrate foods and trigger those dopamine pathways or motivation pathways, and our here and now pleasure pathways, as in serotonin, we can really get into affecting our overall sense of well being. So parts of those pathways can get really deep into the brain, it's just another form of external regulation.
Then we have alcohol and caffeine. So, like I said earlier, some of our external regulation can come from substances that are more socially acceptable than others, and alcohol, and caffeine are a couple of those substances,. So we can have a glass of wine or beer to help us come down after a very stressful day, that is external regulation. And we can use, caffeine, to keep us alert and more focused throughout the day, and use that as a way to kind of overcome our natural ebb and flow of energy through the nervous system.
Medicine, pharmaceuticals, and both legal and illegal drugs are also considered external regulation. And remember, everything you consume is going to affect your nervous system in some way, even if you don't notice it so even if we're just talking about something very mild like an over the counter anti inflammatory like Tylenol or Advil or something like that, even if you don't notice it that is still going to have some kind of effect on your nervous system, and maybe in just removing that inflammation, you are actually calming the nervous system, but it definitely does still have that effect.
Now, in a future episode we are going to be talking about how external regulation can lead us into addiction, and addictive behavior. So I don't want to get too much into that right now but I do want to remind us all here that there is a fine line between medicine and poison in the human body and each and every one of us has a slightly different physiology. And so for the idea of taking some kind of drug to specifically help us with a nervous system response for example, anxiety disorders or depressive disorders. We want to be really really careful here because, as I mentioned earlier, changing just one thing about our physiology, doesn't necessarily mean that only one thing will change. Everything works in concert, all of our neurotransmitters and hormones, everything is connected to something else, in ways that we don't really understand fully yet. Although, you know, doctors understand a lot right. Medicine is a miracle, but sometimes the body knows best.
Now, I want to finish this particular segment with a little talk about supplements because over the counter supplements also can affect our nervous system response for the reasons that I just mentioned. Because when you change one little nutrient value, it can have kind of a cascading effect through the body sometimes positive sometimes negative. And so we want to be really really careful here about what we are taking, and why. So, I want to do a future episode on why we take certain supplements because it's, there's a lot out there and it's really hard to kind of filter through all of the information and figure out what is going to be right for you. Everybody just wants to be healthier wants to be the best, the best person that they can be, and in the best health that they can have and that's great.
So I want to give you a resource here. It's a website called examine.com, and I learned about it from one of my favorite podcast hosts, Andrew Huberman, and he does the podcast Huberman Lab. If you go to this website examine.com And you can put in any supplement, any drug, and it's going to give you the science behind that, that particular substance, and what it actually does and you may even be able to find certain levels of whatever it is. If you, let's say, are curious about using ashwagandha for stress reduction, you can put ashwagandha in there and find the clinical trials that they've used what they, what the actual results were and whether or not they were significantly statistically significant, to make your decision. So it's just another way to be better informed.
I highly recommend that people always check with their doctor before taking any kind of supplement and, and then do their own research, because you want to become your best expert in your own body, for sure.
Physical External Regulation
Okay, so let's move on from our chemical external regulation of the nervous system, and then talk a little bit about the physical external regulation. And what I mean here is physical movement. Movement is another one of our pillars of resilience, and it's really important for many reasons in the human body. We are made to move, we are not made to sit at a computer all day, or made to hang around on the couch and watch Netflix all day, this body that you are living in is created to move.
One of the ways that many people use to externally help them balance their stress response is exercise or movement, and as you know, there is a wide range of options for how you can do that. Everyone is different. Some people love exercise some people love to sweat. Some people hate it, some people really just are so resistant to the idea of exercise in the way we think of exercise that hardcore boot camp or choreographed aerobics or running or even just walking.
But, let's break out of the idea that you have to take yourself out of your day to get activity. The body doesn't know whether or not it's in a sweaty, gym, or if you're outside gardening. Both of those things count, and in my opinion, doing some kind of what I would consider gentle or moderate activity outside where you can see the sun and breathe fresh air, much more beneficial to the nervous system than taking yourself out of your day and checking a box to go to that boot camp. Which in some cases can actually escalate our stress response beyond. Now, that is just a personal opinion. And again, I just want to remind you we're not making a judgment on what type of exercise or movement but exercise itself is a external regulatory activity that you can do for your nervous system. We just need to be careful that we don't push ourselves beyond a certain level and actually aggravate our nervous system more.
It just all depends on what our goals are and what our intention is behind that exercise. So, if we are exercising to train for an event, or if we are exercising to reach a certain fitness goal a certain weight loss goal, something like that. That type of exercise of course looks very different than the type of exercise we would choose if our goal is to calm our nervous system, or establish a new resilience pattern for our stress response. So keep that in mind.
Another way to externally regulate our nervous system is not something that I recommend, but it's the idea of introducing pain into the body. Now this is where we can kind of overlap a little bit with our exercise, because for some individuals who have been living in this chronically elevated state of activation. In other words, really really high on that stress scale.
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If you have lived there for a very long time, there's this thing that happens where the body kind of disconnects. A lot of the sensations from our brain and so it takes a lot more effort for you to feel something in your body. And so this is kind of on the extreme level, but for some people, they will use either extreme types of exercise, to feel pain, and they confuse pain with hard work, or a great workout.
Or on the extreme side of that, you know, in order to feel anything people who want to feel something, or anything will resort to self harm. And, of course, as I said before, there's no judgement here but this is just a reaction to find a way to sort of reconnect with the body with some kind of feeling any kind of feeling.
So another way that people physically externally self regulate is by seeking out high risk behavior. So this is an interesting thing because what happens when we are in a high risk situation or a threatening situation is that the body will flood with adrenaline and epinephrine. And in that state, with adrenaline just pumping throughout the body. There's kind of an opioid response or a numbing response. It's a survival response for the nervous system because when we are in that high risk state, in that high risk experience the body is trying to protect us from pain.
And so that's part of adrenaline's job that kind of shuts down these pain receptors. And so for some people that high risk activity, it can be addictive because they are addicted to that numbing response that comes from all of that adrenaline. So it's something to think about.
I want to wrap up this segment on physical external regulation talking about the breath. Now this technically is both a physical external regulation, and an internal self regulation, and this is what I was talking about earlier about this overlap between a somatic and autonomic systems, and a way to get in. Now we are going to be talking more specifically in a future episode about some of those breathing techniques and tools that you can actually use in real time to affect your nervous system state, but for now I just want you to think a little bit about your breath, because the breath is how you breathe, you do not have to think about it, so I'm asking you to think about how you're breathing right now so you can notice how you're breathing. You have the power you have the control at your fingertips to be able to change how you're breathing at any given moment, but if you decide you don't want to think about it, which most of us pay no attention to how we breathe you don't have to. And so that is why it is one of the fastest pathways into the nervous system, it's an external thing that we physically can do to affect our state, but we don't have to. And so it makes it kind of unique in that way.
Mental External Regulation
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Our final category of external regulation is what I consider to be kind of a mental external regulation, it's something that I have noticed a lot specially over the last year with our COVID pandemic. And what I want to talk about here is this idea of voluntary dissociation, or numbing activities to avoid feeling whatever it is that we're feeling.
Now there's probably some therapists and psychologists out there that are going to disagree with this as a form of external regulation, but this is just something that I noticed in myself and I noticed in other people as well, and it's just kind of coming up over and over again.
I want to mention dissociation first, and I'm not talking about the kind of dissociation that happens in voluntarily, when we are stuck in that high functioning freeze state, where we lose pieces of time. Okay, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the everyday kind of dissociation, that people do all the time,. You and I do this all the time I do it every time I get in the car. Anything that you do that is a long term habit like driving a car that you don't have to think about anymore, gives you the opportunity to dissociate. Which means you don't have to think about how you drive the car anymore, right, you can think about other things. And I can make it from point A to point B driving in my car and never have noticed a single turn stoplight, stop sign anything about the traffic at all. That's dissociation.
Or maybe dissociation might be you have an intention of going to get something out of the kitchen, you all of a sudden find yourself in the kitchen and can't remember any thing about what it was that brought you to the kitchen. So those are the kinds of associations that I'm talking about.
And along with that dissociation that choice full action to remove yourself mentally from the moment or from your day. Doing things like binge watching The Walking Dead, for three weeks, where we just sit ourselves down, find a place of stillness, because we don't want to be consciously present in our day, we're going to do something else that takes us completely out of our reality for some length of time. So it could be television, it could be podcasts, it could be reading. I personally am very fond of Kindle Unlimited and I will get nine books series, and sit down and read them for hours and hours I can lose myself.
This is a choice because we are bringing something else in from the outside to help take us out of our body in the moment. And that's what I mean by mental external regulation. It's not necessarily something that improves our, our nervous system state or is detrimental to our nervous system state it's like a neutral action just pulling back completely.
Chemical, physical and mental external regulation. These are just some of the very powerful ways that people can externally regulate their nervous system. And I don't know about you but I have recognized many of these in my own life, and now I can really notice them a lot and other people as well. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using external regulations sometimes, sometimes we need that.
The problem I think comes from the fact that our society and culture today has misled us into believing that we can’t self regulate without something outside of ourselves. The human body, nervous system is well equipped to handle all sources of stress, and threat. You’re born knowing how. It’s just that we’ve been socialized out of our natural responses. It’s not polite, it’s not socially acceptable to trust your gut, Sometimes it’s rude.
But whatever the reason for it, it’s never too late to rediscover our innate resilience. We can use that overlapping space between somatic and autonomic to give the body a way to release unresolved stress and trauma in safe ways. That’s what we’ll be talking about next time on the work IN. I’ll be sharing some very simple, accessible tools to help anyone, anywhere find their nervous system reset.
Thanks for listening, be sure to check the show notes for any links mentioned in today’s show and if you like what you heard and you want to learn more you can follow me on facebook @elementalkineticsmovewell or IG @elementalkinetics.
I’m Ericka,
I teach a powerfully effective modality called trauma release exercise that works through the body without the need to relive the story.
Whether your fight is on the frontline or the home front, past or present, personal or professional... chronic stress & stress injury can be a debilitating enemy.
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