Resilience: Physical fitness for your nervous system
Transcript
Hi there everyone and welcome back to The Work IN. I'm your host Ericka Thomas and I'm coming to you today, solo, to talk a little bit about resilience. Specifically, the definition of resilience, what exactly is it. Now, when we discuss PTSD, trauma, stress, anything like that, the word resilience comes up quite a bit, but the explanation of resilience, seems to be fuzzy.
I know that many of you have some kind of understanding of what resilience means, but I want to take some time today to clarify it just so that we can sort of start to embody the idea of resilience in a way that makes a bigger difference for ourselves in our everyday lives, and then also for other people in our lives. So that we can understand some of the behavior that is going on around us.
Okay, so the way I understand resilience, the way I wrap my head around resilience is basically that it is how we rise to a challenge, and how quickly we can come back to some kind of baseline state of calm after that challenge, and that could be anything. When I say challenge, it could be good, bad, neutral doesn't really matter what it is. In the moment, something that is activating how quickly how effectively you can respond to that in the moment, and then come back to your baseline state of calm.
And it's fine if we understand resilience that way, but I want to give you maybe a little different way to think about it, and hopefully it will help you understand how to access resilience, a little bit easier, and how we can support our own healthy levels of resilience.
I think of resilience as physical fitness for your nervous system. So stop a minute and think about what physical fitness is, what we understand physical fitness as. There are a lot of different components, when we are getting fit when we're getting healthy. If you have ever been to a gym or worked with a personal trainer in any way shape or form, you may be familiar with them. We have cardiovascular fitness, we have mobility, we have flexibility we have strength, we have power. We have endurance. So, there are many many components to physical fitness, and we don't necessarily work, all of them, every time we go to the gym or every time we do an exercise class.
And you know this, because we have cardio classes, we have Mind Body classes, we have strength classes, we have sculpting classes, we have high intensity, low intensity, all different kinds of things going on when we're talking about physical fitness. And it is very very similar. when we talk about resilience. The difference is that in physical fitness, we are mostly working just from the body from the physical standpoint, we move our body in a certain way, we pick up certain levels of weights, we incorporate different speed, different intensity levels, those kinds of things. It's all through the body. And unless you're working with a health coach or a personal trainer, we don't really get into the top down processing or motivation, behavior change side of physical fitness, although that is a piece of overall health and wellness, right, that mindset piece when it comes to how healthy we are.
When we talk about resilience, you have a lot of different areas of resilience, going on in our nervous system, and almost as many as when we talk about the body by itself, but a lot of times, the resilience programs that are put out into the world, really only operate on that mindset side of the coin. The top down processing. In other words, thinking through different scenarios that trigger your stress response, or talking about your story, or planning out how you're going to react. If this happens, then I'm going to do this.
All of that is very valuable. But what it ignores is the very physical response that comes up in the body, any time you are activated by some kind of challenge. Some people will talk about that activation in terms of threat, but it's not always threatening. To the nervous system, everything is a threat to your survival, and it's just an on or off kind of thing. You're either being threatened and you've got to do something or you're not and you're safe.
Because we are human and we have this prefrontal cortex, that is very developed and we have self awareness, we crave meaning. So we attach a lot of meaning to all of the experiences that come at us on a day to day level. And that meaning sort of shades the level of threat or challenge on those experiences. The meaning that we assign to those experiences or challenges, doesn't change our physiological response.
So, If our goal is to build resilience we need to think about it a little bit like we think about physical fitness. Now if you want to go get in shape. If you want to get stronger and get more endurance, and maybe get more flexible. Then there's very specific types of exercises that you would need to do to challenge the body enough so that it will change and get stronger. And typically what happens is we ask for more than what we can already do with our body, and that triggers cellular changes in the muscles in our cardiovascular system. And in the flexibility of our joints and our muscles and tendons, so that they become more flexible, they become stronger, we get stronger through our heart and lungs and all of those things in order to make those changes we have to challenge the body.
Same thing happens with resilience. We can't remove all of the challenges, all of the triggers that we could possibly come into contact with simply to make ourselves feel more resilient because resilience isn't about being calm all the time. Resilience is about rising to the challenge whatever it is, and then coming back to our calm. And if we want to get better at doing that, then we need to practice doing that. The same way if we want to get better at running, we have to run. If we want to get better at yoga and Down Dog, we have to actually do yoga and down dark, same with resilience.
The problem is, if we're already living in a highly activated state on a regular basis. Our baseline state of calm, is maybe already stuck too high, and it's going to take a little bit of work a little bit of attention and curiosity and observation for us to see for us to be able to find the ways that we're going to need to practice the things that we will need to practice to bring that baseline state down a little bit, to kind of turn down that dimmer switch.
One of the challenging things when we work with resilience is that every human being has different triggers different things that activate their nervous system, and every activation is going to feel different between individuals. It's a very personalized and individual response to activation to any experience. And so no professional is ever going to be able to lay down a set of steps that will work for every individual. Just like a diet. If one thing worked for everyone, there would be only one thing, and we need to remember that. And part of our resilience training is to cultivate enough curiosity to allow ourselves to look at lots of different options for helping that nervous system to come back. To turn down that dimmer switch to move in and out of activation with some level of confidence that you're not going to get stuck in that activated state, or get pushed way over the top into overwhelm where nobody wants to live.
So if we can start to think about resilience a little bit like physical fitness for the nervous system, we can approach it a little bit differently. Now if I were going to train someone for a marathon, I would not completely ignore the strength component, I would not completely ignore their flexibility. Those things are important, you can't only run, run, run, run. When you're training for a marathon, you need to make sure that your training is balanced. That it incorporates enough active rest, and that we have enough strength to support the body in whatever way that we're moving. Same thing with resilience.
A very big piece to our bottom up approach to resilience, the kind of bottom up approach that we use when we practice breath centric yoga, trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise.Those kinds of things always also incorporate a lot of that top down processing of observation, and witnessing, and then a lot of body scan, and guided meditation, where we can re establish some friendly connections between the mind and the body. You're not a body that runs around without a mind and you're not just your mind running around without a body. Those things are connected and they are connected in ways that we are not consciously aware of.
We can become more consciously aware of those connections. And the more aware we are, the more in the moment we are when we are activated or challenged, and we start to feel that nervous system come online, the easier it is for the mind to start to replace some of the negative experiences the negative emotional baggage that we attach to a lot of our nervous system response.
And as we start to replace that with new experiences, the brain learns. It's very very plastic. And that's really what resilience is all about is to constantly offer other options for a response that come from the body in ways that feel safe. So this is what that safe self regulation piece is that we strive for especially in trauma release exercise. It's the reason why in TRE, when you're working with a certified provider, you're given so many opportunities to stop the process and rest. That is really where the nervous system training is happening. Because if we just activate the nervous system with a tremor, and we just shake. Now all we're doing is activating activating activating. You may have walked in the door completely overwhelmed to begin with, and that isn't really what we're going for. We're giving the body and the nervous system and the brain new response patterns, new ways to reorganize back into efficient resilience efficiently moving in and out of that activation. And the more we can do that, the easier it becomes when you're not in a session to be able to do that without thinking about it.
And that's why so many of our clients report that rather than having all of their anxiety go away instantly. They tell us all the things that used to make me nervous that used to upset me that used to set me off all of those things, they don't really bother me so much anymore. Those things that used to make me fly off the handle at the drop of the hat. Gosh, I don't even hardly notice that happening anymore and that's what true resilience is.
That is the kind of resilience that we are striving for when we are working in that trauma informed space. So I hope this helps to kind of put some context around the idea of resilience, of course we want to have some top down processing, always. We are human and we love to know the why of everything, but it's important to remember that your nervous system is acting on your best interest, whether you understand that response as your best interest or not. So keep that in mind.
And if you're interested in learning a little bit more about trauma release exercise or trauma informed yoga or how to fuse the two, I would be happy to talk to you about that more, go to elementalkinetics.com/inquiry and schedule a quick 30 minute consultation, I would love to chat with you about it. And whatever you do, remember, stop working OUT and start working IN.
Thanks for listening, everyone. If you like what you heard, and you want to learn a little bit more, be sure to head over to elementalkinetics.com or follow me on Instagram @elementalkinetics or Facebook at @elementalkineticsmovewell.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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...
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