Safe Self Regulation: What does that even mean?
Transcript
Ericka Thomas 0:06
Welcome to the work in your guide to natural ways out of stress, tension and trauma. My name is Ericka Thomas. I'm a certified trauma release exercise provider health coach, and yoga instructor, and I'm using my 20 plus years of experience to bring you a new perspective on health and wellness. I believe that true health and healing begins and ends with the nervous system, and that means, for most of us, we need to reintroduce those connections.
0:38
The great news is that we can, and that's what the work IN is all about. Throughout this podcast, you'll find tools, resources, practices, people, and perspectives that will help you add to your own resilience arsenal and shake off the effects of all sources of chronic physical, mental, and emotional stress, my intention is solely to bring you information and empower you with permission to stop working out and start working in the work in is brought to buy kinetic Grace resilience, kinetic grace is an online program designed to teach safe self regulation of the stress response through the body using trauma release exercise guided body awareness, and the breath. The program includes private instruction, exclusive access to certified providers and 30 days of group classes. And because it's online, kinetic grace is available anywhere you our enrollment is open now. Visit elemental kinetics.com to learn more.
1:50
Hi there everyone. Over the next few episodes we'll be talking about regulation, specifically how the body regulates itself. Our number one purpose with any stress relieving exercise or protocol is or really should be to teach, safe, self regulation. But what exactly does that mean, what does it mean for the body. What are some of the ways that we do it without conscious effort. That's what we'll be exploring in today's episode, and then over the next few episodes, we'll go deeper into what external regulation is and how that can shift into addiction, and then we'll be moving into some specific skills that you can practice to help you retrain your nervous system, so that it safely self regulates without your conscious thought.
So let's dive right in.
2:52
Hi there everyone, and welcome back and today we are working in to the idea of safe self regulation.
You're nervous system has one and only one job and that's to keep you alive. And it does this through constant regulation. Regulation of body temperature, regulation of energy that balance between waking and sleeping, regulating our digestion, the balance between hunger and satiety, hormone regulation, and many many more.
Today, we're going to spend some time talking about how the body regulates our stress response where that balance between activation and calm. At it’s base, if you strip everything away, we need to understand first and foremost, that the body, the brain the nervous system, it's always seeking balance or homeostasis, and it really needs this, in order for us to survive. The brain is a part of your nervous system, and it's the thinking and self aware part that has us listening today, but that self aware that conscious thinking part of our brain has very little to do with the survival part of our brain.
The survival part is what is connected to the nervous system, in ways that affect regulation. So let's back up a minute, we're going to do a general run through here of what is included in our nervous system and the parts that place in regulation, and then we'll make our way towards this idea of safe self regulation, and how we can start to affect that.
So our central nervous system includes our brain and our spinal cord, most of us remember that from basic biology class. We also have a peripheral nervous system and the peripheral nervous system includes all of the nerves that are outside of our brain and spinal cord that interact with our world. These are the nerves that kind of bring us the information back about what's going on around us.
The peripheral nervous system is broken down into two different parts, you have a somatic nervous system, which is responsible for all of our voluntary actions, anything that you think first and then go and do that is a voluntary action, and it happens within the somatic nervous system. You might recognize that word somatic, because we have some stress relief and stress management modalities like somatic experiencing that really integrate movement voluntary movement through the body to activate some of that stress relief. Somatic nervous system equals voluntary action.
Okay. The other piece to our peripheral nervous system is the autonomic nervous system, which I'm sure sounds familiar to you, but this nervous system is responsible for all the automatic stuff that happens without us thinking about it. It controls all of our organs and glands, and mostly the involuntary, or you might replace involuntary with reflexive action.
Okay, so the autonomic nervous system is then broken down into two more parts. The parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, which is where we're going to keep a little bit more of our focus here today, and as you know the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for kind of our baseline state of function, this is where we have our state of calm. We consider the parasympathetic nervous system to be kind of our rest and repair state, and the sympathetic side which is considered to be our activation side and that could be activation in a range of ways, everything from simply getting up out of bed to fighting off a tiger. So there's a lot of variation in activation, that can come from the sympathetic nervous system and not all of it is considered to be, quote unquote bad or dysfunctional in some way.
Now, the autonomic nervous system happens through several cranial nerves -never just one it in the body and the nervous system we're never just talking about one thing. But the main cranial nerve, that is kind of the star of the autonomic nervous system is the 10th cranial nerve that's the Vegas nerve, and it plays a big role in the polyvagal theory. Stephen Porges theory, which states that really, there's more to our autonomic nervous system, then simply the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So if we were to break that down into fight or flight or calm the polyvagal theory, adds another layer to that it offers the idea that there's more than just an on off switch that we have lots of mixed states.
The polyvagal theory posits this idea that there's also a freeze, state, and a social engagement state, and we can blend between those states and our activation states in certain ways to give us a lot more room to move. In our world, and to be regulated in different ways. People are way more complex than simply an on off switch, and this is obvious this is obvious just from basic observation of humans. So, even though it would probably be a good theory is just that it's a theory. It does have quite a bit of influence over how we understand the stress response.
Now, part of the complexity between that on and off switch is the overlap between the idea of voluntary action that we can control and the autonomic reaction that we can’t control, and that's where this idea of safe self regulation lives, in that in between space that overlaps between the somatic and the autonomic. And this is where we can actually get in to the nervous system, it's where a lot of our best safe self regulation tools lie. We have this beautiful harmony between our reflexive actions to the world, and the deliberate actions that we can choose in response to our perception of the world. And that is really important to remember as we are trying to develop a toolbox or an arsenal of ways to handle all of our experiences, past, present and future, and to build and retrain resilience, especially if we're coming out of a place where we have felt stuck or disconnected from some of these options.
So, no matter what is happening, there's always going to be some kind of immediate reaction from our nervous system. And we will always have a choice. Now, the trick here is that most of the time, our reactions to experiences around us, our autonomic nervous system reactions are reflexive first. It's like what we think of as a gut reaction, and they happen so fast that we cannot activate a conscious brake to that reaction in time to stop it if it's something that we don't want to have happen.
But we are designed and the nervous system is designed to seek some kind of balance between that activation and our baseline states of both the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. At the same time, we can't turn one off completely and turn one on completely, or vice versa. We are looking for a way to balance it's more like a wave, there's always some blend.
So here's what some of that looks like that activation regulation in the nervous system. You can have activation without any fear. What would that look like, well, activation of the nervous system without any fear might look like excitement, or play, or some kind of social engagement, any level of social engagement, whether you are highly socially engaged or whether you're just sitting next to someone.
Then we could be activated with fear. Right. We could be in a state where we're highly activated and afraid. At the same time, what might that look like it could be anxiety. It could be anger, we could be frustrated. There could be panic, or you might simply be a little bit worried right there's a big range of levels within that activation response, then we have the idea of stillness, or calm, so we're not activated, we are being still and in that state without fear, that might look something like snuggling on the couch with the companion with a partner, right, in order to be still in order to be calm and with another person we cannot have fear attached to that.
13:22
Right. So, stillness and calm might also be attached with fear. And in a state like that. You might find a person who is frozen. Physically frozen in animals in small rodents, they actually play dead. Like that paralyzed state. In humans paralyzation doesn't always look like that, though.
We can be still and fearful and paralyzed in ways that simply look like we are unable to make a decision. We might be confused. We might have a really hard time focusing on one particular thing where we're easily distracted. And that also might be a paralyzed, state. And it could be in a single moment, or it could be in a state of being in your life where you are in a place in your life where you just simply cannot change your situation. That’s also a place of stillness, with fear.
14:39
Now there's, there's one other blended state that is really interesting to me, and I see it, often with people who are in chronically elevated stress states, where you have been under a lot of toxic levels of stress for a very long time. And this state is a state of activation and shutdown, at the same time. In other words, you can physically do things, you're active in your life, you can approach any situation, you can do things, but you are physically, mentally and emotionally disconnected and dissociated from your body.
This is what we call a high functioning, freeze state, and it happens a lot in first responders and soldiers and EMTs over time. Because we learn, the nervous system and the body and the brain, we've learned and adapt to our environment. If our environment is a place where we are constantly under threat, but we still have to show up there, we still have to be present there, in order to survive, then that adaptation clicks over and dissociates, the mind from the body in order for you to function properly. In order for you to survive.
So all of these things really happen at a very primitive level between the nervous system and the body, and any combination of these states can be possible. Most of us are not going to pay very much attention to how the nervous system regulates itself, in any of these various combined states until we notice some sort of dysfunction something feels wrong. Something goes wrong and that might be physically, it might be mentally it might be emotionally.
So it might be physical pain, it might look like insomnia or an inability to sleep. When we completely lose our appetite or our appetite just goes through the roof, where we're just eating all the time. And in those cases that that relationship to food can be really, really tricky, because we've lost our ability to feel satiety, or feel hunger. And so the body is simply seeking a way to feel better, right. Where the body and the nervous system only wants to find balance so it's going to do it in whatever way it possibly can. And it might be, by saying, No, you don't need food or it might be saying, yes you need all the food, right.
This could also look like racing thoughts, emotional dysregulation, that's a fancy way to say there's a lot of emotional outbursts, very random sometimes completely unconnected to the situation that you're in. So, can look like a lot of other things as well. Everybody is different, and there's no really specific, straight line diagnosis here between a specific kind of stress, and the way the body responds.
So there's several books out there that tried to translate that for people, one in particular is called Your Body Speaks the Mind it's by Deb Shapiro and she breaks down different areas of the body, where, when you start to feel dysfunction in those areas that has some sort of meaning and, as you know, our conscious mind, our aware brain is always seeking meaning.
And things like resources like that book are great, they're a great place to start but it doesn't change the fact that just because you feel pain in certain areas of your body, it doesn't mean that that's necessarily where the stress originates, or where the source is the source could be anything, including a memory that you do not even consciously acknowledge.
What we need to remember is that everything that we do, everything that we come into contact with. From the moment of birth and sometimes before. It all affects our nervous system in some way, and that nervous system is constantly trying to adapt to what we have experienced. And because everything affects our nervous system, it's going to cause some sort of regulatory response in that system.
Now let's talk about this idea of safe versus unsafe regulation and this is where things can get a little bit tricky, a little bit complicated. And just keep in mind, every single person listening here is unique, you are an individual, and you come to the table with a unique individual, history, and it all affects you in a unique individual way that is important because our perception is nine tenths of the law when it comes to how our nervous system response. This is important to remember because we can have two people who experienced the exact same kind of traumatic event, and they can have two completely opposite reactions to that same event. And it's because they came to the table with a completely different individual history, even if they came out of the same family, so please keep that in mind.
So because our perception and our subjectivity, about what is happening around us is so important to our stress response, we need to first start with some level of awareness of what's going on. If you aren't. If you don't, or if you can't notice what's going on in the moment, it's really really hard to change anything, and to get a different reaction out of it. But the good news about this, about this idea of subjectivity is that you have some control here this is where we can get in because it's how we see things and how we see things affects our thoughts, our belief systems, and those things are changeable.
21:49
Now first, if we find that level of awareness, and we notice what's going on, we need to start by noticing and finding that awareness on three different levels, a physical level, a mental level, and an emotional level. We access the body in three different ways.
Okay, once we have that little bit of awareness. Let's practice a little bit of acceptance here, just know that you're not going to be able to catch those reflexive reactions, before they start. At least not in the beginning. What we first have to do is notice them. That is number one thing is to notice first, that your body or your mind or your emotions are reacting in a way that you may or may not want to have happen, or you may or may not want to have continue. Okay, so once we have that awareness, and then except that we're not going to be able to stop it before it happens, then we can start the real work.
And the real work in is to find a way to interrupt those reactions because they happen in a split second, once they start and you notice, then you can interrupt them. And we have some really specific ways. For example, the breath that can immediately interrupt, some kind of stress response. Right. And once we have interrupted, that response, we notice we accept it. We interrupt it.
And then we can start to replace it and this is really important. We're going to be talking about recovering from extended time periods under toxic levels of stress and a couple future episodes. In order to recover from that to really pull back out of some of the debilitating things that can happen with diagnosed PTSD and undiagnosed PTSD, we must be able to replace those reactions those reflex of actions. This is where we, where the rubber hits the road with retraining the nervous system.
Whatever response that you have to whatever trigger is out there, whether it's a smell, whether it's a person whether it's an experience or a sound or a place, whatever that trigger is, once it starts that reaction, our work in is all about replacing it with something else. And part of that replacement requires disconnecting all of the emotional connections that have been made, that have surrounded that event. So a lot of the work that our brain does when we sleep is disconnecting that baggage, and sometimes that just doesn't get a chance to happen, because we're either not sleeping well, or we have been living in this state for so very long, and the adaptation is really deep into the nervous system.
Our safe self regulation comes from allowing ourselves the grace to start to replace some of those reactions with something else. Something that is safe, or falls under that safe category in our perception, and this is super important. When we're retraining the nervous system, that it isn't about finding a state of calm all the time. It's about practicing that transition between our activation and our calm state, and that's really where that safe self regulation piece falls in, is the transition.
Being able to regulate is not about holding yourself in a particular state all the time, it's about being able to safely, efficiently move back and forth, in and out of those activated states without fear, hopefully. But if there is fear, to be able to come out of it in ways that don't feel overwhelming, where you can have some type of control, some little bit of control in that situation.
This was just a general overview about the idea of self regulation about the idea of safe self regulation about how that works in the nervous system. Stay tuned. Over the next few episodes we're going to be talking about some different areas of regulation as well. And we'll be moving more deeply into what some of those tools are that we can use for safe self regulation, as well as the idea of what external regulation means and why we want to maybe avoid some of that.
27:17
Thanks for working in with me today everyone. And if you're looking for a little bit deeper of a work in, I'll give you a little bit of homework. See if you can notice any moments in your day, where you feel your nervous system, Highly activated or see if you can notice that transition between some kind of activated state, and coming back down to your baseline state of calm. What does that feel like to you. What does it feel like in your body, what does it feel like emotionally, and just make a mental note, and if you'd like to share. Follow me on Facebook at elemental kinetics, move well feel free to leave me a comment or a message, or you can find me on Instagram at elemental kinetics. I'll see you next time on The Work IN.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai