When a child is emotionally dysregulated we call it a temper tantrum, a phase and these days “big feelings”. When an adult is emotionally dysregulated we call it mental illness. What is it that happens or doesn’t happen between childhood and adulthood that paves the way for the long list of disorders now associated with emotional dysregulation and what can we do differently? That’s the topic for today’s Work IN.

People are wired for connection. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism innate in even the most introverted of us. And it’s repeated from our cultural community and tribal tendencies all the way down to a cellular level in the body. Connection in the context of health and wellness can look like mindfulness practices, building self awareness through meditation and journaling, setting healthy boundaries, improving work life balance, strengthening relationships with family and friends, getting involved in your community, building your own communication and leadership skills, tapping into hobbies and activities that bring you joy.

On the surface those things might not seem as critical to our health as getting our blood pressure under control or lowering our cholesterol and losing weight. But it’s precisely BECAUSE those things are critical that we need to acknowledge the influence that our connection to ourselves and our community has on those more measurable health outcomes. Today we’re discussing the internal and external connections that matter when we’re making changes to our health.

We are working our way through 5 categories of health with our Cat 5 challenge and today we’re diving into category 4 the nervous system. Last week we discussed the overlap of the nervous system and sleep and how we’re looking for ways to help the body feel safe enough to be able to relax into that parasympathetic so we can rest and be close to other people. Today I want to discuss how playing it safe ALL the time can actually keep you in a state of protection, hypervigilance and anxiety.

There is NO trick to unlocking resilience. No one skill or tool or practice will guarantee that you will never be overwhelmed by stress or trauma. We can’t trick our body’s survival system. And I don’t think we want to even though people try all the time.

There are 3 things that make something feel stressful or traumatic to your nervous system. And you can apply these to situations, relationships, memories, thoughts or injuries, pretty much any experience you’ve had long or short term, present, past or future. Isolation, uncertainty and lack of control. It could be any one of those things or any combination of them.

The good news is that knowing those three components of stress and trauma, we can customize our own behavior to build the kind of unshakeable resilience that so many people are looking for.

The Freeze state is part of the parasympathetic side of our nervous system. It can be a little confusing because social engagement and calm also is parasympathetic and we think of freeze as bad and social engagement as good. So today we’re going to work IN to the freeze state and talk about what it is, what it’s purpose is, what it looks like and feels like in humans and how we can safely move out of that state if we find ourselves stuck there.

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