TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Last week we talked about what dynamic self-care is, why it’s so important, especially for mothers.
[00:00:07] This week I wanted to talk to you about what I call nervous system literacy. And this is my favorite gateway to all of dynamic self-care. I don’t like picking favorites on the topics that I talk about, but nervous system literacy is going to rank pretty high.
[00:00:24] I love this topic. It’s very near and dear to my heart because it’s had such a transformational power in my own life. So nervous system literacy is essentially learning about and understanding the way that your nervous system innately works so that you can use that knowledge to work for you instead of against you.
The Polyvagal Theory:
[00:00:46] Much of this work is based on the polyvagal theory, which was created by Dr. Stephen Porges, as well as work from Deb Dana who’s a licensed clinical social worker and she has worked extensively with Dr. Porges. And then some of it is just what I’ve learned through studying neuroscience in my training as a TRE (tension and trauma releasing exercises) provider.
[00:01:07] Let’s first talk about some key points about nervous system literacy. So the first thing is that everything your nervous system does is in service of survival. And this is a really key point to understand.
[00:01:22] I actually remember I had a therapist tell me this for the first time. And it was one of those things that, you know, when you hear something and it just hits you and you realize that it’s, it’s just so profound and it’s so simple and yet it is so impactful? That’s what the statement was for me. So I’m actually, I’m going to say it again. Everything your nervous system does is in service of survival. And the reason that that’s so important is that when we start to understand that we can start to shift our reaction to our reactions.
[00:01:54] When we understand that our body is doing its job, it actually starts to make more sense.
Your Thinking Brain vs. Your Survival Brain:
[00:02:06] Let’s talk about your brain and I’m going to totally oversimplify things here, but I’m going to break it down into two main parts.
[00:02:14] First is your thinking brain. This is also your conscious brain. It’s all of your upper-level executive functioning, and then there’s also your survival brain or your reptilian brain. And so there’s a relationship between the thinking brain and the survival brain, and they each have very different roles in what they do and how they interpret information that is filtered through our body.
[00:02:39] And our system is constantly searching for cues of danger. What’s really important to know about these cues of danger is that these can be real or they can be perceived. This is important because sometimes our survival brain will react to a threat that is perceived.
[00:02:58] It’s a perceived threat, but then our thinking brain thinks about it and it’s kind of going WTF. What just happened? Why did I react that way? Because it can’t find a threat that feels “real”.
[00:03:13] Here’s the thing though, is that all of the information that our body perceives and takes in for assessment first gets filtered through the lens of our survival brain before it makes its way up to the thinking brain to be analyzed.
[00:03:29] So the survival brain is the master gatekeeper. It’s also the thing that’s controlling responses – things like fight or flight are all going to come from the survival brain and they happen very, very quickly and they all happen subconsciously. The survival brain is responsible for things like keeping your heart beating, it’s digesting your food, making sure that hormones are coursing through your body correctly.
[00:03:53]The survival brain is designed to react quickly and that’s why sometimes it can leave the thinking brain confused and this occurring sometimes is okay, but what can happen for people is that if that happens chronically it can lead to things like anxiety and anxiety can sometimes manifest as this sort of mismatch between information that the survival brain perceives and what the thinking brain analyzes.
[00:04:28] And that can cause this sort of internal conflict that leaves you feeling anxious and you can’t quite name why. Sometimes when we feel anxious, we specifically attach it to something, right? So if we have a big presentation at work tomorrow, and then we feel anxious the night before that, that kind of makes sense.
[00:04:48] Right? There’s a, there’s a particular thing that we know that has a direct correlation on that feeling of anxiety, but oftentimes when you’re sort of chronically anxious, the way that I have been in my life, you don’t always know, and it doesn’t always seem to really make sense. So if you’ve ever sort of sat with yourself, feeling anxious, going, I don’t have any reason to be feeling this way.
[00:05:11] It can be that your survival brain thinks there’s a reason to feel like you’re under threat where your thinking brain doesn’t and that mismatch can lead to those anxious feelings.
The Hierarchy of Nervous System Responses
[00:05:26] Next I want to talk about, what your nervous system responses are and how they are arranged.
[00:05:32] This is important because they are arranged hierarchically. There are three main states that your nervous system can be in. The first is called safe and social. And so this is directly coming from Dr. Porges, his work with the polyvagal theory. And the idea of safe and social, this is where we feel calm. We feel relaxed. We feel at ease, the world feels safe and we feel safe to interact with it.
[00:06:00] This is also the first place that our body wants to go when we see a threat is we want to engage on a social level and we want to take information in and analyze it based on social cues. This is where things like tone of voice or facial expression are really used as cues for your nervous system to ascertain if another person is safe.
[00:06:27] Let me give you an example because when I’m recording this it’s now 2021, so we can’t say it’s 2020 anymore, but we’re still dealing with COVID. We’re still under a pandemic and people are still wearing masks. When masks are worn, they cover up most of your face if they’re worn correctly anyway. You can see people’s eyes, but it’s hard to gauge facial expressions.
[00:06:49] And I actually noticed at the beginning of the pandemic, when masks were sort of first becoming widely used at least where I am. I realized that I was feeling extra anxious. I was already feeling anxious to have to go out in public in the beginning.
[00:07:06] But I noticed that my anxiety was even worse than what I expected it to be. It took me a little bit, but I started realizing that part of what was going on is that I couldn’t see people’s faces and that, that was taking away this potential cue of safety. And in its absence, my brain was interpreting that as a cue of danger.
[00:07:30] Because that’s the way our brain works: it’s either safe, or it’s dangerous. If it’s not safe, it’s inherently dangerous. Once I started understanding that that’s what was going on, it helped soothe that anxiety. And that’s why nervous system literacy is so powerful for me because this is a way to practice dynamic self-care.
[00:07:50] When I was able to apply what I know about the brain and how it responds, I was able to understand and have more self-awareness about my anxiety level. And then I was able to extend myself some compassion that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. My body was responding exactly the way that it was supposed to, that this situation was feeling even more threatening because I couldn’t see people’s faces. Just knowing that it shifted how I felt about having to go into the store.
[00:08:25] I got off on a tangent. I am known to do that, but let’s go back so safe and social – that’s the first place that your nervous system can be in. It’s the place where it feels the most comfortable to live.
[00:08:38] Next is fight or flight, everyone has heard of these before, and this is what I call nervous system activation. This is where your survival brain perceives a threat. And again, that can be real or not, but it has the perception of threat. That seems like it is going to be dangerous for your body, but you feel as though you can take it on and you can take it on either through fighting or flighting.
[00:09:04] So this means actually engaging in a physical confrontation or using that energy, that surge of survival hormones that comes with that and running and getting out of the situation.
[00:09:16] In fight or flight, the sort of motto or mantra of that state is “I can”, you have this sense of being able to take on that threat or be able to take it on by leaving and getting out of that situation.
[00:09:30] That’s where our body wants to go to next and it will do this on its own. This again, it’s all subconscious and it all happens very quickly. If your body determines that one of those two options is not going to be viable so either fighting or flighting is not going to be a good choice, the next state that you move into is one of freeze. Here your body has perceived that the threat is so threatening that your life is in imminent danger.
[00:10:00] Here you think that the bear that’s attacking you is going to kill you and that you cannot escape and you cannot fight. And so the next best thing is to freeze and collapse and shut down. And this actually makes a lot of sense, because what this does is it makes you less capable of feeling pain.
[00:10:21] If your brain is perceiving that this threat is going to potentially be life-threatening, then you don’t want to feel that. And so it shuts your brain down, it shuts your body down so that you aren’t able to feel that as well. And so in that way, it’s actually kind of a brilliant response.
[00:10:39] But It doesn’t always feel that way at the moment because most of us are not being attacked by literal bears, but more often by figurative ones. Because again, this could be perceptions of threat. So if your boss is giving you a tight deadline at work, or your toddler has been screaming at you all day long, your brain doesn’t know the difference that those are not threatening threats.
[00:11:04] And then. At a certain point, if you aren’t able to fight or flight your way out of those threats, your body starts to shut down.
[00:11:12] And again, this all doesn’t need to make sense on a rational level because it’s not happening in the realm of rationality, it’s happening in the realm of survival. And that’s why that statement from the beginning, everything your nervous system does is in service of survival is so important because that’s its prime directive. That’s the main thing that your brain is directing your body to do. Because without survival, nothing else matters.
[00:11:38] Let’s shift gears for a moment.
[00:11:40] Those are the three states of your nervous system and the order that they tend to go in.
A Healthy Well Regulated Nervous System vs. Modern Reality
[00:11:45]Next, I want to talk about what a healthy well-regulated nervous system looks like because, in a healthy well-regulated nervous system, you have the capacity to flow back and forth between these states with minimal effort.
[00:11:59]Your body can go from a place of activation, either fight or flight or freeze, but then also come out of that with relative ease. And when I say come out of it, I mean return to a place of being in a safe and social state where you feel at ease with the world again. And that’s what we want to see.
[00:12:17] And that’s what our nervous system is very good at doing. It’s very good at being able to flow dynamically back and forth between these but here’s the thing- our world is not what our ancestors evolved to live in. Modern stressors tax our ability to stay in a place of regulation where we can come in and out of activation relatively easily.
[00:12:40] In our modern life, we don’t often give ourselves space and the room and the time to be able to come out of activation. Instead, we move from busy thing to busy thing to busy thing to busy thing without taking time for rest and recovery in between.
[00:13:00] And again, your body is perceiving danger when you are driving in hectic traffic. Your body is perceiving danger when you are grocery shopping in a pandemic. Your body is perceiving danger when you can’t find the cord to your kid’s computer to get them online for school.
[00:13:22] And one of these things isn’t life-threatening, but what is life-threatening is an accumulation of those at least perceived by your body. So over and over and over again, these things become death by a thousand paper cuts and your body can get to this place where you come out of your window of tolerance, as it’s called, and you can become stuck there.
[00:13:45] Chronic stress can lead you to be in a state of chronic activation and that chronic activation can take the form of being chronically in fight or flight, but it can also be in freeze. It can be one or the other, or it can be sort of moving back and forth between those two States, but without ever really spending time in that regulated, safe and social state in the middle.
[00:14:08] The other thing that’s important to remember about all of this is that it can be really hard to practice self-care when you’re in an activated state. The reason I think this is so important is that when we can start to understand why, what I call Pinterest style, self-care might help at the moment, but not over the longterm because it’s not helping us to shift out of and stay out of chronic activation, it allows us to find tools and resources that do instead.
[00:14:38] I mentioned this in the episode on dynamic self-care, if you haven’t listened to that yet, I’ll link it in the show notes, you should go back and give it a listen. I break down Pinterest style self-care versus dynamic self-care.
[00:14:49] When we start to understand these things, we can start to look at the practices and the mindsets that we offer ourselves that are in line with the way that our body works so that we can do things to help us stay out of this place of activation and come back into a place of regulation with the more ease.
[00:15:10] Now, some of the practices that we can offer ourselves are going to be things that help to discharge excess stress hormones that are coursing through our body as a result of our nervous system being in this place of activation. Some examples of this would be things like calling a friend, physical exercise, spending time in nature, creative outlets, et cetera.
[00:15:34] Actually, if you want a list of some of these that are super mom-friendly and practical, you can actually grab a free copy of my ultimate reset list. It’s over my website, christabevan.com/ultimateresetlist. I’ll put that link in the show notes, but it outlines a whole bunch of different ways that you can tone your vagus nerve.
[00:15:57] I know we haven’t covered the vagus nerve in-depth, but needless to say, vagal toning exercises are going to be the things that help to create a reset both at the moment, but also increase your capacity and your resiliency for stress over time. So that guide that I have outlined some different practices that work with these ways that your body is wired.
Interrupting Shame Spirals & Befriending Your Body’s Stress Responses
[00:16:21] Next, I want to talk about the other way that dynamic self-care can help us, which is that it can interrupt a shame spiral. Remember how I said earlier that our body responds to threat, whether it’s real or perceived? Feeling, shame, and beating ourselves up about things actually gets seen by our survival brain as a threat.
[00:16:41] So that internal dialogue that we’re offering ourselves when it’s a, one of self-criticism, actually ends up perpetuating us being in this activated state. If we can interrupt that shame spiral with self-kindness radical, acceptance, objective reflection, – all parts of dynamic self-care, we can actually help ourselves move back into a place of regulation, even faster.
[00:17:09] Nervous system literacy gives us the power to befriend our body and our stress responses rather than feel betrayed by them, I don’t know about you, but when I’m stressed out, it feels like the whole world, including the way I respond to stress is against me, but knowing how my brain and bodywork lets me shift that story, this in and of itself creates an opportunity for dynamic self-care.
[00:17:34] Let me give you an example. When we’re in a state of nervous system activation, the part of our brain responsible for speech called Broca’s area tends to go offline.
[00:17:46] This makes sense when we think about it because speaking isn’t a function critical to survival. Remember that your brain will already have tried social engagement with a threat before it gets to this point, it will have assessed whether fight or flight makes sense and determined that those are not going to be options.
[00:18:03] By the time that your brain shuts down Broca’s area, speech, like other things, digestion, reproduction, et cetera, are no longer critical.
[00:18:13] Let me give you an example from my own life. My ex-husband, used to get really frustrated with me and really upset when we would be having an argument and I would just shut down, he thought that I was ignoring him and intentionally not speaking.
[00:18:28] And because the reality is I’m usually pretty articulate and this was incredibly frustrating and annoying for me because I wasn’t doing it intentionally. In fact, it felt like my brain was abandoning me at times when I needed it most, I would be able to think the thing that I wanted to say, but I couldn’t get it out of my mouth.
[00:18:47] It was like the part of my mouth and the part of my brain that thought the thoughts weren’t connected at all. I think this is actually a fairly common situation where we’ll think of the perfect thing to say either in the moment or even after the fact, and then feel so much shame and anger with ourselves that we didn’t do it at the moment.
[00:19:07]. How many of us have beat ourselves up after something’s happened saying, Oh my God, why didn’t I say that? Or why didn’t I defend myself? Or why didn’t I speak up when this thing happened that I knew was wrong.
[00:19:23] The reality is is that there’s nothing wrong with us in those moments. Our brain is actually doing exactly what it’s supposed to do – it’s keeping us safe from danger. When we can start to see it in that light, instead of feeling disappointed and feeling frustrated, we create so much less inner conflict.
[00:19:44] This is the reason that I love nervous system literacy so much. It’s all about creating a self-awareness for our innate stress responses so that we can then practice radical acceptance, self-love, kindness towards ourselves.
[00:19:59] We can leverage this knowledge of nervous system literacy and allow it to change our inner dialogue. We can shift into a place of radical acceptance in which the world of dynamic self-care is an act of self-love. And that is the best way I know for caring for ourselves.
[00:20:19] I want you to give it a try – think back to a time where you felt embarrassed about the way that you responded. A time where you overreacted or a time where you under reacted or at least that’s how it felt. And see if you can apply some of these principles that you’ve learned about today to change how you view your response. See if you can use this knowledge to change and soften that memory and then use it moving forward for the next time that you notice you’re in a state of activation, start paying attention to how it feels in your body when you start to notice a threat. When that information makes its way up to your thinking brain, and you start to feel that, notice the sensations in your body and just observe them and see what happens just with that act of observation alone. I have a feeling you’ll be surprised at the results.
[00:21:20] I want you to do all of this, approaching it with a sense of curiosity and exploration for yourself. If you’re new to thinking about yourself in these terms, let that be okay. Let yourself learn this stuff and let yourself apply it to your life slowly, but start integrating it. See if you can use nervous system literacy as a gateway to dynamic self-care.
[00:21:46]