The Link Between Insomnia and Trauma

Today we're going to look at the states of the nervous system and how they contribute to deep, restorative sleep. One of the most common questions I get asked is: how do I improve my sleep when I'm dysregulated? Or why do I find it hard to get to sleep, or stay asleep?

Sleep is the combination of the dorsal vagal state and the ventral vagal state. For us to get to sleep we need to access our blended state of stillness. Following trauma, it can be challenging to access this.

When we are chronically stressed, we spend much of our time in sympathetic (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal (freeze or shutdown) activation. These are both states that serve us in the short term but are not intended as long-term ways of being.

When we experience repeated or chronic stress, these responses slowly begin to undermine the maintenance of homeostasis. In fact, healthy immune response, healthy digestion, and sleep are the hallmarks of healthy physiology. To fall asleep, we need to discharge this activation.

To support healthy sleep, you could try gentle stretching in the early evening to discharge sympathetic activation. Having a regular wake-up time, seeing early morning sunlight, and having a  regular bedtime can help. Another way to support yourself is by putting light pressure on the eyeballs to lower the heart rate. It elicits what’s called the oculocardiac reflex (e.g., using eye pillows).

Personal Reflection

The below questions can help you to reflect on your own sleep.

 • Reflect on a recent time when you had difficulty falling asleep. What state was your nervous system in? How did you spend the day and hours leading up to going to bed?

• What could you try out to discharge activation and support your sleep? (e.g. committing to a regular sleep cycle, early evening stretches, getting early morning sunlight)

• What could you avoid to support your sleep (e.g. too much caffeine, late night snacking and workouts)?

Why Do I Get Stuck on My Phone When I'm Stressed & Anxious?

Our phones can be powerful tools to help us navigate life, but they can also take a toll on our nervous system and wellbeing. Whilst being informed and keeping in the loop is important, so is understanding how devices can cause us to feel.

Do you find yourself reaching for your phone when you feel anxious? Or are you losing long periods of time scrolling mindlessly?

When we are up in a state of hyperarousal, feeling anxious, we might reach for our phone and go on the hunt for more information to help us find a sense of security. Our thinking brain is telling us that we need to find out, research, plan and take control. But in our body, this increases anxiety and only brings us into an artificial state of regulation.

We may also feel flat or emotionally numb and use our phone to seek a sense of connection. Our nervous system wants to feel a sense of connection with ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

For us to move into true regulation, we need to look at the deeper desire of our nervous system and step out of judging our behaviour as good or bad. We are simply trying to manage our state, but we can also find more supportive ways to regulate ourselves.

Personal Reflection

We have prepared a worksheet for you with questions that can help you to reflect on your own habits and needs. Download the worksheet here or reflect using the questions below.

📝 Identify the habit you may use to artificially regulate your nervous system.

📝 What nervous system state am I in? Can I notice the thoughts, sensations, or energy of this state?

📝 What short-term benefits is this habit giving me? Does it relieve or soothe my nervous system?

📝 Is there an unmet need that I have? How could I meet this need in a healthier way?

Once we identify the habits and their motivations, we can take an active part in changing them to better support our nervous system.

When it comes to phone use, here are some potential solutions to help you:

1.     Change the environment – leave your phone in a different room

2.     Move your apps away from the home screen and into folders to avoid overindulging

3.     Consider deleting distracting apps

4.     Turn off notifications for specific apps

5.     Turn off your data or switch to airplane mode

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If you’d like to learn more about a profoundly transformative methodology of nervous system repair, you can now register for our 8-week Vagus Nerve Program. The aim of the program is to empower you to step into the driver’s seat of your own health and wellbeing.

Your Voice Can be a Doorway to Understanding Your Nervous System

Your voice can be a doorway to understanding your nervous system. In response to anxiety or despair, your vagus nerve changes both your nervous system and your voice.

When you feel fearful the pitch of your voice may become higher, and you may speak faster or feel the need to fill every silence. Maybe your mouth becomes dry, and your throat constricts or sounds croaky.

Hearing your voice like this can amplify anxiety.

You may feel afraid to say what you need to say, feel vulnerable in taking up space, or hesitant to be seen and heard. How does the pitch and tone of your voice change when you are feeling anxious? Does the voice speed up or slow down?

Speaking well requires freedom and balance in the muscles around the larynx and jaw and a flexible free posture for the breath.

Your vocalisations can be a portal to accessing what's known as the Social Engagement System of your vagus nerve.

This is the state that primes you for communication and connection. You feel calm, connected, and safe. Your voice will have variation in rhythm and pitch, your body will feel comfortable, your breath full and your posture relaxed. 

Personal Reflection

The below exercises can help you to reflect on your own voice and posture. You can also download the exercises as a free worksheet here.

1. Bring to mind a recent time when you felt anxious. What do you notice about the posture your body takes on?

2. How does the pitch and tone of your voice change when you are experiencing this emotion? Does the voice speed up or slow down?

3. When we feel anxious our head can sometimes move downwards, collapsing the spine. This makes it difficult for us to express ourselves with confidence and control.

Notice what happens when you change your posture into a taller position, focusing on creating length in the back of the neck, perhaps tucking your chin. How does your breath and voice change? Do your emotions change?

If you’d like to learn more, you can join our regular publication “Education=Regulation”. It’s designed to educate and inspire you to take the driver's seat when it comes to your health. Learning how your nervous system functions can help to empower you to improve your wellbeing.

You can join our Education = Regulation Community here.

Retraining the Nervous System

Just like a house has a thermostat that keeps the temperature at a set point, your nervous system has its own set point that it returns to. It will often come back to what feels familiar, or what it’s learned.

This set point is dynamic - meaning it changes from what we experience throughout our life.

Implicit learning means we may automatically respond with fight, flight or freeze, physical sensations, muscle and myofascial tension, body postures, emotions, and patterns of movement used for defence.

These sensory and motor responses getting conditioned into the survival brain when we experience traumatic stress, just in case we encounter a similar threat in the future, is why we keep getting triggered.

It happens outside of conscious awareness so it’s not something we’re choosing. Often we blame ourselves for our stress responses, thinking we’re too sensitive, emotional, reactive or weak, but that’s not the case. Our physiology learnt to respond this way.

We can desensitise the survival brain so it’s not so reactive to cues or setting off alarms. This first requires unlearning what’s become automatic or reflexive when we face stressors today.

When we use the interventions that bring a a bioplasticity reset of the brain and nervous system, not only does this change our neurocircuitry and physiology, it changes almost every area of our life.

We have can use innovation and clarity when we stop responding with panic to challenges.

We can re-train our nervous system to respond in new ways when we face demands or conflict.

If we stop moving into shut-down or helplessness when we’re scared, we access our agency.

When we shift out of states of burnout that cause chronic fatigue and exhaustion, we have the opportunity to flourish and thrive.

Dissociation from the Body and the Vagus Nerve

Interoception refers to your awareness of your bodily sensations.

It plays an important role in helping you recover from chronic and traumatic stress.

We can fall on a spectrum of being hypersensitive to sensations, or sometimes being hyposensitive. Neurodivergent individuals might recognise this.

An adaption to chronic and traumatic stress is to dissociate from sensations because they’re overwhelming.

What’s dissociation?

It’s when you feel numb, disconnected or separate from the physical sensations an emotions in part of the body. This leads to less interoceptive awareness and is linked with depression.

Dissociation from the body can also lead to chronic pain and inflammation in the areas you feel cut off from.

Blocking out visceral sensations and the body’s sensations can cause chronic health conditions because it dampens the two-way connectivity between the brain and the body, via the vagus nerve.

As well as chronic pain, anxiety, depression, gut disorders and eating disorders can arise from having low or inaccurate interoception.

When you train this sensory system you integrate the body with a region in the brain known as the insula - this plays a major role in emotional regulation and body awareness.

You engage the vagus nerve, which can help to bring you back into the state where rest and repair happen and inflammation reduces.

Interoception is not only intrinsically soothing to your nervous system and helps improve how your organs function, it also improves your emotional regulation.

As you restore the integration between the body and the brain following chronic and traumatic stress, your nervous system becomes more flexible, adaptable and energised.

Re-training interoception in a way that respects dysregulation and were you have the resources to remain stable and grounded is what restores balance to your nervous system.

Trauma and Memories

To cope with the intense sensations and emotions of trauma, the survival brain fragments the experience into “memory capsules”. 

In highly stressful times, a memory is stored below the level of conscious awareness in the survival brain. Due to the stress arousal the thinking brain is offline so conscious memory of the event is vague - certain sensory details can be etched into memory with clarity and others may be forgotten. Memory capsules can be fragments of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch. They can be bodily sensations, feelings and emotions such as strong anxiety, anger or the energy of helpless shut-down. 

Memory capsules remain active and vulnerable to getting triggered until there is a complete recovery from the old stress activation. The survival brain will project the ongoing stress activation it perceives in the mind-body system, onto the present moment. It loses the ability to differentiate between the past and the present so it cannot learn and adapt, and the body and nervous system will continue to respond as if this event was happening today. 

An activated capsule taints the present moment and your ability to respond to the here and now. Anxiety over something at work could trigger a memory capsule that things are going to fall apart again, even though there’s no threat. Your heart may race, you may feel reactive and have intrusive thoughts. The survival brain is trying to respond in the same way it did to the original traumatic event and complete recovery. The body and nervous system don’t understand that the event is actually in the past – but instead continue to mobilise stress arousal to cope with this misperception of an ongoing threat.

A cue today may cause dissociation where you leave the present moment – this may cause an interruption to the concept of time, making you feel spacey and disconnected from your body and what’s going on around you. When there’s conflict you may automatically internalise the situation as your fault and be overwhelmed by shame and hopelessness. You may feel numb, disconnected and withdraw. Whether it’s anxiety or dissociation, memory capsules affect your ability to attune to the present moment and take you back to the past. 

It is essential that the unresolved activation locked in the nervous system be discharged and recovery of the stress arousal take place for the survival brain to learn and adapt.

This transformation has nothing to do with talking about the memory or thinking about what happened - it has to do with the process of completing the stress response and your survival instincts.

When your body and nervous system learn to come back to the present by completing the stress activation from the past, the capsule can dissolve. You return to wholeness when your nervous system is able to respond to what’s happening today, in this moment, rather than living in the past. This helps you return to freedom and spontaneity in your relationships, your work and your entire sense of being. 

Your resilience expands each time you learn to return to regulation. Your ability to cope with anxiety, conflict and demands all increases, and you find true freedom when you’re no longer responding physiologically to the past. With each round of recovery your ability to meet life’s demands expands and a world of new possibility opens. 

Through what you experience today you can teach your nervous system a new way of existing, despite what you learnt in your past. You can experience the present moment without the layers of past memories.

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Learn more in the upcoming Vagus Nerve Masterclass

Why a History of Trauma Increases the Likelihood of Developing a Gut Disorder

If you have a history of trauma, you are more likely to have a gut disorder.

The connection between your gut and your nervous system is inseparable. The vagus nerve creates the two way communication highway.

It’s not just brain biochemistry and physiology that’s affected by chronic and traumatic stress. 

The gut changes too and this can have an enormous impact on your digestive health, as well as your thoughts, moods, memory, concentration and emotions. 

Following stress and trauma the microbiome changes.

The number of “bad” bacteria increase, and the “good” decrease. This affects the 100 million neurons in the gut that produce neurotransmitters like GABA, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and endorphins, which are essential for resilience.

This change in the microbiome can lead to a gut disorder.

You may think it’s a digestive issue only, but what’s often found is it’s CAUSED by a dysregulated nervous system, and it’s a SYMPTOM of a chronic stress disorder. The disorder arises because the vagus nerve is disrupted from its job of regulating your digestive system.

The wear and tear that accumulates in the body from chronic and traumatic stress is called allostatic load. It can lead to ongoing cycles of dysfunction. 

The effects of allostatic load on your body can be reversed with interventions that help the nervous system recover and return to a healthy baseline.

Re-establishing self-regulation through balancing the nervous system and increasing vagal tone can get to the root cause of stress related illnesses, rather than treating the symptoms. 

A key intervention is interoception. 

This is the experience of noticing and understanding internal bodily sensations.

Training your “eighth sense” improves the communication between the gut and the brain, as well as regulates the nervous system.

It plays a key role in the balance of the digestive system and your emotional health.

The British Society of Gastroenterology re-classified irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) as a disorder of gut-brain interaction, rather than a functional gastrointestinal disorder. Studies show that low interoception is associated with IBS.

Interoception is something you can retrain just like other sensory systems, for example, balance.

This improves both your emotional health and your physical wellbeing.

Interoception: regulate the nervous system and recover from trauma

Trauma can change the accuracy of your eighth sense: INTEROCEPTION.

This is your ability to notice and understand your internal sensations.

Interoception is key to regulating the nervous system following chronic and traumatic stress.

The surge of evidence on interoception points to the vagus nerve’s role as the main pathway for communicating information about the internal condition of the body to the brain.

The most important region being the insula. 

Sensations of a racing heart or butterflies in your stomach are a foundation for your emotions and your physiology.

Previous life circumstances may change your interoceptive accuracy.

An adaption to traumatic stress is to dissociate from sensations and block out internal awareness.

There may be less activity in the insula and a feeing of numbness. 

In research, people with depression often have less interoceptive awareness.

The reduced ability to feel their bodily signals may lie behind their sense of exhaustion and emotional numbness – the sense that they can’t feel anything at all.

On the other hand, anxiety may make you attentive to signals, but you may not read them as accurately.

A small fluctuation in your heart rate may be misread by the insula as being a much bigger danger signal than it actually is, causing anxiety.

This may lead to sensations becoming overwhelming. Research shows following chronic and traumatic stress there can be increased connectivity between the insula and several regions of the fear circuitry in the brain, and this can amplify your sense of panic.

Both of these states can create an inner homelessness.

You leave your body and the present moment, swept up in survival states and dysregulation.

You don’t feel comfortable in our body.

Interoception is a sensory system that you can train, just like you can re-train other systems to improve things like balance.

You can influence the two-way communication between the vagus nerve and the insula. This is like improving the phone signal between the body and the brain - it becomes clearer and more accurate.

The greater accuracy you have for tuning into sensations and understanding your physiology, the greater agency you have in shaping your life. You feel in charge of your body, your feelings and yourself. 

Interoceptive awareness is the key to regulating the nervous system following chronic and traumatic stress.

Re-training interoception helps you develop greater accuracy at reading body signals in the present moment, rather thank responding to challenges like you’re still in the past.

Uncoupling sensations fro a story that just around the corner something terrible is going to happen, calms the brain’s fear circuitry, regulates the nervous system and reduces anxiety.

You can also change the under-activity in the insula so that we don’t feel numb, flat and disconnected to life whenever you are facing demands or conflict.   

Re-training the insula means you can stop swinging up to the highs of anxiety and agitation, down to the lows of burnout and shutdown.

You get a balanced, accurate input of what’s happening in the present moment and you can use those signals to guide you, rather than confuse and overwhelm you

As you improve this skill for your inner world, your outer life will flourish, 

Being at home in your body again is something that you can train and is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to recovering from chronic and traumatic stress.

Understanding and Befriending Your Nervous System

Befriending and understanding the unique responses of your nervous system is a powerful antidote to the dysregulation that can arise from chronic or traumatic stress.

Not understanding the responses of your nervous system can create its own inputs that increase fear and amplify dysregulation.

Bodily sensations from anxiety and feeling destabilised, can quickly escalate into panic when you’re scared of what’s happening and don’t understand these sensations. The brain perceives this as a very real threat so it increases stress arousal.

Unexplained and ongoing pain that you can’t see, increases the threat of pain. Studies show the more information a patient has about a surgical procedure - even knowing that pain after surgery is quite normal - the smaller amount of pain relief required, and the shorter the length of stay in hospital.

A sense of doom, spaciness, fogginess, apathy and helplessness can take us down into the story that our life is ruined, we’ll never be loved or belonged.

Recognising burnout as a sign that you’ve been under chronic stress rather than a sign that you’re weak, broken changes how long it takes for you to recover and the self-leadership you take in supporting your nervous system.

To understand and befriend your nervous system you need to know that it can be influence by:

• Bottom-Up factors: biological or physiological things: vagal tone, injury, hormones, the immune system, your gut.

• Outside-In elements: work, money, relationships, your community, life events.

• Top-Down factors: thoughts, belief systems, internal narrative, language. “I’m a mess” or “My back is broken”.

When you recognise and bring compassion to your own unique nervous system responses and understand how they fit into a framework, shame can dissolve. You see them as patterns shaped by your past, or what’s been going on in your life, and that anyone could experience dysregulation with too much adversity no matter how resilient they seem.

Rather than seeing yourself as too emotional, reactive or needy, you see that your internal surveillance system has become sensitised to cues of danger because of being under chronic or traumatic stress or maybe injury. Less shame and self-blame can bring regulation. Knowledge and understanding combined with resources to help with shifting from different states of dysregulation, are what lead to reduced stress arousal.

These feelings and behaviours came about in service of your survival from what happened in your past. Your nervous system gets retuned towards hyper- or hypo-arousal when there’s too much stress, or the stress goes on for too long. It may be time to recalibrate your nervous system back to its set point so that you can come back to the state where you feel a sense of ease, inner security and trust.

Knowledge is power and understanding how your brain and nervous system work is what can lead to re-regulation in itself and puts you back in the driver’s seat to build more resilience. You’ll spend more time feeling calm and trusting. Where rest & rejuvenation of your mind-body system takes place. Where you can think, feel and function at your best.

Recover from Chronic and Traumatic Stress through Nervous System Re-Education

Whilst a history of trauma leaves a footprint on your nervous system, it doesn’t mean that you’re broken.

Experiencing dysregulation means your nervous system has learnt to become more efficient at shifting into survival states.  

Chronic and traumatic stress result in a re-organisation of your physiology. It re-tunes your nervous system to shift away from safety and connection into a state where your physiology is mobilised. This can leave you feeling more anxious, overwhelmed and destabilised. 

The vagus nerve becomes less efficient at bringing you back to regulation when you face challenges and meet demands.

It’s no longer able to down-regulate threat responses - this drop in vagal efficiency means there can be prolonged stress, anxiety, shut-down, depression and dysregulation long after something that was stressful for you has ended. This impacts on both your physical and emotional health. 

It’s understandable you may feel anger or aversion towards your body and nervous system for the way they quickly move into states of protection. You may blame yourself for these responses. From what they learnt, it’s become more prepared to fight off threats, or run away from them, when maybe there isn’t one. This process happens outside of conscious awareness and is not your fault. 

You may also find yourself frequently suppressing your feelings or becoming numb to your body as an adaptation to trauma’s footprint. This makes sense - it stops you feeling overwhelmed by powerful sensations and emotions. Anxiety and numbness may be the automatic state that you move into today when you face stressors, despite the context. 

The ways that you respond to adversity today is not who you are, it’s simply what’s been learnt from the people in your life and the environments you were in.

What you experience today will actively influence these states as they’re in a constant state of change. Through nervous system re-education you can actively influence these states, and teach your physiology to respond to what's happening today. It brings an emotional, relational, physical and psychological transformation. 

Whilst adverse experiences are painful, building enough vagal efficiency to return to regulation after challenges is the key to resilience. Learning to shift out of the states of anxiety and shut-down not only brings relief in the short term, each time you practice you build vagal tone (improve the functioning of your vagus nerve) and neural flexibility that stays with you for the long-term. You re-tune your nervous system so that it's more efficient at moving into the state where you feel safe, connected to your body and to other people.  

Welcoming yourself back into your body without the overwhelming sensations that flood your mind-body system, increases your regulatory capacity and allows you to meet life's demands in a more resilient way. Life also becomes meaningful and you feel at home inside of yourself when you're not trying to suppress sensations or numb your feelings.

There is so much potential to change automatic responses when you learn something new.

There can be room for both past traumas and a present moment with new possibilities. 

There’s room for new chapters of your story

If you'd like to learn more about nervous system education, the 8-week Vagus Nerve Program starts very soon.

Increase Self-Regulation via the Vagus Nerve and Reduce Anxiety

When your capacity for self-regulation increases, you spend much less energy on trying to manage your feelings, physiology and emotions. 

How your nervous system responds when you face challenges, meet demands and when you’re pushed outside of your comfort zone, will profoundly influence your life.

Stress affects your physical, emotional and cognitive energy reserves. You only have a limited amount of energy you can expend each day. It’s quickly depleted by overwhelm and being flooded by emotions like anxiety and shame.

With self-regulation you can reshape the nervous system and break this cycle.

Then when challenges arise, your emotions don’t leave you depleted, exhausted and unable to put energy towards what it is you truly want. 

With greater self-regulation and stress resilience you free yourself from constantly trying to calm yourself back down when you feel anxious, reactive or unable to switch off. In this state, you’re flooded by emotions and your cognitive processing becomes disorganised, so you don’t make good choices. It’s hard to work towards your goals in this state.

With greater self-regulation you don’t have the continual struggle of trying to bring yourself back up because you feel flat, shut-down, numb or depressed. Your cognitive processing slows down in this state so it’s harder to think clearly. Communication is also affected making it hard to speak up, ask for help, set boundaries or build relationships. 

Moving into the states of anxiety or shame is not something that you’re choosing. This process happens outside of conscious awareness in the lower regions of the brain. It’s not you - it’s what your nervous system learnt from your past experiences. With neural exercises it’s possible to teach it new ways of responding to challenges and demands.

Increased self-regulation allows you to put more of your precious energy into the things that matter most to you.

This happens by accessing the vagus nerve to slow your physiology back down. When you don’t need to manage nervous system dysregulation, you’re far more likely to be successful – all of that energy can be redirected into your passion. You can grow, flourish, thrive and reach your potential.

You can spend more time enjoying life rather than swinging between the highs of anxiety and overdoing, down to the lows of shame and not feeling good enough. Self-regulation leads to greater resilience, and you learn to work on an even keel. 

If you’d like to learn more about the vagus nerve, neuroscience and balancing the nervous system, the eight week Vagus Nerve Program.

A Healthy Vagus Nerve is the Key to a Regulated Nervous System

A healthy vagus nerve is the key to a regulated nervous system.

A problem “out there” can look completely different depending on the state of your nervous system. 

Your thinking brain may create a story about the type of person someone is when you’re in your fight energy that may not be an accurate reflection of who they really are. You may have thoughts that they’re untrustworthy, wrong or bad. You may criticise and blame them. You may start arguments in person and online. 

“Flight” energy may make you rush into making a decision before you’ve had time to think things through. You may say yes without knowing what’s going on, overcommit or agree to do something you don’t really want to. The urge of the sympathetic nervous system is mobilisation and you may feel you need to do more & go faster or you might miss out. What could serve you best is slowing down. You may be better off doing less, or maybe you don’t need to do anything at all.

 “Freeze” energy may create a story that a situation is hopeless. You may be filled with shame and thoughts that there’s something wrong with you, or how you’ll never get the relationship, love, work or opportunities that you long for. The story from this state is often how your situation is hopeless and you’re stuck because this state brings immobilisation.

Perhaps you do have choices but the way your nervous system affects your thoughts and your levels of arousal influences you to believe that there’s no use trying. This can lead to extreme procrastination and avoiding things because they feel impossible to deal with. You may find yourself withdrawing from people and situations. 

Autonomic awareness helps you to step out of these states and not only change the lens that you’re looking at a problem through, but also the associated thoughts, feelings and energy that lead to over-doing, anxiety & perfectionism, or extreme procrastination, lethargy and flatness. Each state is like looking through life through a different pair of sunglasses that prevent you seeing things as they really are. 

Recognising that each state will change how you view people, environments and situations helps you find clarity and calmness again. It stops you rushing into things, becoming reactive and doing things you later regret. It also stops you putting things off for days and weeks that may not be as bad as what your nervous system has you believe.

Nervous System Regulation Empowers You 

You’re empowered when you can take care of the needs of your nervous system and autonomously regulate it to the place where you make your best decisions. When you’re triggered into either fight, flight or freeze you lose access to the parts of your brain where innovation, flow and creativity happen. 

When you come home to a regulated state via the vagus nerve, you see life without all the filters and noise. It helps you to see situations as they really are. 

Differentiating between old triggers, wounds & urges that move you into fight-flight or freeze and those sensations that can bring an inner security and trust, help you live a life congruent with your values. 

Your relationships will improve, you do your best work and you can live without the extreme ups and downs. You’ll find greater flow and ease. 

You have agency when you recognise the energy, feelings and thoughts that come from each state and how they uniquely affect your nervous system. 

Wisdom is knowing to regulate your own nervous system first if you can, and then take action or make a choice. Your future will be bright if you can choose to act from the place where you’re at home inside yourself.

If you’d like to learn more about regulating your nervous system and the vagus nerve, the Vagus Nerve Masterclass is coming up soon.

Trauma is Physiological You Can't Out-Think it

Trauma is physiological. You can’t out-think it. 

It’s an event that causes long-term dysregulation in the nervous system.

“Why am I always so anxious?”

After chronic and traumatic stress, the nervous system may not return to its baseline functioning. It remains “tuned” to excess fight-or-flight, and the vagus nerve is interrupted from bringing you into a calm and connected state. When you face future stressors, you respond with excess stress activation because your nervous system has moved away from its regulated baseline. This is not your fault. 

“Why didn’t I say something or stand up for myself instead of freezing?”

Under traumatic stress, the nervous system can become locked into a state of high activation of the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and dorsal vagal (shutdown) systems, causing a freeze state. It may default to this today, making it hard for you to communicate or take action when you’re under pressure. It’s not your fault, it’s your physiology. 

“Why can’t I get over it or just let it go?” 

Responses of the nervous system happen below the level of conscious awareness, in the survival brain. Becoming anxious, triggered or shutting down isn’t something you’re choosing – it happens automatically and instantly. If something feels familiar to a previous trauma, your physiology will move you into a state of fight, flight or freeze. You can’t talk yourself out of it or be more positive/capable/strong to change this. Again, it’s not your fault.

Shame dissolves when you see your nervous system is still acting in service of your survival, and your physiology changes following chronic and traumatic stress.

It may not be the best response for you to use today, and your nervous system may need support to respond to stressors and demands in ways that better serve you navigating life’s challenges. 

When the survival brain is allowed to process what happened and recover, default strategies don’t get cued again and again. By teaching the nervous system to recover fully and bringing it support, it can return to a healthy, regulated state. This will change how you think, feel and the actions you take. You’ll feel grounded and at ease, and have more options when facing future challenges.

This is how you develop new neural pathways and restore the functioning of the vagus nerve.

You’re not stuck in limited defensive strategies that only rely on fight, flight or freeze. You can then recognise your nervous system’s survival responses early on and not be swept away by them. You can engage with it instead of feeling helpless to what’s happening. You can develop the tools that keep you better regulated under pressure or in the middle of conflict.

It isn’t your fault if you’re experiencing dysregulation from what happened in your past.

Your nervous system moves away from a regulated baseline following chronic and traumatic stress. It may need support to come home again to the place where you feel a sense of inner security and trust, and the place where you recover your innate capacity for resilience. 

Returning to a regulated baseline is the essence of resilience, and can change how you feel in your body, how you connect with other people, and how you feel in the world. The key to this is bottom-up regulation that recalibrates the nervous system and allows the survival brain to recover.

Learn more in the two-hour Vagus Nerve Masterclass.    

The Vagus Nerve Why it's the Key to Your Well-Being

The vagus nerve: the key to your well-being.

The vagus nerve is the two-way communicator between your organs and your brain. 

Your heart and brain are always communicating and working together via the vagus nerve, to regulate your emotions and your physiology.

Higher heart rate variability improves your self-regulatory capacity. It’s a window to the functioning of your vagus nerve, or what’s called vagal tone. It assesses your vagus nerve’s ability to regulate the beats of your heart, especially when facing demands. 

When you have high vagal tone, under stress you won’t be as overwhelmed by your emotions and you will be calmer when challenges arise.

On the other hand, low heart rate variability and low vagal tone is associated with prolonged stress, anxiety, shut-down, depression and emotional dysregulation that continues long after something stressful has ended. 

Low heart rate variability and low vagal tone keep you stuck in stress responses that are only meant to be short term, and this takes a toll on your emotional and physical health, but also your personal and professional relationships.

By harnessing the vagus nerve you can improve heart rate variability and build flexibility and resilience in your nervous system. This means your vagus nerve will be able to bring you back to the state where you feel calm, centred and can work on a more even keel.

Neural exercises are powerful, evidence-based ways to improve both your heart rate variability and your vagal tone. Short daily practices that you use in the “heat of the moment” can create powerful shifts to your nervous system. This can help you stay calm under pressure, handle the fear that might be holding you back and can improve how you relate to others when you’re stressed.

As the vagus nerve has a regulating affect on other organs and systems, your physical health also improves. It can help to improve stress related symptoms like digestive issues, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation, chronic fatigue and migraines.

This becomes even more important following periods of chronic or traumatic stress.

Want to learn more? The Vagus Nerve Masterclass is coming up soon and teaches you the tools and resources to improve heart rate variability and vagal tone.

The Vagus Nerve: How to Engage it

Did you know that play improves the tone of your vagus nerve?

 Play positively impacts on your nervous system by improving your inner resilience and self-regulation. It’s a powerful way to exercise your vagal brake, which keeps you calm and balanced. 

 The need for play doesn’t end in your childhood. It continues to shape your body and brain as an adult, and it’s something you can cultivate more to help your nervous system respond well to daily stressors.

Research has shown that without play, adults are less curious, less imaginative and can lose a sense of joyful engagement in daily living (Brown et al, 2009).

The biological make-up of play is a blend of two states of the nervous system: 1. The sympathetic nervous system (this energy is mobilising, exciting), and 2. The ventral vagal state (this brings a feeling of safety, calmness and security)

Chronic and traumatic stress can lead to you being stuck in the sympathetic nervous system leading to anxiety, irritation and an inability to switch off. Or you may get stuck in a state of disconnection where you feel flat and there’s a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Being stuck in these states is what leads to nervous system dysregulation. 

Using play as a neural exercise teaches your nervous system to apply to the branch of the vagus nerve known as the “vagal brake”, and will down-regulate your nervous system. You can also use play to add mobilising energy and up-regulate it when you feel flat and depressed.  The ability to attune to your state and calm your physiology, or bring it up, is what makes you more flexible and adaptable as you face challenges and conflict. You don’t get stuck in anxiety or shut-down for long periods of time.  

Play improves your emotional health, as well as your psychological and physical well-being. You’re not spending long periods of time in survival mode which takes its toll on your mind-body system. You can feel your emotions and physiology being mobilised by the energy of the sympathetic nervous system, but you don’t have to move into fight-flight-freeze and release their associated stress hormones because you have access to a state of safety from the vagus nerve. 

Neural exercises are a powerful antidote to nervous system dysregulation and helping your nervous system recover from chronic and traumatic stress. You reduce the emotional, physical and psychological suffering that can come from being stuck in the fight-flight energy of the sympathetic nervous system and the immobilising energy that can bring apathy and shutdown.

• Who brings out your playful side?

• What activities feel like play to you?

• What activities add energy and excitement to your nervous system?

• Where are you your most playful? 

Learn more about the blended states of the nervous system and how to engage the vagus nerve in the Vagus Nerve Masterclass starting soon. 

Where is the Vagus Nerve and What Does it Do?

Where is the vagus nerve?

The vagus nerve is comparable in size to the spinal cord. In latin it’s name means “wanderer” because of the vast area that it covers. It’s so important because it is the epicenter of the mind-body connection. 

It controls the autonomic nervous system - this is how our stress physiology changes when we face demands or step outside of our comfort zone. The vagus nerve plays a key role in regulation and stress resilience. 

It originates in the medulla oblongata of the brainstem. This lies at the base of the brain and the top of the spinal cord. The vagus nerve is divided into two distinct pathways, known as the ventral vagus and the dorsal vagus. They run down into the chest and are separated by their individual roots at the diaphragm - this separates the lungs and abdominals. 

The dorsal vagus influences the organs beneath the diaphragm, especially the gastrointestinal system. The ventral vagus innervates the heart and the lungs, and also forms the Social Engagement System. The Social Engagement System is created between the cranial nerves to do with communication and speech, listening and facial expression, as well as the branch of the vagus nerve running from the heart to the face.

The ventral vagal therefore influences our heart rate, breathing rate and also how we connect to others through our tone of voice and facial expression. 

Besides giving some output to various organs that regulate them, the vagus nerve comprises between 80% and 90% of sensory fibres that run from the body to the brain. This gives important information about the state of the body's organs to the brain. 

The vagus nerve changes all systems depending upon which of it’s pathways are activated: the cardiovascular, digestive, musculoskeletal,  immune and endocrine systems all change with stress. So the vagus nerve isn’t really one nerve, it has different pathways and connections.

The vagus nerve

The vagus nerve plays a key role is stress physiology.

What does the vagus nerve do?

When the vagus nerve is functioning well it means that you can fine tune the amount of energy that you allow into your nervous system – so if you want to meet a challenge you can let a little bit more energy in by inhibiting it. This brings attention regulation and it brings focus. Then when it’s over, you can engage more of it and calm your physiology back down. A healthy vagus nerve functions this way and this is what makes us flexible and adaptable. 

Following periods of chronic and traumatic stress, the vagus nerve may be interrupted from its job of regulating your nervous system and you may spend more time in fight-flight-freeze. This can take a toll on your psychological health. 

A healthy vagus nerve is essential for both your physical and your psychological well-being

What we’re seeing more and more come out in the science now is how the information sent from the body, for example our gut, is impacting psychological well-being.  Science is showing how the signals of the heart and their electrical impulses change what’s happening in the brain. 

Finally we know that there’s a specific pathway that leads to a reduction of inflammation that can lie at the heart of many chronic issues like pain, depression and  gut health. When the vagus nerve is working well inflammation decreases because it reduces what’s called inflammatory cytokines. 

Vagus nerve disorders, or low vagal tone, can arise following periods of chronic or traumatic stress. It can lead to things like:

• gastrointestinal issues such as irritable bowel syndrome, chronic constipation and diarrhoea. 

• it may lead to things like a racing heart or hypertension. 

• it may impact on the immune system causing allergies, asthma or autoimmune issues. 

• it may cause musculoskeletal issues, chronic pain or fibromyalgia. 

• it can cause headaches or migraines

• it may lead to insomnia

• it may cause anxiety or an inability to relax and switch off

• it may cause chronic fatigue, extreme procrastination and flatness.

Hope lies in knowing that the vagus nerve’s functioning can be improved by using powerful, evidence-based tools and resources. These are like doing bicep curls for your vagus nerve and in time, you’ll become more flexible, adaptable and resilient when you face stressors. 

Your physical and psychological well-being will improve, and so will the health of your professional and personal relationships. 

Want to learn more about how to improve the tone of your vagus nerve? The Vagus Nerve Masterclass teaches you how. 

How the Vagus Nerve Helps You Recover from Trauma

Improving the functioning of your vagus nerve following trauma, helps to regulate your nervous system

Chronic and traumatic stress (or trauma) can interrupt your vagus nerve’s ability to regulate your nervous system.

The vagal brake is the branch of the vagus nerve that runs between the brainstem and the heart’s pacemaker: the sinoatrial node.

The vagal brake slows your heart rate and regulates how much activation is available to your nervous system.

Chronic and traumatic stress impact on your vagal brake reducing your ability to recover from stressful events.

Learn more about accessing the vagus nerve to recover from trauma in the Vagus Nerve Masterclass.

How Trauma Leads to Shame and Blame

If you have a history of trauma your thinking brain may automatically think “there’s something wrong with me”, rather than “there’s something wrong with this situation”, when you face stressors today.

When the thinking brain’s belief is “you need to do or be more to be complete” you may frequently find your arousal limits go to the point of overwhelm and exhaustion. 

It’s sometimes necessary to push yourself outside your comfort zone to grow, or to work through challenges. This can build resilience and improve the function of the vagus nerve if there’s time to recover fully from the activation and complete the stress response. 

But if you have a history of trauma and you’re frequently in survival mode and ignoring your limits, allostatic load can build. This is the wear and tear that accumulates in the mind-body system. 

Autonomic awareness gives you the ability to see things as they really are, rather than internalising you’re falling short and should be doing more. 

This stops you swinging between the highs of anxiety and overdoing and the lows of shame and not enough-ness.

You can learn to work on an even keel. You learn to see that your responsibility is only to see the current situation as it is and to work with it to the best of your ability. 

The more clarity you have about the reality of a situation and the reality of your neurobiological limits, the less you’ll buy into the belief that there’s something wrong with you. You can work with your nervous system rather than being driven by the fear and shame that can drive overdoing and burnout.

You can learn to see reality just as it is. 

Learn more about recovering from trauma in the Vagus Nerve Masterclass.

The Vagus Nerve: How it Helps You Feel Calm

The vagus nerve is what helps you feel at home inside of your body.

Chronic and traumatic stress can make it hard to come back to the state of your nervous system that feels like home, leaving you feeling less safe and secure. 

If your nervous system is dysregulated, it may feel like you spend minimal time at home. 

You may live in the mobilising energy of your nervous system - this causes you to feel anxious, angry, agitated and you may find it hard to switch off. 

Or you may disappear into its shut-down dorsal energy and feel fatigued, flat, numb and depressed. 

“Home” is where the body rests, recovers and repairs. This is why the vagus nerve is your in-built anti-inflammatory.

Without it working properly your emotions, as well as your immune, digestive, endocrine systems are dysregulated. This is how many chronic health issues arise. 

When you’re disconnected from “home”, or your vagus nerve isn’t engaging as well as it should, it’s harder to connect with others. It’s hard to form and maintain relationships when you’re not in the state where you feel safe and trusting. 

You may find you’re more likely to start arguments, or withdraw and avoid people. 

Your nervous system has evolved to help you survive and is quick to take you away from “home”.

It influences your thoughts and stories about who you are, what other people are like and how tethered you are in the world. 

This can stop you from feeling calm, and relaxing and enjoying life.

Your entire human experience changes depending on whether or not you feel at home inside yourself, where you can access the calming energy of your vagus nerve.

Hope lies in knowing that the nervous system is highly adaptable and something you can reshape with exercises that engage the vagus nerve and build vagal tone. 

These are like doing bicep curls for your vagus nerve. It builds resilience, self-regulation and you spend more time in the state where you feel calm. When you face demands you don’t swing up to the highs of anxiety or down to the lows of shut-down.

The vagus nerve is the pathway that takes you home to the place of inner security and trust.

To the place where your psychological and physical well-being will improve. 

To the place where you can connect with other people, improving your relationships. 

Learn more about the ways to access the vagus nerve in the upcoming Vagus Nerve Masterclass.