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.