Feeling good is not a luxury but your legacy

The fight, flight and freeze response

What is considered trauma or stress is not in the actual event but is defined by your response to it or what happens in your physiology. The autonomic nervous system allows you to respond automatically without thinking (digestion, blood pressure, respiration etc.) and is comprised of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system is the fight, flight, protect, attack defend responses which require more blood supply to the limbs for action. The parasympathetic nervous system is the rest, digest, slow down, but also freeze response to danger.

How people respond to stressors in their lives depends on how regulated their nervous system is. If there has been abuse, stress, shocks, and hardships ongoing through your life then your autonomic system is more likely to be dysregulated.

Our brains are constantly making predictions based on what happened in your past and what is happening now, it is connecting our past to our present to find the best way for you to react. As you get older, you have more and more stressful events stored up in our conscious and subconscious minds and many of us have been taught to ignore our feelings and never process our emotions in a healthy way.

When you are under threat your brain will tell your body to flee, fight or freeze to keep you safe. The brain is constantly sending messages to your body and the body back to the brain in a loop. After a while your neural pathways change, and you can become trapped in chronic survival stress, and the result is using unhelpful coping habits to feel better, such as social media scrolling, self-sabotage, addictions, and procrastination. These may all be unconscious reactions.

One way to start regulating your nervous system better is to work through the body rather than just trying to change your thoughts about situations. Starting to become more aware of what our body is feeling is a good response, feeling it and letting it out, and processing it (if not appropriate at the time we need to process it later) otherwise you store it as a fight, flight, or freeze (shut down and try not to feel it) response.

What can I do to release trauma?

Releasing trauma is an individual thing – some people need movement such as shaking, stretching, or running, some need words to talk it out, some need to release emotions by crying. Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT are a wonderful tool to release stress in the moment or later at an appropriate time. The worst thing you can do is ignore it, shove it down or disassociate from it as it is more helpful to accept it and feel it as a natural part of the human experience without judgement and with compassion.

You can gain more capacity (more ability to handle stress) by tuning into your body and following impulse if that impulse is keeping you and others safe and is not risky. To do this you need to tune into your bodies and ask what it needs right now? Start listening to your basic biological functions and emotions. Get attuned to automatic responses.

Ask yourself - What do I need now in the moment? Am I thirsty, hungry, do I have pain somewhere, do I feel happy, sad, anxious or do I need a hug? Do I feel this anywhere in my body? 

You may never have had anyone who could soothe you after you experienced a stressor or trauma which has made it difficult for you to know how to soothe yourself. You may feel the need to scream, punch a pillow, or phone a friend to vent. You can also vent while using EFT as a tool to bring cortisol levels down.

Our brain is always trying to keep you safe by making predictions

Your brain is a prediction machine that tries to keep you safe by making predictions based on what has happened to you in the past.

Our brain always tries to disconnect you from your physiology for survival in highly stressful situations. This is OK in initial extreme situations of trauma when survival means disconnection, but we often use it for everyday stressors. Our autonomic nervous systems become hypervigilant and works on overdrive either in fight, flight or freeze waiting for the next thing that will attack us. Awareness of how your nervous system works is the first step to changing it.

When your nervous system is always dysregulated and this becomes ‘normal’, you may then create dramas in your life as it keeps you in this familiar state. If you are always in hyperarousal or disconnection it will eventually causes physical health problems.

Having a regulated nervous system helps you to have a better life in so many ways as you respond differently to events with more capacity and resilience.

You can start to make better decisions when you are calmer, which is much better than operating from a feeling of chronic underlying panic, anxiety, or disconnection.  Over time with awareness and practice in working with your body, the neural pathways in your brain changes. Your brain is less likely to feel you are under threat, and this then influences the messages it sends back to your body.

Written by Susan Christoffelsz