💚 Getting Back into the Body

Part 1: The Nervous System

Author

Roslyn McLarty
June 25, 2024

🧊 Disconnection from the Body

When I burned out, I was completely disconnected from my body. Which meant I had been missing out on clues and messages (maybe more like alarm bells) from my inner systems that were trying to tell me that something was off. Because I ignored those clues, it took me experiencing full-on exhaustion, debilitating overwhelm and a deep sense of dread for me to wake up and realize that something was very wrong. 

I came into my first session with my burnout coach (and yes, I’m very aware of the privilege in this!) having intellectualized my burnout and all of the factors that led to it. I had consumed self-help content and extensively journaled everything out. And Cait, my burnout coach, was like “… ok great, there’s lots here to work with… but more importantly, you need to get back in your body.” Which I was confused by, but also was ready to do whatever it took to heal.

What I learned from Cait was that when you’re completely burnt out and have been ignoring your body’s messages, the very first thing you need to do is to show your body you’re finally listening to it. 

This means very basic things like sleeping when you’re tired, eating when you’re hungry, putting on a sweater when you’re cold, moving when you feel anxious, going to the bathroom when you need to (GO TO THE BATHROOM!!!! This isn’t school lol.). 

Cait really reiterated that this baseline of showing your body that you can meet its basic needs was necessary before doing all of the other work. 

Looking back now, I’ve reflected on how much being connected to my body has been a major part of my healing since then. 

  • It’s allowed me to better connect with my intuition and use my body’s messages to tell me what’s working and not working in my life. 

  • It’s allowed me to better feel emotions in my body and be present with them, rather than keeping them stuffed down or trying to distract from the discomfort. 

  • And it’s allowed me to detect when memories from my past are triggering me and influencing my behaviors in the present. 

But before I was able to access any of that inner wisdom (which, by the way, is still very inconsistent), I needed to learn how to regulate my nervous system. 

Today I’m going to talk about the nervous system and how to regulate it. And for our next newsletter, I’ll talk more about tapping into the body’s intuition.

💥 Stress & the Nervous System

When we face anything our brains perceive as a threat, stress is our body’s natural response. The normal and healthy process is for us to be able to move through the beginning, middle and end of our body’s stress cycle when faced with a stressful event, and come back to our relaxed state. However, if we get stuck in the middle of the stress cycle without completing it, and hang out there the majority of our time, our nervous systems can become dysregulated, which can lead to burnout. 

For example, let’s say you’re being chased by a predator (the stressor). Your sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for its fight-or-flight response, releasing cortisol and adrenaline and increasing energy, blood pressure and heart-rate. Once you’ve successfully outrun the predator, your cortisol levels decrease and the parasympathetic nervous system reduces the stress response. This is a successful completion of the stress cycle. 

In this day and age, causes of stress are more psychological in nature. An interview, a deadline, an overflowing inbox, an ex-boyfriend. These stressors can be on-going and don’t necessarily have a natural conclusion. When you get stuck in the middle of the stress cycle, you can find yourself in a constant state of the sympathetic nervous system being activated. 

Can you think of a time your heart was racing, your breath was shallow, you felt jittery as you raced through your to-do list, skimmed through all the requests in your Slack and started worrying about an important presentation the next morning? None of these pose physical danger, but your body is acting like they do.

The sympathetic nervous system activates our fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses when faced with a stressor. Let’s take a look at what each of these can look like.

  • Fight: Your fight response prepares you to face any perceived threat aggressively. Signs you’re in fight response can look like: a tight jaw, tense body, anger/rage, irritation, aggression, talking loud, difficulty listening, interrupting, reactivity.

  • Flight: Your flight response prepares you to run away from danger. This can look like feeling fidgety, tense or trapped, a restless body, sensation of numbness in extremities, dilated, darting eyes, worry/panic, rumination, defensiveness, avoidance, always rushing, an urge to flee, perfectionism or workaholism.

  • Freeze: In our freeze response, we’re unable to move or act against a threat. Signs of this are: pale skin, a sense of dread, feeling stiff, heavy, numb or cold, a loud, pounding heart, decreased heart rate, dissociation/spacing out, not listening or responding to others, holding your breath, unable to take action, procrastination.

  • Fawn: Fawn response is when we try to please to avoid any conflict. This can look like people-pleasing, lack of assertiveness, no boundaries, hard time saying no, pretending to agree with someone, being overly apologetic, assuming responsibility for someone else’s emotional reactions and hypervigilance. (This is typically prominent in people who grew up in family situations where they had to be agreeable and helpful to feel safe.) 

When you’re burnt out and stuck in this constant state of nervous system activation it can be difficult to think straight, to be present, to access your intuition and behave in the way that you want to. These states can be the underlying causes of ineffectiveness, reactivity, conflict and regrettable decision-making. (So if you’ve been there, go easy on yourself. There’s not something inherently wrong with you. Your body was just reacting to a perceived threat.)

Another consequence is what it can do to our bodies. When our stressors are always present and that fight-or-flight stays turned on, too much exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can disrupt almost all the body’s processes. This puts us at higher risk of anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, sleep problems, weight gain and problems with memory and focus. 

So, with all of that being said, what can we do about it? 

The solution isn’t to never experience stress. It’s to learn how to cope with stress in a healthy way so that we don’t get stuck in our sympathetic nervous systems. 

In the context of burnout recovery, this act of regulating the nervous system is a necessary step before being able to get into all of the rest of the work. 

So how do we do this?

➡️ How to Calm the Nervous System

⬆️ Regulating the Nervous System From the Bottom Up

As I mentioned in my story of my first coaching session, I’ve often tried to deal with stressful situations by thinking my way out of them. 

It’s not uncommon to hear that we should simply meditate or journal when we’re stressed. These can definitely be helpful tools, but it might be hard to drop into these when our nervous systems are activated. There are some very compelling neurological reasons why taking a more body-based approach can make more sense when the goal is to calm the nervous system. 

According to Johnny Miller, an entrepreneur and nervous system expert: “Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain—in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. As a result, so-called bottom-up interventions—or practices that leverage our physiology—are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.”

Here are a few practices I’ve found helpful to calm the nervous system from the body up:

  • Yin yoga and restorative yoga: Yin yoga is a very relaxing, slow and meditative form of yoga, designed to encourage deep release of tension held in the joints, connective tissues and internal organs. Unlike the more ‘yang’ types of yoga (think Ashtanga or Vinyasa), Yin is designed to help you unwind and release tension. When I was fully in my burnout, I found my Yin practice to be very comforting, especially when practiced with props like bolsters and blankets.

  • Feeling the five senses: Taking a moment to name five things you can see around you, four sensations in your body, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. This exercise grounds you in the present moment (pulling you back from ruminating about the past or worrying about the future). Here’s a guided meditation.

  • Abhyanga: Abhyanga is an ayurvedic therapy that involves massaging the entire body from head to toe with oil. It can be a powerful way to calm our nervous system and also a beautiful act of self love. You can learn more about the benefits and instructions or a video on how to go about it.

  • Get outside: Go for a walk outside, preferably in nature. Even better if you leave your phone at home.

🔄 Completing the Stress Cycle

Coming back to our discussion of our body’s stress response, we covered how being unable to complete our stress cycle can lead to burnout. Another important strategy we have at our disposal is to complete our body’s stress cycles. I want to caveat that when I was fully burned out, this information alone probably wouldn’t have been that helpful to me since I was so far gone. So if that’s where you’re at, you may need to consider more serious types of changes and support. 

But if you’re not fully burnt out and are looking for a healthy way to manage stress day-to-day that can help you avoid burnout, here are six evidence-based strategies to complete the stress cycle: 

  • Physical activity: Since stress is physical, physical activity can be a big part of ending stress cycles. A run, hiking, the gym, dancing, water aerobics — any type of movement goes.

  • Creativity: Engage in whichever creative activity appeals to you - drawing or coloring, writing, photography, basket-weaving, origami, baking.

  • Laughing: Laughter is a way to release and express all our emotions we’re keeping inside. Read a funny book, watch some comedy on YouTube or TikTok, listen to a funny podcast. 

  • Crying: Crying is one of our body’s mechanisms to release stress. If you feel yourself wanting to cry, let it come up and embrace it (lean into the drama of it, I say!). You’ll feel so much better after. If you find that you’re not able to cry, I find listening to sad music can help bring out that emotion. Or watching any sad dog movie.

  • Physical affection: If you have someone you feel safe with, ask for a long hug. Spending time with a loving pet can also work. If you don’t have access to either, even hugging yourself or engaging in self-massage (like Abyhanga mentioned above). Physical affection helps your body release trust and bonding hormones, which slows our heart rate and we begin to feel safe. 

  • Breathing: As mentioned above, deep breathing can calm down your vagus nerve and complete your fight or flight response. 

⌚ A Quick Note on HRV and Wearables 

If you own a wearable that measures HRV (heart rate variability), like an Oura ring or a Whoop, you have great data at your disposal to understand how regulated your nervous system is, and to make changes accordingly.

HRV represents the fluctuation in time between your heartbeats. Your heartbeat doesn’t beat perfectly regularly — it changes its rhythm with each beat. And a higher fluctuation in the time between beats can actually indicate a healthier autonomic nervous system and balance between the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest) and the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight). 

By balancing between these two forces, the autonomic nervous system helps you respond to daily stressors and regulate some of the body’s most important systems like heart rate, respiration and digestion. 

Your autonomic nervous system greatly influences how your heart beats, and thus your HRV. Your rest-and-digest tells your heart to slow down, making room for variability in HRV. Your fight-or-flight system tells your heart to speed up, limiting space for variability. So a higher HRV is associated with rest-and-digest, general fitness and good recovery. Whereas a low HRV is associated with fight-or-flight responses, stress, illness or overtraining. 

Personally I have an Oura ring and love having access to my HRV data as well as features that measure daytime stress, recovery, resilience and heart health. When I burned out, I saw a big plunge in my HRV around that time. Now it’s something I take a look at daily, along with my stress and recovery. And I (try to) respond to what I’m seeing, integrating more rest or calming activities into my day when I see my HRV decreasing.

🤿 Go Deeper

If you’d like to go deeper on any of these concepts, I’d recommend the following resources:

  • Read: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagowski, explains why women experience burnout differently than men and provides science based advice to help women minimize stress, manage emotions and live a more joyful life.

  • Follow: @nicolesneuroscience, Nicole is a BSc, MSc in neuroscience & psychology who talks about habits, brain health and neuroplasticity. She has lots of tips for managing stress and regulating the nervous system. 

  • Learn: 

    • Nervous System Management, a (free.99) five-lesson course from nervous system expert Jonny Miller that will teach you how to build nervous system regulation.

    • To Be Magnetic: If you’re in the mood to go deep, TBM’s workshops teach you how to rewire your brain to uplevel your self worth. They have lots of education around nervous system regulation since it’s a first step before being able to engage in the rest of the work, so you’ll learn lots and find self-hypnosis recordings around calming and regulating your nervous system.

📋 Takeaways

  • In order to recover from or prevent burnout, we need to connect with and listen to our bodies (sounds obvious, but hard to do!).

  • When we encounter a stressor, our body responds with a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response. 

  • A regulated nervous system allows us to experience the beginning, middle and end of a stress cycle, ending back up in a relaxed or “rest and digest” state. However, if we don’t complete the stress cycle, we can end up stuck in fight-or-flight, resulting in a dysregulated nervous system, which can lead to burn out.

  • A constantly dysregulated nervous system can lead to ineffectiveness, reactivity, conflict and regrettable decision making. It can also disrupt almost all of the body’s processes and put our mental and physical health at risk.

  • Some of the strategies we can take to calm the nervous system or to complete the stress cycle include: 

    • Breathwork

    • Yoga nidra/Non-sleep deep rest

    • Yin yoga, restorative yoga, stretching

    • Abhyanga / self massage 

    • Getting outside

    • Feeling your 5 senses

    • Physical activity

    • Creativity 

    • Laughing

    • Crying

    • Physical affection 

  • Wearables can be useful tools for tracking our HRV — and thus the healthy functioning of our autonomic nervous systems — and using data to make adjustments to our daily actions.

Now that we have some ideas on how to regulate our nervous systems, next week we'll be talking about how to further reconnect with the body and access its wisdom. 

🪞 Reflection

  1. Considering the different nervous system responses to stress — fight, flight, freeze or fawn — which do you tend to fall into the most when stressed?

  1. When you notice your nervous system feels most dysregulated, are there any patterns or themes you notice that activate it? A certain type of external trigger? Or an internal thought? A time of day?

  1. Next time you notice your nervous system is dysregulated, what are three tools you can turn to regulate it?

Thank you so much for reading. I’d love to hear your feedback so I can improve and serve you better. You can fill out my anonymous two-minute survey here. 

Appreciate you!

With love,

Roslyn 💚

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