Nervous System Tools to Transform the World
How finding safety within our bodies allows us to show up outside of our bodies
Limerence is our mind in the driver’s seat. It’s time for our bodies to take the lead. Why? Because it is impossible to think your way out of dysregulation. Furthermore, our bodies are where we can access our intuition, and when we are in our survival states we are cut off from our bodies and our intuition.
As I sat down to write this article, I noticed that my body felt heavy, weighted, and sleepy. Part of me just wanted to forgo writing and instead lie down for a nap.
Instead, I experimented with turning on some upbeat dance music for a couple of minutes.
Moments later, I felt the energy shift in my system and motivation to write return.
This is an example of using nervous system regulation tools moment by moment to come back to a state of balance. It was just a small tweak, but it required me to be aware of how my body and energy was feeling in the moment, as well as the specific tools that would help me shift the stuck energy in my system. There is a constant feedback loop of communication between my witnessing mind and the present moment. It requires me to stay connected to my body, emotions, and experience.
Staying connected to the body, emotions, and present moment is something that long-term limerence sufferers can struggle with, because they instead get used to spending a majority of their time in mental reverie and on autopilot. Unfortunately, as I discussed in my last post on nervous system dysregulation, we are cut off from choice when we are in this state.
Let’s go back to my example around increasing motivation for writing for a second. One could argue that maybe I really did need a nap and that shifting my state was a form of me not listening to my body. In certain circumstances, yes, that would be true. But this is why awareness and context is so important when learning how to incorporate nervous system regulation into our daily lives. I was aware that I had gotten plenty of sleep and had been full of energy not that long ago, so I had a hunch that rather than being truly at my limit, my body was just dipping down into a freeze state.
I could test the theory out even further by doing a small experiment like the one I did with the upbeat music. Chances are if I was really in need of sleep, the energy wouldn’t have been able to shift back as easily as it did. These are why practicing tools and small experiments throughout the day to help rebalance our nervous system in the moment can be so invaluable.
So, let’s get to it. What does it look like to begin to regulate our nervous systems?
As I said earlier, awareness is one of the most important parts of beginning to learn nervous system regulation. We can’t know what we need, if we don’t first know where we already are on the scale from hypoarousal to hyperarousal.1
A helpful visualization of this is Deb Dana’s autonomic nervous system ladder. Throughout the day, one is either going up the ladder towards safety, or one is triggered and going down the ladder into deeper and deeper states of dysregulation. Being able to determine where we are on the ladder in any given moment, allows us to know if we need to upregulate (bring ourselves up) or downregulate (calm ourselves down).
We do this by first slowing down and pausing, taking a deep breath, and checking in with our body and mind. First, we notice what our breath feels like. Is it shallow or deep? Fast or slow? Then, we notice the quality of our thoughts. Are they racing or calm? Creative or dulled? Lastly, we do a quick body scan and note any strong sensations or impulses. Do we feel restless and like we want to jump out of our skin? Do we feel the urge to numb ourselves? Is our body full of heat? Once, we have done a full body and mind check, we can label where we think we are on the autonomic nervous system ladder.
Examples:
Parasympathetic Ventral Vagal Safety
Feels like: Consistent energy, creative, calm, content, compassionate
Thoughts: “This is workable. I can figure it out.” “I have an idea for a project…”
Behavior: Want to reach out to a friend, start a creative project, play with many different ideas
Sympathetic Hyper-arousal
Feels like: Irritable, anxious, agitated, restless, ruminative
Thoughts: “I want to get out of here. I can’t handle this.” “What are they thinking about me?” “I can’t survive without them.”
Behavior: Strong reactions, emotional outbursts, running away, inability to relax, reassurance-seeking
Parasympathetic Hypo-Arousal
Feels like: Heavy, foggy, disconnected, numb, exhausted, flat
Thoughts: “I feel alone.” “I want to sleep.” “Is anything worth it?”
Behavior: Shut down, using very little words, withdrawal, sleeping, dissociation
Freeze State: Fight or Flight + Shutdown
Feels like: Wired but tired, tense, stuck, frozen, panic, overwhelm
Thoughts: “I feel like I can’t move or do anything.” “I don’t feel safe. I’m trapped.” “I’m confused.”
Behavior: Hypervigilance, difficulty communicating, vacant staring, procrastination, sitting still but ruminating intensely
Once we have mapped out what our specific nervous system states feel like, then we can take action to bring ourself back into balance. Mapping out our specific nervous system states will take time as we witness and observe daily in order to familiarize ourselves to our specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in each state. We want to make sure we have many data points that we are pulling from, and because we all have different past experiences and conditioning, this will look unique to our body.
In order to access more and more of the parasympathetic safety state, we need to intentionally teach our bodies what an embodied sense of safety feels like. This does not mean just getting out of unsafe or threatening situations or environments (although that’s important too!). Our body can still feel survival threat even when we are alone at home with just ourselves thanks to a process called neuroception which is happening underneath our awareness 100% of the time. Neuroception is our body’s way of scanning the environment for cues of safety, threat, and danger without involving the thinking part of our brain. You can’t shut it off because it happens outside of your awareness, similar to breathing or digesting. And small cues such as our tense muscles or racing thoughts can re-feed danger cues to our neuroception.
Once our brain receives the information that neuroception is picking up, it starts to create a story. This is where a lot of our fearful, conditioned, and automatic thoughts show up. We are not choosing the state of our nervous system consciously, neuroception is, so we do not have to blame ourselves for getting stuck in certain states often.
However, the more that we learn to work with and understand our body and invite it to work with our mind, the more that we can begin to teach both how to be in a state of safety. We do this by consciously choosing tools and creating environments that our body would feel in a truly safe state so that we can begin communicating directly to that neuroception. Things such as slowing down, learning how to be rather than always doing, cultivating presence, deep breathing, focusing on one task at a time2, feeling our emotions through somatic processing, and listening to calming music are some examples.
You might notice that many of these are counter to what our society tends to promote: constant busy-ness, fixation on productivity, multi-tasking, avoidance of emotions, and reliance on high stimulation.
There is a reason why our nervous system regulation has gotten so off track. It’s because our culture and world is not set up to tend to it. It takes a lot of courage to realize that what we have been doing for so long has not been working, but we do have the power to shift our experience.
It takes building intentional habits which over time stimulate safety and slowly rewire our nervous system and bodies. Once our nervous system knows how to rebalance, the thoughts, feelings, and parts of ourselves we have access to also transform and follow suit.
So, final step. Nervous system state shifting. Learning how to adjust your energy to better match your needs and stimulate a sense of safety over time for your body. We do this through a mixture of upregulating (stepping on the gas when you need more energy or in order to release energy) and downregulating (tapping the breaks to lower your arousal and come back to a state of calm). Each time you do this, you are helping reinforce your body’s ability to self-regulate and over time it will become more natural.
When you notice that you are in a hypo-arousal or low energy state, you are going to want to reach towards upregulating tools.
Upregulating tools include:
1.Physical Movement: Exercise, even a short burst of activity, can increase your heart rate and boost energy levels. Try a brisk walk, dancing, or even some jumping jacks.
2. Cold Exposure: A splash of cold water on your face or a brief cold shower can activate your nervous system and increase alertness.
3. Breathwork: More active breathwork like heart-opening breathwork or “breath of fire” in yoga can move energy and stimulate your nervous system, waking you up.
4. Stimulating Environment: Change your surroundings—turn on bright lights, listen to upbeat music, or step outside into fresh air to invigorate your senses and feel sunlight on your skin.
5.Engage Your Mind: Challenge your brain with a quick puzzle, a stimulating conversation, or a task that requires focus. This can help shift your nervous system into a more activated state.
6.Use Sensory Input: Grab a fizzy or cold drink, gently sway or rock, rub your hands together to create energy and awaken your body.
The trick is, however, to move very gently. When we are in a shutdown state, any quick movement or building of energy is going to feel like a lot, so we want to be very slow, mindful, and gentle. I will talk to a lot of people who are in freeze or shut down states, confused and beating themselves up for not being able to go on a run or clean their house. This is way too huge of an expectation for ourselves when we are frozen. We have to work up to that over time- but we start small. This is important because if we go too quickly too soon, then the danger cues for our body actually increase and shut us down even more. Sometimes just sitting up, rubbing our hands together, or stepping outside to feel fresh air is all we need to start with.
When you notice that you are in a hyper-arousal or anxious energy state, you are going to want to rely on downregulating tools.
There is a caveat here, however. Sometimes we are in such an activated or mobilized state that we actually need to release the energy before we can move to downregulation. When your body is so restless that the idea of slowing down makes you want to scream, then you know you need to release some energy first. Some safe ways to release energy include standing up and shaking the body, taking a pillow and screaming into it, and/or doing a quick round of jumping jacks or other heart pumping exercise. When we don’t have a safe way to release the excess energy, it gets trapped and turns to anger/lashing out, inward shame and self-attack, or endless rumination.
It’s important that we follow up the releasing of the energy with downregulation, however, because that’s what is going to communicate to the body that the danger has passed and we can rest now.
Downregulating tools include:
1.Deep Breathing: Slow, deep breaths activate the relaxation response, slowing your heart rate and reducing tension in your body.
2.Mindfulness Meditation: By focusing on the present moment and just being a nonjudgmental witness, mindfulness helps reduce stress by preventing anxious thoughts from spiraling.
3.Guided Imagery: Visualizing peaceful scenes helps your brain shift from stress to calm, reducing physical and emotional tension.
4.Singing, humming or chanting: Turning on your favorite tunes and singing along can stimulate your vagus nerve which increase your heart rate variability and helps to soothe.
5.Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Tensing and then relaxing muscle groups helps release physical tension, sending signals to your brain to calm down.
6.Calming Music: Soothing music can promote the production of delta waves, associated with deep relaxation and reduced anxiety.
7.Binaural Beats: These audio tones can help synchronize your brainwaves to a more relaxed state, easing stress and tension.
8.Nature: Spending time in nature naturally lowers stress levels, helping you feel more grounded and at ease.
9.Screen Detox: Resting without watching a screen gives the body much needed space to recalibrate and a break from constant stimulation.
10.Self-Care: Activities like taking a warm bath or reading a good book nourish your body and mind, helping to bring you back to balance.
11.Tapping (EFT): This technique involves tapping specific acupressure points on your body to release pent-up stress, helping to calm both the mind and body. Other grounding activities are also useful.
10.Yoga and Tai Chi: These gentle practices combine movement with breath, promoting relaxation by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. Poses that get your head below your heart can quickly activate the body’s relaxation response.
Photo by Unsplash
Understanding the nuance of our nervous system is important, because the well-meaning advice of “just take your anger and anxiety out at a kickboxing class or on a 5 mile run” can sometimes be useful. But, if we are chronically stuck in a stressed out sympathetic nervous system state than this isn’t as helpful as we might first think. In fact, it can dump even more stress hormones and danger cues to our already maxed out nervous system. If we are wanting to amp up that state, then sure, high energy exercise is going to be a great boost for this. But generally, what we actually want to learn how to do is bring our highly activated system back down to a calmer state.
First, feel the feeling (this isn’t the same as expressing the feeling or acting it out). This means mindfully feeling the energy and sensation in your body. Then, once you have processed the emotion, release the energy through an intentional shake or dance. Then, you can choose to move the energy back into a state of balance through consciously downregulating. Once you are back in your ventral vagal state, that’s when you decide how you want to act, what you want to express, and what boundaries need to be set. From this place, we have access to our wisdom.
What this means is if we are already living high stress, high overwhelm lives, a long restorative yoga class or walk in the woods is going to do far more for us in the long run than a high intensity HIIT class or stimulating Instagram scroll. When we reach for downregulating tools, we are encouraging the release of calming neurotransmitters like GABA and reducing activating stress hormones like cortisol, both which are giving cues to our body that we can stop running from that tiger and come back into the present moment.
On the flip side, if we are living our lives more from a depressed and shut down state than doing socially recommended activities like meditation and journaling can be the last things that are helpful. They cause us to go even deeper into states of stillness and dissociation.
This is why knowing where our starting place on the autonomic scale is paramount to knowing what we need.
A regulated nervous system does not mean that we don’t still feel pain or negative emotions, it wont mean we will suddenly cease longing for our LO, but it does mean that we will have more creativity, resiliency, and capacity to move through it rather than staying stuck.
The reality is regulated nervous systems are our biological birth right. The only reason they might seem unfamiliar is because we have been living lifetimes more deeply rooted in our survival brains than knowing how to access states of embodied safety. Learning how to regulate our nervous systems is not an immediate, over night magical pill solution. But it is the most meaningful, long-lasting, and full-bodied change if we commit to learning how. And as previously mentioned, our world needs us to have access to our resiliency and creativity more than ever before.
This may look different for neurodivergent minds. This is why understanding and tracking our own nervous system states and experimenting over time is so crucial for this work.