How does the Nervous System respond?
Part 2 in a long missive on the nervous system and rainy days.
I am incongruously ill with a mysterious head cold that some days feels like almost nothing. A head cold that sparks up in the morning with a chest cough and sore throat but quickly loosens into medium congestion and a running nose through the day. I’ve been resting and increasing my dosage of Zinc. I’ve drunk copious cups of tea despite the temps rising into the mid-80s. I feel cross-eyed and looking at screens makes me feel a bit ill.
But I suppose indoors, resting is exactly where I prefer to be on hot summer days.
The sounds of summer in this new landscape please me less than the sounds of spring. They’re maybe even more troubling than the sun and the heat. The lawnmowers. The children screaming (I know, I know, they’re mostly screaming in delight (I hope)). The fireworks. The car and motorcycle motors. Even one of my grandmother’s wind chimes placed at the front of the house had to come down. It wouldn’t stop singing through my walls and the overstimulation was too much. (When I explained to her that I’d taken them down she initially thought I’d taken them down because they were ugly (which I would never do, even if I thought they were ugly!), even though she sits on the same side of the house as my apartment, she couldn’t hear them and did admit if she had been hearing them constantly, she wouldn’t have been able to tolerate it either.)
Snow, on the other hand, is nature’s muffler. Everything feels still and quiet. There are, as Ross Gellar points out, fewer people on the street in winter. I’ve always thought of myself as an autumn person, but I’m very quickly recognizing the peace that winter, alongside rainy days, brings to my nervous system. And everything is, after all, all about the nervous system.
Last week I began a journey into nervous system education and practice. I declared an intention to explore just how regulated my nervous system could become, which I suspect will be an ongoing journey, but how does the nervous system behave?
In a free breathwork teaser through The Reconnected, a woman-owned Australia-based company founded with a mission to regulate the autonomic nervous systems of parents and their children all around the world, Eleanor described the movements of the ANS like a swinging pendulum: in the center is the Ventral Vagal state or the parasympathetic. This state is also known as the social engagement system where we “rest and digest” or feel “safe and social”. When we are in the Ventral Vagal, our bodies come into healing. When we are in the Ventral Vagal most of the time, barring any actual threats or traumas, our ANSs can be considered regulated.
However, way back in the day when lions and tigers and bears were even larger animals than they are now; when neighboring tribes solved disputes with weapons rather than diplomacy (um…), a twig snapping on a leisurely walk swung the pendulum up into the Sympathetic state or the mobilization state, otherwise known as Fight/Flight. Our senses heighten, muscles contract, and any functions that do not contribute to fighting or fleeing shut down, including digestion (there are now studies that suggest that digestion issues are more likely caused by a dysregulated ANS rather than the foods we eat; will I be able to eat bread again?!).
In this scenario, barring we don’t die, we either win the fight or we run to safety, and thus our ANS regulates back into the Ventral Vagal. Our muscles release, our senses desensitize, our digestion comes back online and we feel safe.
However, we don’t battle sabertooth tigers anymore.
We battle bosses, partners, parents, friends, a constant workload, manage children, and bills. Screens shout at us in taxis and at gas stations and from our hands, there’s always something to be doing, not to mention the endless doom scroll, terrifying political situations. We witness (or endure) heinous acts of destruction, and some of us aren’t safe in our own homes let alone when we walk out of them.
Most of us experience a constant barrage of stressors to some degree and burnout, which used to be strictly associated with work, is a real and widespread issue that goes beyond our working environments and as Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, found in their book, Burnout: The secret to unlocking the stress cycle, it lives in our nervous systems and can only be unlocked through nervous system regulation practices.
But the thing about the nervous system that has really been illuminating for me, is that most of our core beliefs about ourselves and our safety were imprinted in our nervous systems before we were 18 months old.
In other words, our ANSs and their responses began to develop with our first breaths. Our core beliefs about ourselves, the world we live in, and the strategies we use to stay safe are the strategies we started developing before we were able to form complete sentences let alone experience conscious thought, and these things are passed down to us by our caregivers, who’s ANSs were passed down to them by their caregivers, and so on.
I posed this bit of research to a friend who’s kneejerk response was disbelieve. How does such a small person feel unsafe? Babies seemed to her never to be unhappy, morose, or miserable, which of course isn’t considering how very frequently babies cry, but it’s a valid consideration. There’s an inclination, I think, as Western thinking adults, to assume that our feelings, experiences, emotions happen strictly in our conscious cognitive brains and that such a small child doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to evaluate their caregivers’ behavior as safe or unsafe.
And of course they can’t and don’t. The nervous system is part of our primal monkey brain. It’s taking in its environment and feeding our brains information well before our thoughts catch up, which is why we can’t rationalize our way our of an activated ANS and we can’t rationalize our way out of our core beliefs and patterns. We cannot think our way into a regulated ANS, we have to practice our way there.
What a small child needs to feel safe is subtle and I’m sure there’s developmental research that can paint you a clearer picture than I can, but children are a reflection of their parents’ and primary caregivers’ ANSs. If their caregivers (and their caregivers caregivers, and their caregivers caregivers) are/ were dysregulated, emotionally distant, negligent, overwhelmed, angry, or disengaged enough of the time (and I don’t know how much that is and it may vary from child to child) without ever coming into Ventral Vagal co-regulation, the child’s ANS will be dysregulated and they will develop coping strategies that keep them safe in that situation that they take into adulthood if otherwise not released and relearned.
My aim here is not to scare current caregivers or insist this or that is the right way to parent, there’s enough shame and blame in parenting. It’s simply to relay how and when based on research the ANS starts to form: breath one, and how your ANS started to form: breath one, and so on up the generational line. There’s very little control we have over how our ANS was formed, but we can choose to come into regulation. We can choose to rewire it.
For those who felt safe in those first 18 months (and beyond) or whose parents managed to be one of the few regulated folks in the world, this is fantastic. These folks (and forlks who have come into ANS regulation practices) walk around typically feeling safe and calm. They respond to new people and new situations with ease. Have a sense of freedom about them. Life very likely just sort of works out effortlessly and rarely feels like a struggle.
I hope this is you. It is not and has not been me.
For those of us who, for whatever reason, did not feel the kind of safety an infant and toddler needs; those of us who have experienced single or consistent traumatic events in our lives (parental divorce, death or chronic illness of a loved one, poverty, unstable living situation, discrimination, etc.); those of us who are stuck in jobs that require more than we can give; those of us who have experienced any kind of abuse; those of us who are extrasensory sensitive and have/had no control over our environments; those of us who have always to be “on” or responsive (i.e., answering work emails at midnight); those of us who are constantly under some kind of stress, say, continually being criticized or judged (by others OR ourselves) or are under some sort of constant stressful threat, the pendulum swings so frequently into the Sympathetic that at some point we shut down and it swings into the Dorsal Vagal or immobilization system.
This is the Freeze/Appease state.
I tend to lean toward Freeze. This state for me is dissociation. I shut down, become apathetic, hide, isolate. I numb out to solitaire and TV and IG reels. I can’t feel or identify my emotions, let alone express them or ask for help. I don’t have wants and barely function to care for my needs. I react to situations rather than respond. I’m on edge. Easily triggered about mundane things. I misperceive others’ behavior: everyone is a potential threat, I am an awful person, and no one likes me. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s intentions are, that’s what I hear.
Even when with other humans I am not there. I’m masking, dissociated. I’m somewhere internal. Nothing brings me joy or pleasure. I’m not alive or living. I’m paralyzed. And I can’t move one way or the other, hence, immobilization. (Sounds like depression? It is.) And because my ANS is designed to keep me safe, it doesn’t let me see that I’m in this state: I blame the external world for triggering me, I become controlling of my environment, I get stuck in routines and overwhelment when those routines are disrupted. I become obsessed with minimalizing my belongings and in worst-case scenarios, I severely control what and how much I eat.
I desperately want others to behave in certain ways so that I feel safe. Of course, even if they did behave in safe ways I would still perceive them as unsafe, because it’s my ANS that feels unsafe, not necessarily (though possibly, yes) the situation. (If there is a threat to your personal safety, seek external safety, call a hotline, call a shelter, call a friend and deal with your ANS later.)
I’ve spent great swaths of my life in this state.
Others move to an Appease state: they work harder, put more attention toward fixing problems with themselves or with the external environment to please others or mitigate painful reactions from others. They become boundaryless, willing to be or do what others need from them at any time while having no real grasp of what they themselves want/need in any given moment. They are always anticipating. Anticipating needs, anticipating moods, anticipating behavior, anticipating traffic, anticipating weather and they work really hard to avoid every possible problem along the way. They too, in effect, make themselves as small as possible, until an uncontrolled problem arises or someone pushes them too far they then become easily triggered and seemingly overreact to small things or things that have a simple solution.
Bottling things inside is the common phrasing for the Dorsal Vagal. When regularly in this state, we aren’t equipped to work things through rationally. We’re on the defensive all the time. We’re protecting ourselves. We’re in survival mode.
All ANSs utilize Flight/Fight and Freeze/Appease depending on the different situations we find ourselves in, and the more aware I become, the more I can see how I utilize all four states, but most of us lean more frequently one way or another. More toward Flight than Fight. More toward Freeze than Appease. All humans, even those with well-regulated ANSs become activated. And we want them to! If we’re walking through a park and a soccer ball is coming at our heads, we want our ANS to register that and duck. If our boss is throwing too many assignments at us we want our ANS to up-regulate and set some boundaries (anger/fight is a boundary-setting emotion) or up-regulate just enough to focus on what needs to be done in that state of eustress, a positive level of stress that creates movement and action.
What we don’t want is an ANS so dysregulated that it never or rarely comes back into the Ventral Vagal. We never feel safe, we never feel calm, our world becomes full of threats, we ourselves become a threat to our own well-being depending on where one puts the blame and the situations we create with our behavior. We become a victim of our own Autonomic Nervous Systems without realizing that its the cause. (This isn’t to say that others’ dysregulated nervous systems don’t cause us harm, again, if you are in an unsafe situation, please seek safety.)
These are of course extreme and persistent examples. Freeze might simply be a feeling of stuckness or a block toward things we want to be doing (erm, writing?); flight might look like chronic anxiety or worry; an inability to ever relax even when resting. In a lot of ways it’s the things we’ve been told for years that are just a part of our mental or biological makeup and there’s not much we can do to shift them, we have to learn to live with it, push through it, or medicate it, which is now understood to not strictly be true.
We can, after all, rewire the brain by regulating the ANS. Mindfulness, breathwork, somatic therapies, what these tools do is regulate the autonomic nervous system which rewires the brain. In rewiring the brain, we release traumas; negative core beliefs; and old, ineffective (or even harmful) patterns of keeping ourselves safe and as I’ve experienced, we move into a more consistent Ventral Vagal state where ease, peace, safety, security, stability are readily accessible and felt from within. Sound too good to be true? Getting there isn’t without it’s discomfort, but we’ll chat more about that later.
Below find one of many ANS regulating tools that I hope you’ll join me in practicing in Breathe + Write sessions I’m putting together and I will eventually work my way back to those rainy days as I hope does the weather.
Cheers,
