“Our culture operates from the false premise that there is something wrong with us.”
We criticize ourselves for being “too sensitive,” “too anxious.” We punish ourselves for being too reactive or emotional, too tired, or “too shut down” to care about things that should matter to us. We view stress reactions and fight/flight responses as weakness rather than intelligent design put in place over time for our protection and survival.
But your nervous system is NOT your enemy.
Your fight/flight/freeze reaction is not attacking your ability to live your life how you see fit.
In fact many of the very reactions you find yourself criticizing yourself for developed because they served AS PROTECTION.
Your body is always looking for cues to how safe or threatened you are. Most of this monitoring occurs outside of your awareness. By the time your conscious mind has formulated what’s happening based on your perceived reality, your nervous system has already jumped into high gear. Whether that looks like tensed muscles, short breathing, feeling emotionally numb, turned on freak out mode, or ready to RUN.
This is not weakness.
This is your body trying to keep you alive.
One unfortunate thing about the nervous system is that it doesn’t always recognize past and present danger accurately. Stress, trauma, emotional dysregulation, overwhelm – they all leave imprints that stay with us longer than they need to.
Which means your nervous system can trigger at the slightest thing… sometimes with little correlation to what is actually happening in the present moment.
Someone offering constructive criticism could make you feel like they’re attacking you
Having a conflict with someone might make you feel like you need to run away
Resting might make you feel uneasy or anxious
Being close to another person might make you scared
Uncertainty about the future may make you tense up all over
The nervous system is AMAZING at doing its job. In fact it often doesn’t just react to what’s happening in the present moment… but what happened years ago.
Once we realize that, we can OPEN THE DOOR.
Learning how to heal doesn’t mean forcing ourselves to “calm down” or “stop reacting.” Healing comes from guiding our body back into a state of greater safety, regulation, flexibility, and trust.
Mindfulness practice allows us to step out of the war with our body and see we have options. Watching our breath, tapping, movement, meditation. These are powerful practices that allow us to turn toward our experience with curiosity and non-judgment.
Self-observation allows us to learn how to:
- Recognize your body when it’s starting to become activated, before you tip into overwhelm
- Feel sensations in your body sooner
- Ground and regulate through your breath, movement, senses
- Create internal sensations of safety
- Gently come back to yourself after a reaction has passed.
These moments of self-awareness compound on each other.
Slowly your nervous system will start to realize it doesn’t need to brace for danger with every little thing. You may find yourself relaxing sooner. Your body becomes less controlled by stress reactions and more willing to stay open to curiosity, connection, creativity, and intimacy.
The path of healing looks different for everyone and is not linear. There will never be a magical moment that we learn to “calm down” and never experience stress, anxiety, or uncertainty again. Life is life.
But what we can train ourselves to do is SHORTEN that reactionary time frame.
How long does it take you to come back to center? With enough practice, we might find that:
- It takes less time to perk back up.
- We can soften into our bodies again sooner.
- We stop fighting our own experience quite as much.
Above all we stop believing there’s something wrong with us that needs fixing.