Part 2: Understanding our Nervous System so that we can live a Happier Life Beyond Trauma and Stress
Jan 15, 2024
Jennifer Townsend
Struggling to navigate the choppy waters of stress and past trauma? You're not alone. This latest episode I unwrap the complexities of our nervous system and the deep impact trauma can have on our reactions and behaviors. Listen as I open up about my own battles, from being ensnared in 'freeze' mode during relational strife to the cycles of counterproductive coping mechanisms like overworking. I share personal struggles; and I hope I provide a beacon of hope, guiding you toward recognizing personal triggers and adopting strategies that soothe your overwrought nerves.
This heartfelt discourse with me I hope offers not just understanding, but actionable wisdom. Discover how states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal affect everything from our eating habits to our sleep patterns, and the ripple effect they have on our interpersonal relationships. I emphasize the monumental role self-awareness plays in our journey to resilience, and how, by mastering this, we can foster a safer environment for ourselves and our children. This episode isn't just a lesson—it's a lifeline, pulling us towards a sense of safety and the possibility of a 'happily even after', despite our histories.
Please follow me on instagram and facebook @happilyevenaftercoach and if you want to see what coaching is all about I offer a free 30 min. clarity call via zoom.
Struggling to navigate the choppy waters of stress and past trauma? You're not alone. This latest episode I unwrap the complexities of our nervous system and the deep impact trauma can have on our reactions and behaviors. Listen as I open up about my own battles, from being ensnared in 'freeze' mode during relational strife to the cycles of counterproductive coping mechanisms like overworking. I share personal struggles; and I hope I provide a beacon of hope, guiding you toward recognizing personal triggers and adopting strategies that soothe your overwrought nerves.
This heartfelt discourse with me I hope offers not just understanding, but actionable wisdom. Discover how states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal affect everything from our eating habits to our sleep patterns, and the ripple effect they have on our interpersonal relationships. I emphasize the monumental role self-awareness plays in our journey to resilience, and how, by mastering this, we can foster a safer environment for ourselves and our children. This episode isn't just a lesson—it's a lifeline, pulling us towards a sense of safety and the possibility of a 'happily even after', despite our histories.
Please follow me on instagram and facebook @happilyevenaftercoach and if you want to see what coaching is all about I offer a free 30 min. clarity call via zoom.
Hi friends, welcome to Happily. Even After. I'm Life Coach Jen, a certified life coach that specializes in relationships. I'm a mom of four awesome kids and one amazing senora, a home decorator, a remodeler, a shopper, a scrabler and a snuggler. I want to help you with your relationships, mainly the relationship you have with yourself and your family and God. Thanks for listening and letting me share the tools I have learned that can help you live happily even after some of life's greatest challenges. Hey friends, welcome to today's podcast. I hope you're having an amazing new year. I for sure am.
Speaker 1:
I wanted to piggyback what I talked about last week on my podcast with the zone of resilience. I'm really talking about your nervous system and you have your zone, your home, and where you feel peace and safety. But we all have different trauma responses. We might go to fight or flight or freeze. I'm going to just talk about those two areas of our nervous system so you can understand it and start recognizing like, oh, I'm going into fight or flight or freeze. I think each of us has. I'm going to just call it our second home, where we tend to. If something upsets us or something happens, we automatically go into freeze or fight or flight, and so just getting to know that about yourself is huge. And I've realized after learning about my nervous system that pretty much my entire marriage I was not in my safety zone. I was very rarely in my safety zone. I didn't even understand what that was till recently, but I lived in fight or freeze and do you know how exhausting that is? And, as you know, I go over the different things that might happen to your body and your thoughts. You can understand, especially if you're experiencing betrayal, if you're experiencing lying, manipulation, emotional abuse, why you would get stuck in some of these zones and why your nervous system does this it's to protect you.
Speaker 1:
So, anyways, have you ever been like you fill yourself, like kind of heat up, you get like start getting like sweaty and just like anger or irritation. It's kind of like the yellow light for your nervous system. It's like a warning, like okay, something's going on here and I'm just going to describe it's called the sympathetic part of your nervous system or your hypo arousal, meaning you're in fight or flight and a lot of times you envision like feeling like a fire, a flame. It's hot, it feels thorny, it just it's very heightened. You're in a heightened sense of, you know, panic. It's what our body was given like when we were, you know, in the cave minutes to protect us from like a tiger or a bear. But we usually don't have to be protected by a tiger or a bear anymore, but our body still warns us when something bad is happening or when you know someone's lying to us or something upsets us. And so just paying attention, there are a lot of like, type A personality.
Speaker 1:
If you consider yourself a type A personality or the people and I've guilty of this, I've done this super busy all the time You're in hypo arousal. You're always busy, always doing, and why we do that is then we can't be thinking about what's really going on in our life. We just stay super busy. We're always active, always moving, we're not sitting, and this can wreak havoc on your body, wreak havoc on your life, in your marriage, in your family, and so becoming aware of like oh, I live, my second home is in hypo arousal, I am living in fight or flight all the time, no wonder you're stressed out and exhausted, and so just becoming aware of it is your first step. Some thoughts you might have is like why is this happening to me? What's going on? You're not good enough. What's wrong with you? Why can't you figure this out? I can't believe this is my life. I mean you wanna blame other people Like why are you here? Why are you fighting? What are you fighting for?
Speaker 1:
If you're, you know, paying attention to your emotions, you might feel irritated or angry, a lot, worried, worried lives. A lot here can also live in hypo, but hyper when you're in fight or flight shock, anxiety, fear. So someone that has a lot of anxiety, their nervous system is in fight or flight and if you get stuck there it can be totally exhausting because you're always trying to run and avoid and it's a way that your body is protecting you from danger. But it's really not right Because technically there's probably not anything that's life-threatening going on. Obviously, if you were really getting chased by a bear, then that would be different. Our body might feel tight, our heart is racing, our stomach feels in knots, you might feel hot. So there's lots of things just paying attention to when you feel super elevated, super like in this fight or flight. Just pay attention Because until you're aware of when you're in this zone, you can't change it and you can't get back to your zone of safety, the resilience, the where you feel like okay, because once you're aware of it, then you can be like, okay, I'm safe. Am I safe? Ask yourself those questions and then you're able to calm yourself down.
Speaker 1:
A lot of times when people are in this zone, you wanna drink caffeine. You wanna eat out not super healthy foods, very snacky, you kind of. When you're trying to sleep, you're tossing and turning. Your brain won't turn off, your mind is spinning, you have a hard time falling asleep, so then you wake up exhausted and the cycle starts all over again. You might numb by spending money or planning or eating food or social media and many other things Work. You might become a workaholic. You're working all the time. You're not taking breaks. You think I can't stop. I have to keep going, going, going. You might disconnect from other people. You're not very fun to be around because you're always trying to be one step ahead of everyone else.
Speaker 1:
You're not your best self when you're in this zone, but a lot of people live their life in this zone and it's not to judge if you were like I live my life in the zone, don't judge yourself. Just become aware of it and say okay, what are some things that I need to change in my life, that I want to change in my life to help me be more balanced, more in my zone of resilience, in a safety, in a more calm, stress-free because trauma can put us up, stress, anxiety, can put us up into this zone of hyper arousal and the idea with our nervous system if you have a healthy nervous system is to move through each of these Cause. Sometimes we need to be like we have a test or we have something really important that we have to spend extra time on and we need to like be a little bit more hyper and elevated and aware and alert. But we need to be able to teach our body to get back into the zone, back into safety, and not get stuck there and so many of us get stuck.
Speaker 1:
The next zone I wanna talk about is hypo, which is your dorsal, vagal part of your nervous system, and when you're in this you feel dysregulated, like just kind of a warning, it feels uncomfortable and it's kind of like maybe depression is a good. So anxiety if you have a lot of anxiety, you're really in hyper and depression is more in hypo and people there's a lot of diagnosis out there with people that have depression and anxiety Think of how exhausting that is have a lot of compassion for those people. But I believe that if you can learn the tools that your particular nervous system needs to be able to create safety in your life, you don't have to get stuck in those zones and you can actually help yourself, of course, through medication, through therapy, through coaching, but you can help yourself. So you're not in heightened anxiety all the time or heightened depression all the time, and it is a protection. It is there when you go into hypo arousal. It's there to protect you and you were kind of frozen and I felt frozen for a lot of my life and I didn't understand why.
Speaker 1:
And it's so interesting because, like a while back, my former husband and I did this podcast together and there's an episode called School Bus Audubon and this concept was told to us by a therapist who now I realize, probably wasn't the greatest therapist and honestly, back 20 years ago people weren't studying the nervous system. So that's why you always have to learn new things. Now we understand trauma more, we understand the nervous system more, so I'm grateful for that because I have more contacts. But it was almost like what is wrong with you, jennifer, because you're the school bus and I'm driving this fast car in the Audubon keep up Right. But basically that showed that my former husband he lived in hyper arousal. He was in the fight flight and I was in the freeze in the school bus and I viewed it as a weakness, that something was wrong with me, that what was I doing? Why was I in there? Now I understand. I was frozen because my husband was cheating on me. I was getting lied to. I felt totally vulnerable, helpless. I had created myself in the scenario as a victim. I did not understand that. Now I understand it and feel very empowered now that, oh, that makes so much sense, like I have a lot of compassion for that woman 20 years ago that I didn't have back then. So when you recognize these things that you're like, oh, no wonder I felt like I was drowning, maybe you can figure out okay, why was I feeling that way and have a lot of compassion for why and forgive that version of yourself because you didn't know what you didn't know.
Speaker 1:
So when you're in hypo or the freeze part of your nervous system, you feel stuck, collapsed, but you're hiding, you're kind of protecting yourself like an emotion would be. You feel depressed, paralyzed, drained, exhausted, heavy, like you can't move, you have no voice. Emotions might be this is impossible. Hopeless, shame, hate, not enough. Depressed, silenced, some thoughts you might have. I'm never going to get out of this. I'm a victim. I can't believe I let this happen. Why won't anyone help me? Is this what life is supposed to be? I got myself here. Why can I get myself out? So really pay attention to your thoughts.
Speaker 1:
If you notice yourself going into hypo, arousal, the dorsal, vagal part of your nervous system, the freeze part of your nervous system, if you feel yourself kind of in a depressed state and kind of just acknowledging it, becoming aware of it and understanding it, is your ticket to freedom, your ticket to figure out. You don't have to stay there. There are tools that you can do. A lot of people they aren't eating or they're just mindlessly eating, not even paying attention, and they're not even enjoying it. So just eating like a whole box of donuts and not even realizing they ate the whole box.
Speaker 1:
Also, with sleep they're having a harder time sleeping, going back to bed, constantly tired, never rested. They might take medication to sleep, watch social media, tv. They're unmotivated at work. They're not present, disconnected, they're not talking to God they might have a messy house, distant with their kids, emotionally unavailable, pretend everything is okay, superficial. So, if you notice this about yourself, either of these that I talked about hyper, which is the fight or flight, or hypo, which is freeze just have a lot of compassion. Just become aware of it and figure out okay, what do I need to do to get me into safety? What do I need to do to get me into my zone of resilience? Maybe I need to go on a walk, maybe I need to call a friend.
Speaker 1:
There's a myriad of things that I talked about last week that you could do, and also, I think, having a lot of compassion if you notice this in your kids or your spouse and, instead of making it mean something about them understanding, like, oh, okay, because this makes a lot of sense when you're like, of course they're like that. Or if you notice finding ways how to help them or how to just support them and I've really been focusing on this like not making your children wrong about having anxiety, just like okay, yeah, today we're having anxiety, and just letting it be, letting them feel whatever emotion they need to feel I think is so important and empowering for them, and then they don't feel like, oh, something's wrong with me. And teaching by example. I think, as a parent, it is our responsibility, our duty, to understand our nervous system and get ourselves healthy so that we can lead by example with our kids, because they're watching us, they're looking at us. They might not want us to tell them what to do, but we can show them what to do and I just have seen this.
Speaker 1:
As I've learned about my nervous system, I've been able to drop a lot of judgment and thoughts about myself that what was wrong with me and nothing was wrong with me my nervous system was actually protecting me for years and years of emotional abuse, a betrayal of hard things that were going in my life, a lot of trauma that I was experiencing that I didn't even know, and unfortunately, the therapist at the time that I hired to help me almost reinforced what I was feeling in a negative way and that was unhelpful. But they didn't know that I can't hold them because all this research has really been going on more recently in the past like 10 years and so the more we know, the smarter we can become, and knowledge is power and that's very helpful. So every person has a different, unique nervous system. You've got to figure out. What is your nervous system doing? Where is your go-to? What is your second home?
Speaker 1:
Do you normally find yourself in fight or flight or do you find yourself in freeze and do you get stuck there? Are you able to easily get yourself out? What is your pattern? Because it is healthy to go into all of it, because we sometimes have to really like take a chill if we're sick or something, and we need to be kind of more in a depressed stage of life. That's normal when someone dies, like you don't wanna be happy, you wanna be sad, and that's okay, but the problem comes when we get stuck in the sad.
Speaker 1:
So if you wanna learn more about your nervous system or anything else, I'd love to help you. Please reach out and email me, follow me on Instagram and I'd love to hear from you. I'm gonna leave the episodes that I referenced in this podcast from the nervous system, as well as the school zone Audubon, in the show notes, so if you wanna listen to those, you can. Anyways, thanks so much for listening and have an amazing day If you want to learn how to live happily, even after sign up for my email at hello at lifecoachjenn with onencom. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at happily even after coach. Let's work together to create your happily even after.