Pause: Regulating Your Nervous System: A Guided Reset [Pause 56]

Welcome to this Pause episode of I Thought I Was Over This, where we focus on the practice of getting regulated through being present and using the five senses. In this episode, Dr. Kimber warmly welcomes you into a world of mental fitness and nervous system regulation, setting the stage for the peaceful journey ahead.

5 Keys You Will Learn:

1. The importance of grounding yourself in unfamiliar circumstances
2. Techniques to settle and calm your nervous system
3. How to use sensory awareness to create a sense of safety
4. Physical movements to help you find balance and calm
5. The power of breath and vocalization in soothing your mind and body

So settle in, take a deep breath, and join me as we journey towards feeling settled instead of overwhelmed. 

Check out past episodes and more information here: https://www.drkimber.net/podcast-info

Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.

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Fierce Gentle Community: https://www.drkimber.net/fierce-gentle

Book: Still: Making A Whole When Parts Go Missing

Transcript

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Welcome to I Thought I Was Over This Pause. I'm Dr. Kimber and I am here to help you regulate your nervous system. Whether you find yourself in a place with lots of excitement, travel, joy, or Or you find yourself in a place that you are navigating devastating loss or a transition that maybe you didn't ask for, or even a transition that you do welcome. All of these things are unfamiliar to our nervous system and our nervous system feels really regulated and uncomfortable. kind of stress-free when we are entering into circumstances that are familiar to us, when we are entering into things that are predictable. And when we find ourselves, say, starting a new job or entering a new relationship, these are things that cause us to have some stress responses We can get into fight or flight. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad thing. Dr. Dan Siegel will say if you are living a thriving life and expanding, growing, all of those things, you're going to have stress. That's part of it. And that is why I have created these episodes and Because we need mental fitness. We need the ability to navigate when we are going through new seasons. We need to be able to know how to ground ourselves. Even this week, I have an aura ring and it's like, you are not sleeping well. And my daughter is visiting from out of town spontaneously. And it's all good. I'm so excited. But for my nervous system, it has a hard time. It has a hard time falling asleep. So I find myself implementing these practices of the deep breathing and that helps my system settle. So let's get started. I invite you to find a comfortable position. So as you settle, I want to invite you to notice all of the points of contact that you have with whatever you're sitting or standing or lying on. In the seated position, notice your sits bones. Notice the contact. anywhere else on your body that is making contact with a surface. In this way, we're just trying to settle our body in just at the microcosm level. When we aren't conscious of it, our body is alert. And when we notice the weight of our body, It helps our system know, oh, we're here to stay. We're not getting ready to do the next thing. That causes me to be just a little bit ready for that. So every time you draw attention to the weight of It allows you to remind yourself, be here, be here. You can imagine string pulling your spine all the way up to the heavens and all the way down to the earth. I invite you to play with your chin position. Even if you're laying down, do this as well because see if there is a Goldilocks just right where your neck feels completely supported and your head is directly above your head. your neck, which is above all your spinal cord. I invite you to soften your forehead, soften your jaw, and take the tongue off the roof of our mouth. I invite you to lightly Put it behind your top teeth. And in this exercise, we're just reminding our jaw, which is a place we hold a lot of emotions, just to relax. It's quite natural to put our tongue up against the roof of our mouth. But when we're pausing, we just soften it. And I invite you to soften your hands. Just another place we hold tension and wiggle your toes. And if you're physically able to, I invite you in this moment to softly massage your jaw. As I just mentioned, this is a place we hold emotions. So if we just softly massage there, can alert that system to let go, relax. And I understand if you hold a lot of tension there, of course, just this mini massage isn't going to permanently release it, but we're offering right now parts of your body support so it can settle in. If you're just coming in from action and activity and rocking feels good, I invite you to rock back and forth and do this slowly and then speed it up and if you are going front to back I just remind you to make sure that you're going beyond center that you're actually going back instead of doing like a half rock where you're only going forward and then back to center. We wanna make it a complete movement. So the degree forward equals the degree back or side to side, the same thing. Try to keep it even in this moment but also not being perfectionistic. Just play with it. And from this place of movement, or if you are still, I invite you to notice the closest sound. And now I invite you to notice the farthest sound. And depending on how you are listening to this, whether with headphones or your ears available to other things, I invite you to notice three other sounds. assuming this recording is picking up some of the birds. And if your eyes are open or closed, I invite you to notice five things. And if they're closed, notice are there any colors behind your eyelids. Are there any shapes, lines? If your eyes are open, notice five things in your space. You can take in color, texture, And let's notice two tastes. What lingering tastes do you have? And two smells. And then let's notice three, points of touch, the temperature of your body, noticing any fabric or textures against your body. And then notice what it's like again to be making contact with a solid surface wherever that is. And then I invite you to use your head and just notice the room going to the left all the way back behind you to the left, moving to the right, and all the way back to the right. And even if you are laying down, I just invite you to, you know, do the movements until your ear hits the floor of each, each ear hitting the floor of your head. And then look up and look down. And see where your safety lands in your body. Of course, your mind knows that you're safe, but our eyes and moving our whole head is part of orientation. And when we orient, it allows us to truly see that we in this moment are safe. Should you ever find yourself feeling unsafe, that's one of the first things you want to do is to look around, because as we get nervous, we actually have tunnel vision and it sends a cue to our body to be more on alert, more ready for fight or flight. And we always actually want to have a pause because the feeling of not feeling safe can be something from a memory We have body sensations that enter and feelings that enter. And if we can find a pause there, we can connect our thinking center with noticing what is this that I'm experiencing and what happens when I look around and look for safety and look for connection, what happens to my system. And so now... If it feels comfortable and your eyes are closed, again, I encourage you to soften your eyes. If your eyes are open, please feel free to have a soft gaze and that you're not needing to pick up all the details. And you can just put your eyes at a 45 degree angle. And let's do a breath, five count in, a five count out. And I'm gonna do that three times with you. And then I'm gonna encourage you to play with your own breath rhythm of what is the rhythm that actually helps you feel that it's not a lot of effort and then it just feels kind of just right. So let's count five. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. Inhale, two, three, four, five. Exhale, two, three, four, five. And now on your own. you to play with it. Don't let your perfectionism wonder if you're doing it right. Now I want to invite you to if it feels okay to put one hand in your heart and play with the where the other hand goes if you want to place two somewhere you can put one on the belly right below your ribs or put one on your forehead you want to experiment with putting a pillow just gently over your forehead. Sometimes that area loves a little pressure. My weighted eye mask can really deepen my relaxation. So you just play around with it. But as you're Hands make contact with other parts of your body. Let's encourage you to notice it. See what it feels like if there's warmth from your hand meeting this other part of your body. And again, soften your hand even while it's there. Soften your jaw. Soften your eyes, your forehead. And another hand movement you can do is you take two fingers, start at the right where your eyebrows meet, if you have a unibrow right in the center, and just take your fingers, two fingers, and move outward and outline your face. You can do both at once, one at a time. It's like you're making a heart shape, but our vagus nerve controls our facial expressions. This is a way to just bring attention to a system in our body that allows us to feel safe and be ready for social engagement. Then I invite you to take your hands to your shoulders and tap. I love to do this one where I cross my right hand is tapping on my left shoulder, my left hand tapping on my right shoulder. And if your mind is racing in this moment, I just invite you to count out loud. If your mind has settled, then please feel free to just enjoy the rhythmic back and forth or count in your mind. But we use counting to capture when our mind is really racing. Our mind needs something to do. Tracking what I'm saying isn't enough to help reorient it and settle it down. So something I learned from Ariel Swartz is this five principles. Check in. And I'm not going to do all five points, but I want to invite you to do a couple of the points. And the one is your mind. If you check in with your mind right now, what do you notice? Is there a theme? Is your mind quieter than when you started? Or is it speeding up? And this isn't a time to evaluate what your mind is doing. It's a time to notice and to name and observe what your mind is doing. I invite you to notice the emotions that feel present, that you're aware of.

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And

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finally, I invite you to notice your energy Are you feeling done for the day? Are you feeling laggy, fatigued? Are you feeling alert, energized? Check in with your whole system. Now I invite you to once again notice your breath. And I'd love to end our time with a voo breath. This is from Dr. Peter Levine. And he calls it a voo breath, part because we make a V breath. with our lips to get the vibration going. And then as we push the air back into our mouth, by dropping our tongue, we make an ooh sound. So as we exhale, we are first capturing the exhale with our lips, by making a V sound, and then we soften our jaw, push the air to the back of our throat so that it makes deep sound. I love the image he uses to describe this, which is we're making the sound of a lighthouse bringing a ship safe into shore. And so it sounds like this. You take a natural inhale and on the exhale. And we'll do two more. Just let that settle. And you can play around with the sounds coming out of your mouth. The voo sound, you can make a sh sound, an ah sound, an oo sound. And really you can play around with those and see what really fits with your nervous system. It could change on any given day, but it can be a lovely way of meeting, say, a racing mind and a dysregulated nervous system and bringing it back into what feels like settled and good enough safety. It's been a blessing to be with you. I wanna remind you, you are a sacred being and you matter. And if you haven't left a review, I would love it. It helps the algorithm and helps people find their way to this type of regulation. And I also want to invite you to sign up for my newsletter, which is called A Moment of Pause. And there I share with you my reflections. And every month I have a suggestion for getting in touch with a certain sense, as well as what to do for fun. And book recommendations, poetry has a little bit of everything there. newsletter at my website drkimber.net. It's been a gift to have you. Until next time.