Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Why We Get Stuck (in Anxiety & Depression): Understanding Nervous System Dysregulation (Part 3: B2B Series)

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 103

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In part 3 of our Back to Basics series, we explore why we get stuck in states of dysregulation and why anxiety and depression persist. Learn how modern living patterns and past experiences shape our nervous system responses, and discover a compassionate approach to understanding your symptoms.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • Why anxiety and depression are normal responses to abnormal circumstances
  • The two main reasons we get stuck in dysregulation
  • How our "parts" develop to protect us but can keep us stuck in old patterns
  • Why your nervous system might favor familiar discomfort over unfamiliar regulation
  • The connection between your current nervous system state, past lived experiences, and current life circumstances

Key Takeaways:

  1. Your Symptoms Make Sense: You're not broken. Your symptoms make perfect sense given your experiences and circumstances.
  2. Lifestyle Matters: Dysregulation happens when we live in biologically unsupportive ways or when our nervous system misinterprets situations based on past patterns.
  3. Perception vs. Reality: Your nervous system might be misinterpreting safety due to past trauma or current high stress. Healing comes from understanding your protective parts and working with them, not against them.

Next Episode Preview: Join me next week as we explore the concept of your "stress bucket" and how to create better balance between stressors and supportive factors in your life.

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Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here now let's dive in. 

Amanda Armstrong  0:27  
Welcome back to part three of our Back to Basics series. So what this series is is we're about 100 ish episodes into this podcast, and I thought we should do a bit of a regroup to go back to the basics of talking about what I mean when I say that we approach anxiety and depression through a nervous system lens. And my ultimate goal with this series, honestly, with this podcast, and really with all of the coaching that we do, is to help you understand that you are not broken, that your anxiety or your depression likely make perfect sense, given your past lived experiences and your current life circumstances, this activation or shutdown of your system is likely a normal response to overwhelming circumstances. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:16  
So quick review in part one of this series, we did a functional introduction to the nervous system, what it is, how it works, and how it relates to anxiety and depression. And then in part two, we talked about the six different nervous system states, their stories, how to start to build some more awareness around which ones you tend to default to. Now today, I want to talk about why we get stuck in states of dysregulation. Why do we get stuck in survival mode, in activation or anxiety? Why we get stuck in states of shutdown or depression? The big questions I want to answer today are, what inhibits our ability to regulate and why do we stay stuck in states of dysregulation. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:02  
So why is regulation so hard, and why and what contributes to us becoming dysregulated in the first place, but then also staying in these states of dysregulation for long, extended periods of time, long enough that we get these diagnoses of anxiety, of depression, long enough for it to impact the way that we feel about ourselves, the way that we show up in the world. And there are two common reasons that I want to unpack in our conversation today. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:29  
Number one is that we are living in a way that's abnormal, and number two is that we are not interpreting things accurately in the moment. So I'm going to elaborate on number one first, this idea that we are stuck in states of dysregulation. What inhibits our ability to regulate is that we are living in a way that is AB normal. We are getting too much or too little of the things that we need. Maybe there are too many stressors happening too quickly in your life. We'll talk a lot about this next week as I unpack something that I call your stress bucket. And these could be physiological stressors, psychological stressors, unprocessed past stress, load that you're still carrying around today. It could be too little sleep, movement or nourishing food, too much social media, environmental clutter or sensory input, a lack of community or safe relationships, the stress load could be coming from unknown health conditions or micronutrient deficiencies or hormone imbalances. So ultimately, what is happening here with this abnormal way of living is that there is an imbalance between things in your life that feel stressful versus things in your life that feel supportive, things in your life that are stressful versus things that are biologically supportive to your nervous system. And when this is the case, your nervous system is actually working. It's working. It's putting you into states of activation or shut down intentionally. But what's happening is that our societal norms or your current life circumstances are stacked against your biology. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:10  
So let me put it this way. I have a plant in my house that I have done a terrible job of caring for, and when it began to wither because it didn't have the optimal nutrients, sunlight, water, etc. It is not because I bought a disordered plant. It is because that is how plants work. When they don't get the things that they need, they wither, they yellow, they die, they they fail to thrive. We have to realize that when the health of a biological system declines for any number of reasons, and your unique contributing reasons are something that we explore with all of our one on one coaching clients. But when. We don't have the things that nurture our nature as human beings. The natural response is anxiety and depression. The natural response is activation or shut down. 

Amanda Armstrong  5:11  
So thing number one that inhibits our ability to regulate, that puts us into survival mode in the first place, and keeps us stuck in dysregulation, is imbalance between stressors and supporters is what I call abnormal living. If we are not living well, we cannot expect to feel well. This activation or shutdown of your system is a natural response to overwhelming and unnatural circumstances. And I spent way too long in my own healing journey without a doctor, a therapist, a psychiatrist, any of the practitioners that I saw asking me basic questions to get a snapshot of what my current circumstances looked like I received way too many diagnoses without ever being asked, how many hours of sleep I was getting a night, if I was eating enough, how supported I felt by others. There was no blood work done at any point in my mental health healing journey, I was labeled disordered for having natural reactions to an unnaturally stressful and depleting life. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:30  
So my invitation for you is to take an honest and really gentle moment to reflect on if this might feel true for you too. Is it possible that your symptoms make sense as a response to past lived experiences, to current life stressors? Is there an imbalance of things that feel stressful versus supportive in your life right now, and maybe, like me, you need to make space for some frustration or even some anger in realizing that you've been labeled with disorders and prescribed multiple medications before ever being asked these questions or being supported and seeing the full picture, what could be at the root of some of your symptoms and my personal experience of receiving this kind of care, or in my opinion, lack of quality care, greatly contributes to why and how we work with clients today in helping them, first to look at their current lifestyle and circumstances, consider past experiences. This is also why we now include comprehensive blood work as part of our approach in our one on one coaching program, so that we can help our clients, number one, see that they're not broken. And number two, this takes a lot of the guesswork out of healing and creates a really tangible and personalized path forward. So consider taking a moment to just bring some awareness, bring some compassionate inventory to how your current habits, your current relationships, your current environments, are either nurturing or depleting, are either stressing or in support of your biology, and this is something that will also expand on a little bit more next week.

Amanda Armstrong  8:35  
Number two, the second common reason why we get stuck in dysregulation, or why, when living with anxiety or depression, we feel like we are broken or we're, quote, like not working right? Is something we hear a lot from our clients when they notice that they're constantly overreacting or under reacting in their daily life, and this is because our nervous system might not be interpreting things accurately in the moment, and this is where we often discover something called our parts, which I'm also going to elaborate on in today's conversation. 

Amanda Armstrong  9:13  
So here is what I mean by this. And this is going to sound repetitive. I've said this a few times already today, but I want to invite you to consider operating through this new paradigm, that the current state of your nervous system, whether you are feeling activated or shut down or regulated, makes perfect sense, is the natural result of your past lived experiences and your current life circumstances. And when we talk next week about assessing your stress bucket, that is essentially what we are looking at, what is the stress load that you carry around day after day as a result of your past lived experiences, and the parts of that, especially that are not you. Integrated or resolved or processed. Those stress cycles, the trauma you've experienced that hasn't been completed or processed. You combine that with your current life circumstances. Current life circumstances are your habits, your environments, your relationships, how many things are on your schedule, the way that your belief systems or patterns that were developed from the past show up in your current life. And when we look at that, all of a sudden, there's this moment that happens for all of our clients where they're like, oh, oh, these symptoms I didn't understand make a lot of sense. Now I understand why I'm moving through the world feeling a little extra sensitive, feeling really shut down, feeling disconnected or feeling anxious. And so it's possible, and I want to invite you to consider that new paradigm, that the current state of your nervous system makes sense based on your past lived experience and your current life circumstances, and as a result of your past lived experiences or your current life circumstances. You may not be interpreting things accurately in the moment. 

Amanda Armstrong  11:10  
And what resonates with clients is when I often say, Have you ever had a moment where you logically knew you were you were good, but you didn't feel good? You logically knew you were safe or fine, but you didn't feel fine. Sometimes, even though our current life might seem fine, it might we might logically understand that we're safe. We can sometimes get stuck, or, like quote off in our brains, interpretation, because either we are massively depleted in the present moment, right? That's current life circumstances that are depleting us or over stressing our system. What you'll come to learn next week is what we call your stress buckets really full, or because our past lived experiences have created some hypersensitivity in our system, and when your nervous system becomes symptomatic or hypersensitive when it gets stuck in states of activation or shut down anxiety or depression. This is not a malfunctioning system. It is a system that has been asked to over function for far too long. 

Amanda Armstrong  12:16  
So I want you to think about it this way. Think about a car alarm. A car alarm serves a really valuable purpose. There's a part in your brain called the amygdala that is kind of like your internal alarm system. So when we come back to thinking about a car alarm, it serves a purpose. It is there to keep the stuff in your car safe. It's there to keep your car safe. But now I want you to imagine a car alarm that is so sensitive that it doesn't just go off when somebody is trying to open the car or bump the car, but instead it goes off every single time somebody just walks by the car. Now we have a system that is getting set off with so many false alarms. This is an annoying system, and it's a system that's probably going to wear out the car battery, and this is what can happen to our internal alarm system as well when we have experienced a history of unpredictable circumstances or hardship. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:23  
Remember those computer files that we talked about in part one? Those flagged computer files are many, and we can become really easily triggered, additionally, when we live a current lifestyle with an ongoing onslaught of stressor after stressor after stressor, especially when we pair unsustainable lifestyle habits with a lack of goodness, connection, play, enjoy. What this creates over time is an over sensitized and hyper vigilant system, a system that doesn't always accurately interpret what is happening in the present moment. What this means is that we are now walking through our world. You're possibly walking through your world with a predisposition to assume that things are more threatening than they might be.

Amanda Armstrong  14:17  
And something to know about our nervous system is that it always predicts more of what it has experienced. Our brain loves patterns. It loves predictability. And so if what it has become familiar with is that there are more danger cues than safety cues, we are going to assume danger first in all of our future situations moving forward, and because the system is primed for survival, it would rather send you 100 false alarms than miss the chance to warn you about what actually is dangerous or threatening. So another thing to know about living with a nervous system that is primed for survival is that it is all. So always going to favor what feels familiar. Even if that familiar state is exhausting or uncomfortable, it is going to default to known and familiar dysregulation over unknown regulation, to familiar dysfunction over unknown goodness. And this is because known states, known situations, even stressful ones, are perceived as safer than stepping into something that is unknown. So for instance, if someone has spent a long time in a heightened state of anxiety or shutdown, their nervous system learns to recognize these states as normal, and they adapt around these states being part of the baseline experience. So what our clients experience a lot of times is that at first, shifting into a state of calm or regulation actually feels unsettling or vulnerable because it's less known, because it's less predictable. And so in essence, your nervous system prioritizes familiarity over comfort, which can make breaking out of chronic stress or dysregulation challenging without conscious practice or support just that context that understanding for our clients that hey, being regulated might not actually feel really good at first, because it's unfamiliar. 

Amanda Armstrong  16:30  
We need to re familiarize our nervous system with states of joy and goodness and safety slowly, over time and with patients. And as it builds familiarity through frequency, through increased duration, it will start to see and prefer that state of regulation. And because I know some of these concepts can be a little tricky to grasp, I want to try to explain this in one other way, in case, it resonates a little bit more with some of you listening. So remember the three primary Nervous System States we have that green zone of regulation, the yellow zone of activation and our red zone of shutdown. We talked a bit in part two about how our state determines our story when you are in the yellow zone. I like to think about this as you wearing yellow tinted glasses. So when you are looking through these yellow lenses, everything around you is going to look more yellow. Is going to look more stressful, a little more activating than it might be. So again, imagine for a moment that you or someone else had an unpredictable childhood. There were a lot of stressors in your life and things that reinforced this protective activation in your system. So maybe you put those yellow glasses on at quite a young age, and for a long time you've been wearing these yellow glasses. Now, if you wear these for long enough, this is just going to become your new normal, you are going to assume that maybe everybody views life through a little bit of a yellow tint, because you don't know any different. Now, I am sitting in my office right now, and the walls are white, but if I were sitting here with yellow tinted glasses on looking around this room, I might logically know that my walls are white, but they don't look white right now. They look yellow. This is representative of misinterpreting a current life circumstance. Right now I am misinterpreting that my walls are yellow, and if I keep wearing these glasses over time, I am going to start. I'm going to forget. I'm going to forget that they're white because our brain does that. It adjusts to our new normal. And I'm going to engage with my walls as if they're yellow. You are going to engage with your world, with your life, within your relationships, as if they are more activating, more dangerous, more threatening than they might actually be. So understanding this through a nervous system lens, even what I logically know to be safe, I might start to perceive as stressful or threatening. That is a hypersensitive nervous system. This is what I mean when I say that one of the reasons we get stuck in dysregulation is because we're not interpreting things accurately in the moment. 

Amanda Armstrong  19:25  
And this can happen for two reasons, either because your current stress load is too high, so you've at least temporarily put on your glasses. This is why sometimes I can respond to my kids whining in a really regulated way, because the stress load on my system is low. I'm wearing green glasses. Other times my kids whining, maybe the same thing, same situation, and I respond with less regulation because I've got yellow glasses on my internal system is activated. 

Amanda Armstrong  19:56  
This can also happen because you're carrying around a lot of power. Patterns of hyper vigilant anxiety or overwhelm, and that's what I want to talk for a few more minutes about, is these past patterns, what I often refer to as parts. So let's talk about your parts, and what I mean by that there is a therapeutic approach called internal family systems, or ifs and elements of this are also sometimes referred to as parts work or inner child work. But the premise is this, we all have different quote parts of our personality, like these little sub personalities that often have their own thoughts, feelings, motivations or opinions that are based on our past experiences. So think for a moment, have you ever been in a situation where part of you wanted to go to that event and part of you didn't, part of you wanted that promotion, part of you didn't, part of you wanted to have this hard conversation with your partner and part of you didn't. That's totally normal and totally human. 

Amanda Armstrong  21:00  
So inside, we have these parts, parts that carry burdens and wounds from the past, and then we have other parts that show up to protect us against being hurt in the same ways, what we call our protective parts. And we have proactive protectors. These are our parts or our patterns that try to keep you in control to prevent painful emotions or experiences. So these might be a perfectionist part, people pleasing, over analyzing, then we have more of these reactive, protective parts that show up when we are experiencing uncomfortable emotions or sensations that try to quickly numb or distract you. Maybe it's an overeating part, a doom scrolling or avoidant part, and a core tenet of this approach is in realizing that there are no bad parts that even these protective or what we might even deem as dysfunctional parts of us, they are actually trying to help you. They were created at various times in your life when you really needed them. But they've become, maybe, you know, quote, dysfunctional now, because these parts of us are stuck in the past, and we don't need them to protect us in the same ways anymore. And a key to healing these parts isn't to push them away or be frustrated with them. It is actually instead, to turn towards them, to get to know them, maybe even to thank them for the ways that they've protected you, and then to lovingly help them see that you don't need that same protection anymore. 

Amanda Armstrong  22:50  
So for example, I have a really hyper productive, overachieving part that works really, really, really hard to keep things under control, to check things off a to do list to prevent any feelings of inadequacy or failure. This part of me carries beliefs like, you just need to keep pushing. There's always more to do. If you slow down, everything will fall apart. You can't rest. There's there's more to do. And I think that this part originated when I was a young teenager, and my mom got really sick. I am the oldest of four siblings, and when she got sick, I truly felt like it was up to me to hold my family together and to keep everything going, or else it would fall apart. And so this part that developed, she helped me feel like I had control over my life when I really needed that. But now, when she takes over, I get super overwhelmed. I take on too much. I feel like I can't ask for help. There's a sense of urgency that's not really real, and this often leads to burnout. And so a big part of my own healing journey has been realizing and recognizing and acknowledging these different parts of me, the ways that they show up, and to be able to notice when they're in the driver's seat of my life. Because when this hyper productive, overachieving part of me is in the driver's seat, I am not accurately interpreting my current world, because it's a young teenager that's decided to dictate what everything in my current life means, instead of my regulated adult self. And so in addition to our parts, our patterns, we all have a wise, authentic and regulated self. And for a long time, I felt really disconnected from that self because my protective parts had been running the show for. Such a long time. And so one of the things that was so integral to my healing journey, and something that we bring into our client work as well, is to help them see these patterns, these parts, and to work with them, to help them find new ways of supporting you in the reality of your current life circumstances. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:22  
So to bring a lot of this together, stress management and understanding our deeper patterns are both essential pieces to regulation and healing. So one more time, the questions I set out to answer with this episode was to bring some clarity to what inhibits our ability to regulate, what gets us into states of dysregulation and keeps us stuck. And we get stuck in dysregulation for two main reasons, living in ways that are biologically abnormal, too many stressors, too little supporters, and because we misinterpret situations due to a hypersensitive nervous system and patterns that are often conditioned by our past experiences. And when working with clients, we operate through the lens that all of their symptoms, all of them makes sense based on their past lived experiences and current life circumstances. And healing is a matter of bringing awareness to those pieces as they are unique to each individual, and then choosing how you want to approach awareness and change through a compassionate lens. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:35  
So bringing everything together into today's three takeaways. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:41  
Number one, your symptoms make sense. Anxiety and depression are often normal responses to overwhelming circumstances, not a sign that you're broken. Your symptoms make sense given your past experiences and current life circumstances. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:56  
Number two, lifestyle matters. How you live directly impacts your nervous system. State, too much stress, too little sleep, poor nutrition, lack of connection, all can contribute to and keep you stuck in dysregulation. Healing means prioritizing biologically supportive habits. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:17  
And number three is this idea of perception versus reality, your nervous system might be misinterpreting safety due to past trauma or current high stress. We all have different quote parts of us that developed to protect us during difficult times, and recognizing these parts of yourself and how they influence your perception and your reaction to things is key to long term healing and regulation. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:47  
All right, friend. Thank you. Thank you for being here and as always, if this way of healing resonates with you, I would love to hop on a completely free discovery call to hear more about your struggle with anxiety and depression, to answer any of your questions about our one on one coaching program, and my promise is that these calls are always pressure free. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:08  
And in case you haven't heard yet, our one on one coaching program is now HSA and FSA eligible, and we have extended payment plan options if that is needed, and you'll always find the link to book that call with me in the show notes. So again, thank you for being here. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:25  
Consider sharing this, or any of these conversations with somebody else you might think needs to hear them, and until next week, I am sending hope and healing your way. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:37  
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

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