Understanding Activation– Anxiety & Your Fight/Flight Response (Part 2)

In this episode we explore the activated nervous system state—better known as fight-or-flight. If you’ve ever felt anxious, tightly wound, or like your body just can’t stop, this one’s for you. We explore why your system gets stuck in this high-alert state and, most importantly, provide a practical toolkit to help you work with your nervous system, not against it. Learn why "just calm down" doesn't work and what to do instead to find real regulation.

*This episode serves as Part 2 in our "Different States Series"

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What activation actually is and how it shows up in the body
• The difference between fight and flight energy
• Why your system gets stuck in this state
• What anxiety is trying to tell you through a parts work lens
• The most effective in-the-moment tools to help discharge activation
• What doesn’t work (and why forcing calm can backfire)
• The deeper work required to shift out of chronic activation for good

3 Takeaways:

1. Your anxiety isn’t random.  It’s your body saying: “Something doesn’t feel safe.” Instead of asking "How do I stop this?" ask "What is my body trying to tell me?"
2. Different states need different support. An activated body needs to move and discharge energy. Trying to force stillness often backfires. The goal isn't to just calm down; it's to help your body complete the stress response.
3. Reactive tools are scaffolding for deeper work. In-the-moment tools are crucial for managing activation, but the long-term goal is to create a life your nervous system doesn't feel the need to constantly escape from by addressing the root causes.

Categories of Tools for Activation mentioned in this episode:

• Movement – march in place, shake out your limbs, push against a wall, stomp, dance, go for a walk
• Breath (but not deep breathing) – try a physiological sigh (two inhales, one slow exhale), or blow air like you're cooling soup
• Vision resets – slowly scan your environment, do lateral eye movements, shift focus from near to far
• Sensory grounding – cold water, textured objects, strong scents like peppermint or citrus
• Patterned action – folding laundry, swaying, rocking, tapping rhythms
• Voice and sound – humming, shushing, singing, or whispering soothing phrases like “I’m okay, I’m not in danger, I’m safe enough right now.”
• Parts Work: bring in the parts work perspective

The goal of these tools isn't to shut down the activation—it is to help complete it. They use up the energy your body has mobilized. And they begin to signal: “We’re okay now.”

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Transcript

Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Amanda, 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  
Hey, welcome back. This is episode two in our series on why different nervous system states need different tools. So if you missed last week, really just set some general context for this conversation around why certain tools that work when you're feeling anxious might not work when you're feeling more exhausted or shut down, why tools might work for one person but not the other. And it set a greater context for our healing journey, and how the goal is not to just use 10 tools every day for the rest of our life, but that these tools are really helpful. I use the analogy around scaffolding for building a house. These tools can be the scaffolding that allow us to do the deeper work to build our healing home. And as part two, we are diving into our first of the four states that we are going to explore in detail in this series, activation, followed in the next three episodes by the state of freeze, shutdown and regulation. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:23  
So with today's deep dive into activation, this is that fired up, can't sit still racing thoughts, kind of state that so many of us know all too well and often label as anxiety. So the feeling where your chest gets tight, your body feels like it's bracing for something that honestly probably won't ever come there's a voice in your head that's like, oh, we can't stop we have to keep going. There's more to do, go, go, go, go, go. And those messages are coming from your sympathetic nervous system. This is your fight or flight response. If you are familiar with the nervous system ladder that I've talked about frequently on the podcast, this is your yellow zone, yellow zone of activation. And today, we are going to unpack what it is why we get stuck in the state and how to support yourself when you find yourself there in ways that actually work with the unique physiology and psychology of this state. We're also going to spend a little bit of time exploring the state through a parts work lens. So if you're familiar with parts work, or ifs internal family systems, that is an element that's going to come into each of these state specific episodes as well. Because oftentimes when we are activated, it is because there is a part of us that has specific needs, usually based on our past lived experiences and understanding. This can bring a lot of compassion and a lot of guidance and really completely change how we relate to activation or anxiety in certain circumstances. 

Amanda Armstrong  3:10  
So let's begin with what activation actually is. This state is governed, like I said, by your sympathetic nervous system. So its job is to keep you safe by preparing you to do something to mobilize. This is a mobilized state to either fight or flee, to defend, to protect, to escape, to move in a way that either avoids or confronts whatever it deems as stressful or threatening. So again, in the wild, this is going to help you avoid an oncoming threat. Think running from a predator, yelling to protect your child, swerving to avoid an accident. But in modern life, the same state can get triggered by an email, family tension, constant demands of parenting, past trauma, financial strain, over stimulation, the news, or even just having a life that is too full too often or for too long. The problem is not the state itself. The problem is not activation. Activation is really, really helpful when we need it. The problem is when we get stuck in it, when this becomes your default state, when this yellow zone becomes the lens in which you are living your life through. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:38  
Now let's talk about what is actually happening for you physiologically in your body when you are in this state. So when your sympathetic nervous system comes online, your body is quite literally preparing for action, and it shifts and changes in order to do so. So when we are in this state, our. Heart Rate typically increases to pump more blood to your muscles so that again, you can fight or flee. Your breathing becomes more shallow and rapid to get more oxygen into your system. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol flood your bloodstream to give you energy, but also focus your eyes. Change your vision. Your visual system changes so your pupils dilate, so that you can see potential threats more clearly. You become very tunnel visioned. Your eyes tend to Dart quite quickly, scanning the area, 111111, there, there, there, there, there, there is there a threat. Your Digestive System shifts, prioritizing immediate survival systems versus more long term functions like digestion, your muscles get tense again, ready to fight or run, and even your hearing can become more acute. And this is an incredibly intelligent response. This response is why the human race still exists today, and if there was actually a tiger chasing you, this would be exactly what you would want your body to do. The challenge is that your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real tiger and a high pressure work deadline or a difficult conversation with your partner, or even just the overwhelm of modern life. What is really helpful to know is that your body's stress response is generic when your body has gone into this physiological stress cycle. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:38  
So what this looks like is, theoretically, you're starting in a regulated state. There is a perceived stressor or threat. This initiates a protective response, one that your nervous system, based on evolution and biology and past lived experience, decides is the best state to meet the threat, it's detected, so that could be activation, could be more of a freeze, even a shutdown response. And then, as a result of that protective response, that stressor, that threat, is either handled or we waited out long enough for it to pass, our system has time to recalibrate to safety, and it resets into regulation, and it goes through this automatically and generically. It can't tell the difference between a tiger and an internal trigger based on your past lived experience or a high pressure work deadline, and so understanding the stress response and what it needs to recalibrate and reset, depending on the protective response that you find yourself in, is what this whole series is about. And what research has made it quite clear, is that our nervous system responds to psychological threats the same way it responds to physical ones with the same generic stress response cycle within our body. And there are a lot of elements of this automatic response that we can't control. You cannot consciously choose to lower your blood pressure or turn your digestion back on or tell your heart to beat slower, but there are certain body systems that you do have some conscious control over, things like your visual system, auditory, touch or breath, and a lot of times, those systems have a ripple effect into the systems that you can't control. For example, your heart rate and your respiration rate always mirror each other. So if you slow down your breath rate, you will, by default, also begin to slow down your heart rate. 

Amanda Armstrong  8:48  
And I share all of this with you in detail, because when you understand the physiology of a particular state, or just your physiology and how it works in general, it starts to make sense why certain tools are a better fit for a particular state that you find yourself in. Today we're specifically talking about activation, and so knowing that your pupils automatically dilate, you become tunnel visioned, and your eyes become a little bit more dirty, moving quickly from one thing to the next helps give you the context for why something like visual orienting, slowly scanning your surroundings, color spotting or activating your peripheral vision might help send immediate and direct cues of Safety, or knowing that in this state your breath becomes short and shallow helps you understand why one breath practice might work to settle you in this state while another one might not. 

Amanda Armstrong  9:51  
So we just talked about some of the physiology for this state. There are also common ways that activation shows up for us. Uh, psychologically or emotionally. And this often looks like racing thoughts that kind of jump from one worry to the next, this feeling of urgency. Everything is an emergency. Everything is important. We've got to go, we've got to handle it. We've got to get it done. Or I can only rest if or when I get a B, C, D done. There is oftentimes a sense of irritability. You might find yourself snapping at people or getting frustrated over small things. There's a sense of being on edge, hyper vigilant, constantly scanning for problems. Anger often lives here. You might notice that you are talking faster, moving faster, feel like you can't sit still, kind of that bouncing Leg Syndrome or shifting your weight from side to side, feeling really fidgety. Sleep often gets disrupted here because your system doesn't feel safe enough to truly rest again. Stress response is generic. When you're laying in bed feeling stressed about work, your evolutionary, ancient system is like, there's obviously, there's definitely a tiger in the closet. Why on earth would your system let you fall asleep, let alone get deep rest when it's it's convinced there's a tiger just waiting to eat you in the closet. And so understanding some of this now puts into context why there's this ripple effect based on a nervous system state to a variety of different things we might be struggling with, or symptoms we might be experiencing. This is also oftentimes where we experience a lot of digestive issues, things like IBS, increased food sensitivities. We can have a lot of mineral or vitamin deficiencies here because our digestion is suboptimal, so we're not taking the time to pull all of the nutrients from our food. And so there's a lot going on with this state. Again, it's an incredibly mobilized state. There is this underlying feeling, if we slow down, something bad is going to happen. 

Amanda Armstrong  12:00  
And if we want to split hairs and get a little more into the detail within this sympathetic activation, there are two main flavors of experience, right? We call this your fight and flight state. Both are activation, but they can feel very different. And so as I talk about these, I want to invite you to see if there is one that feels maybe a little bit more familiar to how you most often experience activation, starting with the fight response, which tends to show up as anger, irritability, defensiveness or A confrontational energy. So when we are in the fight, flavor of activation, you might feel like you want to argue, defend yourself, push back against something. So the fight response is where you move towards a stressor. There's often tension in your jaw, your shoulders, your hands, you might feel hot or flushed. We are mobilizing to face the threat or the stressor head on. 

Amanda Armstrong  13:02  
And then there is the flight version of this activation response, which shows up more like anxiety, panic and urge to escape. It can also show up as perfectionism, people pleasing, overthinking, avoidance and inability to sit still or focus. I sometimes get questions about like the perfectionism or people pleasing. Why is that fall in the flight response? It falls there because we are engaging in perfectionistic or people pleasing as a way of avoiding conflict. There is another survival response called your Fawn response that overlaps a lot here as well, but energetically in our system, we often feel kind of jittery, restless. You might feel like you want to jump or crawl out of your skin. Have thoughts about just escaping, avoiding the situation in any way possible, both of these fight and flight, same physiology, mobilization just different directions, mobilization either towards a perceived threat or away from it. And so this is where understanding your unique nervous system patterns really matters, because some of us lean really heavily into flight, trying to avoid and get away, while others of us go straight into fight, and many of us, most of us, flip between the two, oftentimes in different areas of our life, where we have different past experiences associated with them, different anchors of safety associated with them. Oftentimes, we will turn to a different pattern when we are working within a relationship context or as a parent versus in the workplace. 

Amanda Armstrong  14:53  
But either way, what you need to know is that your system is trying to protect you, which leads us to the. Internal landscape of this state. And the key insight here is that when you are activated, your body is flooded with energy. Your system is saying something doesn't feel safe. I need to act. And this is where most traditional approaches to anxiety get it wrong. We are often told, calm down, just relax, or we attempt to verbally process it, but when your body is flooded with stress hormones and mobilized energy, trying to logically process or force calm can actually backfire. It's like trying to slam on the brakes. When your car is going 60 miles an hour, you are more likely to skid than to safely slow down. And when we are really activated, it can be helpful to know that your prefrontal cortex, the logical part of your brain, actually goes offline. So our brain has a very specific information feeding pattern. 

Amanda Armstrong  15:58  
So think about your brain for a second as having three main regions at the bottom, at the base of your skull. Think about that as your survival brain. That's your brain stem. Then in the middle of our brain we have our limbic system. This is your emotional brain. And then in the front, forward of our brain we have our logical brain. And information comes into our system. It goes through our survival brain, into our emotional brain, into our logical brain. And so if the information is deemed not a life threat, great, it safely passes through our survival brain, then it goes into our emotional brain. And if it is not deemed an emotional overwhelming threat, there, then it can go to our logical brain. When we are in really activated states, that information typically gets stuck somewhere between our emotional or survival brain. So in an activated state, trying to sit down and have a rational conversation or to rationally think through while your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol is probably going to be one of the least productive things that you can do unless you are sitting down with somebody who is regulated and you can help. They can help to co regulate with you. So instead, what typically works best when in this state is not trying to force calm or to rationalize it, but to help your body complete the response it's trying to have to help it metabolize and discharge this activated stress response, to meet it where it is and then slowly walk it towards more regulation. This is something that I have often referred to as tool layering. 

Amanda Armstrong  17:34  
Now, before we go further, I want you to consider a new question. Instead of asking, How do I get rid of this feeling? How do I make this stop? What if you asked, What is my activation, trying to tell me, and from this lens, your anxiety is now information, your system might be saying, We're doing too much, too fast. We're beyond our capacity. There's unresolved survival energy here from the past that needs our attention this situation or relationship or environment doesn't feel safe or it feels familiar to a time in our past when we weren't safe or accepted, or maybe it's saying I need support and compassion, not more pressure to perform. And when we start to listen to these underlying messages of activation. Everything can change. It can start to point us towards some of that deeper work. 

Amanda Armstrong  18:29  
So let's talk about why we get stuck in chronic activation, in anxiety. Why does your nervous system keep firing the alarm? And here is the short list, and then I'll go into more detail. You likely get stuck in activation for one of four reasons, or some combination of some of the four, or all of the four. Number one is that your current life is too full, too many things to do, mental load stimuli you are in an adrenaline induced state, because that's the only way to keep going and going and going and going. So maybe it's that you're in a job that feels unsafe, a relationship that's stressful, you're dealing with financial pressure. Maybe you're trying to parent and manage work while you're going through life transitions, your nervous system might be responding actually accurately to real stressors in your current environment. The second reason might be that there is some unknown internal stressor that's sounding the alarm. This could be blood sugar spikes and drops, inflammation, hormonal balance being undernourished. The third reason is that something in your current reality feels familiar to your system, to something in your past that was unsafe or overwhelming. And a fourth thing that can contribute to chronic activation is that you are still burdened by and. Living out past trauma or stress cycles that were never settled, completed or processed. 

Amanda Armstrong  20:06  
And I want to point out that activation or anxiety in response to any of these things is not a disorder. It is a natural, physiological and psychological response to your current life or past lived experiences, and one of the most powerful and tangible things that we do with each of our one on one clients is to help them determine their unique contributing factors to their internal alarm system constantly firing. Is it because their life is too full? We do comprehensive blood work with all of our one on one clients to see if there are any underlying physiological things like inflammation or hormonal imbalance, we help them identify if their current reality is triggering something from their past, how much of their past they're still carrying burdened within their internal system. 

Amanda Armstrong  20:52  
And this is where I want to sidebar for just a moment and talk about activation through an ifs or a parts work lens, because through this lens, activation is often driven by something we call our protector parts. So the overarching concept is that when we have had overwhelming lived experiences, we have developed these protective strategies, these protective parts, kind of within our internal psyche that help us to manage life. So you might have a perfectionist part that believes, if I just get everything right, then I'll finally be safe or accepted. You might have a hyper vigilant part that says, If I let my guard down, something bad will happen. You might have a fixer or a helper part that feels responsible for everybody else's emotions, or a controlling part that clamps down to try to manage all of the chaos. These parts are not irrational. They learned to do these jobs because at some point they needed to at some point, these strategies worked to help you feel safer, get your needs met. Maybe there was chaos in your childhood, and staying busy helped you to feel less helpless. Maybe your emotions weren't welcome in your home, and so this flight, part of you learned to stay ahead of them, to avoid them, to run away from them. Maybe your anger was your only power, so your fight part stepped up to defend you, and now in adulthood, those same parts are often running the show. They are still trying to protect you, even though circumstances have changed because maybe they haven't had a way to release or process that survival energy or these survival stories that keep them stuck. So if you have experienced trauma, chronic stress, or even just grew up in environments that did not consistently feel safe, or at least safe more often than unsafe, your nervous system learned to stay alert. It developed a lower threshold for perceiving threat, because at some point that hypervigilance was what kept you safe, and it's not your fault. It doesn't mean you're broken. It just means that your nervous system calibrated in a different environment. It means that your nervous system is actually really, really good at its job. It just learned to do that job in an environment where constant activation and alertness was necessary. 

Amanda Armstrong  23:28  
Again, coming back to this point when we start to listen to activation as information, rather than just seeing it as a problem to fix, things start to change in real ways. Instead of asking, How do I stop this? We can start asking, what is my body or what are my parts trying to tell me? And that question alone can bring regulation, because it shifts you from fighting against your nervous system to listening to to working with it. 

Amanda Armstrong  23:53  
But what I do want to share with you now are practical tools. Are these tangible things that work with the current mechanisms happening in your psychology and your physiology within this state when your body is flooded with energy and it's mobilized. The key here is not to shut this down or force calm, but these are particular tools that can help your body, hopefully complete or de intensify these responses by adding in different signals of safety, and this feels like the perfect time to segue into talking about practical tools that you can use when in this activated state. So remember, sometimes the worst thing someone can say is just calm down. It rarely, if ever, works, because your body is flooded with mobilized energy. What we are looking to do with these tools is to complete that stress response, first to meet your system where it is, and then slowly give it different cues of safety, different physiological levers we can pull to. Help you resource and regulate when you're here. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:02  
So here are some tools that tend to work best when you find yourself in an activated state. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:09  
Category number one movement as a form of discharging. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:14  
So this could look like you march in place, you shake out your limbs, you push against a wall, you dance if you are somewhere where you can't move freely, maybe you try to push your palms against each other, especially if you're finding yourself in more of like a fight response, pushing your palms together firmly with an inhale, exhale, release or inhale, clench your fists. Exhale, release. And this works, because the key here is that motion helps to complete the stress cycle that your body is trying to run in nature. After you run from that tiger, you would shake and discharge that energy naturally. So we're just helping our system to do what it wants to do which Hey, we gotta go. We gotta go. We gotta go towards. We gotta go away. I'm gonna let you go. I'm gonna meet you in mobilization. I'm going to meet you in movement, and then maybe I'm also going to layer in some breath work, ideally, breath work focused on an exhale. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:12  
So breathing techniques for activation are often different than just general relaxation breathing, because remember, when you are activated, trying to take a slow, deep breath can sometimes make you feel more anxious because it fights against what your system is trying to do. So some breath practices, especially in higher states of anxiety or activation, that work really well for our clients, is something called a physiological sigh, that's two inhales through your nose followed by a long exhale through your mouth. I have a lot of guided practices for these exercises inside our coaching programs, but it's in in out. You can also try blowing air like you're trying to cool soup with those pursed lips, or like you're blowing through a straw that can activate your vagus nerve in a really gentle way. So the key with some early breath practices in the state is to focus on elongating your exhales rather than trying to take a deep breath in All right. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:17  
Next category of tools uses our visual or our sensory system. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:23  
We've talked a little bit already about your visual system, how it becomes narrow and focused because you're scanning for threats. So we can help to reset this by continuing to scan our environment but slower, allowing your eyes to just gently, slowly shift from one object to the next. Maybe you do lateral eye stretches, where you look as far as you can to the right, hold for 20 to 60 seconds and look as far as you can to the left. One of my personal favorites is just to wiggle my fingers on the side of my head, because motion helps to activate our peripheral vision, so that can pull us out of that tunnel vision. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:01  
Then for some sensory grounding, you can try cold water on your wrists, splashing it on your face again, pushing your palms together, engaging with different textures, maybe grab an ice cube, feel a soft blanket. Your senses send real time signals to your regulation center. Hey, we're here. We have time to notice the sensory experience. It helps to ground you more into the present moment. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:29  
Something else you can use when you find yourself in an activated state is voice and sound so humming, singing, making a really low like i Ooh, your voice is directly connected to your vagus nerve, and so when we can stimulate and activate our vagus nerve, it helps to turn on our body's relaxation response. You can also try using voice to talk to yourself, hey, I'm safe. There's no real tiger talking to yourself like you would, maybe a child or a friend you really care about. 

Amanda Armstrong  29:07  
So instead the self talk being, why am I so anxious? Why can't I control this is so hard right now. It's Hey, I notice I'm activated. My body's responding a certain way. Maybe I know why, maybe I don't, but it's got a reason. How do I regulate? How do I resource here? 

Amanda Armstrong  29:25  
Another really, really helpful tool to have in your toolbox is CO regulation. We are not always meant to nor capable of regulating on our own. So if you notice, you're activated, is there a safe person available? Because simply being in their calm presence, hearing their calm voice, receiving hug, whatever it is, can be a really powerful tool. This can also work with pets. Pets are really great co regulators. So why it works is because our nervous systems are. Designed to sync up with each other's so a regulated nervous system of someone or a pet can bring your own system back closer to a state of safety.

Amanda Armstrong  30:11  
and then, from a parts work perspective, when you're activated or in reflection, to a time where you felt activated or anxious? Can you try getting curious about which part of you is activated and what it needs? So maybe there is an anxious part that's trying to keep you safe by staying alert. So you might be able to turn to that part within this parts worker, ifs model within each and every one of us is a core, regulated, authentic self, and oftentimes, when doing this work, some of the first steps is just, how can I source for that sense of self, that calm, regulated self, so that I can bring that part of me in conversation with these other wounded, burdened or protective parts of me. And so maybe in this context, you are able to say to that anxious part, Hey, I see you, and I appreciate how hard you're working to protect me. What do you need right now? Or maybe there's that part of you that was afraid to slow down because it believed something bad would happen. Can you turn to that part in acknowledgement and say, I understand why you learned to stay busy. That made sense then. But right now, we're safe enough to rest. Or right now, would you consider kind of stepping back and allow us to try resting and see what happens? If there's a part of you carrying old fears or trauma, you might offer that scary thing, that scary thing, it happened. It already happened. We survived right now in this moment, we're okay. The key is approaching these parts with curiosity, with compassion, with attempts to collaborate with them, to shift tactics or strategies or response patterns, instead of trying to shut them down or push them away. 

Amanda Armstrong  32:01  
And hopefully, with all of this detail and explanation, you're starting to understand why some traditional approaches might not have worked for you. Why, if you're somebody who struggles with anxiety, traditional sit, still, be still meditations might not work or might not feel possible for you, why trying to take a deep, spacious breath when you're anxious might not work for you. Your body in this state is saying, move, move, move. And so often life puts us in a place where we need to stay still and be put or maybe you now understand why trying to think your way out of activation rarely works, because it is primarily a physiological state, not a mental one. And I want you to remember that these are what I've offered you. Here is reactive tools, and I'm going to put just a snapshot list in the show notes of you know, vision, movement, discharge, breath, to remind you about some of the practices I went into more detail here. But these are for moments when you are already activated, when you need support in the moment. And the ultimate goal is not to need these every day for forever, but to have them available to you while you do some of the deeper work to get to a place where you don't need them every day. If activation is your baseline state, the proactive or the deeper work is about creating a life your nervous system doesn't feel the need to escape from, doesn't feel the need to fight. This can happen through lifestyle factors. Maybe it is changing habits so that you're more resourced, sleep, movement, nutrition, environmental shifts so you're less overstimulated. This could look like setting better boundaries, more consistent routines, adjusting caffeine or media intake. The deeper work often involves exploring those parts of you that we talked about, understanding what they learned, what they're trying to protect you from, and helping them to know that you're safer now in ways that you might not have been before. You're more resourced now than you might have or have not been before. It can look like therapy, somatic work, other healing modalities to help you process old experiences and new patterns and ways of responding. It also just might mean making your life less busy, so you don't actually need to live in this adrenaline and cortisol induced state to just get through your day. We do not shift out of chronic activation by learning to relax. That might be part of it, but that's not all of it. We shift out of chronic activation by creating a life our nervous system doesn't need to fight or flee from and that takes time. It takes support. It oftentimes takes a lot of unlearning, and this multifaceted approach is what I think makes our work at regulated living. Be with our clients so impactful, we help them to take an honest look at their daily circumstances, their parts. We look at their blood work to help them create a personalized, full picture and strategic approach to their healing. 

Amanda Armstrong  35:15  
So as we wrap up, let's review three takeaways from this episode. 

Amanda Armstrong  35:19  
Number one, your anxiety is not random. It is your body saying something doesn't feel safe. And so my invitation for you this week is, instead of asking, How do I stop this? Can we bring some curiosity and say, What is my body trying to tell me? 

Amanda Armstrong  35:34  
Number two, different states need different supports when your body is flooded with fight or flight energy trying to force calm often backfires. Instead, the goal is to help your body complete this response, meet the activation where it is. Maybe that's some movement, maybe some discharging, then layer in some visual orienting, some breath work, gathering these felt experiential cues of safety regulation is not about overriding your body. It is about working with these responses. 

Amanda Armstrong  36:09  
And number three, reactive tools are the scaffolding for deeper work. What is the deeper work that might be necessary for you to get out of a chronic state of activation. All right, that is it for today. Next week, we're going to dive into the freeze response, and that that is a tricky in between state where we feel so activated and so stuck at the same time. But until that conversation, I am sending so much hope and healing your way. 

Amanda Armstrong  36:43  
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.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai