From Knowing Different to Living Different (Part 5)

In the final episode of this stress management series, Amanda steps back from frameworks and talks about the gap between understanding what needs to change and actually changing it. She revisits the nervous system ladder as a way to help listeners locate themselves after five episodes of honest reflection, reads from her book Healing Through the Vagus Nerve on the four-phase healing process and her strategic healing philosophy, and closes with a direct look at what personalized, whole-human support actually looks like inside RESTORE.

3 Takeaways:

1. Know the phase or season of healing you’re in and try to match you expectations and support to your actual capacity.
2. Healing has a general sequence. Education & awareness, regulation, rewiring, and resourcing. Jumping ahead of the foundation, trying to do deep rewiring work before your nervous system has the capacity to hold it, is where people get stuck or sometimes get worse.
3. Knowing different is not the same as living different. The gap between understanding what needs to change and actually changing it is real — and it's not a willpower problem. It's a capacity and support problem. Strategic, personalized, whole-human support is what bridges that gap. And if you’re looking for that kind of support, we’re here.

CLICK HERE for the full show notes, resources, and 3 tangible takeaways!

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Looking for more personalized support?

•  1:1 Coaching (RESTORE):  Learn more or book a free discovery call (HSA/FSA eligible & includes comprehensive bloodwork)
•  Regulated Living Membership:  A mental health membership and nervous system healing space (sliding scale pricing available). Join here.
• Order my book: Healing Through the Vagus Nerve

*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Website: https://www.regulatedliving.com/podcast

Email: amanda@regulatedliving.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 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. Hey, welcome back. This is part five, the final episode of our stress management series. And today's going to be a little bit different than the other episodes. Less structured, more of a chat, kind of a collection of things that I've thought about or have come up over the last few weeks together. Let's start though with one final recap of the series. Part one was about understanding stress. So what it actually is, what a healthy stress cycle looks like, why stress is either processed or stored. And we also talked about the two frameworks that anchored everything in the series: the stress bucket and this seesaw. So with the Seesaw, you have your stress bucket on one side and your supporters on the other. And how stress management isn't just about having less stress, but it's about finding the balance in our lives. We can hold more when we're more supported in that holding, in that carrying. Then part two was the assessment. So this was taking an honest inventory of both sides of your Seesaw. So when we're looking at the bucket, how much of that bucket is full of baseline stressors versus daily stressors? Because remember, if you're mostly baseline stressors and some daily, that's going to point you towards a different kind of work than if you are mostly seeing daily stressors in your bucket or the balance. So we talked about that in part two. And then also assessing and looking at your supporter side. The other thing that really stood out to a lot of you in the conversation we had part two was the difference between overflow and triggers. Then we had part three. This was about filtering everything that was in your bucket through a lens of your core values. And then finally, part four last week was about editing. So you looked at your bucket, you found some filters for your bucket. Using those filters, how are we going to change our reality? Change the balance or imbalance between the stressors and supporters. And we talked a lot in that episode about the 3Ds framework as a practical way to change what's in or goes in your bucket. So, really, the entire goal of this series was to help you better understand the unique stress load on your nervous system and the way that in doing so, it helps you lay out your unique roadmap towards healing. One of the number one questions I get asked all of the time is, you know, what are the steps to take to regulate my nervous system? What are the, what's the first thing I should do to heal my anxiety or to really come out of depression? And my answer is always, it depends. I wish I could put together some five-step blueprint or framework, but every single person is unique. And while there are universal human needs, and and we'll talk a few minutes about what I feel is a universally helpful framework or phases of healing, there is ultimately only your roadmap towards healing. And one of the things that we do in our practice and the way that we support clients in a very personalized way inside Restore every single day is helping people get really clear on what their roadmap might look like. Now, before we get into anything else today, I want to revisit the nervous system ladder for a moment. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know this visual well. But in case you are newer, I want you to imagine a ladder. And on this ladder, there are three different color blocks. At the top of the ladder is a green zone, which represents regulation. In the middle, there's a yellow zone that represents activation. And at the bottom, there's a red zone, which represents a state of shutdown. Now imagine that you are standing at the top of that ladder, holding a bucket, holding your stress bucket. Now, the heavier that bucket gets, the more life, circumstances, health, anything, the more that gets added to your bucket, the further down the ladder it pushes you. So based on everything that you looked at in this series, this kind of new awareness, where are you on that nervous system ladder right now? In your daily life, do you feel like you're more in that green zone? Life feels mostly manageable, you're mostly regulated most of the time, you've got a good balance between stressors and supporters. Or do you feel like you find yourself more in the yellow zone? Are you experiencing a lot of activation, anxiety, irritability, feeling on edge? Or maybe the weight in your bucket has been so heavy for so long that you have dropped down into more of that red zone on a daily basis. Maybe you're feeling more exhausted, apathetic, overwhelmed, maybe struggling with depression. And there's no right or wrong place to be. This is just an opportunity. This is just an invitation for you to become more aware, to come into conversation with your nervous system and say, okay, oh, where on this ladder am I with what I'm holding, what I'm carrying? And wherever you are, my hope is that after this series, you are a little less confused about why you're there, that you are able to look at your stress load, the baseline and the daily stressors, or the imbalance between your stressors and supporters. And that you've had this moment of, oh, oh, oh man, okay. Maybe it makes sense why I'm struggling. Maybe it makes sense why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling, why I have the symptoms that I have. And that moment, that moment of, it makes sense. Of course, of course I'm struggling, or of course I feel this way. That moment is what I call the light switch moment for so many of our clients. It is the shift from I'm the problem and I'll always be this way. I held that story for a really long time. And this is the moment that I see that story for so many shift to, oh, like, wait, maybe I can actually do something about this. Maybe something can shift for me. I'm not the problem. This load is problematic. Where's the help? Where's the support? Where's the strategy? Where do I start? And this becomes a moment of awareness and self-compassion that then drives curiosity towards the natural next question, which is like, okay, okay, where do I start? How do I actually bridge the gap from knowing different to living different? And there are some of you who are going to be able to take the framework from the last few episodes and start doing exactly that. You've followed along, you are going to assess your stress bucket, you're filtering it, you're editing it, you're adding supporters, you are making small, consistent changes over time. You just needed, you needed the framework. You needed to conceptually see, oh, that's something that I can do that can move the needle in my healing journey. And then there are probably more of you. And I say this with so much love and compassion because I have been this person many different times in my healing. So many of you understand the framework. You can see what needs to change, but you won't actually be able to bridge that gap between conceptually knowing and actually living differently. And that's not because you are weak or less motivated or you lack willpower. It is likely because you genuinely lack capacity. And capacity is built with support. It's built with tangible support, not just more information. Just the other day, in a discovery call for my restore program, I heard from one of you, one of you here listening after week after week. And this person said exactly this I've been listening to your podcast for almost a year and a half. It has given me such a different perspective on my healing. And I'm finally in a place where I realize I need help in personalizing it, in taking the action. So I know different, but I need help to do different. I personally would never, never, never, never have been able to make the changes necessary to regulate my nervous system and heal my anxiety and depression without one-on-one support. I tend to be somebody who really does try to pull myself up by my bootstraps, figure it out on my own. And I would say, specifically in the last handful of years, I am so much quicker to just ask for the support, to just invest in my healing, in the people to support my healing, because I've come to understand that it is the thing with the highest return on investment in my life. Bar none, when I'm living better, when I'm feeling better, when I'm supported, everything else in my life becomes more manageable. It becomes easier. I become better able to support. So before I close out this series, I do want to talk about a few things. One of the things I want to talk about is the different seasons of healing that we find ourselves in. Because I think knowing what season you are in can change everything about what kind of support you need or what kind of support you choose to seek out. And then I want to tell you a little bit about how we work with people. Because if you are sitting here thinking, I need more than a podcast series, I want you to know what is available. So let's start by talking about healing seasons. So in my book, Healing Through the Vegas Nerve, in one of the chapters, I lay out a four-phase neuroscience and trauma-informed model of healing. And I actually want to read directly from that section of the book because I think it frames what I want to share here really well. And if you happen to have my book, I am reading from page 84, where it's titled The Process of Healing. So it reads, I once had a client come into a session and share that the concept of quote, healing felt really overwhelming to her. She had questions like, How what does healing even mean? What does it look like? Where do I start? How do I know whether it's working? And so on. I laid out for her what I sometimes call a pyramid of healing. And I'd like to do the same for you to provide a framework and help answer some of those questions, knowing that healing is never perfectly linear. But if your journey has felt overwhelming or ineffective at times, it is likely happening out of order. So these four phases outline a basic flow for healing in a way that supports your mind-body system instead of stressing it out. So phase one is education and awareness. Understanding the nervous system, your vagus nerve, and the role they play in healing is fundamental and foundational to this work. If you do not understand how your system works, you cannot work with it towards healing. And so that is the education. Learn about the nervous system. Then awareness comes in anytime you explore your unique nervous system. Phase two is regulation. So in this phase, you continue to learn the language of your nervous system. You get better at identifying when you're in dysregulation and start to implement your different reactive and proactive tools and practices that help you feel more grounded and regulated. With time and practice, you also start to identify the unique tools and strategies that work best for you in certain situations. This phase is rooted in some good old-fashioned trial and error to discover what works for you. Then you build on what works with consistent practice, collecting regulation reps over time, day after day. This is what we'll dive into later on in the book. This is also something we talk about here on the podcast. This regulation phase is all about stability, stabilizing, cultivating a sense of safety, and creating capacity. So the book continues. This is a crucial step before you dive into any deeper healing or repatterning work, what I refer to as the rewiring phase. First, you must prioritize building up the ability of your nervous system to regulate and the capacity of your nervous system to move through discomfort, difficult emotions, and even trauma without becoming totally overwhelmed. In this phase, you learn how to regulate and to better understand the landscapes of each of your nervous system states. You also learn how to identify the specific things that activate your system versus what helps you feel safe. If you do not do this work first, your system can get overwhelmed by attempts at cognitive reframing or trauma healing work, which can exacerbate your symptoms. Phase three is rewiring. The first two phases form the foundation to create the capacity in your body for the deeper healing work to occur and to help you mitigate more stressors from coming in and getting trapped in your system. Once you have a more regulated baseline, as well as the necessary strategies to keep you connected and regulated, you now have the capacity to do some of the deeper work. This is where things like thought work, talk therapy, meditation, hypnotherapy, parts work, ideally all in combination with some parallel somatic work, can come in and be really effective. These are healing modalities that often work with the conscious mind to repattern thinking, behavior, or trauma responses. In my opinion, it can do more harm than good to dig into the vulnerable details that usually come up in this work before first laying a proper foundation of regulation. Then we have phase four, which I've labeled resourcing. I often refer to this as maintenance mode. This is where you continue to engage in the practices that are supportive for you, making small tweaks here and there, depending on what you need to keep yourself at your new baseline. It is important to note that no one stays here forever. Inevitably, new triggers come up, or life hands you a new situation outside your current ability to cope. And you cycle back through these phases. But each time you do, you'll notice that you likely move through them with a little bit more ease and confidence from the previous healing work you've done. And this section kind of concludes by saying this order and sequencing matters. When you jump too quickly into all of the quote, vagus nerve stimulation practices or the nervous system regulation hacks without having an understanding of how those systems work and the unique role that they play in anxiety, depression, or chronic pain, whatever you might be struggling with, you lack the context for how to integrate any of these practices intentionally. For example, a client shared that a few years prior, she had a therapist who did a lot of the same things that she and I were doing in session: nervous system regulation work, somatic practices, breath work. But then she would go home and be so, so dysregulated. She did not know how to do any of those practices on her own in that environment. And what she came to realize during our work together was that no matter how helpful those practices were in a session, without the background education and awareness of how they impacted her system as a whole, she was totally dependent on another person to help her regulate. Where I think most people go wrong is they try to jump right into the deep waters, rewiring things in talk therapy, biohacking, psychedelics, plant medicine, all of these might do amazing things for people at certain points in a healing journey. But if your nervous system is not ready for that big shift, then it can be ineffective at best or backfire in some serious ways at worst by creating even more shutdown or fracturing. I'm not saying it does for everybody, but I can confidently say that it does for many, many people because I see this all the time in my practice. I have worked with countless individuals who spent years in traditional talk therapy and their anxiety or depression isn't any better. In some cases, their symptoms have gotten worse. Without having the tools to stay present and regulated, your nervous system doesn't know the difference between the retelling of a traumatic experience versus actually re-experiencing it. Likewise, with clients who have tried meditation or plant medicine retreats, even a deep tissue massage can poke at the stored trauma in your fascia, in your tissues, and make someone come out even deeper in a freeze response. Here's the thing: talking about your trauma or trying to access it through other channels is dysregulating. There's no way around that. If you do not have the capacity for additional dysregulation or know how to notice dysregulation happening in your system while having the ability to bring yourself back into a felt sense of safety or regulation, you are simply reinforcing the dysfunction and you need to stay in survival mode. So before diving into deep rewiring work, you must first cultivate the capacity for it. And I'll end there. That is what this entire series has been about is about reiterating the importance of assessing where your current capacity lies, of assessing what is currently in your bucket to point you towards the type of deeper or more strategic work that could be the most effective for you. And what has been so helpful for so many of our clients is understanding this sequencing. The idea that healing isn't random, that it has an order, and that jumping ahead of that order, skipping the foundation, trying to do deep rewiring work before your nervous system has any kind of capacity to hold it, that's where people get stuck sometimes. That's why I spent years, years feeling like therapy was just an expensive venting session that did not change anything about my actual life. Turns out therapy can actually be wildly helpful and is and has for me. But in my earliest experiences of therapy, it lacked the support in helping me create those foundations. That's probably not a universal experience for everybody, but I do know that it's been a common experience for hundreds of people that I have come in contact with and supported through my practice over the years. So maybe just taking a moment to reflect and ask yourself in my healing journey up to this point or in the current way that I'm pursuing my healing, am I establishing a strong foundation, a strong baseline for understanding my mind, my body, my system? Do I know what's going to help resource me in the present, in the moment, so that I can then take on the deeper work needed to get to a new place, to create a new baseline of thinking, of seeing the world, of experiencing it in and through my mind and body so that I can actually start to get to the other side of anxiety and depression and really know how to stay there. And I want to read one more section from my book before I close out because it speaks directly to how I think about supporting people and why I built our restore program the way that I did. And this is on page 90 under a section head titled Strategic Healing. And it reads Before establishing my full-time mental health coaching practice, I spent almost a decade as a personal trainer and wellness specialist, hence all the strength training analogies that I use. I consistently and strategically created specific workout programs based on clients' goals, their current fitness levels, their lifestyle. I took into consideration any limitations that they had, the resources that were available to them. These plans were strategic, but they were also flexible. Then things would be adapted and changed based on what we observed was working, what wasn't working for one reason or another as clients progressed. I apply this same process now to the anxiety and depression work that I do. Although there are many universals in how to improve both physical fitness and mental health, there is always a need for personalization and adaptation. I believe in strategic healing and in creating an intentional plan of action to achieve your goals. I'm also a healing minimalist. My goal for clients, both when I was with them in the gym and now in my mental health practice, has always been for them to get away with doing as little as possible to accomplish what they want. And I'll close there. So that's the philosophy that I have carried from my decade in the fitness and wellness space into everything that I do now. Strategic, personalized, minimalist in the best sense, helping you find what actually works for your specific system and doing that consistently rather than just throwing everything at the wall and hoping something. I used to tell my clients in the gym all the time, I don't care. Nobody cares how good you are at the gym. Does what you do at the gym help you feel better and live better outside of it? The same thing applies here. I do not want you to have to build your life around healing. I want you to heal so that you can go out into your big, beautiful life and actually live it. And that is exactly what Restore was built on, was built around to help people do. And if you don't know what Restore is, it is my 16-ish week one-on-one coaching program. And I want to take a few minutes to tell you what it actually looks like, not just what this program is, but how it works, why our clients see an average symptom reduction of 38% in just in just a few months. Because I think the structure itself tells you a lot about why it's different from what most people have tried in their healing journey. And even if, even if, even if, even if you already know that you're not interested in getting support through regulated living, through this restore program, I want to invite you to listen, anyways, but listen through the lens of how can I take the way that this program is set up? And is there a way that I can currently apply that to how I'm approaching healing right now on my own or within another program or with another support person? So, in working together in this program, we always start by exploring your unique nervous system. What are your patterns? What does dysregulation look like for you specifically? What is your history with anxiety, depression, stress? What season of healing are you in right now? And from there, we then help our clients build out their reactive toolbox. What are the specific regulation tools, the specific supporters that work best for their nervous system? Not some generic list of somatic practices that are good for everybody, but we help them get into their body to rebuild that relationship, to come into conversation, mind and body, to figure out the specific things that work for them, the specific things that work for you. And then we help you practice them enough to be accessible in the moments that you need the most. And then in the program, we do exactly what this series has walked you through: a full stress bucket assessment. We get the big picture of your unique stress load, both baseline and daily. We look honestly at your supporter side. And from that, we build a personalized roadmap for your healing, not some one size fits all protocol, not some generic 10-step program. A roadmap that reflects your actual life, your actual circumstance, the actual season of healing that you find yourself in. And not only that, but this program also includes comprehensive blood work because part of what's in your stress bucket is your underlying physiology. And when that is ignored, you can spend so long spinning your wheels in the wrong places when we can get your personalized health data relatively easily and start to bring down the stress load physiologically where it matters most. Then, so we've zoomed out, and then that program zooms right back in. We look at your stress bucket, we look at the things that are there, and we say, what feels like the most meaningful and accessible place to start right now? And we build from there together with accountability, with somebody who knows your system, who knows your story, who's on the ground floor in the weeds of your life. And because they are, they can help you adapt when things don't cooperate with the plan, when we need to pivot. We're pivotable because we have that context. This is the whole human whole life healing that I talk about. Because I genuinely believe, and the science supports it, that you cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot talk therapy your way out of a life that is perpetuating the problem every single day. The physiology, the psychology, the relational, the circumstantial, the past, the present, all of it matters. All of it has to be brought to the table. And all of it is what gets looked at in Restore. So if you have spent years understanding yourself, but you still feel stuck, if you have done therapy, if you've learned the things about yourself that matter, but nothing in your day-to-day life actually changes, if you know you need more than a podcast series, this is my soft and tender, no pressure invitation that restore might be exactly what you're looking for. And there is a link in the show notes where you can book a completely, again, I want to reiterate, pressure-free discovery call with me personally. You and I are gonna hop on a 20-30-minute call. I get to sit with you, I get to hear what's worked for you, what hasn't worked from you, what are you frustrated, what are you hoping to get? And together we can decide if restore is the right next step for you. It's just a conversation. And my promise is always that even if it's not the right next step for you, you are likely going to leave that call with a clearer understanding of what else might be. All right, friend, thank you so much for being here in this series. Whether you found it in one sitting or you showed up week by week, I really hope that you are leaving it with more than just information. I hope that you're leaving it with a genuinely different relationship to your stress, your symptoms, your nervous system to what is possible. Healing is possible for you, not just general. I believe healing is possible for you. With your actual nervous system, your actual history, your actual life, your nervous system, your symptoms are not fixed. They are responsive and it responds to the conditions that you create for it. And if you would like support and creating some new conditions, we are here. And now before we close, here's our three takeaways from today. Number one, know the season of healing that you are in and try to match your expectations and your support with your actual capacity. Number two, healing has a general sequence: education and awareness, regulation, rewiring, and resourcing. And jumping ahead of the foundation, trying to do that deep rewiring work before your nervous system has the capacity to hold it is where a lot of people get stuck, or even sometimes worse. And number three, reiterating that knowing different is not the same as living different. And the gap between understanding what needs to change and actually changing it is real. And it is not a willpower problem. It is oftentimes a capacity and a support problem. Strategic, personalized, whole human support is what bridges that gap. And if you are looking for that kind of support, we are here. All right. Until next time, I am sending so much hope and healing your way.