You’re Not Broken, Your Nervous System Is Protecting You

Hi guys!

Last week we talked about dysregulation. This week, we’re going deeper! In this episode, I break down what’s actually happening inside your nervous system when you spiral, shut down, overreact, and/or go numb. I explain the science of the nervous system in a way that makes sense, and why your body reacts before your mind can catch up.

We’ll talk about how trauma lives in the body, how self-worth and safety are connected. And most importantly, I walk you through how to start unwiring those old survival patterns so you can feel safer, more grounded, and more connected in your everyday life.

You’re not crazy. You’re not too sensitive. You adapted. And healing is possible. Thanks for being here!

Xx,
Shy ♡  

Transcript

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Hey y'all. Welcome back to Shy Space, where we talk about all things pertaining to mental health and manifestation. My name is Shy. I'm the host of this podcast and I'm so excited to be back with another riveting with my eye patches on once again. I will say, they give me like a sense of safety to show up on this podcast and be very vulnerable in an ugly state and be okay with my ugly state. So I'm loving that. I've come to the conclusion that they do fall down my face when I'm giving my TED talk and I don't notice. So I'm gonna try to notice that because. They are for your eyes, obviously not for your cheeks, but hey, I'll take whatever I can get. I've also come to the conclusion that I don't think anyone knows whether or not this is the right direction of application because not a single person has corrected me and I've worn them. Both directions, so let me know if these are on incorrectly. But anyways, I hope you're all having a beautiful week. I got some really positive feedback about last week's episode."You're not crazy, you are dysregulated. How to heal your nervous system." And I also got a request to do a part two, so I wanted to do that because I thought. Um, when I did the episode, I thought this deserves a part two already. And so I was really glad that, you know, the episode did well and resonated with folks because there's so much deeper that we can dive into this topic. I mean, we could talk about this truly forever. It could be a series in itself or a podcast in itself. So we're really scratching the surface. But anyways, I'm just super excited to do a part two on this."You're not broken. Your nervous system is protecting you." Because I do think it's really important on this journey of regulating and just understanding yourself better and being able to show up better every single day. You do need to heal the relationship that you have with how you view yourself. And I think that that has to be done really early on for any like substantial healing in life to happen. Because when you're judging yourself, you cannot get to a place of empowerment. Like you can't heal something that you're continuing to judge. So anyways, if I continue to like touch the eye patches, I apologize. I'm just insecure about them falling down my face now because what the fuck? But anyways, um, so let's talk about why you keep ending up here and why so many of us keep ending up here because I can definitely relate. Londy, stop, please. She always does this. I love you so much, but I need you to not make a single noise. Mm-hmm. Okay. Last week or last time, I told you you're not crazy, you're dysregulated. And so many of you said, okay, but how do I keep getting dysregulated in the first place? Why does the same argument feel like life or death? Why does being left on red feel like literal abandonment sometimes? Why does one small comment spiral into shame, self-doubt and self-criticism. So today we're gonna dive deeper because your nervous system is literally not malfunctioning. It is just protecting you. It is just trying to do its job and it doesn't quite really understand how to do its job. As the world continues to evolve and change on a rapid basis, and I mean rapid, like holy shit, it's crazy. So the real question to ask yourself is, what has it learned to protect you from, and how can we then regulate through that? Whether or not it's a perceived threat or an actual threat, regulating through either scenario. So let's talk about how we get dysregulated in the first place so that we can understand ourselves better and really like put those pieces together on our own about what our nervous system is trying to protect us from, because obviously I can share my examples and my stories, they may not resonate with everybody and they may not be relatable with everybody. So my hope is that I can actually just give you like the practical application to understand yourself and why you're operating this way, so that you can be like, oh, okay, this happened to me, which triggers this, and therefore I'm having this reaction. One plus one equals two. Okay, so we talked a little bit about this last week, but I wanna dive deeper into your autonomic nervous system because it really does run the show behind the scenes. I know I talked about the two or four stress responses that there are within complex trauma, but it's helpful to understand it further in my opinion. So the autonomic nervous system has two main branches, which is the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic. I think of it as like your sympathy, your empathy for yourself. That is what puts you in fight or flight when it perceives danger because it's protecting you. Parasympathetic is rest and digest. But it's a lot more nuanced than that. So again, we talked last week about the fight or flight response. This is when you're very activated, anxious, and reactive, in general. There's the freeze or shutdown response. This comes from the dorsal vagal nerve, which causes people to be numb, collapsed, disconnected, disassociated, you name it. Then there's social engagement, which is triggered by the ventral vagal, which allows you to be grounded, open, connected. So basically the opposite of the freeze and the shutdown. And then there's a polyvagal chart that you can reference that explains your nervous system and how it has three primary states, not just two. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm mentioning the ventral vagal and the dorsal vagal and the freeze versus like social engagement. So we think of ventral vagal and social engagement as like a green zone. It's. You know, positive, good vibes. This is when you feel, again, very curious, open, compassionate. Your heart rate is very steady. Your breath is smooth, your digestion is working great. You can make eye contact with people you feel connected to yourself and to the world around you. This is the state where healing can actually happen in your life. It's not calm like you're sedated. It's literally being regulated and connected. And then there's the sympathetic. Fight or flight zone. This is what I would consider the red zone. So like the opposite of the social engagement or the ventral vagal. This is when you're activated, you believe that you're in danger, your body believes that you're in danger, and then there's a lot of things going on physiologically that you cannot control at this point. So your heart rate's increasing, your breathing is speeding up, your blood is moving away from your stomach. To not aid in digestion so that it has blood to be able to give to other things. And that might give you a stomach ache, your muscles tense up, your pupils dilate. Your adrenal glands actually release stress hormones into your body. And then emotionally it can show up as, you know, a myriad of things, right? Anxiety. Being pissed off, being irritated, being in a panic, feeling like you have to like race and being just super urgent. Overthinking everything, needing to fix something right now, this second. And like that is, I don't know about y'all, but that is like a mode that I can sway into pretty easily if things get stressful and that's not good, like, that's not productive. But the thing to, to understand when you're like getting triggered and you're going into the state is that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Like it's literally meant to protect you. It's just if you live here chronically. Like chronic stress, obviously, that that will burn you out, that will get you sick, that will cause illness and all of those things. So you, you really need to be able to regulate. Now going back to the other vagal nerve the free, the dorsal vagal, which is the freeze slash shutdown. So this is a collapsed state. It's when fight or flight doesn't really work. Your system is conserving energy, so it's not like red alert or green go, it's shut down. Again, conserving energy. And then physiologically, there's a lot of things happening that are very much opposite of what's happening in the, in the sympathetic or fight or flight response, which. Includes like your heart rate slowing down, your blood pressure's actually actually going to drop. You might feel super heavy and just like numb, your digestion will also slow down. And then emotionally you will typically feel like really depressed, very disconnected, disassociated, have really bad brain fog. Maybe just feel like hopelessness and just complete disconnected from yourself, the world, whatever it may be. And also just having thoughts of like, I do not care, like no fucks given vibes. It's not like a lazy feeling where you're just like tired and lazy. It's literal nervous system depletion and exhaustion that you just can't ignore and it just like flatlines you. And so this polyvagal chart that I mentioned, I'm learning about this in a program that I'm in right now. The chart shows that we move up and down through these different states and these different zones depending on perceived levels of safety, not logic. Now, I would like to repeat that again. Our body moves through the different states of regulation. Our nervous system regulates in different zones, fight or flight, freeze or shut down, social engagement slash green, which means go and openness. Moves up and down through these phases depending on perceived sense of safety. Not logic. I don't know about y'all once again, but I am not the most logical person at all times in my life, especially at all times in my hormonal cycle. Like it's just not, it's not realistic. So understanding that your body is literally always scanning for safety, as is your mind. So you're always like basically in the background running a checkup. Am I safe? Am I connected? Am I alone? It's just like habitual behavior. So it's not random. It's very much pattern recognition. I've talked about this in one of my other episodes, and this is so important to understand pattern recognition within your nervous system and your body and your subconscious, like it's all interconnected and it drives your life. Drives your fucking life, and if you don't have an awareness of this, I don't know. I don't know. You need to, your body is literally always asking at all times throughout every interaction and stimuli that we experience. Am I safe? Am I connected? Am I at a risk of rejection, abandonment, danger? Now, think about how many times the answer is going to be yes when it comes to like rejection. Abandonment and potentially danger depending on what you do in your life. Like I don't live a dangerous life per se, but I do have a dangerous sport that I partake in. And you know, there's a lot of times where my fight or flight response is very much activated when I'm riding. If something goes wrong and I get really scared. The eye patches have fallen down. Okay. I can feel that. I got onto a tangent, but we're back. Yeah, so it's like, it's constantly happening. I'm flowing in and outta that and it's really hard. I have to like breathe through that and it's just, it's a lot, but it's again, keeping us alive. It's doing its job. So that's important to just remember that it's, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not, like I said in my last episode, you're not crazy, you're just dysregulated. You're having a natural human response, and you're processing, you're learning how to regulate and that is fantastic. But here's the part that I wanna share with you that I feel like no one talks about. Your body actually reacts to the emotional threat the same way that it would react to a physical threat. And I feel like that just does not get talked about enough because these responses at this point in our evolution as humans are so emotional a lot of the time, or these threats, I should say, are so emotional a lot of the time. It, again, goes back to like the abandonment, the rejection, things like that. Like being scared to get in trouble at work or mess up at work or like, you know, get in a fight with your partner, get in trouble with your parents. Like whatever it is, there's just so much and it's not often that we're put in a position anymore again, that we're like in that physical danger as much depending on what you do with your life, but it's the same level of intensity for your body and for your nervous system. And that is something that really needs to be taken into consideration. Like trauma is real and trauma is not just what has happened to you, it's what your nervous system had to do to survive it. So it, this could be something that was like a. Static moment in time, like I had to experience, like I had to do this to survive or you know, live in this way to survive what I went through in that period of time. If I was like in an abusive relationship or if it's like, oh, during my healing period, I had to go into like shut down mode. There's so much. And the other thing to remember too is like when it comes to complex trauma, it's less about words, it's more about sensations and trauma is actually stored in the body. And so when we, A lot of the times when people are treated for complex trauma, a somatic approach might be taken to be able to enhance that mind body connection so that you're not just like aimlessly talking about trauma and triggering yourself and not tapping into the signals that the body is giving you and being able to translate that energy into like basically nothing. Transmute it, let it, let it pass through and actually process, so that it doesn't have to take up space, right? Because it's just, it's asking for attention so that it can move through. And so when we allow that to move through and we focus again on the sensations in the body and less about the words and less about what's like the chatter of the mind and just more about what, what's being felt, it's literally so powerful. So lots of stuff I just threw at you there, but. Let's talk a little bit more about the brain. I wanna talk about the limbic system. So there is this visual that I just came across recently in something I was studying that explains something super, super huge in terms of the limbic system specifically. So trauma is not stored primarily in the thinking brain. It's stored in the emotional and survival brain. So when something reminds you of a past wound, a past event, a past trigger, the amygdala within your brain, which is your like alarm system, activates very heavily, and then the limbic system lights up. Your frontal lobe, which is responsible for logic and reasoning, partially shuts down. And that's why you can know you're safe, but still feel like you're not. So it's like multiple things going on in your brain, multiple responses happening in different parts of the brain. Your body is actually reacting before your thoughts are able to catch up. So you might feel something really crazy in your body. And then you have like the actual cognitive process of what that is and what the threat is. But this is also why arguments can escalate so quickly with people. It's also why you can say things that you don't mean really easily or why you might like disassociate and go numb mid-conversation, been there a million times to all of the above. And really like, it's not immaturity, it's actual nervous system dysregulation and dominance. Like it's truly so much more complex than that because when you are dysregulated, your survival brain, so your limbic brain, is louder than your rational brain, which is your frontal lobe. So it just overpowers your frontal lobe. And it's like, sorry, this is what we're doing to survive. We're gonna be crazy. We're gonna cuss him out. We're gonna say, fuck you. We're gonna say, I never loved you. Like we're gonna say it. We're gonna fucking say it, and we're gonna say it with our chest. And you know what? We shouldn't have said it, but whatever. Life goes on. So healing in this realm really is like based within strengthening the pathway back to regulation. Again, regulation, regulation, regulation so that your frontal lobe can stay locked in longer than the rest of the brain that's trying to overpower it. And that's again, to me personally, very empowering information. So just recognize that if you can, the next time you get triggered and it I think might actually prove to be very insightful in a lot of scenarios. Okay. So I think truly like the hidden link here in terms of how you unlock dysregulation as it pertains to, being tied to self-worth. So I'm the type of person that feels like my self worth is very much tied to my performance and my output as a human being. And because of that, feedback feels like danger. If you're somebody that has your self worth that's tied to approval, then a lot of the times having conflict can feel like abandonment. If your worth fluctuates with your success or failure like me, then your nervous system will fluctuate too. But self-worth truly is constant. It's not something that you need to earn. It's not tied to your productivity. It's not based on someone's approval. It's not based on how much money you make, it doesn't flow with your success. But most of us have been like conditioned to have this belief for some reason based in performance based values. So this is really when we start to like, forget our inherent worth. And so we choose to chase this like counterfeit safety that is not gonna actually make us feel safe. Like being a people pleaser, trying to overachieve, shutting down emotionally, trying to control situations. All of those are forms of dysregulation that are really just like you being super wounded in disguise essentially. So a little bit more about what dysregulation feels like somatically. I wanna weave in something called the emotional embodiment technique. This is really fun. So this is where we shift from theory into practice. So the technique teaches us to, instead of ask yourself, why do I feel like this? You ask, where do I feel this? So again, this is something that I've learned in therapy. I'm not a therapist, but I use this weekly with my therapist and within myself. And it's really, really helpful. So basically you close your eyes and you just tune into your body. You locate different sensations and just acknowledge different sensations within your body. Like for example, if you have anxiety, it might show up as a tight chest, a racing heart, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach. Shame might show up as a little bit of heat in your face, maybe a collapsed posture, heavy shoulders. Grief can feel really hollow or achy or weighted. The key instruction here, the key thing to like understand is that you want to describe the sensations, not the stories. So I think it's really easy for us to get caught up in being like, well, I feel this way because this happened, da, da, da, dah. And it's like, yeah, that's, we get that, but let's talk about like, what does it really feel like in your body? Like what is it, what does that feeling produce in your body? So instead of saying, I'm spiraling, you say, my chest feels tight, my jaw is clenched, my stomach feels unsettled. And this starts to teach us to have what we call nervous system literacy. So you again, begin to just understand your nervous system on a deeper level so that you understand how to regulate. And it's just so helpful because when you can name that sensation, I've said this before in my episodes, when you can name a sensation without judgment, the system is able to regulate. It's so powerful because attention to what you are struggling with, without panic involved, signals safety to your body so that you can actually regulate. Because again, anxiety is not just a thought. It's not just, oh, am I gonna fail? Oh, am I gonna lose my money? It's your heart racing. It's your tight chest, it's your stomach dropping outta your asshole. Like it's all the things. It's not, oh God, did I mess up? It's that shame that's truly like burning face and clenched jaw of with anger, like hot hands pressure behind your eyes. It's all those things that you feel when you're just so fucked up mentally and you're like, what is going on? Your body will never lie. Like you will always be able to feel the dysregulation emotionally in your body first. I just feel like people don't pay attention to that and they go straight to what's going on in the head because we were not taught to listen. Like, it's just crazy. Like, I, I don't understand how this is not taught to people because it is so empowering and it's so life changing. And it's such a basic concept, I feel like once you understand it. Personally to me, I'm like, wait, this makes so much sense. Like why, why is this not like sorry, why is this not like more. Like, I don't know. It just, it feels so basic. And again, why is it not more like widely known and just, I don't know. It's crazy. Going back to like most of us not being taught to listen, I feel like we always go into story mode instead of sensation again. So focusing on what you're feeling over what you're thinking is going to help you regulate and move through that. And if you're anything like me, you might wonder why you can get triggered by the same thing over and over a million times, and that's because your nervous system is extremely efficient. God bless her. So if it worked once, it's gonna use it again. That's basically the science behind that, which I fucking hate, but. Had to share that with y'all once I learned that, because even if it's outdated and it's not relevant, and it's like not, doesn't need to be here, doesn't need to be protecting, it's going to. If shutting down protected you as a child, in a form of relationship, in any situation, you'll freeze in hard conversations as an adult if you haven't worked through that. If being hyper independent kept you safe, then you're going to go into fight mode when somebody gets too close to you, like it's just. It just adds one plus one equals two. The nervous system always prioritizes familiarity over happiness. It just needs to be safe and know it needs to know that we're going to be safe. It does not want to go into the unknown, and that's where your logical and conscious mind comes in and has to be like, okay, I do know better and I am reacting the same, and that's okay. The way that we're gonna unwire it and heal ourselves is not by forcing ourselves to be calm and not by shaming ourselves into further dysregulation by being like, I shouldn't feel that. Not by fake positive thinking, but having an actual nervous system literacy, body awareness, allows you to find a baseline regulation because you will actually be able to know whether you're there or not. So noticing what's going on in your, in your body, I not trying to change things with force. Allowing yourself to cultivate head to toe awareness. Noticing with zero judgment, just noticing period point blank, and not passing judgment. You cannot regulate if you're not connected to something, so you have to bring awareness to it. And doing that body scan builds internal and honestly mental safety. Because being aware is basically bringing safety to the body. So, awareness is safety returning to the body, is what they teach. That's really powerful. And again, sensation over story, those are like your two anchors. Sensation over story, body awareness, name the sensation, not the narrative. I feel tight, I feel warm, I feel buzzy. I feel expansive. This teaches you that you can analyze your nervous system and actually be like, okay, I can feel this, I can understand it, and I can survive it. And that is literally so crucial to everything that you need to do to pass it through. And then another great way to regulate is actually through co-regulation. So this can be done through animals and humans. Animals regulate through presence. They don't respond to your words, they respond to your nervous system. So a lot of the times, if you're anxious, they might move away from you, and if you're grounded, they soften and they wanna come towards you. They really mirror your internal state, the one that you're not like consciously aware of, and allow you to kind of bring that conscious awareness to it, which is fabulous. That's why I love my animals so much.'cause they reflect my state back to me before I even really have the recognition of it myself sometimes. And anytime you're allowed to feel like safety in a relationship, whether it's with an animal, a person, or an experience, your nervous system will feel safe, and that's when you can also begin to heal. Um, and this is why connection heals trauma or helps heal it, and isolation really reinforces it. Another thing you can do is really focus on energy clearing and setting strong boundaries. So when you have awareness in terms of your energy and your body, you can start to cultivate awareness of the practices, things, people, experiences that bring you energy or drain it, and ask yourself those questions like, what gave me energy today? What drained me? Where did I give my power away? And just again, cultivate, cultivate awareness, cultivate understanding, and bring that awareness back to yourself, which is that safety, as I mentioned. So it's not about just calming yourself down, it's actually about being like a protective or a protector, to of yourself and your system from that constant activation and like bringing yourself back, bringing yourself back, centering yourself, breathing, focusing really having those boundaries is truly nervous system protection. And I don't mean that just in the sense of like regulating yourself, but also having boundaries with people, places, scenarios, habits, whatever, that don't feed into your best self. Okay, so to sum it up, the rewiring formula, awareness, compassion, repetition, safe connection, not force shaming or trying to be perfect. Your nervous system learns through experience, not lectures. So the more that you teach yourself and remind yourself and experience safety. The more you will actually be able to feel that truly and wholeheartedly. Every time that you force yourself to stay present during a dis like phase of discomfort or an uncomfortable situation and force yourself to breathe instead of react or you set a boundary or you just allow a wave of of emotion to pass through you. You are literally building new neural pathways within your brain that will allow your frontal lobe to be much more locked in and front and center when it comes to your healing journey and your ability to show up as your very best self. So reminders as always, affirmations. You are not broken, you are adapting, you are evolving, you are resilient, you are brilliant. The anxiety, the shutdown, the people pleasing, the overachieving. They're all survival strategies. They're all things that you needed to do to keep yourself safe with the information that you had at the time and the experiences that you were having at the time period. Point blank. Do not judge yourself for that ever. They were survival strategies and they served you well at one point, but it's just time to say bye to them because they do not serve you anymore. You do not have to live in survival. For your entire life, and I really hope that you don't want to because it is not a fun state to live in, and your body doesn't wanna live in it either. Last thing I'll leave you with is a reminder that healing isn't about becoming someone new. It is again, teaching yourself that you're safe enough to be who you already are. No exceptions, no modifications. And with that I will wish you all a good night. I love you guys so much and I appreciate you listening, joining in, and giving your feedback and your thoughts. As always, please continue to do so and I can't wait to see you in my next episode. Bye.