It’s been a whirlwind of a year, hasn’t it? I can’t believe we’re almost at the end. I wanted to check in and see how everyone is doing?
I’m busy...a little bit more busy than I’d promised myself I’d be. And I’m feeling it.
It’s all fine when I have the balance right. Ideally I balance work, family life and study with lots of essential downtime, which for me looks like slow walks in the forest, meditation and sleep. All three have managed to fall off my schedule lately – in sneaky ways, so I justified it it...there seemed to be a valid excuse for my absence from the forest (‘weather is too bad, I’ll go burn myself out in the gym instead!’), meditation (‘I meditate with clients in clinic, that’s enough...’), and sleep (‘I’ll catch up’)...
I’m so familiar with this pattern...we let ourselves push beyond our ideal balance, because it’s ‘just for a couple of weeks’, and then that pattern becomes the new normal. The time allocated for essential recovery and downtime gets gobbled up, and the days rush past. We appear to be functioning ‘fine’, sure we’re a little more tired in the mornings, and more in need of coffee, maybe a bit more irritable, less present, digestion seems off, headachey...
We also notice our thoughts are more anxious, things are bothering us that we thought we long forgotten, problems seem bigger, sleep gets interrupted, we're irritable, anxious and uncomfortable.
Our nervous systems are rattled...
Do you notice this?
For me ('now' me that is) I’m very quick to notice. I have to be. I observe nervous systems for a living. I can feel when my system is running on hypervigilant stress hormones – I’m functional, organised and efficient, but I’m jittery and uneasy and life feels a bit, well, threatening!
So what can we do, when life has temporarily become too busy for the forest walks, hot baths and meditation? How can we quickly recalibrate when life is moving very fast and things are feeling heavy?
Remember, our body FEELS first and puts a story to it after. The mind puts a story to the sensations our body is feeling. So a triggered nervous system that's fallen into a hypervigilant state will lead the brain to try to find an explanation that 'fits'. And that explanation is usually vastly out of proportion, contorted or plain or incorrect. We can only make real sense of the world from a parasympathetic/relaxed state, when we are calm and fully connected to the logical and objective pre-frontal cortex, not the 'deer in headlights' fight/flight/freeze/fawn limbic system we occupy in a stress/sympathetic activated state.
The lens through which we view the world is determined by the status of our nervous system. A grumpy person in the queue in front of us becomes a mortal enemy trying to hurt us when we're in sympathetic, but in parasympathetic, we might view them with more objective compassion - 'maybe they're grumpy because life has been hard for them lately, it's nothing to do with me'.
Life looks and feels easier when viewed through a parasympathetic.
Here are five quick ways to reconnect your system into a PARASYMPATHETIC state of balance and calm presence, and come back ‘online’ when the world feels like it's spinning...and note, NONE OF THEM INVOLVE THINKING! We FEEL our way back to balance....
EXTEND THE OUTBREATH – breathe in for 4 beats, breathe out for 6 beats. This longer exhale is a signal to the body that it is safe. Holding our breath, or taking a big sharp inhale creates the opposite signal – that of threat/sympathetic alert. Work with the breath to let your body know it is safe.
BREATHE INTO THE DIAPHRAGM – focus on bringing the breath into the base of the ribcage, so that you are expanding your waist with the inhale (not the upper chest or the deep belly). Moving the diaphragm with the breath engages the parasympathetic response via the vagus nerve– it signifies to the body you are safe.
ORIENT WITH THE SENSES – a hypervigilant mind is lost in imagined future terrors and not actual current reality. Remind your system that you are, in fact, SAFE in this moment by engaging the senses – what can you see, what can you feel with your hands, what can you hear, smell, taste. Twiddle your toes and your fingers, make contact with the physical world. Take a big breath in and notice something in your environment you hadn’t noticed before – a bird, a pretty tree, clouds etc (if you’ve been with me in clinic, this practice will be familiar to you!).
MOVE – stand up and shake the body, get it back online. When we get lost in our thoughts, our bodies can ground us back into reality.
YINTANG – tap into the power of acupressure point YinTang, between the eyes. I wrote a post on IG, check it out here....
These quick practices will re-orient your system back online, giving you access to your pre-frontal cortex once again, allowing clear thinking, a balanced response and a soothed system.
And the more we do them, the brighter our world gets.
Much love and blessings for the rest of the year,
Comments