Losing and Recovering Our Equilibrium
Serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace amid the storm.
— AUTHOR UNKNOWN
“KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” was one of the mottoes of the British government during World War II. When we feel we are under siege ourselves, enduring our own personal version of the bombings during the Blitz, we need to call on the CEO of resilience and use body-based tools (somatic resources) to regulate the progression of worry, fear, and panic in our nervous system that could cause us to freak out or fall apart. The somatic intelligence that flows from a well-functioning prefrontal cortex allows us to stay calm, stay steady in our wise mind, and deal.
That place of calm steadiness that the prefrontal cortex reliably returns us to is a physiological state known in modern neuropsychology as the window of tolerance. This is our baseline state of physiological functioning when we’re not frightened, stressed, overtired, or overstimulated. When we’re in this window, we’re grounded and centered, neither overreacting to other people or life events nor failing to act at all. Being able to meet the storms and struggles of our lives from that place of steadiness, and being able to return quickly to that window when we are pushed out of it, is the somatic prerequisite of resilience.
In this chapter, you will learn ways to strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex to regulate the reactivity of the lower brain, with its rapid assessments of potential harm and survival responses of connect — or fight-flight-freeze, submit-collapse. You will also learn why it is normal for the prefrontal cortex to have difficulty in regulating that reactivity and how both the legacy of early conditioning and our biological legacy of the stress response can put the prefrontal cortex temporarily out of commission, sometimes for longer than is good for us.
Chapter 11 offers many experiential exercises that help you quickly recover the functioning of the prefrontal cortex and return to that baseline of calm equilibrium — the window of tolerance. You’ll learn how to:
• use body-based resources like breath, touch, and movement to quickly return your nervous system from overreaction or shutting down to your baseline equilibrium, the calm that allows you to carry on;
• resonate with the calm in someone else’s nervous system to calm your own;
• use relational resourcing to activate the release of the natural hormone oxytocin, the fastest-acting mechanism in the human brain to counter the effects of the stress hormone cortisol and return us to a state of calm and connection;
• use body-based tools to rewire old, conditioned responses to your survival reactions, so that they no longer derail your resilience.
Chapter 12 shows you how to build on the stable base of your window of tolerance to use your own body-based wisdom to further develop many skills of somatic intelligence:
• priming the brain to be less reactive to stress in the future by creating both a neurochemical buffer zone and explicitly encoded “memories for the future” that can protect you from the slings and arrows of your personal outrageous fortune;
• using implicit body memories as well as explicit cognitive memories of previous resilient coping to help you cope resiliently now;
• expanding the window of tolerance so that you’re better able to handle stress;
• working with another important neurochemical circuit — the dopamine system — to help alleviate the anxiety, fear of failure, and doubt and risk involved in trying something new.
Once you can use the somatic intelligence of your prefrontal cortex to manage your body’s automatic reactivity to danger or threat and reliably maintain an inner equilibrium, you can act in the world with skill and conscious response-ability. You can carry on.
The Window of Tolerance and Equanimity
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.
— BUDDHA’S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK
Window of tolerance and equanimity are terms from two different paradigms of brain change. Both refer to the physiological and mental state necessary to recovering resilience, stabilized by the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The term window of tolerance was coined a decade ago by Dan Siegel, based on the past twenty years of research into the resolution of trauma and the development of new mindfulness-based, body-based therapies for trauma. In the much older Buddhist wisdom tradition, the mindful cultivation of the practice of equanimity is a reliable way to access the same zone of equilibrium. When we are in our window of tolerance or in equanimity, we do not react disproportionately to disruptive changes in our circumstances. And if we do react (survival responses can trigger us to act or collapse in less than a second), we are likely to remember to pause and become mindfully aware of our body’s initial reactivity. With practice, we learn not to react to our reactions. When a cup is balanced on the edge of a table, it’s in equilibrium. We have equanimity if we don’t lose our own equilibrium when the cup falls and shatters. With equanimity, we can respond to the shatterings of life with careful reflection and wise choices.
I see the window of tolerance and equanimity as the physiological and spiritual constituents of the inner base of resilience (see chapter 8), which also allows us to stay in our window of tolerance and calmly meet the stressors and pressures of our daily lives.
You may already be able to sense, at times, a physiological state of peace and ease, of being calm and relaxed, yet engaged and alert. (One of the exercises below is designed to help you enter this state.) When the prefrontal cortex is functioning well, we can easily maintain this natural equilibrium. We’re not too revved up; we’re not too shut down.
One lunchtime, my client Serena saw a small group of boys playing soccer in a neighbor’s yard as she rode by on her bike on her way to the gym. She instinctively slowed down and kept her eye on their game. But suddenly the soccer ball flew from behind a parked car into the street, and one of the little boys darted out after it. Serena swerved to avoid hitting the boy, hit the bouncing ball, and went headfirst over the handlebars onto the pavement. She landed on her right shoulder, fracturing it on impact.
Serena had had falls from her bike before; she knew to keep her body still and breathe slowly into the pain. She managed to think clearly enough to ask one of the older boys to get her cell phone out of her backpack and to explain to him how to call the emergency services. By the time a neighbor dashed out to help, the ambulance was already on its way. Serena asked the neighbor to store her bike for her and to call and ask her sister Anita to meet her at the hospital. Serena was able to stay lucid and coherent at the hospital as the doctors x-rayed her shoulder and fitted her with a sling. She had Anita cancel the two sales calls she had scheduled for that afternoon; she even thought to schedule her first physical therapy appointment before she left the emergency room. Serena’s prefrontal cortex managed her body’s stress resiliently, enabling her to ask for and get the help she needed as quickly as possible.
Skill 1: Maintaining Equanimity
For 2,500 years, Buddhist practices that teach equanimity have helped practitioners such as Serena calm the body and the mind, allowing them to return to the window of tolerance, enabling them to perceive events clearly and respond wisely. Here’s a simple practice to help you cultivate a sense of equanimity.
Exercise 1: Cultivating Equanimity
1. Sit or lie in a comfortable position. Settle your awareness into a sense of presence, relaxing into this moment, here and now.
2. Notice anything you are experiencing in this moment — the pressure of the chair or floor against your body, a realization that you forgot to buy toothpaste yesterday, an anxiety about paying tuition for the college your daughter has set her heart on attending, concern about early signs of dementia in an aging parent
3. Notice your reaction to what you’re noticing. Notice your reaction to forgetting the toothpaste, the anxiety about the tuition, your concern about the dementia. Then notice any further reaction to those reactions, any judgments or worrying or planning in response to the initial reactions.
4. Choose to let go of all of that reacting and noticing the reactions. Return your awareness to simply being in this moment, breathing here and now.
5. Continue to practice noticing your reactions and your reactions to your reactions and then letting them go, returning to the window of tolerance. You are using the process of deconditioning to retrain your brain; be persistent.
There are many times when it’s appropriate and necessary to focus on a problem and try to resolve it. This exercise is teaching your brain to choose to return to the window of tolerance as a prelude to any skillful problem solving later. If it seems impossible to find the calm of the window of tolerance at all, seek a place in your body that is calm — your elbow or your big toe. Find some place out of the vortex of worry and focus your attention there. Return your attention there when you let go of your reactions and your reactions to your reactions.
When you first begin practicing equanimity, resting in the window of tolerance may seem like only a tiny break from all the worry churning in your mind. Keep practicing; keep retraining the brain. The window of tolerance is your natural baseline state of equilibrium. When you persevere in the practice, you can attain a steady physiological state of equilibrium from which you can begin to solve your problems. Over time, equanimity practice helps you expand your window of tolerance to handle bigger stressors with calm; you become more and more resilient.
The Neuroscience of Why Cultivating Equanimity Returns Us to Our Window of Tolerance
The Buddhist tradition teaches that suffering is inherent in the human condition: no one is immune to sickness, old age, and death and a host of other losses. However, as the teachings add, we don’t have to add to our suffering by reacting in ways that are harmful or inappropriate.
As we have learned, every experience of reactivity creates a pattern of neural firing in the brain. Repeated neural firings reinforce the pattern of reactivity, adding to our suffering. If we get upset watching the evening news and then stay upset through dinner, staying in reactivity is adding to our suffering and possibly to the suffering of people around us. If we react to being upset by shutting down and withdrawing, or collapsing into helplessness, then we aren’t engaged in resolving the stressors, either: we’re reinforcing the patterns of not acting. Returning our awareness to our window of tolerance gives the brain a breather from reactivity. When the firing patterns in the brain are calm again, yet engaged and alert, we have created the state of mind from which we can solve our problems wisely and efficiently.
Recovering Our Balance through the Balance of Others
We learned in chapter 1 that fear — the body’s response to a stressor — triggers the drive for attachment, our inborn reaching out for help and protection from another person. If, in our early years, our parents were able to soothe our fear with comforting touch, words, and behaviors, our developing nervous system learned to calm down and stay actively engaged, too. In effect, our parents’ prefrontal cortex regulated our own. Through positive experiences, our developing prefrontal cortex learned how to perform this most basic function for resilience — regulating the stress response — on its own.
When that conditioning goes well, the developing prefrontal cortex can recognize the rev-up of stress or the shutting down in reaction to stress. It can direct the use of neurotransmitters to calm the lower brain’s alarm center, the amygdala, and stay in the window of tolerance. (You will learn in chapters 11 and 12 to activate the release of these neurotransmitters.) And the prefrontal cortex can still use the regulation of another person to stay within the window of tolerance, too.
Skill 2: Resonating with the Calm of Others to Calm Ourselves Down
Because of the efficiency of the relational resonance circuit, which allows us to pick up the physical and emotional vibe of another person, just being near a person who is calm, in his or her window of tolerance, helps us return to our own window of tolerance. For example, Joe’s silent presence and equanimity helped Nathan and Dan return to a calm state. The nurse who sat with me in the parking lot after my dad’s stroke helped me recover my equilibrium. Someone being present in the room with us helps us relax and get our taxes done, and the calm presence of someone else by our side helps us believe we can get to the top of the hill. It’s a wise harnessing of our neuroplasticity to have someone nearby who can help us stay calm if we’ve just witnessed or caused a car accident or there’s a bomb scare in the building where we work. At any moment when we know we are revving up and need to return to our window of tolerance, we do well to find someone whose calm can calm us down, too.
Exercise 2: Resonating with the Calm of Others to Calm Ourselves Down
The next time you’re in a situation that might cause your own nervous system to rev up and push you out of your window of tolerance, like flying during a thunderstorm, you can practice picking up the vibe of someone else’s calm to keep yourself calm. In this exercise, it’s the physical proximity of the calmer person that is helping your regulate your own nervous system, even if the person is not someone you’re close to personally. Of course, you can rely on the calm of people who know you well to help yourself calm down, too. You can even use memories of people who care about you and support you to calm yourself.
1. Pick a partner for this exercise. If you’re in a public place, this person may not even know you’ve chosen her. First notice and name the stress response in your own body — mild, moderate, or severe.
2. Tune into the calm you can pick up from the other person; synchronize your breathing with hers, if you wish, and receive her calming energy into the energy field of your own body. Continue receiving her calming energy until you do feel calm again.
3. Reflect on your experience. Notice whatever calming your body was able to do.
Trust the calming; you can learn to do this more and more easily with practice, and each time you do it, you are rewiring your brain for resilience. By using the calm of another person to help you calm yourself, you are developing one of the five Cs of coping — learning how to stay calm in a crisis.
The Neuroscience of Resonating with the Calm of Others to Calm Ourselves Down
Dyadic regulation is a term used to describe how the calm in one person’s nervous system can regulate and calm down the nervous system of another. (Dyad in this context refers to two people interacting with each other.) Dyadic regulation is the process by which the brain of a calm, well-regulated parent teaches the brain of a fussy baby to calm down and soothe itself: it provides the conditioning that enables the baby’s prefrontal cortex to learn to regulate its autonomic nervous system (ANS). Dyadic regulation is operating any time a friend soothes another friend over the loss of a romance or the death of a pet. It operates when a calm person takes charge and leads others to safety from a burning building without panic breaking out.
Dyadic regulation can also help us reengage with ourselves, with others, or with a stressful situation when our survival responses take us in the direction of numbing out or collapsing into helplessness. The reassurance of someone who is comfortably in his or her window of tolerance can encourage us to regroup and try again, too.
Two structures in the brain contribute to effective dyadic regulation. One is the vagus nerve in the brain stem, where all resonance begins. The ventral branch of the vagus nerve perceives safety, trust, and calm in situations where there might be danger or life threat and can then slow down our heart rate and breathing or help us stay connected when our own response might be to collapse. A strong vagal tone in a calm person can evoke a similar response in the brain stem of another person. This vagal regulation is not cognitive or conscious. (Though, of course, thinking our way to a sense of safety and calm can work, too; it just happens more slowly.) Strengthening our own vagal tone by interacting with well-regulated people is one way that the brain learns to regulate itself and return to its window of tolerance.
The other structure is the fusiform gyrus, the small structure in the right hemisphere of the brain that the prefrontal cortex uses to recognize facial expressions. Studies have shown that when one person sees calm in the facial expression of another person, activity in the amygdala — the fear center — in the first person calms down. The functioning of both of these structures is developed through eye contact and mirror neurons, as in relationships of secure attachment and between a true other and a true self.
Losing Our Equilibrium Is Normal; Recovering Our Equilibrium Is Learnable
The involuntary revving up and shutting down that the prefrontal cortex is regulating are the normal, hard-wired survival responses of the lower brain that keep us alive, both as a species and as individuals. (See chapter 1.) The amygdala — the central alarm system of the lower brain — assesses in a very rapid, fairly primitive way signals of safety, danger, or life threat. If it detects no danger, we remain in equilibrium: we keep calm and carry on. If it detects possible danger, it relays that information through the insula to the prefrontal cortex for a more comprehensive (though slower) assessment. When the prefrontal cortex decides for itself on the most resilient, flexible response, including the possibility of connecting to others for help, it sends its own signals back down to the amygdala, regulating the unconscious revving up or shutting down of our nervous system and bringing us back into the window of tolerance. (The prefrontal cortex gets significant help in its assessment from the vagus nerve in the brain stem, which can activate the brain’s resonance circuit to help us connect with others and act as a brake on the amygdala.)
While the prefrontal cortex is evaluating information coming from the amygdala, the amygdala is already activating the two branches of the autonomic nervous system — the sympathetic and the parasympathetic — to act like the gas pedal and brakes of a car. The sympathetic activates us to get us moving. The parasympathetic deactivates us to stop us from moving. (See table 4.)
| Table 4. The Window of Tolerance | ||
| Sympathetic activation | When fear is regulated or absent: interest, curiosity, exploration, play, productivity, enthusiasm |
When fear is not regulated: fight-flight-freeze response; too revved up; agitation, anxiety, panic |
| Window of tolerance | Physiological baseline of equanimity: calm and relaxed; engaged and alert | |
| Parasympathetic deactivation | When fear is regulated or absent: relaxation, reverie, daydreaming, napping, falling asleep after making love |
When fear is not regulated: submit-collapse response; fainting, dissociation, numbness |
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is the branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) that mobilizes our bodies to act. When the amygdala responds to a sense of danger with fear, the SNS can move us to connect with others, if our early experiences in attachment relationships conditioned the brain to do that. If the brain learned that reaching out to others led to comfort, soothing, and protection — which is the evolutionary function of secure attachment — then our automatic survival response will be to connect. The nervous system is calmed down by the presence of a calm other, and we return to our window of tolerance. From there we are free to go off and explore and play.
When there’s no fear, the SNS can still activate us to move in the world, experiencing interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, and joy, while remaining in the window of tolerance. A well-regulated activation is what fuels creativity, productivity, exploration, play, and all manner of engaging and bonding with others. Our daughter can be nervous and excited about her upcoming piano recital but stay within her window of tolerance. She can feel relieved and relaxed when it’s over, still within the window. We’re alert and engaged, but not in trouble.
If connection to others has not become the automatic response to fear, the sympathetic nervous system moves us into the mode of fight-flight-freeze. We move to fight against the danger: in a car accident, this might lead to yelling at the driver who rear-ended us. We move to flee from the danger, perhaps driving away from the scene of an accident if we hit the other car. Or, even if our nervous system is revved up, our body might freeze, like a deer in the headlights, not moving or talking until the police arrive.
These automatic survival responses can be conditioned into habitual responses. We lash out at someone who disparages our carefully constructed way of being in the world before we think about consequences or consider his or her point of view. We panic when we realize our wallet is not in our pocket and start running around out of an urgent sense that we need to do something, but if we act without thinking, we might make things worse. If we are locked in automatic patterns of survival responses because of years of conditioning or past traumas, we may always walk away from an argument and refuse to engage, or we may always pour gasoline on the fire of any argument, yelling and refusing to listen. These are not resilient responses.
The other main branch of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), has a largely deactivating function: it slows us down or even shuts us down to prevent us from moving. When there’s no fear, the parasympathetic branch relaxes us into not moving, as in the deep calm we can experience in some forms of meditation, taking a nap on the beach, and falling asleep after making love. Our bodies are calm and relaxed, still within the window of tolerance, but not necessarily engaged and alert. (Mindfulness practice, as a form of meditation, keeps us very much within the window of tolerance, calm and relaxed as well as engaged and alert.)
When we experience fear — and if connection to others has not become the automatic response — the parasympathetic branch may act to immobilize us through modes of submit or collapse. We submit to the danger, not asserting ourselves with the driver who hit us, or we collapse, numbing out, becoming paralyzed and dissociated, not “there” to deal. These automatic deactivating survival responses can be conditioned, too: we may have learned to give in in an argument without standing up for ourselves, so that we find ourselves without a backbone when we need one.
When the lower brain senses life threat, a primitive branch of the dorsal vagal nerve sends signals from the brain stem to the heart, lungs, and gut to shut down almost completely. People can faint from the sudden drop in blood pressure caused by this reaction, the body’s early survival response of playing dead so the lion won’t eat you.
Why It’s Sometimes Difficult to Return to the Window of Tolerance
All these survival responses are normal and, in their own way, resilient: they keep us alive so that we can thrive another day. But glitches in these survival responses can make it hard to come back into our window of tolerance.
Glitch 1: Fast-Track Survival Responses Preempt the Slow-Track Reflection
The brain structures responsible for triggering our survival responses — the brain stem, the autonomic nervous system, the amygdala, and other structures of the limbic system — operate in milliseconds, always outside our awareness. For millions of years, our brains have been hard-wired to react instantly to perceived threat or danger. We can jump out of the way of a speeding car or catch a falling child without having to think about it. We turn away from someone who gives us the creeps in one-tenth of the time that our higher, “thinking” brain needs to even register anything about that person. Much as we evolved to play dead so the lion wouldn’t eat us, we can quickly disappear in a fog of dissociation so no one can find us.
The prefrontal cortex operates on a slow track. It takes three to five seconds to register that an event has occurred. The advantage of the slower processing is that the prefrontal cortex has the capacity to complete a far more comprehensive assessment and generate far more options, far more choices, far more flexibility in how to respond. Because the lower brain operates so much faster than the higher brain, it can cause us to respond to an event before the higher brain even knows anything is happening. In the time it takes the prefrontal cortex to decide whether what’s lying in our path is a snake or a stick, the amygdala has already caused us to jump aside. (The slow track can sometimes be very slow: we’ve all experienced something taking days to dawn on us, or needing a week or two to connect the dots between one insight and another.)
Slow-track processing is not a problem if the prefrontal cortex catches the lower brain’s reactivity quickly enough. Sometimes, however, our survival responses can hijack us into an inappropriate response before our prefrontal cortex manages to do the necessary reflection. When we feel threatened, we can reactively shake a fist in somebody’s face, storm out the door, or freeze like a deer in the headlights. Or we might cave in or fall apart. Training our brains to pause before reacting, to give the prefrontal cortex the few seconds it needs to process the situation — as we learn to do in equanimity practice — is essential to responding resiliently.
Developing equanimity requires an understanding of our past conditioning. The amygdala operates entirely outside of our conscious awareness and can use only past conditioning to assess a situation and signal the ANS what to do. Given the brain’s negativity bias, the amygdala is more likely to generate a stress response, perceiving danger or threat even where there may not be any.
The prefrontal cortex has its own conditioned patterns, too. Early experiences of fears not being regulated may slant its interpretations and responses toward the negative. This is precisely why the experiences that conditioned our earliest patterns of response can be so powerful. For the rest of our lives, both the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex continue to draw on these conditioned patterns to evaluate new situations. So our body’s stress responses are rooted not in any particular event but rather in the meaning the brain attributes to that event and our conditioned response to that perceived meaning.
If our earliest experiences did not condition us to regulate our survival responses effectively, the prefrontal cortex may have not fully developed its capacities for self-regulation. We may need hours to calm our bodies down after an outburst of anger, causing more harm in the meantime. Or we may have learned survival strategies for coping with potential harm that were brilliant in the schoolyard but don’t work so well in the office. We may automatically remove ourselves from any situation that seems threatening, missing out on opportunities to engage with new people at work or school, or to move our lives forward in a resilient way.
Glitch 2: Stress Responses Can Knock the Prefrontal Cortex out of Commission
The hormone cortisol is the neurotransmitter of the stress response. Its release in the body gets us moving to save our lives. The signal to release cortisol comes from the amygdala. In perceiving a possible threat, the amygdala essentially asks, “Have we seen anything like this before?” It compares the current experience to its bank of implicit memories and within nanoseconds returns an answer: “This is okay or even good,” or “This is bad or even dangerous.” This hypervigilant processing of experience never stops, even in our sleep. (In our window of tolerance, it leads to pleasant dreams; outside that window of tolerance, it results in nightmares.)
The amygdala assesses not only perceived physical or external stressors but also psychological ones, like a new romantic interest failing to call back, not having enough money in the bank to pay this month’s mortgage, or a gash on the leg that isn’t healing. If it assesses the stressor to be dangerous or threatening, it immediately activates the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which immediately signals the body: “Don’t just sit there; do something!” Or, if somewhere along the way we learned that taking action was itself a dangerous thing to do, that conditioning may stop us dead in our tracks so that we do nothing.
The effects caused by unregulated surges of cortisol can temporarily knock out the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. When I’m already late for work and I can’t find my car keys, if I stress about that, for sure I won’t be able to see them even when they’re right in front of me. If we’re not in our window of tolerance — for example, if we’re tired or already stressed by other crises — a surge of cortisol coursing through our system can cause it to run amok. The amygdala can release cortisol, but it has no mechanism to turn it off; that is a function of the prefrontal cortex.
When the functioning of our prefrontal cortex is derailed by a stress response, even temporarily, we can remain stuck in a chronic state of alarm, agitation, hostility, rage, panic, or terror — or stuck in numbness, lethargy, or depression for a longer period of time than is good for us. In these states, reality testing becomes impaired, our judgment becomes compromised, and discernment and planning may be preempted by impulsive reactivity or by paralysis. Our explicit memories of resilient coping aren’t available to quell the fear response. We have lost our balance; we have lost our resilience.
There are substantial costs to not being able to regulate the cortisol flowing through our system. Cortisol suppresses the immune system: the message to act now to escape a threat puts other systems in the body on hold. Studies show that chronic stress can increase the risk of contracting heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, and cancer. “Stress kills” is no empty slogan.
Cortisol also destroys new brain cells and new synaptic connections among cells. This cell death especially affects the hippocampus, where new experiences are encoded into explicit memory, enabling the brain to learn. To encode new memory, the hippocampus has to generate new neurons and new neuronal connections. It is the most neuroplastic of all structures in the brain and thus one of the most vulnerable to the toxic effects of cortisol. By damaging the capacity for conscious learning from experience, a poorly regulated flow of cortisol impairs our ability to develop more adaptive, resilient responses; we default to the hard-wired survival response, causing a kind of vicious circle.
Pulling It All Together
• Everyone’s resilience at times goes awry. There’s no shame or blame in this. Our survival responses are biologically hard-wired, and less-than-optimal conditioning is the human condition.
• For the same reasons, losing our equilibrium at times is inevitable. This chapter shows the importance of learning to return to the physiological state of equilibrium — calm and relaxed, yet engaged and alert — known as the window of tolerance, the somatic prerequisite of resilience.
• The prefrontal cortex regulates our body-brain’s survival responses to stress — fight-flight-freeze or submit-collapse — so that we can return to the window of tolerance, which allows us to deal with stressors resiliently.
• With an understanding of the survival response, we can use skills of equanimity practice and dyadic regulation to help us stay both calm and engaged. We can recognize the adaptive activation of our autonomic nervous system (through the sympathetic branch), which leads to curiosity, exploration, play, and creativity, and the fear-based activation, which can lead to the fight-flight-freeze response.
• We can also recognize the adaptive deactivation of our ANS (through the parasympathetic branch), which leads to relaxation, daydreaming, and sleep, and the fear-based deactivation, which can lead to collapse, numbing out, and withdrawal.
• Implicit-only, fast-track survival responses can operate so quickly that they preempt the slower functioning of the prefrontal cortex to regulate our reactivity, thus temporarily derailing our resilience. The unregulated flow of cortisol can further impair our capacities to recover our resilience.
In the next chapter you will learn tools and exercises to overcome these glitches in our nervous system’s responses. The exercises use somatic (body-based) resources to retain or regain our equilibrium and then to recondition those responses. This is resilience in action.