When I was a child, the word anxiety wasn’t in my vocabulary – not because I wasn’t anxious, but because, a bit like an Inuit who’s never known a balmy summer’s day, I just assumed that the way I felt was how other people felt too.
As I look back at my younger self today, I can see many signs of the hyped-up state within which my nervous system lived. Apart from the physical impacts of irritable bowel syndrome and in time, the chronic illness ME/CFS, my emotional state was also a constant challenge. I was hypersensitive emotionally – overly merging with others’ feelings – and searching for physical and emotional safety was far more of a focus day-to-day than it should have been. Anxiety wasn’t just a state that I sometimes found myself in, but the emotional home I’d normalized to.
Although I might have adapted to the way I felt, there were obvious clues on the surface that my nervous system was running too fast. I ate my food too fast, my mind ran too fast, and I moved too fast. Most notably to others, I also spoke very quickly – for much of my childhood people would constantly ask me to speak more slowly and to stop mumbling. Alas, it did little to help, because of course, for most of us, the way we use our voice isn’t something we tend to consciously modulate and control; instead, it just reflects the state we’re in.
As part of growing my training and experience as a therapist, I did several courses in hypnotherapy. And as I discovered just how important our voice is for intentional communication – which of course is at the heart of any kind of effective therapeutic work – learning to slow down my voice became one of my key focuses.
A few months into one hypnotherapy training course, we were encouraged to practice recording guided meditation and hypnosis sessions – firstly to get used to how our voice sounded, but also to gather feedback from others about how we could improve. Feeling optimistic that my efforts had paid off and that my voice would now be the therapeutic tool I hoped for, I cracked on with my homework.
However, my reaction on hearing the recordings I made was a rather painful and awkward silence. I’d deliberately slowed my voice to what I thought was a calming and soothing pace, but it was still significantly faster than the average person’s speaking voice. I had to halve the speed at which I spoke, and then halve it again to sound even vaguely relaxing.
Early on in my work at The Optimum Health Clinic, I realized that my experience was far from unique – in fact, it was very common. Many of the people I was working with to calm their maladaptive stress response had no idea just how dysregulated their nervous system was. Even if they knew intellectually that they were not in a calm state, the consistency and intensity of their nervous system’s over-arousal was still outside their conscious awareness.
Remember, part of the brilliant design of the human system is our ability to normalize to whatever becomes our consistent experience. And so, to be truly effective in learning to reset our nervous system, we must first become aware of the state it’s in. I’ll say it again: If you can see it, you don’t have to be it.
In Chapter 5 we began to look at how being in a maladaptive stress response will impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health. In this chapter, we’re going to focus on learning to truly recognize when your body is in a state of maladaptive stress response and then understand what’s triggering it.
When it comes to understanding the states of our nervous system, the work of Dr. Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina in the USA, is immensely helpful. Professor Porges’s work has become known as Polyvagal Theory (poly = many; vagal = wandering).
Originally, Porges had been researching the vagus nerve, which connects our brain with our digestion and other bodily systems. He came to realize that there was a fundamental gap in the research into stress, which focused on the activated stress response via the sympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system.
However, this activated stress response didn’t match the lived experience of many of those living with trauma. Indeed, for trauma victims a more common experience is feeling shut down and immobilized, and this often makes them more susceptible to further negative experiences because their ability to defend and fight for themselves isn’t activated.
Put another way, we can be in a stress state without being in the fight or flight state we discussed in Chapter 5. In fact, sometimes our most activated state of stress is a state of freeze or shut-down. The effects of unprocessed trauma, along with ideas about releasing them, are described in the seminal work The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.1
Professor Porges went on to study the parasympathetic nervous system, another part of the autonomic nervous system. The primary nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system is the vagus, which has two pathways originating from different areas of the brainstem – the dorsal pathway and the ventral pathway.
The dorsal vagus is evolutionarily older and is shared with most vertebrates. However, the functioning of the ventral pathway, which is to calm us and connect us socially, is limited to mammals. Professor Porges documented that the more primitive dorsal vagus is responsible for our nervous system shutting down or ‘freezing.’
According to Porges, there are three states that our nervous system can be in: socialization, mobilization, and immobilization. Let’s explore these now.
Polyvagal Theory highlights that human beings are social animals and that our nervous system is wired to relax through positive human interaction. Just as babies relax through co-regulating their nervous system with those of their caregivers, as adults we’re wired to look for safety cues from those around us. In a sense, nourishing contact with other people is more than just a nice experience – it’s a key building block for being in a healing state and sending the message to our nervous system to relax because we’re safe.
When we have positive and supportive experiences with our primary caregivers as children, it not only helps soothe our developing nervous system, but it also sets up a positive foundation for our relationships going forward. Furthermore, it also teaches our nervous system how to self-regulate, and so we can self-soothe when we’re alone.
Ultimately, when our socialization system is activated, we’re in a healing state. This means we can relax deeply, respond appropriately to the world around us, and if we have emotional healing work to do, we’re able to do it.
In this state, we’re ready for action and instinctively prepared to deal with danger. We can do this by fighting it or fleeing (running away from it). In an acute state of fight or flight, we may be aware of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol flooding through our system because we’ll feel primed, or mobilized, for action. Depending on the nature of the situation, emotionally we might feel excited and energized if the stress is positive and fearful and in danger if it’s not.
When we’re in a chronic state of fight or flight (as in the experience I described at the start of the chapter), we’ll likely have normalized to the state we’re in. What’s particularly problematic about this is that the negative impacts on our body are there but we’re unaware of the state that’s driving them. This is when the awareness we’ve been talking about is so important because it allows us to work to calm this response.
When an animal is under extreme threat, sometimes fighting with or running away from the threat is ineffective or likely to make the situation worse. For example, imagine a rabbit pottering around when it suddenly spots a wolf in the distance. The rabbit has no chance of winning in a fight with the wolf, and although it might win the race if it flees, it’s a risky move. So instead, it reflexively collapses and appears to be dead, showing itself as of no interest or threat to the wolf, and indeed hoping it doesn’t even notice it. For the rabbit, freezing and immobilizing itself is the best survival response it has.
Years ago, I saw a live TV show in which a small child, when asked a question by the host, froze, and appeared to almost stop breathing. The host tried multiple ways to get a response, all to no avail – the child had frozen as a form of self-protection, until the spotlight was off them and they could relax again.
Sometimes our nervous system will go into a freeze response because it’s the best option; other times it will do it because of an overload of mobilization. It’s almost as if our system blows a fuse and shuts down in an attempt to protect itself from further threat and danger.
However, despite the lack of movement, there’s often a great deal of energy tied up in sustaining immobilization. What can appear, on the surface, to be a state devoid of energy is in fact one of intense energy demand, which will drain our already depleted system further still.
As you may have noticed, there’s a sequence to these three states of the nervous system. A healing state of socialization is a healthy baseline for the nervous system; however, if we’re triggered into stress, our baseline is raised and we progress to mobilization, which, at its extreme, can turn to immobilization.
Returning to our ECHO model, remember that one of the major impacts of trauma is that it shifts our homeostatic balance, ultimately affecting the baseline to which our nervous system returns. A key part of the work we’re doing in this book is retraining your baseline back to socialization and a normal level of functioning.
When it comes to understanding your nervous system, you don’t just need to be aware of your baseline, but also how you’ve moved away from it in different ways throughout the day. When the homeostatic balance in our nervous system shifts, we’re not just more likely to have a raised baseline, we’re also more likely to be easily affected by people, events, or circumstances, or indeed even the anticipation of any of these.
The things that lead to these sudden increases in the activation of our nervous system are called triggers. For example, have you ever noticed that your nervous system can react to something before you’ve even had a conscious thought about it? Perhaps you meet someone for the first time and immediately dislike and feel unsafe with them. Or you’re walking down the street minding your own business when you have a sudden sense that you need to speed up and get away from a certain person.
What’s particularly interesting about the way we respond to these triggers is that it often happens outside of our conscious awareness. It isn’t that we necessarily recognize something that happens and decide it’s a threat to us. Instead, our unconscious is scanning the environment and deciding if we’re safe or not, long before we can have any kind of conscious reflection about it. This is what Professor Porges calls neuroception.
However, what do you think informs the way your unconscious determines the cues from your environment? You’ve guessed it – the learned experiences from your own trauma history. The more unprocessed emotional trauma we have, the more likely it is that this is coloring and influencing how we’re responding to the world around us. Indeed, the research clearly demonstrates that when we’re in a fight, flight, or freeze state, we’re more likely to misread the cues in our environment and, for example, to perceive someone with a neutral expression as being a danger to us.
Ultimately, there’s a powerful confirmation bias in our unconscious in that it will actively look for and find danger signals where there are none as a way of attempting to keep us safe. This is one of the reasons why healing our trauma is so important – it allows us to learn to respond to the environment around us in a healthy and appropriate way once more.
So, to recap, in the RESET model, your first step is to recognize which state your nervous system is in. Now that we’ve spent some time looking at the key ingredients of your nervous system, I want you to see this in the lived experience of your own body.
We want to understand more about how your nervous system evolves throughout the average day – i.e., what your baseline is, what your triggers are, and how they affect your baseline. Note that we’re talking about normal day-to-day life here, not the exceptional circumstances when triggering a reaction in our nervous system might actually be necessary and appropriate.
As we explore this, it’s very important to remember that each person’s presentation of a maladaptive stress response is unique to them. However, there are some general patterns and trends that can help inform our understanding, and some people find using the scale below to rate their experience of their nervous system a helpful starting point.
10. Completely numb and shut down
9. Disconnected and feelings hard to access
8. Demotivated and feeling stuck
7. Intense anxiety moving into feeling of resignation
6. Mind and body pumping with adrenaline and feeling wired
5. Mind racing, body feeling tense, and trying to think one’s way to a feeling of safety
4. Feeling agitated and finding it hard to completely relax
3. Neutral feeling, but able to relax and enjoy the moment
2. Calm and relaxed and enjoying the company of others
1. Deep sense of relaxation and feeling safe within oneself
As you reflect on this nervous system rating scale, if you can see an easier or more accurate way to rate your own experience of your system, I’d encourage you to use it. This is about helping you to understand your own lived experience, not trying to manipulate it to fit that of some others I’ve just described.
Once you feel reasonably comfortable with the rating scale above, I’d like you to use it to rate your nervous system at certain times each day. I suggest doing this assessment for at least the next three days, but you can do it for longer if you find it helpful to have the additional information. You can download a worksheet to help with this in your companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
On waking: 1–10
Start of active day: 1–10
Lunchtime: 1–10
Mid-afternoon: 1–10
Early evening: 1–10
Bedtime: 1–10
During the night (if you wake): 1–10
Please note that there are no right or wrong scores here. This isn’t about shaming yourself for where your nervous system is right now – it’s about bringing more awareness so we can work on changing what’s happening.
What did you discover from doing this assessment? Did you notice that your nervous system baseline was raised throughout the day, or perhaps there were particular times when there was an obvious increase in activation. Were you mostly in mobilization or immobilization, or did you have a healthy dose of being in a socialization/healing state?
For example, perhaps you noticed that you were activated around seeing a particular family member or doing a certain activity, or that as you became more tired later in the day, your resilience was lower. Ultimately, different things trigger different people.
The good news is that wherever your nervous system is right now, we can work together to reset it to a more normal level of functioning. Growing your awareness of what’s currently happening is a key step toward this.
In my experience, when people complete the exercise that you’ve just done, they commonly say that they don’t even know what’s driving or triggering their nervous system – they just feel like they’re in a perpetual, and at times all-consuming, state of anxiety. It’s almost as if regardless of the content they’re thinking about, the way they’re thinking about it is from a perspective of anxiety.
It’s a little like being tuned in to a podcast in which the guests might change but the core subject is always the same: anxiety. When we’re tuned in to the ‘anxiety podcast,’ anxiety in its many and varied forms is what we get! If this is your experience, and there’s just a constant sense of anxiety – sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground – please don’t worry, because this is also part of what we’re going to work on changing.
When we’re feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated in our nervous system, sometimes the last thing we need is a complex process of awareness and a practice to create change. If you’re feeling like this right now, or in the future as you’re working with this, the good news is that we can distil all of this down to one very simple question: In this moment, are you in a stress state or a healing state? Put another way: Are you in a mobilization or immobilization stress state or are you in a socialization/healing state?
Remember, for our body to heal, it has to be in a healing state. Whether it’s our physical body or our emotional body, when it’s in a stress state, our resources are directed to the demands of sustaining this state to keep us safe. This means those resources are not available for our healthy functioning in day-to-day life, let alone processing our trauma history and doing our healing work.
When we’re in a healing state, our immense capacity for self-healing is unlocked. The more we work to retrain our homeostatic balance back to a healing state, the more we unlock this capacity. In our next step toward this, we’re going to examine some of the personality patterns that are driving your nervous system away from a healing state.