Plunge into Calm

Happy Tuesday! Today's newsletter is a different format—a little longer and a little more personal. If you have thoughts, questions, or comments after reading just hit reply and shoot me a message. I'd love to hear from you.

Disclaimer: I am not a therapist or trauma informed specialist. My intention in writing this is to create awareness and lend some ideas for practices we can implement to help regulate our nervous systems and move through the smaller life stresses we all encounter.

The lingering dream.

You know the feeling when you wake up from a bad dream, and even though you know it wasn’t real, you still can’t quite shake the weird feeling in your body?

Here’s why:

1) Nervous systems take time to regulate. While our brain recognizes the dream is over and wasn’t real to begin with, our body’s physiological reactions can linger long after waking, keeping our nervous system in a dysregulated state.

2) We torture ourselves with our minds. We continue thinking about the dream, and our thoughts perpetuate an imagined reality that the body perceives as an actual reality. This hints at the broader subject of how thinking is the root of all psychological suffering. I'm currently reading Don't Believe Everything You Think, which has been a great deeper dive on the subject.

Our bodies often remember what our brains have moved on from. A lingering dream is just one example of how this phenomenon appears in our lives. What happens when real life hits you with something terrifying?

My real life nightmare.

This weekend I was home alone with my three kids, trying to get them ready to leave the house. If you’ve ever wrangled three kids out the door, you know it feels like trying to catch butterflies on a windy day. I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen Jacob, my soon to be 3-year-old, in awhile. He’s an independent little guy, so I wasn’t immediately worried, but when I called his name and heard nothing, I started to panic.

I ran through the house, checked the yard, the garage, everywhere—nothing. At this point, my mind went straight to worst-case scenarios: Did he choke on the snack he was eating? Did he get out the front door and was lost in the neighborhood? My older kids were crying and I was terrified. I even called 911, convinced that if I found him in the house, he’d be unconscious.

And then, as I’m on the phone with the 911 operator, Jacob walked in from the garage, totally unfazed. Turns out, he’d gone out to the car and buckled himself into his car seat. He was ready to leave for our outing to Touch-a-Truck (which we were nowhere close to being ready for).

When he walked in, I immediately started shaking, similar to how you would shiver from being cold. This has happened to me before—after childbirth, for example. Shaking is one of the the body’s ways of releasing pent-up energy from a fight-or-flight response. My body had been primed to spring into action, and once the danger passed, it was trying to return to equilibrium. Shaking (similar to crying) helps discharge the excess energy and complete the stress cycle. If you suppress this natural response and don’t let it run its course, it can lead to stored trauma in the body, potentially causing issues like PTSD, anxiety, or chronic stress.

We slathered him in kisses, discussed rules for going in the garage alone, and finally got ourselves together and headed to Touch-a-Truck.

Our bodies remember.

Let me tell you, the sprawling Touch-a-Truck event was the absolute worst place to be when you’re already in an dysregulated state. It was packed with small children. Horns were honking, sirens blaring, and it was 95 degrees with brutal humidity. I couldn’t handle it. I was snapping at my kids and my husband, my heart was racing, and everything felt overwhelming.

Although the event would have been overstimulating for anyone, my perceived reality of my environment and my family was completely distorted because of my dysregulated nervous system.

When we got home later that afternoon, I immediately crashed and fell asleep. If you’re familiar with Polyvagal Theory, you’ll recognize that I went straight into dorsal vagal. This is the body’s last mode of defense—it literally shuts down to conserve energy and recover. We cycle through this state all the time after being in stimulating environments or having a heightened emotional experience.

Re-grounding.

The next morning I woke up still feeling off. Partially because my kids have no chill, but I still didn’t have the bandwidth I usually do. My body was holding on to the experience from the morning, and I couldn't think or logic my way out of it. Luckily, I’ve spent the last year nerding out on nervous system regulation.

Here’s what I did:

Stillness: I prioritized meditation. Our sympathetic nervous system is what puts our bodies into action, so when we sit in stillness this gives the parasympathetic branch time to kick in and promote relaxation. During the stillness of meditation is when you can notice the raw sensations of the body. I found I was holding tension in my hip flexors, belly, chest and jaw. Sitting in meditation is also an opportunity watch your thoughts—are you looping through the traumatic event over and over again in your mind? Are you still reliving the experience and keeping yourself stuck in the stress cycle?
Cold Plunge: Cold exposure activates the vagus nerve and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping to relax the body and regulate a sympathetically activated nervous system.
Breathwork: I did a lively 45-minute breathwork session. While it might seem counterintuitive to do activating breathwork when you’re trying to calm down and de-stress, it can help to discharge trapped emotions and complete the stress cycle.
Movement: I put on some music and did 30 minutes of unstructured movement. I let my body move however it wanted—squats, spinal flexion and extension, a little dancing, and modified Qigong. Movement, like shaking, helps release stored emotions from the body.

By the end of it, I was back to myself again. It’s amazing what a little nervous system work can do.

What qualifies as trauma?

Trauma is anything that is too much, too fast, too soon. Trauma is an incomplete cycle in the physiology - something that wasn’t said, a movement that wasn’t made. It is never an event; it is how our system processes that event.

- an excerpt from my breathwork facilitator training

Trauma feels like a very buzzy word right now, at least in my world. As someone who had a wonderful childhood and overall great life, I found it hard to accept the idea that I could have experienced trauma, let alone have unprocessed trauma stored in my body. It wasn’t until I read The Body Keeps the Score and the above definition of trauma in my facilitator training l that I even considered the possibility of having had experienced trauma myself.

Trauma is not an event. Something can feel traumatic, even if it ends up to be nothing at all (like my happily lost child), and can remain stored in the body until it’s fully released. While not a catastrophic mistake, I clearly was not ready to go to Touch-a-Truck. I needed time to let my nervous system recover, and because I didn't allow myself that space, I had to deal with it later.

The concept of "embodied emotions", which once seemed "woo" and esoteric to me, is now becoming mainstream. A growing number of researchers and therapists agree that our bodies do store unprocessed emotions.

This awareness is part of why breathwork and other somatic practices are becoming so popular. This is also why these practices deserve the upmost respect. Digging into trauma isn't something to take lightly. Finding the correct tools along with the proper support and space for this work is essential for healing.