Survival Mode Amsterdam
Many of the problems we deal with in today’s world are rooted in a deregulated nervous system. It is possible to retrain a deregulated nervous system.
Dealing with Fight or Flight
Fight or Flight?
You meet someone whom you find attractive. He steps a bit closer and suddenly you want to run away. Your boss walks into the room and suddenly your mind goes completely blank. Your husband puts the dirty dishrag on the kitchen counter and you explode. A car cuts you off in traffic and you have violent thoughts about the other driver.
After your body calms down, you sometimes realise that your reaction was not really in proportion to what had occurred. And yet, it happens over and over again. You make up a story: the person wasn’t really your type, you just made a mistake at work and your boss found out, your husband never listens to you, the other driver almost ruined your shiny car.
Slowly you begin to notice that everything triggers you. Your stress levels go up, signs of burn-out appear. You notice that your heart is often racing, you are again out of breath, your shoulders hurt, you’re leaning over instead of standing up straight. So what is going on?
Our Nervous System
A lot of this has to do with our nervous system, especially what we call the vagus nerve, the nerve that wanders through your body, regulating your breathing, your heartbeat, your digestion and, in this case, your fight or flight reaction. So why is your body reacting this way? (Notice that I say your body, not your mind. Your body reacts, you feel the anger in your body and, as I mentioned before, your mind then starts to make up a story about what happened.It is also important to realise that your body doesn’t react rationally, it reacts to signals that it picks up.)
Bottlenecks
There are basically two bottlenecks here. The first is that your nervous system gets regulated in the first few years of your life (even starting in the womb). When we grow up in a surrounding where there is uncertainty or danger (a mother whose moods are unpredictable, a father who gets angry), then our nervous system gets regulated towards being alert and easily triggered. We then go through life with our body sensing danger everywhere.
Overwhelming
The second bottleneck is that our nervous system gets overloaded in a world in which everything is urgent. If we don’t answer an app immediately, people will reject us. If we start to feel exhausted but need to finish a job, we push through. Otherwise we will definitely get fired and have to live on the street. These overwhelming thoughts are our nervous system trying to navigate this modern jungle that we live in. (Physiologically we are wired that when we go into fight or flight, blood is routed to our adrenal glands, to our heart and lungs, to our muscles so that we can take action. Blood and oxygen is reduced in our brain so that it is more difficult to think clearly.)
We then resign ourselves to the fact that we get easily scared, cannot connect to people, or connect to people that are toxic and continually trigger us. Continually tired of being in fight or flight mode. This is just how I am.
A Deregulated Nervous System
Many of the problems we deal with in today’s world are rooted in a deregulated nervous system. Looping thoughts, negative beliefs about ourselves, needing to feel control (where the dishrag hangs can really feel so important), obsessive behaviour, dissociation are all symptoms of fight, flight or freeze.
Re-regulating
The good news is that with mindfulness and hypnotherapy we can learn to re-regulate. Release old energy that is keeping our system trapped in old patterns and teach our system that it is ok to open up, connect, be vulnerable and feel safe.
On the one hand, there are simple ways to regulate, such as putting our hand on our heart and feeling what it does, or re-learning to breathe properly. These things do require practice though, it is so easy to forget in the chaos of life.
Learning about your own nervous system, what fight or flight feels like, can also help you to learn how to navigate it. If we don’t know what is happening, we cannot change or heal it.
Using Hypnotherapy
With hypnotherapy, we can go back to the moment that we started believing that we weren’t good enough and transform this belief into something that is positive, more suitable to who we are now. These are some of the ways to learn to re-regulate our nervous system, to feel safer in the world and see opportunities rather than just danger.
If you recognise yourself in this description and would like to learn more about re-regulation, feel free to schedule a free introductory meeting via Zoom with me.