Greetings, Reader!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten so many beautiful messages in response to my series of newsletters about the ‘F’ survival responses from readers like you who are starting to realize that hustling (flight), controlling (fight), numbing out (freeze), and people-pleasing (fawn) are acts of self-preservation, not self-abandonment.
Your nervous system is supposed to activate in response to stress and potential danger. That’s not a failure, it's an intelligent, biological adaptation designed to keep you alive.
At some point in your life, you learned that you had to protect yourself. Because your nervous system uses past experiences to predict what will happen in the future, responding to the world from a place of protection can become encoded, causing you to default to these survival responses even when there isn’t any significant danger.
The irony is that when survival responses become chronic patterns, you become disconnected from yourself in order to preserve your connection with others.
From a nervous system perspective, connection provides protection. In times and places where humans lived communally and relied on each other more directly for survival, disconnection from the pack was catastrophic. Many of us carry those ancestral fears in our bodies. We worry that we are not enough, or that we are too much. We fear the rejection that could arise if we were to be honest about what we need.
That internal tension can be so profound that we cope by disconnecting from ourselves as the ultimate act of self-preservation.
This is why you find yourself staring at your screen for hours when you have to write an important email, compulsively cleaning your house instead of facing the looming conflict, spending hours tweaking the tiniest details so that your work is absolutely perfect, or sacrificing your own needs over and over again.
These survival responses protect us from feeling the discomfort of our core wounds, but they also keep our nervous systems in a hypervigilant state, making it feel unsafe to be ourselves.
To break the protection spell, we have to reconnect with our bodies.
You cannot think, reason, or force your way out of a survival state because it is a physiological process. When it comes to the nervous system, you can't heal what you are unwilling to feel.
Embodiment rewrites the predictive coding of your nervous system by providing real-time feedback that it is safe to be here, right now, in your own skin. It’s not a practice of enduring or suppressing, but rather of bringing deep self-compassion to your present experience and teaching your nervous system that you won’t abandon yourself when things get uncomfortable.
Instead of trying to "fix" your protective responses, embodiment allows you to shift from protection to presence. This week, when you notice that you are getting pulled back into that survival loop, try these three practices:
Collect Evidence of Safety
When you are stuck in mental loops of hypervigilance, your primal brain assumes you are under siege. Pause, slowly turn your head, and let your eyes take in your actual surroundings and listen to the sounds around you. Let your nervous system confirm: There is no immediate physical threat in this room.
Ask Your Body
Instead of asking, "Why am I feeling so anxious?" (which keeps you trapped in your head), drop your awareness into your body and ask, "Where is the tension in my body right now and what is it trying to protect?" Simply acknowledging the tightness in your chest or jaw without trying to change it signals to your brain that your internal state is safe to inhabit.
Unwind in Micro-Doses
You don't have to drop all your defenses at once. Unclench your teeth by 5%. Let your shoulders drop half an inch. Take one unhurried breath before opening your next email. These micro-reconnections teach your body that downshifting is safe.
When you listen to what your body is communicating and you don't turn away from what you are feeling, your nervous system starts to trust that it will be taken care of, and it can start to bring down the defense shields.
And, when you are situated in yourself, you can form more genuine relationships that give your nervous system the safety, belonging, and connection it craves.
If your nervous system is overprotective and you'd like some support coming home to yourself, let's connect.
Click here to book a free consultation with me.
In love and solidarity,
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Rachel
Doctor of Physical Therapy & Integrative Pain Specialist
Rewire your nervous system and break the cycles of chronic pain, depletion, burnout, and overwhelm so you can be fully present for what matters most in your life.
Start with a free Nervous System Attunement Strategy Session
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PS: Come to the Shelburne Farmer's Market on Saturday, August 15th. I'll be offering free mini-CranioSacral sessions to celebrate Shelburne Day (and Lotus' 4th birthday) and I'd love to see you!
Submit a Question
Have a question you'd love answered or a topic you'd like to learn more about? Anonymously submit your questions and musings to me and I'll respond in a future newsletter, workshop, or maybe even a podcast!
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