How often are you in Fight or Flee?

This Survival response comes from the Sympathetic branch of our central nervous system.

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Last Month we focused on the Ventral Vagus nerve. This month I will offer explanations of Sympathetic and how we can use tools to get back to Ventral (aka regulated state) when we are in the Fight or Flight response of sympathetic.

One tool from Polyvagal work that I would like to offer today is being able to gain some awareness around what happens within our body when we are in sympathetic.

This tool has 2 parts

1- Exploring My Regulated Sympathetic Landscape

2- Exploring My Survival Sympathetic Landscape

We will go over the regulated landscape this week and the survival landscape next week.

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When we talk about our sympathetic nervous system, we often just hear about our survival fight and flight response that our sympathetic is in charge of...

In it's everyday role though, our sympathetic nervous system influences our breath and heart, including their mobility and rhythms. It gives our body the energy and mobility to move through out our day.

Our body is designed to have regulated energy and mobility within our system and also designed to kick into survival when we are in danger, which is the hyper aroused state of fight or flight.

However, when we have trauma, our survival doesn't shut off and parts of our system stay and get stuck in the fight or flight state.

This tool helps us start to understand what a regulated state feels like and "looks" like internally. To remind ourselves and gain awareness, that regulation is part of our body's natural functioning. This awareness and experience with this tool, offers safety to our body, which starts us on the path of being able to get out of survival and heal our trauma.

The second part, (that we will discuss next week) helps us safely, gain some awareness of what happens within our body when we are in fight or flight.

Both parts take practice, but awareness like this is the first step to change. You can't change what you don't know or can't see.

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Here's how the tool works...

This week, we will focus on part 1- Exploring My Regulated Sympathetic Landscape ....and here are 2 examples of regulated.....

We use imagery for both....

I love to Mountain bike. One of my happy places is the Salt Rim trail in Utah. I can easily go to that place and get into my body. I can imagine all the muscles in my legs and arms moving and I go up steep hills and over rocks. I can feel my heart pounding and my breath heavy. I can feel the sunshine on my skin and how it nourishes the cells inside my skin. I feel strong and powerful.

This is a level of high mobility that is regulated and calming in an energized and invigorated way.

Maybe for you it is exercise or dancing. Maybe its laughing with friends. Maybe it's an amusement park....what gets your heart and body pumping in a strong, fun, invigorating way?

Once you have thought of an image of the time you were in this state....here is an imagery practice....

1. Feel the energy in your body.
2. Imagine the features internally in this space (like I thought of the muscles, heart beat, breath & sunshine nourishing my skin cells).
3. Imagine the landmarks in the physical space (mine was the hills, rocks, sun and my bike).
4. Take time to sit and "walk around" in this imagery, either within your body or the physical space you are imagining. (For the sake of time in this newsletter, I didn't go into detail in this step. I invite you to really explore your space and if you can't stay here long that's ok. I couldn't either when I first started).

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Then you can do this again for a lower level of mobility.... (both high and low mobility are good and helpful for us, one is not better than the other and awareness of both helps us heal).

I love to also sit in a quiet room in my house, in the early morning hours and do a meditation or journaling. When I am in this space and I go within, my heart is at a regular beat, my breathe is slow and even, I can imagine my blood flowing freely and with ease throughout my body...

Can you imagine a space where you are in a regulated calm state? Where your body is functioning to simply pump blood and oxygen throughout your body......Where your breathe and body are functioning at their normal pace......?

Is your space sitting in a park, laying in bed, watching tv, listening to music......?

Once you have this space in your mind, I invite you to let it become an imagery practice, and explore this space as go through that list of four from above and really explore this regulated state as well.

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And....if it's hard for you to get in a regulated state or yours looks different than mine, nothing has gone wrong, I promise. And....this is what I help my clients with. If you want help, reach out and get on a call with me and I can walk you through these tools and help you get to regulation.

My regulated state, looks much different now than it did, even a year ago.

I used to be only either/or in my body......I was either hyper aroused (sympathetic) or shut down (dorsal).

These type of tools helped me to slowly build capacity to sit in my good (regulated) moments too. These experiences offered my sympathetic nervous system a chance to build up capacity for awareness of what regulation looked like in my body. And it was powerful to know that I could actually be regulated at times....

You can gain more regulation. And more awareness of the regulation, leads to more regulations. It's a pretty cool cycle.

Give it a try. ❤️

And.....I'd love to hear about it, so reach out anytime.

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Remember, ❤️

You Matter. Your Healing Matters. You Are Worth It!

P.S. When we are in this regulated state of our sympathetic system, we are also able to tap into our ventral as we connect with ourselves in this powerful inner regulated space. Pretty Cool, right?!?

P.S.S. We are continuing our Polyvagal Theory Series for the month of April.

This Theory describes the Autonomic nervous system that incorporates the Parasympathetic & Sympathetic Nervous systems.

Parasympathetic includes Dorsal and Ventral (We talked about Ventral a lot in March and will discuss Dorsal in May).

Sympathetic is this month.

P.S.S.S. I give a break down of the Polyvagal Theory on my podcast Here.​