It's Not You, It's Your Nervous System

I want to say this to you if you regularly feel overwhelmed, scared or confused by your own behaviour. If you often feel like you are letting yourself down. Letting other people down. If your emotions get the better of you: anxiety, anger, fear, low mood or anything else that’s uncomfortable to feel. Or if you see yourself as lazy, avoidant and unmotivated. I want you to know that it’s not you, it’s your nervous system.

Meet your autonomic nervous system

You might not be familiar with it, but the autonomic nervous system is what controls all the processes in the body that keep you alive without you having to think about it, such as breathing and digesting food and pumping blood around. The ANS sends messages from the brain stem to the rest of your body along the vagus nerve – a huge nerve system that travels down the spine and branches off into all the major parts of the body. According to polyvagal theory, it’s responsible for activating the fight/flight/freeze response when you’re in danger, and bringing you back to a calm baseline (known as ‘rest and digest’) when danger has passed and the stress hormones that flooded the system in activation have been discharged. The whole process is essential for our survival. We need to be reactive to danger when necessary, but we need to spend most of our time in rest and digest to be in optimal health. However. For a million reasons associated with the trappings and stressors of modern life, our nervous systems are fucked. Our bodies are going about believing they are in constant danger, and many of us are spending a lot of our time in an activated state of nervous system arousal, which means we’re stuck in either fight, flight or freeze, or swinging wildly between the three.

For a million reasons associated with the trappings and stressors of modern life, our nervous systems are fucked.

Fight, flight or freeze: choose your own adventure

The fight state manifests as irritability, anger, aggression or all-out rage, which is either directed at others or the self. We all know what it’s like to fly off the handle or witness someone else do it. Internalised anger can come through as self-directed punishment – such as when we self-harm or deprive ourselves of our own needs through behaviours like disordered eating. The flight response manifests as worry, anxiety and panic – very few of us discharge that energy by literally running away from a predator (as we’ve evolved to do), so we get stuck running mentally. When the fight or flight states don’t get to run their course physically and emotionally, we can end up tipping into overwhelm and landing in a freeze state – a sort of numb no-man’s-land where the chronic activation of the nervous system is still taking its toll on the body, we just can’t feel it. I’ve spent a lot my own life numbing myself without knowing that’s what I was doing – through smoking, drinking, medicating, and emotional eating. I needed to do this because I wasn’t ready to feel the things that were bubbling under the surface, and that’s ok. What’s not ok was thinking I was lazy, inconsistent and flawed when in actual fact my survival system had just been in overdrive for a long, long time.

Laziness is a myth

What I couldn’t figure out was why I couldn’t just ‘cope’ like everyone else seemed to. I felt lazy for being unable to just get shit done, and I felt like a failure every time my willpower crumbled and old habits crept back in. I didn’t know I was on a freeze-flood rollercoaster – creeping just above and below the overwhelm line. I was productive enough at work, and my anger and anxiety acted as fuel for a long time, but my dysregulation was so chronic that my coping mechanisms weren’t able to prop it up anymore. The cracks just got deeper and harder to ignore. My freeze was no longer keeping me safe – it was keeping me at a distance from life.

How to stop getting on your own nerves

I say all this because the path to more self-love and acceptance begins with self-compassion. The more we understand ourselves, the more compassion we’re able to hold for the parts we don’t like. It’s one thing to have a dysregulated nervous system and want to heal that, it’s another to shit-pile a load of shame and self-criticism on top. This only contributes to the issue, because if we can’t be safe in our own minds, there’s literally nowhere else to go. So making these subtle shifts in your self-awareness can be a huge step towards healing the nervous system and feeling more in control of your emotions. I have found trauma-informed coaching a really helpful way to explore stuck emotions and move through them in a safe space, and somatic practices like TRE help me release them. There are some excellent resources out there offering in-depth insight into the nervous system and offering practices for building vagal tone. Re-establishing the body as a safe space isn’t always an easy road, but one thing you can do is cut yourself a break. Remember that it’s not you, it's just the most loving part of your evolutionary brain trying to keep you safe – and getting a bit confused.

If any of this resonates and you'd like some advice, drop me a message in the form below.