There is POWER in your posture
Most of us are aware that non-verbal behaviour like posture, eye contact and movement greatly influence how others perceive us.
Category: Holistic mental heath/wellbeing Page 1 of 2
“If you think of your body as a house, movement is the large front door, swinging wide open to allow your awareness, your thinking, to enter back inside where you have always belonged”
hILLARY mCbRIDE, pHD
That heart thumping out of your chest, the clammy hands, jelly legs, shortness of breath, pale face, sickness in your gut, racing thoughts, swirling head, dry mouth, the intense urge to turn away, fight, avoid, run.
Every single one of these feelings is generated in the face of what your nervous system perceives as a threat….
…part of your bodies’ attempt to prepare you to get away, to survive what it thinks is about to happen.
Yet if you’re feeling it regularly, it’s likely that the response is out of proportion to the threat you’re actually facing? Maybe the threat here is a memory or thought… a hook back to a time when you were in danger. Perhaps you don’t even know the trigger.
Those intense symptoms of an activated nervous system can all too easily create a sense of frustration. Maybe you feel like your body is letting you down, working against you by reacting this way repeatedly when you don’t want it.
But your body is never the enemy.
It’s doing exactly what it THINKS you need in that moment. It’s stepping in to to mobilise you to fight or run for your survival.
Getting cross with it will only increase your activation and cause the intensity to last longer.
As an alternative, can you offer something like this as a silent message:
“Thank you, body
I know you’re standing up for me and working hard to protect me.
I’m so grateful for that.
But this time it’s ok.
I’m safe and I don’t need protecting.
We can be alongside each other.
We can breathe together,
we’re safe”
Please do come back and share how it feels 🙏🏻
When I run I sometimes experience something lovely with my thinking. I liken it to shaking up a snow globe and feeling my thoughts criss-cross and settle wherever they please.
When I finish I feel calmer but I’ve often also made some reflections or connections that hadn’t occurred to me before, which I quickly scribble down before I loose them.
Your stress response is working for your safety but for many of us – the pressures of everyday life can feel like “stress” is the constant state.
Our autonomic nervous system – the part of the nervous system which operates silently, almost completely underneath conscious awareness – connects the brain with all our essential organs. In very simple terms, its understood to have two modes/ branches – sympathetic and parasympathetic. They’re both essential and ideally we move freely and easily as required from one to the other.
There’s literally NO HACK for repairing and restoring a tired mind-body. Not one single substitute for rest. And if you’re having a harder time than usual, your need for rest will increase in order to balance out the additional energy you use via an activated nervous system.
Over recent years, a growing number of therapists are offering an alternative to the conventional ‘one-hour weekly’ model of psychological therapy. Intensive therapy involves seeing a therapist for a longer block of time, ranging from 90 minute appointments to extended sessions covering 3 hours, whole days or even several days or weeks. This means that while the time investment as therapy begins is much greater, the total length of time in therapy (from start to finish) is often much shorter.
PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS
If we view the physical manifestations of stress, fear and anxiety with an evolutionary lens (i.e that our nervous systems are preparing us to fight or flee in response to a perceived threat) then naturally the clever human system has an effective process of discharging these physiological changes (using up stress hormones etc). The whole point of the threat state is the system preparing you to fight for your rights or run for your life) so the body anticipates movement.