Your Nervous System Regulates Itself - Part 1

Your Nervous System Regulates Itself - Part 1

 
There I said it! 
 
If you feel wonky and anxious with symptoms of being out of breath, racing thoughts, hypervigilance and others, it's not your nervous system's fault or even anything-outside-of-you's fault (or even the fault of your past). It's not dysregulated. No matter who told you that and how many books or courses they have taken.
 
Our nerve system and, in fact, our whole-body system works extremely efficiently, elegantly, and as designed all the time. What gets called "dysregulation" is actually your brain and spinal cord system working as designed. What!!! 
 
"Why do I feel so bad?" 
 
"Where's my energy?"
 
"It wasn't like this before the trauma that happened!"
 
We just misunderstand the signals.
 
Your nervous system organizes around how you are shaping your world, usually unconsciously and innocently, with the creative power of thought. What you believe to be true about your world. 
 
We usually don't notice it and never question it. 
 
What is labelled dysregulation or not regulated is your body's response to the information it perceives you are giving it about the outside world and the information you are giving it about your internal world. It's giving you back what it thinks you want. Essentially exactly what you asked for. With perfect fidelity. Every time.
 
The only problem is that we don't know how to speak its language. We aren't aware of what we've told our nervous system and really the whole body in general. Especially after an injury or a traumatic, intense happening. It's as if you are yelling in English and your system happens to speak Japanese. Or what may be a truer analogy is that you are screaming in an alien language and your system speaks fluent English (or whatever your first language is), and you both don't understand each other. We then blame our bodies, our nerve system, our brains, the past, our circumstances, and other people for how we feel.
 
We blame everything when all that needs to happen is to realize how it works. 
 
Then we can start speaking to ourselves in our natural language. In a language that is understood.

Have you ever travelled to a country where you don't really know the language and ordered in a restaurant in that language, then found yourself wondering what was going to show up at the table? Is the food going to be remotely what I was hoping for? Or something wildly different?
 
Your system is actually naturally adaptable and will regulate itself to the internal thought environment you give it, no matter what happened in the past or might be happening now. It then cleverly feeds that information back to you as a felt feeling to check the order with you. Is this what you wanted? You sure you ordered calf's brains? Perhaps a lovely head cheese, then? 
 
No? 
 
Ever know someone who was really calm and collected in the face of actual danger? Or had a very terrible past but it didn't affect them? They were actually happy?
 
Yes, it might be rare, but there are people out there like that. 
 
Have you ever been the calm one while others were freaked out? 
 
This happens to me a lot with insects (I just don't care about how gross they might be) (I actually really like them) and the weather (yes, it's crappy but I can't be bothered to get upset about it).
 
The feeling of what we call not regulated (maybe anxiety or fight-or-flight or just can't relax) is a feedback loop in which your system is essentially letting you know:
 
"Hey, this is the quality of your thinking right now. This is the feeling of it. Is this what you ordered?" 
 
No?  Yes?  It might actually be what we ordered or maybe not. Knowing how our system works says nothing about how we "should" feel. All emotions and feelings are natural in the moment or if we want to feel them. But a hyper-alert feeling most of the time. That's exhausting and actually confuses our natural awareness-of-danger system. 
 
If it's the wrong order, we can send it back to the kitchen. Or decide to keep it. It will dissolve because, unlike actual orders from a kitchen, our thought orders dissolve if we leave them alone. If we poke at them, they sit there and rot. 
 
Getting angry at the kitchen will only make things worse. 
 
Our nerve system is not complicated in how it works. We overcomplicate matters and then feel squirrelly and blame it on the system. 
 
We try to reverse engineer things to get our bodies to "work better" when they were working just fine the whole time. Anything done to try to solve these sorts of out-of-sorts symptoms at a body level has limited results. It helps, but it's not addressing the cause. 
 
Any approaches that look at controlling, regulating, identifying thought content, getting better thinking or "getting one's mindset straight" have limited results (and actually keep the problem alive). At this level, it may sorta help in the moment but makes the problem worse over time and also doesn't address the cause. 
 
You need to go upstream to the source. 
 
Next week’s blog talks about how going upstream to the source and noticing our thoughts makes all the difference.
 

With Love, 

Sara Joy
 

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