Quick and Dirty on Nervous System Care

A few weeks ago one of my best friends called me super stressed asking what to do to feel “normal again.”

She too is a therapist and life has been throwing her one curve ball after the next recently. She was in a space where she could recognize that she had been sustaining a very high level of stress for a long time and that as her life around her began to settle into a new normal, she could not continue to operate this way in her body.

My response? “Friend, you need a nervous system reset.”

I want to share with you what I mean by this and why it is so impactful.

Last week, I wrote to you about cumulative stress and provided insights about how to recognize it. That’s all fine and good but now, what do we do if we find that we are sustaining (i.e. habituating/getting used to) increasingly high levels of stress? 

The answer is that we need to reset our nervous system. What this looks like and how long it takes is highly subjective. It depends on your specific stressors, your body, and even more specifically– what your body is telling you it needs.

You may be asking what the heck I’m talking about: “my body can tell me what it needs? Isn’t that what you docs are for?” But I promise. Your body is telling you what it needs.

The problem is that many of our lives are so incredibly demanding that we lose touch with many of the cues our bodies are giving us. Or maybe we notice the cues but life is moving so fast that we really can’t attend to them. For many, this gets to a point where we are not only bypassing the stress symptoms themselves but also pain and other loud signals from our body that are telling us that we need care.

Nervous system care is a call for us to slow down and get back in touch with the quiet and subtle signals our bodies communicate to us.

It's a call for us to listen and take seriously the messages, internal images, and feelings that arise in us. At first this can seem a little weird and confusing, but with support we can make sense of it and see significant impacts by making small changes.

A few years ago I was working as a client with a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. One of the first exercises she taught me was called Orientation. In sum, Orientation is a very slow turning of the head from one side to the other while noticing your surroundings and applying affirmations. I now also teach this to many of my clients.

It's an exercise that helps us begin to down-regulate and tune into the subtle cues of our bodies. We may yawn. Our tummy may rumble. We may become aware of the urge to stretch or move gently. We may swallow or burp. All signs that our body is calming.

In our day-to-day lives we often have the image that relaxation involves lounging with our feet up, deep breathing, meditation, doing a calming activity, or going on a whole vacation. While these are definitely some ways, many of us could use support learning to directly support our nervous system in our daily lives with noticeable outcomes. 

Building that awareness is step one.

From there, with this new information about what our bodies need, we can tailor a Nervous System Reset Plan.

For this friend of mine, her plan involved being highly structured about returning to her daily routines from before this recent episode of sustain high stress.

This included routines related to: sleep, movement, and nutrition. I asked her to listen to her body and feel for when she needed to be active and move emotions through her body using sound and/or movement or when she needed to be still or feel compression such as lying under a weighted blanket. And we agreed that it would likely take a few days of doing this diligently for it to work.

There are a myriad of strategies to implement here to bring your nervous system back to its optimal window of tolerance (meaning: not so high we are super stressed, not so low that we are shut down, but rather floating in the middle).

But THE most powerful factor in doing a nervous system reset is restoring a sense of trust in yourself. 

You are essentially sending messages to your system that

🪻You’ve got this under control
🪻You know what you are doing
🪻You are capable of perceiving and attending to your needs
🪻And the need for high-alert is over.

And guess what? A few days later, my friend called again and said that she did the reset plan and it worked!

Everything I have mentioned here are things you can try on your own. If you do, let me know how it goes!

With love,
Dr. Rebecca Cohen