REGULATING OUR NERVOUS SYSTEM
How to life hack your brain and reduce suffering the fastest way
Our brain’s primary purpose, what it sees at its job, is to keep us alive. But not just alive; alive and comfortable. A mandate to avoid suffering is directly tied to the brain’s prime directive. This starts even before birth — we acclimate to the sound of our mother’s voice, heartbeat, and smell. We then learn when my mom makes this face, she is happy, sad, angry, and so on. We learn lessons of how to eat, talk, walk, ride a bike, add one plus one, and so on.
All of this information is stored away in our brain and is foundational to to help us operate efficiently and avoid suffering. We learn to eat to avert hunger. We learn to walk because we don’t like our toys being out of reach. And the brain kicks into gear and offers up different thoughts, such as: “Try it this way. If I fall down again, I will get up, and I will try it a slightly different way and see if that works.”
This is all in service to help us learn, but really what’s happening is it’s helping us learn how to avoid our frustration and difficulties. The suffering is: I can’t reach my toy, I can’t play with my older siblings, I can’t get to my mother or father, and I need to learn another way to get there faster. As we learn how to master tasks, our brain gets rewarded by feeling pleasure and a sense of accomplishment, thus helping us avoid suffering.
After we become older, our suffering shifts into not so much our physical limitations and frustrations but more into emotional limitations and frustrations. How do I connect better with my partner? Why is my boss upset with me? Why can’t my coworker understand what I’m saying?
Then our brain thinks, “I know what to do! I will start thinking about things, and I’m going to spit out different offers for solutions: Try this with your boss, try this with your partner, maybe I can stop some things so that I can end the suffering.” Our brain often goes into hyperdrive working the problem, trying to help us understand what happened and then avoiding it in the future.
This is why we often notice our brain thinking about things in the past and chewing it over, or having anxiety about the future. All of this is in service of our overall well-being, to help us avoid suffering.
The thing is, you are suffering in the moment, and this is where this immediate hack becomes more powerful than any thought we can have. You will learn to bypass thought and go right to taking care of suffering.
This is why we need to do our work in the now, in the moment — because this is where suffering exists, where we find ourselves upset or overwhelmed.
Here’s the hack: How to self-regulate
There are many tasks the nervous system must do; however, for our purposes, we are only going to focus on how to master self-regulation of our nervous system. And there is a surprisingly easy hack we can use to regulate our nervous system.
I am going to invite you to think of your nervous system as a young child that lives within us. If you look at young children (infants and toddlers) you know exactly how that child is feeling at any given time. As parents, we tune into our child, notice, and attend to this need. For example, I recall many times when my oldest was around one, I would try to time going to the grocery store between naps. Well, sometimes this would turn out ok, and other times, he would be hungry about halfway through shopping. He would start fussing, and I would quickly look for a reasonable food item I could give him that would tie him over until we finished and we could go home. I would grab a banana or Cheerios that he could hold, while I finished as fast as possible.
This would usually satisfy his fussing; but sometimes, if he was too hungry, he would be overwhelmed and have a meltdown. Again, I would tend to his need to be held, etc., and is is where magic happens — somewhere during the holding phase, I would feel his little body give a deep sigh and relax. I had satisfied his need of being seen, satisfied his immediate need. When children receive this attention, their nervous system sends this message to the rest of their body: “Our needs are now taken care of, and it is safe to relax.” Take a moment to think of one of your own children. Do you have a memory of them crying, and after holding them, their little body sighed and deeply relaxed into you?
It is this process that is still very much alive within us as adults. We can bring a deep sigh of relief to our nervous system by giving to ourselves what we need in the moment.
Here are the four steps to hack our system:
Notice
Name
Validate
Plan
Notice
Simply notice that something unwanted/unpleasant is here right now; I feel upset or triggered.
Name
What is it that I am feeling right now? I am so angry!
Now let’s try to deepen our naming. I am angry because when my partner doesn’t come home when they say they will, this makes me feel as if I am unimportant and that I don’t matter to them.
Now try even deeper, tying it to a past wound. I feel hurt and abandoned when they do this because it reminds me of how little I was seen/valued by my own parents. That was so painful.
Validate
Your feeling makes sense; validate why these feelings are here now. It makes a lot of sense to me why these feelings showed up. No wonder my pain showed up when this happened.
Plan
How do you want to handle this in the future? Make a plan for when these triggers come up again. I will self-soothe when my partner doesn’t show up. I can remind myself that they don’t intend to make me feel unimportant. I will check in with my partner to ask if this is their intention. If this keeps happening, I will take further action to protect myself from letting them treat me as unimportant.
At this point in the four steps, you will easily notice that your body has relaxed and feel comfortable that you have attended to your own needs.
We will probably need to do this more than once as feelings have often built up. This is ok and normal, and you will find that as you get through these waves of emotions, it brings a nice quiet to the body. Remember that after a long, deep cry, our body goes into a state of deep rest. It is that place of deep rest that we are restored.