GROWTH: How to thaw your nervous system

Have you ever felt frozen, like a deer in the headlights?

Or checked out, like you’re not really here?

Or foggy, like you can’t think straight?

Or suddenly sleepy, even though you were plenty awake a minute ago?

With mild cases of these, you might just notice that you can’t get off the couch or stop scrolling on your phone, and conclude that you’re lazy. But you’re not lazy: you’re in a parasympathetic stress response.

Like the sympathetic Fight-or-Flight response, this is a mode your body can turn on without your conscious control. This one is often called the “Freeze” state, but it’s actually a little more complicated than that. I like to divide parasympathetic stress responses into Freeze (where you feel stiff and freaked out)¹ and Flop (where you feel limp and hopeless).² Some people divide them into even more categories.³ But the important things to know are:

• They’re a totally normal and protective function of your body.
• They mean your body believes you’re in a threat situation or is remembering such a situation.
• They happen on a spectrum. Just because you’re not totally paralyzed or totally limp doesn’t mean it “doesn’t count.”
• Your body can learn to go into these at the drop of a hat. While they evolved for situations of mortal danger, you’re not “overreacting” or “weak” if you get them when you think about having a hard conversation or debugging your code.
• You can regulate your nervous system so you don’t have to just wait until it naturally wears off!

I’ve read many guides⁴ on helping people come out of Freeze and Flop, and they have great information, but there are so many techniques for regulating that it can be hard to remember them all in the moment. So I wanted to find the underlying principles behind these techniques, and then create a mnemonic device to help people remember them. And I came up with: GROWTH.

I hope this will be helpful to my clients, who often procrastinate not out of laziness but out of dysregulation, and to coaches and therapists who help their clients regulate in session.

First, let’s look at the principles.

What brings you out of Freeze and Flop?

I found two principles for getting out of these states:

Experience Safety

Since Freeze and Flop are reactions to perceived threat, perceiving safety removes the need for them. To tell your nervous system that this isn’t a time when you actually need to Freeze or Flop, attend to cues of safety.

Take Baby Steps in the Opposite Direction

The relationship between conscious mind and subconscious mind/nervous system/body is a two-way street. A stressful thought can raise your heart rate, and heart rate increasing caffeine can make you feel stressed and start thinking stressful thoughts.

So when we ask the body to do something that’s incompatible with a parasympathetic stress response, we ask it to change its nervous system state.

The trick is to do this in teeny tiny baby steps. Otherwise, the ask can feel intimidating, or just plain impossible. And feeling intimidated, or like what’s asked of you is impossible and you’re doomed to fail, are exactly the kind of things that put you into Freeze and Flop! So we make small, gentle shifts.

Now that you get the principles, we can look at the mnemonic.

GROWTH

Ground

Feel your feet on the floor, your butt on your chair, or your back on whatever you’re lying on. Make sure your head is supported.

The weight of your body is one of the easiest things to sense, and the solidity of the ground tends to give people a sense of at least a basic kind of safety.

If you’re in a Flop state, it’s also important to make sure your head is safely supported. If Flop goes to the extreme, you can faint. Fainting doesn’t hurt you, but hitting your head on the way down can. So just to be safe, ground your head as well.

Resource yourself or Reassure others

Tune into safety.

Freeze and Flop are responses to perceived threat, so if you perceive safety, your nervous system can start to move out of them.

If you’re trying to regulate yourself, notice anything that feels good, or at least neutral. This could be:

• A pretty piece of art on the wall
• A blanket that feels nice
• A warm cup of tea
• The feeling of your feet on the floor
• A picture of a loved one
• A friend or pet
• A tree you can see out the window
• A cat video

If you’re helping someone else regulate, start by grounding yourself, because the most important way you’re going to reassure them is with the calm of your body. If you say calm words with a nervous body, it probably won’t help!

Then, you might let them know that they’re safe and you’re here with them.

Then, ask them if there’s anything you can do to help them feel safe. It’s important to give them choice and agency,⁵ and not to rush them into anything. They may not be ready to talk or make eye contact. They may want reassuring touch, or they may not want to be touched. They may want you closer, or farther away. Your calm nervous system and respect for their wishes do the heavy lifting here.

Orient

Look around and name things you notice with your senses.

A more involved version is: name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. If you can remember that one, great, but if not, you don’t need to stress about it! Just name some things you notice.

This is a classic technique that accomplishes many things:

1. It gets you in touch with your body and the outside world. This counteracts the withdrawal that Freeze and Flop put you into. It’s like giving smelling salts to someone who fainted.
2. Connecting with the outside world reminds you that you’re here and now, not “back there, back then” when something bad happened. If this resonates with you, you might also be interested in the Flashback Halting Protocol.
3. Connecting names to these things engages your brain’s cortex, which Freeze and Flop tend to disengage. This one is very helpful if you’re starting to get sleepy, brain foggy, or confused, because it asks your body send more blood to your brain.

Wiggle

Wiggle your fingers and toes.

Your parasympathetic nervous system inhibits your muscle movement, so we can counteract that in baby steps by wiggling our fingers and toes.

Touch

Touch your body however feels right.

The parasympathetic nervous system circulates painkillers in your body, which make you physically and emotionally numb. It can also make you dissociate, feeling like you’re not really in your body. Touching your body can help bring you back, and soothing touch can also make you feel safe.

Follow your intuition about how to touch your body. You may feel the need for a specific kind of touch in the moment. For a few months, I needed to tap the left side of my chest, above my heart. Then that spot stopped calling to me, and stroking down my arms became my go-to.

Here are some ideas for soothing kinds of self-touch. You don’t have to do it a particular way, but I’ll link to modalities that do teach a particular way just for more information.

• Gently tapping (EFT)
• Squeezing your arms and legs (Radix)
• Hugging yourself (Linda Thai)
• Stroking down your arms (Havening)
• Stroking down your face (Havening)
• Rubbing your palms together (Havening)
• Scalp massage (Qigong)
• Butterfly hug (EMDR)

Hum

Use your voice however feels right.

Using your voice counteracts the social withdrawal and “play dead” aspects of Freeze and Flop, and it’s also just fun.

Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing, recommends making a “voo” sound, which is a great idea, but GROWTV isn’t a word. But you can try humming, voo-ing, om-ing, and even singing if it doesn’t feel like too big of a step.

Stephen Porges, developer of Polyvagal Theory,⁶ says that high pitches with lots of variation in pitch — think of the sing-song voice parents use to coo at their babies — are particularly soothing to the nervous system. That may provide some inspiration for your song. But it may also be hard to do anything but a flat hum when you’re frozen, and that’s okay. Remember: baby steps.

As you hum, you can notice the sound and the vibration, which again helps bring you into your body and the present moment.

It’s up to you

You can skip steps. You can add steps. You can do them out of order. Safety and agency are the goals here, so listen to your body over me. This is just a way to help you remember some of your options.

Get it in your memory

To help you remember, you can download the GROWTH cheatsheet and keep it handy on your desktop or print it out and put it in view. It doesn’t hurt to do these things when you’re feeling fine, so you can go through the list a few times just to get it in your muscle memory and make it easier to remember when you need it.

It also helps with Fight-or-Flight

While I developed this for Freeze and Flop, it’s not much different from what I would create for Fight-or-Flight.

Ground: feeling supported is great for moments of Fight-or-Flight. People also tend to feel like their energy is “up high” when they’re anxious, so focusing downward can be helpful.

Resourcing: Fight-or-Flight is based on a lack of safety just like Freeze and Flop are, so resourcing is just as helpful as ever.

Orient: can help by getting you to focus on the present moment instead of anxiously ruminating/planning.

Wiggle: moving is great for Fight-or-Flight, but there’s no need to start with the smallest possible movements. Exercise, dance, and qigong are great options.

Touch: pressure, like using a weighted blanket, squeezing your arms and legs, or getting a bear hug, is thought to soothe the Fight-or-Flight system.

Hum: one of the best things you can do in Fight-or-Flight is to extend the length of your exhale. Humming and singing naturally do this! You can also just do it as a breathing exercise: box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, breathing out through a straw, or breathing out through pursed lips.

So if you remember GROWTH during Fight-or-Flight and just use bigger movements and harder touch, you’ll be doing great.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Flop can get less common

GROWTH will help you change your nervous system state in the moment, but it may not make your nervous system less likely to go into a threat response in the first place. But it is possible to make that shift through deeper work.

Personally, I used to go into Fight-or-Flight predictably during certain kinds of conversations, and I used to go into Freeze predictably when I faced certain kinds of social threats. It took me a long time to recognize my Freeze response, because I didn’t feel literally paralyzed, I knew I wasn’t facing mortal danger, and don’t have a strong trauma history. But as I learned more about nervous system states, I realized that’s exactly what was throwing off so many of my days.

First, I learned to use the techniques above to recover from Freeze so that my day wasn’t a total loss. But I would still go back into Freeze easily. Then, an Aletheia Coach did somatic work with me and I started releasing stored stress. Eventually, I stopped going into Fight-or-Flight at times when I previously would have, and felt less day-to-day anxiety. Then, I kept going with somatic work, and eventually stopped going into Freeze so often as well. People close to me have commented that I seem less anxious. It wasn’t a quick or easy process, but it is possible.

If you’re freezing up in meetings or wilting at the sight of an intimidating task, and you think your nervous system might be a factor, you can fill out my Imposter Syndrome Inquiry form to get personal feedback on your situation.

1. Freeze can actually involve your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. ↩︎
2. Here’s a great infographic on the difference between Freeze and Flop. ↩︎
3. Kozlowska and colleagues have an excellent article on different threat responses for those who want to get more technical. ↩︎
4. Soulful Therapy covers a few of them, and I’ve been given guides in trainings by Aletheia and Red Beard Somatic Therapy. ↩︎
5. This is a principle emphasized in Trauma-Informed Mindfulness, by David Treleaven. ↩︎
6. There are many problems with the evolutionary and anatomical claims of Polyvagal Theory. I’m not aware of criticisms of this particular finding, but as always, notice what works for you. ↩︎