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.

Read more “GROWTH: How to thaw your nervous system” →

Distinctions for Inner and Outer Conflict Resolution

I’ve been thinking a lot about conflict resolution lately, so I interrupt your usual productivity content for some short and sweet reminders for when your head is spinning or your relationship is fraying.

Distinctions Stop the Domino Effect

There are concepts that sometimes feel very connected but are actually distinct. When they’re not distinguished from each other, they act like dominoes. When one domino falls, all the other dominoes fall, too. It can look like “I’m hurt, therefore you must have wronged me, therefore you’re a bad person, therefore you must be punished.” 

The result is escalation of conflict.¹ In inner conflict, a worried thought can escalate into panic and overwhelm. In outer conflict, a hurt feeling can escalate into a broken relationship and a fractured community.

Distinctions put space in between our dominoes so that our conflicts don’t get escalated for no reason.

Read more “Distinctions for Inner and Outer Conflict Resolution” →

What You Need to Know About Anger When You’re…

Trump was just re-elected in the United States, and we could be entering an era where the most extreme anti-humanitarian forces in the country run unfettered.

Leftists and liberals are outraged at the people who voted for fascism, misogyny, and white supremacy. Trump voters are often motivated by anger as well. So in order to move forward from here, I think we all need to understand anger better.

Read more “What You Need to Know About Anger When You’re Fighting Fascism” →

Mindfulness as flexibility

As I start piloting a program called Finding Mindfulness, I’m reflecting on what I think mindfulness is really about. Once again, I’m drawing on my experience getting physical therapy and massage to find a helpful analogy.

One time, my friend and gifted massage therapist Ron Aur Hod told me that my problem wasn’t so much knots in my muscles as adhesions – places where my muscles were sticking to my fascia. Fascia is connective tissue that creates a casing around muscles and other structures in the body. It’s supposed to slide past your muscles as they move. When it adheres or sticks to your muscles, you lose some of that freedom of movement, and develop pain.

Just as massage can un-stick fascia from muscles, I think mindfulness can un-stick layers of thought that are supposed to be able to move independently. It’s not that one kind of thought is good and the other is bad, just like it’s not that muscles are good and fascia is bad. It’s just that we need flexibility.

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