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January 3 - January 25, 2025
“As long as the trauma is not resolved,” wrote Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating.”38,39,40,41 The body must also devote excessive energy to “suppressing the inner chaos” of trauma, or the activated fight-or-flight response, which further pushes us into a state of dysregulation. It’s a vicious cycle, a physiological loop repeated over and over again.
Some of you never feel safe; you may always feel like the sky is about to fall.
Why was my body in a state of heightened activation without there being any immediate threat?
The location and function of these nerves help us understand why the body reacts so swiftly when we’re stressed: why our hearts race when we run into an ex; why feelings of panic make us feel short of breath; and why I started fainting (or losing consciousness) out of the blue. When we are in a state of homeostasis, the vagus nerve acts as a “neutral break,” keeping us calm and open, helping us be our most social selves. When the vagus nerve is activated and it enters its defensive system, fight-or-flight responses can manifest themselves almost immediately.
When we have poor vagal tone, we have higher sensitivity to perceived threats in our environment, which overactivates the body’s stress response and leads to reduced emotional and attentional regulation overall. Those of you who experience the discomfort of social anxiety might recognize this disconnect.
ease. Our energies and states are transferable. We feel better and calmer around certain people because our nervous systems are responding to theirs.
Applying qualifiers like “good” or “bad,” I now realized, grossly oversimplified the wildly intricate interplay between mind and body.
Thanks to epigenetics, we know that our genes are not fixed; thanks to neuroplasticity, we know that the brain can form new pathways; thanks to the conscious mind, we know the power of our thoughts to effect change; thanks to polyvagal theory, we know that the nervous system affects all other systems of the body.
We can unlearn and relearn as adults, even if we’ve endured significant trauma in our past. We can harness the power of our bodies to heal our minds and the power of our minds to heal our bodies.
She felt motivated, clearheaded, and filled with purpose.
Life is crazy and beautiful and challenging and sometimes dark and stormy and also light filled, and I’m thankful for mine.” Ally’s dramatic transformation provides a beautiful testament to the power of the mind-body connection. Her dedication to her well-being shows us that investing in our mental and physical health requires daily, committed effort. Her story also serves as an inspiring reminder that no matter how broken, out of control, tired, or hopeless we may feel, change is possible.
It begins with the act of witnessing: How is my body reacting? What does my body need?
The brain-to-body conversation is called a top-down process. “Top-down processes” recruit your brain to guide your body on a path toward healing. An example of a top-down practice is meditation, which in the act of training your attention helps regulate your autonomic nervous system responses. A similar though opposite reaction happens with bottom-up processes, wherein you use the power of your body to affect your mind. Most exercises that engage the polyvagal nerve that we discuss here employ bottom-up processes, such as breathwork, cold therapy, and the physical aspects of yoga.
Though many bottom-up and top-down processes are out of our control, we can consciously choose specific interventions that actively decrease our psychological stress, slow the sympathetic responses in our nervous system, and even strengthen our musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems. In addition, when we activate, challenge, and tone our vagus nerve in a safe and controlled environment, we build tolerance and learn how to live with discomfort, which is key to building resilience, the ability to recover quickly from hardship.
“Your mind makes you strong from within. It is your wise companion,” he wrote in his book Becoming the Iceman. “If you can grab the wheel of your mind, you can steer the direction of where your mind will go.”
An ultimate “window-widening” exercise, given its direct activation of the vagus nerve, is yoga. Dr. Porges is also a huge advocate of yoga (he’s written extensively about its benefits on vagal tone in academic journals). Yoga engages both the mind and body by combining the regulatory power of our breath with movement. As we advance in the practice, increasingly challenging poses begin to test our body’s physical limits, further stressing our system, and offering an opportunity to reconnect with the calming power of our breath. Regular yoga practice has been shown to have more diffuse effects
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many yogic practices are designed to activate the body’s stress responses of fight, flight, or freeze. The whole idea behind yoga, he said in an interview, “is that through training, you can begin going into these immobilizing states normally linked with faint and freeze, but more aware and less frightened.” He described it as “the ability to go deep inside oneself and feel secure” in response to a perceived threat.61 This is key to healing: learning the power of your body and your mind by testing their outer limits.
In one study, people who were practicing yoga for six years or longer could keep their hands in ice water for twice the time of controls who never practiced it.62 The yoga practitioners did not distract themselves from the pain, as the nonyogis did, but actually leaned into the sensation and found ways to focus on and channel the pain as a way to get through the sensation—the essence of a resilience exercise.
The benefits of singing do not stop in adulthood. Belting out your favorite song will help tone your vagus nerve in many of the similar ways that breathwork, yoga, and play do. If you can sing with others, the benefits are even greater; the co-regulatory force of a room full of singers is incredibly uplifting. Even singing to yourself in the shower can be healing.
I started a daily meditation and breathwork ritual, deepened my yoga practice, and incorporated play, finding time to sing and dance and hike in nature.
Today I am embodied. I know how it feels to be in my physical self, how sensations pass through me: the butterflies in my stomach when I’m nervous or excited (it turns out that although they feel the same, they are actually two different feelings), the pangs of hunger when I truly need to eat, the feeling of satiety when I’ve had enough food. Previously, I was so disconnected that I never truly connected to those sensory messages. I’m also less hunched over, less tense overall. I have more energy. I wake at 5:00 a.m. and feel productive and clearheaded throughout the day.
Core beliefs are the many stories about ourselves, our relationships, our past, our future, and the innumerable other
topics we construct based on our lived experiences. One of my deepest narratives, one that ran the show for years without my knowledge, became clear to me once I started doing the work of becoming conscious and witnessing my internal world. That story is: I am not considered.
As her unspoken anxiety increased, she was entirely unaware of the small creature unraveling under her feet. She was not emotionally attuned to me in that moment and not present in any way to my needs or fears. She simply could not be.
In other words: the more we think something, the more we are likely to believe it. Our practiced thoughts become our truth.
When a belief is repeatedly validated, it can become what is called a core belief. Core beliefs are our deepest perceptions about our identity; they were installed in our subconscious often before the age of seven.
We universally lean into something called negativity bias, in which we tend to prioritize (and therefore value) negative information over positive. This is why you can see a glowing performance review and forget it shortly afterward, though you’ll never forget the sting of a colleague’s criticism.
If we weren’t able to filter and prioritize sensory input, we would be constantly overwhelmed by the onslaught of information coming at us. There is a lot going on in our world at all times. Just try to acknowledge the totality of the world around you right now. If your brain took in all of those stimuli at the same time, it couldn’t function.
Allowing ourselves to honestly witness the entirety of our past and current experiences is fundamental to our healing.
They check all the boxes, yet once they’ve achieved their goals, they find themselves just as unhappy if not more so—hence the ubiquitous midlife crisis.
Our real long-term goal is to find that security inside ourselves. Our work is to internalize the feeling of being good enough—a state of okayness that is not reliant on others.
Ego beliefs don’t come out of nowhere; they are grounded in lived experiences.
Because if what you believe is who you are, there is no space for conversation or contemplation. There is no space for expansion or adaptability.
Ego work gives you an opportunity to choose a new narrative. The more you can repeat these practices, the better (I still do them anytime I feel activated). Repetition will prime new pathways in the brain and allow witnessing to come more easily with time.
Over time and with more practicing of these thoughts, my subconscious quieted and the thoughts became beliefs. I still deal with emotional activation—as we will likely always—and over time (lots and lots of time) I channeled my
emotional activation into considered, intentional action.
One can be only as connected to others as they are to themselves.
We went to bed earlier. We worked out. We did our morning routines. We journaled. We changed our nutrition and detoxed our chemical-ridden bodies. In the beginning, all of that awareness and change was emotional. We would sometimes lie on the floor and cry—it was that overwhelming. It was overwhelming together. Our togetherness made the healing journey all the more transformative. Even on days when I really did not want to, I chose to show up because she was. Over time, I began to show because I wanted to for myself
It is a grounded state. You do not need to perform in a certain way or hide parts of yourself to receive love.
Conscious relationships aren’t fairy tales.
An ultimatum is a statement that assigns a consequence to someone else’s behavior as a means of trying to effect a change in it. A boundary, rather, is a personal limit that is expressed so that your need will directly be met.
An important aspect of setting boundaries is allowing others to have their own limits and boundaries and respecting and honoring theirs while you maintain your own.
It is beneficial for us to put up boundaries around our internal world. We then allow moments of quiet in conversations without rushing to fill the silence with our own stream of consciousness. There are things that we can decide to keep private. When we have proper boundaries in place, we have a choice about when and to whom we direct our emotional energy. Choice is pivotal; it’s the understanding that your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are your own and you can decide if you want to share them with everyone or with no one.
Often emotional dumpers feel comfortable, or in familiar homeostasis, only when discussing topics that allow themselves to feel depressed. When faced with the unfamiliar positive, they turn the conversation back to the more distressing baseline where their entire system feels at home.
Look at the people and events in your life. When you think about having brunch with a college friend, how do you feel? Does your chest tighten? Is there a feeling of resentment leading up to it? How about during the meeting? Do you feel expansive, spacious, and nourished, or do you feel depleted, constricted, and limited? How about afterward? Do you want to see her again soon, or are you already wondering how you can dodge her next call? Boundaries keep us connected to our intuitive voice. (That tightness in your chest is a big clue!) It is important to tune in to how you feel to use
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The goal is to reclaim your own energy and ask what will make you feel happier, safer, and more comfortable. Spend a few days looking over your relationships, and identify and list your most commonly crossed boundaries.
Setting an intention for yourself gives you the space and opportunity to identify your “why”: I’m doing this because of x or y, for example, because I want the relationship to survive, because I care about our friendship. While this does not need to be articulated to the other person it is helpful for it to be fully clear to you.
They can choose to continue engaging in that behavior and be faced with a boundary (often the removal of your presence or support), or they can choose to respect your boundary and continue their relationship with you in a new way. This is what is empowering about setting boundaries: you are giving them a choice, too.
I could have my own wants, needs, and desires, and they didn’t have to match theirs.
Creating boundaries is some of the hardest work that you’ll encounter on your healing journey. It’s also probably one of the most important steps in reclaiming a connection to your authentic wants and needs, while honoring and respecting those you love. This is what the work is all about: making space to allow each of us to be seen, heard, and authentically expressed.
