I walk into the large conference room. My global team was nestled around the table, shuffling around and getting geared up for another grueling week of protecting and defending the company. As the global vice president of communications for a highly watched public company in turmoil, I looked polished as usual -- wearing something prim and proper helped mask the inner turmoil I was holding inside.
Inside the terrains of my psyche, the world was unfolding differently. My nervous system was, once again, buckling under the weight of constant pressure. As I gazed at the many faces around me looking for leadership and guidance, underneath my ribs, my heart was pounding and my breath was panting as blood flow redirects to the parts of my body that could fight off the imaginary bear that my body was confusingly believing was chasing after me.
This wasn’t a rare occasion -- this is how I felt every week in that conference room. As a matter of fact, feelings of panic became my moment-to-moment reality. And the worst part was that I assumed it was completely normal. Didn’t everyone feel nervous about performing well in life too?! My nervous system was stuck in a perpetual loop of fight or flight response. The mechanism by which my body was able to return to a sense of safety had long been malfunctioning. It had been broken for quite some time and it was causing my perception of the world to short circuit.
How does this look experientially? On a biological level, my body was starting to shut down its capacity to heal itself as it exerts more energy to “protect” me from perceived danger. Consequently, I was the sickest -- physically, mentally, and emotionally -- I had ever been in my life. I was developing a heightened paranoia of being unappreciated and misunderstood by others which eventually caused me to detach from real, authentic connections with people. In my mind, the only coping available to me was to distance myself from anything and anyone who could activate my insecurities. The combination of these two sets of triggers caused me to isolate myself, propelling me into feelings of helplessness (aka the freeze response) -- within the privacy of my walls, I was drowning from my own tears of shame and hopelessness.
In the last four years, I’ve learned a lot about the art and science behind being human. There are three fundamental truths that I’ve uncovered:
Stress and anxiety are primitive states that are built into us as a species. It holds an important place in human existence. It isn’t (nor should it be) something you can run away from. It’s something you manage. Escaping an all-consuming job may allow for temporary relief, but eventually, they will catch up to us again. Why? When we don’t fully allow emotions to pass, they get lodged into the fibers of our body and will keep nudging at us over and over again until we fully feel them.
Our body can default itself into believing it’s in danger, which means no matter what you’re doing, there’s an undercurrent of stress and anxiety running through your system -- yes even during seemingly relaxing activities. If left in this way, it can lead to other mental disorders like panic attacks and depression, and eventually, chronic and life-threatening physiological illnesses. We are meant to fully feel our emotions, friends! Emotions are simply “energy in motion” and when there is energetic disharmony in the body, it eventually manifests itself into biological imbalance.
Here’s the good news: we have all the tools we need inside of us to sustainably bring our nervous system back into order -- and with willingness and commitment, you won’t need to pop a single pill.
In the same way you’ve unconsciously trained yourself to live inside of stress and anxiety, you can retrain your nervous system to more easily access calm and stillness. By using body-mind-environment awareness, visualizations, and engaging your breath in a very specific way when you are emotionally activated, you can turn off your stress response as quickly as within 90 seconds. This is now how long it takes me to bring my system back into safety.
Our nervous system health is an important part of maintaining a life of vitality and wellbeing. Our biological underpinnings rest in our nervous system’s capacity to efficiently turn on our mode of safety -- the state where our body can fully heal, restore, and relax. Otherwise, this critical internal engine is perpetually focused elsewhere -- instinctively mobilizing our body to either fight off or run from an illusionary lion. And when our stress response gets unresolved, we move into a freeze response, which is our physiological response to surrendering to our perceived fatality (think of a limp gazelle whose neck is caught in between a lion’s sharp fangs). To leave this device malfunctioning after years of neglect and abuse can lead to a whole host of psychological, emotional, physiological, and yes, even spiritual deficiencies. I know because I lived that exact reality for years.
There’s a way out -- I’ve walked the path myself and it has deeply inspired me to help others charter the same road to freedom.
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