How Tuning In to Your Body Can Make You More Resilient
By balancing our physiology and nervous systems, body-based
practices can help us through hard times.
Stuff happens. Another car suddenly swerves
into your lane on the freeway. You misplace your keys and wallet two minutes
before you need to catch your bus to work. You shred the wrong client file at
the office.
These mini-disasters create quite a startle
in your nervous system—a rush of adrenaline that helps ready your body for “fight
or flight,” our natural defense against perceived danger. But if your body is
hit with adrenaline for every little thing that goes wrong in life, it can tax
your capacity to cope, making recovery from future setbacks like these even
more difficult.
Luckily, it’s possible to strengthen your own
body-based somatic intelligence to quickly respond to and recover from any
sense of threat to your safety or well-being. What is somatic intelligence?
It’s understanding how your body responds to danger and using that knowledge to
support your body as you go through life—which, if you’re human, is bound to be
filled with at least some adversity.
In my new book, Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment,
Difficulty, and Even Disaster, I explain many
of the resources we have within us to build up our resilience. While the book
outlines several resilience tools—including those aimed at improving emotional,
relational, and reflective intelligence—building somatic intelligence is key to
all of these. Without it, it’s difficult to engage in any of the other
practices available to you.
To better support our natural somatic
intelligence, we need to soothe our nervous system through body-based practices
that steady our brain’s perceptions of and responses to danger and help us
retain a sense of safety. Once we master some of these techniques, we are
prepared for more resilient coping, learning, and growth.
Here are some simple practices I recommend in
my book, each of them grounded in neurophysiology.
1.
Breathing
To breathe is to be alive. Every inhalation
you take activates the sympathetic branch of your nervous system a little bit
(a lot when you overreact to something and hyperventilate), while every
exhalation activates the parasympathetic branch a little bit (a lot when you
feel scared to death and faint). That means that your breath goes through
natural cycles of energizing you and relaxing you.
We can intentionally use this rhythm of
gently breathing in and out to reliably regulate the revving up and shutting
down of our nervous system. Simply pause for a moment and focus your attention
on your breathing. Notice where it’s easiest to sense the sensations of your
breath flowing in and out—your nostrils, your throat, in the rise and fall of
your chest or belly. Take a moment to experience some gratitude for the breath
that sustains your life, every moment of your life.
2.
Deep sigh
A deep sigh is your body-brain’s natural way
to release tension and reset your nervous system. Simply breathe in fully, then
breathe out fully, longer on the exhale. Studies have shown
that a deep sigh returns the autonomic nervous system from an over-activated
sympathetic state to a more balanced parasympathetic state.
Even as what you’re coping with becomes more
challenging, you can deliberately pair any moment of tension or frustration
with a sigh to shift your physiology into
a relieved and more relaxed state, thereby enhancing your chances of seeing
clearly and choosing to respond wisely to what’s happening.
3.
Touch
To soothe the nervous system and restore a
sense of safety and trust in the moment, it helps to use the power of touch.
Warm, safe touch activates the release
of oxytocin—the “tend and befriend” hormone that creates pleasant feelings in
the body and is the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone
cortisol.
Oxytocin is one of a cascade of
neurochemicals that are part of the brain-body social engagement system.
Because being in the presence of other people is so critical to our well-being
and safety, nature has provided this system to encourage us to reach out to
others and connect. That’s why touch, along with physical proximity and eye contact,
evokes a viscerally felt sense of reassurance that “everything is okay; you’re
fine.”
4.
Hand on the heart
Research has
shown that placing your hand over your heart and gently breathing can soothe
your mind and your body. And experiencing the sensations of touch with another
safe human being, even recalling memories of those moments, can activate the release
of oxytocin, which evokes a feeling of safety and trust.
This is a practice that takes advantage of
breath and touch, but also memories of feeling safe with another person. Here
is how it’s done:
1. Place
your hand on your heart. Breathe gently, softly, and deeply into the area of
your heart. If you wish, breathe a sense of ease or safety or goodness into
your heart center.
2. Remember
one moment, just one moment when you felt safe, loved, and cherished by another
human being. Don’t try to recall the entire relationship, just one moment. This
could be with a partner, a child, a friend, a therapist, or a teacher; it could
be with a spiritual figure. Remembering a loving moment with a pet can work
very well, too.
3. As
you remember this moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished, let yourself
savor the feelings of that moment. Let yourself stay with these feelings for 20
to 30 seconds. Notice any deepening in a visceral sense of ease and safety.
Repeat this practice many times a day at
first, to strengthen the neural circuitry that remembers this pattern. Then
practice this exercise whenever you experience the first signal of a startle or
an upset. With practice, it will enable you to back out of a difficult
emotional reaction before it hijacks you.
5.
Movement
Any time you move your body and shift your
posture, you shift your
physiology, which, in turn, shifts the activity of your autonomic nervous
system. Therefore, you can use movement to shift your emotions and your
mood.
This
essay is adapted from Resilience: Powerful Practices for
Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster (New
World Library, 2018, 304 pages)
For example, if you are feeling scared or
nervous, research has
shown that taking a pose that expresses the opposite of that—putting your hands
on your hips, your chest out, and your head held high—will make you feel more
confident. Yoga poses can increase your
confidence, too—perhaps even more so than poses associated with social
dominance.
So, if you are experiencing any state of fear,
anger, sadness, or disgust, try shifting your posture. Let your body move into
a posture that expresses the emotional state you want to develop in yourself to
counteract what you’re feeling. I’ve found that working with my clients on this
technique can sometimes really shift something for them, as they discover that
they actually have the means inside of themselves to deal with these difficult
emotions.
There are many more practices outlined in my
book that you can use to cultivate more calm in the body, restore your natural
physiological equilibrium, and access a deeper sense of safety and well-being
that primes your brain for more resilient learning and coping. By practicing
these tools, you will not only cope better with any upset or catastrophe and bounce
back better from any adversity, you will also learn to see yourself as someone
who can cope.
And that sense of being able to soothe
yourself after setbacks is the beginning of developing true resilience.
BY LINDA GRAHAM |
OCTOBER 3, 2018
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_tuning_in_to_your_body_can_make_you_more_resilient?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=6c914756ae-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_Oct3_2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-6c914756ae-51482775
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