Triggers and Dysregulation
Greater Life
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Today's Greater Life health newsletter is very practical and potentially very important because it could help prevent a bad situation from becoming irreparably damaging, or turn a challenging situation into a triumph.
It happens to all of us. We may call it different things and it will show up in different ways (usually one of 4 that I’ll lay out below), but there is no doubt we all get triggered. We all become dysregulated at some point in our day or week.
Certain people, places, words, and events can all cause our ‘fight or flight’ response to be activated. The issue with this is that when we’re dysregulated in this way, we lose access to our higher cognitive functioning (it has literally been shut down so we can fight or run) we are prone to making terrible decisions: doubling down on a bad investment, choosing to stay in a toxic relationship, eating two pizzas when we only needed half of one. You get the picture.
So today we explore what is really going on in such situations, and what we can do to come back into balance, back to ourselves. I share this topic today because it was very present for me over the weekend. Echoes of past traumas were stirred by current circumstances and I found myself becoming increasingly anxious, aware of a racing heart that seemed simultaneously weighted down and overwrought, complemented by that nauseating knot in my stomach and the kind of tingly feeling across my skin that lets you know you’ve adrenaline and cortisol flooding your system.
As I gave myself the time and space to feel what was going on, working out what was underneath this surface-level, sensory experience, it became clear that my system was responding to those echoes of past events as though the actual original event was happening right now in the present.
If you read the work of folk like Bessel Van Der Kolk, Peter Levine and others, you’ll know that this ‘past being lived in the present’ is classic ‘trauma response’ – though the reaction is more apt. Whilst you’ve likely heard of the ‘fight/flight response, it actually comprises one of four ways our system reacts to traumatic (or perceived traumatic) stimuli: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn (what most people know as people pleasing).
Most of us will have a ‘go to’ reaction, though we will likely experience them all in some way, shape or form. I was very much in the freeze. Stuck not knowing what to do, feeling utterly paralysed, yet with a system that was hyper-activated and flooded with adrenaline. So what helped? And what practical steps can you take if you or someone close to you gets triggered and becomes dysregulated?
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In today's coffee cast, I share a little bit about what also helped me in terms of an overall reset, but in this article, I want to share with you a couple of exercises that I found to be profoundly helpful. Since we are caught talking about a physiological response, what we can do so that we can come back into equilibrium by working with the body and the first of these is to harness the power of breath.
The over-arching principle is that the longer you can make your exhales longer than your inhales, the more your system will calm itself. Think about it: when you give a relaxed, contented sigh, you typically breathe out, with a satisfied sound for longer than you inhaled. In a nutshell, this is what our system experiences when we can exhale longer than we inhale – that all is well in the world and there is no threat.
If you want a framework, you can use the 4-7-8 breath: that is simply you breathe in for four seconds, hold for seven and then exhale for eight. Ten to fifteen rounds of breathing like this, especially if you can focus on bringing your breath all the way down into your belly as you inhale will likely shift you back into your parasympathetic nervous system, and back to feeling like yourself again.
Of course, the above is a lite-touch approach, and traumatic dysregulation can be a major thing to overcome. My hope is that in the above, you are armed to help yourself or another if they do butt up against a trigger, but as ever, if exercises like the above have no impact, seeking professional help is always the best option.
And breathe…?