How To Regulate For Resilience

The second tier in the resilience pyramid, the building block on that internal safety that we can cultivate is understanding regulation. Go back to last week’s post to read about the first tier.

Regulation is our ability to head back to practices that notify our body that we are safe when we feel stress or experience difficult moments or feelings..

Before we get into some important regulation techniques, I want to take a minute and explain a bit about stress. Because it often feels like we misunderstand stress as something that is largely dependent on circumstances outside of us and that can put the brakes on our ability to regulate. So let’s get into it.

There are stressors and there is stress.  

Our stressors are the things that activate the stress response in our bodies. Most of them are external, so things like work, kids, money, red tape, maybe even small things that activate the stress response like waiting for an important bit of information or traffic or when something is broken that we really need access too. Stressors can also be  internal things like body self-criticism or those voices of the inner protector, and they also activate the stress response. If these things are the stressors - the stress itself is what happens in your body. It’s this chemical mash up of energy and hormones that gets activated in response to the stressor, and ultimately it’s our body’s evolutionary protection mode that flares up to notify us that something is at risk, is not right, is in struggle within.

In their book Burnout, sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about stress as a cycle that needs to be completed. I think this is a really revolutionary way of explaining and understanding regulation. And it’s also accessible, because what it means is that even if the stressors in our life aren’t going away, we can still learn to complete the cycle of stress in our bodies and regulate ourselves amidst the stressors. 

In turn then, this also means that when the stressors do go away, you also have to prioritise dealing with the stress itself separately because it’s happening in our bodies. 

For example: I have friends that work in am-dram. When they are in a show, it’s full on. They are often working day jobs in a demanding physical, emotional roles and then going straight to rehearsals and performances. You can guarantee that the week after their show ends its run, they will be unwell for a few days - like clockwork. They will have throat problems, their stomach issues will flare up, their body will responding to the stress. Even though the stressor is gone - the show is finished. The stress in their body will manifest. It has been working the cycle all along but it has got stuck because the adrenaline of the pressure and the performance of the show has masked it. But now that the stressor is gone, even if it was an enjoyable one that felt fulfilling as a whole - the body is speaking up - “pay attention! I’m still stuck!” Im sure we all have examples of this in our own lives. We’ve all experienced times where we’ve had stressors to contend with - be it the death of a loved one, submitting a big project or paper, being on a deadline for work, working on something complex or even conflict in relationships or building up to a difficult conversation we know we have to have - and often times once those experiences come to a close or are sorted in some way, our body feels like it’s been through a war. And internally it likely has. It has been stuck in a stress cycle. So we get sick, we need to take to bed for a day or two, we feel rotten. 

And it’s not because we all of a sudden got sick, you were likely unwell from the stress in your body all along, but now your immune system can finally get its voice heard over the noise of all the stress. Our nervous system has been deregulated and that system impacts a whole bunch of other areas of our physical bodies and their abilities to thrive.. 

Nervous system deregulation occurs when the nervous system is in a state of continual or repeated activation or in extended conditions of stress.

The impact ranges from chronic physical illness and dis-ease such as: memory problems, insomnia, dizziness, digestive problems and psychological: fear being seen, people-pleasing, hyper-vigilance, overworking, lack based thinking, planning for the worst, feeling unsafe in your body, easily overwhelmed, a need to control/ win/ be good/ right, maybe even addicted to negative reinforcement.

COMPLETING THE STRESS CYCLE:

So if stress is a cycle that happen in your body and involves the full intelligence of your nervous system - which extends from the top of your head to the tip of your toes and beyond the skin, burnout is what happens when we do not complete the stress cycle. We get stuck in the middle of it. 

And burnout is the result of chronic stress - when your stress level outpaces the resources you have available to drain off the stress or complete the stress cycle. You go from stressor to stressor and continue to go halfway through the cycle in the stress response and back again to a new stressor without deploying ways to notify your body that the stress cycle is complete. And that notification that we give the body to complete the stress cycle is what I mean by regulation. 

So how do we regulate and complete the stress cycle? Let’s talk about it.

• Most efficient – physical activity.

So it can be any form of physical activity. It can be dancing it out in your living room. It can be just standing up from your desk, tensing every muscle really hard, every muscle in your body until they’re shaking and begging for you to stop and then you flop down, put your hands on the ground and let your body soak and release. And that, even by itself, is going to begin to release the physical chemical stuff that was happening in your body with the stress. Any movement of your body

• Next up - Breathing down-regulates your nervous system.

Especially when you can take a slow breath in and especially a slow, long breath out. All the way to the ends of your abdominal muscles contract. That’s how you know you’re engaging the parasympathetic nervous system to down regulate the central nervous system. It is the gentlest way in to completing the stress response cycle. It sounds too hippy, too easy. But it’s science and it works. Most popular with two groups: yoga instructors and military special forces.

Other ways to complete the stress cycle: 

Positive social interaction

Laughter

Affection

A good old cry

Creative Expression

It’s important to remember, stress is not bad for you. Being stuck in stress and not completing the stress cycle is bad for you. We must find ways to regulate ourselves in times of stress, even if we aren’t able to remove the stressor. I find this to be a really powerful bit of information to keep in mind when it comes to resilience building.

If we are able to understand the conditions that bring us internal or emotional safety and do our best to maintain that AND THEN deploy our resources to regulate and complete the stress cycle when we do feel threatened by stress or uncertainty or risk then we are setting ourselves up for a really healthy way of navigating the inevitability of life and can be confident that resilience - the ability to move through difficulty without adding more pain to the experience - is within reach because we have ways and means to understand it and manage it those tougher times.

As always, I’m here - willing to chat more - you can email me hello@melwiggins.com if you want to reflect on anything I’ve said today and if there’s anything I can do to go further with this and support you or your maybe even spend some time with your team or workplace looking at resilience building, know that I’d love to do that and you can email me for more details of what that could look like. 

And if you’re a female business owner keen to do more work on building your resilience as you build your business, we make space for all of this in my four month brand builder programme which is open right now. If you want to chat to me about what the brand builder involves, there’s a link in the show notes to book a little bit of time with me, for free and chat that through.