Feeling "safe enough" in our bodies
Building a baseline of safety, even when our nervous systems are wracked with fear
Why we feel fear, even when we’re “safe”
Long Covid — as well as many, if not most, chronic pain and chronic health conditions — is predominantly a fear response. It is a massively over-activated and poorly understood fear response, but at its core, Long Covid, and so many other chronic conditions, are the result of our nervous systems believing we are in danger and trying to get us to safety.
It might seem like the obvious solution is to just calm down. Take a pause, look around, see that my life was not in obvious danger, see that nothing was about to hurt me physically, and relax. However, this approach assumes that the only physical threats to life come in the form of an external “attacker” of some sort, and that’s simply not the case.
First, things can go wrong inside our bodies. Heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, cancer, bacteria, viruses, and any number of unseen, internal threats kill people every day. Moreover, we’ve been taught to believe that many normal imperfections in our bodies are a sign something is wrong, when in fact, our bodies just don’t resemble an idealized medical training dummy. When doctors find these so-called “normal abnormalities” it can trigger significant fear. Or when we feel like something may be off inside of our bodies, we may fear that we have a dangerous abnormality because we’ve been taught that if we don’t feel perfect at all times, that’s a sign something is wrong with us. For many of us, feeling “perfect” means that we can’t have any bodily sensations at all without triggering our nervous systems to think something is wrong.
Our nervous systems, once overactivated, can perceive any symptom, twinge or unexpected bodily contraction to be a sign that something is badly wrong with our bodies and that our lives are in danger.
Second, although it’s common to act as though we’re all individualists who can and should be able to survive on our own without any help from others, in reality, humans are social beings whose survival depends on fitting in with the group. To be alone, to be alienated from the group that helps us stay alive, can be deadly. That means, if our nervous systems perceive that our emotions or how we’re interacting with other people are putting us in danger of being rejected by the group, then our nervous systems may react by going into a fight/flight/freeze state during different emotional or relational situations.
I’m going to write more about this in another post someday, but I want to really emphasize this point: It is completely reasonable and rational for our bodies to go into a fight/flight/freeze state if our nervous systems believe that we are at risk of being alienated by a group and left to fend for ourselves. Especially because our nervous systems developed many of their automatic responses as babies, toddlers and children, it was critical for survival that we our emotional responses—or lack thereof—matched the needs of our caregivers and peers.
The part about automatic responses is critical as well. Our nervous systems are reacting automatically to a threat. Our adult minds might be well aware of the fact that there’s no physical threat, but our unconscious nervous system is very aware of and responding to threats that we don’t know about. For example, we might be perfectly prepared to give a presentation in front of a large group of people, but we still feel nervous because, even though our adult minds know it’s a friendly audience and nothing bad will happen, our nervous systems were wired at some point to fear these interactions. Alternatively, we might have learned as small children that crying or getting angry triggered those close to us to either get mad or to mock us. As a result, by the time we’re adults, our nervous systems are so well trained that such emotions are repressed without us ever being consciously aware that the emotion existed in the first place.
Feeling “safe enough”: my experience
So where am I going with all of this? I’ve recently been talking to some people who are struggling to even start many of the techniques that help us recover from chronic conditions because their nervous systems are so over-activated. These interactions have gotten me thinking quite a bit about the early stages of my own recovery, and I’ve realized that, long before I learned about JournalSpeak or brain retraining or neuroplasticity, I’d already started down a path to calm my nervous system. I *think* that may have helped me already start to rewire my neural circuits before I began any of this work. For all of the reasons mentioned above, I did not feel “safe” in my body, but by the time I got to this work, I think I felt “safe enough.”
One of the things for me is that I’d started learning how to listen to my body without fear of what it was telling me. I wasn’t good at it, but I’d begun the process. I want to share some of what I tried and learned here.
First, to go back to my comment at the start about why “just calm down” doesn’t work: a lot of really common techniques to calm the nervous system made me worse. Most breath work made me worse. Restorative yoga poses made me worse. Body scans made me worse. Tensing my muscles to help them relax made me worse (my muscles never relaxed after being tensed!). Massage and acupuncture had triggered panic attacks. Even medication for anxiety made me worse.
I think what happened for me was that my nervous system was very aware that none of these things was actually getting to the root cause of my issues. My nervous system had to be hyper-vigilant to stay safe, and it didn’t believe it could keep me safe if it was in a relaxed, non-vigilant state. So these attempts to relax my nervous system just acted as triggers. Moreover, I had perfectionist tendencies, so if a technique didn’t work well enough or fast enough, my nervous system (again functioning unconsciously) would believe that something was wrong with me. That, of course, just reinforced the belief that nothing was safe.
After reading “Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma” by Elizabeth Stanley, I now believe this isn’t that uncommon. In the book, she mentions that for those of us who are over-activated, a lot of standard relaxation techniques don’t work.
When I first got sick, I remembered something I’d read by Eckhart Tolle where he explained that if we’re ever feeling like we’re getting sick, a good way to prevent the illness is to spend 15 minutes feeling into our entire bodies, though he acknowledged that for most of us, that would be difficult to do without practice. That advice had resonated with me because it seemed like such an obvious thing that we should be able to do, but I found it impossible. For a couple of years prior to covid, I would occasionally come back to this practice, but without much luck—I could barely feel into a couple of my fingers at the whole time, let alone my whole body.
As I lay in bed on a September day in 2020, I could feel a crippling headache starting to form—I was feeling all the same sensations that I’d had prior to a “headache” the previous week, which had landed me in the ER with a watery eye that was swollen nearly shut. It basically felt like my brain was trying to explode out of my eye. Not wanting a repeat of that “headache,” I decided to try the “feel-the-whole-body” approach again. I thought it might be motivating to listen to Tolle’s “The Power of Now,” at the same time, as that’s the book where he mentions this approach. So I had his audiobook running in the background, and I considered my whole body. I couldn’t really feel any of my body because I was so scared that the pain in my head was going to return, so I thought it might be best to start by focusing just on my feet.
With Tolle’s peaceful voice droning in the background, I focused on sending my breath down to my feet. I became aware of “energetic blockages” in my hips, and so my focus would alternate between trying to move my breath through those and just focusing on my feet. I did this for five hours—I dozed during that time too, but when I was awake, I was breathing into my hips and feet. By the time I finally quit, not only had my headache never appeared, I felt practically euphoric. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d just had my first experience calming my nervous system. That particular headache never returned.
Because that was so successful, I often took that approach over the next year, with one other component added in. During the first session, I’d felt surges of energy going through me and those scared me a little. During the second session, I decided to just let my body do what it needed to do with those surges of energy, and it turned out, what my body needed was to shake like crazy. Initially, this was a bit scary too, but because it was something I could control and because I always felt so much better after, I allowed my body to shake as much as needed. I later read Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger,” and learned that this is a common reaction to release trauma and tension from the body.
Over the first year, I would often do this while listening to a variety of different calming audiobooks in the background. Usually the audiobooks were by well-known authors on mindfulness and eastern traditions: Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, Tara Brach, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, Anodea Judith, and so many others. One of my favorites was Reginald Ray, who includes incredible full-length somatic meditations in his audio books, so even though I personally don’t practice Buddhism, I listened to his books more than any others. I always listened to the books, rather than read them, because what I needed most was the soothing sound of someone talking peacefully to me (also, I didn’t have the mental capacity to read at the time).
Why this practice worked for me
I think there were a few things going on that made this practice so powerful.
1) It was easy. I’ve had people say that they couldn’t just lay in bed and do this for five hours, but it’s important to remember that I was sick. I wasn’t a superhuman healthy person who was meditating for five hours straight. I was a sick person who couldn’t get out of bed or focus my attention on anything like TV or movies. When we’re sick, it’s a lot easier to just lay there and zone in and out of consciousness. I picked books that didn’t require rapt attention, and that would still make sense even if I dozed off for half an hour or was alternating my attention between my feet and the speaker. I dozed a lot during those “meditative” hours. There weren’t rules to what I was doing beyond: as much as possible try to feel my whole body, and if I slept or got distracted by the book, that’s good too. I also accepted that I probably couldn’t feel my whole body, and so often I would focus on just an area of my body, typically below my belly button (so either my legs or my lower abdomen, which is a focus area for Zen and many other eastern practices). I also often just did this for 30 min to an hour or two. Five hours wasn’t that common.
2) It didn’t involve judgement about my body. I wasn’t trying to see what was going on in my body; I was just trying to feel into more than one part of my body at once. So it didn’t matter if there was pain or other symptoms in that body part. I didn’t have to stress out about what I was feeling. I was just trying to feel. If anything, my self-judgement was focused on how bad I was at feeling my body, rather than any particular sensations themselves.
3) Often, my focus was within my body, but not on a specific “part.” Many of the meditations I preferred would focus my attention on the lower Dantian, which is a space in your lower abdomen that’s associated with ancient Chinese practices. I also became a huge fan of chakra meditations, which place your focus on “energetic” points throughout the torso. I also liked many yoga nidra practices (as long as they weren’t the kind that suggest tensing the body). All of these practices took me within my body without asking me to feel into a specific body part, which could have been activating if I had a symptom or issue with that body part.
4) Having someone else speaking in the background meant I didn’t get lost in my own thoughts as often. If I didn’t have the audio books running in the background, I was much more likely to get distracted by my own thoughts about things that were wrong with me. I liked to say that I needed someone’s voice in my head, but it didn’t have to be my own voice. In fact, it was better to have a peaceful voice reinforcing the idea that all was right with the world and that I too could achieve a better state of mind and being.
5) I was giving my body what it wanted. There’s a lot of advice to go out and push through the fear. Some of this comes from people who really don’t understand what’s going on inside of us, but some of it comes from people who have recovered using brain retraining techniques. My personal experience was that I often didn’t know what I was actually afraid of, and so trying to push through an activity might be helpful, or it might be triggering: it depended on whether my nervous system was only afraid of that activity or if there was an underlying issue I wasn’t addressing. One of the most important things I learned from this illness was to stop listening to what other people said I needed, and instead, listen to my body. If my body was forcing me to lay in bed, it’s because that’s what it needed. If my body wanted to shake, I let it. By allowing that, I think I was unknowingly building a baseline of trust with my body so that, when I started doing the real work, I had a foundation of safety already laid out. I didn’t feel “safe” in my body, but I felt “safe enough.”
What calms your nervous system?
There’s more I was going to include in this post, but this has gotten long. I’ll revisit many of these ideas in future posts. For now, I’m really curious what other people found effective for calming their nervous systems, either traditional techniques or random things you just found helpful. My schedule has normalized again, so I should be able to more easily respond to comments now.