Pausing for brain retraining and emotional regulation
The very first step of retraining our brains and nervous systems to feel safe with, address, and minimize our symptoms and emotions is to pause. Only when we’ve paused can we really sit with the symptom, identify triggers, realize that we’re safe, practice self-compassion, etc. Yet the simple act of pausing can be just as challenging as any of the techniques that we use in the process of rewiring our nervous systems.
What is pausing?
To be clear, I’m not aware of an official definition for this, though there may be one, and other people may think of pausing differently than I do. But the following is how I think of it.
I’ll start with a basic example that most people have experienced at some point: the stress headache at the end of a day. We’ve all had days where work or school got too busy, we had stressful interactions with people, we weren’t fully aware of everything going on within us, and we didn’t have time to emotionally process everything in a timely fashion because we had to keep powering through the day. The body rebels and gives us a headache.
Too often, rather than ever try to address the emotional issues that triggered the stress headache, we turn to distractions: painkillers, TV, food, sleep, alcohol/drugs, and sometimes even exercise. These may make us feel better in the short-term, but they don’t address the root cause of the headache, and they reinforce our subconscious suppression of the emotional responses that triggered the headache.
As I increased my workload after long covid, I had so many days where I had to end the day early because work was triggering my symptoms, and I didn’t know how to address it. Overtime, I realized that if I could recognize a symptom starting to flare up earlier—or, even better, if I could recognize that I was just starting to tense up before a symptom ever developed—then I could pause, do a JournalSpeak session, vent about whatever work thing was upsetting me, and/or practice self-compassion, and I often felt better.
Pausing, for me, is a bit of a mindfulness activity. It requires being aware of what’s happening in our bodies in real time, and taking a step back from a situation or a thought pattern in order to give ourselves the time and space to understand and rewire our response. A way that I like to think about it is that, instead of our nervous systems subconsciously sending us into a freeze state, we’re regaining some measure of control over our internal responses by consciously pausing and taking the time to become aware of what’s happening inside us. This helps reinforce to our nervous systems that we don’t need to be in a freeze state.
Why is pausing so hard?
The very act of pausing is one of brain retraining. Our system has been trained how to respond to pain or emotions, and it was trained on this when we were very young. If we feel pain or other symptoms, we’ve been taught to identify what’s wrong with our body so that we can fix it. So our brain’s immediate response to a symptom or an unwanted emotion is to feel fear that something is wrong. Because the brain is now sending fear signals, the fear of the symptom and emotion amplifies, and then the symptom gets worse. In order to stop that process, we need to catch it before the cycle begins.
The problem is that the symptom-fear and symptom-emotion-fear cycles happen subconsciously. At least initially, I found catching the cycle before it begins to be nearly impossible.
Going back to my work example: As I worked more hours post-long-covid, I began to get headaches from work, and I didn’t know why. At some point, as I did this work, I began to realize days after the fact, that something specific had triggered the headache. Then, I got better at realizing more quickly what had happened to trigger the headache. Then, I started to realize in the moment that something was triggering my headache, but I couldn’t prevent it from forming. And only after about a year of going through this did I finally get to the point that I could reliably recognize the triggers and address them in real time to prevent the headache.
This situation is complicated when repressed emotions are involved, but even for cases in which the brain retraining is focused on a symptom without an underlying emotion, there’s typically frustration and fear that we still need to identify, sit with, and address.
What does this process look like?
I found that learning the practice of pausing occurred in roughly four stages. I want to reiterate that these took a long time to work through. It took me about a year of going through the stages below to get where I am now. Maybe some people can do this faster, but others might need more time. So far, everything I’ve seen suggests that it takes time to get ourselves out of the freeze states.
For me, the first stage in developing a practice of pausing was awareness of the symptom, and there is so much to be aware of.
First, I had to work on realizing the symptom was coming on and to pause whatever I was doing to sit with the symptom. Initially, I would have the symptom for a while before I remembered to start the pause process.
Then I would ask myself standard brain-retraining questions: What is the symptom? Where do I feel it in my body? What does it feel like to just accept this symptom without fear?
That, on it’s own, only worked if there were no other emotional components involved in the symptom. Usually, there were emotional components, the most obvious of which was usually a significant amount of fear. And so I would try to sit with both the symptom and the fear.
That rarely worked very well, and I would start to realize just how frustrated I was with myself. I was frustrated that I was dealing with the symptom, and often extra frustrated because I was dealing with it again. I was frustrated that I was still getting frustrated rather than feeling acceptance. I was frustrated that I had so much fear, even though I knew there was nothing to be scared of. I was frustrated if I couldn’t figure out what had triggered the symptom. And so on.
At this point, I might decide to do a JournalSpeak session to see if I could figure out the trigger and to give a voice to my frustrations. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.
Eventually, I would start to realize how unfair it was that I was being so hard on myself, and I would begin to practice self-compassion. (Although this actually came later in my recovery because it took me so long to discover the importance of self-compassion.)
You may not be surprised to learn that none of this made the symptom better, at least not right away. However, what I was doing was beginning to reprogram my responses to the symptoms and the emotions. As I mentioned above, at first, it took me a while to determine what the emotional trigger had been, and it could be days or weeks after the symptom before I’d realize what had happened.
So the second stage was developing an awareness of the trigger closer to real time, and this involved learning to prioritize myself over anything else that was going on. If I started to feel a symptom, I had to pause what I was doing and deal with the symptom and its underlying emotional trigger.
Obviously, I couldn’t always stop in the middle of something, but as soon as I could pause, I did. That might mean taking a break from work, ending work early, accepting that I couldn’t meet a deadline, telling my husband I couldn’t do something with him, or ignoring our dogs.
At the very least, I would always take at least 20 minutes to do a JournalSpeak session about whatever was going on at that moment so that I could try to figure out what had triggered the symptom. I regularly took JournalSpeak breaks throughout a workday so that I could become more aware of what I was feeling as I got through the day.
Often I would do a deep relaxation to remind my body that I was safe, regardless of how stressful work was.
Sometimes I had to allow myself to shake and move, cowering with fear or punching the air in rage.
Especially early on, but even now, I also still went/go through the bullet points in the first step, especially the parts about feeling frustrated.
Again, as I learned more about self-compassion, I practiced that more in this stage.
The third stage was recognizing the tension that was a precursor to a symptom in real time, but not being able to do anything with it. This stage was mostly just being aware of what was happening in real time, but then needing a bit more time to remember that I needed to pause and run through the bullet points from stage two.
The fourth stage, which I’m in now, is being able to address an emotional trigger or tension in real time without feeling symptoms.
As soon as I feel any sort of twinge, which for me, now typically comes in the form of tension, I go right to the tense spot and let it know I’m there with it.
I feel into my whole body and identify anyplace else I’m holding tension. Then I just sit with the tension, sometimes breathing into the location, but often just allowing it to be there.
If I’m not with other people, then I’ll talk to the tense spot, asking it questions as a therapist might to understand why it’s here, and sending it lots of compassion and love.
If I’m with other people, I let the tension know that I’m with it, and I will address it more fully as soon as I can. I’m trying to get even better at prioritizing myself and my needs in these situations.
If I’m in the middle of something or I have plans, I let the tension know that I’m with it, and I’ll address it as soon as I can. Then I keep checking in. Often, it just goes away, but sometimes it will be waiting for me to address it when I have some privacy.
For the most part, this is now a process that only requires a few minutes, however, it’s important to remember that emotions, especially big emotions, can be exhausting. If something big happens, I may still need an hour or two or three to lay in bed, resting and processing big stressors. I may also just need to lay on the couch and binge happy TV shows while my nervous system resets. I still do some JournalSpeak, although not nearly as often. I also still spend a period of time feeling super frustrated before I remember to practice self-compassion and acceptance.
However, I’m not getting symptoms anymore that force me to be bedridden, and I can do whatever I want without fear of triggering symptoms. It’s just that now I’m much more aware of what my body needs, and I honor that by taking those pauses to check in and see how my emotional body is doing.
I will be taking a break next week for the holidays, so I will post again in the new year. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year!