Kicking + Screaming?

The other day, from the bottom of my soul, I screamed F*%K YOU at the door of my shower.

It was not my proudest moment, but man did it feel like a good release.

I was bone tired, had a wicked headache, was over functioning, and moving too fast. When I hit my funny bone hard on the shower door, I couldn’t contain the pent up feels anymore, and the rageful f-bomb flew. 

The first quarter of the year is hard. It is full-on right out of the gate. Regardless of whether I’ve had plenty or not enough down time at the end of the previous year, Q1 has a way of flipping my nervous system into hi rev.

Mere minutes after the shower scream, I sat down with a client on zoom who is a self-employed consultant. I immediately saw she had the same look about her—tired and crabby, with tears just under the surface. Rather than diving straight in where we left off in our previous session, we chose to sit still and quiet and breathe together for a bit.

When she did began, she said what I expected: “It’s like I’ve got a hopper of lottery balls spinning in front of me right now. Everyone and everything is popping up at once, and it’s all urgent. I’m at my breaking point.”

“Here’s the thing,” she further confided, “ I am SO good at taking care of my nervous system on a regular basis. But when my life and work get this intense all at once I totally lose that connection to self-care, and then I get crabby and victim-y and spun out.”

I, too, am usually really good at taking care of my nervous system. But certain combinations of situations throw me into a full-on flurry inside, and that’s what I had been operating within for the first few days of the new year 

Sitting with my client and reflecting back over my own full-tilt week, I realized that the self-care measures I had taken—a long, hard hike and connecting with a handful of friends—weren’t the kind of care I needed. 

Hard hikes and hangouts help balance and ground me when I have energy, but when I’m already depleted from being in hi rev for too long, those activities are draining and they send me deeper into that place of spin where there’s never enough time or energy to do all the things.

Rather than going into strategy about how my client could make changes to her business or find more space and time in her schedule, I  said, ”We’ve gotta’ take a look at what you’re doing to regulate yourself.” 

What you need to regulate yourself changes depending on whether your nervous system has you in a super mobilized state or an immobilized state. And until you come back to a regulated state, any strategizing you do to make things better likely will not help because it’s coming from a spun out or shut down place.

So, my client and I worked to identify one grounding practice she could reliably and comfortably do during her work day.  

She said she knew that stepping outside—even just onto her porch—helped to ground and balance her. So, I suggested she couple a visit to her porch with something she does every day a number of times a day, no matter what. Like getting a snack or going pee.

Coupling a practice for regulating your nervous system with a habitual activity is a great way to anchor it in your daily life. When you link that new practice in your mind to a necessary thing that you’ll never not do, it’s easier to remember to do it and you don’t feel like you have to carve out time for it. 

Just talking about stepping onto her porch every time she eats a snack shifted my client’s energy, softening her slightly. And then, like magic, she could see what she needed to do to navigate her crazy schedule. 

Understanding how your nervous system works and how to work with it are key tools in any kind of personal work. Until you know how to assess what’s happening with your nervous system and discern how to regulate it, you will think and act from unconscious survival strategies—like over-functioning and people pleasing. 

Or you’ll automatically default to the activities that have worked for you in the past to regulate, forgetting that the activities to bring balance need to be as dynamic as we are.

And though those survival strategies and default activities for feeling better “work” in that they keep you going, they aren’t always the best for you…and might land you suddenly screaming an expletive at your shower door, too.

In my Yours Truly course we address how to engage with your nervous system in a way that supports you building an embodied relationship with your nervous system, so that you can catch yourself when your attempts at self-care aren’t effective, and redirect yourself toward ones that will be as your life changes. 

Because without that, any learning you do will end up in the same pile that much of self-help goes into—knowledge that you conceptually understand is good for you but don’t use when you most need it.

When you know how to regulate yourself no matter the flavor of dysregulation, new learning not only sticks, but it becomes easier to apply in real life—which is the whole point behind investing in personal development! 

Learn more about Yours Truly here.