Why one cold plunge, one breathing exercise, or one therapy session won’t rewire your nervous system
Why One Breathing Exercise Doesn’t Fix Anxiety
If you have experienced years of stress, or a childhood of trauma, one session of polyvagal regulation exercises is not going to rewire your nervous system.
Many people enquire about the somatic techniques and polyvagal exercises for nervous system regulation, saying that they only want to learn these and then do it by themselves.
What I know, from 10 years as a somatic psychotherapist specialising in anxiety and trauma, is that one session is not going rewire your nervous system. Your brain needs repeated experiences of FEELING safe in order to build new neural pathways (neuroplasticity).”
Want to listen rather than read? Here’s the Podcast (19 Mins)
How Does Neuroplasticity Rewire the Nervous System?
Neurons that fire together wire together. The connections between the neurons are strengthened by repetition and the pathway becomes myelinated (which means the pathway becomes faster).
If you are stuck in a heightened state, it means that those particular pathways have been repeated and strengthened.
Luckily though, your brain has the ability to rewire your nervous system by creating new pathways and prune redundant connections. This is what we call neuroplasticity. Your brain can rewire through new experiences.
Imagine you have a series of well-worn train tracks in your brain. We need to teach your nervous system that they are other branches and destinations to these train tracks. We can go to Chill Village or Relaxation Town instead of always going straight Panic City.
Safety needs to be experienced repeatedly. This is especially important if you have experienced trauma, which is not just a memory, it’s a physical and neurological shift that keeps your body stuck in a heightened survival state.
If you have experienced trauma, we especially need repetition of experiences of safety to strengthen (myelinate) those neural pathways to Chill Village.
Why Your Brain Predicts Threat Instead of Responding to It
Here’s something you may not know. Your brain doesn’t react. It takes in information through external and internal stimuli (neuroception) and predicts based on your historical experiences. Afterwards it course-corrects if necessary.
Here’s an example.
One lunchtime I walked down my street towards Woolies. As I passed a neighbour’s driveway, my brain caught sight of a dark shape in my peripheral vision and internally yelled out “SHIT! DANGER! There’s a bull!” I jumped out of my skin and turned towards the bull and then immediately giggled.
See below a picture of my supposed bull.
As you can see it’s a harmless black motorbike. My brain had seen the shape and size and the ‘horns’ (wing mirrors) and predicted that this was a bull with it’s head down, ready to charge.
The context is that I was tired and I’d had a ‘heavy’ morning, predisposing me to be in a more heightened nervous system state. The history that my brain had examined, is that I had lived on a farm in Samford where cows roamed freely in the paddocks around the house, and this was exactly the shape and size of a cheeky young bullock!
Despite the fact that this was leafy inner city Brisbane and really unlikely to be a bull, my brain had predicted that this was a dangerous situation. But as soon as it had more information (when I turned to face the ‘bull’) it course-corrected. I laughed and, slightly embarassed, carried on with my walk!
Why does your brain predict rather than react?
If your brain reacted to events it would be too inefficient and slow to predict danger and keep you safe. This is because of the volume on external information arriving via your senses (exteroception), and internal information (interoception) coming from the sensations inside of you (much of which you will not be aware of).
So instead, your brain sifts through past experiences to create a hypothesis and compares it to the information it is receiving from your senses to make meaning. These past experiences can be from actual events/people/encounters, or what you’ve ingested through movies, books or games.
“Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.” How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain – Lisa Feldman Barrett (Amazon link)
How Repetition Teaches the Nervous System That It’s Safe
In order to teach your brain the way back to a more regulated nervous system state, you need to repeatedly have experiences of FEELING safe.
Your nervous system learns through EXPERIENCE not insight. Through repetition of experiences of safety, we rewire your nervous system.
Each time we do a regulation exercise and you have a ‘state shift’ in to a more regulated, calmer state, I will ask you to notice what you FEEL in your body. Sensations not just thoughts of “I feel better.” Getting you to become really aware of what it feels like to feel safe, relaxed, calmer.
Throughout your session it’s likely that your nervous system will react to thoughts or memories and go back into heightened states and we will repeat the regulation exercises. Repeating so that your nervous system learns the way.
My goal is to bring back flexibility into your nervous system response. The opposite of ‘stuckness’.
We WANT your nervous system to react instantaneously to danger. But we also want it to be able to calm down again when the danger has passed (or it wasn’t actually danger at all, as in the case of the ‘bull’).
Just as you wouldn’t expect to be awesome at the guitar in your first lesson, please don’t expect to do this perfectly after one practice.
Repetition is what myelinates the neural connections and strengthens the pathway.
“State shifts become pathways through repetition.” Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using Polyvagal Theory, Deb Dana (Amazon link)
You need co-regulation – your nervous system needs a guide
A very intelligent and self-aware client asked me: “Why don’t breathing exercises work for me when I’m on my own?”
The answer was that they had experienced an entire life to date of childhood neglect, zero regulation from their parents and their nervous system was just starting to learn the way to safety. They needed a guide to help them co-regulate.
We ALL need co-regulation when we are extremely distressed. How many times do you think “I just want my mum” when you’re really upset. Or need your girlfriends when you’ve been dumped.
Our culture praises hyper independence and individualism but we are designed to be pack animals. We need others.
We are designed to be comforted by the mere presence of a safe person. Your nervous system subtly picks up the cues of safety and regulation that this safe person provides: their posture and facial expression will tell you that they are listening to you and providing comfort. They may slow down their breathing. The prosody of their voice (volume, tone, speed, pitch) will send signals of calm and safety.
If you have experienced trauma you definitely need a SAFE person to lead you through this. You can’t process trauma on your own.
Why Insight Alone Doesn’t Rewire Trauma
You may have made the connections in your mind in a talk therapy session/or read a book, but you still feel heightened, or feel that something is ‘stuck’ in your body.
Your body needs to experience safety. We call it the ‘felt sense’. This is an embodied learning, not a cognitive one.
Talking about safety is not the same as feeling it.
I’ll be asking you to check in with your body and notice the sensations you feel. Perhaps you feel like your shoulders have dropped, or the absence of that pit in your stomach sensation. Maybe you notice you are yawning. All these are felt experiences of safety.
Somatic therapy focuses on the sensations in your body, your emotions as well as your thoughts and memories. It’s a whole body experience. Read more about Somatic Therapy
How Often Should You Practice Nervous System Regulation?
If you want to rewire your nervous system you need daily practice In fact, multiple times a day.
How about: every time you touch water. Or every time you see a 60 speed sign.
If you just did the exercises when you come to my therapy studio each fortnight, that is only 0.5% of the time you are awake. (The average person is awake for 16 hours a day. 16×14 = 224 hours awake over a fortnight. 1 hour out of 224 is 0.446%.)
So what the maths nerd in me is saying, is that if you only practice the regulation exercises in the 1 hour that you see me, it’s not enough.
Daily micro-practices are going to make more headway (and make you feel better) than an hour once a fortnight.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. Consistency is more important than ‘getting it right’.
“Small, consistent moments matter most” Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using Polyvagal Theory, Deb Dana (Amazon link)
Can You Really Retrain an Overactive Stress Response?
Yes, through repetition.
“State shifts become pathways through repetition” Anchored: How to befriend your nervous system using Polyvagal Theory, Deb Dana (Amazon link)
Please be patient and be realistic. It’s not possible to reverse the experiences of 20 years of an abusive relationship, or a childhood of neglect, in one week. It’s going to take time, repetition and self-compassion.
But through repetition and co-regulation you will get there.
Be kind to yourself.
Try a polyvagal regulation exercise – the Physiological Sigh:
Sniff in through your nose, hold your breath, sniff in again (feel your chest and ribcage expand) and then slowly exhale through your mouth.
You can do it really obviously (making a haaaa sound on your exhale), or do it really subtly in front of other people in a meeting or on the bus!
Why the Physiological Sigh works:
It’s a natural reset for the nervous system and respiratory system. It’s like you are saying to yourself “Nope, I’m not going to stay in this state. I’m going to pull the handbrake”
It opens up our lungs. When we are stressed we naturally breathe shallowly, the second inhale helps to reopen the little air sacs (alveoli), improving the intake of O2 and removal of CO2.
It regulates the amount of CO2 in your blood. When we overbreathe during periods of stress we can sometimes create an imbalance of CO2. The long exhale helps to more efficiently release CO2. We actually do this breathing pattern when we are asleep if CO2 levels build up.
The long exhale through your mouth also activates the parasympathetic nervous system response, taking your into a state of calm.
Now you’ve had an experience, you will benefit from daily neural training practice.
It doesn’t matter when you do it. Do it whilst avoiding the new irritating adverts on subscription TV. Do it whilst waiting for your coffee.
As they say at Nike “Just do it”
