The Nervous System Gone Awry

Almost ten years ago, I taught English in a small town in France about 40 minutes from Paris. It was an interesting and difficult experience on so many levels, and it would have been a great time to have had my yoga tools, but alas, that is a story for another day. But right now I’m remembering a scene in the teacher lunch room. I eat fast, but one day, I watched one of the teachers literally inhale his yogurt. Looking back, it sort of reminds me of how my dogs eat – they sort of forget to chew.

My grandfather was the polar opposite of that French teacher. When we were children (and I will admit, even a bit when I was in college and would visit my grandfather), my brother and I would make a joke of my grandfather’s eating habits and count the number of times he would chew his food. One time he got up to 27 chews . . . for a piece of lettuce!

Looking back on these situations, I see two very different nervous systems. The French teacher was jittery in general. His manner of eating was simply one manifestation of his underlying hyper quality. My grandfather, on the other hand, was an accountant. Now, I adore accountants, but they are definitely not known for their high-strung jittery qualities. Instead, they are methodical and calm and precise. And my grandfather’s ability to chew was just a manifestation of those qualities. (And in case anyone is keeping score, I’m writing this while scarfing down my breakfast faster than I should.)

But this post is not about eating, though I do think about that a lot. This post is about our nervous systems. I had some fillings done on two of my molars yesterday, and I was in pretty excruciating pain for several hours after it was done. And I just kept thinking that my nervous system is so strung out. Being in pain for over a year does that. But as someone said to me earlier this week, that pattern has been in me for years. One could even argue it was there as a child while I was getting annoyed with my grandfather for eating so darn slowly. Sometimes he would even have to microwave his food in the middle of the meal because it got cold.

 Yes, our nervous systems manifest in various ways. I have written before about people who bounce their feet constantly. But there are hundreds of manifestations of our internal energies. Have you ever met someone you knew was just totally wound up? Have you ever met someone who just seemed relax regardless of the external circumstances? That is the nervous system at work.

And most people I know are living with their nervous systems in high gear. It is why dis-ease is rampant, pain is everywhere, and somehow it is October when it feels as though the year started last week. Most of us are all running on nervous system fumes. This is, in many ways, a different way of looking at the fight or flight response. We are living on high alert. But the nervous system is what then starts to fire differently, and it changes how we see the world.

The nervous system is our connection to the rest of the world and to ourselves. It is how we feel. If we had no sciatic nerve, for example, we would be unable to walk. It is not just our muscles and bones that hold us up, but our ability to feel our feet that allow us to stand. Serious trauma to the nervous system can paralyze us. And our nervous system allows us to connect to others as well. Neurons are the transmitters that help our brain understand what is happening in the world around us. We need our nervous system to function at its peak, or else we stop being able to function at all.

When we are being chased by a wild animal, we need our nervous system to be on high alert. We need to have a single-track mind to protect ourselves from the imminent danger. But we do not need that singular focus the rest of our lives. In fact, it can get in the way of our relationships and our ability to live a full life.

When we are in a calmer state, we notice the world around us. We notice the people around us. We are able to give more of ourselves to our work and our lives. It is the biggest paradox of our culture that we think by working more we can get more done. But deep within our core, most of us know that it is really when we take regular breaks to recharge that our ability to work strengthens. Modern science is finally making these connections as well. I’m still trying to implement naptime at work, but I’m having difficulty.

Unfortunately, without regular breaks, without taking time to breathe, or sometimes as a result of dis-ease, the nervous system goes awry. It takes over and goes into overdrive, and getting it out of that state feels impossible. Doctors give us medication that is supposed to stop that overdrive, but instead of actually calming the nervous system, those medications simply block our response to it. Sometimes that is the boost we need to calm down ourselves, but sometimes it just makes it more difficult.

The good news is that the body/mind/soul do not want to rest in hyperactivity, so getting back to calmness is actually their natural state. We just have to get out of our own ways enough to make that happen. And that can take years of training. Or it can take a few minutes of breathing every day. There are so many tools to calm ourselves: Walking in nature, deep breathing (most accessible and easiest but somehow one of the more difficult to do), being with good friends, going to a calming yoga class (this means no Bikram when the goal is to calm the nervous system), meditating, massage, energy work, acupuncture, etc.

But those are all “just” tools. They are absolutely amazing tools, and all of them will help us get on the path to calming the nervous system. They are not, however, panaceas. In order to fully calm our nervous systems, we have to want them to be calm. We have to step out of the mindset of the modern world and recognize that we need not be nervous wrecks in order to function. We do not have to go 100% all the time. We are allowed to stop and take a walk in nature. Until we allow that one thought, nothing is going to change long term.

Have you noticed your nervous system has gone awry? Are you willing to allow yourself to calm? What are your tools?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Nervous System Gone Awry, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture

Yoga teaches us to trust our intuition. Some days it is a really good idea to go to a vinyasa class and move. Some days it is a really good idea to relax into a calming, restorative class. But every day is going to be different, no matter who you are. One of the only parts of each of us that is the same is that we change on a daily basis.

And yoga not only allows this, but it encourages these differences. It encourages us to look at our subtleties and understand them more fully. We can move into our bodies each and every day and understand its needs that day. We can use different modalities to calm our minds and calm our nerves every minute. We live in an age where there are thousands of modalities, and we just need to find the one that works for us.

The “real” world, however, still has not quite caught on. Law schools still seem to think the right answer for every student is a law firm life, the bigger the better (and yes, I know not all schools do this, but the underlying culture still does). Professionals specialize more and more such that simple answers outside their specialty evade their understanding. We live in a world where we try to make every situation the same because then it fits a pattern that is familiar to us.

When I was studying in New Zealand, there had recently been a change in New Zealand requiring lawyers who represented children to actually see their child clients in person. Prior to that, many lawyers just assumed all children were the same, so they did not actually have to meet their particular client in this case. And that was in family law, where seeing the child with each of the parents and more fully understanding that child’s relationship with each child was even more important.

I do not mention this to say these lawyers did not care. They simply did not think through the fact that every single person is unique and has individual qualities. When I went to see a surgeon, he really only looked at my MRI. The physical therapist and another doctor said, “I want to see you before I look at the images.” When we get into too much specialization, we lose subtleties of each and every person.

And this does not only affect the professional world. It affects our everyday lives. If we stop expecting people and situations to be different, we start making assumptions about how certain situations are going to happen. And with that, we have the potential to stop trusting ourselves in the moment of those situations. But yoga helps us tap back into that intuition in the moment. It helps us see that each and every day our body and mind are different.

For example, we learn to tap into the subtleties that make up our every day lives. We learn to find new meaning in what we might have otherwise thought would be a mundane situation. This is really the next step in gratitude. Not only can we be grateful for what we have, but we can start to see how nothing is really as it seems, and our lives are richer and more interesting than we might otherwise imagine.  But first, we have to learn to look. We have to learn to step outside of our focused vision and see the bigger picture. But in order to see that bigger picture, we have to learn to notice the small differences in each and every person, encounter, and situation.

I guess the big question is, “so what?” My 8^th grade English teacher used to ask us that on our writing assignments. Why am I mentioning this? How does this affect our daily lives? Some people believe that one of the underlying reasons for unhappiness in our world is when people believe they are not fully seen for who they are. If we believe that everyone of a certain characteristic (whether race, occupation, age, etc.) is the same, we fail to see the person before us. It is not easy to do. It is much easier to put everyone in a box and go from there. It takes less mental effort . . . on the surface.

But in the long term, what takes less mental effort is not keeping people in those boxes, whatever they are, but allowing yourself to fully experience life. Just like we do not usually need the fight or flight response in our daily lives, though it is great when we do, we do not need to box people into categories anymore. We live in a different world than we did 10,000 years ago when there were reasons not to trust anyone but our clan.  Now our world will be better served by tuning into the subtle differences of each and every person and situation. For me, I have found the ability to start doing that through yoga.

Do you find yourself caught up in assumptions? How do you get out of that mindset? How do you see each person as an individual?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, The Subtleties of the Bigger Picture, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Daily Gratitude

Gratitude is something some people only think about in November (particularly Americans because that is the month in which the holiday Thanksgiving falls). Certainly, a time focused on giving thanks is a great time to think about Gratitude, but it can fuel our lives each and every day. When gratitude permeates our lives, the difficulties of our lives become less visible, more of a teaching moment, and may even disappear. Actually, the one downside I see to living in a country where Thanksgiving is such a big deal is that it takes away from finding gratitude every day. We can just compartmentalize it to a particular month. Not all societies have such a holiday; in fact most do not.

Our minds are powerful. While yogis have known this for millennia, and the new age community has been saying it for decades, the modern, conventional world is finally catching on, and some people are making a big stink about it. But why? What is so important about gratitude? What is it about bringing gratitude into our lives that makes our lives so much better?

Stress hangs out in our bodies and can physiologically change them. I am not just talking about a sore back or a headache. I am talking about serious disease processes and serious physical pain. While I have known this and talked about this for years, even I was skeptical about just how powerful it is. We are so trained to believe that pain and disease have other physiological causes. And sometimes they do, but stress underlies many of those “real” causes as well.

As I mentioned in the last post, a great book about this is called Mind Over Medicine. It said nothing I did not know, but it used the scientific proof so many of us crave. The proof was in peer reviewed medical journals. It is no more proof, really, than intuition, but we have been trained as a society to only believe these proven facts. And when I say stress here, I mean more than just working too much. I mean the stress that eats away at our bodies and minds, the stress that enters us and never leaves. I mean the stress that turns us into pessimists and makes our brains and bodies think we are constantly under attack. 

But back to gratitude. Gratitude is one of the antidotes to that stress. It helps create the optimism to overcome it. Stress puts us in the fight, flight, or freeze response, and chronic stress keeps us there. The antidote is, therefore, relaxation. But relaxation is more than vegging out in front of the television or even getting a massage every month. Relaxation has to permeate our lives to counteract the chronic stress many of us experience. A gratitude practice can be what helps us enter that relaxation phase.

Gratitude helps us start to see beauty in the world. It helps us recognize the good in our lives. And when we start to recognize the good in our lives, our brains can slowly begin to come out of that fight, flight, or freeze mode. We can reprogram the brain to recognize the fear that put it in fight, flight, or freeze is not life threatening. It is not a lion about to eat us. We can slowly begin to let go of our defenses and begin to find healing again.

This month on the Is Yoga Legal facebook page, I am going to post a daily gratitude. Join me there and share your gratitude as well. It is a beautiful time of year. We are in the end of summer, schools are going back in session, and here in Arizona the monsoon skies continue to show us unmatched beauty. I rarely have themes I follow each month, but this month it seems fitting to find a deep and true gratitude practice, one that is not just a passing phase but that infuses each and every moment of the day.

How do you bring gratitude into your life? Have you ever kept a gratitude journal? How has it changed your life?

Namaste!

© Rebecca Stahl 2013, all rights reserved.

The post, Daily Gratitude, first appeared on Is Yoga Legal.

Recognition is the First Step

In the last post, we discussed the concepts of Vicarious Trauma and Secondary Shock. At a conference I attended last week, a presenter called it Compassion Fatigue. That is a lot of names for the same issue. But what is it? And what does it have to do with you? Most importantly, how can we know if it is affecting us?

As I mentioned before, I had not heard of this concept until after I graduated from law school. I loved law school (seriously, I did), but I find it unconscionable that I managed to graduate never having heard of this concept. Lawyers are four times as likely to be depressed as the general population. I knew that statistic, but I did not understand why. Of course, part of the problem is the hours, but I think it actually has more to do with Vicarious Trauma and Compassion Fatigue.

This is burnout on an entirely different stage. Burnout is not a lesser form of vicarious trauma, but it is something different. The difference between them is what causes each of them. Burnout comes from overwork or from a lack of support. It comes from stress that never dissipates. Vicarious trauma originates in the repeated interactions with people experiencing trauma. While some of the symptoms may look similar between burnout and vicarious trauma because they are both stress responses, the symptoms of vicarious trauma also include those  associated with PTSD.

I am not, in any way, minimizing the effects of burnout. It is painful and difficult and can be just as awful as vicarious trauma. My point is simply that they are different in kind. It is possible, and common, to suffer from both, but recognizing how each is different helps us recognize how best to overcome them on their own terms. And here we are focusing on vicarious trauma. In many ways, this entire blog is about burnout. In this series, however, I want to stay focused on the issues associated with vicarious traums.

What makes vicarious trauma unique is the trauma. It is the constant, repeated exposure to other peoples’ trauma. The person experiencing vicarious trauma gets there by being empathetic. Too empathetic. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to put yourself in their situation. Too much empathy is wearing those shoes until the soles fall off. One of the first stages of compassion fatigue is an overzealous need to change the world. Sound familiar? That was the last post.

But overzealous leads to something else when we realize we cannot change the world overnight. And that’s the vicarious trauma. The symptoms follow many of the signs of primary trauma, though they are not always as intense . . . at first. Zealous excitement to change the world becomes cynicism, hopelessness and despair at the belief that change is possible. This leads to changes in our underlying belief structures, of ourselves, our family, our friends, and even our spirituality. Instead of believing we can change the world, we start believing we cannot change anything. 

Physiological signs include sleeplessness, irritability, guilt, anger, disgust, and fear. The downward spiral of email is a common side effect. Interestingly, someone with vicarious trauma experiences some PTSD-like symptoms including hyper arousal (at noise or startling events) and increased sensitivity to violence and other kinds of pain in the world. Watching the news becomes not mildly depressing but painful and nearly impossible.

And then this parade of horribles leads to relationship problems, social withdrawal, issues surrounding trust, and the favorite among lawyers – substance abuse! When your entire worldview is shattered by feeling that you cannot change anything, substances can numb the pain (alcohol) or keep you going long enough to keep on working, hoping you can get it back (cocaine and other stimulants). It starts to feel as though you never have time for yourself. You know you have to take care of yourself, but there is simply no time. There are other signs and symptoms, but these are the big ones.

But why? Where does all this originate? Why do these particular symptoms occur?

Cortisol! Once again, we are back to the fight-or-flight response. As I learned while being chased by a sea lion in New Zealand (hey, I had to add a bit of humor to this post), the fight-or-flight response is necessary to survival. We only exist because we respond to trauma with hypervigilance and what feels like superhuman strength. But we are not supposed to live in that state constantly. Cortisol and adrenaline shut down what are non-essential bodily functions. You know, digestion, rational thinking, creative thinking, and immunity. They do not sound too non-essential, do they? In their place, we get an increased heart rate, speedy and shallow breathing, and tensed up muscles. The natural cycle is to come down from that state, but vicarious trauma does not allow that natural cycle to occur. Instead, we live in that state of hyper-vigilance. And on top of the stress response, there is the fear response. Every sound freaks us out, and news reports bring us to tears. 

When our bodies live in that state, and continue to experience vicarious trauma, there is no coming down from it. And then it becomes a downward spiral. The lack of sleep precludes our bodies and minds from releasing the trauma, and then we need more stimulants to get us through each day, and then we retraumatize throughout the day, do not sleep, cannot release the trauma from the day before, and on, and on, and on.

Sound like someone you know? If you are interested, here is a link to a self-test you can take to see where you stand. Maybe you are not as bad off as you think. Maybe you are in a more heightened state of trauma. The key is knowing. Recognition is the first step.

The next post will be less of a downer and will offer some tips for overcoming vicarious trauma. But until then, do you see this in yourself? Do you see it in others?

Namaste!

"Recognition is the First Step" is part of the series, "Overcoming Crisis Mode," in which we discuss the second-hand trauma associated with being a lawyer and specific ways to overcome it.

© Rebecca Stahl 2012, all rights reserved.