The biology of stuckness: how your nervous system can stop you achieving your dreams and what to do about it
There will be times in your life, when change is forced upon you, the rug is pulled out from under your feet, where what you had is lost or taken from you and you are thrown into a sudden abyss of darkness and uncertainty. The way is lost.
There will be times on your life journey when you lose your way, lose your vision, become directionless, disoriented, confused and you don’t know what to do, who or where to turn to.
You may feel immense fear, panic, dread, and confusion, worry or even numbness or shame. You’ve lost your sense of safety. You may obsessively take action to try and get yourself out of your current situation without success or get stuck in a freeze state not knowing what to do and not finding answers no matter how much you think about it. Maybe you are sleeping too much or procrastinating.
When things stop working in your life or where you are trying to reach a goal but can’t find your way to get there, you can easily jump to the conclusion that something is wrong, that you’ve made a mistake and that you need to fix things to make it work again.
It’s biological
There is a biological reason for your experience.
Your nervous system is constantly absorbing sensory information from your external environment and internally from within your body to assess risk – to work out if people or situations around you are dangerous or life threatening and you need to take action to protect yourself.
Dr Stephen Porges calls this neuroception. In his book, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, he explains that, “neuroception takes place in the primitive parts of the brain, without our conscious awareness.”
When your nervous system detects danger it will automatically trigger processes that can send you into fight, flight, freeze or fawn to keep you safe. This happens so quickly that your rational cognitive brain won’t even understand what is happening yet or make sense of it.
You have probably experienced being in a situation or witnessing something where your heart starts to beat more rapidly, breathing accelerates, your blood pressure starts to rise and muscles tense or you start to feel dead inside and frozen in place before you’ve even begun to mentally process what is happening and that you don’t feel safe.
When your nervous system and body are loudly signalling to you that you are in danger, it is natural to conclude that something is wrong. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. It just means that based on your previous life experiences and your nervous systems processing and assessment of the information at hand that risk is here. It has assessed you as being unsafe and wants to return you to safety.
This automatic process can be lifesaving if you are in a situation that endangers your life. However, if you’re not in a life-endangering situation, this automatic process and unconscious assessment can try to keep you so safe that you get stuck and unable to take any risk or actions towards your goals and dreams.
Why your goals, dreams and new experiences feel life threatening
Your goals and dreams and anything new you want or need to do and face in your life lives in the unknown. It’s what is known in process-oriented psychology as being over the edge. The edge is the boundary between what you know and what you don’t know.
To go over the edge towards the new thing requires that you take risk to move out of what you know and into the unknown where your goal, dream, new thing or different life or way of being lives.
But how do you get there if every time you think about what you want or what you need to do that is new, different and scary (but not life endangering) or you try to take action to make it happen, your nervous system sends you into a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn?
How to stop freak outs on your growing edge
To stop the freaking out, fear, panic, fight, flight or freeze on your growing edge, you start by attending to your body’s experience and retrain your nervous system.
Here’s how you can do this.
The first step is to re-find safety in the current moment.
This will bring you out of your automatic response and help your brain come back online so that you can assess your situation with your conscious awareness.
One way to do this is to breathe slowly and deeply using a polyvagal breathing exercise such as The Basic Exercise or Heart and Belly Breathing, which can stimulate your vagus nerve to bring your body and nervous system back into a state of rest and digest.
If you’ve gone into a freeze state, your body and nervous system will also benefit from having some gentle or even firm touch or squeezes to wake it back up into the moment. You can work your way up and down each arm with squeezes or even firmly rub your thighs.
The second step is to help your nervous system understand you’re not in life-threatening danger
Eckhart Tolle says, “Stress is a sign that you’ve lost the present moment. The next moment has become more important than life itself.”
To this I would add, you have not necessarily consciously chosen to focus on the next moment to make it more important so it’s not your fault that next moment has become more important. As explained earlier, your nervous system may be automatically doing this for you via neuroception and its assessment of future risk if you do or don’t take certain actions.
What is helpful to recognise from Eckhart’s statement is that by grounding yourself back into the present moment and helping your nervous system see that your are safe and experience being safe in the face of change can help you experience greater levels of safety in this moment and in the face of this change. Over time, your nervous system may not have the same life-threatening reaction to your current experience.
To help yourself ground more deeply in the present moment try this…
Name objects you can see in detail
As you start to feel safer, continue the polyvagal breathing then look around you and name things that you can see. The walls, curtains, photos, household objects, trees outside your window. Name them in detail.
As you name what is here in the present moment, your focus will be in the present moment, not the future and you will become anchored in the here and now where there is no danger.
Speak calming, soothing, safe words to yourself.
It may also be helpful to hear your own voice say soothing, safety-reminding words like:
“I’m okay.”
“I’m safe.”
“I am breathing.”
“I’m facing something new that I’ve never experienced before.”
“I’m capable.”
“I’m resilient.”
“I don’t have answers right now but they will come.”
“I have found my way in my life to this point, I can do it again.”
Do this as you continue to do polyvagal breathing or long, deep, slow breathing. And then notice any good feelings or sensations that arise in your body even if it’s just a little bit of peace or ease and breathe with those good feelings. This will signal to your nervous system that you’re a yes to experiencing more of those good feelings so it will seek them out for you.
Want some resources to help you find relief from panic, anxiety and stress, and find safety in the face of your situation?
If you are feeling very stressed, anxious and overwhelmed, it may be easier to be guided into feeling safe again. My free Safe Harbour meditation is designed to help you find safe harbour from fear, anxiety, stress and overwhelm and help you find safety again in the present moment.
I have also written a Love Letter To Your Stuck or Panicked Soul full of soothing words and a wisdom map to help you discover a different way out of your situation, one that is safe, loving, curious, empowering and wisdom-making.
Wondering what you can do next?
Once you feel safer in your body and grounded in the present moment, then you may be able to start to enquire more deeply and with your conscious awareness into your current situation and experience to see and understand what is happening for you on this edge.
I really want to stress the words ‘may be able to’ here, because sometimes what we need to do first is build our inner resources and capacity to face what is on our growing edge and on the other side of it. Sometimes there are traumas known or unknown, difficult energies or characters in our psyche or our life that stalk or ambush us so that we keep getting stuck on our edge or pushed back into fight, flight, freeze or fawn modes.
Often when we are in the thick of a personal process or experience, we simply can’t see what we cannot see.
You may need safe, wise and loving outside persepctive, help and support to help you get over your growing edge, out of your stuckness and current challenge.
So if you can’t find your way out on your own, don’t give yourself a hard time or let your inner critic do that either. Humans are wired for connection. We are meant to support each other, care for each other, heal and elevate each other.
I love supporting people on their growing edges and it’s where my shamanic, empathic and intuitive gifts really shine. You can learn more about out how I can help you by clicking the button below.
