Change and Resilience
Many people are living with heightened nervous system activation right now. Personal, communal, and global events activate vigilance that easily spreads between people. Our innate capacity to sense each other’s fear or anger was more helpful in keeping us safe when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups. This now exacerbates hypervigilance in modern life with its constant sensory stimulation and crowds of people around us who are buzzing with anxiety.
Our nervous system is doing its best to keep us safe, but is often inaccurate in its assessment. Images, stories, and emotional cues from screens are interpreted as immediate danger, even when our body is safe in this moment. To counter balance this, we need to cultivate awareness of our particular specific situation, not just generally this month and year, but in this exact moment.
Look around the room. Is there anything dangerous in the space you are in? What are the cues of safety and support? We need clarity. Before trying to change anything, we notice how we are actually feeling and what our body is carrying right now.
Looking around, sensing your body, and noticing real cues of safety helps reduce unnecessary alarm and lower chronic hypervigilance. Take a deep breath. If you’re feeling antsy, move your body, stretch or shake out the tension. Slow, extended exhales and gentle movement can calm our body and interrupt catastrophic thinking generated by survival responses.
Being in a survival state not only creates intense stress in our body and mind, it impinges on our humanity. When fight, flight, freeze, or people-pleasing dominate, access to compassion, connection, and care diminishes. Our priority when we are in a survival response is to live. We lose sight of the humanity of other people and our affect on them. We become greedy.
Qualities of compassion and connection only return when we feel safe enough and come back into nervous system regulation.Our brain believes what we see, which is in part why visual images of news, social media and doom scrolling are so alarming.
Pause for a moment and recall people, relationships, everyday kindness, and experiences of being seen or supported. Does someone’s face to come mind? The feeling of a warm hug? A friendly neighbor? Your cat purring on your chest?
This helps the nervous system remember safety and belonging. Basic goodness can be explored somatically as well as philosophically. When our body is more settled, we can sense an underlying quality of care, warmth, and presence beneath our thoughts and reactions.
This increases our capacity for meaningful response. A steadier nervous system allows clearer choices about how to engage in life, whether through direct action, service, relationship, or quiet support.
What inspires you? In what way could you change the world? It might be finding others and protesting in the streets. It might be donating time and money to something you are passionate about changing. Healing trauma and restoring our nervous system is core to this.
Make a commitment to actively do something every day to regulate your nervous system. We need this respite, an oasis of feeling safe enough to breathe and relax our body to build our strength and resilience to engage. We have so many powerful tools to help with this. Come to daily practice at 8AM Eastern. Click here for Emergency Practices.
Caring for your nervous system is not disengagement. It is a foundation for resilience, discernment, and compassionate participation in a challenging world. We need everyone in this.
An accurate, regulated nervous system is the foundation both for living well and for changing the world!
In 2022, Resmaa Menakem published The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide To Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. The somatic exercises in this book are a masterclass in strengthening our nervous system and meeting the challenges of this time.