Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

How Stress experienced as a child can impact our midlife journey

Stress is not our friend in our midlife journey.

Did you know that the stress you experienced in utero can impact on your perimenopause transition?

When we experience stress hormones from our mothers, our little body gets the message that when we arrive earthside, we need to have a pretty quick off the mark stress response because the world is not safe. Fast forward to the baby becoming a woman and what this means is that her body will go into a stress response more easily.

Amazing thought. The science of epigenetics is showing us that our cells actually store memory in their DNA and that it is possible for non genetic information to be passed down mother to baby. So it's possible for your mother's trauma as well as your own affecting your body.

When our adrenal glands (which make stress hormones) are tired, our body will literally steal the sex hormones we have and turn them into stress hormones. Guess what we will become deficient in? You guessed it sex hormones. This can translate into PMS in our menstruating years, and more physical symptoms of perimenopause, like hot flashes, anxiety, depression, in our menopause transition.

We are made to survive. Our body will prioritise our safety first every time. Let's think of all the ways this impacts on our relationships in our life.

A woman who is sensitised to high stress (which given they way we work now is most women) as a developing baby or young child, will tend to perceive her environment as unsafe or stressful where others may not. This pattern continues throughout life and by the time we arrive at perimenopause we are burned out and might have adrenal fatigue.

In our second half of life, our adrenal glands and fat cells take over our sex hormone production from our ovaries when they wind down at menopause. If the adrenals are tired when we start this journey and our body is giving them another new job, to produce not only stress hormones but also now sex hormones, they are not going to cope too well are they.

Remember it is all connected.

Learning to work with our emotions and feel safe to experience the emotions we have been told are 'bad' all our lives is so critical at this time in our lives. When we have been repressing an emotion for years and then all of a sudden we start experience it at midlife because our body can't keep the lid on the repression anymore, it is going to make us feel unsafe. Most of us will shut it down, this takes up even more energy or it will come in an outburst. This has a negative impact on our relationships also.

What is the best way to deal with this?

It is not a thinking exercise, you can't think your way out of trauma. It is learning to feel sensation and create safety in your body that that feeling is OK and may be even pleasurable. So we call that feeling approach a somatic approach.

Learning to feel the sensations in your body somatically and connect with them will bring you into a deeper level of emotional intimacy with yourself. It will create more capacity in your nervous system to feel. When you start to learn and practice this skill, you get more comfortable with the sensations and feelings and you get better at talking about it to others.

In my experience coaching women to do this, it has an unbelievably positive experience on all their relationships but most often it is their primary intimate relationship that benefits the most. This is because they are able to have a deeper level of communication with their partner about what is going on in their inner world. This deepens intimacy in the relationship; the crux of intimacy is communication. When we can talk about our inner world with honesty, it is appreciated so much by our partners, they learn from it too and can mirror us, and in my observation this is what leads to better sex.

As I say to everyone I coach, intimacy means 'into me you see'.

So when you are looking at your physical symptoms in your midlife journey remember everything is connected. It is not just about physical changes alone or dietary changes. Learning to actually be in your body and feel the sensations, to make your emotions your allies, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

I currently have space to coach two new people. So whether you would like to reclaim your emotions, enhance your leadership skills, create more ease in your life with a big transition, you can contact me to book a clarity call to see if we are a good fit to work together.

Growing all the parts of us

In every system on earth, one pattern you see is the pattern of contraction an expansion. It is the natural ebb and flow of any system. When they are growing in complexity they expand out, and then they contract back in, before they find their new rhythm.

What does that look like in a human? Well I am glad that you asked. Ever shared a really vulnerable comment in a group or online and then wanted to go and hide in a cupboard in the dark? Yes that is when you have really pushed on your edges. Whilst it may feel incredibly uncomfortable you should celebrate yourself because you have just stretched yourself a little bit. Doing it in little titrated bursts is a good thing for your nervous system too. Then the expansion doesn’t feel so overwhelming.

We often see this other systems too. Our natural environment has swings and natural patterns and rhythms to it. Fire, flood, drought, cyclones they are all natural occurrences that some might say are over corrections. However when I look at indigenous Australians and the way the work the land, the use of fire in a controlled way is a natural part of the healthy growth of the natural environment.

One thing that I find super disturbing is the increase in mental health issues in society. It seems a big swing out don’t you think? At the moment, in the pandemic context it is understandable because it is hard to be isolated from our friends and family. Our nervous systems co-regulate each other. The ventral vagal part of our nervous system which is predominantly in our face and upper chest and shoulders and neck is all about connection. Being curious. When we are in our ventral vagal state we are curious and connected. Wearing masks at the moment is necessary, but that can be challenging because when we look at people, at their faces, it’s the ventral vagal part of our nervous system that is sussing that person out. Feeling into their system and asking, can I trust them, are they safe? Combine that with not being able to be around each other too much, so missing out on that co-regulation, it makes sense that people are suffering. In particular, women like to be around each other and tell stories, that is soothing to us. I think men like it too, the like to tell yarns and have a laugh with each other.

Current context aside, the mental health issues have been around for a while. I think one of the reasons is we have been encouraged for a really long time to disconnect from our bodies as a source of wisdom and intuition in favour of rational and logical thought. The part of our brain that controls the logic and rational stuff is the neo cortex. From an evolutionary perspective this is a newer part. We have two other parts that we are really not hanging out with so much, the primal part of our brain and the limbic part. The latter runs our nervous system and the limbic, emotions, feelings, orientation toward pleasure and pain, reward. There is so much benefit from inhabiting those other two parts. When we ignore them we are cutting ourselves off from the message from our emotions and the intelligence of the nervous system.

To access these parts of your self, your inner world, you need to practice focusing in on them, feeling sensations in your body and describing them. There is so much to be gained from doing this. This is our unconscious, it is very clever. Steph Biddulph in his new book Fully Human describes it so well. “When you listen to your insides, they inform you how to change, where the answer might lie. And when you have really ‘got the message, even just wordlessly, making space for it, it very often shifts. You feel a change in your body that is positive, releasing, enlivening, and you know that something has moved and you are different now”.

“If you don’t practice going inside yourself, pretty soon you forget you even have an inside. And this is a problem”

Steph Biddulph, “Fully Human”

I use tools in my coaching to bring people into these parts of their brain and this is what I find; when people focus on their inner world, their unconscious, they realise that they have a wealth of information in there that can help them find the answers they are seeking. This improves their sense of self-confidence and efficacy. They feel a sense. of coming home to themselves. They learn to love their emotions and to be with them and listen to their messages, they stop pushing them away. They stop getting stuck in stories about what happened to them in their lives to explain the way they are. They are able to move on from them and are able to step into their personal power. They learn to trust their bodies as a source of wisdom. They start listening to their body, talking to it and giving it love and attention. They realise that their mind and body are not separated but one. They realise they are multi-dimensional beings with different parts and stop being at war with themselves. They learn to love all the different parts of themselves. When we love and accept ourselves, we start to accept and love others for being just the way they are.

I want everyone to have these skills, so people stop suffering so much. I want people to thrive because given the level of comfort we live in we should be. I want adults to have adult conversations with each other, that are rich, rewarding and vulnerable. I want adults to step into their leadership roles and be able to make tough decisions. I want children to have hope. I want children to be able to be children and have fun and play. I want humans to stop looking outside of themselves for answers, giving their power away to materialism and consumerism and realise they have the answers within. I want the planet to thrive. I want to deal with climate change. My desires are big but I think achievable.

What do you think?