Helping yourself and living an intentional life relies on learning to manage your higher brain and making effective decisions from that place. There are times, however, when the presence of a stressor (bear or active shooter, for example) causes our body to physiologically hijack our brains and render them useless for any effective long-term decision making.

What is happening? This is emotional disregulation.

Emotional Disregulation Explained

Emotional disregulation occurs when fear or upset has cognitively impaired us, but what does it really mean? All the sayings used to describe it-- "wigging out," "checking out," and "going offline"--are a key to what's physiologically happening. To be disregulated means that our autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is the body system responsible for our safety on an unconscious level is no longer regulated by our thinking brain. It has taken over and the pre-frontal cortex, the bus driver and CEO of our effective decisions, has left the building.

Leaving the Zone of Safety 

Our autonomic nervous system does not know the difference between a real threat (swarm of killer bees on your face) and a perceived one (single honeybee on a nearby flower), but the regulating space between the stressor and the high alert response of the ANS, in which we can evaluate the threat level, is our personal zone of safety. Basic self-care habits (rest, movement, nutrition, hydration, deep breathing) increase the size of our zone of safety, but it is also impacted by things like trauma, illness or other physical impairment, and unprocessed emotion. To be disregulated means that you are out of your zone of safety and you are now in in fight, flight, or freeze (and some schools of thought add: fawn). This is great news when you're being chased by a lion. Your body takes over and you get the heck out of there (or fight it). If all goes well, the lion situation gets cleared up and your body resumes normal higher-level thinking capabilities. When it gets stuck in disregulation, however, and doesn't know the way back home, this is when trauma occurs.

When it's time to call in the lifeboats, try this simple technique to get regulated (or help someone else regulate) in real time.

Step 1: Establish safety: (Ask yourself or the other person) Am I (are you) safe right now? If no, there is no reason to down-regulate. Move to safety! If yes (probably yes), say aloud to yourself "I am safe right now."

Step 2: Do I feel safe? (Ask yourself or the other person)  If you are still disregulated, the answer is almost certainly no. But while the brain can go to the past (flashbacks) or the future (what ifs), the body is always in the present. It's time to drop into the body.

Step 3: Acutely relax the body As a woman who gets her hackles up when ordered to "relax," or "smile!," I want to assure you that this is a do-able exercise and meant for your well-being. As you slowly take deep breaths, scan your body for tension. Bending forward and letting your body dangle as you do this, you will quickly return to your body. Repeat as needed.

Have you ever researched a car to buy and suddenly start seeing it everywhere? Have you ever been in a noisy crowd of people where nothing seems audible until you hear your own name clear as a bell? This is your brain's Reticular Activating System at work, charged with filtering out the unimportant stuff so you can notice what is important--or what you think is important at the time. Some of these filters are based on survival instinct (food=good!), but others have come about from beliefs you may not even realize you have (always looking for an exit because you have a belief about being trapped, for example). 

Exciting news! You can intentionally program the RAS to seek and find evidence of anything that you want! In the example of the titular game "Looking for Hearts," which I learned about from author/speaker Mel Robbins, one simply decides to look for heart shapes in the world wherever they go and begins to find them--in clouds, in rock formations, in imprints on toast, or in a reflection off the person-near-you's hair.  

When you give your brain a job, it goes to work faithfully for what you have told it is important.

But after a time, maybe your brain notices that hearts aren't actually that big of a deal to you because you can't eat them or they're just not really getting you out of the bed in the morning and that's okay! If you want them to be a priority to you, just leave a reminder to keep looking for them. Keep re-deciding to keep telling your brain they are important.

OR...pick something that actually matters deeply to you, but is not looking the way you want: your romantic partnership, your business's success, your connection with your kids, your home environment. Put your brain on the job of finding the good and beautiful in one of these areas. The more you decide to look for it, the more you will find. The more attention you give it, the more you will create examples of it through your own connectedness and loving attention. 

You create more of what you focus on.

That ALSO means...if you're determined to find evidence of negativity, frustration, disharmony, hostility, resentment, etc, you can do that, too. Does it feel good to you to focus on those things? Probably not. You don't have to convince yourself that you love things you don't love; your mind will not believe this at all! Just slowly, intentionally, consciously: look for the good and hopeful and bright. 

Look for the hearts! They're everywhere. You'll see.

I grew up in a small town with a historic movie theater built in the 1920s and the projector there wasn't much newer, meaning that occasionally there would be unintentional intermissions during the show because a light bulb exploded or the film reel was stuck or broken or put in upside down, or in one memorable instance, loaded in the wrong order. I believe this theater now has modern trappings of the digital age, but in the free-wheeling 80s and 90s, going to the movies was its own adventure, never mind the feature!

The first time I saw the greatly anticipated third and final installment in the Back 2 the Future franchise, for example, the reels were loaded into the projector out of order. As the very subject of the movies is time travel, it took us, the confused audience, quite awhile to figure out what was happening. The theater finally offered a complete ordered showing of the movie following the complete disordered mix-up and we all got home very late that evening and thoroughly confused.

But what do the adventures of Marty and Doc have to do with self-help, the semi-cohesive theme of this blog?

We (the audience of the Select Theater in the summer of 1990) thought we were just watching a very confusing movie. "This is just how it is," we thought as we crunched our popcorn. But it wasn't the movie at all; it was the projector that was messed up. At the movies, as in life, we think we're seeing everything playing out in front of us just as it is, but it's really the projector that's running the whole show.

In the movie of our life, the projector is our mind and our thoughts are the lens through which we experience every emotion beamed onto the background of the world. What's really going to bake your noodle is the fact that the majority of craftsmanship of our projector lens is completed by the time we reach the sophisticated and informed age of 7*, honed by our interpretations of inputs we received from our families, our cultures, our backgrounds, and our experiences. The brain mostly operates in theta and alpha frequencies in these early years--the same as in hypnosis or deep meditation.

While your experiences before age 7 could have created a very positive view of money and healthy self-esteem that may be serving you well to this day, that is unfortunately not always the case. So if you saw your parents fighting over money just before they got divorced when you were 5, are you doomed to live a lonely, bankrupt life and have an adversarial relationship with money? Of course not! Though your lens was formed in those early years creating the foundation of your subconscious mind, you can make changes to it anytime you want to. In many cases, life does this for us as a new experience challenges an old belief that makes the old one less useful. 

But you can be the cause of changes, too--not just the effect. You can wipe down the lens. You can get a totally brand new one! You can buff out a scratch. You can swat the fly that keeps landing on it. The only trick is, you have to do this intentionally if you want to create an intentional result. The way you create intention is with your thoughts. And the shortcut to creating and believing the thoughts that you want is with a life coach.

And scene.

Are you are ready to change the movie on the screen, uplevel your life, and give your poor, painful, doomed thoughts the heave ho?! Let's work together and let's go! It would be an honor to be your coach! Click to go to my appointments page to schedule your free 20 minute consult call.