Reclaim Your Nervous System: How to Maintain Mental and Emotional Resilience In Times of Turmoil

This article is for you if you feel like the world and society is in turmoil, and it just feels too heavy.

There is much more awareness in recent years around mental health and how it impacts the other aspects of our health.

My goal is to connect some dots between mental health and the physical manifestations of chronic stress, and to provide some perspectives on how to safeguard your total wellbeing.

What got me thinking about this has been everything surrounding the highly publicized and divisive murder of Charlie Kirk.

For context, I have watched a lot his content and see interviews he has done over the years. Some of it I agreed with. Some of it I did not.

I personally want to hear perspectives that challenge my own, and then I do my best to have my own informed opinion.

On a human level, it was a horrific tragedy. I don’t want to see anyone murdered. The most dangerous thing I am noticing is that a lot of people are becoming numb to the violence and even celebrating this.

And on a social and political level, the commentary and news around this tragedy has been everywhere online. You can’t avoid it if you tried to.

What has been most difficult for me is how much of my mental energy and attention it was beginning to consume following the news and seeing what others were saying.

The irony was when I was offline on the tennis courts, at Church, at the gym, I didn't hear anyone talking about it.

It was as if I was simultaneously living in two different worlds at the same time—a virtual world where it felt like the world was ending and then my local community and physical reality where life was continuing as if nothing happened.

I realized that the online world was shaping my thoughts and triggering my emotions.

Then I saw this video by Chase Hughes (now over 3 million views) that snapped me out of it and gave me a clearer perspective.

He described what I was intuitively feeling.

This is one big psychological operation (psy-op) to radicalize our country.

I was watching people on both sides being consumed with proving the other side wrong. What we don’t realize is that this distraction is being used to weaponize our emotions and pit us against each other.

Emotions Can Be Used Against You

I learned early in my clinical training that I am further on the empathic end of the spectrum. I tend to absorb and feel emotions of the people I am around and content I consume.

My first patient interaction came during my very first shift--a counseling shift. I remember walking into the patient counseling room and seeing a female whose body language that was telling me she was not in a good place.

I remember introducing myself and asking the standard opening question, "what brings you into the counseling shift today?"

Almost immediately the tears start flowing and she starts to share what happened.

"I recently tried to take my own life by overdosing on morphine."

This is only something I had only trained for in hypothetical situations. I could feel my mind racing as I walked through the questions I was supposed to be asking while trying to remain calm and present.

In the end, I had a great supervising clinician, Amy Davis, who walked me through what to do during the rest of the appointment, and we ensured that this patient was in a good place before leaving.

I remember leaving that shift feeling like I got hit by a truck. I was emotionally drained and spent much of the rest of the day lying on the couch.

When I shared this with Amy at my next shift, she taught me about transference and countertransference. This is when the patient projects emotions on to the therapist or therapist projects emotions onto the patient respectively.

What I had inadvertently experienced was that I had carried a lot the angst and sadness from my patient home with me.

The very same thing can happen when we watch graphic images from the news, movies, books, and music we consume.

Our bodies and minds are like highly sensitive antenna. We are constantly absorbing information from our environments and the people around us…or the content we consume.

As I wrote about in the last newsletter, we can sense not only what is apparent to us but also what is less apparent--energy and invisible light. Emotions are also forms of invisible energy.

This same mechanism can be weaponized by media to shape how you feel and how you behave, all while leaving your physical body weaker and susceptible to illness.

The Autonomic Nervous System Doesn’t Lie

The autonomic nervous system is the monitoring system that then interprets these emotional signals into two main categories, sympathetic (fight or flight) or parasympathetic (rest, digest, and reproduce).

Depending on how this information we consume is interpreted, it changes our biochemistry and physiology.

The sympathetic inputs activate our energy and prepares us to fight, flight, or freeze. You might experience this as fear and anxiety. Physically, you can feel your heart racing, palms sweating, and mind go blank. In the short term, this helps your body deal with threats. In the chronic state, this leads to feeling emotionally and physically burnt out, weakened immunity, weight gain, hormone imbalances, and physical deterioriation.

(Do you think people in a highly agitated state of fear would be more or less violent?)

On the other hand, the parasympathetic inputs make you feel calm, safe, and secure. Physically, your energy can be focused on digesting food, recovery and healing, and reproducing (aka fertility).

The thing is, we need both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity in the right amounts. We call this autonomic balance.

You Must Develop The Skill Of Knowing What To Ignore And Reclaiming Your Nervous System

One of my favorite authors and modern day philosophers, Robert Greene, says that in the world of distraction, the greatest skill today is knowing what to ignore.

Our nervous systems did not evolve to absorb or process the sheer volume of information and data being forced onto us. It can easily lead to the feelings of overwhelm and despair that many people are silently struggling with and blaming themselves for.

Our world is pushing us into sympathetic overdrive. Our unnatural environment is making us feel like we are in a constant state of danger.

• News that reinforces our collective awareness of violence, inequalities, and impending doom

• Online echo chambers built around algorithms that can nudge you down rabbit holes of highly emotional content, which can range from highly adorable and heartwarming to rage bait, division, or depravity

• Unnantural environments that remove us from sunlight and nature

• Manufactured food that is unrecognizable to our bodies as anything found in nature

• Devices and screens that push every button in our lizard brains that hijacks our attention and locks us into a virtual world devoid of meaning

Just like my first clinical experience with transference and countertransference and the firehose of information drowning our consciousness, we need to set up proper boundaries to buffer and neutralize the excess sympathetic inputs.

I don't know what the right boundaries for you are because you may have a different tolerance. But I do believe that each of us is more susceptible than we realize.

Here are some strategies that you can use to reclaim your nervous system and restore autonomic balance.

• Spend more time outside. Take a walk. Sit on a park bench. Go hiking. Put your feet on grass or in a lake.

• Commit some time each day and week to be completely offline. Turn off your phone. Close your laptop. Turn off the TV.

• Allow some time to be bored. Meditate. Day dream. Write in a journal with pen and paper.

• Take on a physical project. Garden. Learn to do woodwork. Fix up your car. Remodel something in the house.

• Pick up a recreational sport or hobby. Join a running group. Play tennis or pickleball. Learn to dance.

• Go to church. Pray. Meditate. Have spiritual practice.

• Fast. Experiment with not eating for 24 hours periodically. Clear your digestive tract and clear your mind.

• Do a media fast. Turn off your phone and take some time off social media, watching the news, or listening to podcasts. Give your brain some space to hear itself think.

• Schedule rest and recovery into your week. Have a day or half a day with nothing on the calendar. Schedule a massage or day at the spa. Sit and read in a coffee shop. Stare at the clouds.

• Engage with real people in real life with people who are energy givers. This means you don't feel completely drained or irritated after interacting with them.

• Be a good neighbor and remind yourself there are still good people in the world.

What it comes down to is creating the right energetic boundaries that work for you.

NOTE: If you are finding yourself turning to food, alcohol, drugs, Netflix binges, endless social media scrolling, overworking or overexercising, these could be signs that you are trying to sedate yourself rather than listening to your body’s cry for real rest, recovery, and connection.

While I can’t claim to know know what is happening in your life or what works for your personality, I just know that we are entering an era where our nervous systems can be easily hijacked by screens we stare at and the media that is being fed to us.

Remember that you have the power to take responsibility for managing your own nervous systems.

No one is going to do it for us.

Send me an email. I’d love to hear from you think.

P.S. Do you want my help to become Un-prescribable? I work with my clients to reclaim their nervous systems and get off their medications and minimize how many supplements they need.

Schedule a consult here https://l.bttr.to/uYxzi or reach out via email.