If you’re like most women going through perimenopause and menopause, holiday stress is as common as hot flashes.
The holidays are full of attunement disruptors and nervous system dysregulation. Events, conversations, and behaviors like staying up late can leave you less attuned to your body’s need for food, movement, and rest.
Here are 3 ways to de-stress during the holidays or any time of year!
The office holiday party is tomorrow. Do you have enough physical, mental, and emotional energy to go?
Parties with a bunch of people you don’t know aren’t your thing. But you want to be supportive. What to wear?
What did you wear last year? Does it still fit? You try on the formal maroon dress and gently slide the zipper up. It doesn’t zip all the way. The dress doesn’t fit. Ugh. Immediately, your critical voice shouts, “You knew you shouldn’t have had seconds of pie on Thanksgiving!”
Negative body image creeps in. You think of ways to “get back on track,” and stop eating holiday foods as you panic search for another outfit for the party.
On the day of the party, you try to keep your negative body image self-talk at bay as you get ready for the party. Shower, hair, and makeup, you try to look “real and put together,” as one of my clients calls it.
“I just need to get through the evening. It’s once a year. Just go through the motions.”
Arriving at the party, you enter the historic ballroom with elegant holiday decorations, a string quartet playing in the corner, a full bar along the back wall, hors d’oeuvres table against the side wall, you glance around the room at what other women are wearing. You feel frumpy. Maybe you’re trying too hard?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a formal holiday party, an important meeting for your job, or starting a new relationship, your body goes through stress and attunement disruptors all the time. Most of the time, the strategy is to “just get through it.” What does that mean for your body and nervous system?
Your autonomic nervous system reads every scene you walk through in life on autopilot. It perceives threats and sends messages to your brain to keep you out of danger – even at a harmless holiday party. Think of your autonomic nervous system as the wing woman you never knew was there. Here’s how she works.
According to Polyvagal Theory created by Dr. Stephen Porges, there are 3 parts to how our autonomic nervous systems interact with the world around us, neuroception, hierarchy, and co-regulation.
On an episode of the Ten Percent Happier Podcast with Dan Harris, one of my favorite polyvagal teachers, Deb Dana, shares her insight on Polyvagal Theory.
“Polyvagal Theory is the science of connection,” Deb says. It’s how we relate to each other and how our nervous systems relate to each other, without our thinking brains being involved. It’s rooted in neuroception, how our bodies perceive our environment as they look for clues of safety, danger, and life threats without involving the thinking part of our brain. Let’s take a look at each of the three parts.
Neuroception is how your body senses cues of safety or danger from your environment.
Hierarchy is how your autonomic nervous system responds to those cues by staying engaged, organized, and emotionally grounded (ventral vagal). By amping up your sympathetic response to mobilize and protect yourself (fight or flight). Or by collapsing and shutting down to “just get through” the event (dorsal).
The third part of the autonomic system response to stress is co-regulation or the need to connect with others (people and pets) who offer a sense of safety through their regulated nervous system. Deb Dana, explains co-regulation as a biological, imperative, life-long need. Co-regulation allows us to have more compassion for ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
Knowing how your nervous system works will help you move through holiday stress and reduce negative body image self-talk.
Let’s go back to the holiday party example. If you feel frumpy or freak out about last year’s holiday outfit not fitting this year (an attunement disruptor), your negative body image self-talk kicks into overdrive. This is an example of nervous system dysregulation.
Your thinking brain likes to make sense of what’s being perceived through neuroception, it creates stories about your experience. Like the story you tell yourself about why your holiday outfit from last year doesn’t fit this year, or the story I told myself about walking into the concert with a man who has a history in the tinny mountain town we call home. How does neuroception work in your body?
Neuroception allows you to feel sensations and emotions based on what your autonomic nervous system perceives from the environment. Whether or not your thinking brain can tap into those feelings and sensations depends on how regulated your nervous system is. In other words, how grounded you feel.
Suppose you can’t check in with what you perceive from your environment, or you can’t deal with what you’re perceiving. In that case, you may feel emotionally dysregulated or flooded with energy to flee the situation.
Beyond holiday stress, understanding your nervous system is a game-changer.
Emotional regulation is a challenge during menopause. The amygdala, part of the brain, your emotional filter, is full of estrogen receptors. It contributes to how you feel and, more importantly, how you react to the world around you.
As estrogen levels fluctuate during perimenopause, it can feel like your filter goes haywire or becomes nonexistent. This can lead to moodiness, menopausal rage, and overall not feeling like yourself – like snapping at the grocery clerk, bagging your groceries, putting bags of wet produce on top of onions and potatoes. Yep, that was my first experience of “what the heck is wrong with me, who am I?“ How can you become more aware of attunement disruptors and how they affect your nervous system?
Here are 3 tips to help regulate your nervous system and calm your nerves during the holidays or anytime!
1. Breathe. Take deep belly breaths with the exhale longer than the inhale. This can bring your nervous system back into the ventral vagal so you feel more connected to the present moment.
2. Move your body. This moves the neuroception cues of threat or danger and stress hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol) through your body so you can get out of a sympathetic (fight or flight) response and back to a ventral vagal response, feeling more present and calm.
3. Singing, humming, and sighing are also helpful ways to move from a sympathetic, hyper-energetic state to feeling calmer in your body.
Notice how none of these suggestions include restricting or bingeing on food?
Intentional weight loss through dieting (or GLP-1 medications) is a sign of nervous system dysregulation. It’s an example of the sympathetic (fight or flight) part of the autonomic nervous system being activated. Food restriction creates a false sense of being proactive. I say false sense because those feelings of control are short-lived once you can’t sustain the food rules any longer.
Dieting is the fight or flight from seeing your body change during menopause or years of living in a body size that doesn’t match cultural beauty ideals. When you can’t sustain those food rules, your autonomic nervous system may feel shut down and collapse, like you failed (again). But you don’t have to stay stuck in the collapse!
It’s possible to get back into a regulated nervous system state with food and your body through intuitive eating and practices mentioned above – even during times of high stress like the holidays.
Check out these episodes from the Savor Food and Body Podcast archives to learn more about stress and mental health:
