If you’re like most of us, stress during the holidays is as common as holiday cookies. The holidays are full of opportunities for nervous system dysregulation. Events, conversations, and behaviors like staying up late, can disconnect you from your body and its need for food, movement, and rest. Here are 3 tips on how to regulate your nervous system and calm your nerves during the holidays or any time of year!
Imagine, your partner’s work holiday party is tomorrow. How do you feel about going? How’s your stress level?
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 sipper up. It won’t zip up. The dress doesn’t fit. Ugh, you knew you shouldn’t have had seconds with pie on Thanksgiving!
Negative body image creeps in. Time to find another dress.
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, your partner expresses gratitude that you’re there with them and how great you look. How’s your stress level? What do you feel in your body?
As 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 mental health disruptors all the time. How does your body cope with stress during the holidays (or any time) to help you “just get through it?”
More specifically 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 a recent 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 and mental health 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 autonomic nervous system works can help you move through holiday stress, calm your nerves, and reduce negative body image self-talk.
Let’s go back to the example of going to your partner’s holiday party. If you feel frumpy or concerned (freaked out) about last year’s holiday outfit not fitting this year, you’re more likely to fall into a self-critical mindset. 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 is perceiving 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.
If you can’t check in with what you perceive from your environment or you can’t deal with what you’re perceiving, you may feel emotionally dysregulated or flooded with energy to flee the situation.
Beyond holiday stress, understanding how your autonomic nervous system works can be a game changer when it comes to life after 40.
Emotional regulation is challenging for a variety of reasons for women over 40. 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 non-existent. This can lead to moodiness, meno-rage, and overall not feeling like yourself – like snapping at the grocery clerk bagging your groceries differently than you’d like. Yep, that was my first experience of “what the heck is wrong with me, who am I.” How can you support your autonomic nervous system to feel more balanced and regulated?
Here are 3 tips to help regulate your autonomic nervous system to 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 autonomic nervous system back into the ventral vagal or make you feel more connected to the present moment.
2. Move your body. This moves the neuroception cues of threat or danger through your body so you can get out of a sympathetic or 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 more calm in your body.
Notice how none of these suggestions including dieting or manipulating your food?
Dieting for intentional weight loss can be a sign of nervous system dysregulation. It’s an example of the sympathetic (fight or flight) part of the autonomic nervous system being activated. Dieting 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.
In reality, dieting is the fight or flight from your current body size or lived experience in a body size that doesn’t match cultural beauty ideals. When you can’t sustain those food rules, your autonomic nervous system may fall into dorsal vagal, feeling 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:
