Discover the transformative power of movement in managing anxiety and the overwhelming freeze response that often accompanies the journey of divorce recovery. Listen in as I relay my personal experience with going from my habitual freeze/shutdown state to instant realigning of my nervous system and feeling better through movement.
You will learn a quick practical technique to calm your nervous system and foster emotional resilience. By using visual cues like post-it notes with "move now" written on them, you can create a habit of movement that retrains your body and mind to respond differently in moments of stress. This movement is different than just exercise—it's a step towards healing and reconnecting with your body.
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
This is Becoming you Again, episode 186, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast.
This week I am offering you a very easy yet powerful somatic exercise that will help you go from hyper aroused, which happens when we are stuck in anxiety and our brain is spinning out in thoughts, or when you are stuck in freeze mode. You know, fight, flight or freeze mode. That's a hypo arousal mode where you kind of shut down and instead it's going to take you out of either of those into move. Movement is what you want. When you find yourself shutting down and freezing, or when you find yourself spinning out in your brain, what movement does is it keeps you in the here and now, which, as we know, is where true healing occurs. So this is a very easy exercise to do. The hardest part is recognizing when it needs to happen and reminding yourself to do it. So it's going to take some practice but I promise you you can start to see immediate pattern interruption and realignment of your nervous system.
When you start to implement this somatic practice on the regular and this specific one where you actually are going to be moving, your body has been completely changing for me, I was being coached one time by my trauma coach and I have a tendency to freeze or shut down when I feel fear, when I'm being triggered by certain memories or certain occurrences. And I was being coached and I started to go into my shutdown mode and my coach recognized it and gave me a very kind prompting of why don't you try moving in this moment? And it worked. I moved around, walked at a very quick pace and began swinging my arms forward and back for about 15 seconds On a scale of one to 10, when I was beginning to shut down, I would say my nervous system was heightened to about a nine and after that 15 second movement exercise, my nervous system on a scale of one to 10 had gone down to a four. That to me was a very poignant moment that gave me a lot of information about myself and a somatic practice that works and that helps me re-regulate my nervous system, tap into the here and now and create healing within my body, which then creates healing in my mind and in my intuition as well healing in my mind and in my intuition as well. So this is what you do You're going to print the words move now on a post-it note, or maybe two, and put them in strategic places where you find yourself being triggered most often.
Maybe you want to put it in your office near your computer where emails come through, so that if you get triggered by some kind of message or email, it's the first thing you see. Remember. The hardest part about this is recognizing when you begin to shut down or spin out, shutting down into freeze mode or spinning out in intrusive thoughts and feeling a lot of anxiety. You want to put those little reminders of move now in places where you typically start to feel those emotions when certain things happen, when situations occur throughout your day. Put little reminders and when you see it, when you recognize when your brain locks in on the move now you get up and you move.
I would recommend some kind of quick pace. It can be even just walking across the room at a very quick pace. You can turn on some music and dance. You can shake your body, shake your limbs out. If you would like, you can do what I did, which was kind of throw my arms forward and back in a forward and back motion. You can just do bipedal movement, like marching your legs left right, left right, whatever feels right and kind of at a quick pace and takes you out of the state that you were in, and provides movement will allow your body the opportunity to retrain, to interrupt this pattern of going into freeze mode or anxiety mode. What you are doing in these moments is you are retraining yourself to respond in a different way when freezing or spinning out typically overtakes you.
So try it out, see how it works and, if possible, start to notice how you feel when you begin to shut down before you do movement or when you start to feel anxiety before you do movement. Rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. How intense does that feel? And then, after you do the movement and it doesn't have to be for very long, like I said in my example, 15 seconds is all it took. Yours could be a little bit longer. Maybe your body needs to release some of that anxious energy, or maybe your body needs to recognize that you hold power within you and that creating a response other than freezing is possible and you are capable of that. Maybe it will take a little bit longer than 15 seconds. It's totally okay. Let your body do what it needs to do, listen and allow, and then rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 again and see if your nervous system regulation goes down. If you feel a little bit better, even if it goes down by half a point, that means you are starting to feel more into your body, more connected with your body and re-regulated.
All right, my friends, if you have any questions about this, feel free to come over to Instagram and message me at Karin Nelson coaching or let me know how it's going for you. I'd love to hear. I hope this is helpful. Thanks for listening and, of course, as always, I will be back next week. Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening.
I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real-life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to karinnelsoncoaching dot com. That's wwwkarinnelsoncoaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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