We've all felt triggered by something during our divorce that alarms our nervous system and pushes us into a flight, fight or freeze mode. We may know what the trigger is or it may be deeper than something we are aware of, but in either case, we know that something feels off inside. We feel off-line, out of sync with ourself.
Learning to self regulate is when you are able to manage yourself, your behavior and your reactions to an emotional response/trigger that you might be having to help you sync back up to you.
I'll teach you three methods of self regulation to relax your central nervous system and bring it back online so you can continue living your life in the way that feel right and authentic to you.
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If you're going through a divorce or are divorced, odds are you've gone through something traumatic. It may show up in how you're constantly second guessing yourself. It may show up in how you feel triggered by even the smallest things. It may show up in never feeling secure in your emotions, always feeling like they are out of control. It may show up in your ability to believe that you're worthy, lovable or capable of living a life on your own. If any of these are resonant with you, then I invite you to schedule your free consult with me and we'll talk about what may be helpful to you to get you through the trauma and begin to heal. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 105.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
Welcome back to the podcast my friends. I am so happy to be here. I love talking to you all. I have had an amazing week besides the weather. Can we just talk about the weather in Utah in the spring. It is very disturbing and not my favorite thing. Right now we have so much snow, a ridiculous amount of snow. We literally got like 2 feet, I am not joking when I say 2 feet of snow the other day. We are almost to April here okay. And I am tired of it. I just got back from Vegas like the day before. My daughter and I have gone down to the Taylor Swift concert and the weather was so beautiful. It was not too hot like sometimes Vegas can be, like if you were there in the summertime it can be very, very hot. It was perfect. It was like I can still wear my sweatshirt and take it off if I want if I am a little too overheated but it gets a little chilly, like it was maybe 60. It was beautiful. Sunny every single day. Blue skies and then in comparison as we like to do, we like to compare our lives to things, right, it is what we do with humans. But in comparison to Utah weather this winter has been a very dramatic winter shall we say. We have had lots of snow compared to the last meeting 10 years. So much snow. Lots of overcast. This is not necessarily my favorite pain especially in the spring when I really just want to start to get warm outside. So that is my rant. Okay I got back from some beautiful weather and came back to snow. A day of clear skies, more snow, more snow, more snow. It is just nonstop. Nonstop snowing. What is it like for you live? Maybe someday I will choose to live somewhere where it does not snow all the time.
I have a friend coach. She is American and she is living abroad with her family. They have lived there for about five years and they live on the French Riviera and every time we coach every week and we talk and we see each other through zoom I am just like, oh, beautiful weather, warm. It is so amazing. So maybe one day I will get up the courage, like my friend, and moved somewhere where they have more weather that I really want to be around because I do not know if snow is it. You know? I do not think that snow is it.
All right that was a huge tangent but I was 100% not planning on going on but there you go. Sometimes when you listen to this podcast you get my tangents and I could apologize for it except then I would be apologizing for me and I do not want to do that and I do not want you to ever have to apologize for who you are either with you really, really hurt someone and then maybe it is appropriate to apologize. You get to decide in that case. Right I am not you. I do not know. I don’t think that needs to be apologized for. It is just who I am. I like to go on tangents. But let us get back to the topic of today which is learning to self regulate.
I think this is a really important topic because my whole thing as a coach is teaching you how to understand and create a better relationship with yourself and with your body and with who you are and with your intuition and your soul and all of that. I want to reconnect you to you and part of that journey is reconnecting yourself to what you are feeling inside of your body. So much of what we feel inside of her body is our emotions right. Our emotions are inside of us. They create sensations and movement and different feelings that are happening inside. And that also comes about when our central nervous system is out of regulation, is dis-regulated. When we are triggered by things. When we can learn to self regulate we gain so much control over our own selves. We reconnect with ourselves in a profound way that is often the missing link to being able to realize and creates amazing things in your life. Realize and makes decisions from a place of knowing, from a place of trust. It is such a beautiful thing. So I think that learning to self regulate can really be a game changer for so many of you. Myself included. This is something that I am continuing to work on as well.
And, again this is one of those things where it is not really a destination. It is not like okay I have learned to self regulate and now I am perfect at it and now I do every time and once I feel a negative emotion I immediately hand regulate myself out of it and get back into alignment or once I feel triggered and my nervous system goes into fight or flight I am immediately able to regulate myself again. No. Okay let us be real here. That is not what I am talking about. I do not think that is a real thing, that you could actually just get to this place for you are not really human anymore. When you just do not feel emotions and you do not get triggered in your body is always in alignment and always regulated. I just don’t think it is real. So I do not want to give you that perception and have you going into this thinking that I am going to learn to self regulate and then my life is going to be a breeze all the time. No. It is not. Right? We are still going to have emotions. We are still going to be human. We are still going to get triggered by things. We are still going to feel things that don’t feel very good. We are still going to feel out of sync with ourselves and that is okay.
But self-regulation is, when you can learn how to do it, you can manage those moments a little bit better. You can treat yourself with more kindness in those moments when you feel out of sync. So let me tell you what self-regulation is because maybe you are like I don’t even know, what is she even talking about. Like self-regulation, okay, maybe it is just like a woke word or something. Like what even is that?
Alright so self regulation is when you are able to manage yourself, your behavior and your reactions to an emotional response that you might be having. So it is kind of like you are living your life and then something happens like a situation happens that is out of your control and for whatever reason, maybe you know why and maybe you do not know why, you have a strong emotional response. It could be your nervous system response. It could just be an emotion that you are feeling that you are trying to work through and it kind of throws you off line. Basically like you are out of sync with yourself. Right? Your mind, body, soul experience, you are out of sync with those things. And so when you learn to self regulate instead of overreacting or reacting or behaving in a way that you kind of do not want to, you learn to self regulate or manage your emotional response by bringing yourself back online. Buy call meaning your nervous system down. By regulating your nervous system. By allowing the emotion to be within you instead of needing to suppress it or needing to fix it right away. You are realigning your self with you even if it is just for a few moments. Maybe it is only four minute and then you are going to go back to what you are feeling before. That is okay. It is not a problem. But here is what is really great about learning to self regulate, once you learn to do this and I am going to teach you a couple of techniques on the podcast today that you can start to implement today and figure out the ones that you like and the ones that you want to do more of and the ones you want to keep trying because once you can apply these techniques you can do them while you are still remaining completely engaged in your life. While you are looking for life to you while you are doing all of the things.
So are you excited? I hope so. Because I am just going to teach you very simple techniques that you can try on and use and see what works for you. All right so I am just going to give you a couple of techniques or methods if you will on ways that you can kind of invoke relaxation inside your body. Inside your central nervous system to calm it down, to regulate it and allow yourself to realign, to bring yourself back online.
Okay so this first method is soft palate relaxation. And the first time I did this I was so in my head. So if you find yourself being buried in your head and in your thoughts and wondering if you are doing it right or wrong, it is totally fine. That is normal. I promise you. I am very good at getting into my head when I try something new and questioning, I do not know if I am doing this right. I am probably doing it wrong. What if everyone else is doing it different than me. Like I am totally like that. I judge myself a lot and I weigh so if you do that to it is totally fine. Just bring it back to that interoception and try and refocus on what is happening in your focused area inside your body. And with this one is going to be with her soft palate. So that is like the roof of your mouth basically. So you want to just sit comfortably and you want to shift your focus to the muscles along the roof of your mouth. And this might be something new to you. It was completely new to me. I had never paid attention before to the muscles on the roof of my mouth so that is new for you it is totally fine. We are in the same boat. And then you just want to do your best to relax the tension that you feel at area. Then you want to expand the focus out to the job and your face muscles. So just release all the tension in those muscles and next as they are relaxed silently save the letter R to yourself with your mouth and try and maintain that subtle arch that you get when you say R that it creates in the roof of your mouth. So just try and maintain that shape of your mouth for five seconds then let it go, relax and then I want you to do that a couple more times.
Go inside. Go to that interoception. Pay attention to the soft palate. Relax it. Then expand the area to your job and your face, silently say the letter R and keep that arch that comes in your mouth when you say it and hold it for five seconds. Try it on your own. You can pause the podcast if you need to. You can trade afterwards. See what works for you. And just notice when you are done if it creates any kind of relaxation, alignment, centeredness for yourself and your body. Okay. Remember what we are trying to do is we are learning to self regulate. So if you are triggered or if you are feeling a sense of overwhelming emotional response this is something you can do to help relax, to help let go of that overwhelming sense of emotional response to help realign and re-center your central nervous system.
Write the next method they want you to try out is belly breathing. This is a technique where you are going to actually be breathing with your diaphragm so what you want to do is place one hand on your diaphragm which is right below your rib cage so you place one hand there on the other hand on your upper chest and as you breathe you want to make sure that you are watching and feeling your diaphragm rising and falling. So watching that hand, feeling that hand moving in and out. Rising and falling. That means that you are breathing with your diaphragm. So breathe in flow through your nose so that your stomach moves out against your hand, make sure that that breath lasts for about five seconds. Pay attention to what is happening in your body. Pay attention to the air filling up your lungs. Pay attention to the sensation of the air coming in and trying to as much as you can making sure that the hand on your chest remains as still as possible. And then tighten your stomach muscles. Let them fall inward as you exhale through your lips allowing the hand on your chest remain as still as possible. And then repeat this a couple more times three or four more times. And notice the relaxation in your body. Notice your body realigning itself to you. Notice what is going on inside your body.
When you can take your thoughts out of your head and start to pay attention or observe what is going on in these moments of breath work, in these moments of relaxation of certain muscles and just paying attention to that instead of spinning in the thoughts what you are doing is you are allowing yourself moments of being present and being present is where healing happens. Being present is where you realign with who you are. It is in the spinning of the thoughts in the future and in the past where trauma continues to occur and we want to be with ourselves present in the moment as much as possible.
So the third method that I am going to teach you is focusing on your peripheral vision. And I like this one the best only because I can do this when I am like even having a conversation with someone, even listening to someone, watching television, on a Zoom meeting, all of the things. I can do it when other people are round and they do not even know I am doing it. The breathing one may be is a little more noticeable. You are not probably going to put your hand on your chest and your diaphragm during a Zoom call or in a meeting at work or something like that, but this peripheral vision one you can totally do when other people are around and they do not even know you are doing it which is pretty cool. So you want to focus ahead on what you are looking at for 5 to 10 seconds and then you are going to shift your focus to your peripheral vision without moving the direction of your eyes. You only want to focus on what is happening to the side of you, start with your left or you are right, whichever side you would like to start with and just kind of notice, observe what you can see in your peripheral vision for five seconds. Simultaneously to the right and then to the left and then back to the rights and then back to the left. Noticing it for a few seconds each direction. And all the while your eyes, your head, all of that is not turning. All of that is not changing. You are just taking a moment to refocus on instead of what is right in front of you to the right and left.
Again this is just the magic of really bringing you to the present moment, to what is going on for you and it is allowing yourself to realign with your central nervous system.
Those are the three methods. I hope that these work for you so that you do feel more regulated when it comes to our emotional responses, so you do feel more relaxed and more present which a promise is where all of the healing is going to happen for you.
All right my friends thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening to my tangents. Thank you for listening to me teaching these methods. I love you so much for being here. I will talk to you next week.
If you like what you’re learning on the podcast and you’re ready to create lasting change and results in your life then you need to be working 1:1 with Karin as your divorce coach. This is where we take everything you’re learning in the podcast and 10x it with implementation and weekly coaching where you start to see change in yourself and your life immediately. To find out more about how work exclusively with Karin go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com . That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
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