The Fifteenth One.

Morning,

Subheading: On not being ok, and the stress response cycle: fight, flight, and freeze.

Hello, friends! I apologize for dropping off of the face of the Earth, but my life has been in a constant state of change and upheaval for the last few months. Many of you have reached out to inquire if I am ok, but a lot of the time the answer was, "No, not really." I am sure I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable when telling someone I'm not ok, especially if I know there is "nothing anyone can do to help", right? However, this is a socially conditioned response. I could have welcomed people to sit with me so I wasn't alone through all of this, but some things I started thinking more and more were, "I want to be alone. There's nothing anyone can say. I am inconveniencing people with my problems. No one will understand me." As a reasonably emotionally intelligent woman, I know that none of these things are true. You know all of these things are true as well, or at least, I hope you do. Yet here we are, stonewalling the people we care about, and playing everything very close to the vest. 

Why do we do this? (There's a TL;DR later.)

I have been reading a very interesting book on sexuality called Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski. However, as much as I am learning about what triggers our sexual accelerators and brakes, I am learning a bit more about the relationship between the stress response cycle and how that can wreak havoc on our emotions and desires if we don't allow this stress cycle to complete. I feel like everyone needs to hear these things.

Emily writes, "Let's first separate your stressors from your stress. Your stressors are the things that activate the stress response- bills, family, work, fretting about your sex life, all of that. Your stress is the system of changes activated in your brain and body in response to those stressors. It's an evolutionary adaptive mechanism that allows you to respond to perceived threats. Or it was evolutionarily adaptive, back when our stressors had claws and teeth and could run thirty miles per hour. These days we are almost never chased by lions, and yet our body's response to, say, an incompetent boss, is largely the same as it would be to a lion. Your physiology doesn't differentiate much."

We have all heard some variation of fight/flight/freeze, whether in school, or work, etc. However, I don't know that I have ever given it much consideration that our bodies don't understand the difference between being chased by a lion and emotional stressors. Ultimately, the message we receive is, "I'm at risk! What do I do?" And by "at risk" your body means "at risk of death". 

She goes on to say,
"So what do you do when you see a lion coming after you?
You feel fear, and you run.
And then what happens?
There are only two possible outcomes, right? Either you get killed by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape and live. So imagine that you successfully run back to your village and scream for help, and everyone helps you slaughter the lion, and then you all eat it for dinner, and in the morning you have a respectful burial service for the parts of the carcass you won't be using, giving reverent thanks for the lion's sacrifice.
        And how do you feel now?
        Relieved! Grateful to be alive! You love your friends and family!
        And that is the complete stress response cycle, with beginning ("I'm at risk!"), middle (action), and end ("I'm safe!")."

She goes on to explain running, then freezing, both with the context of the lion. The freeze example is very interesting.

"But suppose the stressor is one that your brain determines you can't survive by escaping and you can't survive by conquering- you feel the teeth of the lion bite into you from behind. This is when you get the brakes stress response- the parasympathetic nervous system, the "STOP!" activated by the most extreme distress. Your body shuts down; you may even experience "tonic immobility," where you can't move, or can move only sluggishly. Animals in the wild freeze and fall to the ground as a last-ditch effort to convince a predator that they're already dead; Stephen Porges has hypothesized that freeze is a stress response that facilitates a painless death.
        If an animal survives such an intense threat to its life, then it does an extraordinary thing: It shakes. It trembles, paws vibrating in the air. It heaves a great big sigh. And then it gets up, shakes itself off, and trots away. 
        What's happening here is that freeze has interrupted the GO! stress response of fight or flight, leaving all that adrenaline-mediated stress to go stale inside the animal's body. When the animal shakes and shudders and sighs, its body is releasing the brake, completing the activation process triggered by fight/flight, and purging the residue. Completing the cycle. It's called "self paced termination"."

Humans interpret basically all stimuli as threats when we're stressed. We can only interpret so much information at once, and when there's too much happening, we start to triage. The brain prioritizes based on survival- so breathing, staying hydrated and nourished, etc. If you can't breathe, it doesn't matter how long it's been since you've eaten, you will not feel hungry. If you're generally overwhelmed by life, practically everything else takes priority over sex, or relationships. 

She says, 

"To sum up: 
Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress- "There's a lion! Run!"
Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress- "There's a lion! Kill it!"
Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress- "There's a lion! Play dead!" 
    And none of these indicates that now is a good time to get laid."

So, the million dollar simplification, "To reduce the impact of stress on your level of sexual pleasure and interest, to have more joyful, pleasurable sex, manage your stress."

Replace the word sex with any number of things, the science is the same.

"If our stress is chronic and we don't take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all that activated stress just hangs out inside us, making us sick, tired, and unable to experience pleasure with sex (or with much of anything else).
    Second, our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with Feels. Our culture says that if the stressor isn't right in front of us, then we have no reason to feel stressed and so we should just cut it out already. As a result, most people's idea of "stress management" is either to eliminate all stressors or to just relax, as if stress can be turned off like a light switch. Our culture is so uncomfortable with Feels that we may even sedate people who've just been in a car accident, preventing their bodies from moving through this natural process; this well-intentioned medical intervention has the unwanted consequence of trapping survivors of traumatic injury in freeze, which is how PTSD gets a foothold in a survivor's brain.
    But third, even without medication and an emotion-dismissing culture, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response midcycle because, "Now is not an appropriate time for Feels." We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation- i.e., not freak anybody out. But, unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels. We've locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles."

How? 

"Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you're being chased by a lion, what do you do? 
    You run. 
    So when you're stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do? 
    You run... or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the single most effective strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, "Exercise is good for stress," that is for realsie real."

She talks about a number of other things that not only will genuinely help us feel better, but complete this stress response cycle. Sleep, affection, meditation, allowing yourself a good cry or primal scream, journaling or other expressive self care, grooming, etc. All of these things force us to focus our minds on ways to move through our stress instead of simply wallowing in it. 

Ok, hold the fuck up. Did you just hear me?

This is the TL;DR:

We have to pay attention to our patterns of self-inhibition ("I'm fine"), and identify the places and people who create space for us to safely experience Feels without fear of judgement or freaking people out. We have to discover the outlets we have for moving through our stress and allowing that cycle to complete, or it will continue to exist inside our bodies. We quite literally won't be capable of feeling better. 

Too often we mistake dealing with stressors for dealing with stress.

Example: Ending a relationship. While the stressor (your ex) is gone, the emotional pain you're experiencing (your stress) is still there. Your body still believes it is being chased by a lion. You would not tell someone nothing was wrong if you were literally being chased by a lion, and you shouldn't say everything is alright if you're going through emotional pain. Why? Because that pain will turn to trauma. 

Trauma exists when we enter "Freeze" and we can't unlock. Our bodies decide that the threat is too great, too inescapable, and freezing maximizes our chance of staying alive... or dying without pain.

She explains this in a really relatable way later when she's discussing attachment:
"Attachment is why we experience "heartbreak." As infants, our lives literally depend on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that's no longer true, but our bodies don't know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn't come back, we'll die. 
    So yeah, love feels good- "I am whole."
    Except when it hurts like you're dying- "I am broken."
    Because: attachment."

Earlier we talked about how our brain triages data to maximize our survival. (If we can't breathe, we aren't hungry.) The problem is that once we can breathe, we are going to notice that we're starving. The goal can't just be survival, it has to include recovering.

"Survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor's will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last."

Also, "Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them. You may tremble or shake or cry or curl up in a ball. You may notice your body doing these things without your volition. Your body knows what to do, and it will do it as long as you sit calmly with it, as you would sit calmly beside a sick or grieving child."

What does any of this have to do with you and why did I just read all this?

I have felt very stuck lately, suspended in a state of unrest. 

I haven't understood why I haven't been able to move past certain things, or feel better. I thought maybe I needed time to sit with my pain and learn what I was supposed to learn from it. I haven't been writing, or acting, or crafting, or any of the things that normally bring me joy because I thought perhaps that was me distracting myself from the work I needed to do. (Also, Covid.) Right now, I am realizing I had that completely backwards. 

Only by doing the things that move us through our stress will we ever actually get through it! That is the work, guys. We can't learn or grow in a state of emotional stress. It sounds so fucking obvious to break it down like this, but I just didn't understand. So, I am sharing all of this with you in the hopes that I will help someone else. 

Please, be kind to yourself, pay attention to your body, and listen to what it needs from you. Talk to the people you have identified as your safe spaces. You'll get through this. 

As always, I hope you enjoyed this stuff, and come back for more things.