Written by Alta Clark
Alta Clark is pursuer of many paths, her current one being the start of a degree as an R.N., where she hopes to take her knowledge and apply it to her world climbing, skiing, dancing, and traveling. She has traditionally filled the role of mentor and educator, and is inspired by working with young people and women. Her life goals include being able to incorporate medicine with exercise physiology and psychology to help people understand that there are infinite approaches to serving their bodies and spirit.
Check out other articles written by Alta here.
Continued Explorations
In my last piece on somatics, I talked about my relationship with mindful movement, and how practices like dance, yoga, climbing, and running have been tools throughout my life to mitigate stress and ground myself in my body. These disciplines that integrate breath and mindfulness with movement always had a calming effect on me, but I never truly understood why. So, I wanted to dive deeper and explore the physiology of why and how somatics are so effective at calming the nervous system and what I can improve on to make my practices more beneficial.
The Vagus Nerve & Healing
In part I was inspired to take this topic further by an Instagram post from Dr. Nicole LePera, aka “The Holistic Psychologist.” Dr. LePera’s platform is based on enabling people to become what she calls “self-healers,” by noticing behavioral patterns within themselves and working toward developing healthy patterns. This post was titled “Why The Vagus Nerve Creates Overall Wellbeing,” and in it she outlines the basic anatomy and physiology of the vagus nerve, as well as recommendations for improving vagal tone (health and strength of vagus nerve). The main function of the vagus nerve is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to counteract the stress response. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the stress response and acts as the “fight or flight” mechanism. The parasympathetic nervous system on the other hand, is responsible for “rest and digest,” basically your normal bodily functions when there are no threats detected.
As someone that deals with chronic stress and spends a large amount of time in that “fight or flight” mode, what I found most pertinent about this piece were her recommendations for strengthening vagal tone. She recommends cold exposure, mind body movement (for example yoga), deep breathing, laughing, singing, and physical connection to help strengthen vagal tone. Specifically, she says:
“When you’re doing a practice that feels uncomfortable (eg. cold exposure or yoga) be focused on what’s happening in the body and actively teach your body to relax into the experience. This creates nervous system flexibility.”
Essentially what she’s advocating for is dosing your nervous system with small amounts of stress (discomfort) and mindfully reacting to that stress in a way that reduces it, makes it understandable (why am I reacting this way?) and ultimately returning yourself back to safety.
Learning to Fall
This practice really resonated with me in the context of how climbers train to deal with the fear of falling. In the discipline of lead climbing, there are times when the climber will find themselves attached to a rope but some distance above the last point where the rope is connecting them to the rock. What this means is if they were to fall, they will more than likely fall safely but will fall to the point of last piece of protection and then at least double that distance before the rope catches them. So as a lead climber pushes their physical limits, they are constantly involved in a conversation with themselves about if and when they will fall, and counteract that stress response to convince themselves that they are safe. The best climbers have mastered this dialogue which enables them to perform at their physical limit without being hindered by the fear of falling.
This is a very specific application of Dr. LePera’s method, but I believe it’s something that is useful in all spheres of everyday life. The key factor in being able to implement it is the awareness of when our stress response is activated, and having the discipline to carry out that de-escalation dialogue.
Polyvagal Theory & Practicing Somatics
In Counseling Today’s article “Polyvagal Theory in Practice,” the author Dee Wagner outlines how polyvagal theory can help trauma survivors regain control over their nervous systems. Polyvagal theory is a concept developed by Stephen Porges and suggests that instead of our previously dichotomized view, our nervous system actually consists of three parts: the parasympathetic, sympathetic, and social engagement system. The social engagement system (what some consider vagal tone) helps facilitate the switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic modes. Like Dr. Lepera, Wagner also advocates for “embodiment” as a tactic to vitalize the social engagement system:
“The body-awareness techniques that are part of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can help clients move out of dissociative, shutdown responses by encouraging them to become more embodied. When clients are more present in their bodies and better able to attend to momentary muscular tension, they can wake up from a shutdown response.”
Essentially, the ability to notice and relax our breath and muscular tone can have instantaneous calming effects on the nervous system. In other words, practicing somatics! So what does developing this practice look like? It could consist of extremes like taking cold showers and talking yourself out of falling from great heights, or more mundane experiences like noticing your diaphragm expand with each breath while sitting at your desk, or pressing your toes into the floor while waiting in line at the coffee shop. What remains important throughout is noticing the physical manifestations of stress in our bodies and creating habits around relaxing and reconnecting with our bodies in order to provide positive feedback for our nervous systems creating a feeling of safety and peace.
Integration
What I took away from this research and what I hope you will take away is the affirmation that your somatic practice can look however you want it to. There isn’t a perfect image of what embodiment looks like, so I encourage you to reflect for yourself on what helps you feel grounded in your body. Something I’m experimenting with right now and what I would recommend is keeping a journal and documenting practices that take 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or an hour, or a whole day, and to create a portfolio of embodiment practices that work for you. My hope is that the more consistently these practices are integrated into a daily routine, the quicker and easier it will become to notice and de-escalate stress responses, ultimately creating a sense of peace and lasting nervous flexibility.
