Hello Escritori,
Newly bolstered in terms of what I wanted to get out of my session this week, I went to therapy.
Since I felt like I needed to get some major context down, I asked my therapist to explain the processes that happened to a stressed body and how to get that under control again. The key is relaxing slowly, to start off a gentle chain reaction back to grounded-ness: probably much like meditation.
It is then that I learnt about the Autonomic Nervous System – this stuff is the goods guys.
I hope it helps at least one person redirect their thinking more compassionately about bipolar and stress. Don’t ditch your meds but do try to know yourself as best you can.
Until now I had only really heard about the Central Nervous System, the control centre of which as far as memory serves me is the brain and spinal cord. The Autonomic Nervous System is even more primal than that, but in three distinct groups linked to the part of our brains that also develops first. It is involved in a lot of basic survival processes and that is what gets triggered during panic attacks and moments of ‘freezing’ or ‘blanking’.
In all honesty Wikipedia has phrased it far better than I ever could but it was interesting to learn about the interior inter-connectivity of how the body processes exterior stimuli.
In order to improve the tendency to get over-excited by noise etc, it’s not about running to a calmer environment alas. Instead, it is about focusing on your own body when in that space, bringing everything back to a gentle form of self control that isn’t subject to anxiety.
This all sounded great, in the past I would have said this was easier said than done, only because I had next to no guidance on how to actually do that: and it boils down to relaxing groups of muscles SLOWLY – like a warm down after the gym.
This reinforces the idea that you exist in your body, you are in control of your body, but you don’t need the grip of stress or the superficial “pushing through” to dominate you.
Here is a prominent theorist in the field talking about the layering of systems.
Afterwards we assessed how I sleep, because I create a lot of tension by holding myself too tightly when I should be relaxing. Gradually I got talked through a pre-sleep routine that actually felt very cosy – once I got over the resistance of squished organs and less room in my chest to breathe. It felt very natural to fight this constriction that I had got so used to, but it was very new to just wait until I became relaxed.
All of this is going to require habit-forming which will take time.This feels good and useful though and linked to understanding practical control and liking myself more because of being aware of my body’s cues.
Keep scribbling,
~ Pola ~
The Escritorium 