Show Notes:

We have been on a journey this whole month, talking about early indicators to be watchful for and aware of as people who work in higher risk jobs. If you’ve been listening, you’ll know that we’ve been talking about the things that let us know that we are changing, being changed, and that we need to know what to look for so that we can intervene early and catch it before we’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole. 

We have touched on the heavy hitters – hypervigilance, dissociation, numbing and avoidance… which together make up the main criteria used to diagnose things like posttraumatic stress disorder. We have talked about how these show up, both early on as well as when we are moving deeper into traumatic stress and stress-related injuries. We have also talked about what we can do to catch them and meaningfully intervene in them to try to protect ourselves from spiralling further down. 

Today, we are talking about the indicators our bodies give us when they are done, and we are going to talk about some of the early indicators that can give us a heads up that our body is crying out for us to do something before it’s too late. 

For the purpose of our topic today I want to share a metaphor that I have used in an episode before but it was a long time ago now. I want you to imagine that your body is like a baby. When a baby wants or needs something, it usually starts by giving a couple little snorts or small vocalizations to try to get a caregivers attention. They might start moving around more or making facial expressions to denote that they have a need. An attentive and attuned caregiver might catch these early signs of need and join the baby in figuring out what the need is and seeking it meet it. And if that happens successfully, the baby settles and all is good with the world. But if the caregiver misses those initial efforts, the baby gets more restless and will up the ante. The baby will cry out louder to make sure its heard. Again, if a caregiver attends and attunes here, crisis can be averted by interacting with the baby and meeting the need. But if the caregiver fails to join the baby here, the baby will have to up the ante again. And this can go on and on until the baby wails to the point that even when the need is met, the baby is inconsolable and it take so much effort and energy for all involved to work at calming that baby back down. It gets dysregulated to the point that it’s whole nervous system is on fire and it can’t bring itself back down for an extended period of time. 

Your body is like that baby. 

When you experience stress over prolonged periods of time, your body will begin to send alerts to let you know that your nervous system is taking a hit and has some needs to balance back out. It will start by offering small indicators that something is up. A few headaches or digestive issues or feeling a bit off, like you’re coming down with something. An attentive and attuned caregiver to ourselves might notice these and see them for what they are – a way of my body communicating with me that it needs more care, less stress and some support to manage. 

…But most of us (myself included!) will tend to ignore these, and worse yet, probably be annoyed by them and frustrated that they hold us back from doing all of the things we need to get done. We’ll push through and rationalize them away as changes in the weather or barometric pressure or food poisoning or that bug everyone says is going around…and on and on. And then you know what happens? The baby gets louder. 

Your body learns that you aren’t listening. You can’t be trusted to be the attentive, attuned caregiver to your own self and it has to get louder to get your attention. So it does. You might notice new patterns and frequency and intensity of headaches, brain fog, dizziness, digestive issues, muscle pain, sensitivity to light and sound, immune issues and so on. You might need to take days off because of it. You might notice you are taking more sick days than usual. You might notice that you are feeling less well but others in your family don’t seem to be catching the same bugs. 

Again, if we can be the attentive and attuned caregiver, we have an opportunity to interact with ourselves and build trust with our brain and body by being actively responsive to the needs we are hearing and picking up on. …It’s funny because I see parents do this all the time with kids – kid says they have a stomach ache every morning for a week, and parents know that while it might be a stomach bug, they are just as curious about what is going on at school that might have that kid feeling tight and tense and ill. We know stress shows up in kids bodies and we explore that with and for them. But with us, we have a tendency to gloss over it, push past it, shush it, demand that it shut the fuck up so we can keep functioning to the level we have demanded of ourselves, and if it doesn’t go away it’s probably cancer. …Ok, that might be a bit dramatic, but only a little – we for sure do have a tendency to assume that for us it is just an annoyance or something medically serious. We fail to account for how our bodies serve as a feedback and alert system for ALL that is going on with us, medically but also psychologically.

We know that our brains impact our mental health and wellness. Did you know that your gut is considered your second brain? That it has many of the same functional capacities as your brain to give orders and exert influence over your bodies systems including your immune function and nervous systems? Our bodies are these incredibly intricate interconnected systems – the design features are beautiful in their immense complexity. We were designed to have every part of us offer feedback to other parts of us – to have delicately nuanced interconnectivity. But all of this design is useless to us if we don’t stop to listen to it, and develop the capacity to know what to listen for. Again, like the baby, our bodies don’t speak a language we understand, there is some guesswork and trial and error involved – but if we join and attend and attune…ie, TRY and make an effort, we come to learn the language. We develop a parent-like knowing of what the specific grunts and gurgles mean, and we grow in our ability to be responsive to the needs. 

Gabor Mate, in his fantastic book, When the Body Says No, writes this: “The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.”

We cannot act in self-preserving ways because we may no longer have the competence to recognize our body’s signals. That is what he identifies as he outlines a myriad of stories that demonstrate ways that our bodies will continue to get louder and louder and louder in an effort to make us listen and serve our own needs. In his book, he talks about a host of cases of significant medical disease that emerge in connection to longstanding stress exposure. He argues that when we ignore and ignore and ignore our bodies, they will eventually force us to meet the needs. Our bodies will force us to stop working by making it impossible to work. They will force us to stop meeting the ...