Before I understood the settings in my nervous system, my life was at a standstill.
No matter how much I tried to change my thoughts and beliefs, nothing I did gave me consistent results — until I found trauma-informed nervous system healing.
If you struggle to create concrete changes in your life, you must address your nervous system’s blocks, beliefs, and comfort zone.
In this blog, I’ll explain what “feel the fear and do it anyway” really means, how to apply it to your life, and how to change your relationship with the fear in your body and mind.
Let’s dig in!
Your nervous system has recorded your experiences since you were in the womb.
All this information gets stored based on one question: is this safe or unsafe?
As you grow up, these settings remain unchanged until you shine a light on them.
The nervous system has remained relatively unchanged for millions of years. This means that your body constantly sends signals about what’s safe and unsafe. Most of these signals are based on past experiences that taught your nervous system its safety settings or “window of tolerance.”
Until you know your window of tolerance and how to increase it, you’ll continue to be controlled by old nervous system responses that don’t serve the life you’re trying to create.
Your nervous system is always trying to protect you. In doing so, it may block good things coming into your life because it views any kind of receiving as dangerous.
This is especially true if you experienced abuse, trauma, neglect, or criticism as a child.
Yes, your nervous system is blocking that great money, new job, and loving relationship. Why? Because something in your past has created a setting that tells your nervous system that receiving those things can open you up for more abuse, trauma, neglect, or criticism! It’s merely trying to keep you away from those original threats.
Here’s what I didn’t understand until recently: my nervous system was viewing positive things I wanted as dangerous and that’s why I had a hell of a time seeing real change in my life.
Whenever I would go after something out of my window of tolerance, my nervous system responded with ACTIVATION in the form of overwhelm, stressful thoughts, physical sensations (heat, nausea, and tingling in my limbs), and a deep feeling of danger. I never understood why I felt so sick going after something I consciously wanted.
Now, I understood what was happening.
My nervous system was trying to protect me from exposure, humiliation, embarrassment, and loss of belonging. It was viewing new things as a threat to my survival.
Now, I had a real shot at true change because I understood the reasoning behind those physical sensations and how to move through them.
There’s a famous quote about everything you want being outside your comfort zone. In terms of the nervous system, this quote is spot on.
When you go after something new, your nervous system decides whether it’s too much of a stretch based on your current safety settings.
Let’s say you want to make more money and take a few steps to create that change. Chances are, your nervous system knows exactly how much money it feels safe receiving and keeping and if you try to push it over its limit, you’ll get physical pushback that stops you dead in your tracks.
This physical pushback is called ACTIVATION.
For most people, this is when they ditch the positive change and return to what they know. Because they’ve experienced activation, they decide more money is bad and return to their old habits. This makes the nervous system very happy!
In the nervous system’s world, more money could lead this person to be exposed to the same thing that caused their trauma in the first place. The nervous system doesn’t want that because it could lead to death or injury. More money means more exposure to danger or unknowns.
Mindset is only 20% of the problem here. The other 80% are physical pathways in your body that tell you subconsciously what to avoid and what to go toward.
Your avoidance of something you deeply desire is based on something in your past that hurt you or caused you to feel unsafe.
To create real change, you must move through activation to show your nervous system a new level of safety and receiving.
“Feel the fear and do it anyway” addresses the physical activation you feel when you try to take action outside your nervous system’s window of tolerance.
This can come in the form of physical symptoms like nausea or queasiness, shaking, weak legs or knees, butterflies in your stomach, a need to run away, feeling immobile or stuck, and a variety of other fight or flight sensations.
It can also come in the form of mental symptoms like negative thinking, self-criticism, self-doubt, bargaining, imposter syndrome, denial, doomsday or catastrophic visualizations, or talking yourself out of taking action.
All of this is your nervous system trying to warn you of a threat — this threat is from your past experiences! Your job is to move through the activation by understanding that these are old settings and deciding to take action anyway.
It’s like saying to your nervous system, “Hey buddy! I can feel you are trying to protect me. I really want this new thing, so I’m going to notice your signals and then take care of you by creating a new pathway. That way, we can both receive this great new experience or thing.”
And you do that over and over until you create a new nervous system that feels safe receiving new things.
Feel the fear (the activation) and do it anyway (create a new nervous system pathway for receiving).
Your nervous system learns through experiences.
To create lasting change, you need to give it new experiences!
The next time you want to let in something above and beyond your current safety settings, your nervous system will respond with activation.
Now that you know what this activation is trying to do, you can work with it and teach it a new experience of safety.
Let’s discuss the simple steps to expand your nervous system’s receptive capacity — or the amount it’s programmed to receive.
Step #1 — Notice the activation.
When you desire to take a new action (like making more money), notice how your body responds and take care of the activation.
Practice deep breathing, move your body to release the stress energy, and hug yourself to soothe the vagus nerve.
Remind yourself that this activation is connected to something in the past that your nervous system wants to keep you safe from.
Step #2 — Take the new action WHILE activated.
As you notice your activation and care for it, continue to complete the new action.
This might mean telling a client you’re raising your rates or sticking up for yourself with a family member, all while feeling your heart race, your breathing increase, and your palms sweat.
Complete the action and notice how you feel. Let your body complete the cycle while you care for it and release the stress energy.
Talk to your nervous system and tell it everything is okay.
Step #3 — Celebrate the new nervous system pathway you created.
As the activation completes its cycle, do a little internal celebration of the new nervous system pathway you created with new, aligned action.
Do a little dance, sing your favorite song, or do some jumping jacks. All these physical actions signal to the nervous system that you’re physically safe and the threat (the old setting) has past.
Now, your nervous system has an updated blueprint of what it considers safe and unsafe.
Yay!! You did it!
Step #4 — Repeat, repeat, repeat!
Repeat this process with every new action or change you want to make.
You’ll start to create a relationship with your activation so it doesn’t feel so scary. In fact, you’ll welcome activation because you know it means change is on the horizon!
As you continue to teach the nervous system a new blueprint, taking new actions will become easier and easier. Dare I say, you may start having fun with change versus being terrified of it.
Learn your nervous system’s window of tolerance and work with it to expand your receiving settings.
WORK WITH YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM and manifest more!
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