128/Cultivating Safety with Polyvagal Theory

Welcome to The BTG Podcast! 🌟

In this episode.... Join me as we talk about the physiology of safety through the lens of Polyvagal Theory and discover how your nervous system shapes your emotional responses, social interactions, and overall sense of safety. Learn how to harness the power of the vagus nerve to regulate your body’s stress responses, promote emotional healing, and improve relationships. In this episode, we will dive deep into the science behind how we experience safety, connection, and threat—giving you practical tools to foster well-being in everyday life. Tune in to gain powerful insights into your own physiology and take better control of your mental and emotional health!

Chapters

• 0:02 Physiology of Safety
• 9:15 Navigating the Autonomic Nervous System
• 19:38 Empowering Safety and Connection With Others
• 26:15 Managing Anxiety and Building Safety

Transcript

Jen Febel: 0:02

Hello and welcome to the BTG Podcast. I am your host, Jen Febel of BTG, wellness and LiveLifeUnbroken. com. BTG stands for Bridge the Gap and it's inspired by my own healing journey. After receiving seven different mental health diagnoses by the age of 19, I quickly realized that there was a massive gap between what I believed and understood in my head and what I truly felt in my heart. A nd no matter how many therapists I went to, I couldn't seem to bridge that gap— until I found the tools and information that I share in my one-on-one private sessions, trainings and right here on this podcast.

Jen Febel: 0:46

My goal is to help you begin to bridge that gap by bringing you different topics related to mental, emotional and spiritual well-being and, in case you didn't know, this podcast is recorded live during my bi-monthly virtual healing circles.

Jen Febel: 1:01

These are virtual gatherings that are 100% free and no RSVP is required, so you're welcome to come whenever you can and stay as long as you want. Each circle, we open the space with a candle meditation, after which I will share with you my favorite grounding practices and lead you through a circle casting guided meditation and breath work, and lead you through a circle casting guided meditation and breath work, followed by a soul-inspiring gratitude practice. If you are interested in learning more about how you can continue your journey and experience my virtual healing circles in real time, please visit wwwbtgwellnesscom and join my free Circle membership If you like what you hear in today's episode. Please also remember to leave a review and share the love by sharing this episode with your friends, family and social network and, as always, if you have any questions about anything at any time, please feel free to reach out to me through either of my websites, either btgwellnesscom or my coaching website livelifeunbrokencom, or through email or social media. Enjoy the episode.

Jen Febel: 2:19

Welcome to the Virtual Healing Circle with me Jen Febel of BTG Wellness and livelifeunbroken. com, and tonight I'm really excited because we're going to be talking about the physiology of safety. A lot of us, when we're not sure how to keep ourselves safe, think that we have to jump up into the world of energy or we have to somehow control our thoughts, we have to somehow control the people around us or the world around us. But it turns out that safety is physiological states in our nervous system and that we can actually hack our nervous system to get ourselves into these states and therefore reverse engineer safety in our life, and that's what I want to talk to you guys about tonight. So why is this important? This is important because our bodies, our neurology, functions better when we're safe, when we're feeling safe. But most of us haven't really been taught how to help ourselves feel safe. This is important because knowing how to help ourselves and the people around us feel safe is the foundation upon which a really healthy relationship is built. If you're not feeling safe, if you don't know how to set up a space for others to feel safe in your presence, your relationships are going to reflect that, and this is important because without this information, you're going to constantly look outside of yourself to feel safe, which means you're putting your sense of safety and feeling safe on things that are completely outside of your realm of control, so you'll always feel out of control.

Jen Febel: 3:59

Now, in the past, we've talked about this idea that you exist on four layers of reality. So, of course, there's the physical layer of reality. This is everything that you exist on four layers of reality. So, of course, there's the physical layer of reality. This is everything that you can perceive with your five senses. So if you can see it, smell it, taste it, touch it or hear it, as part of the physical layer of reality and your body, this is made up of things like your bones, tissues, organs all the physical stuff that makes you who you are. There's the emotional layer of reality. This part is associated with the part of our psyche called the unconscious mind. This is where our memories are stored. This is where our emotions live. This is where our values live. This is also where we like to stick all the stuff we don't want to deal with. Every time you say something like I put it out of my mind. This is where it goes. There's the mental layer of reality. This is your thinky thinky self, associated with the part of your psyche called your conscious mind, the part that's aware of what's going on. The mental layer of reality is where our thoughts live. It's where that little voice and story in our head that's constantly analyzing the data around us lives. And then there is the spiritual or energetic layer of reality. Now, while this does include things like spirit guides and ghosts and all the fun wooly stuff that I love, this is also where things like your aspirations and dreams reside, all those things that you want to manifest in your life that don't yet exist anywhere else in any of the layers of reality.

Jen Febel: 5:31

Now, when it comes to feeling safe, we need to cultivate safety on all the layers of reality. So how do we do that Energetic layer of reality? Nice and easy. This is something we do all the time in Healing Circle For those listening on the podcast. If you want to come join us, you can certainly get that information through my website.

Jen Febel: 5:50

When we imagine ourselves in a bubble of energy, we are protecting ourselves on the spiritual and energetic layer of reality and so that we can feel safe energetically On the mental and emotional layers of reality, safety is about making sure that our thoughts support what we want to do and that we feel connected to others. We think that when we look at safety on the physical layer of reality, that means things like specific threats. So often what happens is we'll look at the world around us and we're like well, I don't see a lion trying to get me, there's no one pointing a gun at my head, so I should feel safe. But still our bodies are responding in a way that doesn't make us feel emotionally or mentally or energetically safe. It turns out that when it comes to safety on the physical layer of reality, it's not about what's going on outside of you all the time. It's not about what's going on outside of you all the time. That when we are in stressful situations over time, that can attune our nervous system and kind of put things out of balance. Luckily, we can restore balance by working with our nervous system.

Jen Febel: 6:57

Now, when we want to work with our nervous system in terms of safety, one of the ways to do this is what's called polyvagal theory. So polyvagal theory was developed in 1994 by Dr Stephen Porges. He's a neuroscientist and a psychologist. It's basically a way of understanding how our brain and our body work together to respond to stressors in our environment, stressors that are part of our everyday experience, as well as those big, significant traumas. Polyvagal theory is emerging as a fabulous response to people who have endured deep trauma, oftentimes with something like complex ptsd or ptsd just post-traumatic stress disorder. We will mentally know we're safe and that we're no longer in this space, but we'll still feel unsafe and our body will respond as if we're still in the trauma.

Jen Febel: 7:51

Polyvagal theory has emerged as a wonderful way to start to reprogram the body to safety, and it does that by focusing on your vagal nerve, which is part of your nervous system. So your nervous system is made up of your brain, your spinal column and all the nerves that go to all the different parts of your body. The brain and spinal column on its own is your central nervous system, and then all the nerves that go out to the peripheral of your body is called, obvious reasons, the peripheral nervous system. Now that system can then further be subdivided into two parts the part of your nervous system that you have active control over and the part of your nervous system that's involuntary. So if I were to ask you right now to take your left hand and tap your nose, you could do that, that part of your nervous system that you consciously control, that's your somatic nervous system. This is the part that you can actively move your body with and that allows you to do voluntary movements. It lets you walk, it lets you talk, it lets you pick off objects, it lets you bonk your nose. You also have the part of your nervous system that controls things that you don't have conscious access to, things like your digestion or your heart rate or your breathing. You don't have to think about these things. It has happened on their own, and that's because of the branch of your nervous system called the autonomic nervous system.

Jen Febel: 9:15

Now that part of your system can also further be broken down even more into two parts the part that is associated with our survival, which is our sympathetic nervous system, and the part that is associated with our safety, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. These are all parts of your autonomic nervous system. So this stuff happens in the background without you noticing it, but it keeps your body functioning when your sympathetic nervous system is activated. This is where you're going to be in that fight, flight or freeze mode. This is all about survival. This is where your higher thought functioning shuts down. Certain parts of your body shut down in order to allow you to survive. We are meant to be in this state for short periods of time and then go back into the part of our nervous system that's associated with safety. This is the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. Your parasympathetic nervous system is all about being more holistic. It sees the world from a higher perspective versus your sympathetic one, where it gets lost. It can't see the forest for the trees. It's a balance between these two systems that helps us respond to the world.

Jen Febel: 10:32

And your vagal nerve. Your vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that's associated with safety. So the vagus nerve is one of the 12 cranial nerves. So you have 12 nerves that begin in your brain, hence cranial, and they go to different parts of your body. Most of the cranial nerves are fairly short. They go from, like, your brain to your eyeballs, your brain to your ears. The vagus nerve, however, is very long. It is the longest of all of the cranial nerves, it is the 10th cranial nerve and it is the main part of your parasympathetic nervous system. The word vagus is Latin for wanderer, so kind of like a vagabond. This nerve wanders through your body and even though we refer to it as the vagus nerve, it's actually a cluster of nerves, not just one. The vagus nerve starts at the back of your brain and then splits, with one part going down the left side of your neck and one part going down the right side of your neck. It then extends all the way from your brain down into your large intestines, going through your neck, through your chest, around your heart, around your lungs, through your abdomen and down into your intestines.

Jen Febel: 11:45

What Dr Porter says is that we actually have three main states of our autonomic nervous system. We have the parasympathetic nervous system that uses the front part of our vagus nerve, or called the ventral vagal pathway. This is associated with a normal heart rate, normal muscle tone. This is where we're relaxed, we're comfortable, we're feeling safe, we're engaged, we're connecting with others. We first thought that the nervous system was all about purely survival and that fight-flight mechanism, but it turns out that when the ventral vagal pathway is activated, it attunes us to connect with others. We have an actual part of our nervous system designed to make it so that we can connect with others, but we can only do this when this part of the nervous system is activated and we're feeling safe. We convey safety through things like eye pattern, cues, facial expressions, tone of voice.

Jen Febel: 12:49

Your nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, is constantly scanning your environment, looking for danger or safety. As long as it's finding cues for safety in the environment, you'll stay in the ventral vagal pathway. You'll feel that nice relaxation and connection. If, as you're scanning the environment, you detect a tone of voice that you're like, or you see someone's facial expression and it reminds you of something from the past, you suddenly start to feel threatened. That's going to now activate your sympathetic nervous system. The whole point of this part is to get you mobilized. This is where you're going to go into that fight or flight or freeze mode. This is where your body is going to start diverting energy and blood flow to get your body activated.

Jen Febel: 13:36

Now, if we are in this fight or flight state and we can't get away and we can't fight back and we can't make ourselves really still or fall on our way out of it, when we can't make ourselves really still or fawn our way out of it, when we can't make ourselves safe, no matter what, that's where the oldest part of the vagus nerve becomes activated, called the dorsal vagal pathway. This is more reptilian. This puts us into full immobilization. Now, this is different from the freeze response. The freeze response is actually a hyper alert state of sympathetic activation, but in a dorsal collapse, when it's immobilization, this is where we drop into that place of hopelessness, of loneliness. We're just locked there on the sofa, scrolling Instagram, knowing all the things we should do, but we can't get ourselves out of it. Now, just like everything else, we are discovering that this is a spectrum and you are meant to not just stay in one part of this, so it's not like, oh, I have to get relaxed and never go anywhere else. No, you are meant to move fluidly through all aspects of this and to know how to get yourself out of an immobilized state and back into your ventral, vagal, relaxed, parasympathetic nervous system response. And it turns out you can do that by stimulating the vagus nerve.

Jen Febel: 14:58

There are lots and lots and lots of different ways. If you want to find a whole bunch of ways one you can google or two you can look up there's a book called Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection by Deb Dana, so it's got lots of. I think it has 50 different practices and exercises in there for you. But it doesn't have to be that complicated. In order to activate and stimulate the ventral vagal nerve, all you have to do is make your exhale longer than your inhale. If you do that for a few minutes, that will automatically take your nervous system and reset itself into that ventral vagal pathway. Typically people will say six counts in through your nose, eight out through your mouth. I've heard people vary that number before. Generally, as long as the exhale is longer than the inhale, that's what tells your nervous system. It's okay, the threat is gone.

Jen Febel: 15:54

You can do mindfulness. My favorite is to do what is called the 5-4-3-2-1 mindfulness practice. This is where you notice five things in your environment that you can see, four things that you can hear, three things that you can feel, three things that you can feel, two that you can smell and one that you can taste. The goal of this is to get you into the physical layer of reality. Oftentimes we spin off into our mind the thinky thinky land and that's where we screw ourselves over, because our thoughts will imagine all the worst case scenarios, thinking that's going to prepare us, scenarios, thinking that's going to prepare us. When we get ourselves out of our head and into the physical reality. We'll realize that in this moment I am fine, regardless of what my brain is telling me might happen, could happen. What if would happen? When I tune into this moment, I can realize that I am safe. And so you just do that by activating your senses.

Jen Febel: 17:00

Why do we start with visual? It's easier to notice five things that you can see versus five things that you can taste. Often there's only one thing you're going to taste. It's just like okay, what did I just recently eat? So you start with the obvious. There are five things I can see and you want to get detailed about it. So right now I can see the shine of my lights. Off the screen of my computer I can see the pink little cat stuffed animal with a shiny party hat. So you want to actually label specifically and pay attention to what's happening in your physical environment visually. And then you go four things that you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste.

Jen Febel: 17:44

By the time you get through that process you'll have activated that ventral vagal system and told your neurology look, it's fine, I'm fine. You can use self-hypnosis techniques such as imagining yourself connected to the earth through roots that are in your feeds or through a bubble of light that surrounds you. That will start to activate your ventral vagal pathways. You can stimulate the vagus nerve by splashing cold water on your face for a few minutes. Some people love this one, some people hate it. You can also dip your face in a big bowl of ice water and do that a few times, and that will stimulate the vagus nerve. And because the ventral vagal system is all about attuning us to our environment and noticing cues for connection and safety, we can also stimulate it by engaging with others in a positive social interaction, surrounding yourself by awesome people that you can feel safe with. If you're going to stick yourself around people who aren't safe, you're not going to be able to get yourself feeling safe.

Jen Febel: 18:49

Now I'm going to introduce you to one more technique that you can use to get yourself into this part of your nervous system. Some of you might have learned this from me before. Those of you who've taken the eight-day training know that you use this one a lot. In that one, this is called the learning state, but it's actually inspired by the ancient Hawaiian practice of Hakalao, which translates to eyes wide open, and it's a meditative technique that you can do in two minutes. It's very, very fast and it utilizes your peripheral vision to induce a mild hypnotic state. In doing so, it relaxes the body, it tells your nervous system all is well and it gives you access to a deeper perspective around you, which also makes your neurology feel safe. I'm going to walk you through how to do this, please.

Jen Febel: 19:38

If you're listening on the podcast and you're in a place where it is not safe to turn your eyes up and look at the wall or the ceiling, please avoid following along and do this later. Put that little disclaimer in there For those of you in circle. If you want to play along, all you have to do is keep your chin level with the ground and turn your eyes up and find a spot on the wall or ceiling that you can look at comfortably. Now the first step of this state is to focus as intently as you can on the very center of that spot. This helps you anchor your focus, because we're going to activate our peripheral awareness. We need to give our eyes a focal point and an anchor to look at. As you continue to do that, you'll notice that your awareness will naturally begin to shift into your peripheral awareness, you don't even have to do anything. So keep your eyes on your spot.

Jen Febel: 20:27

But now allow yourself to explore the space around you using only your peripheral vision and notice that you can look left and right and up and down all over the place without moving your eyes, using only your peripheral awareness. And at a certain point you're going to reach the edge of that awareness. It's usually somewhere around your ears, and when that happens, I want you to now use your imagination and imagine that you can wrap that awareness all the way around, 360 degrees around you. I'm taking a few breaths in this space, knowing you can normally spend as much time as you want in this space. And for now, once you've done that and you've expanded that awareness, when you're ready you can bring your eyes back down and take a moment to notice what's different in your body, what it feels like. The more you use this technique, the more you start to attune yourself to what it feels like in your body to have an activated ventral vagal system, to have your parasympathetic system activated, to feel safe. The more you do these things to activate that part of your nervous system, the more you attune yourself to safety. Now, while it's great to do this for your own self.

Jen Febel: 21:47

The whole point of this part of your nervous system is to also create safety with others. Your nervous system is constantly scanning the environment. Is this safe or is this dangerous? What part of my nervous system do I need to be in? Can I relax and connect, or do I need to fight or run? We want to make sure, in addition to keeping ourselves safe, that we're also being safe to others. If our tone is activating someone else's sympathetic fight-or-flight system, if our words, if our facial expressions are activating that in someone else, it's going to make it harder for us to feel connected.

Jen Febel: 22:25

A big part of what I teach in the eight-day training is how to signal safety to others, how to create a space of safety so that you're not triggering other people. That is part of the responsibility of being in relationships to make sure that we're taking responsibility for our own emotions and to recognize that when we unintentionally break the connection, that we find a way to reconnect as soon as we're ready and as soon as the other person is ready. Breaks in trust and breaks in safety happen, even in the most healthy relationships. It's how we repair these ruptures, how we repair these breaks, that actually builds trust. This is the conduit to building trust. Trust is not just something that you have and you automatically give and that, okay, you have trust until you break it and then I never give it back to you. That's not how it works.

Jen Febel: 23:21

Trust is something that you create by creating a space of safety, by making sure that you are keeping your nervous system feeling safe and then extending that to others. If you notice in the middle of a conversation that you're starting to feel that feeling, that you notice is when your brain starts to go, ah, taking responsibility for that, taking a moment, going somewhere, calming your nervous system down, allowing yourself to feel safe again and then going back to the conversation. Safety, it turns out, is something that we have full control over in our life, and when we learn how to keep our nervous system feeling safe, when we learn how to then extend those cues to others, we really do ignite the light in others. So some key concepts to remember. Remember that safety is something that you have full control over. It's just about making sure that you're activating the parts of your nervous system at times when it's the most appropriate. If there's a lion chasing you, hells, yeah, you want to be in that fight or flight space, but if your body's doing that when you're snuggling up with your partner or hanging out with a crowd, that's a problem.

Jen Febel: 24:28

Remember that taking responsibility for your own safety is the ultimate in empowerment. As long as you make other people responsible for how you feel, I can't feel safe around these people. I don't feel safe with this situation. As long as we're putting that sense of safety outside of you, you're always going to feel out of control and unsafe. When we take responsibility for how our nervous system operates and know that we can actually shift it and retrain it, that's empowerment.

Jen Febel: 25:02

And remember that your job is not only to learn your own safety cues, but also to make sure that you are safe for others to connect to. That doesn't mean being nicer or being a doormat or having no boundaries. It means ensuring that you are connecting authentically and creating a space where someone else can do the same. If you're always offering quote-unquote helpful guidance, you're probably not that safe for the other person. So remember that safety is something that you can extend to others as well, once you master it yourself.

Jen Febel: 25:30

And as always, I want to remind you to decide you want it more than you're afraid of it. Knowing that we have the power to help ourselves feel safe is kind of scary. Ironically, to know that we can at any time help our biology feel calm is a level of responsibility and power that scares the living shit out of us, frankly. So just decide. You want it more than you're afraid of it. That's always the decision that will take you to the next step. And, of course, if you have any questions about anything from tonight's circle or podcast, please know you can always reach out to me through either of my websites, either btgwellnesscom or livelifeunbrokencom, or through email or through social media.

Speaker 2: 26:15

It's just a comment the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,. It's interesting because I don't remember if it was a commercial or what, but there was a thing that I was hearing about. If someone's experiencing an anxiety attack or panic attack, or if you're experiencing one of those, you should be like okay, what are five things that are blue? And like, name the five things that are blue. And they're like okay, what are five things that are blue and like, name the five things that are blue. And then, okay, what are four things or five things I can't remember the progression of it, but it was like blue and then look for five things that are this and five things that are that and they're like.

Speaker 2: 26:44

And for some reason, I think I heard that once, like years ago, and it stuck with me. I was like that's interesting because I know people who can have like panic attacks. I've never seen them have it, but they told me they experienced them. I was like that's a good tip to have in my head in case I need it. And I heard it here today and I was like oh, that's what that was. So it was cool to to know more about it. Thank you.

Jen Febel: 27:06

Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure, yeah. When our nervous systems in that activated, mobilized, immobilized state it's thinking that there's a danger somewhere and so, by tuning into our actual physical reality, it reminds our nervous system that, oh, there's not a lion chasing us In this moment. I am fine and I am safe and we just need to get ourselves out of that crazy mental chatter land that drives us nuts, that brings up all the emotions. Now, if someone is having a full-blown panic attack, it will be challenging for them to set the intention. Oftentimes we forget in the heat of the moment because at that point our nervous system it's gone into a full, like crazy, mode. It's full activated, they're in what we call an NLP, an unresourceful state. It's full activated, they're in what we call an NLP, an unresourceful state. And so getting yourself into a more resourceful state can be done a hundred percent and in the beginning your body will fight yourself. You'll fight yourself.

Jen Febel: 28:08

Same with if you use the learning state that one, I actually like that one better for getting someone out of a panic attack. I find it simpler. Instead of having someone, you know someone's panicking, you're like name four things that are blue. Sometimes they'll deck you in the face Like that's annoying. Oh, get out of my face, I'm panicking right now, right?

Jen Febel: 28:26

So, um, again, always ask permission before you help someone, but having someone just stare at a spot, even that will have their neurology fighting them Because again you're having their nervous system shift gears. It's kind of like for anyone who drives standard you try to shift gears without putting in the clutch, it's going to grind a little right and so we need to give that space for them to switch gears. But absolutely we can get. I've seen someone go from a full blownblown panic attack to being completely calm in about 45 seconds ish less less than a minute for sure using that learning state to their eyes up, and it's interesting to watch someone's nervous system literally go from hyper activated into this more receptive, open state where they can communicate and they can receive help. So, yeah, it's very interesting how much control we have over the part of our nervous system that technically, is uncontrollable because it's involuntary.

Speaker 3: 29:28

So, in keeping with that, one of the things that I have difficulty with is relaxing, and by that I mean not being on high alert. I've learned to use different exercises to try to keep my body calm physiologically and not be reactive, you know, think before I act. However, to fully relax, not so much Because my experience has been that when I fully relax and just go with the flow and I'm not on high alert, things have happened and it's caught me off guard that were dangerous for me. And it's caught me off guard and so my reflex and be able to take action, I don't know seem troublesome or too slow, or just it feels I feel more able to keep myself safe if I'm on alert, so that I can catch it before it's already happened. But, of course, being in that state all the time is not good for me, for danger.

Jen Febel: 30:50

It is because the part of your mind that is logical is telling you that if you do that, it will prepare you better. While that may be true, you might be prepared to react more quickly, you never actually get to enjoy the sense of safety from having a faster response. Yes, right, so you end up in this feedback loop when we recognize that and we take active steps to create moments of safety, or glimmers, I think is what they now call glimmers of safety. I grew up in high trauma and my body had no idea how to feel safe, and so, even if I was surrounded by safe people, my body was still telling me don't trust them. And so I had to take actual time out of the day where I created a space and I created a moment or two where I felt safe for just a second, for half a second, and just trying to get these little glimmers of safety. Just can I feel safe for like half a second right now? Okay, and what does that feel like? And then see if I can extend it. And for me it started with creating actual little safety rituals where I, for me, it's always with energy and smudge. You know you're talking a lot about how you did that.

Jen Febel: 32:18

To prepare that was telling the neurology something cool is happening. It's going to be safe. In the same way, we can start to prepare our neurology by giving it these little moments of safety and starting to feel what that feels like, and then extend them. So, while we might not be in a feeling of safety all day, every day, that's not the point.

Jen Febel: 32:38

The point is to know how to get ourselves in and out of that state at will, so that, even if we are surrounded by other people who are not safe, we can take a moment, go to the bathroom and feel safe. We can go outside for a few moments and feel safe, even in chaos. We can find these moments, and the more we know that we can do that, the safer we feel, because we know that we're not trapped, which is what our brain tells us is the problem and which is why we have to be hyper alert. So, making an active intention to start to train your neurology for safety and it's going to feel weird, it's not going to feel safe. Yet If you're highly attuned to danger, feeling safe is going to feel threatening in some capacity or boring, right's going to feel like numb, almost similar to the dissociated state, but there is a difference once you experience both. So if you're finding that you aren't giving yourself these moments, then you can. Just, it's literally just an intention does that make sense?

Speaker 3: 33:50

yeah, I can. I can experience moments, glimmers, as you say. I've been able to do that, but I find I wish I could be calmer longer, more often and be alert without it being exhausting yep, yep.

Jen Febel: 34:09

So then, if you're already getting those glimmers, then the next step is to extend the amount of time and see if you can hold it for longer.

Jen Febel: 34:17

So if you can get a glimmer, that last let's say three, four seconds see if you can now do 30 seconds of focused, actual calming moments of safety and then, once you're like, okay, I can do 30 seconds once a day, so you can now make it twice a day, actually actively, just like we stretch our body, we can stretch our nervous system into a different space of safety. But we have to actually actively push against our, our instinct to shut down. I will tell you that, having grown up in trauma, that system will get activated by the smallest things, by certain people. Just a little look from my husband can sometimes cause me to spiral into a shutdown, and not because he's done anything terrible. He's having a moment and he just I don't know his face did whatever it did. You know, resting bitch face. It happens, but my neurology interpreted it as something, something and I'll find myself going into it. I can actually feel my body doing it sometimes and it'll take me a couple of days to come back from that. What I've had to learn is to go to him and say I just got triggered by your face. I'm in a shutdown right now. I'm going to be weird for a few days while I get my shit together. It's not about you In the future, you know, if I ask something, it would be helpful if you don't give me that weird look, but ultimately your face is allowed to do what it's allowed to do. This is a me problem and I'm working on it.

Jen Febel: 35:57

And then in those days I did everything I could, as often as I could. Every time I felt myself going into that space again, I put myself on learning state. There were days I was doing it like six, seven, eight times a day. My job is to help my nervous system find itself balanced again by constantly refocusing it as much as I can into a place of safety. So it's going to happen Like I've been doing this work for how long? And that shutdown I had happened like six months ago, right, like it still happens. It happens less and I now recognize what it is and I know how to pull myself into balance. But the goal isn't to not, it's still going to happen at some points. Things are going to happen.

Jen Febel: 36:32

That's what your nervous system does. It attunes to danger and safety. And if we've grown up with a lot of danger, it's just more skewed in that direction. So we just have to actively teach it new skills. So if you're getting those glimmers, the next step is to extend it or to do it more often until you can start to hold it for a little longer.

Jen Febel: 36:52

And the more you can stretch into that space, the more you'll find that other people don't bother you in the same way, because how could they? You're safe. So what's the difference? So it's a little tiny bit at a time. So keep stretching your neurology. The more you can explore and set the intention of finding safety in your life, the more you'll create it. It's a creation. It's something that you get to have power over. Does that make sense? Does that answer the question? Yeah, awesome, great question. Thank you again for joining me for this episode of the BTG podcast. Before we sign off, I've got some exciting news I want to share. My brand new book how to Set Boundaries Without Feeling Like a Dick is dropping November 2024. If you're ready to stop people-pleasing and reclaim your time without the guilt, this book is for you To get an exclusive sneak peek and check out the first chapter, visit btgwellnesscom book. Trust me you're going to want to go check that out. Thanks again and until next time.