Stop Trying to Change Your Polyvagal State. Do This Instead for True Self Regulation...

We all search for that sense of inner balance, don't we? And when it comes to finding calm or managing stress, our breath can be the first thing we turn to, although many of us, maybe even you are unaware of our breathing. You probably became aware of it now as I'm talking about it.

You might have heard the advice- breathe in to energize, breathe out to relax, or perhaps even followed a prescribed breathing method, like box breathing or a certain amount of seconds in and out, uh, balloon breathing, color breathing, I think, and whatever else is out there. And that's, that's fine.

But what if the most effective path to feeling settled and connecting with yourself in the present moment isn't about imposing a rhythm, but tuning into the one that your body naturally holds. In this episode, we explore this very idea. I want to convince you of two things. Number one, you'll shift your polyvagal state naturally and compassionately through connecting with the way your body already wants to breathe.

And I also want to convince you that if you don't, you're fundamentally rejecting your body. It's needs and actual long lasting self-regulation. Hi, I am Justin Sunseri. I'm a therapist and coach who wants to help you live more calmly, confidently, and connected without psychobabble or woowoo. Welcome to Stuck Not Broken. This podcast is of course not therapy, nor is it intended to replace therapy. What you're gonna listen to is a clip from a live q and a that I hold within the Unstuck Academy.

I've removed as much of the students', uh, voices as I can, and I've replaced them with ai, uh, voices. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the in breath stimulates the sympathetic and the out breath stimulates the parasympathetic? So, obviously, in the simplest form, you breathe in for two and out for four; or you breathe in for three and you breathe out for six?

I, I personally don't like the prescribed breathing, the counting the in for two out for two or four or whatever. I don't care for that. Um, I would much prefer people mindfully connect with their breath as it is. There is value to extending your exhale. I like that, but I don't, I personally don't recommend counting or having it be for a certain amount of time. I'd rather people focus on comfort level. Um, versus time.

Actually, I just met with someone right before this, and she was doing the prescribed breathing. She was counting, and, you know, that's fine. But I told her, well, why don't you just ex extend your exhale, but just, you know, don't count and don't count out. Just focus more on comfort. She tried that and she's like, I liked it a lot more. Okay. I felt like I got more out of it. Just, just feeling it and being, and you know, breathing out. She said, I felt like I got more out of it.

It was, I was more focused. I was more mindful because otherwise you're counting and that's not, I think that's counterintuitive to the mindfulness piece of it. I know there's a lot of prescriptive breathing out there to relax. Sometimes it's to like amp up, you know, speed up your, or extend your inhale and decrease your exhale. It's just, to me, that's very artificial. Um, in one of the courses that I, the Stillness to Sympathetic- in that course I talk about something called, uh, induction.

How do we mobilizing through induction, like forcing yourself to mobilize. And that would be one of those ways is through prescribed breathing through, um, longer inhales or more rapid inhales. But I, I don't like that stuff. I'd rather people feel connect with their natural state and their natural breath.

The only really prescribed breathing I'll give is mindfully maybe, maybe take a deeper breath in once mindfully, if the body wants to, but you have to connect with what the body wants. Mindfully extend the exhale. Maybe, you know, but not two seconds in, four seconds. Box box breathing, color breathing. I'd rather we get out of our heads and more connect with what's happening bottom up. I feel like I am fairly in touch with my body and the present moment.

But if I can change my state through induction, that is something I am open to. I'd rather not wallow in my shutdown. Well, you said in order to change my state. Why do you wanna change your state? And what's the, so what what's the point? Is it because I don't like it and I wanna get rid of it? If, and if that's the case, the way I think and the way I'm teaching in the coursework is you're fundamentally rejecting the natural state of your body.

And if you're doing that, I don't think natural self-regulation can occur. You can induce it. You can force some level of shifting, but that's not sustainable, I don't think. And that's not a natural, mindful, compassionate connection with yourself.

What I would argue is that when we bring mindful connection to our breath from our safety state, it will change naturally. It will naturally, through self-regulation. Your body knows more than your brain does. So our brain might say, "Well, I don't like my state. I don't want to feel this way," and I don't blame anybody. Of course not. I don't like, it doesn't feel good to be in shutdown or what- right? It doesn't feel good.

So our brain, our conscious mind is saying, "No, I feel this way. I don't want to feel this way, so I'm gonna change my breath or drink an energy drink or I don't know, put some sort of time constraint on myself in order to induce mobility or to induce, induce a, a state shift." So that's our conscious plan, right? But our body is really just like, "No, just feel me. Pay attention to me and I'll take care of the rest. I, I can self-regulate.

I just, I need you to stay in your safety state." Right? I'm mixing up my personas here. Your, the body's saying, "I, I, I just need you to bring attention to what I'm going through and I'll take care of the rest." That, that's really the shift that I think needs to take place as far as how we think about these things.

Because what- path A, when we're changing our breath, or you know, putting all these pressures on ourselves or whatever, that is fundamentally rejecting the natural state of our body, which to me is the opposite of self-regulation. Path B, which I'm laying out and try and teach, is let's truly connect with the state of our body and see what happens. And what's gonna happen is it's gonna self-regulate. It has to. That's, that's the natural compulsion of every living organism is self-regulation.

I think our conscious mind gets in the way. So trauma means we're stuck in a defensive state. Not completely, not a hundred percent. Um, obviously, obviously, you know, more severe at times, but there's always some level of access to all these states at any given moment. It's never a hundred percent in any specific moment. So even though we might be in a stuck defensive state, the body is still compelled to self-regulate. The, the natural compulsion. It's, it's a homeostatic biological thing.

It has to self-regulate in order to optimally function. Okay? The more that we can get outta the way consciously and allow that to happen, the better. Even though we may be in a traumatized state, stuck in like shutdown, maybe- the body still has a natural compulsion to self-regulate. It wants to, it needs to, but we do things like scroll on our phone and we distract it.

We use drugs, we drink, we stay out late at night, we overeat, we undereat, and the body's like, just stop doing all that stuff so I can self-regulate. So the sooner we can get closer to cutting out all that noise, then the body can say, "fricking finally, thank you," and it can do what it needs to do. The problem is it's very uncomfortable. It's not easy, it's uncomfortable, and it requires a lot of safety activation. But once we can get those pieces in place, the self-regulation will happen.

The coming out of defensive activation will happen. I tend to do better with productive means of shifting state like through induction versus the passive. If it's true induction, like you're forcing it, then that's, I don't think it's sustainable and it inherently rejects the fundamental need of our body. There's some level of fundamentally rejecting, "I don't want this, I don't want this experience, I don't wanna feel it, I don't wanna connect with it. I'm tired of it." Okay. So there's that.

And then you said, you do better with, um, productive. So that's totally fine. Nothing wrong with that at all. That's great. Love it. Again, in my client work, my question would be, "Okay, well, what does productive feel like? What is, what's that urgency? What does that feel like?" Can we connect mindfully with that instead of acting on it and doing something to feel differently, can we just pause and feel that urgency or that pressure or that antsiness or that, whatever that is.

That feeling of like, no, I gotta do something- that could be one's body coming out of shutdown. And now there's some sympathetic activation coming in the system. So we wanna feel that. We want to feel that pow, you know, mindfully. We want to connect with that and then use it in a way that feels good for the body versus doing something to feel differently. That feeling of like, I want to, I got, I gotta do something. I wanna do something like that's a gold mine.

There's a lot there to connect with if you mindfully, patiently feel into it and just feel, where does that live in the body? And all the coursework stuff. Okay. What would happen potentially is if you can, generally, if you could feel that that rising, um, activation, we'll call it mobilization energy, if you could feel it, it may not tell you to change your breath. It may tell you to pull or to push or to squeeze. Or to run or sprint or do squats. I don't know.

It may tell you like, "no, no, we need to move. We need to use, let's use our muscles." Instead of breathing differently or distracting ourselves with some project or whatever, your body might say, "No, this is what we need. Please do this so we can release all this activation that's coming up within us." But we won't know that until we stop rejecting how we feel and we deeply feel how we feel. Then the body will tell you, tell us what it needs.

You'll probably find that as you go through the coursework, it's, it's probably very different than the other stuff you've, I don't know where, where else you're taking in, but I keep hearing from people and from my own little, you know, as I learn and read and whatnot, what, what we're doing here is very different than I think what other people are getting.

Can you discuss how to create the optimal conditions for the body to self-regulate? So the optimal conditions. I want to, I want to compartment- I want to split something up here. What I'm not talking about is how do we force ourselves to feel better. That that's not okay? The optimal way of creating conditions for self-regulation depends on what state you're in. That's why you gotta really connect with the state that you're in.

So if I'm in shutdown, I will do better with, this is my, my body in particular. But typically people in shutdown want lower stimulation, quiet, um, lights usually down or maybe natural lighting, sunlight. Pieces like that in general. Lower stimulation in general. Now, someone in particular like me, I like the scent of, uh, coconut. That does something for my body. It just feels, it brings me to life. It, it's exciting.

Whereas the next person might say, "That doesn't speak to me at all." So there's general conditions like lower stimulation for shutdown and then more specific things for each of us as individuals. But we have to listen to what our body needs. We have to be mindful of, of the needs of our body. So if we can create that around us, that creates the external conditions now that helps us get closer to feeling what it's like to be in shutdown without forcing it, without trying to change it.

It's just listening to what do I need, giving it to ourselves, and then looking back away inward and saying, okay, well now how do I feel now? What's happening now? Okay, so for someone in flight fight, they're not gonna want probably lower stimulation. They want more stimulation. They might want more instead of a close closed um. A cozy space, they're gonna want probably more space.

They're probably gonna want natural sunlight and, and being outside and green and, uh, pathways and, you know, things to walk down, space to run, space to walk that for someone in flight fight, they want that. They don't want a closed room with the lights turned down. That doesn't speak to their system. So to create this what they need, they would listen to their body and then give it. So when people that I meet with say, "I wake up every morning, I

feel anxious." I say, "okay, well what do you do with that anxiety?" They say, "Well, I, I listen to a meditation to try and slow down, or I'll drink some tea." And I'm like, "but that's not what your body wants. Your body wants movement. You, you wake up, ready to move. Why are you doing the opposite?" "Well, 'cause I'm supposed to feel better. I'm, I'm supposed to feel safe. I'm supposed to feel calm."

It's like, "okay, but you don't. You don't feel that way." So instead of giving yourself the opposite, what happens if you got up and the first thing you did was go for a walk? Actually, someone recently wakes up. He, I just talked to him last week and he wakes up with a lot of anxiety and, uh, I said, well, what if you, we were brainstorming.

I said, "what if you, when you're making your eggs in the morning, what if you stood on your toes?" 'Cause that way it's like you're still flexing your muscles and you're giving your body a little bit more movement. But now you're, you can cook mindfully as well. Or what if you stood up instead of sitting down to eat your breakfast? Um, what if you tensed and released your, your leg muscles while you eat?

What if you listened to the needs of your body and used your anxiety, your energy, your mobilization? What if you used it instead of ignoring it or try to stuff it down and feel better? That seems counterintuitive. I would call that "anti-logical." That's the opposite of what we typically do.

I fundamentally believe that the typical wisdom we bring to these things, the cul cultural maybe way of doing things is, is wrong, is fundamentally wrong, and probably has a lot to do with why there's such rampant, um, mental health problems. Hmm. I really believe that we are fundamentally doing things wrong. And instead, what if we just listened to what our body needs and provided it?

Thank you so much for joining me on Stuck Not Broken. I've got a little challenge for you. Try to trust the wisdom that your body already has. Maybe I didn't convince you from this clip, and that's fine, but as you practice mindfulness and meditation, can you set aside the pressure to count, to measure, or to force your breathing to feel something other than what you're already feeling? Maybe today or, or in some quiet moment, you can pause and simply ask, what does my body need right now?

And the answer might not be what you expect. It might not be a longer exhale, but a, a gentle stretch, a moment of stillness or a walk outside. Maybe it's a bigger breath, maybe it's a breath into the belly or the chest. Just be as open as you can to what the answer is. And if you want to keep rejecting your body's needs and force a certain way of breathing, that is up to you. I'll respect that.

I don't know what your favorite gurus are telling you, but when it comes to unstucking and the way that we do things here, remember the goal isn't to fix. You're not broken, but to connect and listen, and to allow your own system to guide you back to its natural state of safety and balance. If you want to join me and the other students inside the Unstucking Academy for a live q and a or one of our other live events, uh, you may, I would love to see you there.

The Unstucking Academy has courses, it has live events, it's got community. All of which help you do the things that we talked about in this episode. All of all of these things help you connect with yourself without judgment in the present moment, without trying to force yourself to feel a different way. We work on self-regulating by truly connecting to the present moment and whatever it brings.

The Unstucking Academy is a wonderful little community, and I say little because, well, what is, but it's also small on purpose. There's a limit of 150 people in the Unstucking Academy, so there's not gonna be thousands of people pouring in and out and saying whatever comes to their mind and sharing trauma stories, we don't- we don't do that. It's a much calmer, slower paced, smaller community, and I would love for you to be a part of it.

Head over to JustinLMFT.com/unstuckacademy, JustinLMFT.com/unstuckingacademy and you can learn more. And I really hope that you are one of the 150 people.