How intelligent are our bodies? Part 2

ByMonica
So just how intelligent are our bodies?  

We associate a lot of the automatic responses that our bodies make with muscle memory, and yet, we rarely talk about our bodies as having their own intelligence.  Increasingly, we are finding that it’s not that our bodies aren’t intelligent, but that we have subverted our capacity to listen to our body’s signals.  

It’s self-preservation that teaches us to overuse our body’s savvy responses to protect us.   Our autonomic nervous system, of which the vagus nerve is an integral part, can shift in and out of states of activation to protect us from real or perceived threats. You have probably heard of fight, flight and freeze responses. These are the strategies that our autonomic nervous system uses to keep us safe. And thanks to these responses, and others, our species has survived and thrived for millions of years. However, in our modern day hustle and bustle, our bodies perceive signals of distress more frequently than ever before in human history.

Most of the threats that our bodies perceive aren’t actually life threatening.  The fight response may have been very useful when our ancestors lived in the bush and had to protect their families from predators, but it’s not as useful when an aggressive driver cuts you off in busy traffic.  

The flight response can keep us safe if we find ourselves walking alone on a dark street with a potential attacker, but when we escape into online games, social media, addictions or any other sort of distraction, we don’t allow our bodies to reach the end of the activation.  It stays stuck in our bodies.  

The freeze response may have been a good strategy for keeping you safe as a small child when your parents or other adults in your environment got angry, but if you can’t get out of the freeze response, your system stays stuck and you start to use freeze increasingly to live your life.

The fawn response is a lesser known strategy of our autonomic nervous system.  It is very similar to freeze, except that when we fawn, we continue to appear socially engaged.  Fawning is what we do when we are in a social situation in which we feel uncomfortable or that we can’t safely voice our thoughts, so instead we go along with what someone else is doing.  

Our bodies aren’t able to reason their way out of feeling threatened the way we are able to reason with our minds.  They rely on instinctual and patterned responses to keep us safe. And ideally, once the threat has passed, our system returns to a state of rest and digest.  This state of rest and digest is supposed to be our default state.  The state in which we can relax, digest our food and the events in our lives, connect with our loved ones and tap into our creativity.  But when our bodies perceive threats in our environment, we end up over-relying on states of fight, flight, freeze or fawn to “get through” our lives.  This causes us to become desensitized to our body’s signals.  We effectively learn to ignore our bodies, often from a very early age.  

Using these strategies, our bodies keep us alive, but over time our bodies feel the strain of being in the activated states of fight, flight, freeze or fawn and we will start to feel pain, illness or fatigued in our body.  The ultimate goal isn’t to stop using fight, flight, freeze and fawn in our lives, but to become aware of when we are using them so that we can tend to our bodies and support ourselves in getting back into a rest state.

This week as you go about your life, try to notice where you might be activating any of these states.  And thank your body, either aloud or in your mind, for how hard it works to keep you safe.

With love,
mónica

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