How your body, your breath, and a quick pause can strengthen you.
Key points
- Difficult interactions with other people can activate our nervous system’s fight/flight/freeze mode.
- When we’re defensive and reactive, we often feel empowered and in control; in reality, we’ve lost control.
- Our greatest power and strength comes when we can access our full selves, and that requires taking a pause.
As a therapist, I spend a lot of time working with clients on accessing agency and personal power. This is because the experience of being in command of ourselves and in the driver’s seat of our lives is essential to our mental health and well-being. Being alive in a human body with a human nervous system can be an anxiety-inducing, even overwhelming experience. There’s so much that’s out of our control. There are endless decisions to be made every day. There are curveballs coming at us all the time. And then there are our relationships with other people.
Our interpersonal interactions are a major source of complexity in our lives—and, if we don’t have the tools to manage them effectively, they can be a major source of anxiety and pain as well. One primary reason for this is that experiencing friction or conflict with another person activates our survival physiology, setting our system into the automatic fight/flight/freeze mode designed to help us respond to threat. Although a fight with your best friend or an uncomfortable conversation with your boss isn’t a real threat to your survival, it feels like one to your body. Feeling threatened feels like losing control. This experience of being out of control is scary and disempowering. It’s a feeling that nobody wants to stay in for too long.
What most of us tend to do when we get activated by an uncomfortable or unpleasant interaction with another person is get defensive and self-protective. We move into this defensive posture so quickly and automatically that most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it. Once activated, our nervous system sends a strong signal to our brain to get back in control. But here’s the paradox and the problem: The things we tend to do when our nervous system is activated and our brain is trying to gain control actually get us even more out of control. What we think is giving us power is actually disempowering us. If you’ve ever said hurtful things to someone you care about in the heat of an argument, you know exactly how this works. In the moment, your highjacked brain thinks those words will defend you against the threat and put you back in control; but soon after they fly out of your mouth, you realize how out of control you actually are.
As human beings, our greatest source of power lies in our ability to access as much of ourselves as possible in any given situation. When our sympathetic nervous system gets activated in response to a perceived threat and we move into the defensive fight/flight/freeze posture, we lose access to the parts of our brain that help us think reasonably, see possibilities, and find solutions. Trapped behind our defenses, we lose our sense of agency and personal power. Although the energy behind getting reactive and defending ourselves might feel like power and strength in the moment, we’re fundamentally weakened when we’re in this state.
To move back into the seat of real power, we have to calm down, slow down, and come back into our bodies. And although this doesn’t happen automatically, it happens surprisingly quickly when we pursue it with intention. The first step is recognizing that our nervous system is activated and that our body feels threatened. Then the next step is to find a way to pause. Stepping away and taking a time out helps us get a hold of our physiology. From this less-activated place, we can access our higher, wiser mind and gain the strength we need to move back into connection and find resolution.
You’ll know you’re back in your seat of power when you can access curiosity, see multiple possibilities, and have some ability to separate the facts of what happened from the story your mind wants to tell about it. You’ll notice that your body feels more open and receptive, rather than tight and constricted. And you’ll get the pleasant sensation of feeling back in your center and a bit more in command of your experience.
The next time you feel activated in an interaction with someone else, try asking for a time-out and taking some space to get back to yourself. Here are a few ways you can use that time-out to re-center and regain real power:
- Take some soothing containment breaths. Place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. Breathe in deeply through your nose, then breathe out slowly through pursed lips, trying to make the exhale twice as long as the inhale.
- Move the energy through your body. Dance around, shake, stomp, or pound the ground. Let your body move in whatever ways it wants to move to release the pent-up energy of the defensive response.
- Get outside. Go for a walk outdoors. Connect with nature. Observe your surroundings. Let your attention move away from your mind and into the world around you.
- Change your temperature. Grab a couple of ice cubes and hold them in your hands until they melt, splash ice-cold water on your face, or take a cold shower. The cold temperature will help redirect attention away from your mind while also helping your nervous system move out of fight/flight/freeze mode.