WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, psychologist, fellow long hauler, and your Long COVID Coach, and welcome to another Wellness Wednesday. So today, I wanted to talk about something that is definitely going to possibly feel a bit controversial and definitely going to make you think. So you've heard me talk a lot about Polyvagal theory, how we have three levels in our nervous system. Rest and Digest at the top, sometimes known as Ventral Vagal. Fight or Flight in the middle, sometimes known as Sympathetic. And Shutdown or Immobilization, or some people call it the Freeze response, and officially known as Dorsal Vagal.

And I know that you've also heard me talk about how in Long COVID due to all of the things that are happening, we spend the majority of our time in Shutdown, Immobilization, or the Freeze response. And sometimes when we have a little bit of energy, we get up to Fight or Flight, and then that becomes overwhelming, and we come right back down again into Immobilization. Now, what I wanted to talk about today, which may sound a little bit controversial, because most of us want to get out of Immobilization, and the sense that we get of the work that we need to do with our nervous system is about getting out of Immobilization.

However, and this is something that has taken me many, many, many months to learn and fully grasp and appreciate and then begin to implement in my own nervous system. All three states are functional. The reason why we have three states in our nervous system is not because one of them messed up and we got stuck with it. They are all there for a reason. And when we are in Immobilization, Shutdown, the Freeze response, we need to let that whole process move through and dissipate before we can come back up again. And this may sound odd because you desperately want to come back up to Rest and Digest.

And we worry that we're going to get stuck in Immobilization that we are going to get diagnosed with MECFS that this will come on for years and years and years. And there won't be any way out. It's very easy when we're in that Shutdown state to catastrophize. And to feel hopeless. And many of us as we know, kind of through a lot of things that we've talked about already, and definitely myself included, spent our lifetimes pre-COVID far too much and Sympathetic activation. And oftentimes then also in Shutdown, when things just got too much, and certainly, myself and I know many friends to periodically once in a while would just have a whole weekend in bed to catch up on the recovery because our bodies had Shutdown from too much Sympathetic activation.

Now, the principle that I'm talking about today is if these three states are functional, and they serve a purpose, when we try desperately to fight against Immobilization and get out of it, we are not allowing our bodies to complete that full cycle and to let things dissipate in our bodies. And when I was learning about this idea, it reminded me very much of what I know about anxiety. I've been a psychologist for 20-plus years now and we talk a lot about anxiety with patients. And this idea that anxiety cannot go up infinitely. It cannot make your head explode, cannot give you a stroke, it cannot give you a heart attack. And that anxiety pretty much follows the normal distribution curve where it goes up it peaks and it comes back down again.

And yet if we leave it when it's not coming back down again, we're reinforcing the anxiety so that when we go back into that same situation, again, we start at that higher point, and then it goes up higher to peak, etc, etc. And so one of the things that we do with anxiety is really encouraging people to hang in there. Anxiety has a maximum life of about 40 minutes, 20 minutes to the peak, and then back down the other side. And if you can just hang in there past 25 minutes where it starts to come down, then you are stopping it from being reinforced, in a very similar principle applies with Immobilization or the Freeze response. That if we don't allow the cycle to complete itself, if we fight against it, desperately clawing our way back up to Sympathetic, we are actually reinforcing that process and making it much more likely that in the future, it's going to grab us and pull us back down.

Now, this sounds kind of scary when I first talk about it, "Wait what? I'm supposed to hang out in Immobilization? I don't know how long it's gonna take to finish. What are you? What are you suggesting?" And it is a little bit scary. What I would say for those of you who are still in the space where most of your time is Shutdown or Immobilization. Actually, what I'm suggesting isn't so bad. What I'm suggesting is that you surrender to that process, stop fighting it, stop trying to claw your way out of it, and let the process run its course. And what we can do in that state is support our nervous systems so that the Immobilization can run through. And basically what our bodies are needing is to collapse long enough that the energy then begins to come back up again.

And it sounds very odd, "Wait a second Long COVID, I don't have any energy, energy is not going to come back up again". But that's part of what's happening, the Freeze response has stolen your energy and when the Freeze response fully works through, your energy will slowly start to lift. So if you are someone who is pretty much mostly in shutdown, right now, your job is to lean into that, support your body as it moves through that Immobilization response, and completes that process. So you may want to, all of those things that we were talking about last week that we can do throughout our day to support our nervous system: supporting your arm, supporting your shoulders, supporting your head, supporting your neck.

That may mean that you're fully lying down, it may mean that when you're sitting, your head is supported, your neck is supported, your arms are supported so that you're not really requesting that your body do anything extra, you're just sitting there supporting it to finish out this response, leaning into that process, accepting that process, which I know is really hard to do when we're in Immobilization. But that's partly why I'm explaining this to you. Because if you know that that's how our bodies work, and you have permission to lean into this rather than fight it, then that hopefully will make it a little bit easier.

Now, for those of us who are a little bit further along in our recovery, and are not spending all our time in Immobilization, this is actually a little bit more scary. Because, "Wait, you're telling me that when I feel a Shutdown coming on, I shouldn't fight against it? I should just let it happen". Well, the real answer is yes. And that's tough, because if you're trying to get back to work, or you're taking care of kids, or whatever it is that you're doing in the daytime now that you're feeling a little bit better. The idea of giving in and just putting those things aside for however long it takes can be scary. And sure we can use those strategies in the moment if it's not the right time, to bring ourselves back up into Sympathetic and that is part of the process learning to move through the different states more flexibly.

And just like with anxiety, the thing we want to keep in mind is that ultimately if we do skip out on completing that Immobilization cycle, it will come back and grab us later on. So absolutely fine if it's not convenient in that moment, but being mindful that part of this is learning to teach your body, that Immobilization is okay. And that you can get out of it. And then it's not something to catastrophize or panic about. So, if you feel yourself going into Shutdown on a Monday, and you're thinking, I've got so much to do today, I can't possibly do this. That is okay, just keep in mind that maybe you want to get Saturday blocked off on your calendar so that you can make it through the week using those strategies to keep your nervous system a little bit more elevated, and then when it comes to Saturday, you can just let that Freeze response fully take over and run through its cycle.

And that mean may mean that you have a duvet day as we call them in the UK, a mental health day where you're in bed, and you're under the comforter or the duvet day, and you just let yourself go through the Freeze response. And that's certainly how I have preferred approached, each time I've had the vaccine, I've blocked out 72 hours made sure that I have the right kind of foods in the house, and then just given myself time in bed to let that horrible process run through. And it's the same kind of principle. So part of what we're doing here, and I really want to emphasize that I wholeheartedly agree that it's scary, and it's terrifying. And I am definitely still at the place where I start to go into Shutdown. I'm like, "Oh, no, can't do this right now". And try and pull myself out a little bit, especially if I've got key things that are going on at that time.

And yet, we all want to keep in mind that part of what we're learning to do here is teaching our bodies that the Freeze response, that the Shutdown, that the Immobilization is okay because once we do that, we cannot possibly get stuck in Immobilization in our future. And so that thing that we're fearing, and that we're catastrophizing about, "Oh, my goodness, I'm never going to get out of this", cannot possibly be true. That as we teach our bodies the way to move through that process, and to complete the cycle, we get back the power, we get back the knowledge of how our bodies work, the little signs and the signals that were coming out, and how the process works for us. And once we've mastered that, then we've never got anything to fear ever again. And that is a phenomenal place to be.

So a little bit of a challenging one for you today. But something to be thinking about. If you are someone who is pretty much in Shutdown most of the time, lean into it as much as you can. What can you learn about your body and this process? How does your body complete this cycle and come back up again, because it will if you let it. And for those of us who are doing a bit better, the challenge is to let yourself go into that Shutdown when it comes and learn what it feels like to then come back up again. And that is the ultimate empowerment that we are looking for.

I hope you have a tolerable week. I will see you again on another Wellness Wednesday. The usual links are below if you want to join our Facebook group sign up with a call with me or to join our next workshop. And watch this space because I'm thinking about not a new topic but maybe just a different way of setting up the next workshop which will be forgetting the date off the top of my head good old COVID amnesia, but it will be on the link below in February sometime. So watch the space, I'm going to work on that hopefully sometime this week. And I look forward to potentially seeing you there. Take care.