The Challenge of the Stressful Modern Life

Many of us are caught up in the intensity of modern life’s challenges, working too much, efforting to keep a roof over our head and also to achieve goals in our professional and personal lives, but in that perpetual striving, the balance can get lost: What balance? The balance between mobilizing to meet the demands of our day (sympathetic nervous system), and the ease of the “rest and digest” system (parasympathetic nervous system). Somatic Experiencing helps us reintroduce a rhythm to our nervous systems to something modern stressful conditioning has made us forget: that both rest and renewed vitality can be part of life again. The rest phase refreshes our energy and focus for when we need it.

Without the shifting rhythm between the mobilizing part of us and the resting part, we end up getting stuck on one side of our nervous system-arrested in constant doing and getting ready to do the next thing is a popular consequence. When this endures for too long, or with too much intensity, there comes a point where a short circuiting of our system occurs: it shuts down into a feeling of deadness, disconnection, exhaustion and sometimes depression. When we reintroduce the rhythm, we regain the natural easing out of mobilization into a state of non-doing, which could also call being. We need time to just “be” in the course of our days.

A feeling of being checked out, spaced out, disconnected, not really living is often part of the suffering of chronic stress and trauma. We can only be “on” so long until the autonomic system takes us offline to prevent spontaneous combustion. The practice of mindful awareness is at the heart of embodied healing, so we re-encounter feelings and a sense of aliveness, we return to the vital presence that is at the core of being a human being.

For those feeling stuck in the freeze or shut down state, there is also a way to enhance ease as well as increase the capacity for the energetic “doing” part of the system. Sometimes we have old attempts at self-protection stuck in our physiology.