50. The BIGGEST Misconception About Nervous System Regulation

Katie: Welcome to the Inner Self Confidence Podcast. I'm your host, Katie Delaman. Real talk for women who are done overthinking, freezing, or abandoning themselves. If you are ready to feel calm in your body, trust yourself, and speak up without forcing it, you're in the right place. Because confidence isn't something you perform, it's something you build from the inside out. Let's go. Welcome to episode 50 of the Inner Self Confidence Podcast. Podcast. The biggest misconception of nervous system regulation. I'm going to do a little three-part series of the nervous system because this is the most important system in your body. I believe it is. It is regulating your breath, your temperature, your hormones, how you digest food. It is your brain, your spine, and all your nerve endings, and it is how you process, digest from stress. It is your ability to regulate your stress. your hormones and your emotions. This is, I've said it in my episode, The Science of Stress, but your relationships are just a reflection of your own nervous system health. So if you don't feel like you're very rich in relationships, then I would say that there is a lot of nervous system dysregulation happening in your body. Some examples of what nervous system dysregulation looks like. It could be waking up at three or four in the morning with your mind racing, craving sugar every afternoon, snapping at your partner or your kids over something small, feeling exhausted but unable to relax, shutting down or going silent during conflict, needing everyone to like you, perfectionism where you never feel ready to start, feeling anxious when someone doesn't text you back, feeling physically sick before setting a boundary, or overexplaining yourself to avoid being misunderstood. Now this is You know, just a few things, but I would say that is a lot of what comes up with my clients. And today I want to give a very specific example with one of my clients because I think it can be very helpful with others. Because I know myself as well as other people have been in this situation. Now, first, nervous system regulation. So many people think, ⁓ I'm regulating my nervous system, I'm doing self-care, I'm feeling safe in my body. Nervous system regulation is not about feeling safe all the time. Can I get an amen? Like this is the biggest misconception is about feeling safe and calm and grounded and put together and content and loving and peaceful and joyful and blissful all the fucking time. And it's not. Nervous system regulation is messy. It means you're gonna get it wrong. You're gonna fuck up, you're gonna fail, you're gonna, you know, not do it right a lot of the time, but you keep coming back to yourself and you learn and you grow and you build your capacity to hold more. Okay, building your capacity to stay present with the discomfort when you are in a safe environment, as far as like actual safety. I'm not talking about staying in abusive or unsafe toxic environments. That's not nervous system regulation either. I'm not telling you to stay in unsafe environments. I'm telling you to stay when you are safe physically, but mentally and emotionally. You're uncomfortable. That's why people leave. Not because they're, you know, in physical danger. Unfortunately, what you do see is so many people who are in physical danger end up going into shutdown. I mean, that's what I've seen it firsthand. I can tell you my story of my grandmother leaving, you know, her toxic marriage with six kids under the age of 10, leaving in the middle of the night. Anyways, like you need to get yourself out of a if there's a toxic abusive environment, you need to fucking leave. I'm not telling you to stay in that. What I'm saying is most people leave environments where they are safe, but they're not emotionally safe because they don't know how to handle their own emotions and their body and their feelings. I'm gonna give you two different examples. So again Building nervous system capacity is not the same as safety. Yes, you want to feel safe in your body, but that means you're gonna feel unsafe at the beginning, but you train yourself to be and feel more safe. So let me just give you the example so you can understand what I'm trying to say. A client recently shared that whenever she and her partner started to have a heated discussion or an argument, she feels like she's gonna have a heart attack, so she has to leave or go for a walk. Or if she doesn't leave and go for a walk, She feels like she's gonna have a heart attack, like she can't breathe. Her heart is racing, she has to get out. This is your typical flight response. Whenever you're feeling stressed or in that sympathetic state, your heart is elevated. You need to leave, you need to go. Now, I'm not saying that it's not safe for her to do that. What I'm saying is she's not training her nervous system capacity to stay with the discomfort. So she told me, this is the interesting part. ⁓ but I feel safe when I do that now because my partner goes for a walk with me. And that's lovely, that's nice. But again, what you're training your nervous system to do is that it's okay. I can still go in flight mode as long as he comes with me. But then she told me she still has trouble sleeping, she gets really stressed at work, you know, she's still exhausted, and all these other things are happening where she's Really anxious, stressed, and dysregulated. And that's also telling me that she is normalizing the flight behavior. Now, I'm gonna just talk about the flight because it specifically has come up in this one. But when you go into constant flight mode, what that looks like is constant busyness. When you can't sit still, your calendar is packed, you feel guilty for resting, and always need to be productive. This is why people Have a hard time sleeping. You don't have a hard time sleeping because you're not tired. You have a hard time sleeping because you have a hard time with this idea of resting. The moment you stop, you feel anxious. But if you keep moving, then you don't have to feel that uncomfortableness. That's what flight mode is. A lot of people who also have flight mode will avoid difficult conversations or avoid doing things that are difficult, even though they might want to really do it. And it could be even setting a boundary with somebody that you really need to set, but you just keep avoiding it. And avoidance feels safer than the conflict. This is not saying that there's anything wrong with you. This is what your nervous system learned to do when you were little. When you were little and you felt stress or fear, this is what your body did. So again. This is not blame. It's just showing you how the dysregulation is showing up in your body and how we learned it from when we were little and what we need to do to build our capacity. Again, I don't want you to get confused. Safety versus capacity. They're not the same thing. Imagine every time the anxiety showed up, you left every uncomfortable conversation, you escaped every difficult emotion, and you distracted yourself. Your nervous system never gets the opportunity to learn something new. It keeps learning discomfort equals danger. So next time it sounds the alarm, even earlier. And this is why we accidentally reinforce those survival patterns, which again go to my episode or download my free ⁓ toolkit. I have a free nervous system toolkit. I've got about four or five handouts in there. I've got a nervous system reboot program. It's only 92 payments of 97 Australian dollars or 167 Australian dollars, which is so cheap. If you actually want to learn about the nervous system, and we go into more depth in my 90 days to inner self confidence, but when you keep avoiding the discomfort, you're reinforcing that fight, flight, freeze, phone, or shutdown mode. And again, if you don't know what that is, check it out toolkit. These are not personality traits. I say this all the time. Your unhelpful habits that you don't love about yourself, they are not your personality traits. They are survival strategies. Now, I don't want you to judge them. That's not what this is about. They're brilliant when your life is genuinely in danger. Absolutely. But if your nervous system keeps using them during every everyday situations, You're not actually teaching your body that you're safe. You're teaching it that every uncomfortable feeling must be escaped. What does nervous system regulation actually look like in real life? This doesn't mean I'm forcing you to stay in abusive relationships. I'm actually encouraging you to leave. Please leave abusive, toxic relationships. Never, ever, ever stay. For the kids. My grandmother taught me this two generations ago. My grandmother left a toxic abusive relationship in the middle of the night with six kids under the age of 10. She lived in poverty and welfare for the rest of her life because that was more important than staying in an abusive relationship. You never ever fucking stay. I know my mom told me that story multiple times, not to scare me. Not to say, poor me, look at me, I'm a victim, but to s to show me as a woman that you never fucking stay, Katie. You always leave. I don't care how hard it is, but you ask for help and you get the fuck out. My grandmother asked somebody to come pick her up with six kids in the middle of the night. A friend came in a Volkswagen beetle bug and brought six kids and this woman to the Greyhound station from West Virginia to New Jersey. You never stay. You, your kids, I don't care what situation you're in. Kids do not learn by what you tell them. They learn by what you model. And if you're modeling by staying in those relationships, your kids will then more than likely do that same habit. Now I know this is easier said than done, and I'm not in an abusive relationship myself right now, and I do not have children, but I Think about my grandmother that night all the time. And and that is what, if I was ever in that situation, I would use that as my courage to say if she fucking did it, so can I. There's always help. If you ask for it, there's always help. People will always help you. Please do not stay in abusive relationships. And I know this episode was not about that, but I cannot stress this enough. I see so many people, I do, so many. People I see are in abusive toxic relationships and they just keep staying. But okay, side note, I'm very passionate about, I'm really just passionate about this world. There's way too many stressed out, silent women, and I'm really sick of it. I I there like I I don't know how to stress that enough. We don't need to be stressed and we don't need to be silent. There is something we can do about it. And it doesn't mean that we sit through situations that are genuinely unsafe. I'm talking about the moments where we're actually safe, but your body doesn't believe you are. Maybe it's a difficult conversation, maybe it's actually speaking up, maybe it's saying no, maybe it's receiving feedback, maybe it's sending an email, launching your business, asking for a pay rise, quitting your job. Your nervous system says, danger, that's not safe because it's unfamiliar. Real nervous system regulation looks like gently increasing your capacity. Instead of leaving after 10 seconds, maybe stay for 20 seconds. Instead of immediately apologizing, take a breath. Don't apologize. Instead of avoiding the conversation for another six months, have it this week. Tiny expansions, not giant leaps. This is how you build capacity. And why this matters, your life will only ever expand to the level of your nervous system that it can tolerate. I did a video on this on Instagram. If you want more money, if you want more love, if you want more success, if you want more visibility, more honesty, all of that is gonna come with way more discomfort because more money means more responsibility, more love means more vulnerability, more success. Means more pressure. More visibility means more criticism. And more honesty means way more uncertainty. If you want more freedom, there is way more uncertainty on that other side. And I'm telling you that from my own personal life. All of the things that I wanted more of came with a lot more discomfort. But if you keep chasing comfort, your world will not only stay small, but get even smaller. When you build capacity gradually, your world gets bigger. And I do also want to share another example from my client. So I worked with my client two years ago. She had one baby, I think it was about six months. She was toying up with sh going back to work, starting her own business. She was ⁓ trying to juggle, ⁓ you know, still going to the gym, like working out, ⁓ you know, having you know a a very solid relationship with her partner, her newborn, like all these things. And she felt really overwhelmed, really stressed. And she was going to the gym like five days a week. And I could tell that she was just yeah, very overwhelmed. And she was also having issues with a friend where she felt like she wasn't able to h put up her own boundaries and speak her truth. And I'm like, right, let's work together. And so we were building nervous system capacity. And she's like, ⁓ my God, Katie, like, I never I did not realize how stressed I was. She was like, I didn't realize that going to the gym five days a week was actually making me worse. So what she started to do, she actually started to go to the gym less. She only would go when she felt like she had enough energy. And she wasn't going as hard as often because that. nervous energy was what she was using at the gym, which was only making that fight or flight response even worse. Anyways, I s she we worked together for three months. She tells me she's pregnant at the end after working together. And I see her, I don't know, six months after she had her second baby. She was she had gone through so much more in those like nine months since I've seen her, or whatever it was. But she was so much more relaxed. I could tell she was so much more happy. She was so much more glowing. I could tell, like, you know, you could just tell when somebody is like not in a good place and they're so stressed and they're like wound up. And you can tell when somebody's a lot more like in that space of feeling good. Like you can see it on people the way you're having conversation. Anyways, I just want to tell you what was happening in her past six months. So i in those few months after like the ⁓ no, it was like She had the second baby, but it was a quite a traumatic birth. So I think maybe she bled a lot. She had to have a big surgery after. Like it was a really big stressor. And then not long after that, but her dad ended up being in the hospital on in like ICU. They thought maybe he had a stroke or something big, and he's overseas. Then a few weeks later, her husband's sister was also in the ICU on life support. It was And they were also having, you know, their own stuff going on. So all of that was happening, but she was like, Katie, after working with you, like I had the tools, I had the understanding. She's like, I knew how to put boundaries in place. I knew how to protect my energy. I knew how to speak up for myself. I knew how to regulate my nervous system. I knew not how to overdo things. She's like, I knew how to do less. She's like, I started to ask for more help. Like, All of these things that seem really easy and really obvious, we don't do because we're not practicing it and we don't have anybody else to keep us accountable. And this is why I'm so obsessed with coaching and with helping people, because I personally also have never been able to do incredible things in my life without help, without coaches, without mentors, without body healers, without groups and communities and women's circles and other people. Being there to keep me accountable and for me to also show up differently consistently. Otherwise, I'm not gonna keep myself fucking accountable. Like I need to be paying for it and to be around other people who are doing different things. Like that's how I learn, and that's why I am starting my 90 days to inner self confidence. I'm starting it in mid September, but I'm opening the doors in August. I'm gonna open the doors for about 10 or 15 days. If you want to join, I'd love to have you in it. I personally, like I said, this is my newest program. ⁓ I have been talking about it, but I haven't been able to launch it because I've been doing other things the past six months. But I'm starting it and I'm really passionate about helping this world have way less stressed-out, silent women. I'm sick of it. And I do believe that we can. Design our own destiny that we can manifest shit that we never thought was possible. And I'm not going to bore you too much about the nervous system anymore, but know that it is, again, a very vital part of your body. If you don't know much about it, I've got a free toolkit. ⁓ if you want my nervous system reboot program, chat to me. Or if you just want to chat about it, like I'm so obsessed with this. and yeah, check it out on my website, www.kadydelmond.com. Or if you're ready for the inner self-confidence program, but you want to ask some questions, jump on a free discovery call. All of that is on my website. Because before we work on boundaries and before you ever feel confident, before you are able to communicate, you do have to build your capacity. You have to be able to stay with discomfort instead of running from it. That's where the real change begins. So till next time. Just remember, the goal isn't to eliminate the discomfort. It's about being the kind of person who stays present through it. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, as Marissa Pearce says. If you want to read about my wild ride from mindlessness to mindfulness, which is basically my wild ride from nervous dysregulation to regulation, you can check out my book on Amazon or anywhere they sell books. And I will see you in the next series.