Befriending Your Nervous System Part 1 with Body Wisdom Coach Marjorie Schreurs

How well do you hear the signals your body is sending, my love? Most of us either don’t hear so well or too often choose not to listen… and the consequences can look like burnout, meltdowns, freak outs, and tantrums, or chronic fatigue, self-criticism, and general cranky-pants-ness. 

So! Got a body? This episode is for you! It’s the first installment of a two-part conversation with body wisdom coach Marjorie Schreurs, where we dive deep on how important it is to pay attention to the multitude of signals our bodies are sending us – so that we can take better care of ourselves and de-escalate when we’re on our way to the red zone (or orange zone!, which will make more sense when you listen).

You’ll walk a way with a better understanding of how to recognize your levels of nervous system activation – as in, the signs that your internal “threat” detector is getting loud and cutting off the signal to the rational/thinking part of your brain. In part two, we’ll cover how to bring your brain back online by soothing your nervous system.

Listen on Apple

Listen wherever else you listen to podcasts!

Connect with Marjorie:

Marjorie’s coaching website: Soulstice Coaching

Follow Marjorie on LinkedIn – where she shares a lot of great resources for neuro-spicy folks!

Resources, References, and Links:

Marjorie defines some of these terms in the episode, but in case you didn’t quite catch it or want to dig in more, I googled it for you! 🙂

Neuroception. “Unleashing Your Sixth Sense: The Power of Neuroception”

Autonomic nervous system. “Autonomic Nervous System: What It Is, Function & Disorders”

Limbic system. “Limbic System: What to Know”

Polyvagal theory. “What is Polyvagal Theory?”

Burnout by Emily Nagoski, PhD. Really excellent book that walks through how burnout happens and what to do to take care of ourselves around it (either preventative or after it’s too late).

Transcript

Note: this transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited by me. Please forgive any malapropisms and misspellings. It’s the robot’s fault! At least this time the time stamps are accurate! We’re getting closer, y’all.

[00:00] Marjorie Schreurs: We often think of our functioning as top down, like brain thinking first, and then the body is a little bit of an afterthought, right? That’s how we typically think about how we respond to our world. But the physiological reality: 80% of the communication goes from body to brain. 20% of the communication goes from brain to body. So there’s way more information going from body to our brain than there is from our brain to our body.

[00:34] Cate Blouke: Welcome to Settling Is Bullshit – a sweary podcast about claiming your joy. If you are an adult human craving healthier boundaries, a greater sense of purpose, or an increased capacity to feel at ease in your own skin, then you are in the right place, my friend. I’m your host, Cate Blouke, and I’m here to offer you practical tools and playful encouragement to help you step forward and be your most awesome self. My hope is that each episode will leave you feeling a bit more empowered to make brave choices and claim your joy.

[01:09] Cate Blouke: Hello. Hello. Before we dive into today’s super juicy episode, I wanted to set the container a little bit, because for the very first time, I am doing a two part series of episodes, mostly because Marjorie and I got super geeked out about the nervous system and talked for a really, really long time, which can happen when you have two geeky, neurodivergent people talking about things they’re super excited about. 

So here in part one, we’re gonna be talking about the basic understanding of the nervous system and how it operates throughout the day, how our body gives our brains so much information that we don’t even realize. And it offers just a really cool way of thinking about what’s going on below our conscious levels of thinking and how all of that stuff that’s going on in our subterranean brain space happens before we get to cognitive thought. And when we get activated, it actually kind of shuts off our capacity to access cognitive thought. 

So, oh, my gosh, such a great episode – it applies to absolutely any and all humans who are listening, whether you identify as having trauma or not, whether you’re neurospicy or not, everyone has a body. If you’re listening, you have a body, and this applies to you, so I hope you find it helpful. I found it super helpful. 

And I want to also signal that I am practicing letting go of perfection! Because we recorded this during the mercury retrograde, and the technology was being all fucked up. And so there are parts of the audio quality that are not to my standard, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and this is a good enough episode. And I want to get the information out there, and I don’t want to drive myself insane. So I’m just, like, pointing this out to all of us recovering perfectionists that it doesn’t have to be perfect. It can still be awesome. And this is a great episode. It just sometimes sounds like I’m mumbling and words get a little cut off and fumbly because the technology was being… Was being dumb, and that’s okay. ‘Cause even the technology is imperfect, the world is imperfect, and we are doing our best, and it’s good enough. 

And without further ado, I will cut into the actual episode, and I hope you thoroughly enjoy it. I know I did. 

Hello, everyone. I am here today with my dear friend and one of my favorite people, Marjorie Schreurs. See, I just did it, and I’m not gonna be able to do it.

[03:56] Marjorie Schreurs: No, it was great!

[03:58] Cate Blouke: Close enough. Say it. Will you please say it?

[04:01] Marjorie Schreurs: Schreurs.

[04:03] Cate Blouke: Okay, Marjorie, last name you just heard, uh, is certified ADHD and microdosing coach. She is a neurodivergence coach, a psychedelic integration coach, a yoga instructor, and, um, someone who is super duper awesome to talk to about neurodivergence and our nervous system. And we are going to have a really yummy conversation today about understanding and befriending our nervous systems so that we can all move through the world with a greater sense of ease and peace and joy.

[04:39] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes, please. Awesome. I always say I’m a body first coach. Like, you know, you can do top down or bottom up, like, starting from the brain and working our way down, or even start at the body level and work your way up. That is the lens that I come through. Cause that has been my own journey as a dancer for most of my life. And it was connecting with my body, and it was listening to my body signals and working with that. That has always been my entry into healing work and growth work, personal growth work. Not something I chose. It’s just something that is.

[05:25] Cate Blouke: Yeah. And it’s one of the many beautiful gifts that you bring to the world and to your coaching is helping people get in touch with their fucking bodies. Yeah. Trying to tell them that most of us aren’t listening to.

[05:39] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. It’s such a treasure trove of wisdom. And our bodies are so. They’re so loyal like they are. They always show up whether we pay attention to them or not. Like, talk about loyalty, like, so, in my yoga classes, I often end with, like, take a moment to, like, say thanks to your body for showing up for you again today, because we take it for granted a lot of the time.

[06:05] Cate Blouke: 100%. Yeah, we do.

[06:07] Marjorie Schreurs: We often think of our functioning as top down, like brain thinking first, and then the body is a little bit of an afterthought.

[06:15] Cate Blouke: Right.

[06:16] Marjorie Schreurs: That’s how we typically think about how we respond to our world. But the physiological reality is that actually our body perceives our environment first. We perceive the world through neuroception, primarily, first.

[06:32] Cate Blouke: And neuroception is our nerves.

[06:36] Marjorie Schreurs: It’s our nervous system perceiving the world through sensory input.

[06:41] Cate Blouke: Oh, okay.

[06:42] Marjorie Schreurs: Internal and external. So the way that you hold your body, the feelings that you feel inside, the way that your physiology is responding to whatever information your nervous system is getting. Your nervous system is getting information through sight, sound, touch, taste. You know, all the five senses. I missed one. But anyways, smell.

[07:06] Cate Blouke: Did we say smell?

[07:09] Marjorie Schreurs: Eyes, nose, skin, mouth. Things that we see, the things that we hear, the things that we’re aware of in our environment, the temperature that we’re feeling, the feeling of our clothes on our body. All of those things send information to our nervous system, including the way that we are holding our bodies and what we’re sort of experiencing. That is our nervous system perceiving the cues of our environment through sensory input. That happens all the time, whether we are aware of it or nothing. And it actually precedes any thinking, feeling, and aware, like, any kind of awareness, because the nervous system takes in that information, continuously, runs it through, like, a data filter of, like, previous experience, and is like, is there similarities? Is there not? And if there is a fingerprint of sensory input that is similar to something that we’ve experienced before, it takes data from that, and it makes a guess on how safe or not safe we are or how alert or relaxed we need to be or how on edge, like, in sort of defense mode or protection mode we need to be.

 So this is where, like, trauma comes in, because if you’ve had certain, you know, smells or situations or sounds that remind you of a traumatic experience, your body takes in those cues and often will go, oh, my gosh, in, you know, not consciously, but like, in the past, when I heard this kind of sound or when I felt this kind of thing or when I smelled this kind of thing, I wasn’t safe. So it goes, whoop, without us having any control over it. This is the autonomic nervous system. It does this on automatic mode. It will raise our heart rate. It will secrete adrenaline. It will communicate from the body through the vagus nerve to the brain that we need to be more in our limbic system than we can be in our frontal lobes, because we need to be more on alert. Nervous system activation regulates what parts of the brain are active.

[09:25] Cate Blouke: Okay. So much goodness there. I want to slow us down just a little bit, because I think, like, what I’m hearing in that is that there’s so much going on. Pre-thinking all the time. That our bodies are taking in all of this information from our environment all the time, totally. Without our being aware of it and without our thinking about it, and without our brain getting to get involved.

[09:52] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes.

[09:53] Cate Blouke: Right. And so I’m just thinking, like, if we sort of. I feel like, set trauma on the shelf for a moment and just, like, normal ass nervousness.

[10:01] Marjorie Schreurs: Normal experience. Yes.

[10:03] Cate Blouke: Yeah. There’s, like, all of this stuff going on. And so I’m super curious about, like, how we start paying attention to the signals that it’s sending us to.

[10:13] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, well, I think the first step is to learn about what is the actual system that’s at play, which is learning about polyvagal theory and the arousal ladder that we are constantly shifting between. It’s kind of like the gearbox of a car with 1st, 2nd, 3rd, fourth, and fifth gear and reverse. And that during the day, we are constantly shifting from one gear to another, depending on what our life is asking of us. What are our day? What are the people around us that, you know, we’re constantly moving into more activation and then down into more calmer places when we have a little break.

And then, you know, it’s like, oh, my God, something happened. I gotta respond to this. Like, we shift into a higher gear to have more rpms to be able to meet that demand of our life. The cool thing with the autonomic nervous system is that while it will react and respond of its own accord to deal with whatever level of safety or threat it sort of is anticipating, based on previous data and the current situation, we also can affect it manually. So the more we become aware of it, the more we can influence it. So we might not be able to stop it from getting activated, but we can consciously help it come back down into a lower gear, if you will.

[11:44] Cate Blouke: Okay, so autonomic nervous system. So what is. So what’s polyvagal? Where does that big come in? What does that mean?

[11:54] Marjorie Schreurs: Polyvagal theory is a theory that Stephen Porges developed 30 years ago or so about the way that our fight and flight system works. And he was looking at that, going, there is another. There’s other elements to it. We used to think that it functioned as a light switch. You either flip on the fight or flight system, or you flip it off and you’re in safety and rest and digest.

[12:20] Cate Blouke: Right. So either you’re, like, super triggered or you’re fine.

[12:24] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, it’s like, it’s either on or off. That’s what we used to think of how it functioned. And then he started seeing these things and was like, I think there’s more to it. There’s more nuance to it. And so the understanding that we are currently working off of the current polyvagal theory is that we actually have several different zones. 

We have three different branches of that autonomic nervous system. We have the safety, rest, digest, connect, befriend, attend a green zone. And that’s the ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve, or actually, it’s two of them that run from the brainstem all the way through the heart and the lungs and the organs and the digestive system. And it is the main communication highway from body to brain. 80% of the communication goes from body to brain. 20% of the communication goes from brain to body. So there’s way more information going from body to our brain than there is from our brain to our body.

[13:37] Cate Blouke: Whoa.

[13:38] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. Mind blown, right?

[13:41] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[13:42] Marjorie Schreurs: Which is why a lot of somatic therapies end up being really effective, because they make use of that 80% going this way versus talk therapy is a little more like the 20% going that way. So they both are effective. They both have roles. They both are applicable in different situations. But physiologically, we have 80% going up to the brain and 20% going down towards the body.

[14:11] Cate Blouke: Yeah. And just for anyone else, the word somatic always hung me up a little bit. It just means body.

[14:18] Marjorie Schreurs: It’s just.

[14:18] Cate Blouke: Somatic is just same. So when we’re talking about somatic, it’s the fancy word for working with your body, and I love it.

[14:25] Marjorie Schreurs: And noticing the body responses that we have, like, physical sensations, feelings, sort of posture, all those different ways that our body talks to us or that we can experience our. Our physical experience.

[14:42] Cate Blouke: Right?

[14:43] Marjorie Schreurs: So, this vagus nerve has three branches. The newest branch is the ventral vagal. We’re going to call that the green zone. That’s the safety rest, digest, attend, befriend. And when we’re solidly in this green zone, we have access to things like all of our whole brain functioning. So all of our higher cognitive skills, that particular branch, because it’s the newest, it’s developed in conjunction with these higher brain regions that we have so rational thinking, creativity, curiosity, calm, and connected connection, like, people connection or even connection to ourselves, those are all states of being that are accessible when we have enough of that. Green zone activated.

[15:39] Cate Blouke: Okay. And when you say newest, this is, like, evolutionarily, right?

[15:43] Marjorie Schreurs: So, like, yes, still, like 200 million years or something.

[15:48] Cate Blouke: You know, isn’t like, oh, yeah. Like, since the industrial revolution, we have cultivated this stuff.

[15:52] Marjorie Schreurs: No, we’re talking in hundreds of millions of years here.

[15:57] Cate Blouke: And to bring it back to the kind of gear shift analogy, which I love, like, that’s new to me, and I think that feels. I don’t know, that just feels yummy and helpful is green zone, like, first and second gear? Sort of. When we’re in kind of, like, chill, we’re doing good. Like, everything’s kosher.

[16:14] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah, I would say first gear. Not a lot of pressure. It’s where we have access to presence. When we are in a state of, like, feeling really present in the moment, that typically means you are in the green zone. You are not ruminating, you’re not thinking about the future of the past. You’re not sort of. You tend to be less in that comparison mind, or judging yourself or other people. All that kind of stuff tends to kind of be much more quiet. We tend to be in a more empowered place, less in the self critical place.

[16:50] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Ooh, that feels nice.

[16:53] Marjorie Schreurs: Green zone is also, like, if we want to go to sleep and have a healthy sleep routine, then being able to come down into green zone safety. Nothing to be afraid of. That’s what allows us to go to sleep. Imagine it like this. Like, we have green zone. Then we have yellow zone, which is like, oh, okay. And the dishes need to get done. I’m going to go dancing. I need to get up off the couch and take care of paying this bill. Like, anything that requires some activation and some movement or mobilization is, like, the word we use in nervous system to speak a lot. Like, we need to mobilize in order to meet the demands of our day. Okay, yellow zone. So I talk about the sympathetic zone, which is sort of the middle block in yellow and orange. Yellow means we are sympathetically mobilized. Okay, so this is the middle branch of the nervous system.

[17:52] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[17:53] Marjorie Schreurs: So a little bit older than that green zone, but not as old as the lizard brain. So this middle sympathetic place is also connected to our mammal instincts.

[18:07] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[18:08] Marjorie Schreurs: It’s our mobilization, but it’s also the fight or flight. And so we can be mobilized with threat or without threat. When we are mobilized without threat, we’re in the yellow zone.

[18:20] Cate Blouke: We’re in the yellow zone, so we’re, like, having a good day. We’re, like, getting this done. We’re thinking about a day ahead of maybe going for a run. Feeling. Feeling like my hands are doing jazz hands right now. So, like, yellow zone is, like, I got some energy. No. Trying to eat me.

[18:37] Marjorie Schreurs: Checking things off the list.

[18:39] Cate Blouke: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the get shit done mode, maybe thinking about a little bit of future, a little bit of past, kind of going through the motions, but, like, not in a scary way.

[18:49] Marjorie Schreurs: No. And it’s often, you know, a more solidly yellow zone might be a little more active. Like, joyfully, playfully active. Could be playing soccer or dancing or sports. Whereas maybe a work activation looks more like a combination of yellow and green, where you have some presence and calm, but you also have some energy that mobilizes you to get things done. So none of this is a hard line. It’s all sort of shades of. It’s like an ombre.

[19:20] Cate Blouke: Yeah, that’s the word that was just coming up. I was like, oh, it’s an ombre. There’s a nice fading, a little, like, wavy. We’re going in and out.

[19:30] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. You know, and that literally can be, like, sort of from moment to moment, depending on what the level of shifting is that your day requires or that your life in that moment requires.

[19:44] Cate Blouke: Okay, so it’s pretty cool.

[19:46] Marjorie Schreurs: It’s sort of like gas pedal, brake pedal. You kind of smoothly shifting up and down and.

[19:53] Cate Blouke: Yeah, but this is when we’re just, like, we’re hanging out. We’re going the speed limit.

[19:56] Marjorie Schreurs: Wow. Now, when we get activated with threat, when there is some level of stress, there’s some level of perceived threat, and that could be you are walking in the woods and you think you’re hearing a bear. That would be a solid, normal fight or flight response. Like, you get into your body reacts before you are even aware of it. Your heart rate has already gone up. The adrenaline is being secreted. The blood flow gets pulled from your digestive system and prioritized into the big muscles so that you can either fight or flee, which is part of where stress, muscle tension comes from. You know, like, you know how stress can kind of make your muscles a little tight?

[20:41] Cate Blouke: I mean, if I think about it, yeah.

[20:43] Marjorie Schreurs: Like.

[20:43] Cate Blouke: Like, when my shoulders get a little, like, hunchy hurts, I mean, it’s basically.

[20:49] Marjorie Schreurs: Your body getting ready to, like, bolt or defend.

[20:55] Cate Blouke: Okay, so this is one of the things I’m talking about. Like, those of us who haven’t been, you know, fabulously body informed yoga instructors for decades. Right. Is like, what are the signs that, like, my shit is activated? And I don’t even really know it yet.

[21:10] Marjorie Schreurs: So you might notice some heart palpitations. You might notice that you get a little snippy or a little irritated or a little anxious. Like, anxiety is one of the most commonly experienced by, what, 80% of people these days? Anxiety is one of the most common fight or flight states that we collectively experience. So in this orange zone, the kinds of states of being that we tend to experience are, like, anger, frustration, judgment, self criticism, anxiety, things like fawn. So fighting, flighting, and pleasing and appeasing, so becoming really nice and agreeable, or becoming a really good deflector, or problem solver or peacekeeper.

[22:09] Cate Blouke: And so it is that kind of, like, orange zone stuff, right? So all of that is kind of a signal that we’re actually, like, fairly activated.

[22:20] Marjorie Schreurs: We are on alert.

[22:22] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[22:22] Marjorie Schreurs: Or in alarm. Like, alert. Alarm is sort of like. Like, alert can be a little bit more, like, there’s a little bit of, like, caution, but we’re not, like, really turned on yet. Whereas alarm is more, like, solidly orange. Alert is more on the yellow orange ombre spectrum, whereas alarm is, like, orange zone. You are activated. And so most of the time, we’re not even consciously aware, because the very nature of the way that our thinking changes when we’re in that state is that we start to think very black and white. We think we are always right, or it’s very hard to sort of be open to other people’s opinions. We can become a little more, like, combative, or even activism, can live in that place sometimes where you’re, like, taking a stand for something because you believe in it so much, but it can still come from that place that is actually pretty threat activated.

[23:25] Cate Blouke: Right. Yeah. What I’m hearing in that is just like, oh, some of those kind of behaviors or thinking patterns that a lot, like, so many of us can get kind of feel like we’re getting stuck in, and then the self criticism, at least for me, can come in of, like, why am I being like this? And what I’m hearing is that it’s a lot of, it’s, like, precognitive. It’s that, like, my body, for all sorts of various, whatever reasons, is in the. There is a threat present mode. Yes. And that then impacts my thinking. And it’s really fucking hard to get out of that.

[24:04] Marjorie Schreurs: It impacts brain function in this way. It literally changes the communication path in your brain from being routed through your prefrontal cortex and your cognitive thinking skills to going straight from threat perception to action. So you don’t actually think about what you’re doing as much anymore. The higher the activation, the higher the threat that is perceived, or the more you lose grounding in some yellow or green zone, the less you are actually consciously choosing what you’re doing. And a really great example is, like, a little kid that completely flips their lid and loses control over everything that they’re doing. They are genuinely not in control anymore. In that moment, I’ve had that as an adult where I’ve gotten so angry that I’m not in control of what’s coming out of my mouth anymore. It’s coming out before I am able to curb it.

[25:07] Cate Blouke: Yeah. So, okay, I want to ask a question here, but I want to then bring us back, because I definitely want to get to the. Like, is fight your more dominant response?

[25:16] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. So that’s an interesting thing, because I’m.

[25:20] Cate Blouke: A flight freeze fawn. Like, fight is never my response. When I’m hearing you be like, yeah, I get angry. I’m like, oh, no, I just, like, cry, or, like, the person of just, like, no, everything you say is fine. Like, it’s. You’re right.

[25:32] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.

[25:33] Cate Blouke: And I just want to, like, pause here for a moment of, like, compassion for, like, me and for any of us that, like, what I’m hearing and what you’re saying is just that, like, when we get activated to that level, like, it’s pre-cognitive, like, we. Like, it’s not our fault.

[25:53] Marjorie Schreurs: It’s not our fault. We can learn over time with a lot of understanding and compassion, to learn, recognize what happens and learn to catch it sooner, or to learn what brings us to these really highly elevated states and develop tools to recover back to a more calm and grounded place. But we can’t stop those reactions from happening.

[26:21] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[26:22] Marjorie Schreurs: Because they’re reactions, they’re not responses.

[26:25] Cate Blouke: Right.

[26:26] Marjorie Schreurs: And there is a grayscale here, of course. Like, you can be activated and still have control to a certain degree over your thinking and doing. And when we get activated to a certain level, we literally lose connection with our frontal lobe. It just gets cut off, which is why talking to someone who’s really, really upset usually doesn’t do very much. It’s part of why, when we’re talking about significant nervous system dysregulation, talk therapy is often not as helpful, because it’s simply that part of the brain is not turned on anymore. It’s offline. And so we have to speak to the parts that are online, which is more the body parts.

[27:16] Cate Blouke: Right?

[27:17] Marjorie Schreurs: Does that make sense?

[27:18] Cate Blouke: Totally makes sense. Okay. So. But, all right, so we. We. I diverted us a little bit. We were in the orange zone. Yeah.

[27:25] Marjorie Schreurs: Orange zone.

[27:26] Cate Blouke: Yes. Which is like, we’re not in the full on fucking. I’m gonna punch somebody in the face meltdown or whatever.

[27:32] Marjorie Schreurs: Well, you might be orange. Might be you are, like, losing your shit. So angry you’re punching a wall. Or you’re saying shit that you.

[27:41] Cate Blouke: Orange is in red zone. No. Jesus. Where are we going?

[27:44] Marjorie Schreurs: Well, so red is actually the safety valve, which is, like, when the adrenaline gets so high. Or we have been in this orange zone for a really long time, and there is. Our body is not really trusting that there is a way out. We go into the dorsal vagal, which is the shutdown or numb zone, which is where we tend to experience a sense of disconnection. It’s where we kind of numb out. It’s where a lot of addictive behaviors live. I often talk about it as, like, it’s the safety valve on the wall. You know, like, in factories, how they have the big red button on the wall.

[28:26] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Like, stop everything.

[28:28] Marjorie Schreurs: Stop everything. Well, it’s a little bit like that. It’s like. It’s the safety valve. Like, when the pressure gets too high, it flips over into freeze, which can be, like, getting kind of rigid and stuck or feeling like, oh, my gosh. I just don’t know what to do. Deer in the headlights.

[28:48] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[28:49] Marjorie Schreurs: Like, you almost stop breathing. It’s also another way to think about it is like, possum play dead. You know, when I’m animal. Imminent danger of death. The last resort is collapse and pretend you’re dead because they might leave you alone. Right.

[29:06] Cate Blouke: So is this where dissociation comes in? Like, when we get.

[29:09] Marjorie Schreurs: Okay. Yeah, it’s where we start to disconnect, retreat, numb out. Often it comes with. There’s a sense of, like, hopelessness, like, feeling really alone. It’s depression. I mean, when we are depressed, this is the place our nervous system tends to be existing in. So it can be a freeze, as in rigid. So, like, body getting kind of stiff or, like, feeling literally frozen. And that can happen in really small ways, right. It can happen in ways that we don’t even recognize, but we just learn to smile, and we’re kind of just smiling until we can get out of the situation because they’re kind of frozen. And then when we walk away, we go, holy fuck.

[29:59] Cate Blouke: Like, oh, you’re speaking my language right there, especially. And we’re going to get to this in a little bit, because all of this. But we’re going to. That feels so relatable from a neuro spicy place.

[30:11] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.

[30:11] Cate Blouke: Right. Totally hidden in that. Because we’re currently just talking about how all of this just applies to every fucking human. Like, whether your brain is functioning neurotypically, whatever. Like, all of us have this. We have this body. This is how our body does. This is how our body affects our brain.

[30:28] Marjorie Schreurs: This is the gearbox we have.

[30:30] Cate Blouke: Yeah, yeah. And you’re blowing my mind a little bit. So, like.

[30:33] Marjorie Schreurs: So there’s another piece I want to name here, because rigid and frozen is one, but collapse is another.

[30:40] Cate Blouke: Okay?

[30:41] Marjorie Schreurs: So I can see different shapes. So collapse can be. I’m sitting on the couch and I just can’t get up. I just wanna. I get caught in my doom scroll on instagram and I can’t get off. That’s a form of dorsal vagal shutdown collapse.

[31:00] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[31:01] Marjorie Schreurs: Over time, like, for me, I know now that when I start to notice myself getting into a doom scroll, that to me is a signal that, oh, wait a minute, I haven’t been paying attention. I’m actually starting to shut down. I’m actually starting to kind of disconnect because I’m not able to find my way back down to the green zone or even the yellow zone. So my body is just going, like, I have no energy left and all I can do is just tune out.

[31:31] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[31:33] Marjorie Schreurs: And that looks, for a lot of people, like, social media scrolling or it looks like, you know, lots of tv watching, or it looks like smoking pot or drinking alcohol or doing other kinds.

[31:49] Cate Blouke: Like, lots of our video games.

[31:53] Marjorie Schreurs: Video games. Excellent. Yes.

[31:55] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Where my brain actually went was swiping on fucking bumble and Tinder obsessively. And then they have made that into a video game. So also that, right, it’s all of this sort of totally distracting and nothing often not necessarily actually soothing behaviors. It is not soothing to find out.

[32:16] Marjorie Schreurs: And think of it as this, like, this red zone is a place where we are very under resourced and where we also tend to be able to, oftentimes we can see what it is that maybe we would like to be doing, but we just simply. We’re not able to actually make it into action. We are not able to mobilize to actually move into those things. And so because we have to actually.

[32:46] Cate Blouke: Go back down the ladder to be able to mobilize. Right.

[32:50] Marjorie Schreurs: And so what happens a lot, actually, in today’s society, what I see with my clients like, almost every single person is that we get. I call it the orange red zone, ping pongs, or functional freeze, which is we bounce between being in this exhausted kind of numb or drained or frozen kind of place of like, oh, man, I’m just so wiped out. Or I can’t get into action, or, ugh, I just. All I have energy for is just to, like, scroll my bumble right now. So, like, okay, I gotta go to work, because if I don’t work, I don’t have income. So we get mobilized with some threat. Like, there’s pressure and threat activation, which often looks like anxiety. Like, you know, our two most common afflictions these days are depression and anxiety. Yeah, here’s the mechanism that we’re talking about that actually governs all of that. And here’s sort of a way of looking at that. Dorsal shutdown collapse is like depression. Depressed. We don’t have the energy to. But then we’re like, oh, shit, I don’t want to get kicked out of my house. I don’t want to become homeless. I don’t want to. I need to have food to eat. I got to take care of my family. Whatever it might be. It might not be that. It might be like, oh, what will people think of me if I don’t work?

[34:19] Cate Blouke: My body just was like, yep.

[34:22] Marjorie Schreurs: Or it might be.

[34:23] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[34:24] Marjorie Schreurs: It might be that you have some inner protectors that are like, get up, you lazy one. What are you doing sitting here? Come on. Some really harsh inner voices that are part of that survival pattern that sort of motivate you back into action to actually get started, do your job and get motivated to some degree because you’re beating yourself up enough to get motivated. But then as soon as you can take the pressure off and you’re done with what needs to get done, you plop back into that dorsal shutdown. You’re like, on the couch, like, oh, my God. Okay, just leave me alone, please. I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to do anything.

[35:04] Cate Blouke: So what I’m hearing in that is that that’s not the healthiest approach, right? Like, bringing in the inner critic or bringing in the, like, fear and the anxiety. And the deadline isn’t actually, well, it’s.

[35:17] Marjorie Schreurs: Effective, but it is not sustainable.

[35:20] Cate Blouke: Yeah. Like, this is very relatable to me as someone who didn’t. I’m late diagnosed ADHD, used to thrive on the deadline, on the like. Oh. And so what you’re describing is very relatable to a lot of my lived experience. Of just, like, going, going, going, going, going, going, going. Fueling myself on this sort of, like, anxiety and pressure because it was very effective. I could get things done.

[35:45] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.

[35:46] Cate Blouke: Then I would collapse.

[35:48] Marjorie Schreurs: Exactly. Exhausted.

[35:51] Cate Blouke: Right.

[35:52] Marjorie Schreurs: Burnout also falls in that dorsal vagal shutdown collapse place. Depression and burnout. That is all the red zone.

[36:03] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[36:04] Marjorie Schreurs: And what happens for a lot of people, but the more neurodivergent we are, the more common this tends to be because our nervous systems tend to be less flexible. They shift less flexibly between states, and they often rev up quickly, but they struggle to slow back down. They rev into activation and orange zone. But they often struggle to come back down to yellow and greenhouse.

[36:38] Cate Blouke: Right.

[36:39] Marjorie Schreurs: Which means people can get stuck in orange and red and just kind of ping pong between the two and feel like, I know I want something different, but I don’t know how to change it because I can’t make myself do it by just thinking it. Because that part of our body doesn’t speak thinking language. It speaks sensory input language.

[37:01] Cate Blouke: That part of our body speaks sensory input language. Yeah, yeah, I. Yeah. I feel so seen, like, younger me feel so seen in all of us. Right. If only we. Well, yeah, I mean, if only we had known these things ten years ago, 20 years ago. Right. And taking better care of ourselves. Right. Like, totally. And I mean, for me, it was. It was smoking weed, it was drinking. Right. And then when I took those out of the equation, it was staying, like, super busy.

[37:33] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes.

[37:34] Cate Blouke: And then, like, I, for years, was sort of in this cycle of, like, over committing, staying super busy, staying super active, staying in that orange zone.

[37:43] Marjorie Schreurs: And.

[37:43] Cate Blouke: And, you know, culturally, we reward that. Right. I was really productive. Yes. Got a lot done. I went and did cool, fun things and. But, like, I didn’t have a, like, gauge for when I was going to hit that red zone. Yeah. And, like, it often felt like hitting a wall.

[38:00] Marjorie Schreurs: Totally.

[38:00] Cate Blouke: Then I would just have to clear my calendar for a couple of days, and then I would do the same thing over and over again because I didn’t have the awareness or the tools and didn’t have a diagnosis. I didn’t understand my own brain.

[38:13] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah. Overwhelm is a word that is used so much, and it so describes a piece of that process that you’re describing of, like, as soon as we move into overwhelm, it’s a signal that we’re moving into the red zone and that, like, the orange zone, like, when our body is in more of a fight or flight activated place, especially when it doesn’t have a lot of consistent, like, connection with yellow and green. It, by definition, because it’s in a fight or flight place, and it tends to be more black and white thinking. It is often reluctant to come out of fight or flight because there is an evolutionary advantage to being more on alert and keeping an eye out for the bear. So it requires, for many of us, practice and awareness and support in order to be able to open up more fluid pathways between these different states.

[39:17] Cate Blouke: Okay.

[39:18] Marjorie Schreurs: And that if you. And most of this is learned, this is an important piece. This is typically learned through modeling. So through parental modeling, if you had parents that had their own stuff going on or have war trauma or come from a family where there’s a lot of dysregulation or a lot of mental health struggle, you know, or even just patterns of, like, you know, not addressing emotions and not being comfortable with feelings, chances are you were never modeled. Your body was never able to take cues from your parents that it was safe to come down or not never, but, like, less so, you know. But the reality is that for many of us, there’s, one, there wasn’t any awareness around it, and two, our body may not have had the opportunity to learn that from another body.

[40:15] Cate Blouke: Yeah. I’m thinking about Emily Ngoski’s book on burnout. She talks about the stress cycle.

[40:22] Marjorie Schreurs: Yes.

[40:23] Cate Blouke: Right. And my own experience is largely that I didn’t have modeled how to process feelings. There wasn’t a light. My parents are lovely, delightful humans. Hi, mom. But, like, we don’t talk about feelings.

[40:43] Marjorie Schreurs: Yeah.

[40:44] Cate Blouke: And I was a very sensitive, tender little nugget who had all of the feelings and didn’t know what to do with them and never had that sort of, like, process of emotional cycle. Yeah.

[40:58] Marjorie Schreurs: Like, being able to process the emotions or be validated and heard, even, like, can be as simple as, oh, honey, I. Oh, that must be so disappointing. I get it.

[41:10] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[41:11] Marjorie Schreurs: Like, that in and of itself can be red, you know, orange to green. Like, coming down and, like, feeling heard and seen and being able to come down into relative safety.

[41:24] Cate Blouke: Yeah.

[41:25] Marjorie Schreurs: What many of us, culturally, what we often tend to do is, it’ll be okay. There will be another opportunity.

[41:34] Cate Blouke: Oh, my God. My stomach just, like, clenched at that. Like, going straight to that. Yeah, right. Like, oh, yeah.

[…] And here’s where I totally abruptly and awkwardly cut this conversation off. A little bit of a cliffhanger. You’re gonna have to wait till next week to get the rest of this juiciness.

I’m interrupting here partly because we pivoted the conversation into a discussion of trauma and how that relates to everything that we’ve been talking about. And I also wanted to just expand out a little bit that very last comment around the ways in which empathy essentially helps us to downregulate that when we jump straight into, “oh, it’s going to be fine, you’re going to do great.” Here’s all of the cheerleady things that rah rah, sis boom ba you want to hear, or we think the other person wants to hear.

And I 100% have been guilty of this. I’m grateful for Marjorie bringing it to my attention because hearing her talk about it, I was like, oh, yeah. When people do that to me, sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it really doesn’t feel good. And understanding that through the level of the nervous system and activation helps me have compassion for myself and for the people who love me, who are just trying to be supportive.

But I know for me, sensitive little human that I am, I really need to feel seen and heard first before we move into solution and problem solving and cheerleading. And so I’m taking this as a lovely reminder to not skip that step when I’m trying to be supportive to someone else. And if you love me and you’re listening and I turn to you with my big feelings, I hope you remember this part of this episode. So just wanted to draw that out a bit because I do think it’s a really beautiful part of this conversation.

And next week, in part two of this little two part series, the first of its kind on this podcast, we’re gonna talk about trauma, and we’re also gonna talk about how to move down the ladder again right now that we have this beautiful analogy of color coded understanding of our nervous system, that we are not fine or triggered, that there’s a whole range that we are dynamically moving through all throughout the day.

Next week’s episode, we’ll talk about how to get ourselves back into the green zone. We’ll unpack how trauma relates to our nervous system and how we can really start listening to and working with our body to live more joyful lives. That’s really what it always comes down to around here, as you know. So that’s what. That’s what’s coming ahead. Love you lots. Thanks for listening.