Ready to Unleash Creative Potential? Learn How Your Nervous System Works
In my book, Wild Words, I talk about the body as a partner in our creativity. There’s a story about how when my son was young, I felt strained and pulled in all directions because I was working full-time, trying to take care of myself, and also writing. I didn't have a lot of time to exercise, and I had about thirty minutes to make dinner every night. Everything felt difficult.
Eventually I noticed what I was doing: pitting writing and movement against each other, and feeling like I needed to choose because of my time constraints. I was constantly feeling the pull between a choice of going to a yoga class after dinner or pulling out my laptop.
One day I realized that writing and movement weren’t actually opposing forces in my life but very intimately linked. They form a necessary, symbiotic relationship and adopting more of a body-first approach was actually the better choice, because when my body feels good and I’m taking care of myself, it opens me up for creativity to flow.
I believe that our physical and mental health inform our creative life. And rather than see them as separate entities, I take a more holistic approach to my writing and see all those elements working together to allow my work to unfold.
What is the Nervous System? (And How it Impacts Our Daily Life)
The Cleveland Clinic describes the nervous system as “the command center for your body.” Essentially, the nervous system regulates your body’s systems—everything from breathing and sleep to digestion and heart rate—by using cells called neurons to send signals or messages to different parts of your body. That’s the very simple definition, and now it can start feeling a bit more complicated because there are two parts and one of the parts has two additional parts of its own, and then one of those parts houses the vagus nerve which is tied into Polyvagal Theory, which I’ll explain as we go.
First we have the Central Nervous System (CNS), which comprises your brain and spinal cord. Your brain uses nerves to send messages throughout your body, and each nerve has a protective outer layer called myelin (my-uh-lin), which insulates the nerve and helps messages get through.
We also have the Peripheral Nervous System. The PNS has nerves that branch out from your central nervous system to other parts of your body, so this system takes information from your brain and spinal cord to organs, your arms, legs, fingers, and toes.
Within your Peripheral Nervous System are two parts:
Somatic nervous system: guides voluntary movements
Autonomic nervous system: controls the activities you do without thinking, like breathing
What Is the Vagus Nerve?
Within your autonomic nervous system is vagus nerve. This is your body’s longest cranial nerve, and it runs from your brain through the face and thorax to the abdomen, and it helps control all those bodily functions like digestion, heart rate, and the immune system that we don’t consciously think about.
In 1994, behavioral neuroscientist Stephen Porges developed the Polyvagal Theory which expanded our understanding of the autonomic nervous system. Up until this time, it was traditionally viewed as having two parts:
Sympathetic nervous system: This is the more activating “fight or flight” response that helps keep us safe from danger
Parasympathetic nervous system: which supports our “rest and digest” response which is geared more towards safety and growth and restoration
Polyvagal theory introduced a third type of nervous system response called the social engagement system: So this is a hybrid state of activation and calming that plays a role in our ability to engage socially, or not, depending on where we fall on that spectrum in any given moment.
The name for this nerve comes from the Latin root of vague, meaning “wander,” which is an appropriate moniker since this nerve has such a far-reaching connection throughout the body. Porges also coined the term “neuroception,” which Deb Dana describes as an “embodied surveillance system broadcasting important information from its place below the surface of awareness.”
How Pandemic Stress Has Changed Our Nervous Systems
What I noticed initially at the start of the pandemic is how The Season of Listening to Your Body seemed to really show up in big ways. Lots of people I knew bought a Peloton bike, home workouts were exploding, and we were all looking for ways to cope and feel better and carve out a bit of time for ourselves.
And this makes sense, right? Even if we’re not consciously aware of it, exercise is scientifically proven to help reduce stress, so our bodies, in their great wisdom, began craving movement as a way to process what was happening around us.
Harvard Health explains that “the mental benefits of aerobic exercise have a neurochemical basis. Exercise reduces levels of the body's stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol. It also stimulates the production of endorphins, chemicals in the brain that are the body's natural painkillers and mood elevators.”
I already had a pilates reformer but we ended up getting a treadmill and I started running a bit more, and like everyone else, I had to figure out a new routine because my son was home, he was home from school for a year-and-a-half before he went back, so it took a little time to figure out how we were going to organize our days and a lot of times in the morning after breakfast I would get changed and he would either play on his own or he would bring something like a coloring book or some Legos into the room where I was doing my workout on the treadmill. And the one we have has a subscription to iFit where you can basically follow trainers in different places all over the world and it just felt like an opportunity to escape a little bit.
There were some routines closer to home like the Oregon Coast or the streets of downtown Nashville, one running series went through Portugal, there was a walking series through Italy, and I would just look out my window and see my street in North Carolina and just feel like, ok, this world I’m shutting myself off from right now is still out there, and it won’t be like this forever.
I held on to that for a really long time, and this time for myself, even when it was interrupted, became a real healing practice, and it led me into the deeper work I’ve been doing around the nervous system.
I don’t remember how this book came into my life, but I read Patriarchy Stress Disorder by Dr. Valerie Rein sometime in the second half of 2020, and she makes the case that the patriarchy as a system is actually a chronic stressor that women have been carrying in their bodies for generations. And that even if we didn’t experience what’s sometimes referred to as “capital T trauma” growing up, our nervous systems have still been impacted and remember everything and that shows up in our bodies today.
And what is stored, essentially, is looking for a way out of our bodies so it can be fully processed.
I remember a period shortly after I started exercising again, that I actually found myself crying while I was on the treadmill one day. I started out walking, and then I felt like running, and then before I knew it I was just crying my eyes out.
And that was before I began learning about the nervous system, so going back to the inherent wisdom of our bodies, they just know. I learned later on that what was happening in that moment was completing a stress cycle.
Redefining Anxiety
In the world of somatic experiencing (which is a body-informed approach to trauma created by Philip Levine), anxiety is often called “activation,” and when we have those sensations we might associate with stress or panic like we feel our heart racing or palpitations, we become fearful and overwhelmed, we might feel a sense of discomfort somewhere in our body, we feel tears forming or our chest tightens, that’s your nervous system communicating that it needs to release something. It’s a somatic response to a past trauma we’ve encountered. Irene Lyon says anxiety, or activation, is a stored stress response. It’s literally something stored in our bodies that needs to come out.
Sometimes we can pinpoint the cause, and sometimes we can’t. And of course, the pandemic itself has been a trauma. There’s a collective trauma we’ve all experienced in different ways of course, but it has impacted us irrevocably.
So after starting with a few books on the topic, I also came across a podcast episode of On Being where Krista Tippet interviews clinical psychologist Christine Runyon about what the pandemic has done to our nervous systems.
Christine Runyon so calmly explained how the nervous system is exquisitely designed to support us in various ways (and we’ll get a lot deeper into the nervous system in a bit) but also just validated that how we’re feeling is completely normal and expected given the difficult circumstances we’re all in.
“We’re all so activated. That nervous system dysregulation is the source of where all of these other behavioral manifestations are coming. And we’re all patterned in different ways…But a lot of that has to do with, what were the ways we met stress as a kid? How did we learn how to meet stress in a way to stay safe, as a kid? And, unexamined, those just continue to show up through our lives.” She goes on to say that we’re experiencing a massive loss of empathy and that quote “We want to have control. That’s why the uncertainty, the unpredictable nature of this, is so hard for us, physiologically.”
One of the suggestions that came out of that conversation was to name what’s happening. By being able to name, “oh, I’m feeling this right now. I’m feeling activated or anxious or fearful,” it’s an exercise in self-awareness that helps us stabilize a bit.
The 3 Nervous System States
Our nervous system is always listening to our environment, and it’s scanning for cues of safety or danger, and then responds by either shutting down (dorsal vagal), mobilizing for action (sympathetic), or anchoring in regulation (ventral vagal).
Dorsal vagal is the oldest and most primitive part of our brain that enables us to shut down or “freeze” when a situation feels dangerous or we’re overwhelmed.
Sympathetic is part of our “fight/flight” system, sort of a “ready to move” state in the case of danger
The most evolved part of our brain, and the newest aspect is the ventral vagul, and that’s a regulated state where we feel at ease and connected.
In Deb Dana’s book, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory, she describes this as concentric circles. Dorsal, the most intense and sometimes debilitating state is in the center, sympathetic surrounds dorsal, and then ventral is the outermost part of the circle. She says “The metaphor I use is of the ventral vagal system encircling the sympathetic and dorsal vagal systems, holding them both in a warm embrace.”
One of the exercises she shares in her book that I wanted to pass along here is to recognize which colors are associated with those states for you, so you can begin to see how they intertwine and recognize them when you might be moving through each of the states.
You can do this by closing your eyes and inviting your brain to take a bit of a break, letting your autonomic nervous system guide you as you begin by exploring the color of your center dorsal circle. As a reminder, this is the state when you might feel the most disconnected from yourself and others. It’s a fear-based state, one where there might be a lot of activation in your body and mind. See what color emerges here.
Then you can slowly move to the next layer of the circle, your sympathetic state, and see what color is there.
And then you can move to the outermost circle, the ventral vagal, and imagine a color that represents a calm, regulated state.
Once you have a sense of these colors, you might imagine holding three different sized balls of light or three streams of energy, recognizing that they’re all part of you, and all serve a purpose in your life.
The Nervous System’s Impact on our Writing Life
Think about what it’s like to write in a state of flow. When you’re in that place where time stops and you’re in the moment, your nervous system is regulated here. It’s stable and calm and helps you be so much more open to creativity flowing.
Writing can help us move from a more dysregulated state into a regulated one. In her book The Power of Writing it Down, Allison Fallon talks about how research has shown that writing can help us “manage negative emotional states, process our lives, and even heal from trauma. One of the reasons writing does this, I believe, is because it invites us, and even requires us, to look at our pain in a new way and for a long time. It requires contemplation.”
So trauma. This can be a very charged word and one that, I know for myself for a long time, I really only associated with that “capital T” trauma. I’m sure you can imagine what those experiences are without me needing to list them, but as I’ve come to realize, there are also smaller, daily traumas that can sometimes go unrecognized because in the moment they might not feel all that impactful. You might have grown up in a family where you had several other siblings and felt invisible. Maybe your caregivers or friends didn’t validate your feelings growing up, and you often felt isolated or misunderstood. Some of this developmental trauma occurs at really young ages, and we might not even have solid memories of it, but the body remembers.
In an effort to keep us safe, we all developed protective responses as children. As an adult, our charge is to recognize that these no longer serve us, meet our younger selves with kindness and compassion, and essentially create new neural pathways that free us from these protective responses that keep us stuck mentally and emotionally.
There’s a wonderful essay called “The Return” in the book Body Work by Melissa Febos, that addresses the topic of writing about trauma and in a section where she describes her voracious appetite for reading and her liberal use of diaries and journals, she says “These escapes made my childhood bearable. Not because I had a difficult childhood, but because childhood is difficult: powerlessness assured, trauma unavoidable, consciousness a weird and indefinable burden that we have no way of contextualizing.”
I really appreciate this reframe, so rather than just say “my childhood was great or it was fine or my parents did the best they could with what they had,” which can dismiss or minimize some of our experiences, recognizing that childhood is hard no matter what is a starting point for acknowledging that we all have something that was difficult or hard that occurred during a time in our lives when we didn’t have the tools or language to fully understand it.
And then she goes on to talk about how establishing a sense of safety is integral to the writing process. With any type of trauma there’s the shared quality of feeling disempowered, so there’s the need to recognize that the events occurred, and then regain a sense of agency over them and ultimately, the body is one of the best tools we have for achieving this. It’s not our brain or the mind, which is the place where many of us retreated to and still find safety in, but our bodies that can unlock that healing.
Peter Levine describes this work as a process of “initiating your own healing by re-integrating lost or fragmented portions of your essential self.” And to do this, you must have this deep desire to access your own wholeness, which is the foundation of healing work.
And if you are working with trauma of any kind, and you haven’t properly addressed it—ideally with a trained somatic therapist—it can make the writing process incredibly challenging and potentially increase harm instead of offering a safe space to land. You can’t just launch into writing the most difficult parts of your story without partnering with your nervous system to release all the stored up stress responses your body has been carrying around for years and perhaps decades.
You need to titrate, which is like going to your edge and then pulling back, and repeating that process gently over time. You can’t sit down and in one session write everything about something that was really hard or difficult.
I’ll say from personal experience, that this is really challenging work. And it’s a path that once you start walking down, you’re on it for life. It’s so worth it, but I won’t sit here and say it’s not incredibly difficult because it absolutely is. I don’t have time on this episode to go through my own personal story, nor do I really feel prepared to share it quite yet, but what I will say is that when we begin writing through the lens of understanding our nervous systems, our patterns, and the ways we’ve protected ourselves from harm in the past, then we can see clearly the ways we may have disassociated, which is a clinical term of essentially going numb to certain parts of our experience in an act of self-preservation. Our bodies, in their primitive wisdom, have helped us avoid the discomfort of difficult feelings and experiences that we may have felt powerless to interpret.
And when we have this new language—and truly, understanding the nervous system really does feel like learning a new language sometimes—but when we have access to that information and this deeper understanding, then we can begin to see our own responses, the actions of family members and friends, and even our characters in the case of writing fiction, through the lens of self-compassion.
Writing with a regulated nervous system, with our full capacity for self-compassion available, and with an understanding of how our past traumas inform our current state is a catalyst for drawing out our best work.
We’re able to write difficult characters or scenes that may be fictional or drawn directly from our personal experience, with a lens that allows us to see everyone for who they truly are.
And that is a gift not only to ourselves, but to those who might read our work and benefit from it.
I’ve often said that writing is a sacred act, and the final passage in Melissa Febos’s essay beautifully articulates why this is, and feels like a fitting place to end this conversation. The nervous system is vast and complex and can difficult to understand, and the work to uncover our past hurts and traumas and then offer compassion to ourselves once we’ve learned that all our nervous system has ever tried to do is protect us from harm, that’s where the power of writing meets us… through the body, and our healing, we transform ourselves, and others as well.
“As a child, I did not understand the spiritual, cathartic, and aesthetic processes as discrete and I still don't. It is through writing that I have come to know that form e, they are inextricable. I am much more interested in what art is and can be than what it is not. It is a form of worship, a medicine, a solitary and social act. It is an ancient process through which I draw closer to my ancestors. On the page, I undergo a change of heart. I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away. Every single thing I have created worth a dam has been a practice of love, healing, and redemption. I know this process to be divine.”
Nervous System Resources
Irene Lyon: The ABCs & 123s of Nervous System Healing
Irene Lyon (YouTube channel)
Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Philip Levine
Radical Compassion by Tara Brach
How to Find a Therapist
If you’re not currently working with a therapist but are interested in finding one to support you, a good place to start is Psychology Today. When using their search filter, be sure to choose “Types of Therapy” and then “Somatic” so you can see results of practitioners who are trained to work at the level of the nervous system.
