I never saw myself as having anxiety, but I’ve been feeling into it a lot lately with much shaking and teeth chattering. The shaking just keeps going unless I stop. Maybe too much of this is overwhelm and trigger, and it led to being sent to A&E with a very high blood pressure.” I assume A&E is a name for emergency. “Seven hours there crammed amongst lots of spluttering children led to horrendous flu, and now my blood pressure is perfectly normal, but heart rate still high. Not been ill like this in a decade. It’s been agonizing. Feels like endurance and suffering are inevitable and relentless.
Call Tag: sympathetic
Whenever I do these exercises on the floor like rolling the head, I feel vertigo, sort of a high floating feeling of disorientation, but not a full vertigo, which I have had once. It also happens every time I get a massage or I’m on a chiropractic table and get up. What’s this about?”
“So how do you recommend dealing with insomnia, in the moment? I typically go through a week-long spurt where I can’t fall asleep until morning hours. Then I’ll get a couple weeks of regular sleep until the insomnia repeats itself. It’s very mental for me, and I’m not sure how to interrupt this loop. I have a 1.5 year old to take care of, so I need some rest. What can I do when it’s 2:00 AM and I’m panicking about sleep?”
“Irene had a great interview at the Sleep Super conference. She mentioned the low tone dorsal for rest digest and the high dorsal tone, which is freeze, and the sympathetic system activated at the same time. I’m a bit confused about high and low tone dorsal. Is this the same as high and low vagus tone? And I have heard that you should have a high vagus tone because then you are more balanced. Doesn’t a high vagus tone that is good contradicts the high dorsal tone, which is bad?”
I saw a short video on Irene’s Instagram where the vagus nerve was mentioned, and Irene said something about the vagus nerve being very popular to work with today. But her expression hinted about this not being enough. I’m very interested in knowing about her reaction to vagus nerve techniques.
So lately I’ve been having fear of falling asleep like I could die when asleep. Also, I’m having a jerking awake sensation while nodding off, sometimes up to 30 or more times a night. Would this be sympathetic activation? Any tips to calm myself down to get some sleep?
You touched on the hyperactivity aspect of ADHD in last week’s call and how it’s rooted in a tight brain stem.” It’s not so much rooted in the tight brain stem, it’s that the tight brain stem is a fundamental part of it. It’s rooted in hypervigilance and a tight brain stem is a fundamental part of hypervigilance, but there’s other parts as well. Your entire sympathetic nervous system is on way too much with hypervigilance. But that tight brain stem is a good place to intervene physiologically. So I just wanted to clarify that. “Can you address the hyperfocus, hyper fixation aspect of ADHD and why that would be related to survival and trauma as well? I can get very tunnel visioned to the point of dissociation and disembodiment
Functional freeze and disconnection from the body makes so much sense. Chronic pain and illness result in a hyper focus on the body and symptoms. How do these two apparently conflicting states happen together?