This section addresses the following questions:

• I feel myself feeling extremely stressed out and overwhelmed but shutting down at the same time — like a tug of war going on inside me that can lead to even more anxiety, and yet I’m still shutting down. Is it possible for both the Sympathetic Nervous System and the Parasympathetic Nervous System to be “on” at the same time, or to alternate from one to the other quickly?
• It feels like I have an ON and an OFF button. It would be nice to be somewhere in between sometimes.

Yes, this is the essence of dysregulation – BOTH the Sympathetic (Fight/Flight) and Parasympathetic (Freeze) survival responses are on in the system at all times. This leads to complex problems like autoimmune disorders as well as many other health problems mentioned in the answer above. This is the gas/brake pedal both being pushed together analogy.

It’s also common when this is the case to flip-flop between being more dominated by one or the other of these survival energies; switching from ON to OFF without much middle ground. Bipolar disorder is an extreme example of such flip-flopping.

Healing trauma and restoring regulation to the nervous system is what restores our ability to have a middle ground, with everything functioning as it is supposed to.