5 Signs of Nervous System Healing (That Don't Feel Like Healing)

In this video, I'm going to talk about five signs of nervous system healing that don't actually feel or look like healing. These are five signs that you're actually on the perfect path, even if it doesn't feel like it yet. When you start healing your nervous system, it is not going to look the way you expect it to look. The way you would want to judge your nervous system healing is based off of, am I feeling better? Is my life getting better? Do I feel calmer? But those are the wrong questions to ask. Healing your nervous system often feels emotional, confusing, and messy. And the great news is, that's actually proof that it's working. But why should you even listen to me? I am not sitting here because I read a bunch of books on nervous system regulation or because I took a course in college. I lived it. 20 years of chronic anxiety, multiple years of chronic pain, and experienced burnout from trying to fix myself for 20 years. And I finally learned how to heal when I realized I had to work with my body instead of against it. I went first. So I'm not here to tell you what to do. I am here to help you remember that your body already knows how to heal. So let's get into it. Sign number one that you are regulating your nervous system is you are feeling more. We all know this is a big part of nervous system regulation. Avoiding the feelings that have come up over the years. Avoiding, distracting, pushing them down, running away from them, stuffing them. If you are healing, you're going to be feeling more emotionally. Emotions that you used to bury and run from will be rising to the surface. So if you start feeling like you're having some like emotional outbursts, crying randomly, getting angry, getting irritable, that was a common one for me. I had avoided anger and irritability my entire life. I kind of ran more on the anxious side. And when my nervous system began healing, I started feeling these emotions that I had never let myself feel because I was taught that anger was bad. I was modeled that I didn't want to be an angry person. And so part of my healing was letting anger rise to the surface and letting it move through me. And I couldn't take that that it was a sign that something was going wrong. It wasn't a sign that something was going wrong. It was a sign that the emotions that I had buried were now having a chance to express and I needed to get out of the way and let them do that. Imagine it kind of like your body is defrosting. After years of suppressing your emotions, you finally start regulating and you see those emotions coming up as an excellent sign that you are healing. Number two is you lose interest in hustling energy. You have become very accustomed to living on cortisol and on adrenaline and on all those stress hormones. And as you start to heal, suddenly you're not able to fake that productive energy. That go, go, go just starts to feel uncomfortable for you. And then also the dopamine hits that used to work really well, maybe when you were overeating or over scrolling or over drinking, they're just not hitting the same way anymore. Another excellent sign. When this happens, you are moving from survival energy to real energy. So we don't want to be running on all those stress hormones all the time. And sometimes it can feel like you're having a bit of a crash, but you're just making the transition from, I'm not living anymore on the chemicals of stress to fuel my day and to fuel my life. So please know that rest, boredom, and stillness are going to precede your healing. But if you're feeling those on a more regular basis, that is a sign that you are healing. So notice if you've stopped chasing that dopamine driven, cortisol driven high, and you start craving a bit more peace, a bit more stillness, and a bit more rest. The third one is similar in the sense that you just start craving more alone time. You realize that being alone and having that solitude feels more life-giving to you rather than an avoidance of your life. You start to notice the way your nervous system is reacting when you are out and about. This was something huge for me. I went on a trip to Minnesota. I went to the mall of America. I did all of these things that had lots of bright lights and lots of stimulation. And my body reacted so extremely to all that stimulation that I got really good at noticing how I needed to downshift. I needed time alone. I needed quiet time. I needed peace. That was restorative to me when I pushed my nervous system too hard. I have found this process of healing to be so self-trust building. It's another deeper way that we begin listening to our body and saying, hey, I see I've pushed you a little bit too hard. I'm going to take some time alone. It required me to use my voice. It required me to tell my family, hey, I need a break. I need some quiet time. I love you so much, but I need to go into my for a little bit. I began craving that time in balance with exertion within my life. I didn't stop living my life, but I needed to do both. Instead of being constantly hustling and moving, I needed to start implementing some slowness and some solitude so that I could recoup. And along with that solitude, you may be pulling away from other people within your circles who live in that constant frantic fight or flight energy. That's also very normal. You may notice that your circle starts to shift. So this isn't a matter of like isolating yourself. It's more about being very choosy with your energy and knowing that the energy you spend time around does affect you. And so you may find that the scales shift a little bit in that sense and you pull away from the people who are living in that old energy. For me, this also looked like pulling back from old online patterns, both with like social validation or checking in with notifications, checking in with what's going on externally to determine how I should feel internally. The fourth thing is noticing that body patterns are changing. This can look very hectic and scary from the outside, but it's actually a good sign that things are changing. Your sleep can become inconsistent. You might need naps. You might wake up at 3am. You might have a hard time falling asleep. And you may take this as a sign that something is going in the wrong direction, but that is a sign of repatterning. Your digestion may change. Your appetite may change. Your period cycles might change because everything is affected by the autonomic nervous system. It runs your hormones. It runs everything going on. There are so many processes that it is running automatically underneath your awareness. So don't be surprised if things get shaken up and you're like, oh my gosh, is this a bad sign? No. Oftentimes it is a sign that things are changing in a positive direction. And this part can be hard because you're dealing with physical symptoms and physical changes and you've been so trained by yourself to focus so intently on what's going on in your body. Be careful not to let this lead you down other rabbit holes or other problems to fix. Most of this is letting our body work it out and not getting involved and stepping back and saying, I know you know what to do with this. I'm going to get out of the way. Allow your body to do what it needs to do. And then the fifth one that's very important is you start noticing instead of jumping into fixing. You notice that you're giving yourself more space. You notice that you are placing a pause before your reaction. And that pause is creating the ability for you to respond. Responding is a choice. Reacting is a default pattern. You start noticing the sensations you're having and you don't get hooked into them. You don't get locked into focusing on them and fixing them and making them go away. You get cozy with your symptoms and your sensations. You bring them along for the ride. This is one of the biggest signs that you are healing. And that is the nervous system learning that ability to feel safe in this stillness with or without sensations. This is the core of the work that I do within my membership with my coaching clients. It's so important for you to learn how to respond instead of react because your response is exactly what unwires the symptoms you hate, which means you can get feeling better pretty quickly. But this is the biggest sign that you're healing because you're not responding to life in the same way. You are becoming different. And when you change, your life changes. When you change your response, your symptoms change. When you change your reaction, you get to exit survival mode. Those are my top five, but I'm going to give you a bonus three. These are bonus signs that things are working. Notice if your old coping tools stop working. You just find that you outgrow them. Whatever used to work doesn't even work anymore and you're almost forced to find a different way. This is a blessing in disguise, I promise. The second one, you just forget to analyze. Your brain naturally gets quieter and you just realize, oh my gosh, I have so much extra energy and so much extra time because I'm not spending my mental energy analyzing everything that's happening in my body. And the last one is your identity starts to feel uncertain because you have not quite moved from survival to thriving yet. You're in that liminal middle space. You haven't got to the point where you know exactly who you are yet. This is the void between the survival self and the regulated self. It can feel very ungrounded. It can feel very like you're being suspended in midair, but you will land. And this is an excellent sign that you are no longer who you used to be and you are becoming someone new. Healing is messy. It is not linear. Everyone will tell you that and I'm begging you to believe them. Just because things look messy from the outside does not mean that the changes are not being made on the inside. You know when you have done the work of stopping all the doing. And what I mean by that is when you have given up the fight, when you have abandoned the rabbit holes, when you have stopped trying to fix and micromanage every symptom, every thought, every feeling, and you begin allowing and letting your body do the work of regulation. Our bodies are self-regulating machines. They know what to do if we get out of the way. If you have done that, trust that your healing is taking place. Trust that even the messy signs show that you are on the right path. Do not use your external reality to tell you if you are changing. You're going to have to run off some blind faith for a little while, but you can do it and you'll get there. Thanks for watching this video, and if you liked it, please like and subscribe. I'll see you guys next time.