How To Drive Your Nervous System

Part 2 of How to Fight Your Family

This is Part Two of the series “How to Fight Your Family.” Once they’re uploaded, you can read the first installment here, the third here, and the fourth here.

Welcome back, fighters. If you’ll recall, in the first part of the series, we established five principles for fighting wisely at your family holiday celebration. They were:

1. Be Prepared

2. Operate Your Nervous System Intentionally

3. Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself

4. Fight to Win

5. Integrity Is A Win You Can Always Guarantee

Operating Your Nervous System Intentionally

Today, we’re going to talk about the second principle - operating your nervous system intentionally. I’m going to teach you everything I know about how to skillfully, reliably maintain grace under fire at your family holiday. Which is to say, how to keep your composure when the people who trained every flaw, quirk and imperfection in your attachment system are exerting an enormous amount of (unconscious) pressure on you to forget your best self and drop into your deepest, oldest, often most dysfunctional patterns.

In order to get the most out of this, you’ll need a bit of time before the holiday to collect some data on yourself and practice building awareness. A couple of weeks would be best, but you can make do with a week if that’s all you have. If you don’t have a lot of time, go ahead and skip the first two sections of this essay.

In this part, we’re going to cover four major topics:

• A Brief Introduction to the Nervous System

• Mapping Your Activation Scale

• Fortifying the Nervous System

• Combat First Aid

Let’s get started.

A Brief Introduction to the Nervous System

The above video is part of the introductory material that Rich Bartlett and I send out to everyone taking the Fight Wise course for the first time. If you are like me and don’t want to take the time to watch an entire video (you are here on Substack, presumably, for the experience of reading), then here is the summary:

Your entire nervous system gets involved whenever you are in a conflict - you are made for this, after all, as this is samsara - but there are two major subsets of the nervous system that are germane to our purposes: The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). These govern your arousal - which is to say, the release of stress chemicals that give you energy for the 5 Fs: fighting, fleeing, freezing, fawning and fucking. It can be helpful to think of the SNS as your gas pedal - it sends chemicals to the engine to give it more energy - and the PNS as your brake pedal - it neutralizes the stress chemicals and inhibits many of your body functions so that you can rest.

One interesting fact about the SNS is that your entire brain responds to its level of arousal by reducing its own functionality. The more you’re excited, the more your neural pathways get inflamed, and individual parts of the brain begin to shut down. This is for a very simple reason - the SNS ramps up in a survival situation, and the brain wants to save calories and chemical stores in case you need to fight for your life, or escape from a tiger hiding in the bushes, etc. If you are running out of a burning building, you do not need to do calculus. So the brain shuts down everything but the essential functions.

The problem, of course, is that the brain does not always accurately perceive a survival situation - it responds to threats to the ego (your symbolic self) in the same way it responds to threats to your physical, animal self. So in a holiday fight with your family, it’s going to perceive arguments and old triggers as physical threats, and begin to shut down the parts of your brain that would otherwise help you be skillful with the people you love.

Let’s take a quick look at the spectrum of activation together:

Provided we are not too overstimulated or distracted, we generally stay in a state of relative chill, by default. Both the PNS and SNS are active, but well-balanced. Our arousal levels hover around a 1-2 out of 10. In this range, we are curious, grounded and present. We care about what we’re doing, we have access to joy, and we feel compassion easily. A good place to be.

As the day goes on and we accumulate the natural stress of the day - helping the family get ready for work, small frustrations, traffic, etc. - we move into higher baseline levels of arousal. Think a 3-5 out of 10. We’re still in control, but we’ve got extra oomph in us. We might be a little irritated or anxious, or feel some real passion. It’s not a bad place to be - it makes you feel alive! The problem is that we can also be less resilient to surprise in this state. From an activation level of 1-2, we can take small spikes of stress in stride. From a 3-4, small stressors can push us out of the zone of conscious control (1-5) and into the realm of impulse and compulsion: 6 and above. In 6-7 territory, we start having automatic fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses. We emotionall shut down. We curse at bad drivers. We become anxious about things we can’t control. We promise self-sacrificing favors to others when we should say “no.”

At levels 8 and 9, we stop being symbolic and start getting physical - at this level we might see physical fighting, running away from conflict, total shutdown (freeze, or withdrawal) or compulsive, unconscious seduction. And at level 10, in general, you’re not making memories and you’re acting like a complete animal (“blacked out”, “completely frozen”, “seeing red.”) This is the realm of functioning at which traumatic psychological injury and PTSD occurs.

The more worked up you get, the poorer your brain works, and the less skillful you can be in a stressful situation. We all know this intuitively - we get stupid when we’re angry, anxious or horny (the three functions of the SNS.) So we obviously want to have as much control over our level of arousal as we can, to protect ourselves from bad decisions and potential trauma, to protect our loved ones from unskillful or unconscious actions, and to protect our relationships from damage caused by the drama and chaos we could bring about at high levels of activation.

And control over arousal is precisely where the PNS comes in. The PNS is quite complex, but there is one major piece of it that’s helpful to understand: the vagus nerve. This is a nerve that runs from our face to our gut along the our spines, behind our facial muscles and internal organs. It controls digestion, heart rate and many other functions - including activating the PNS when it’s stimulated, and decreasing our level of arousal.

Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve (the lungs inflate and physically make contact with it) as does eating a big meal (the stomach expands and touches the inside of the spine, which calms you down.) So does diving into water (an old, strange reflex from the mists of evolutionary time) and a variety of other interventions that we’ll cover later in the article.

One tricky note: the PNS can restore calm, rational brain function pretty quickly, because neurotransmitters in the brain are nearly instantaneous. But stress hormones move much more slowly, which means we often have our higher faculties restored before we have the emotional experience of being calm. (One way to remember this is neurotransmitters are sent by e-mail, hormones are sent by post office.) So if you’ve ever been angry at someone over a misunderstanding, then gotten a good explanation, but still needed time to cool off from the initial emotions, you’ve probably experienced this for yourself. It might have gone something like this: you hear the explanation and realize you were mistaken. You feel surprised, realization dawns on you, and some feeling of tight constriction in around your skull begins to relax and widen up. Your eyebrows relax and your mouth opens slightly. You say “ohhhhh.” You start to think and say conciliatory things, maybe even apologizing for becoming angry. BUT. Your arms stay crossed and your chest is still raw and painful, like you just smoked a cigarette. Irrational suspicion still pings off the back corners of your mind, looking for something to seize on. Your hips and glutes are still tense as a rock. In other words, you’re still emotionally worked up, even though you now have the mental faculties to understand you were mistaken. You know it will take a couple of minutes to get all the way back to baseline, so you take a little space to recover. The time it takes to “pull yourself together” is the differential between neurotransmitters and hormones.

So it’s important to note, when driving your nervous system, that you can’t get an accurate measurement of your arousal level only by checking your emotional experience. You have to also monitor your thoughts to glean their character - when they’re aggressive, suspicious, strategic, etc. they are still coming from a place of arousal. When they’re reasonable, accepting, complex, compassionate, etc. they are coming from a place of inhibition. That means your PNS is working, even if you can’t feel it.

To recap: the SNS increases your level of excitement, corresponding to an old biological system used to detect threats to our survival. The lower the level, the more access to our highest human faculties we have. The higher the level, the fewer brain functions we have access to, and the more rash, impulsive and passionate we become, until eventually our animal nature overwhelms us. The PNS is what decreases/balances/stabilizes your level of excitement, and the most important component of the PNS is the vagus nerve, which you can directly stimulate to calm yourself down.

All of this is well and good, but as you well know, human beings are neither simple nor mechanical. Every individual differs in important ways, and there are countless cultural and biological conditions that affect how we respond to excitement. That means there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for driving your nervous system. You have to build a set of custom tools that are right for you and your situation. And in order to do that, you first need to understand everything about your personal experience of being triggered.

Mapping Your Activation Scale

Previously, we conceived of arousal as a scale from 1-10, with 1 being joyful and peaceful, and 10 being traumatic overwhelm or rage. Here’s how Rich and I visualize it:

If it looks a little weird to you (why aren’t the distributions even?) that’s because we want to train you to become total masters of the 3-5 zone. To experience the fullness of your frustration, your passion, your anger, even your anxiety, while remaining perfectly in control of yourself and able to skillfully advocate for your needs. You might also notice two dotted lines. The first is “minimum threat perception” and refers to the first moment that something in perception feels wrong or off. It marks the point that calm absorption in the present subtly shifts to a resistance to the present. It often feels like a diffuse frustration, you want something to be different, but it hasn’t occurred to you yet what that is. Sometimes this feeling has accompanying thoughts like, “I wish I had my own office” or, if you’re the self-critical type, “I’m so bad at focusing.” This feeling often occurs at the level of activation just before you identify the distraction or frustration that’s bothering you - perhaps the tapping of a coworker’s pen, the sound of construction equipment outside the window, etc. Understanding this shift is a powerful awareness tool, because it signifies a shift out of the ventral vagal mode and into the lightest, most barely perceptible form of SNS-activated consciousness. To maintain maximum effectiveness in your everyday life, this is the moment you’ll want to start regulating your nervous system (we’ll go over those techniques later in the article.)

The second dotted line is the “threshold of regret” and refers to the point at which you lose full control of your words and actions, and begin to say or do things that are not coming from your best self, and that you may regret later. These include aggressions, insults, threats and so forth.

In Fight Wise, we stress that we want people to become masters of everything that occurs between Minimum Threat Perception and the Threshold of Regret. For the purposes of this article, I’d like to also encourage you to work within this range. While the exercises and techniques we’ll cover here will also work at higher levels of nervous system activation, you need safe, expertly controlled environments to train those effectively, and that’s out of the scope of either our course or this essay.

Discovering Your Personal Activation Scale

The scale, as we’ve presented it, will more or less conform to most people’s experience of activation, but everyone will deviate in important ways, so you’ll need to discover your scale for yourself.

The first exercise is to map your bodily sensations of arousal, and it starts with your journal: get out your pen and paper and spend a few minutes in silence thinking about what sort of things get you worked up - pissed off, scared, any of the 5 Fs. Then, try to think about it in the context of your family. What are times that a family member triggered you to a 3/10? How about a 4/10? How about a 5/10? Write a little about those scenarios and feel into your body. Does your pulse quicken a little, your blood get warm, your skin get a little sweaty? Is there energy in your arms, or tension in your glutes, or does your jaw lock up? What are the somatic signatures of tension for you?

Again, just to stress the point: if you remember scenarios in which you were at a 6 or above, which is to say, you got aggressive, you ran away, you gave something away that you didn’t want to - basically, you said or did things that you regretted later - don’t use those scenarios. They may be important to you personally, but they’re not useful for this training.

As you map your physical sensations associated with each memory, try and observe whether there are patterns. Is there more and different tension when you’re angry, as opposed to mildly frustrated? Is there a particular bodily sensation that springs up when you first feel anxious, as opposed to a mild unease? Try and plot those sensations on the scale from 1-10.

When you’re finished, you should have a rough outline of what it feels like to be at a 3, 4 and 5. Once you’ve got that, you’re ready to move on to a longer term assignment: Creating a day-long chart of your nervous system activation levels. Here’s an example:

You’ll start on the far left when you wake up, and take measurements throughout the day by checking in with yourself. In order to do this, I like to use an app called Mindfulness Bell, which is available for both iPhone and Android. It plays a little bell sound at semi-random intervals throughout the day (you can silence it for meetings and so forth, as necessary), so it’s impossible to predict and always a little bit of a surprise when you hear it. Get the app and set it to go off several times over the course of the next day. Whenever you hear it ring, take a deep breath and check in with your body. What level of arousal are you at? What was the trigger, or if that’s not obvious, what was your reaction to it? Make a little note, enjoy the moment of presence you’ve afforded yourself, and then return to whatever you were doing.

At the end of the day, you should have several entries you can plot on a simple chart like the above, and you’ll have a picture of what a normal day’s stress looks like. The sorts of things that trigger you - and the frequency with which they happen - may surprise you! In the example chart, the triggers and responses are mostly external, but you may find that you have just as much stress from your memory and imagination as you do from the outside world. Write it all down - anything you notice, anytime you notice. After a while, you shouldn’t need the Mindfulness Bell, because you’ll be well acquainted with your stress signatures, and you’ll have built a habit of checking in with yourself. The more of this awareness you can build, the more fine-grained your sensory clarity becomes, the greater and richer your data will become, and the more effective you’ll be in operating your nervous system intentionally.

Fortifying the Nervous System

There’s a reason we have an old cliche saying about “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” - it’s as true in medicine as it is in any context where preparation can accomplish far more than hapless, unskillful reaction to the vicissitudes of the moment. Conflict is just one of these, because you can actually store up calm and composure to be used later. You can’t decide what to spend it on - that’s up to life - but if you prepare well, take good care of yourself and get lucky, you’ll arrive at holiday dinner in a ventral vagal state, relaxed and ready to skillfully respond to anything your family can throw at you.

Fortifying the nervous system properly begins a week before you expect to fight your family. If you have the time, that’s when to begin extra self-care. Sleep is the most important variable here (and in nearly every situation related to mental health and performance) - you need to be getting a full night’s sleep every night, 7-8 hours at the least. The cleaner you can get your diet, the more emotional regulation you’ll experience, and the more resilient that regulation will become. Try to avoid any excess stress - just take it easy this week with plenty of tea and time on the couch reading a good book. Now is the time to avoid drugs and alcohol - even weed, even a casual drink - as they’ll stimulate and inflame your brain, which needs as much rest as possible right now. And to the extent that you can, try to avoid doomscrolling - this keeps you in a state of low-grade activation for as long as you’re locked in to your phone screen, and builds up a lot of unnecessary stress.

Regular exercise - daily, if you can get it - will help train the nervous system to tolerate high levels of stimulation, and importantly, will physically exhaust you, which makes it hard to get emotionally worked up about anything. This, in turn, reduces inflammation and stress in the brain and allows it to rest and heal in anticipation of the fight. I have yet to meet an emotional problem that I could not sprint out of my system. If you have an excess of anger, you can also spend some time working a punching bag or chopping wood until you’re exhausted, or you experience some emotional catharsis. Both are helpful for processing - I have chopped wood until tears started flowing on many an occasion, and felt much better and more regulated afterward.

Finally, as we covered in the previous part, meditation is crucial for fortifying the nervous system. You need to do it for at least 20 minutes per day in the week leading up to the family holiday. If you can do two sessions of 20 minutes per day, even better. On the day of the holiday, try and get to your family’s place a little early so you can sit in your car and meditate for 20 minutes before you go in - that will refresh your composure just when you need it the most.

If you don’t have an entire week to prepare, and you’ve just found this article on Thanksgiving morning, the most important thing you can do is get outside or to the gym and completely physically exhaust yourself. Afterward, eat a healthy meal, make sure you’re well hydrated and get a nap in. Then, avoid stress and stimulation the rest of the day. Get a good long meditation in before you leave the house, then another in the driveway, then turn and salute Caesar and make your way into the Colosseum.

Fortifying your nervous system is more important than interventions in response to triggers in the moment. Don’t treat it as optional - it’s the lynchpin of your efforts to fight wisely.

Combat First Aid

We wouldn’t send you into battle without a good first aid kit. There are many excellent, manual nervous system interventions you can use to keep yourself calm throughout the holiday. We’ll list our favorites here.

Box (Square) Breathing

A classic, used by psychologists all across the world to help their clients regulate and stay regulated. Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Repeat. You can do this the entire holiday gathering if you want, and it will help keep you soothed and composed.

Cooldown (Pursed-Lip) Breathing

Another breathwork technique, this one is for more acute attacks of excitement. If you find yourself suddenly worked up - angry, anxious or irrationally concerned about the emotional state of a family member, you might be pushing against the threshold of regret. Now’s the time to start cooldown breathing. Breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, then blow the air out through pursed lips for 8 seconds, like you’re blowing through a straw, or trying to cool off a hot cup of coffee. Your lips should be pursed enough that you feel resistance - breathing out should be slow. If you have smaller or bigger lungs, just keep the ratio of 1:2 - smaller people breathe in for 3 seconds and blow out for 6, larger people inhale for 5 seconds and exhale for 10, etc.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

One of the gold standards for anxiety management. Doing PMR means tensing up each major body part, then slowly relaxing them, to manually give your body a sensation of relaxation. Begin with your feet, squeezing and tensing them as much as you can without causing yourself pain. Hold the tension for a few seconds, keeping your attention on the sensation of tightness, and then slowly, slowly release the muscle. Feel every bit of relaxation as you let go, little by little. Repeat with your shins, then your calves, then every major muscle group and body part all the way to the top of your head. The slower and more deliberate you can be with this, the greater the relaxation, and the greater bodily awareness you’ll build over time.

Valsalva Maneuver

Interestingly enough, the same technique that unclogs your ears also stimulates cranial nerves in your face that are connected to the vagus nerve, which sends a signal to the PNS to relax. It’s very simply. Pinch your nose with your fingers and gently blow air into your nasal cavity. You should feel the pressure change, and some mild stimulation in your nose, sinuses and cheeks. It’s subtle, but do this for a minute or so, and you’ll notice the quality of anxious or frustrated thoughts begin to change for the better.

Mammalian Dive Reflex

A strange and fun feature of the human body - when we dive into water, our heart rate drops, we become calm, and our body completely relaxes, so that we can swim effectively. This happens even if our SNS is extremely active - if we were to tense up in water, we’d easily drown. You can use this to manage light anxiety or anger by simply splashing cold water on your face - that’ll give you a small response- but you can also manage panic and intense anger with this reflex. You do this by putting a bowl of cold water (ice water is best) on the ground, kneeling in front of it, and sticking your face in for as long you can hold your breath. Your nostrils need to be completely submerged for this to work. When done properly, the mammalian dive reflex will kick in, you’ll be able to hold your breath much longer than normal, your PNS will activate, and your body will begin the process of relaxing and regulating.

This one’s a little hard to do surreptitiously, of course, so you may need help from a sympathetic family member, or you may need to disappear into a room no one’s using to make it work.

Some people can make this work by holding a bag of ice to their face, plugging their nostrils with it and making sure to make contact with the sinuses, but this doesn’t work for everyone, so it’s worth experimenting with before you to visit your family.

Ice Pack Therapy

I save this one for emergencies. If you feel out of control in any way, or you even notice you’re past a 5 - thinking of mean things to say, or feeling aggressive, but you haven’t acted on it yet - remove yourself from the situation as quickly as you can. Go get an ice pack from the freezer (a bag of frozen vegetables works just fine) and head to the bathroom for some peace and privacy.

First, stick the ice pack on one side of your neck, and leave it there for 15 seconds. Then, stick it on the other side for 15 more seconds. Use cooldown breathing at the same time for maximum effect. If you still feel panicky or out of control, take that ice pack and stick it right in your armpit. This will be quite intense! Just like with your neck, leave it there for 15 seconds, then do the same thing in your other armpit.

There is one final last resort intervention available to you here, if you still feel activated, and you are afraid you’ll do something truly regrettable. Take that ice pack, stick it down the front of your pants, and put it directly on your genitals. I have never met a trigger that survived contact with an ice pack to the balls (or vulva), and I don’t expect I’ll ever hear of one that can.

(NB: Don’t do this with a fresh ice pack. Warm it against your neck and armpits first, and only then use it on your genitals. If the ice pack is right out of the freezer or still covered in frost, there’s a chance it could stick to something down there you really don’t want it to.)

Ahem. That said, one final thing to keep in mind is that, if you’re so activated that it requires an intervention as dramatic as this, you might be better off politely excusing yourself from the holiday celebration and heading home early. Better to suffer the embarrassment and disappointment of a celebration cut short than to damage an important relationship.

Looking Ahead

That’s it for Part Two! In the next installment, we’ll cover the third principle: Empathize Without Abandoning Yourself. In this, you’ll learn how to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand where they’re coming from, without caving on what’s important to you, or losing your nerve. Once it’s uploaded, you’ll be able to find that installation here.

If you’d like to come practice with us, we still have a few seats available for the upcoming cohort of Fight Wise. You’ll be able to rehearse scenarios with others, build your courage, and try out new orientations toward your loved ones that open up your inner resources. You’ll also get the chance to work directly with both Rich and I on any difficult particulars of your situation.

We’d love to see you there!