Have you ever woken in the middle of the night with butterflies in your stomach, a beating heart, or sweaty palms, stressing over not having completed a piece of work or a concern for someone or something? It’s a sign you’ve got a lot on your mind and fear is at the root.
What do you do when this happens?
Do you get up and do the work?
Do you jot down your thoughts on a note pad by the side of your bed?
Do you read a book?
Do you look at your phone or turn the TV on with the hope of falling off to sleep again?
Do you count sheep or other use techniques aimed at wooing you back to sleep?
Whatever you do, the hope is that the fear symptoms subside and we get back to sleep promptly, but not all of us do.
It is considered a disturbed sleep if we’re awake for longer than 30 mins, so sleep professionals say… They also conclude that this amazing human feature, that we call sleep, provides us with our very own onboard therapy unit. Getting a quality nights sleep is central to waking up feeling replenished. But so many people, particularly Social Workers, or so they tell me in countless workshops, just dont wake up feeling replenished. They either have less than the recommended 6-8 hours or the quality of the sleep isn’t good enough.
What if I said to you … if you could access the magic of replenishing high quality sleep while awake, would you jump at the chance? I bet you would…
What conjures up in your mind when you think of the word fear? Does it make you think of a situation in your life or work? Does it spark an emotion or feeling in your body?
We asked these questions of the 230 Social Work participants during a presentation called Neuroscience of fear in Social Work and How To Let-go of It, delivered by me, Jan Carpenter, and co-trainer Sue Skrobanski.
There were a florid of responses to the above questions including: feeling it in the stomach, throat and chest, emotions of panic, overwhelm. anxiety. Feeling powerless. Fear of being blamed, making the wrong decision and not being able to meet deadlines. Fear of death. Headaches, feeling hot in hand. Feeling angry. Walking on eggshells. Sense of dread, feeling shaky, fatigue, brain fog. moving from capable and confident to exhausted and rather scared.
Fear manifests in different ways. Fear, anxiety and phobia are all variations of fear which are prevalent in day to day social work. They are survival based, involuntary Fight Flight Freeze responses to stress. As opposed to worry and caution which are voluntary, intentional and controllable. Fight Flight Freeze is an ancient hardwired involuntary response to fear. A survival response that was designed for when faced with a bear or tiger. Modern day stressors combined with a stressful job is like having that metaphorical bear looking over us day and night.
Neuroscience helps to shed light on the role the nervous systems plays in our stress responses. A boost of stress chemicals giving us the power to fight or run like hell or just freeze, hoping the moment will pass. A toxic mix of Neurochemicals Cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine are fired off in high doses, driving autonomic behaviour, like a fast beating heart, butterflies in the stomach or sweaty palms. They provide a warning sign that we are experiencing stress.
Dr Stephen Porges cites the vagus nerve being central to the process, which starts at the brain stem and wanders parallel to the spine connecting many organs not least the brain, neck, spine, heart, lungs and stomach. There is a bilateral relationship carried by a network of neurons between these organs and the brain via the vagus nerve, which controls many of the body's functions including: breathing, heart rate, Immune response and digestion.
When in fight flight freeze mode stress chemicals give a message to ensure these functions are involuntarily curbed in order to ensure all resources are focused on dealing with the danger. If going on for any longer than short occasional episodes it is going beyond the intended purpose. When enduring a daily increased toxic load within the system it can lead to a pattern of involuntary fear based habitual responses and associated health related concerns. Over time, experiencing this on a daily basis can start to feel out of control and inescapable, causing another level of fear. These are features of negative stress.
Feeling trapped is one of the 4 conditions that contribute to traumatic stress and vicarious trauma. They are: 1. a threatening event ie a lone home visit going wrong; 2. a perceived loss of something meaningful, ie safety or control; 3. a vulnerable electro-chemical landscape ie the body being under stress due to poor sleep, work or personal stress, lack of self care or prior trauma; 4. Inescapability, unable to influence the outcome.
Its this vulnerable landscape that increases the risk of negative stress and, when combined with traumatic stress, it lays a seed bed for an escalation to the freeze response, and feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, overwhelm, wanting to escape, feeling trapped. Chronic stress means our nervous system is in an habitual pattern of increasing fight flight freeze. If we don’t have effective measures to control the stress response, to process the toxic chemicals out, we make ourselves vulnerable to chronic stress and burnout.
One of the objectives of the nervous system is to adjust the systems response to adverse stressors in order to optimise performance within the scope of our capabilities (Root being capacity and abilities) to the extent that we might not feel stressed, but if we dig a little deeper, we may find the system is under a great deal of stress. Increasing our job based abilities through training and reflective practice is crucial, yet inevitably that means increasing volume and complexity of cases. How do we ensure our emotional capacity can take on more stressors?
Not all stress is bad for us. There are 3 types of stress responses. Positive Stress (eustress) is energising, motivating and performance enhancing. Negative Stress (distress) is energy sapping, long term and accumulative and demotivating, particularly at high quantities over time, as is Traumatic Stress. The latter two, negatively impacting on performance, service user outcomes, wellbeing and health.
Our goal then should be to elevate Positive Stress (eustress) in Social Work. The hallmarks are high challenge and high support from managers, leaders and the team around us, resulting in high engagement/flow, and a sense of meaning and achievement in the work we do. Rest and recovery and self care is highly valued, not only to rest, but also to recuperate and heal from the damage of physical and emotional stress and trauma. This approach is associated with higher incidence of resilient neurochemicals and better health outcomes. Attaining Positive Stress is everyone’s business.
‘No one said a happy life was not a life without stress. Indeed it’s a life of meaningful stress.’
There are 4 primary drivers of stress: personal, professional, team and organisational. We all have a responsibility to promote staff wellbeing. It should feel like a partnership between managers and leaders seeking to reduce unnecessary stressors and Social Workers, personally and professionally, building a resilient inner landscape.
Many peoples personal choice is to take the pleasure approach to wellbeing, spending many hours and money soothing stress doing less than healthy activities, like hours of TV, comfort food and alcohol to name a few. While feel-good neurochemicals are generated, they only serve to alleviate discomfort, rather than heal the accumulative damage caused by stress.
‘We each need to do more than alleviate discomfort if we want to repair the damage of by negative and traumatic stress and improve wellbeing’
Stage one is awareness. One participant said just knowing this stuff is healing. Awareness is curative. That is knowledge, observing our emotions, knowing what we don’t want and what we do want. Journaling is an essential tool.
Stage 2 involves accountability, ensuring little and often action to build a resilient electro- chemical landscape, by way of improving the quality and momentum of our movement, sleep, nutrition, rest and breathing. By doing so we access the positive stress loop. These are essential activities in our wellbeing toolkit. What we measure improves.
The next level is healing damage caused by stress. The practice of Letting-go results in exiting what no longer works for us, ie, processing out recurring unhelpful emotions and bringing unhelpful patterns/habits to an end, that previously laid a seedbed for fear based emotions and trauma to thrive.
Havening® is a neuroscience informed technique founded by Dr Ron Ruden. It uses self touch of arms, hands and face, to generate feel good electro-chemicals to create a neuro-biologically safe internal environment that enables healing. We combine that with a range of deceptively simple techniques and we have the tools to rewire our brains to let-go of negative and traumatic stress. We also combine it with breathing techniques. Just 5-10 minutes of Havening can be enough to process out unhelpful emotions, which also helps to reduce uncomfortable symptoms of stress. The objective of every Havening session is to make a measurable positive difference. For the stomach churning to stop or the dial significantly turned down. For the excessive beating heart to slow down. For the pain in the neck to go away. Used daily, little and often, it works to systemically let-go of unwanted emotions and feelings in the body, by way of reducing the toxic load in the mind/body and serving to prevent a recurrence of negative and traumatic stress. Essentially rewiring the mind, Havening then is one of the essential tools in our wellbeing toolkit.
In a 5 minute guided havening session, during the presentation, participants recalled just one distressing fear emotion, as cited in paragraph 3 above, rating them from 0 to 10 (where 10 is a high level of distress). Many of them left the session feeling much more positive citing the following emotions: 'hope, peace, curiosity, relaxation, calm, fantastic, softness, refreshed, strong, warm'. Upon inviting participants to recall their fear emotions all those who commented cited that the rating had come down. It was evident that for many participants this 5 minute session helped them to improve their inner landscape.
I will conclude with some words from attendees. One person ended with ‘its the first time I have smiled today after a stressful day at work, thank you’ another person said ‘wow that was amazing, i feel so relaxed and yet alert, in a good way… Havening really takes you to haven!’
Author Jan Carpenter
Founder of Turn Over a New L.E.A.F.®
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