How to stimulate your vagus nerve, stop procrastinating, and reinterpret stressful situations.
Welcome to the Big Feelings Weekly #002, the newsletter of Really Big Feelings. This week: bunnies with PTSD, monastic love songs, stimulating your vagus nerve, and more. Subscribe at reallybigfeelings.com.
One big question: What is therapy?
The basic work of health professionals in general, and of psychotherapists in particular, is to become full human beings and to inspire full human-beingness in other people who feel starved about their lives. When we say a full human being here, we mean a person who not only eats, sleeps, walks, and talks, but someone who also experiences a basic state of wakefulness. It might seem to be very demanding to define health in terms of wakefulness, but wakefulness is actually very close to us. We can experience it. In fact, we are touching it all the time. — Chögyam Trungpa
Go deeper → Read: Becoming a Full Human Being
Headlines
✴️ Trauma is hot right now. Did you know that The Body Keeps the Score is #1 on the NYT list of bestselling books for Paperback Nonfiction? I didn’t, either, but that’s good news for our children. Ezra Klein does a sprawling interview with Bessel van der Kolk; here’s the transcript. (The New York Times)
🐅 Animals have PTSD, too. In Waking the Tiger, the story goes that animals shake off trauma and return to life as usual. Researchers studying the ecology of fear disagree, at least in part. One example: Snowshoe hares getting stalked by coyotes get PTSD — and PTSD, “with its intrusive flashback memories, hypervigilance and anxiety, is part of an ancient, evolved response to danger.” (Knowable)
💭 How to stop procrastinating. Procrastination seems to go hand-in-hand with depression and shrinking motivation. Here’s a practical guide to working with procrastination from a business school professor. Pairs well with therapy. (Psyche)
👧🏽 Why do we keep ignoring children? This writer is on point: “Today’s public schools serve as institutional spaces where children, who once worked in factories, could now have something valuable to do while their parents contributed to the economy. It serves as a way to keep children occupied while the adults take on economically productive tasks.” (The Conversation)
🧠 Thinking your way out of the pandemic. A very large study by a group called the Psychological Science Accelerator found that cognitive reappraisal — in the form of “refocusing” or “reconstruing” — helped people decrease negative emotion and increase positive emotion. Limitation: The study looked at so-called “single-session” interventions, not long-term emotional health. (Vox)
Inspirations
🍰 Aran Goyoaga’s emotional food photography and baked goods (which probably works well as a single-session intervention).
📖 Walt Whitman’s song to himself.
🎨 Yuko Shimizu’s illustration of trees and their roots.
🎵 Monastic Love Songs by John David Morris.
🎙️ John Welwood on healing the core wound of the heart.
Concepts
Cognitive reappraisal: A cognitive behavioral therapy technique meant to help work with overwhelming emotions by reinterpreting the situation that’s causing distress. Let’s say you lose your wallet or whatever holds your credit cards. Here’s how that spins out into further distress: “I lost my wallet! I screw everything up. Just another example of how life doesn’t go my way. I’m worthless.”
In cognitive reappraisal, you might instead reframe losing your license and credit cards as, “Wow, I was really moving fast this morning. Thankfully, I can replace my credit cards within days, and maybe it’s a good time to restart my meditation practice and slow down a bit.” Studies show that this type of reframing can help down-regulate emotions and parts of the brain related to arousal, such as the amygdala and the insula — at least in the short term. (Which is to say: Not a good strategy for chronic dysregulation related to trauma and early childhood wounds, but a useful technique for improving day-to-day experience.)
Go deeper → Scientific Paper: Cognitive Reappraisal and Acceptance: Effects on Emotion, Physiology, and Perceived Cognitive Costs
Practices
“Basic exercise” for stimulating the vagus nerve: The vagus nerve (or “wandering” nerve, or cranial nerve X) is the longest of the 12 cranial nerves. It travels from the brain stem to the neck, thorax, and down to the abdomen, touching many of our important organs and regulating how they work. Heart rate, digestion, sweating, coughing and swallowing, speaking — all of these are impacted by information collected through the vagus nerve. The wandering nerve deserves its own newsletter (which we’ll do in the future), but for now, let’s just say when we give it a signal that we’re safe, our whole body responds to that cue with more ease and better overall health. Here’s craniosacral therapist Stanley Rosenberg’s “basic exercise” for stimulating the vagus nerve.
- Lie on your back.
- Interweave the fingers on both hands and place them behind your head.
- Without turning your head, look to the right.
- Remain here until you spontaneously yawn or swallow.
- Return to the neutral state with head and eyes straight.
- Repeat on the other side.
