Ep #142: Mastering Your Reactions: The Key to Healthier Relationships

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name's Mikki Gardner, I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome back to the podcast friend. Do you ever have those moments? Maybe you know that you need to calm down, but you just can't get yourself to do it and end up unloading on someone else, or you don't wanna say those bad things about the other co-parent to your children, but they just slip out or you know you really wanna make better choices, whether it's with your health, your wellness, your rest, but you just can't seem to do it. That's what we're gonna be talking about today. But before we dive into the episode, I wanna offer you an opportunity to grab one of the audit spots that I have. These co-parenting audits are for you to be able to help yourself get clarity, get balance, and take action in the direction you wanna go. What it is, is it's an opportunity where I'm gonna walk you through a life audit process.

We can look at your co-parenting relationship, we can look at your marriage, we can look at any relationship that you have going on, maybe it's with your children, and we're gonna focus on that one area, and we're going to flush out what's working, what's not working. Then once we do that, you and I are then going to get on a one-on-one call, where we have one hour together to really decide what is it that you want, and create an actionable plan to help you start doing it. And then you are going to have me in your back pocket via Voxer, which is an awesome app for us to communicate back and forth for two weeks so that you absolutely have all the support and accountability you need to actually start to see results. And here's why we're doing this, because this is a rinse and repeat cycle.

Once you learn how to do this, you start applying it in other relationships in other areas of your life. But we need the help and the guidance to start to learn how to walk through that process. This is a super low cost at only 297, and you get a ton of hands-on one-to-one time with me, your coach, so that we can make sure that you are not living one more day wasting your time, feeling stressed or hitting your head against the wall when things don't change. I want you to start to create change in your own life and feel that success. So, I want you to go use the link in the show notes and grab your audit spot today. You can also go to my Instagram and it's in the link tree there, but let's talk about the conversation that we're having today. There's those moments, and I hear so often from my clients and they say, "Mikki, I know what I should be doing, but I just can't seem to do it."

We have the awareness around what we do or don't wanna be doing, but when the struggle comes, when it gets really uncomfortable, we sort of don't have the capacity to keep going. There's no integration. We have the knowledge, but the knowledge isn't being integrated into our daily action. This first and foremost is totally normal. I don't want you to think that anything has gone wrong. And what we need to understand is that if we want something different, we have to act differently. And more than that, if we want a different result in our relationships, in our parenting, in our health, we cannot continue to do the same thing. We have to learn to believe, to think, to act and to feel differently so that we get the different result. But that gets really, really hard when we get triggered, when we're activated, when we're exhausted, when we're stressed, because our nervous system is dysregulated, not because there's anything wrong with you, there's not my dear.

What most of the time is happening is we have a dysregulated nervous system, which makes it nearly impossible to be able to integrate the changes that we actually wanna see, right. And that's what I wanted to talk about today, because in order to grow and to transform the struggle is necessary. We have to be uncomfortable. So, really what we need to learn to do is stepping into getting more comfortable with the uncomfortable. And here's the good news, it's totally doable. So, even when we have a very dysregulated nervous system, even when we've been that way for quite a long time, repair is available to you, we humans are pretty amazing. And when we start to get different tools and skills, we can manage our life totally differently, and that's when we start to see really different results. So, I wanna just talk a little bit.

When I say nervous system regulation, you might be like, okay, "Mikki, I've heard about this." You might be like, "What are you talking about?" So I wanna just give you a really quick sort of overview. There is an autonomic nervous system. We have a full nervous system in our body that controls everything from our heartbeat to digestion to the way that we feel. One part of this is the autonomic nervous system, and this is really an important part when it comes to our emotional wellbeing, and it can be divided into two parts, which is the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. And both of them will utilize hormones to prepare us for what our brain thinks we need to do. And specifically, when the brain perceives a threat, it turns on our sympathetic nervous system. You've probably heard of this, the fight or flight response, right?

You might have a racing heart, some sweaty palms. It's your body's way of preparing for a stressful situation. The parasympathetic system though, on the other hand kicks in when the brain thinks that it's time to recover, when it's time to calm down and chill. So, the balance of these two systems is really, really important. The fight or flight sort of gets a bad rap these days, but actually both are very necessary and needed. Balance is really the key. And when I say balance, it's learning how to regulate so that you can have both sides of the coin. What we're really looking to do is have flexibility in our nervous system, so we're not living in the sympathetic nervous system living in that fight or flight or freeze that we hear about all the time. Because when we're living there, we do not have the ability to think rationally, to make decisions, to be clearheaded.

No. Our body is being flooded with stress hormones to get us to either move or to freeze. Fight or flight is all about taking action. It's about mobilize. It's moving towards or away from something. But when we have the freeze response, which is another one, the activation is more on the inside, and that one is the energy in the body is working to immobilize us so that we free. All of these things are helpful. They're not helpful when they take over. And this is where nervous system regulation, learning how to calm the system down, learning how to get back into that flexibility so that we can move through the stressors so that we can move through the triggers, but that we keep moving and we don't get stuck there. A lot of times people think that nervous system regulation, when we talk about that, is about calming down or being chill. It is not.

A regulated nervous system means that you are simply at choice, meaning you are flexible and available to make choices about what's next. And we have to be in a place where our actual thinking mind, our prefrontal cortex is online. So, what happens when we are dysregulated? Well, when we're feeling stressed, our body has that natural response to prepare us for the situation. Again, that heart rate goes up, the palms get sweaty, our muscles tense. We're really thinking about how we are going to either challenge or escape whatever is happening. When our bodies are always in high alert this is where the problems come in because our bodies are not designed to be under constant stress. When the sympathetic nervous system is working all the time our bodies are continually flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, and this creates health issues.

In the short term, we might just feel tired, irritable, or have trouble sleeping, but over long periods of time, we can get much more serious health issues, high blood pressure, weakened immune function, heart issues. And I know that so many of us from our lives, from divorce, from trying to take care of the children to hold down a job, to be a single parent. Listen, it's stressful. It is. And with the cost of everything going up, life is so stressful. But that's why I wanted to come with this message today, because even in those moments, even when everything is so difficult and we are so stressed, you have the capacity to regulate your own nervous system so that you have the flexibility to move through it with more grace, with more ease, with more decisiveness, with more intention. And that's what I want for you.

Listen, we can't stop the difficult things from coming all the time. And we can't control our environment and everyone around us so that nothing bad happens. No, we have to learn how to move through it with as much choice and with as much intention as we can. And so, I wanted to really talk about that because that's where we get into where we feel like the struggle and the uncomfortable, and we have the awareness, but we just don't know how to integrate it. Well, it starts with learning how to regulate our nervous system. Before I get into how we do it, how do we know that we have a dysregulated nervous system? Let's go through a couple of the signs. Basically, a dysregulated nervous system is the body's way of responding to too much or too little. It's that off balance state where we are not at choice, where we are not flexible, where we get stuck.

Recognizing the signs and understanding it can help us get back to that flexibility, being able to promote relaxation, steadiness, clear headedness, clear thinking. So, here are some signs to say that you may be experiencing a dysregulated nervous system. Anxiety, panic attacks, digestive issues, trouble sleeping, constant fatigue, muscle pain. There's outside stressors that can disrupt our nervous system as well. Like I just said, chronic stress, traumatic events, poor sleeping habits, unhealthy diet, not having any downtime. So, we have to understand that there are so many things at play here, but what I really want you to take away from this is that you have the ability, my friend, to have more agency and more control over your experience. And so, I wanted to offer you a few ideas on how you can do that. So it starts again with that awareness and everything starts with awareness.

Awareness of the fact that maybe you are triggered, maybe you do feel dysregulated. So, awareness is the key. But then before we can get to choice we have to make sure that we're really addressing what's going on inside of your body so that you can regulate your nervous system, have that clearheaded thinking, come back online and move forward. One way to do this is to breathe. [laughter] Breathing is actually part of our nervous system, and it is an unconscious, automatic thing that happens. It's actually the only thing in our nervous system that is both unconscious and conscious, because what we can do is use our breathing to be able to calm ourselves down. One really great breathing technique is to be able to have an extended exhale. And what this does is it actually allows our sympathetic nervous system to calm down, and it activates the parasympathetic. That's the rest and digest.

That's the one that sort of restores the calm back in. So, this might look like taking a deep breath in through your nose, maybe for three seconds, and then doing a slow exhale out of your mouth for double the time. So in through your nose, 1, 2, 3, and then exhaling for six, and then just repeating, breathing in, and then allowing an extended exhale softly to come out. That is an excellent way to allow our nervous system to relax. Another way to calm our nervous system and regulate our nervous system is moving our body. Exercise is a great way to relieve stress and regulate our nervous system. You can take a walk, practice yoga, have a dance party in your living room to your favorite song. Listen any of these things may help relieve the tension and have your body feeling more relaxed.

But it's important that we actually allow ourselves, because so many times when we are dysregulated, we either shut down completely or we're just spinning, spinning, spinning. So, we actually need to come back to our body and to allow that movement to move through. Meditation, that is an awesome way to reduce stress and restore balance to our nervous system. I actually put this one less in the sort of in the moment, although it is very relaxing and more as a preventative technique. That's why we meditate every day so that we build the muscle to be able to center our thoughts and calm our mind so that we have more capacity available to us. Singing and laughing can both stimulate the vagus nerve, which is a main nerve in our parasympathetic nervous system, and it helps us feel relaxed. Even just making a humming sound can be really calming for the nervous system, and it helps us increase the oxygen and increase our energy and mood.

Giving yourself a massage even it's just on your temples, your neck, your arms, your feet can help you relieve stress or wrapping your own arms around yourself and giving yourself a hug to provide comfort and a sense of security. I'm doing it right now. I invite you if you can, to do it as well. Another one that I love is connecting with nature. Sitting outside, feeling the sun on your skin, listening to the birds, if you have those sounds available to you, or putting your feet on the earth. If you can put your feet in the grass, your hand or back against a tree, it is one of the most wonderful ways to calm our nervous system. If you don't have grass or a tree available, just putting your feet barefoot on the earth, even if that's cement or the ground in which you're standing on right now, and just grounding yourself, breathing in and out, feeling the weight in your feet is extremely helpful.

Another one which my clients love, is what we do in session, which is co-regulation. This is where people tune into each other's emotional state and helps stabilize and balance their nervous system. What this does is this allows us to trust another person and practice trusting and using empathy by sharing and expressing feeling. When I'm in session with clients, I hold the regulation of my nervous system so that they can attune to mine and I attune to them, and we're able to help regulate even when we feel dysregulated. Having someone who is regulated helps you come back to that place. That's one of the reason coaching is so helpful, is we learn how to do things in session that we can then take out into our lives. This is where the integration gets built up. When we learn how to regulate ourselves in session, when we learn how to process our emotions and regulate our emotions in session, we can do it outside more and more.

We can make those healthy choices in session, and then we start to make those healthy choices outside. This is where having either a really good therapist or a really good coach can be so beneficial to transformation and healing because it just helps you move forward so much faster. And learning how to support yourself so that you can do this for the rest of your life. And the last thing I'll say about regulating nervous systems is another preventative, which is prioritizing sleep. Sleep is so important. Our bodies need to be rejuvenated, rested and restored, and that only happens during rest and sleep. So, we need time for our brain and our neurons and everything to talk with one another, to filter out everything it doesn't need. Sleeping actually clears your mind from the stressors. But we have to allow for and prioritize sleep to be able to get there.

So, I gave you a bunch of ideas. A few ideas to try to see how you can start to regulate your own nervous system. When we have a dysregulated nervous system, we can get really addicted to it. It's like a natural set point that stress, that intensity. It's what we're used to, and it just becomes the new normal. So, in order to feel differently, we have to create a different normal in our nervous system. We have to learn how to actually calm everything down so we have that flexibility so that we're not constantly flooded with the hormones that keep the cycle going. It's like we can actually get addicted to the anxiety, to the chaos and the conflict. So, we have to be willing to do things differently so that we can create more and more moments of wellbeing, more moments of feeling safe, connected, at peace, so that we can learn how to self-regulate ourselves so that we don't need it from other people.

Listen, it's a beautiful thing to have other people soothing you and helping you, but we don't wanna be dependent on other people to be our source of safety and connection. You wanna do that for you, and you are totally capable of it, I promise you. And it takes learning different tools, different ways to start to be more comfortable in the uncomfortable, to be okay struggling, because the struggle is necessary. You can do this, and I want you to know that you can. If you have any questions, you know where to find me. You can click the link in the show notes and grab an audit spot with me where we can work together and help you really focus on this. Or you can shoot me an email. Always feel free to do that at [email protected]. I hope you have a beautiful week. I hope it's filled of moments of awareness, of regulating yourself, of calming yourself, of getting back to a place where you have the mental and the emotional flexibility to move forward and create the life and the family and the home that you want. You can do this, my friend, and I'm here cheering for you in case no one else tells you today. I love you and you've got this.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff. This podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or a qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week.

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