Ep #161: Reset, Rewire, Reconnect: Using Nervous System Regulation & Breathwork to End Negative Patterns

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who want to move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly want to 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, we'll get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Hi, welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm talking about something that I love talking about, which is nervous system regulation and how we can actually support ourselves to show up differently in life and in divorce and in co-parenting and in parenting. And in fill in the blank. Listen, here's what I know. Life divorce, co-parenting, it's stressful, but staying stuck in the same reactive patterns makes co-parenting even harder. And that's why I wanted to talk about nervous system regulation today and how we can use one thing that is completely free and always available to us to break free from the cycles of frustration, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm. What is that free thing that is always with you, your breath. So we're going to dive into ways for you to shift out of that survival mode that so often we get in how to increase and improve our communication and create calmer, more connected experiences in our lives. I want you to keep listening. If you have ever felt triggered by your ex, if you've ever felt overwhelmed by the single parenting or if you feel completely exhausted by the emotional rollercoaster, that can be our lives.

If you said yes to any of these, I want you to stay tuned because we are going to talk about how to reset, rewire, and reconnect both for yourself and for your kiddos. So if there's one thing that I hear over and over from moms and dads that I talked to on the breakthrough calls, which are totally free and available to you, if you are feeling like you want some help or a different perspective on your situation, I'm happy to jump on a call. The link's in the show notes, so please do that. But on those co-parenting breakthrough calls and with my clients, the one thing I hear over and over and over is the emotional toll that is being taken from being stuck in the same pattern day in and day out and not being able to change it, the emotional toll and the physical toll that the stress from the divorce and co-parenting takes on us and I hear over and over is, I know I shouldn't do that, or I know I shouldn't engage, or I can't understand why I keep putting myself in the same situation over and over and over again.

Listen, I've got my hand up here too. All of us get into negative patterns that we kind of get trapped in, and until we can start to recognize and understand what's going on, we're just staying them. And so that's what I want to help you do today is start to understand how that stress and how those past conflicts are actually keeping you stuck in this cycle and creating more of what you don't want and how we can use regulation and our breath to actually help us move forward. So we're going to talk about nervous system. We're going to talk about some breath work. I'm going to teach you some really simple, easy ways that you can start to put this into practice today and how you can start to apply these techniques to your co-parenting so that you can really be responsive, taking responsibility instead of reacting to what's going on around you.

All right, sound good? So let's dive in. So let's first look at how is the stress and the past conflict, all of the quote evidence that we have for why things won't work, why the person is difficult, why we are stuck in the situation that we are, how that keeps us trapped, trapped in our stress response, and what is a stress response? Well, there's fight, flight, freeze and fawn, right? I'm not going to do a deep dive here into nervous system regulation, but let's just say that when we go through a divorce, and yes, especially in high conflict, but even just your run of the mill divorce, there is a lot of stress and the toll that that can take on your nervous system is a lot. But what really happens is when our nervous system becomes used to conditioned to stay in this very active reactive stage, it's like staying in this hypervigilance.

That's one thing I hear from moms and dads so often. We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, always waiting for what's next. We've become conditioned to the stress and we almost can't imagine life without it. We say intellectually we don't want it, but actually our nervous system has become really used to it. And so that becomes kind of the default, right? Like that normal, your body and your brain in the stress state start to perceive everything that's going on around us as ongoing threats, even when immediate danger isn't there, even when it isn't a threat. And it's because of, again, all of the past conflict. It's when we have unresolved emotions, when we have that chronic stress that just day in and day out keeps us in a dysregulated nervous system state. And that makes it extremely difficult to be able to respond calmly or rationally.

So how does this stress response really show up? Well, let's talk about it in terms of co-parenting dynamics. Like I said, there's fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, fight, flight and freeze. We hear all the time. Fawning is a little bit different, a little more nuanced, but we're going to touch on it. So let's go through each of them. So when we are in the triggered stress response and we are in fight mode, we are reacting with anger, with defensiveness, with criticism. We might feel the need to win the argument with the other person, always needing to have that last word with your acts, always needing to find the exact way so that you can get them on board with you or finding that one shred of evidence or argument that's going to help you win. Fight mode also looks like yelling, being short-tempered with our kids because we're just so overstressed, it might look like struggling to compromise or a struggle to deescalate conflicts.

It's almost like we're just constantly adding fuel to the fire. That's what fight mode can look like. What is flight mode – right? Flight can look like avoiding communication even when a conversation is really, really needed. But you just feel like that you have no ability to do it, and all you want to do is avoid. It might look like feeling really overwhelmed by the co-parenting responsibilities and withdrawing emotionally, kind of just checking out. Maybe there's things you need to do, but you just end up doom scrolling because it's just too overwhelming to even take a step into flight mode can look a lot like distracting ourselves again, certainly with social media, but also with maybe work or working out or socializing or any other means to escape that discomfort that we're feeling. So that's fight and flight. What does freeze mode look like? Well, the freeze stress response looks like feeling emotionally numb, just stuck, paralyzed.

When conflicts arise, it might look like struggling to make decisions about parenting or communication with your ex, and you just don't make any. It might feel like you're just shut down instead of advocating for yourself or your kids. You just kind of go into shutdown mode. Now let's go to fawning, right? This is a newer of the stress response and one that isn't talked as much about, but fawning looks like trying to people please to avoid a conflict even when it's at the expense of your needs. It might look like over accommodation for your ex demands just to keep the peace where you start to take on all of the responsibility and accommodating and compromising just to sort of meet the demands of the other person so that it keeps everybody sort of copacetic. It might look like struggling with boundaries, which then lead to resentment and burnout.

So I'm curious, have you found yourself in any of these? Again, I got to raise my hand on all of these, but when we are chronically stressed, when we have really been engaged for years or months in continued conflict, when there has been really difficult situations that we've moved through or chronic stress, we can get trapped in these modes. And when we do, the unfortunate part, when it is not dealt with, it becomes our new normal. That hypervigilance becomes just what we're used to and when we're kind of stuck there, we don't have the capability or the capacity to choose differently. So what's the impact of this kind of unregulated nervous system on our parenting and our co-parenting? Well, like I just said, we really get trapped and stuck in that stress response and it directly affects our ability to co-parent or parent effectively. So I'm just going to name a few.

It could look like increased reactivity where those even small triggers really make you feel overwhelmed and lead to emotional outbursts or complete shutdown. It could be just a text or a small disagreement over schedules that puts you into this massive emotional feeling and your kids might be witnessing or absorbing this stress and that will impact their emotional wellness. Unregulated nervous system can also make it very difficult to communicate because when we're dysregulated our prefrontal cortex, that part of the brain that we use for problem solving, for logical thinking, for willpower, for delaying gratification, all the good things that are needed, it just goes offline, right? It's just we are offline. And so that makes it harder for us to listen to other people. It makes it harder for us to process information, and it makes it really hard for us to respond calmly to other people.

And unregulated nervous system also keeps us emotionally exhausted and leads to burnout. Chronic stress keeps you in a cycle of depletion, right? Making it hard to be present, making it nearly impossible for you to feel really engaged and connected to others and to your children. Parenting ends up feeling more like a survival than a connection experience. We're just trying to make it through. And I think the one thing that really hits every time I know when I talk to parents is the unintended role modeling that we're doing for our kids when we are living in a dysregulated state because our kids absorb our emotional state, they can feel what's going on, and they also are watching us for cues of how to cope with stressful situations. And when we are not coping, when we are dysregulated and they are seeing constant conflict or avoidance or us completely emotionally shutting down, they might start to learn those coping mechanisms and do similar patterns in their own relationships.

That's not what we want for our children. And so to be a role model for our children, we want to be a positive role model and really be able to move forward for them. So what is the solution? Well, that's what we're going to talk about. It's really rewiring the nervous system, but we're going to start just today with one simple thing to help us shift out of the reaction so we can be more responsive, help us stay more present and emotionally available, and improve our mental, emotional and physical health. And we're going to do that with breath. I'm going to offer you three breathing techniques that you can use in different situations, but can all be really effective. So breath is the one part of our body that is both involuntary, meaning it happens without us thinking about it and voluntary meaning we have control over it.

And when we can use our breath to actually help us regulate our nervous system, help us become more calm and grounded, we become more powerful. Listen, power comes one breath at a time. And so why is it so important that we do this? Because we need to be able to respond, not just react to the difficult interactions, which by the way are going to happen, not because necessarily you have the worst ex in the world, but because we're people with free will and emotions and crap happening and difficult stuff happens all the time, we want to be able to respond to that. We want to be able to use these techniques to be able to ground ourselves before we go into tough conversations or into the transition transitions with the littles. And the big kids are really hard, and we don't want to be as emotional as they are or as reactive as they are.

We want to be really calm and grounded so we can be that anchor for them. And breathwork helps us do that. We can use breathwork before we have to respond to triggering texts or emails before we have to have a face-to-face conversation. And ultimately when we do this for ourselves, we can help our kids regulate their own emotions, certainly through our example, but also teaching them how to do it. Okay, so I'm going to teach you, I said three. These are very simple ways. So one simple practice to reset maybe before a stressful moment, right before you have to go in and see your acts, or maybe before the transition starts or before a difficult conversation, I want you to use grounding breath work. This is really to pull our energy in and down, grounding us into our own power. So we're going to use what's called a halo active breath. It's very simple. It's breathing in through your nose and releasing it through your mouth.

It can be done at any speed that feels comfortable for you. I don't recommend super short anything like that because that actually is a little too activating, but just a natural breath in maybe for two or three counts and out do three or five or 10 of those. Game changer. Super simple, right? Okay, let's go to this next one. So maybe you need a technique when we get really stressed out inside of a situation. This might be looking like you're in the conversation or maybe right before still, but maybe the other person is kind of in your visibility or you're hearing them and you want to be able to calm yourself down. Well, we can use box breathing. I've said this before on the podcast, but I'll just go over it again here. Box breathing is four sets of equal breath. So we go always in through our nose in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four through your mouth or through your nose, and then hold for four. So again, let's do that right now together. So breathe in for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four.

I am guessing if you just did that with me, you feel a little calmer. I know I do. And so that is one that we can certainly do while we're in the middle of it. We can use that four square breathing. I like to imagine as I'm going in for four, that I see the line going up on the box hold for four, it goes to the right. I exhale down for four, and then I hold for four, and I see the line go to the left. So just drawing that box in my mind. The last one. So this one is actually used to stimulate and calm the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the largest nerve in the body that runs from the base of the skull all the way down and actually wraps around, right? It's the Latin word for wander. So it's a wandering nerve.

It sort of encapsulates a lot of things. And a vagus nerve is really one that we want to be able to help us calm and soothe so that we can shift out of survival and into safety. And so one of my favorites for this is the 4, 7, 8 breath. This is for any time that you're feeling overwhelmed, anxious, but those anxious times we can really soothe the vagus nerve. And we do that by breathing in through our nose for four, we hold it for seven, and then we exhale using the sound of the ocean for eight. So breathing out like you're breathing out through a straw and making this noise.

So let's do it together. We're going to breathe in for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight with the sand of the ocean. This one just calms me right down. So the 4, 7, 8 is an easy breath to use for any time that we're anxious. Again, to shift ourselves out of that stress response, out of that survival mode. And in to safety. Listen, all of these things can be done without anyone knowing what you're doing around you. And these are beautiful things to be able to teach our children, and we can just model them. That grounding breath when things are starting to get a little crazy in the house or a little activated, or we're having trouble with the transition, just offering that slow breathing in through our nose, breathing out through our mouth.

Such a beautiful way to calm ourselves down or when we need a little bit more structure. Using that box, breathing that box, breath. And then finally for really anxious times, adding in that vagus nerve activation of 4, 7, 8, breathing. So I hope that these have offered you some ideas. And listen, you might say Mikki breath is not going to change anything, but here's where it really does. When we start to use our breath to keep ourselves calmer, when we start to bring ourselves down, I like to think about it as letting your breath be the first word of every sentence, right? So when your other co-parent has texted you, when you're talking on the phone, when you guys are in an argument, when you fill in the blank, instead of just reacting and saying whatever comes to you, I want you to let your breath be the first thing you say, meaning you breathe in, exhale, and that creates space.

This is what creates the opportunity to choose. This is what creates the space for you to be able to respond instead of reacting. This is completely possible. And here I was thinking about one of my dear clients that I love, Bethany, when she and I started working together, there was zero communication. She was in a full stress response from all of the conflict all of the years of everything that had been going on. And they were not able to have any communication outside the court appointed app, right? And even that was so triggering that we had to get to a point where she would only do it once a week, right? She could only look at these messages once a week because it was just too overwhelming, and she would go into complete shutdown. So by starting to use the breath to regulate her nervous system, to start to learn a different way of being, a different way of calming herself down, she started to notice that she was able to respond differently.

She noticed that she was feeling less exhausted. She was noticing that she did less time ruminating on all the things that she had to do, or the unanswered emails or feeling stressed or even noticing that she was constantly feeling that that other shoe was going to drop. And when she felt all of those things, she wasn't present most importantly to her children. And so instead, we were able to help her use her breath to start to gain more and more control over her breath, over her experience where she could start to use these tools to respond. And then she was able to notice that she was actually interacting with her kids differently. She was calmer at home, and we started to apply these things then to her ex, where she was able to learn how to respond effectively, create boundaries, keep herself in a safe space out of that survival mode.

Out of that stress response, she was able to then put her kids' wellbeing in the center and start to remove her emotional reactions and triggers from the situation, which gave her more power. It gave her more clarity and more perspective. Ultimately, she was able to start communicating quicker, more efficiently, but they were able to talk when they saw each other at drop off and at transitions, she was able to text without getting triggered. She was really able to change the pattern and the negative pattern they had been in. She stopped taking the bait and she started taking control over herself and how she responded, she told me one day that the freedom that she felt from watching him lob one of his normal insults that came that way. It was like she said, that game of hot potato where the potato, he threw it and she just watched it land, and she turned around and she walked the other way.

The freedom that she felt from that was the best gift that she had ever given herself. And you know what? It started with one breath at a time. Really choosing to regulate her nervous system, choosing to use her breath to show her a different way of being. And this is available for you too. I know it because I've experienced it in my own life. I work with clients and see it all the time. But you are so powerful. You have every capability of changing the dynamic, I promise you. And it starts when you start to shift yourself out of the stress responses and into response, into calm groundedness to find out what's next. Because when you have that groundedness, when you know that you can trust yourself to take that breath, to take that beat before you react, and you can trust yourself to respond game changer, because then you're able to enter into those big sort of negotiations or arguments even right?

When you are willing to take a stand for what is needed, what is right, what is in your children's best interest, what is in your best interest, you are willing to do that, right? You are willing to fight for yourself, for your children, and you do it from a place of love and from power and from calm, groundedness, all centered in your breath. This is what happens when we start breathing differently, and this is what can happen for you. I hope these tools have been helpful today. Again, if you need any help, you have any questions, click the links in the show notes, get in touch with me. I'm happy to walk through and find any additional resources or support that might be helpful to you. But I really appreciate you being with me here. Thank you so much. I'll see you next time. And in the meantime, remember, you're loved. I believe in you, and you can do this.

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Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parenting with confidence.com. I'll see you next week.