Resource, Resilience and Regulation, Part 1: Orienting to Resources
This is the first article in a series in which I share easy to implement practices to help foster greater resilience and regulation in your nervous system. This introduction focuses upon the practice of orienting to resources and serves as the foundation for all subsequent practices. Orienting to resources is typically the first intervention I offer Somatic Experiencing clients to help them feel more grounded, settled, and relaxed, as well as more curious about their felt sense. The felt sense is the awareness of one’s internal sensory/energetic/emotional landscape.
Before sharing the practice itself, I will define a few terms and briefly explain the principles that underlie orienting to resources. For the purpose of this discussion, a resource is anything with which you associate comfort, support, strength, safety, enjoyment, pleasure, and connection. Examples might include the soothing tone of a friend’s voice, the invigorating smell of citrus, the soft warmth of your favorite hoodie, or the breathtaking sight of a star-filled night sky in the countryside.
Nervous system regulation refers to how your body's control center, the autonomic nervous system, manages and coordinates every activity, such as breathing, moving, and feeling, in order to maintain optimal function. Being in a state of optimal regulation is referred to as coherence. Resilience refers to your capacity to rebound from adversity in at least as strong a state as you were prior to the events.
Now, let’s explore how the brain responds to orienting to resources as compared with orienting to perceived threat. Focusing attention upon resources promotes coherence and, when practiced regularly, rewires the brain for more resilience and regulation. On the contrary, focusing upon perceived threat drives the nervous system into survival physiology, better known as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Being in chronic survival physiology negatively impacts memory, learning, and emotional regulation.
Because of how we are wired as humans, we are instinctually predisposed toward a phenomenon known as negativity bias, wherein we pay more attention to and place more weight upon perceived threat than upon supportive resources. This bias has evolutionary roots, as it likely conferred survival advantages in our ancestral environments in which attunement to potential threats was crucial for survival. For example, hunter-gatherers foraging in the savanna were more likely to survive if they focused their attention upon the sound of a twig snapping in the brush (indicating a potential predator) than if they tuned into the enchanting sound of a songbird.
In contrast to hunter-gatherer societies, our hyperstimulated modern culture is filled with a high density of stimuli that trigger the stress response, such as loud noises from autos and machinery and rapid fire images in media that strain our orienting responses. Though these stimuli are not inherently dangerous in and of themselves, our negativity bias causes the nervous system to respond to them by mobilizing a defensive response in preparation for worst case outcomes, resulting in a vicious cycle of stress response activation and a perpetual unsettled feeling.
The negativity bias often leads to a skewed perception of reality, in which excessive focus on negative aspects of situations, events, or interactions results in a world view in which threat is mistakenly perceived as ubiquitous. The combination of a negativity bias and the chronic overstimulation with which we are confronted is a recipe for nervous system dysregulation that takes the form of anxiety, depression, insomnia, hypertension and myriad chronic diseases and syndromes. However, now that we clearly appreciate the problem and its origin, we can establish a new nervous system pattern by shifting our attention to resources.
PRACTICE
I invite you to get started with this practice by tuning into a resource that may be present right now in your immediate environment. Anything you can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch that brings pleasure is a perfect candidate. If you are reading this outside, the resource might be the feeling of the sun on your face or the wind in your hair, or it might be the joyous sound of children laughing and playing. Or maybe you are snuggling with your cat on a comfy couch and feeling the rumble of her purring while you stroke her soft fur. Music lovers may find the sound of a funky groove to be a resource. Still others may find the aroma of an essential oil blend to be settling and soothing.
You may also use imagery for this exercise. If you are having difficulty identifying a resource in your immediate environment with which to practice, you might call to mind the image of a cherished memory or favorite place in nature. As you conjure the image of this scene in your mind, bringing in as many of the sense perceptions as you can will deepen its impact. For example, if you are calling to mind a visit to the beach, you might smell the salt air, hear the seagulls and surf, see the sun glimmering on the water, feel the breeze on your shoulders.
Whatever the resource may be, once you have identified it, I recommend staying focused on it for twenty to thirty seconds. My clinical observation has been that this is an adequate time period to initiate a transition of the nervous system from survival physiology into a “rest and digest” state. While thirty seconds may not seem like a long time, you may find it surprisingly difficult to keep your attention from drifting.
Finding words to describe your sensations will extend your attention and help you savor the experience. For example, if you just crawled into bed and are focusing upon the feeling of the sheets on your skin, some descriptors might be soft, cool and smooth, or perhaps fuzzy and warm. These are words that describe the feeling at the point of contact with the stimulus.
You may also notice internal sensations in response to this focus upon pleasure. You might notice a pleasant tingling sensation throughout your body, or a softening in your shoulders and belly. Maybe you notice a deep spontaneous breath, or a sense of expansion or opening. Alternatively, you could experience a feeling of settling. Oftentimes, the words that come to mind do not make logical sense, and that is fine; you might describe feeling flowy, fluffy, melting, or sparkly. Keep in mind that you are not trying to induce any particular sensation, but rather remaining curious about what sensations present organically.
After the exercise, take a moment to open your awareness to the entire spectrum of sensory information in your environment. Are you now noticing more details in your surroundings? Is your field of vision wider? Are you taking in sounds and smells that you didn’t notice before? Are you more aware of your body’s location in space? Do you feel that you are more fully inhabiting the body?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you are experiencing the benefits of orienting to resources. These changes are the result of a shift away from a stress response and into a state of greater coherence. When we are in this more settled state, we become more perceptive to subtle sensations as well as to the details of our environment.
COMMENTARY
If you are not yet well acquainted with relating to your experience in this manner, you may have found it quite challenging to keep your focus or to identify sensations. Initially, coming up with a blank when trying to identify or describe our inner experience is to be expected. If you are initially having the experience of not noticing much of anything, creating more easily detectable sensations can help, like vigorously rubbing your hands together and then noticing if you feel a sensation in that area, or using the massage setting on your shower head and directing it to various body parts to stimulate sensation.
Just as regularly practicing piano scales and chords promotes more speed, precision and nuanced expression, repeatedly focusing upon resources will enable you to detect your sensations with greater ease and describe them in greater detail. By giving your attention to something, you are signaling to the brain that what you are focusing upon is of value, resulting in the nervous system allocating more resources to this process.
When you practice orienting to resources repeatedly, the nerves that help you sense your experience transmit information more rapidly and efficiently as they grow more myelinated, becoming more like fiber-optic networks than dial-up modems. But, at first, just as in piano practice, you may feel like you are all thumbs. Over time, you will rewire your brain for regulation and resilience as you intentionally direct your attention to sensations that feel welcome and supportive. The more you intentionally orient to resources, the more you will spontaneously notice them throughout your day.
This approach is not a pollyanna “just keep your chin up” manifesto. Nor is orienting to resources a whitewashing of the challenges and real dangers that you face, but rather a practical and evidence-based approach to gradually building a better regulated and more resilient nervous system. The practice builds your capacity to remain curious about the unpleasant inner experiences associated with trauma and serves as the foundation for its subsequent renegotiation via the Somatic Experiencing therapeutic model.
Clients sometimes voice concern that by focusing more on resources they will be more vulnerable to being caught off guard when real danger arises. But the opposite is true. When you excessively focus upon threat, you enter a state of hypervigilance in which you often miscategorize non-threatening stimuli as dangerous. In such a state of constant dread, you will have difficulty distinguishing real threat from imagined. However, by regularly abiding in a more regulated state, real threat will stick out like a sore thumb because it will evoke an unmistakably distinct response within your nervous system that is dramatically different from the steady state of ease with which you will grow accustomed by orienting to resources.
Although your problems and life challenges will remain after your nervous system is better regulated, you will begin to relate to them in a very different way. Being in a state of coherence changes the pattern of cerebral blood flow, increasing oxygen to the part of your brain associated with executive functioning. This physiological change will literally create a temporary increase in your IQ in comparison with when you are in stress physiology, enabling you to identify creative solutions and helping you to adopt the more accurate perception that you have choices and that many possibilities exist.
You now have a simple and powerful tool at your disposal that has both immediate as well as long term benefits. In the short term, the practice will help you settle when you are feeling overwhelmed or anxious. In the long term, your nervous system will grow more resilient as orienting to resources becomes second nature as the process becomes increasingly autonomically mediated.
THEORY
While I am fascinated by the neuroscience that underpins clinical applications, not everyone shares my enthusiasm about these technical details, so I have placed the discussion of this topic last. If you’re not interested in a bunch of cerebral jargon, read no further, as you are already equipped with everything you need to know to put the principles of orienting to resources into practice. For the remaining geeks, let’s explore further.
In order to illustrate the far reaching effects of orienting to resources upon our health, an understanding of the function of the amygdala, a key structure in the area of the brain known as the limbic system, will prove useful. The amygdala plays a pivotal role in processing incoming sensory information, particularly stimuli with emotional significance. Acting as a kind of "emotional hub," the amygdala receives input from various sensory regions of the brain, including the visual, auditory, and olfactory systems.
Upon receiving sensory input, the amygdala rapidly evaluates its emotional relevance, determining whether it poses a potential threat or reward. This evaluation is facilitated by connections with other brain regions involved in memory, attention, and decision-making. If the incoming sensory information is deemed significant, the amygdala orchestrates emotional responses and coordinates physiological reactions, such as the release of stress hormones, to prepare the body for appropriate behavioral responses. Thus, the amygdala serves as a critical mediator in our ability to perceive and react to emotionally salient stimuli in the environment.
The concentration of serotonin in the amygdala modulates the set point at which the threat response is triggered. If levels are low, the amygdala will trigger survival physiology at the slightest perturbation, whereas higher levels of serotonin raise the activation threshold. This phenomenon, coupled with the reality that chronic or protracted focus upon perceived threat itself depletes serotonin in the amygdala, often results in an escalating cycle of activation and hypervigilance, especially for those with a trauma history.
Chronic survival physiology dysregulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, impacting immune function, cardiovascular health, and even cognitive function. Additionally, prolonged activation of the amygdala can lead to structural changes in the brain, affecting areas involved in memory, learning, and emotional regulation, further perpetuating the cycle of negativity bias and its effects on the nervous system.
This vicious cycle can be remedied by shifting attention to non-threatening stimulus in order to elevate serotonin levels in the amygdala, thereby deactivating the threat response. Focusing upon sensations while simultaneously identifying words to describe them causes the executive functioning part of the brain, where the language center is located, as well as the subcortical regions, where we process sensory data, to be concurrently engaged. This parallel processing helps to increase capacity for self regulation by promoting the formation of new neural pathways that interconnect the prefrontal cortex with the midbrain. This explains the potent physiological impact of orienting to resources.
In addition to the processing of external sensory data via the amygdala, our brains also assess safety and danger via the process of interoception. Interoception refers to the perception and awareness of the internal state of one's body, including sensations such as heartbeat, breathing, hunger, thirst, and visceral sensations. It involves the ability to detect and interpret signals from within the body, providing information about physiological conditions and emotional states, and is mostly conveyed through afferent motor neurons in the vagus nerve.
As we will explore further in a future article, incomplete self-protective responses induced by trauma often result in the establishment of chronic ineffectual motor responses within the nervous system that result in the generation of a continuous stream of interoceptive distress impulses directed to the amygdala. These outdated distress signals give rise to a chronic sense of dread without any ability to identify its origin.
When the brain relies upon outdated bodily responses to assess threat, as is the case for those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, the body unnecessarily remains in a hypervigilant state. In contrast, focusing upon non-threatening stimulus and describing one's interoceptive experience, as outlined in the exercise described above, enables individuals to remain with the experience long enough to disrupt this cycle of distorted perception and facilitates a transition to present moment awareness and a spontaneous regulation of the nervous system.