How to Calm your Nervous System with Somatic Therapy

When you've had a lot of chronic stress in the, in your life, you know, your nervous system essentially becomes weaker and weaker. What also happens is the nervous system kind of stops interpreting threats or dangers or stress properly, which then leaves you more vulnerable to it.

Welcome to Beyond Diagnosis, a podcast to raise your awareness, decisions, and voice for alternative practices so you can take back control of your health. I'm Rita De Michele, your host, a mindset and empowerment coach, and the founder of the Onus platform. Join me each week so you can create the health of your dreams. Today's guest is Danielle Rubio, a nervous system expert And this is what I know about Danielle. When women want to ditch anxiety, depletion, and chronic stress for good, they come to her to rewire the blueprint of who they are—their nervous system—to reclaim a healthy and vibrant life. Hi, Danielle. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on.

Oh, look! It's a pleasure. And wow! Nervous system, nervous system. Really encompasses so much, doesn't it? So as a nervous system expert, you're also a somatic trauma coach and a mindfulness guide. So in your opinion, what is nervous system regulation, and what does it mean when someone's nervous system is dysregulated?

Uh-huh. Yeah, so again, your nervous system is essentially the software system of you, and your nervous system has evolved over millions of years with its main responsibility of keeping you alive. Mm-hmm. So the nervous system is constantly assessing, sensing, perceiving the environment for danger, for threats. And essentially, a regulated nervous system is a nervous system That will become activated. So if there's a stressor coming in, the nervous system will go into a fight or flight or freeze as a response to the threat or the danger. But then once that danger's gone, a regulated nervous system will then automatically— because in, in my work, we're working specifically with the autonomic nervous system, which is your— it's automatic. Everything's happening automatically.

Mm-hmm.

The nervous system will automatically go back to rest and digest, or we might also call it socially engaged, this harmonious place of the nervous system. And so a dysregulated nervous system is one where that's not really happening. So the nervous system is basically getting stuck in a fight or flight or a freeze state.

Right. And there's a lot of talk about that, especially, you know, if people are chronically stressed from work or they're chronically stressed with family and work, et cetera. And this is where a lot of, you know, the new modalities are coming out, breathwork, all that sort of thing. But what I think what my listeners would like to know is what are some of the physical, mental, emotional symptoms that someone can experience to identify that they have a dysregulated nervous system?

Yeah, so I, I always— this, uh, there was this great meme that was going around that always pops into my head when I get this question. And the meme was, um, I had 99 problems and regulating my nervous system solved 98 of them. So when— so because the nervous system, it's essentially the software system of you. So your brain and your nervous system are constantly in communication. But 80% of that communication is going nervous system up. And so your nervous system is literally informing your physiology, your biology, it's governing your endocrine system. So it's controlling a whole lot about you. And from infancy, from birth, essentially, your nervous system was sending these messages. to your brain to interpret how to keep you safe. And thus, that's essentially how your personality was formed, is your brain getting all of this information from the nervous system. So when the nervous system is dysregulated, stuck, we could say, all sorts of a myriad of issues will arise from this. So you might find that you're anxious, A lot of the time. So people who are, are having a lot of anxiety, they most definitely have a dysregulated nervous system. Um, if you have a lot of chronic ailments, like you're getting repeated headaches, you have a lot of chronic pain, you have these sort of like unexplained, um, physical pains or annoyances, and, and even like the eye twitches that happen, we can root that to a dysregulated nervous system. And essentially with that, we could say there's trapped survival stress in the body that needs to be released. And so this is where that somatic, the body-oriented work comes in, because until that stress is released, it's going to continue to cause havoc for people emotionally, physically. Mentally, some other symptoms people might have. You know, they are chronically angry people. You know, they have a lot of that fight nervous system energy in their system. So it's really, it's a pretty like wide spectrum of of the symptoms. You know, somebody who's chronically stressed all the time. So a lot of my clients that come to me. They come to me and a lot of them are saying like, I just feel like life's hard all the time. I feel like I'm chronically stressed all the time. I'm always anxious. I feel like I'm burnt out. I don't have any control over my emotions. I feel like I'm constantly at the mercy of my triggers and I'm constantly, you know, hot-tempered or I'm constantly shutting down. You know, that's what we see with people that have a lot of that freeze nervous system. So, so there's, there's a lot of wide symptoms that, that can come up when the nervous system is dysregulated.

I love that. What I find really interesting about that is that you spoke of it the other way around. I think a lot of people, including myself, would have thought, well, the brain is informing the nervous system because we— everyone talks about the brain as the master. And I would have thought that the brain informed the nervous system. So if we're anxious, our nervous system is going to be anxious, we're going to be doing— but you're saying it's the other way around.

Yes.

It's our nervous system that's informing our brain.

Yes. So, yeah, so, so, so like an interesting kind of analogy or way to think about it that I give my students is, you know, say there's, there's a bear, you come across a bear in the wild. Did you run from the bear because you were scared, or are you scared because you ran from the bear? Most people would think that it's, uh, that it's you run from the bear because you're scared, but it's actually you're scared because you ran from the bear. So the physical automatic reaction is first. The way that your brain interprets the information is second. It's all happening so fast in a situation like that where there's like, you know, a very big danger. But yeah, like I said, 80% of that communication is going nervous system up. And of course the brain is interpreting things and then of course informing, you know, the, the nervous system as well. But most of that's coming from from the nervous system. And it's very, again, it's automatic. It's very, um, I say like the nervous system is your perceiver and the brain is the analyzer. And, and what's happening first is that perception, that perception of danger. And for those, the millions of years that your nervous system has evolved, and it's been evolving far longer than your higher brain has, Ooh. You know, our main stressors were predator-prey, uh, territorial fights. And, and only in this very tiny, tiny sliver of human evolution have our stresses been what they are today. Um, but the nervous system has not changed. And so the nervous system is interpreting things like your boss screaming at you or being in an, um, Constant stress with having 4 little ones at the house or being in a toxic relationship, your nervous system is, is perceiving that as danger.

Yeah, I wrote down 2 points here that I wanted to bring up before we move on to anything else. One is you talked about the autonomic nervous system. Does that encompass the vagus nerve?

Yes.

Because I hear a lot about the vagus nerve, especially for people who have digestive issues. So it's all intertwined, you can't separate it. So whatever you're feeling affects the vagus nerve, and then that's going to— for people who are struggling with digestive bloating, um, IBS, I assume it's all interrelated.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your vagus nerve is running, you know, from the brainstem essentially down to the colon. And your vagus nerve is, uh, the main nerve that is essentially responsible for helping to bring you from fight or flight into a place of rest and digest, to a place of, you know, easygoing social engagement branch of the nervous system.

Mm-hmm.

And if you, if you have a lot of chronic stress or you've had a lot of trauma or even any trauma, um, the vagus nerve becomes weak.

Yeah.

And the vagus nerve has these branches branching from it. So it's nicknamed the wandering nerve. So it has these branches going all throughout your body. And of course it's, it's, it's very connected to the digestive system. Your nervous system governs Your digestive system. So this is you know coming back to that meme: I I healed my nervous system and I solved 98 of my problems because a lot of our digestive stuff is psychosomatic.

Yes, that would be very interesting to many of the listeners today. And also wanted to touch on for people who don't know what is somatic. Therapy? Just a quick touch on that to explain.

Yeah, so somatic, you know, comes from the word soma, which is a Greek word that means the body. So it's essentially body-based, body-oriented therapy. So we're using, um, bottom-up approaches, which essentially we're using the body. So we're using movement, we're using sound, we're using You know, somatic inquiry. So dropping into the body rather than things that would be top-down, like talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, or even affirmations, or even tapping, you know, where you're using that higher brain to try and fix something, when really we want to go at it by way of the body, because that's giving us the greater access to the nervous system.

Great. So let's talk about the science of chronic stress and its long-term impact on the nervous system.

Yeah, so it's kind of like, uh, a bit of like a chicken and the egg or a loop, because essentially if, if you had, for example, a lot of adverse experiences at it as a child, or you had trauma, and essentially, you know, that could be anything from surgeries or accidents, or it could be, you know, more serious types of trauma, or it could be a lot of little cuts. Maybe there was a lot of neglect in the family. Your nervous system is going to basically lose its strength and lose its capacity to handle stress. It's kind of like the nervous system becomes Weaker, and that software system isn't functioning properly. So you're not going to be able to handle future stress very well. So, so then at that point, you know, minor stresses are going to seem much bigger for you.

Um, you touched on trauma. Now, trauma runs, you know, depending on the type of trauma someone has experienced, whether it's Emotional trauma or trauma from a car accident, whatever it, it does. I think everybody knows how that can affect your nervous system. So this, I'd like— I'm really curious to explore this long-term unresolved trauma, the impact it's having on your nervous system daily. And if you can give us an example for our viewers and our listeners. So they can paint a picture in their mind that when you talk about the somatic therapies and using our body as opposed to our mind, because most— a lot of people go and see a psychologist or, um, you know, a talk therapist, you know, for their trauma. You're saying bring it from the body.

Mm-hmm.

So how— what do you do physically in these sessions to to help people who have this very deep-seated trauma?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I, I, I, I like, you know, to tell a lot of the people that I work with or who are interested in my programs, you know, trauma, trauma is a fact of life. Everybody has some degree of trauma because trauma, at least in, in the somatic field, how we define trauma is anything that overwhelmed Your nervous system. So it's not so much about the event. It's how your nervous system responded to that event.

Mm-hmm.

So 2 people could have the same exact event happen to them, say a car accident. One person comes out without trauma, one person does. So what was the difference there? Well, the person who did come out with trauma likely already had some underlying trauma in their system that hadn't been dealt with, and this bigger accident tipped them over the edge. So then their nervous system became completely dysregulated. It doesn't have capacity anymore. And there they are in the throes of PTSD and everything that comes as a result of it. Um, so everybody has trauma, and trauma is essentially what's what created the nervous system to become dysregulated. And oftentimes, the brain will suppress those traumatic events, it's going to push these back into the recesses of your mind, so you can keep on keeping on. So it's, you know, it's, it's not a bad thing necessarily that your brain does this. But this is why things like talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or things that are top-down approaches are not greatly effective for dealing with trauma because you don't even really have access. However, the body is never going to forget. So this is why there's that famous saying that's been going around for a bit now that the body keeps the score.

Mm-hmm.

Because the body is— it's not— it can't suppress it. So your body will express it in ways like anxiety, Depression, you know, chronic anger, you know, being completely emotionally irregulated, you know, emotions are physical. So your body is going to constantly try to find this homeostasis, it wants to release that stored survival stress, it wants to release those, that energy, essentially, of of those times that you got stuck or times that, you know, your nervous system was in a fight or flight. But, you know, if you're like a 5-year-old going into surgery, and they put you under anesthesia, you can't feel the pain, but it didn't shut off your nervous system. So your nervous system is still sensing, I'm, I'm being cut open. This is like high fight or flight, and then you're gonna shut down into freeze because there's nothing the nervous system could do about that, right? You're under anesthesia. You can't fight. You can't flee. So all these things, you know, start piling up, and they're stuck in the body essentially. So when we use body-oriented practices and exercises, tools, the beautiful thing is that We don't have to remember every single, every single thing that happened. We don't have to analyze it. We don't have to endlessly talk about it. We can use body-oriented practices essentially to move this stuff out, moving it out of the system.

And what are some of those exercises so someone can understand?

Yeah, so, uh, so one thing that I, um, You know, for example, of tonifying the vagus nerve, we want that nerve to be strengthened again. You know, things like singing, things like humming. Um, you know, there's this, uh, really magical sound that, uh, Peter Levine, who's a huge pioneer in somatic experiencing— he created somatic experiencing, but a pioneer in trauma therapy— um, it's this boo sound that sounds like Ooh. And they found that this helps to tonify that vagus nerve. So you're using your body, you're using your voice to get access in there and strengthen the nerve. Other things like dancing, for one, is going to, um, it's going to create these new neural pathways because at, at the root of this work, essentially we're, we're rewiring the nervous system. We're creating new mirror neuron mirror neurons and new neural pathways. So dancing, dancing is also going to be a great release. The one of the biggest things I give clients who work with me is simply feeling again. So we have become chronically, sadly, in this place where we are talking heads. And we're completely disconnected from our bodies. And we need to feel— you have to feel it to heal it. So the way that we release trapped emotions, for example, is we need to feel them. There's no bad emotion. And we keep treating certain emotions like they're bad, or I have this anger, so I'm gonna go try to take it away with meditation, or I'm gonna go try to take this away by, you know, calling up a friend when really it just needs to be felt.

That's an interesting— and I do agree with you there. Like, we have such a disconnect between the head and body. You speak to a lot of people and it's all, I'm going to think my way through this, I'm going to analyze my, you know, what's, you know, the research on this or whatever, instead of actually going— this seems Why is it, do you think, in your profession and from the people that— the clients that you've seen, what do you think it is that's stopping them from going down into their body? Is it they're scared to feel? Is it to rec— is it to acknowledge? What is it that's keeping them from going?

Well, we're in a culture that doesn't feel, so We're taught from birth, essentially, to negate our felt experience and to not— and to become disconnected from our bodies. So, you know, it's, it's, it's even things like when you're a little one and you're crying and you're told stop crying, or even, you know, you get hurt when you're a little one and you're crying and you're immediately told like, shh, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay.

That's so true.

You're being gaslit. Your parents don't know any better because this is just, you know, what I say is there's nobody is to blame and everybody is to blame at the same time. And so we've just essentially passed these, these ways that we call normal. Um, I love Gabor Maté's recent book, The Myth of Normal. Pioneer, yes, in the trauma field. And, uh, you know, these ways that we are with our children, with our babies, that are not healthy, but we take it as it's normal, you know, uh, you know, constantly in all these very subtle ways or very extreme ways of basically not allowing our children to have their voice or not allowing our children to express their emotions. They're interpreting this They're getting that message that to feel is wrong. At the very root of that is that, like, my emotions are bad, or being too emotional, expressing my emotions is not okay. And so we really internalize that at a very, like, subconscious level that starts to dictate, you know, how we are with our emotions. And then, you know, if somebody has had trauma, And they've been taught— they haven't been taught how to emotionally regulate, or they've been taught that their emotions are wrong. You know, the body becomes an unsafe place to be. And people don't want to feel because they then have this fear that if they feel that, that pain or that emotion is going to completely swallow them.

Hmm. You can see that, and I can now see why a lot of the traditional medicine and psychology practices are just missing the point. Like, they're just staying from shoulder up. You do have some who are very, you know, broader and wider and encompass a few more practices like yourself. But just this years, and that's where you get so many people— I've been in talk therapy for 10, 15 years because we're not going down into the body, and you have to feel it. You have to feel it to heal it, I suppose, in a way.

Yeah.

When someone does these somatic practices with you and they get into their body and they can feel it releasing, is this a permanent thing for their nervous system, or do they have to continuously fine-tune because that's the way they are?

You know, it, it becomes a lifestyle change. So you start to completely relate to yourself and others and the world around you very differently. So it's, it's kind of like, you know, I, I tell the women in my program, like, if you were, if you were wanting to lose weight, you wouldn't go into a program for 15 days and eat really healthy and exercise, and then after that 15 days, stop and think that you're going to keep the weight off. So you, you have to keep creating these new neural pathways, and you have to keep establishing a different relationship with yourself where you're connected to your body. where you're allowing the emotions, where you can actually, you know, really be with yourself and not try, because it's— we have been so conditioned for our entire lives until you might be lucky enough to come across a work like this of not feeling ourselves. So, you know, it's gonna take some diligence to go in the other direction. And, and really, you know, because the mind is so clever and it's so tricky, you know, and you might find like you start to get in there and you end up sabotaging yourself, or you end up, you know, you so quickly wanna like reach for that piece of chocolate cake or that cocktail or whatever it is to numb it out and not feel. So you have to stay diligent and committed with this new relationship with yourself and these new Practices.

Yeah, I love that. It really is sort of repatterning and just kind of being— coming back and being a parent to yourself again, you know, like looking after yourself, nurturing yourself. So what is one action that someone can do, our listeners can do today, to help them get back into their body? If they feel they're too much in their head, what can they do today at home? Simple first step to get back into their body.

Yeah, yeah. So I would say the first step, because, you know, I don't know who, uh, will end up listening to this and what their past trauma or experiences— I would say the first step in general for everyone is listen to your body. So, you know, as simple as When you have to pee, pee. When you're hungry, eat. When you're thirsty, drink. When you're tired, sleep. So we're— we've also become chronically used to ignoring the body's needs. And we just override these things. And it's bringing up, you know, we have to come back to honoring the body and honoring the ways that your body is trying to communicate. Because if you can Start doing things as simple as go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom, eat when you need to eat. It's, it's gonna be— it's gonna start compounding where it's gonna be easier and easier for you when you have that big sadness come up, where you're gonna actually be able to listen to it, listen to your body when it's experiencing it.

Perfect. What great advice. So for people who are experiencing You know, stress, a frazzled nervous system, chronic headaches, anxiety, you know, maybe they're experiencing a bit of ADHD. Um, there are so many digestive issues. Um, they can feel tingling in their nervous system. These are all those types of symptoms that come from a dysregulated nervous system. How can people work with you? How do they find you, Daddy?

Yeah, so I offer a big one-to-one 6-week program, which is usually where I have people start. I really believe this work has to be one-to-one because everybody's walked very different lives and everybody has very different nervous systems. And you wouldn't necessarily work with somebody who's stuck in freeze in the same way you would work with somebody that's stuck in a fight or a flight. Um, and so I also have workshops. I also offer retreats. So I, you know, the easiest way is, is follow my Instagram, which is @iamdaniellerubio. Um, and there you can find the links to all the ways to work with me.

Lovely. And for anyone who wants instant access, all of Danielle's details will be in the show notes. So please go there. And really, if you are struggling with a dysregulated nervous system, Danielle's your girl. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.

Yes, thank you for having me.

Thank you. I would love to know what was the biggest insight or aha moment you got from this interview so you can now speak up, take action, and make informed decisions for your health. And if you like this episode, get instant access to your free ebook, Alternative Wisdom: Taking Back Control of Your Health, at life-onus.com.