Welcome to 3-2-1 Tuesdays with Better Wellness Naturally: Your Nervous System Called. It's Time to Pick Up
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Quick bits of therapeutic info and learning, ideas, concepts, and quotes.
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3: Keys
2: Concepts
1: Quick Article
"The body is a multilingual instrument. If you listen, it will tell you exactly what it needs to heal."
3 Keys
Your Symptoms Are Messengers
Are you feeling a bit antagonistic toward your body? That recurring tension headache or the tightness in your throat isn't an inconvenience to medicate away. It's a communication. Your body is flagging something your mind isn't ready to hear. Stop fighting the symptom. Start asking it: What are you telling me?
The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
Some of us believe we can talk ourselves into believing we’re ‘over’ something. The fact is that your nervous system keeps its own records. Quick example: If your heart rate spikes when you hear a certain tone of voice, your body is still holding that story. Healing happens when you let the body finish what it started years ago.
Softening is a Superpower
You were handed a script that said grind, push, hustle. The nervous system doesn't heal on that schedule, though. It heals in the softening. This week, notice where you're bracing. Your jaw. Your shoulders. Your neck. Offer that spot 5% more ease—with awareness that you are doing so— and see what shifts.
A Couple of Concepts
Interoception: Your Sixth Sense.
No, not ESP. Introspection is the ability to feel what is happening inside your own body. The flutter of your heart. The fullness of a breath. The warmth in your hands. High interoception is the foundation of emotional intelligence and self-regulation. You cannot regulate what you cannot read.
2. The Body Scan Reset.
This is a simple practice, not easy at first, but simple. Move your attention through your body, head to feet, without judgment. The moment you acknowledge a sensation, "I feel heat in my chest," for example, you shift from being inside the emotion to observing it. That gap is where regulation lives. That gap is how you widen your Window of Tolerance.
A Quick Overview: The Vagus Nerve—Your Internal "Peace" Highway
If you've ever gone from panic to peace in a matter of minutes, your vagus nerve deserves the credit.
It's the longest nerve in your body, running from your brainstem all the way down to your colon, threading through your heart, lungs, and gut along the way. It is the central highway of the parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" system, and it functions like a brake pedal for your stress response. When it's activated, your heart rate drops, your breathing slows, and your brain gets the message: threat over.
Here's where it gets useful. Because the vagus nerve passes directly through the vocal cords, you can activate it through sound. Humming, chanting, singing, even gargling water creates vibration along the nerve pathway and sends an immediate safety signal upstream to the brain. Research in the field of vagal tone supports what ancient cultures already encoded into daily practice: Gregorian chant, call-and-response prayer, Sanskrit mantra, indigenous drumming and song. These weren't just ritual. They were nervous system medicine, delivered before neuroscience had language for the mechanism.
Vagal tone, the measure of how responsive your vagus nerve is, can be strengthened over time. Slow, extended exhales, cold water on the face, humming your way through a stressful commute, these are not soft suggestions. They are inputs your biology is wired to receive.
When you learn to work with your physiology instead of muscling past it, you stop white-knuckling your way through the day and start operating from an entirely different baseline.
That's not a wellness trend. That's architecture.
References:
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
Rosenberg, S. (2017). Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.
Fogel, A. (2009). The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense.
A Trauma Therapist’s Guide to Life After Betrayal
by Laura Weber Garrison, PhD
New Review:
“I spent years trying to understand how trauma changed who I am, how I think, and how I react. Then I found Laura. She doesn’t coddle me or give me another excuse to stay stuck. She’s helped me understand what happened to my brain, my body, and my nervous system. In Going Rogue, she’s given me tools I can use outside her office and beyond her retreats. She brings decades of clinical and personal experience, scientific research, and the same profane honesty to this book that she brings to her practice. I only wish she’d written it years ago.” A.C.
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