Episode 298: How to complete the stress response BEFORE you pour a drink
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I’ve been saying for years that emotional sobriety is really about nervous system literacy, the ability to read your own body language. And I just finished reading The Biology of Trauma by Dr. Amy Apigian. She’s been on my show a few times. I ordered the book after I did the interview with her. And the way she explains all of it truly changed my actual day-to-day life. It wasn’t so much an epiphany that I had after reading it.
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It was more that there was a new step in the process. So today I’m going to walk you through a moment in my life that could have snowballed. There was an unexpected email that sent a jolt through my system. But instead of getting caught up into the story, I was acutely aware of the process that was going on in my body. And that simple awareness allowed me to complete my stress response, bring myself back into a state of regulation.
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without feeling like I had to fight or override my stress response. So this episode is for you. If you are somebody who gets hijacked by urgency, you jump into action the second something feels off because you’re still under the impression that the problem is out there. You’re gonna walk away with a brand new understanding that your power isn’t your ability to outrun your stress. It’s actually your ability to notice it sooner, respond with compassion.
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so that you can restore your capacity before you take action. Because the only way to manifest something new in your life is to stop running the old plays.
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My name is Colleen, and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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So I want to share just a little story with you about the last couple of days and what has changed in how I am operating as a person in my life, as a body, as a human. So I spent my Sunday last weekend finishing from start to finish Amy Apigian’s book, The Biology of Trauma, and it’s a game changer.
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And it’s all I can do to control my excitement, my sense of urgency to just start firehosing all of you with this content. But what I’m noticing is that as I assimilate the content into my own observations, my own responses to what’s happening in my body, that I’m learning so much more about the content as I apply the content because
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managing your nervous system requires a very subtle, subtle awareness of your physiological responses. In the last episode, I talked about the five stages, steps that lead to a trauma response. Step one is a startle. Step two is stress. And that’s the stress part of your response when you go into fight or flight, fix it or figure it out. And then if
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you hit a mental situation in your mind where I can’t do this or an external situation where there’s a literal wall, you know, dark alley or a wall of people or a wall of bureaucratic bullshit. Then instead of having the energy and the hyper focus that is our stress response, our go, go, go sport mode in our body, instead of having access to that motivation and drive, then
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After the wall, we hit the freeze, which is where our bodies lock up. The tension tightens in our body. All that adrenaline and cortisol gets locked in our body, which causes us to go into the fifth step, which is shutdown, which is energy conservation mode. You literally are heavy and slow and sluggish, brain fog, distracted, dissociated.
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And of course, there’s 50 shades of gray on that. You you may just be a little distracted or a little less peppy. Maybe you’re just procrastinating a little bit. Like none of these things happen in a vacuum. You know, we’re constantly managing hundreds of thousands of different contexts and pieces of information and demands on us. And everything’s always changing. But I really like the simplicity of noticing
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where I’m at in the cycle. I love noticing that startle. know, the first step of the stress response, which includes the trauma response, is the startle. That moment of, oh fuck, I have a problem. And then the mind starts racing to solve that problem. And then based on whether or not you have the capacity to solve that problem, you either keep going or you hit the wall.
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And capacity is something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to lately. And capacity is all of the internal factors, how well you slept, how much you’re already in a stress response, how you’re eating, your mental frameworks, how you are thinking, how you are solving problems, the questions you are asking yourself. Your capacity is only so big on any given day and it’s constantly changing.
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Think of your capacity like a bank account. You make deposits and withdrawals. And the more deposits you put in on any given day, taking time to slow down and breathe, eat well, sleep well, give yourself frequent short breaks during the day to catch your breath, to check back in, to ground or connect with a sense of joy or fun or playfulness or another person.
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Capacity also requires healthy movement. Whether you call that exercise or a nice walk, your movement demands should be within your capacity. One of the things I’m just now learning is to adjust my exercise or movement to what I have the capacity for. It should feel invigorating, not depleting. And this is the litmus test that you have to live your entire life with.
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Like any given day, your needs are always changing and you have to respond to those needs in real time. And the litmus test is very simple. Does this, whatever this is, feel expansive, like I’m making a deposit in my capacity account? Or does it feel contractive, like I’m depleting my energy? And you just have to remember that what fed your soul yesterday,
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may be draining it today. And you have to adjust. You have to listen to your body, not your brain. The truth of everything is in your experience of it. How does it feel? And as a high achieving, high performer, type A crazy person, I have spent decades living in my head, letting my brain set the pace, define the goals, and override any physiological
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incoming energetic message from my body that says, this isn’t working right now. And the aha moment that I have had reading the biology of trauma and then applying it, testing it out in my own life is, oh my God, what changes when you operate from within your capacity and you problem solve for your capacity.
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Instead of letting your brain operate in the mindset that is draining your capacity You know the mindset that sees the problem can’t solve the problem because it’s busy creating the problem and as I am testing the hypothesis that my number one goal is always to notice my stress response to deal with my stress response and to complete my stress response So that I don’t hit the wall freeze and go into shutdown
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I am finding my energy, my capacity, my critical problem solving skills, my ability to cope with whatever’s going on is rapidly turning into a superpower. Like I can’t believe that these little steps, these little awarenesses, these little adjustments that I make in favor of my body are actually producing dramatically different results.
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Including just my ability to enjoy my own damn life. So I had a minor little stressful event this morning But before I take you into that story I want to explain why I had the capacity to actually function as I’m telling you this morning and that is I noticed that I hit the wall yesterday for whatever stupid fucking reason I haven’t been sleeping and I’ve been practicing amazing sleep
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hygiene, like no alcohol. I’ve been going to bed early with my window open. I’ve got essential oils. I’ve had several books that I can lay there and listen. Like I’m doing all the things right. I’m monitoring my stress response during the day, but either way, whatever, I have not been sleeping well. And yesterday I probably had four hours of sleep, even though I’d been in bed like nine, but I woke up and I went ahead and
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did my workout because I was super excited and I’d gotten my new tonal and I just love it. And I figured that would help me and it did. I felt really good. But as the day wore on, I noticed my capacity, my joy, my problem solving skills, my stress response. My stress response was kicking on a lot sooner. Like I just didn’t have the capacity, you know, the parasympathetic state.
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which is our normal operating mode. You know, we’re driving the car, all lights are green, no problems. The more deposits we make into our capacity account, the easier it is for us to stay in a relaxed, calm, alive state. The less things bother us, we don’t experience stress responses over every little tiny fucking thing. You know, we’re just kind of cool. We’re happy. We’re engaged.
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We’ve got the energy to do what we need to do. We don’t feel like we’re dragging ourselves or having to push ourselves. We’re running at a sustainable pace and we can keep going as long as it takes. And yesterday, I knew I was hitting the wall. I was exhausted. And with that exhaustion was coming more pessimistic responses. I didn’t feel like a badass.
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I didn’t feel super confident about where I’m at and what I’m doing or where I’m gonna be in six months. Those dark thoughts were starting to creep in. Nothing crazy, just not a fun day. And so last night, instead of going to the dance class that I was super looking forward to, because it’s beginner rumba and I really like the rumba, I decided I didn’t have the capacity to tax my brain because I told, I’m doing the ballroom dancing lessons and it’s hard and I’m loving it.
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but I wasn’t gonna send my brain into something I didn’t have the capacity to do. And so I decided to walk my dog instead and go to bed. And the other decision I made was not to set my alarm this morning. Normally I either wake up or my alarm goes off by 5.45 and then I do some sort of a workout. And last night I decided because I’m on Colleen’s team that her workout in the morning would be sleeping and that she would be sleeping
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until she was done sleeping because I didn’t want to go through another day dragging or pushing myself. And so I woke up this morning at like, I don’t know, an exquisite 7 38. Well, yeah, I guess I do know. So 738 when I looked at the clock, and I felt so good, but also was tempted to have the first thing I thought to myself was fuck I’m behind because normally even with my workout, like I’m
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done and ready to go by 7.30 and either working or working, one of those two things, or making breakfast. Sometimes they make breakfast. But I noticed that thought came into my head, but I had the capacity to catch it and put my hand on my heart and override that message and say, you are going to have a slow morning today. The doctor’s prescribing slowness for you. That is your number one priority.
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to rest and recover, to increase your capacity. Because my friend, my sweetheart, my love, my body, I’ve noticed that your capacity has been depleted. So we’re gonna slow it the fuck down so that you can feel like your feet are underneath you. And so that’s how I went into my morning and was getting ready and doing all the things. And then this is the story I wanted to tell you about. I had the capacity to deal with a very small stressor.
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We’ve been waiting to hear back from a firm, our financing company, and it’s been a very stressful situation because they don’t give you the rules. They just kind of ding you or shut you down, like we’ve been shut down, which of course affects our ability to sign new clients who can’t afford to pay in full. So we’ve been shut down all week because of something it’s hard to even understand, like digital versus physical products and some sort of shipping exclusion and
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We’re trying to, not trying, we’re committed to being in full compliance, but there’s no place you can go to look at the rules. And so you don’t know like what the problem is. And then, you know, all of a sudden they just shut you down. And it’s very stressful because of course it interrupts our flow of business. So I was making my breakfast and a nice breakfast. I was making avocado and two eggs and mushrooms, my sauerkraut.
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and then my homemade sourdough bread that I put a little bit of butter on and garlic salt and then put it in the cast iron skillet. So I was very much looking forward to my breakfast. And this email comes across my phone. I realized there was a question. it’s like I didn’t understand the question. It seemed like a very simple question. But I knew the way we answer this question determines
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whether we’re getting reinstated or not, whether we have access to financing, 0 % financing for our clients. And so I texted Coral, my COO, also my soon to be daughter-in-law, and I said, don’t answer this until I go to chat GPT and get the big picture. What does this question mean? What’s the big picture? What are they looking for? And how do we answer it in a way that is truthful?
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but also giving them the information that their underwriters need to give us the green light to go back into business. And so at the same time that I said, hey, don’t respond to this, give me a few minutes to finish my breakfast and then go and get the big picture, we’ll craft a response together, she sends me a screenshot of the email that she just sent in response. And so here’s the physiological big picture. I had a stress response. m
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I didn’t think, oh, I’m having a stress response. And it wasn’t some big, you know, burning face flushing, shutting down of a thing. But that was the moment that my body went, oh, fuck, like this could be a problem. That was the startle. And then the startle hijacked my brain. My breakfast, I had just put it down and.
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I went straight to my computer, sat down at the chat GPT and said, what is this shipping exclusion thing and what does it mean and da da da. So I don’t even remember that I just spent 15 minutes making a breakfast and I’m doing the thing. So that’s the stress response, right? Then it comes back with a response that would be truthful, but also give them what they need. And in my mind, what Coral had sent was not it.
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they were looking for an explanation that allows them to classify us as a hybrid model where yes, we’re digital providers, but we do ship a workbook. We do ship other materials through the year. That small little thing, according to JATGBT, is what they’re looking for to justify their ability to offer our clients up to two years, 0%, which is way better than the 6 % that you just get when you sign up with Stripe or whatever. And so I hit this wall because I thought,
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Fuck, she already sent it. It’s not the right answer. And they’re going to shut us down. Like, my business is over. know, half of our clients end up financing. And if we can’t provide reasonable finance, which I refuse to do those other high interest shit, a firm does 0%. I’m like, so of course, in that moment, my whole business is spinning out of control. I got to go shopping to pick my box so I can go live in a van down by the damn river. This is how stress and trauma hijack our brain.
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think however you’re feeling and you have to learn to solve for the feeling. You have to learn to think greater than you feel. You have to recognize what’s happening in your body. And I did that in that moment. I thought, oh, I’ve now hit the wall where I feel like I’m fucked. And the bottom line is that attitude doesn’t fucking help. That’s not going to move me forward. That is draining my capacity rapidly.
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to think bigger picture, higher level and be a problem solver. And so in that moment, I took a deep breath and instead of doing what my brain was telling me to do, which was to be mad at Coral for responding to the email too quickly and then wallow in the fact that we are now officially fucked, I was able to meet the situation with intelligent, assertive, best actions instead of that overwhelm.
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And so I sent what I had learned from ChatGPT and I said, Coral, draft another email, follow up. I mean, it’s been like 37 seconds. She probably hasn’t even read the other one. Let’s put our best foot forward and follow up with this clarification as to why we do have physical products in our workbook and also it’s a hybrid with the digital model. And that felt immediately better, which told me because of how it felt.
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which was better, good, that I was moving away from that critical line of overwhelm instead of closer to it. And this is what I’m trying to communicate that using your feelings, your felt experience of what’s happening to let you know the quality of your thoughts is how you become somebody who expands their capacity and has the ability to effectively deal with hard shit instead of losing your shit. The mindset.
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of the stress and soon to be overwhelmed response operates on dumb assumptions like, have to figure out X, Y, Z, I have to figure out the affirm shit so that I can feel better. But the truth is that the things just are what they are. You don’t need to feel better about X, Y, Z, about whatever the problem is. You need to feel better about yourself and how you’re showing up to this problem.
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Knowing that you are operating at your full capacity, that you took every intelligent, assertive action, timely action to the best of your ability. Knowing that is where confidence comes from. It doesn’t matter what is happening out there. It matters how you respond to what’s happening out there. It matters how you see your own ability and capacity to handle whatever comes next.
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And so I haven’t gotten a response back from the affirm, but I know and I feel good about how we handled that situation, even though there was what I perceived to be a little bit of a blip. You know, it’s the best we can do. And then I realized there sits my breakfast and the rest of my day ahead of me. And the difference between me carrying this stress into the rest of the day and me
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Learning the lesson they needed to learn returning back to a sense of calm alive safety I got this and I’m hopeful of the future is simply me choosing to take a moment to complete the stress response and I actually looped coral in on this too because I’m like, okay We both just had a stress response and now we both need to complete the stress response I’m going to eat my breakfast not at my desk
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But in my kitchen, actually, I went out on my deck and ate it outside. It was wonderful. But with Coral and everybody on my team, I’m trying to lead them by example of the only obstacle preventing you from completing the stress response, noticing that you had a startle, you hit the wall, you brought yourself back, you corrected, you took powerful positive action, and then you have to go back into a full, deep breath.
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where you’ve released the energy from your body. And the only thing that ever stops you from doing that is the belief that you don’t have time to do that because you’re still in the goddamn stress response that’s telling you run bitch, run. And so I took a moment to stop, breathe bitch, breathe and complete my stress response, bring myself all the way back into neutral. And then I encouraged her to do the same because
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You think you don’t have time to complete the stress response, bitch, you don’t have time to not complete the stress response. That is what keeps you draining and depleting yourself and making low level knee jerk reactions through the day because the car’s driving you, you’re not driving the car. When you understand that noticing what’s happening in your nervous system and responding to wherever you’re at in a way that is respectful of your capacity,
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and restoring your capacity is your highest goal. Everything in your life changes. Completing the stress response is like wiping your bomb bomb or washing your hands after you use the bathroom. You still gotta use the bathroom, do all the dirty stuff, but you have to bring yourself to full completion before you move on to the next thing. That is how you move through life like an unfuck with a bull unstoppable person.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.