Building Happiness and Resilience

The history of fear stored in our body shapes our present.

We carry the history of our fear and anxiety in our body through our nervous system. This is how our past shapes the present. The relative calm or hypervigilance in our nervous system determines our health and happiness, what’s going on in our mind, and our relationships. At least some of the time, we need to be out of fight/flight/freeze/fawn and into a relaxed state of trust and connection to enjoy our life.

We can learn powerful tools and emergency practices to self-regulate, including a soothing diaphragmatic breath, relaxing our body, 5 senses, shaking the tree, and working directly with anxious thoughts that drive hypervigilance. All of these are useful to bring us back into the present moment where our body can notice there is no immediate threat here right now. Click here for Emergency Practices.

A longer term strategy to build resilience is to develop new neural networks for trust and connection, and weaken the established grooves in the mind that drive fight/flight/freeze/fawn. Healing our nervous system is not instant, like an on off switch. It’s more like a continuum of feeling more or less threatened, and more or less stable and grounded in safety.