If you swam in arctic waters, you would get cold. What would your body do to warm you up? Shiver to get movement going and your hair would stand on end to create thicker insulation. Your body is wired for survival, and it’ll go into overdrive to help you return to the safe zone.
Why does your body want to warm up?
You are designed to operate within a set temperature range. When you get hot it’s usually a sign of a fever, but if not, you may have sunstroke or some sort of malfunction. When you get hot, your body perspires to cool down. Likewise, when you’re too cold, your body takes action.
Your body is finely tuned to maintain the status quo. If you take in toxic material, your body wraps the toxins in fat molecules and stores it as far away from your organs as possible. If you stub your toe, alarm systems gather blood cells to protect and cleanse or neutralise invading matter so that your body can heal as quickly as possible.
When you lose a few pounds, your body helps you to find them again, and because it is so helpful, it also finds a few extras just in case you lose more.
Your whole system is designed to self-regulate. When a healthy person eats sugar, their body releases insulin to restore balance. What happens when that body doesn’t release insulin? It tries to maintain balance until it is overwhelmed. Without support, body systems eventually begin shutting down.
Your brain is also wired for survival. Your nervous system works toward maintaining balance. When your nervous system perceives stress, it will prioritise safety. That’s what fight or flight response is all about – assessing the situation and dealing with it quickly and efficiently. What is the safest option?
Your brain is clever. If you’ve got a lot going on, it will take unnecessary systems offline so that you can prioritise what matters. If you are stressed, you might lose your appetite so that your energy can be used for action not digestion.
When you work through relational issues, your nervous system can identify the emotions of the process as dangerous. That will flick you into survival mode. Once you’re in survival mode, some systems go offline and reactions and reflexes rise to the surface to maintain the status quo.
As you begin to deal with your stuff, don’t be discouraged if your spirit, or your heart, heal faster than your nervous system. You may have an insight or change of perspective that shifts everything for you, you may choose to forgive and let that thing go; you have had a breakthrough! Congratulations! Your nervous system may take time to register the change in status alert.
This is why you may need to forgive over and over again – your brain has been looping this scenario around and every time (up until now), it has received a certain response. Now, you respond differently. Your brain will check this out. Now, instead of receiving consistent feedback, there is an anomaly. It’ll throw the emotion at you to see how you respond. It expects you to slip back into the familiar pattern. If you don’t, it’ll replay the scenario to check that you understood that the emotion was triggered from this event. Your brain is trying to bring you back to status quo, it’s trying to reestablish normal.
When it throws the emotion at you, it would be easy to be disheartened. “I knew it wouldn’t work, it’s useless even trying.” No! Your brain is just doing what it is wired to do – continue down the familiar, don’t mess with the system.
When you lose a few pounds, you are supposed to be super-careful for the first little while to maintain your new patterns. Once your body realises that it is safe to be here and you are not actually going to starve or shrink away, it will settle into the new and maintain your new weight.
Same goes for your brain. It expects a certain pattern to play out. Your brain loves patterns and it creates all sorts of patterns to keep you at status quo. Change is unpredictable, so when it happens, your brain works overtime to convince you that your old patterns worked. It makes slipping into old patterns easy. It has paths for your old ways, the new stuff is uncharted territory, not necessarily safe. Anything different is considered suspicious, if not dangerous – at first anyway. Unforgiveness is supposed to lead to bitterness, resentment, anger etc.
Interrupting that process breaks the loop and your brain won’t have the manual for that at first. But, like any new neural pathway, as you continue to look at your story differently, your brain will create a new pattern and realise that this new perspective actually creates safety. Once it realises that this new way of thinking is safe, it’ll support you wholebrainedly. But until then, you have to persevere and maintain your decision while your brain does mental gymnastics to try and figure out just exactly what happened.
Once your brain has established that your new way of thinking is safe, it’ll learn from the process and may even take the lessons to apply elsewhere. Perhaps there is another situation that could benefit from your new thinking. That’s why it’s easier to forgive if you’re in the habit of doing it – your brain now knows that forgiveness is safe, so it’ll support you in the process.
When you have held hurt for a long period, it’s challenging to let it go. When you know that, you are better equipped to walk the road towards healing. You may make a decision to change, that’s wonderful! Persevere. Your brain will eventually work with you, but at the beginning, don’t be surprised if it aims all its ammunition to take out that point of change.
Your body is wired for survival, but it also works with what it knows. In order to learn a better way, it needs to realise that this journey of becoming unoffendable is actually a safe one. Once you realise that, your survival mechanisms will give way to a restored sense of peace, allowing you to learn and grow in a new way.
