Past trauma can have a lasting impact on your nervous system, says Alex Howard, therapist and founder of the Optimum Health Clinic. Here’s how to retrain yours into a healing state and reclaim your health
Trauma causes changes in our body. When our nervous system becomes overloaded, our body’s stress response, which is designed to keep us safe when we’re under immediate threat, becomes stuck in the ‘on’ mode. I call this a maladaptive stress response and we pay a heavy price in our physical and emotional well-being in maintaining this mode.
Over time, a maladaptive stress response leads to shifts in the various homeostatic balances in our body.1 This means that a state of anxiety, which might at one time in our evolution have been necessary for our survival, becomes our normalized way of being.
The body has all kinds of homeostatic balances, from blood pressure and temperature to the circadian rhythms that manage our hormone levels based on our regular sleep and awake times. The term homeostasis is derived from two Greek words meaning “same” and “stable,” and in a sense, our homeostatic balances are the body’s way of keeping things the same and stable to support consistent and reliable ongoing functioning.
Our homeostatic balance allows us to feel safe and steady and is heavily influenced by whatever state we live in as our normal. The problem, though, is that repeated exposure to trauma triggers, and our inability to regulate our nervous system, leads our homeostatic balance to shift.
In the short term, if we try to calm our system, as soon as we stop, it’ll return to the higher level of arousal that it’s learned is normal. When we experience ongoing stress as a child, ultimately, we’re training a shift in our homeostatic balance that can define our life as an adult.2
The impact of sustained stress on our physical body—from our immune system to our digestive system, and from our hormones to our nervous system—is well documented in modern science. For example, the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) has established that psychological stress disrupts the interaction between the nervous and immune systems.
Stress-induced immune dysregulation has been shown to be significant enough to result in health consequences, including reducing the immune response to vaccines; slowing wound healing; reactivating latent herpes viruses, such as Epstein-Barr virus (EBV); and increasing the risk for more severe infectious disease.3
In my work with chronic illnesses, one of the phrases I use most often is “For our body to heal, it has to be in a healing state.” In this context, I’m referring to our physical body, but the same is true of our emotional body.
When we’re in a maladaptive stress response, we’re blocked to the very healing that we need. To process our emotions, we must first learn to calm and reset our nervous system. Furthermore, the feeling of safety we’re so deeply seeking simply cannot be found when our body’s pumped full of stress hormones, our mind is running at twice the speed it needs to, and we’re locked in a state of constant tension.
Ultimately, safety is a feeling that exists in our body, not as a state in our nervous system and mind. And because safety is a feeling, you can’t think your way to a feeling of safety.
To build the feeling of safety in our body, we must learn to switch off our maladaptive stress response, reset our homeostatic balances and train our nervous system into a healing state. With a calmer nervous system, we’ll then find the feeling of safety that we seek in our body.
The most calming thing we can experience is discovering that we can directly impact our own state. The more influence we realize we have, the less powerless we feel and the calmer our system will become.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of different tools have been developed over the years to help us learn to self-regulate our nervous system, and almost all of them have their roots in mindfulness and meditation practice. In fact, one of the most researched psychological tools in the history of science is the practice of meditation.4
Meditation is one of the key methods I use with my clients, as part of my RESET program (see “The RESET program” below), to help them retrain their nervous system. But not all forms of meditation have the same benefits and focuses.
For example, practices such as transcendental meditation are designed to help us cultivate a trancelike state of bliss, and visualization practices may focus on impacting certain feeling states. Although these are both helpful, they are not necessarily the quickest path to cultivating a feeling of inner safety.
In the form of meditation I advocate, the key is to shift your focus from your mind to your body. You’ll gradually train your energy out of your mind and over-activated nervous system and into the feeling of safety we ultimately crave.
I prefer to keep it simple and find the “minimum effective dose.” If we master the basics, over time we can add more elements to take our practice to the next level. We’ll focus on the scientific elements of meditation that have been shown to play a key role in self-regulating our nervous system.
Many people healing from trauma find meditation hugely helpful to calm and ground their mind, emotions and body. But for some, it leads to close contact with the trauma, which can be difficult.
Sitting still and observing our mind and body sends us into a loop of running too fast, feeling frustrated about it, then running faster in response. In this instance, forms of moving meditation, such as walking meditation, yoga, tai chi and qigong can be immensely helpful.5
Allowing the energy in our system to move, or moving with it, makes it easier for the system to calm and reset. Sometimes starting with a moving meditation before trying a sitting meditation can make all the difference.
Also, although closing our eyes during meditation often helps our practice, for some people it is triggering. It’s fine to keep your eyes open, but pick a spot on the wall on which to hold a soft gaze to prevent distraction.
If you’re new to meditation, start with just five minutes of practice. If you have some experience, you can spend more time. It’s often helpful to sit up with a straight spine and your feet on the floor. If you’re more comfortable lying down, that’s fine, but if you fall asleep, that isn’t meditation—although, of course, it’s hugely valuable in itself!
Four intentions
There are four key intentions we’re trying to achieve through meditation.
Five steps
Once you’ve adjusted your mindset with the four intentions above, hold to them as you complete your meditation following the five steps below.
There are no right or wrong experiences when you first start to meditate. If you feel that nothing has shifted in your nervous system, don’t worry. Keep going. If you feel more activated in your system, consider moving meditation, along with doing some trauma healing beforehand.
Even if you feel calmer immediately after practicing, you’ll likely find that as soon as you stop, your nervous system gradually reactivates its stress state because it believes that’s its homeostatic balance. To create lasting change, you must be diligent, consistent and patient.
Once you’re consistently practicing for five minutes, you can start to build up to at least 30 minutes a day. Over time, as you keep bringing your nervous system back to a state of calmness and connection to your body, you teach it that this is the new homeostatic balance, the place from which you now want to live.
To help lay the foundations for resetting your nervous system, spend a little time exploring its current state:
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then there’s a good chance your nervous system needs some help to calm and reset. You may also notice it’s more agitated at some points in the day than at others, and that you’re much more easily triggered around particular people and situations.
Sanaya was in her early twenties when she approached me for treatment. Her ongoing state of anxiety meant that when she looked at herself, her feelings and the world around her, she perceived everything through the lens of fear.
The prospect of changing was terrifying, but so was not changing. And even if she could change, would it last? Would she even like the person she became? Trapped between a rock and a hard place, she found a trigger for her nervous system everywhere she looked.
One of Sanaya’s most challenging triggers was noticing the feeling of anxiety in her body and seeing this trigger more anxiety. In a sense, her maladaptive stress response was self-generating. The more anxiety she felt, the more anxious she’d become. This is what I call anxiety about anxiety.
When our maladaptive stress response results in an excess of stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, being released, it takes some time for our blood chemistry to normalize. When I explained this process to Sanaya, it helped her to understand that measuring any intervention by whether she felt different immediately wasn’t realistic. Instead, she needed to learn to find a place of acceptance in the short term and then notice things settling in her body a few minutes later.
Alongside some other elements, meditation played a hugely helpful role in calming Sanaya’s anxiety. Breaking the cycle of anxiety triggering more anxiety and learning how to self-regulate her nervous system meant she was no longer at the mercy of her panic attacks, and she could start to bring her true personality and talents to the world.
By the end of our sessions together, Sanaya was full of joy and excitement for her future and had landed her dream internship in the film industry. As I said to her in our last session, the key wasn’t that she’d never feel anxiety again but that she now had the tools to self-regulate her nervous system in response to it, which is the ultimate freedom in life.
Aadya, in her early thirties, suffered from intense migraines that were so debilitating, she had to lie in a darkened room for three or four days until they passed. According to her doctors, they had no known cause.
When Aadya approached me, her migraines were being triggered almost weekly, and she was also starting to feel increasingly hopeless and depressed that things would never change. I knew from Aadya’s intake questionnaire that she’d experienced sustained physical abuse as a child, and it seemed plausible that there was a link between this and her migraines.
It was also obvious to me that Aadya lived in a state of high stress and anxiety. She often felt highly anxious about small things, and after a shock, it took her much longer than it should for her system to settle back down into a state of calmness. Even when she felt less wired, she noticed there was an ongoing feeling of trepidation.
The abuse Aadya had suffered had been utterly overwhelming and would have been too much for anyone, let alone a child, to process. Part of the genius of the human organism is that when we face the threat of danger, our nervous system switches gears to protect us. Aadya’s system had become hyper-activated and sensitized to any kind of threat.
This speeding up of the nervous system serves a dual purpose: it prepares us for immediate danger and allows us to disconnect from the resultant difficult feelings that we don’t feel safe to process.6 Aadya’s nervous system had become normalized to living in a constant state of stress, and she was so familiar with being this way that she barely noticed it.
I explained to Aadya that her migraines were not in themselves the issue—they were a symptom of an underlying issue: her nervous system was not functioning the way it should. Aadya was living in a maladaptive stress response. The impact of her trauma wasn’t ultimately in the original event, but in the changes in her stress response and the outcomes in her life.
As Aadya worked with me using the RESET model (see below), which includes regular meditation practice, she was able to reset her homeostatic balance and almost immediately noticed a reduction in the frequency and intensity of her migraines. Eventually, her migraines stopped almost completely.
The RESET model at the core of my work with trauma has taken many forms over the past two decades. It was shaped by the enormous laboratory of learnings that dozens of practitioners have gained while working with thousands of patients at the Optimum Health Clinic.
Each step in the RESET sequence is important, and skipping steps often slows down rather than speeds up the healing journey. Here’s an overview of the five steps:
Which state is your nervous system in? To reset your nervous system, we must first make you aware of the state it’s in right now, both recognizing dysregulation and becoming aware of what’s happening with it day-to-day and moment-to-moment.
How is this state being created? Once you’ve recognized which state your nervous system is in right now, we need to dig deeper to understand the personality patterns, thinking and behaviors that are driving and maintaining this state.
Rewire your brain and prevent unhelpful thought patterns. First, learn to retrain your nervous system through practices such as meditation. Then, actively stop the momentum of the patterns of thinking and behavior that are maintaining your maladaptive stress response. If you habitually reset your homeostatic balance, in time it will start to shift to a calmer state.
Connect to and process your emotions. With trauma, one of the reasons our nervous system becomes activated is to help us escape the overwhelming emotions that we don’t have the support and resources to process.
As we start to retrain our nervous system into a calmer place, we can find ourselves reexperiencing some of these emotions, and processing them is an important part of our deeper healing. Furthermore, this healing allows us to stay connected to our body and emotions in a healthy and sustainable way.
Change your relationship with yourself. As you continue to process your emotions, you now have the potential to fundamentally shift the way you relate to yourself and the world around you. Developing an inner sense of boundaries, safety and love is critical not only for healing the past but also for increasing emotional resilience in the future.
Adapted from It’s Not Your Fault: Why Childhood Trauma Shapes You and How to Break Free by Alex Howard (Hay House, 2023)
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