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The Thais Gibson Podcast
When You're Finally Ready for Healthy Relationships This Video Will Find You
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You do not attract the love that you deserve. You attract the love that your nervous system is actually wired for. And when your nervous system is finally regulated, you may finally feel safe investing in love for the very first time. So in today's video, if you're not familiar with this whole concept of literally our subconscious comfort zone, our nervous system, we are going to talk about why nervous system regulation is essentially one of the prerequisites for healthy love. You're gonna learn a little bit about why a dysregulated nervous system keeps you forever stuck in these toxic cycles. You're gonna learn what neuroscience says about nervous system health and how it relates to secure attachment and developing a more secure attachment style. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how ancient wisdom predicted what neuroscience is proving today. And at the end of this video, if you stay around, then you will learn a powerful starting practice that will help you begin regulating your nervous system as of today. And quite honestly, if you don't learn some of these different techniques, there is a good chance that you will keep mistaking anxiety and chaos for chemistry and miss out on the kind of love that actually lasts. So I want to start by just touching on three high level facts and then we'll get into the really fun stuff. Fact number one, Securely attached people essentially demonstrate having a more regulated nervous system. And what this means is their bodies return to baseline factors faster after conflict and they spend less time in sympathetic nervous system mode. If you're not familiar, your sympathetic nervous system is your fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses. And really the cost of spending too much time, which is very common for all insecure attachment styles in sympathetic nervous system mode is I want you to just think of this yourself. I want you to think about what your life looks like when you are constantly making decisions and choices from fight. Maybe you're overly defensive, you're quick to argue. Maybe you find yourself constantly pushing, pushing people away. As a result, flight may mean you lack staying power. You struggle to actually commit to things, to see things through. You run too early and sabotage relationships and connection. Freeze, which is really just being in a state of avoidance a lot of the time. Maybe you like, don't look at your bills in the drawer. You kind of like turn a blind eye to dealing with problems that you need to work through or fawn, which is our chronic people pleasing mode. Maybe you find yourself chronically saying yes when it's actually a no for you. And as a result, you're constantly abandoning yourself. And you'll see all of These things are actually damaging to the relationship, to yourself first, and then they're damaging to your relationships second. Because from being in fight, flight, freeze or fawn, we sabotage the things we truly want. And it often causes us to feel like we are living inauthentically, living in resentment with people or frustration. And dysregulation equals disconnection. When your nervous system is constantly in one of these fight, flight, freeze or fawn modes, people on the receiving end of that often view it as unpredictability. And so there's an inherent distance there, even for those of you who are anxiously attached, who are like, okay, well I spend a lot of time fawning. There is a hidden cost to intimacy, to closeness in relationships, when you're always people pleasing. Because you're connecting and investing in the relationships around you through a mask, you're not being your authentic self. And so that will be a barrier to intimacy, to connection, especially across time. You'll also see that if you're more in focus, fight, flight or freeze mode, then you are less able to be present. And truly this connects and affects all attachment styles in various ways. Our anxious attachment cells often are chronically people pleasing. Our fearful avoidance often oscillate between that chronic people pleasing mode and then fight mode or flight mode, and dismissive avoidance often struggle and spend a lot of time in freeze mode. And all of these things are associated with being less present, less authentic, and less emotionally available. Now, a regulated nervous actually signals to somebody else safety. And if you didn't already know this, your nervous system is constantly in training with nervous systems of people around you. This is something that all mammals do. And we have the power to pick up on small social cues, micro expressions, body language changes, tone of voice changes that then allow us to sort of tap into a subconscious and even unconscious understanding of how people are feeling around us and whether or not we are safe to be around them. And these are all giving signals off about whether or not somebody is actually available for intimacy, for trust, and for long term connection. But if you want to dive more deeply into a course that really helps repair this, you can check it out fully for free for seven days, which is more than enough time to finish this course. And just for a limited time, you actually get the how to heal from a Breakup course for free, for life. So you get to keep that one literally for free. It's a gift, a giveaway. But you can dive in and you can actually check out and work through the workbook and materials. Our course called Overcoming Jealousy and Repairing Broken trust. And it's a really powerful course that outlines in more detail the steps you can take, how to communicate how to deal with trust issues in a relationship head on, so that you can either heal and fix them, or you know when it's time to go. Now, There was a 2005 study done by diamond and Hicks on attachment and human development. And the study found that securely attached individuals actually showed lower physiological reactivity during conflicts with their partners. Their heart rates and cortisol spikes were smaller, meaning they could remain calm, repair conflict faster, and build trust a lot more effectively in the relationships they had to other people. And this in turn allowed them to have better breakthroughs in conflict, have better outcomes associated with conflict, actually bringing each partner closer to one another after a conflict got worked out. There was also a study From Powers in 2007 on human development and psychology that demonstrated couples with healthier nervous system regulation not only reported higher satisfaction and stability in their long term relationships, but had a greater chance at staying with somebody for longer periods of time. So more longevity in their relationships. In other words, regulation equals resilience and love. Now I want to talk about how neuroscience is just catching up on things that ancient wisdom has been communicating to us for thousands of years. And then we'll talk about an exercise you can start doing all right now to retrain your nervous system to be more calm, to connect with people, and to actually build towards healthy and secure love. Now this is something I have always loved to study. I've always loved to find the overlaps between psychology, neuroscience and ancient wisdom. But here are some really powerful places to start. The Buddhists often talk about how peace comes from within. In fact, Buddha says do not seek it without. And Buddhists often describe how inner peace comes from inner regulation, which then allows you to be the seed of loving kindness towards others. Essentially, showcasing that inner calm or nervous system regulation aligns us with a greater ability to be more present in loving and close relationships. Psalm 46 says, Be still and know that I am God, demonstrating how stillness of the mind and body tapping in to how stillness within the mind and body thus regulating our nervous system, allow us to to move from a place of peace and then allow us to create more loving and grounded connections. Hinduism often talks so much about how yoga is the journey of the self through the self to the self, and often discusses the really powerful concepts of breath, work, meditation and nervous system regulation through yoga as being paths to inner mastery that then prepare us to deeper connection not just to ourselves, but also to others. So if it Isn't already clear. Literally, one of the fundamental factors that is going to allow you as a human being to develop secure, healthy, loving relationships with others and take a step to becoming more securely attached. Because in fact, regulating our nervous system and retraining our nervous system is one of six pillars of integrated attachment theory, which is the neuroscience of how we actually change our attachment style to become securely attached. If we do not know how to regulate our nervous systems and do not learn to have a focus of control there, then you are going to constantly be more reactive, more flighty people, please too much and abandon yourself in the process, keeping your attachment wounds alive and blocking connection, blocking intimacy and closeness in an authentic form with somebody else. But here's a really powerful, easy place to start when it comes to actually regulating your nervous system. And one of these eight major concepts is our ability to learn to connect internally with our breath. So you may have heard of this before, but we're connecting two foundational concepts, which is one, our ability to connect with our breath. And number two, the ability to self soothe through self soothing touch. And what I want you to do here, and it's very simple, it's a really easy place to start from, is you're gonna start by practicing sitting with yourself for five to seven minutes at a time and getting really conscious about your breath. And what I mean by this is we're gonna inhale for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale for four counts and hold for four counts again. You can actually imagine a box. This is called the box breath. It's a very common practice. And while you're doing this, okay, you're going to repeat this for five rounds. So breathe in for four, hold for four, then you're going to breathe out for four, hold for four, okay? And while you're doing this, I want you to practice placing one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly and actually telling to your body, you don't have to say this out loud, but telling to your body, you are here now, you are safe now. And what this is allowing you to do is practice getting anchored in your body. So many of us, especially who are insecurely attached from childhood, grow up being disconnected, being divorced from what's going on in your internal reality. And I know when I was a fearful avoidant, this is something I struggled with. So I had such a hard time knowing what I was feeling in real time while I was in the company or presence of other people. So I could find that when I was away from people, I kind of knew what I wanted or what my boundaries were. But a lot of times when I was with other people in real time, if somebody was like, let's do this this weekend, or hey, I need you to do me this favor, I couldn't even get in touch with my own emotions quickly enough to make a decision. So I would just compulsively agree to doing things that sometimes I didn't want to do. And so sometimes I would leave an event or a get together and be like, wait, why did I agree to that? That's not what I want. Or why didn't I set a boundary there? Or sometimes I would just feel frustrated, like, hey, that person didn't speak to me in a healthy way. Why didn't I address it? And at the root, it was because I was not anchored in my own body. I had spent a lot of time being mildly dissociated because I was so externally focused on what other people were feeling and experiencing around me and being very hyper vigilant around other people as a whole. And so this is a great practice to just practice anchoring back into yourself, retraining your nervous system to know that you are safe, to actually reconnect with your breath, with your own internal world. And practicing this five to seven minutes a day has shown to have a really powerful impact on moving us out of sympathetic nervous system and into parasympathetic, which is rest and digest mode. But it's also the place from which we have the most capacity to heal from a nervous system point of view. So I hope you enjoyed today's video. If you don't want to miss any of our daily videos that I put out here on a regular basis, make sure you subscribe to the channel like share with somebody else who might benefit. And thank you so much for stopping by and for watching. I'll see you tomorrow.