Our Soul is Just Trying to Catch Up: The Need for Rhythms of Rest
TRAUMA IS BECOMING MORE UNDERSTOOD
If you’ve been on social media or YouTube recently, you’ve probably heard someone (whether a mental health professional or mental health coach of some kind) talking about trauma. You may have heard about the 'Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn' responses, which are becoming much more familiar terms now than they were just five years ago.
If you haven’t heard about Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn, they are nervous system responses to chronic stress or trauma. I wrote about these in further detail in a previous blog if you want to learn more: https://www.mindjoycounselling.com/blog/our-god-given-nervous-system-and-why-its-so-important-for-our-mental-health
The idea is, if we need to escape a threat, our nervous system will prioritize certain processes like making our heart work harder to direct blood to our extremities, preparing us to fight or run away.
It’s a beautiful system really, God has hard-wired us for survival so that we could survive a broken world. During Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn our body is prioritizing stress hormones and energy so we can be engaged for battle, and it is suppressing processes like rest, digestion, feeling our emotions, and creating connection. It is about surviving the moment, not about processing the moment and reflecting on how it impacted you.
So maybe you have heard of these survival processes before, or maybe this is news to you. Either way, what we still don’t talk about enough as a society, and certainly in the Church, is that our body perceives “busyness” very similar to how it perceives the traumatic survival responses.
I often use the picture of a bear chasing us in the woods as a picture of trauma and stress. In the woods your eyes would take in the threat of the bear, and your brain would rapidly prioritize if you need to fight, flight, or freeze (play dead) to survive the moment.
This survival system is robust and hard-wired. The hope is your nervous system will do it’s job and protect you, and that you would escape harm. Then, when the threat is gone your nervous system would recalibrate (or, “regulate”) so that you re-enter a place of safety and peace. The hard-wired survival response is meant to be temporary, so we can hopefully shift back to thriving.
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE BEAR
As much as I lean on this example of a bear chasing us in the woods, today’s threats tend to be more nuanced. They also tend to be more prolonged.
The same nervous system process that helps you fight the bear, is the same process that helps you respond to the copious amounts of emails waiting for you at your desk. The same eyes that spot a bear in the woods and alert your body’s alarm also notice the angry expression on your employer’s or family member’s face.
The ears that hear the bear crunching branches beneath its paws are the same ears that hear the bombarding notifications from your phone; another text, another email that needs your response. The same hormones—adrenaline and cortisol—that help you focus during danger also fuel the constant busyness of work, life, and ministry.
Being constantly busy is a threat. Being chronically overwhelmed in life is a perceived danger. And just like we don’t take time to process our emotions when running from the bear – because we are focused on surviving the moment - our soul also goes on hold when we are chronically busy. Our soul goes on hold when our schedule is packed to the brim and looks reminiscent of the game Tetris.
Simply not having anticipatory rest breaks where we are able to relax, can keep our body in a chronically stressed state. All the hurts and stressors that are really bothering us in life don’t have time to have a voice. Instead the hurts and pains stay there, accumulating, and buzzing under the surface.
THE DISORDERED ALARM
I am fully persuaded that many of our mental health disorders - such as anxiety and depression - are a result of historical pain that never had an opportunity to heal. People have been through trauma or other stressful live events, and due to busyness and being preoccupied with the chaos of life, the pain has remained in place, and the alarm bells are going off.
Imagine living in a house where a smoke detector is constantly beeping. When its batteries are low, the noise is not just annoying—it’s distracting and stressful. When that happens, I want to address it immediately; it is difficult to function with that noise in the background.
In this case, the alarm is going off even though there is no smoke, and this is what happens with anxiety and depression. The symptoms of anxiety and depression are the alarm bells. The symptoms are the constant beeping of the smoke detector. Only in this case it is not because of a dying battery, it is because of a suppressed soul that doesn’t feel safe.
CREATING SAFETY TO HEAL
After 20 years of working in mental health, I fully believe that a foundational component of healing, is finding rhythms of rest. We need to tell our nervous system that we aren’t running from the bear (stress or trauma) anymore, so that our soul (our mind, will, and emotions) can finally have a chance to catch up. Creating space and stillness for an opportunity to heal.
When we finally stop running from our pain, we can process our pain. When we finally stop living in an alarm state, we can feel and heal what is underneath the alarm. When we finally stop living in a state of urgency, our body can enter a restorative state of rest.
Without regular rhythms of rest, we fall into an “urgent push and collapse dynamic” where we urgently push through life and eventually collapse when we finally stop or reach our limit.
We urgently push through the week to collapse on the weekend. Or we urgently push through the year to collapse on vacation. Or we urgently push through our entire career only to completely collapse when we retire.
Constantly getting sick during the holidays or when you finally take a day off is a sign of a body in a toxic stress state. It’s a sign you are still running from the bear.
START SMALL - JUST BE INTENTIONAL
Let me encourage you today, even small steps toward regular rest can have a profound impact. Rather than waiting for the weekend or vacation to rest, try creating quieter evenings a few days a week. Intentionally building in pockets of down time, time to catch-up with your soul.
What if you intentionally took your breaks at work? Instead of using that opportunity to write 10 emails, use it to create a quiet space for breathing and relaxing. I promise your nervous system will thank you. Your soul will eventually come alive again.
We talk about “processing pain” a great deal in therapy, but this can only happen when we are safe. You cannot process how running from the bear made you feel while you are still running. Healing trauma requires a foundation of safety.
Instead of putting our soul on pause, let’s practice pausing in life so that our soul can have necessary moments of reflection, pondering, feeling, and healing. If we need boundaries to create more safety that can be explored too, but again all of this is easier to discern when we are entering a restful state. Clarity comes when we are resting. Answers come when we are still. Wisdom cries out, but are we quiet enough to listen?
FINDING JOY IN FINDING REST
If we want to experience joy, we must stop running. If we want to move from surviving to thriving, we most calm the urgency. We must build in rhythms of rest.
Be creative, be strategic, but most of all be intentional to find those rhythms. If you need guidance, help is available. Together, we can find restful rhythms that God in His infinite wisdom, called 'holy' from the very beginning (Genesis 2:3). I must say, I completely agree. Rest is holy.
