Show Notes:

Since starting this podcast, one of the most frustrating things I hear all too often is that as front line workers you are told to be aware of trauma. To be looking out for PTSD. To be on alert that you are at higher risk for stress-related mental health concerns. …But then never being told WHAT to look for. Not knowing what exactly PTSD looks like, feels like. How to know when there’s a problem, before it’s so bad that you can’t convince yourself to get out of bed and face the world.

That trend is so very concerning to me. While I know we have made gains in reducing the stigma of mental health concerns and that things like therapy are being made more accessible and are encouraged more by workplaces now than ever before in history – what does any of that matter if we aren’t equipping people with the basic knowledge of what the hell to look for? How can we expect people to get support and do the work to help themselves if they don’t even know there’s a problem?

This stood out to me most starkly a while back, and I have referenced it a number of times on the show since then, when Jenn Pound came on and talked about her PTSD symptoms manifesting physically. She felt sick, like she had a bad flu that she just couldn’t shake. No one told her what to look for. Despite posters from occupational health that said to be watchful for indicators of occupational stress injuries, no one clarified what exactly to be on watch for. So it went on and on and on, untreated, assumed to be some bug. Until it got so bad that it could no longer be chalked up to the flu. And by then, the damage was so severely done that it becomes a totally different kind of ballgame to try to play out.

I hate this. I hate that this is a thing. I hate that you are trained to identify markers of mental health concerns in those you serve, but aren’t trained to look for your own. Whose brilliant idea was that?!?

So during this series, we are going to talk about some of the hallmark concerns that show up in people who are exposed to trauma and high stress experiences. We will also talk about some of the less hallmark but equally need-to-know pieces to be aware of. Of all of the series’ I have done on this show, this one is among the most important and I hope that you will listen, use what we talk about, and please, please help others working alongside you by sharing it as far and wide as you possibly can. This is the stuff that can help us turn the tide on so much of what is plaguing front line workplaces. We can make it different guys, but I need your help.

Today I want us to talk about hypervigilance.

Hypervigilence is the word we use to describe the feeling of being on high alert. That feeling when your body feels tense and activated, ready to do what it needs to do to keep you or others safe. It’s an on edge feeling. A heightened feeling.

When we’re in vigilance, there are a number of changes that happen for our brains and bodies. This state is the readiness that would, in a stress inducing situation, give way to fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. When we feel it, muscle tension increases, blood flow changes, body temperature changes, breath rate and heart rate both change. Our senses will tend to feel heightened, looking and listening for indication of threat. Our brains will tend to get super focused, scanning and assessing.

That’s vigilance…but what about HYPERvigilance? Well, this is vigilance on speed. It is an activated state that carries with us, regardless of the scenario. It’s extra, beyond what we need and beyond when we need it. When nothing stressful or threatening is happening, it is energy directed to waiting for something that isn’t coming. More often than not, it’s wasted energy. And it’s ridiculously depleting.

Why would your brain want you to be on edge when you’re having a bubble bath, or trying to fall asleep under your comfy blankets, or when you are sipping your coffee in your favourite chair in the morning? …Well, because stress and trauma generalize.

What that means is that our brains expand stressful and traumatic experiences in an effort to protect us not just from bad things that have happened but also from any possibly affiliated things even in close proximity to a thing that’s happened. And they think a great way to serve you is by having you ready for anything, all the time.

Some people would talk about this as triggering. And they are connected. A trigger is exposure to something that our brain has associated with a traumatic experience (whether consciously or not), and when our brain picks up on that trigger, it elicits a hypervigilant response – an over-the-top protective activation even though there is nothing of particular importance to be activated by right this moment. For lots of people, vigilance will come up in very specific situations, when triggered by specific stimuli related to specific past events or experiences. For others, their vigilance will feel persistent and unabating.

The thing about hypervigilance is that number one, it’s not natural. And number two, it’s not helpful. What do I mean by not natural? Well, while vigilance is a natural protective response, HYPERvigilance does not work with what our bodies were intended to give us. Our bodies are meant to have a reactive, self-protective response to threat but it’s meant to be very time limited. It’s meant to come up, advise me to fight for my life or run as fast as my feet with take me or hold my breath and hope to God it’s over soon…and then it’s meant to subside gradually as our system finds itself in safety again. Our brains and bodies didn’t plan for being in persistent threat where safety is never known or felt. They aren’t meant to run in this state all the time – the energy cost is WAY too high and the depletion connected to it is immense. Which is why for many people who live in this state they struggle with fatigue, irritability, feeling like they have a short fuse. The vigilance burns the wick so short that there isn’t much left to work with. On top of that, hypervigilance is rarely helpful. Your brain is choosing to stay stuck in vigilance because it believes that despite not being made to do this, it’s better to stay here than lower your defenses and risk something happening you weren’t ready for. …It’s maybe not terrible in theory, but in actual practice the issue is that your body carries the toll – the cost of being in this activated state for a prolonged period of time. It actually becomes LESS responsive, LESS capable of thinking and problem solving and handling something if a threat did end up popping up. The cost is more than whatever benefit it generally offers and it can dramatically reduce our capacity to manage through a stressor or traumatic experience because we’re walking into it so very depleted rather than with our best skills and capacities intact. If fact, for some, the persistent extent of hypervigilance leads to a new problem we’ll be talking more about in another episode – dissociation. Quickly for today, dissociation is when our brain and body numbs out in an effort to cope with too much activation – it checks out because the cost is too high. And this happens often in connection to hypervigilance costing too much for too long.

Now, we’ve been naming that so much of this happens without feeling like there is a lot of conscious choice to it. Your brain and body are mapping these things without your vote, and often it feels like you’re just along for the ride. Worst ride ever.

So how do we take the reins and get off the ride? Well, two things…and one caveat.

First, opposite actions. At the start of this episode I described some physiological ways that your body reacts when it moves into vigilance. To train our bodies that they don’t need to be in that state right now, we have to help them go back to homeostasis – that place we’re in when we are safe and chill and fine. When you think about the things your body does when it becomes vigilant, your goal is to do the opposite. So, if you get tense, shake your muscles out. If your extremities get cold, squeeze your hands into fists to get blood moving back into them. Scrunch your toes in your shoes to do the same thing. If your breathing gets short and fast, challenge yourself to lengthen and deepen each breath. If you tense down into tight, closed off posture, try to stand with your feet firmly on the ground and stretch out to take up space. By putting your body in the opposite of what vigilance demands of it, you are making your brain think about whether it really needs the vigilance right now. You are coaxing it into the possibility that you are more safe than it thinks. And you are training your brain to gradually recognize the difference between threat and safety. The big trick here is consistency – when you do it consistently, you can train your brain to adjust how it interprets and interacts with stress and small triggers. If you aren’t consistent with it, your brain easily gets roped back into what it thinks is the safer option, which is to keep you hypervigilant and ready for anything…even as you try to fall asleep in your warm safe home.

Second, anchor to safety. Safety is a complicated thing, because often we have had it until suddenly we didn’t. Because of that, it can be hard to try to convince your brain you’re safe because it knows about times when you thought that and were wrong. Your job here is to look for evidence. Be like a detective – what is there to tell you that you ARE safe? And what calls into question the safety? If there is a hefty long list of evidence for safety, and virtually nothing on the list of evidence to suggest unsafe, then your brain and your body can anchor to that. They can rest easier in knowing that they have fully evaluated the situation to the extent they are able, and recognize that the evidence leans heavily toward this being a safe scenario.

Now, I said there were 2 ways to take the reins over hypervigilance, and one caveat – and here is the caveat. Looking at the evidence and building a case for safety, is actually a really important part of the process for people who experience severe and persistent hypervigilance, because safety can sometimes FEEL unsafe, even when it is totally there and present. This is most especially true for people with more complex trauma histories, where environments that were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren’t; where people who were SUPPOSED to be safe, weren’t. When this is our experience, especially from early in life, it wires our brain to link supposed safety with unsafety, and we have difficulty finding a feeling of safety almost anywhere. In these cases, our brains have been forced to strongly associate what should be safe with unsafety and they struggle to tease these apart later in life when we have more capacity to control situations and ensure our own safety. Because of this wiring, we will often have a FELT sense of unsafety even when situations are completely and perfectly safe. Even more than that, we might actually find ourselves with an INCREASED felt sense of unsafety when we are in the presence of safety, because we are actually more familiar and strangely comfortable with unsafe – it’s known and predictable…like the evil we know being better than the evil we don’t know. Safety can FEEL threatening, because we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to trust it. We don’t know who we are or how to be in it.

The problem in these situations is that we are relying on our feelings as the only source of viable information. While our feelings are an important source of information, and ones we should listen to and take into consideration, they are easily skewed given our wiring, and we need to make sure we check them against other sources of data. This is where evidence comes into play – my feelings are telling me I am unsafe, but all of the evidence suggests safe. I can be informed by the feeling, but also give weight to the evidence. I might then act from a cautious but more open place, and as I have more evidence I can then use this to train my emotions to know the difference between safety and unsafety.

Regardless of whether you have known safety and struggle with hypervigilance now in certain types of situations, or if you have always struggled with safety and experience hypervigilance in many spaces almost all of the time – the job is the same. Develop attunement to evidence for safety, and anchor to it. Notice it. Really pay attention to it. Examine the evidence, and let it build the case for your brain to take it down a couple of notches.

When you can combine these two skills – opposite actions to de-escalate hypervigilance, and using evidence to anchor back to safety, you will find yourself conquering hypervigilance so much more often than you are currently feeling conquered by it.

Episode Challenge:

· Where does vigilance (and possibly hypervigilance) show up in your life?
· How does it usually show up in your body?
· What would be opposite actions you could try out?
· What are hallmarks of safety for you? What evidence tells you that you are safe (even if you don’t feel safe)?
· How can you actively and intentionally use these pieces of evidence to anchor to safety? How can you remind yourself about them and prompt yourself to notice them in moments you might need to?

Additional Resources:

Reflect on where you’re at and what you might need by using our free Beating the Breaking Point Indicators Checklist & Triage Guide.

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