How To Instantly Increase Your Capacity

Anyone that has taken one of my classes or worked with me individually knows how often I say “it’s a process.” I say it a lot, because rewiring the brain and nervous system is. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to recognize our patterns that contribute to dysregulation and change them. It’s also common that we feel even more dysregulation when we are in the process of changing some of those patterns, so it takes quite a bit of patience and time. It’s a process.

So it’s not very often that I speak to something instantly increasing or shrinking our capacity. In general, building our capacity takes time, work and a ton of patience. However, there are some things that can have an immediate impact on expanding or shrinking our capacity in the moment. One of those things is the story tied to what we are experiencing in the moment.

When we have a symptom or challenging emotion come up, our brains want to create meaning about that experience. Our brains naturally want to explain what is going on, what it’s tied to and what it will lead to in the future. In other words, our brains want to create a story about the symptom or experience. This story might have some fact to it: the emotion might be tied to someone, the symptom could be related to other factors, in the past it may have led to other things, etc. But getting pulled into the story instantly shrinks our capacity to be with the symptom or emotion.

The story can be pretty big and it often takes time to be able to identify the story and separate it from the symptom/emotion. There are however, some key words that indicate we’re getting pulled into storyland and shrinking our capacity. The words “forever”, “never” or “always” tend to have an almost instant impact on our ability to be with a hard emotion or symptom without fear and resistance. All three words indicate a permanence to the challenging experience and that makes it infinitely more difficult to remain calm and nonreactive to what is arising.

It goes without saying that the symptoms related to LSI/a dysregulated nervous system can be intense. So can challenging emotions. When we remember that this is temporary and changeable, it increases our capacity to allow that symptom/emotion to be there and respond to it in a way that lets our brain and nervous system know we are safe. It’s hard, but we often can do that. But who can do that if things is always going to be like this? Who can do that if this is never going to change? Forever is a long time and asking ourselves to be nonreactive and calm to something so hard for that length of time usually feels unachievable. In those moments, our capacity instantly shrinks and we get pulled into fear, hopelessness, helplessness, and we react to the experience instead of responding to it.

The next time a challenging emotion or symptom arises, try to notice if your brain is creating a story that indicates a permanence to the experience. The experience will not last forever, nothing does. It will not always be like this, you are changing your brain and nervous system every time you use your tools. Just noticing those old limiting stories can have an immediate and profound impact on your capacity and how you respond to the challenge.

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