How to Get Out of Your Own Way - Tips for Beating Functional Freeze

Do the simplest tasks ever feel like monumental challenges? Join me as we dissect the phenomenon of functional freeze—a state where your brain's response to stress can leave you feeling disconnected and anxious. We'll delve into how your brain reacts to everyday stressors like work deadlines and social obligations, and manifests in physical symptoms and reactionary choices (or lack thereof). I'll also explain the roles of the autonomic nervous system and the amygdala, and how chronic stress or unresolved trauma can worsen these experiences. Using the cognitive triangle framework, we'll explore how your thoughts, feelings, and actions intertwine to sustain this freeze response, and most importantly, I’ll give you actionable insights on breaking this cycle to become more proactive and present in your life.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding and Overcoming Functional Freeze
• 10:52 Developing Self-Care Techniques

Transcript

Crystal McLain: 0:00

Do you ever find yourself feeling stuck, like you're incapable of making even the tiniest decision or doing the smallest task? Well, you can blame your brain for throwing you into something called functional freeze. Today, here at CMC, we're going to learn exactly what functional freeze is, why it happens and, most importantly, what we can do to overcome it so you can show up in life like the decisive, proactive badass that I know you're capable of being. My name is Crystal McLain. This is Creative Self-Care, and together we're exploring new ways towards wellness so we can effectively care for the mind, body and mother, love and soul and live healthy, empowered lives individually and collectively. If you appreciate what I'm doing here at CMC, want to support my work and to gain a more personal experience, you can join my friends at Patreon To learn more about our community and how we're making a positive impact. You can visit crystalmcleancreativecom. All right, let's get to it.

Crystal McLain: 1:06

So the functional freeze response is a completely natural reaction that occurs when the brain is feeling overwhelmed, making it harder for you to do seemingly simple things, despite being a relatively functional human. Signs that you may be in functional freeze are feeling disconnected from your body or surroundings, having a hard time thinking clearly, or making decisions, ongoing low levels of depression or anxiety, wanting to isolate or disconnect from people, trouble taking care of yourself, procrastinating and having a hard time starting or completing tasks, or feeling exhausted or struggling to move your body. Now, I don't know about you, but all of this feels pretty relatable to me. There have definitely been times throughout my life when I've felt like this, and I'll share some of those stories with my Patreon friends. But right now let's talk about why this happens and what you can do about it. So, when the brain does not feel safe, it signals the body to activate the sympathetic response which we all know as fight, flight or freeze. This means your body is literally preparing itself to fight off the danger flee from the danger or freeze to protect yourself from the danger. Now, whether you fight, flee or freeze, your body is still going to increase your heart rate, elevate your blood pressure, speed up your breathing, activate muscle tension, slow down digestion and release adrenaline. This response is controlled by something called the autonomic nervous system, which means it happens automatically without your conscious control. And we love that this happens automatically because we do not have the time to sit around and contemplate our circumstances when we are in real danger. But here's the thing A lot of times when this response is triggered, we're not actually in danger. We're just feeling uncomfortable or challenged in some way. You totally know what I'm talking about here.

Crystal McLain: 3:16

There are so many things that cue the freak show in our brains, like psychological stressors, like work deadlines in our brains. Like psychological stressors, like work deadlines, arguments, conflict, boundary breaking or setting, public speaking, financial worries, unfinished chores, social obligations, new experiences or general feelings of doubt, worry, shame or fear. There's also environmental stressors like loud noises, bright lights, extreme temperatures or crowds of people. And there are physical stressors like acute or chronic pain, illness or infection, allergies, pms, headaches, muscle tension, exercise or digestive issues. Now, under the best circumstances, we're able to experience these non-life-threatening stressors and have all the thoughts and feelings that come along with these stressors but then tap into our prefrontal cortex so we can think rationally about them and make choices that deal with them in an appropriate way and get on with our damn lives. But for someone who lives with chronic stress, trauma or unresolved emotional issues, these regular everyday stressors can keep them stuck in that sympathetic response. But because the brain is clever enough to eventually figure out that you're not in real danger. You can appear to be relatively fine, showing up enough to eventually figure out that you're not in real danger. You can appear to be relatively fine, showing up enough to do things like work or feed your kids, but behind the scenes, your nervous system is actually running on overtime, trying to keep you feeling safe, but also making it really fucking hard to be present in your mind, body or life. What's literally happening is your amygdala is driving the bus. The emotional part of your brain is causing you to make reactionary choices based on those fight, flight or freeze feelings, and this likely means that you're going to be exhausted and choosing things that feel easy, comfortable, predictable, or hits those dopamine buttons just right. Comfortable, predictable, or hits those dopamine buttons just right. And while these choices might feel good in the moment, they're not the choices that are going to get you out of this sympathetic cycle and move you forward.

Crystal McLain: 5:39

If you've been taking my free online creative self-care course, then you know about something called the cognitive triangle. In short, this triangle consists of your thoughts, feelings and actions, and each of these things influence the other. Your thoughts are going to influence your feelings, both emotional and physical, and your feelings are going to be the driving force behind your actions, and your actions reinforce your thoughts. Here's a super simple example. Let's say you're a person who's been living with chronic stress for whatever reason, and you've got a mountain of laundry that you've been avoiding for a really long time. Every time you look at that mountain of laundry, you beat yourself up because you haven't dealt with it, you throw down some shame, you call yourself some names and you question why you're so lazy. This is going to make you feel really, really bad, and not just emotionally but physically, and your brain is going to perceive this as a threat and put you into the freeze response, which is why you can't seem to deal with the laundry, even though you'd like to. So. Instead, your brain is going to tell you to go have a snack, check your phone or go do almost anything else that feels easier than the laundry, because that is going to give you the illusion of feeling safe. And the next time you pass that mountain of laundry, those same negative thoughts are going to pop back into your head, but this time they're going to be even stronger, because your previous actions reinforced your original beliefs. Do you see how this works? Now this is all happening subconsciously as a reactionary cycle. Now, this is all happening subconsciously as a reactionary cycle, and how we're going to break this cycle is by accessing the power of the conscious thinking brain and creating a somatic experience that helps regulate the nervous system.

Crystal McLain: 7:41

But first, let's talk about compassion. The first thing I need to tell you is that you need to be compassionate with yourself. Being stuck in a functional freeze response does not mean you're failing as a human. On the contrary, it means your systems are working just as they're designed to. The only issue is is that your autonomic nervous system has been running on autopilot long enough to convince you that you're no longer in control, but that's not true. You made the choice to listen to this podcast, so that's proof that you are the boss of you. You just need a reminder and a little practice, which you can start doing in two ways. Number one identify what's going on.

Crystal McLain: 8:29

My advice for this first step is to practice when you're feeling relatively in control, like perhaps right now, reflecting on a time when you felt frozen in the face of a challenging choice. What was going on with your cognitive triangle? I know you were in a freeze response, but do your best to either remember or imagine what was happening. Remember, this is creative self-care, so we're going to use our curiosity and imagination. But what were the thoughts that were running through your head? What emotions and body sensations did you experience and how did you react as a result of those thoughts and feelings? Write that shit down. Manually writing, if it's accessible to you, will not only improve brain function that controls movement, vision, sensory processing and memory, but it will also act as a way of processing your thoughts and feelings out of your body. Once you've written down what's going on, then it's time to write a plan for the changes you're going to make. How would you like to mindfully respond? How do you need to feel in order to respond in this way, and what thoughts or narratives do you need to have to evoke these feelings? That's your plan, all right.

Crystal McLain: 9:52

Step number two is to practice grounding techniques. Grounding techniques are things that you can do to become present in your body or in your moment. If being present in your body feels safe, you can do things like deep breathing, body scans, active relaxation or some kind of mindful movement like yoga. But if being present in your body does not feel safe, you can practice noticing things in your environment like shapes, colors, sounds or textures. Honestly, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Now, what's happening with these seemingly simple exercises is you are literally creating new neural pathways which rewire the conscious brain to be in control and able to focus and witness without judgment, and this is an important skill when we're trying to redirect that emotional reactionary amygdala part of the brain towards more thoughtful and supportive thoughts and actions.

Crystal McLain: 10:52

Now, don't go and do this once and expect miracles. That's not how this works. You're going to have to practice these grounding techniques throughout the day for several days, maybe even months. Just go ahead and do them forever, but little by little, you should start noticing that you're able to gain control of your thoughts more easily. And, as far as the writing goes, I do it daily, if you can, and over the course of a month or two, you can read back and see how your thoughts and feelings and actions have changed. All right, my friend, that's gonna do it for today. If you wanna become a master at creative self-care, you can sign up for my free online course, or you can become a patreon member, which also means that you're supporting my work and contributing to the giveback program. I'll leave a link to everything in the show notes below. I love you, I appreciate you and I am so proud of you for being here today. All right, I'll see you soon.