a note on… healing your nervous system

notes on freedom

A weekly email series containing easily digestible morsels of info on relational trauma and how to find freedom from it.

THIS WEEK IT’S A NOTE ON…healing your nervous system

Your amygdala are two small almond shaped structures deep within your brain. They’re your alarm centre: if they sense threat they set-off your fight-flight-freeze response.

Everyone’s amygdala operate similarly. But those of us who have experienced trauma have hyperactive amygdala that set off our survival response at the smallest sign that we could be unsafe. These tiny structures are responsible for how constantly we’re triggered into overwhelm, fear and anxiety.

Healing our trauma, then, is intimately bound with healing these parts of our body.

But how?

Here’s what laboratories at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have found out:

Just 8 weeks mindfulness and meditation practice appears to:

– shrink the amygdala, leading to less reactivity

– thicken the prefrontal cortex (PFC; the executive centre responsible for reasoning, high level thinking and problem solving), leading to greater attention and concentration

– increase the number of connections between the amygdala and the PFC, leading to greater executive control over the fear response

– increase the size of the Posterior Cingulate (the part of the brain responsible for wandering thoughts), leading to a greater capacity to focus and less thought wandering.

Freedom from relational trauma is found as we show-up for ourselves daily in new ways. It’s clear that one of these ‘new ways’ can, and should be, a daily mindfulness and meditation practice.