Don't Call It Laziness: The Biology Behind Avoidance
Have you ever felt completely unable to connect with your friends or family, even when you desperately want to? In this engaging episode, Vance Hansen breaks down the complex interplay between shame, avoidance, and our nervous systems. He explains how our biology often misinterprets social situations as threats, leading to what he calls 'social freeze'. Vance shares his personal experiences, illustrating how common feelings of guilt and shame can keep us locked in a cycle of avoidance. The episode explores how these responses are not moral failings but biological survival mechanisms and introduces listeners to effective somatic tools that can help break this cycle. From breathing exercises to gentle body movements, Vance equips us with practical strategies to address the freeze response and reclaim our ability to engage with the world. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand their own avoidance patterns and learn how to show up fully in their lives. It’s all about compassion, understanding, and, most importantly, actionable steps towards healing.
Takeaways:
- Understanding avoidance as a biological freeze response helps dismantle the stigma of laziness and not caring.
- The concept of the Double Hijack reveals how shame can exacerbate feelings of paralysis and disconnection.
- Task paralysis, social withdrawal, and emotional numbness are signs of nervous system dysregulation, not flaws in character.
- Vance presents four somatic tools to interrupt the freeze response, each suited for specific situations.
- We learn that self-compassion and curiosity are far more effective than shame in overcoming freeze states.
- The episode emphasizes tracking our nervous system's responses over time, not just seeking immediate transformation.
Links referenced in this episode:
Transcript
Welcome to the Pocket Recovery Show.
Speaker A:I'm your host, Vance Hanson.
Speaker A:Each episode, we dive into the raw, real causes of fear, anxiety and addiction.
Speaker A:We give you the exact biohacks needed to break the cycle, quiet the internal chaos, and regain control of your life.
Speaker A:Thanks for hitting play.
Speaker A:Now let's get started.
Speaker A:Take a breath.
Speaker A:Let your shoulders drop.
Speaker A:I'm glad you're here.
Speaker A:I want to start today's episode with an image I've buried since my addiction.
Speaker A:My daughter, a concert she'd been planning for weeks, a special outfit, custom makeup, and me unable to take her.
Speaker A:I'll come back to that moment, but first I need to give you the science that explains what was really happening.
Speaker A:Because it wasn't what either of us thought at the time.
Speaker A:Today's episode is one I have been most excited to get to you.
Speaker A:Not because it's complicated, but because it's one of the most misunderstood, most mislabeled, and most shame saturated experience in the entire landscape of recovery and behavioral change.
Speaker A:We're talking about the biology of avoidance.
Speaker A:And before this episode is over, I'm going to show you three things that will change how you look at yourself permanently.
Speaker A:First, I'm going to show you that what you call laziness, what you call not caring, and what you call being fundamentally broken are not character flaws.
Speaker A:They are the results of a biological freeze response.
Speaker A:Your nervous system learned this in order to protect you.
Speaker A:Second, I'm going to show you why shame about the freeze doesn't help you escape, actually makes it worse.
Speaker A:And I'm going to share something personal, a difficult part of my story.
Speaker A:Because I think you need to hear it from someone who has lived it.
Speaker A:Finally, I'm going to hand you four specific body based tools you can use to interrupt a freeze response in real time.
Speaker A:An actionable tool that you can use right in the middle of the moment when your system is offline.
Speaker A:This is not inspiration.
Speaker A:This is instruction.
Speaker A:You are not lazy.
Speaker A:You are not cold.
Speaker A:You are not broken.
Speaker A:You are hijacked.
Speaker A:Let's go.
Speaker A:When we look at avoidance through traditional psychology, we talk about self sabotage or a lack of motivation.
Speaker A:But when you look at it from a neurobiology perspective, everything changes.
Speaker A:Leaving that phone call unanswered or backing away from a conflict isn't a character flawless.
Speaker A:It is an adaptive, functional survival response triggered by an overactive nervous system.
Speaker A:Simple life events are being interpreted by your brain as threats.
Speaker A:Your racing heart and internal tension are sending constant threat signals straight back up your vagus nerve to your brain, locking you into A seemingly unbreakable loop of pure avoidance.
Speaker A:If we want to start showing up for our lives again, we have to stop fighting our behavior and start changing our physiology.
Speaker A:To understand why the freeze response shows up in our lives the way it does, we have to first recognize that it doesn't always look the same.
Speaker A:In both my clinical work and my own personal recovery, I've watched the freeze response show up in three main ways.
Speaker A:And the reason most people never get help for it, the reason they spend years quietly suffering inside one of these patterns, is because they don't recognize what they're looking at and they actively blame themselves.
Speaker A:I will be talking more about the shame we feel later in section three.
Speaker A:The first way the freeze response shows up as avoidance is task paralysis.
Speaker A:This is staring at the unanswered text, the project you open and immediately close the to do list that grows longer every day while the dread grows with it.
Speaker A:In task paralysis, your prefrontal cortex, the initiating, organizing decision making region of your brain, has gone offline because your amygdala, a cashew sized part of your brain that serves as a danger alarm, has hijacked your nervous system and determined ordinarily demands as survival threats to your brain.
Speaker A:Your to do list has become a mountain lion ready to pounce.
Speaker A:The tasks don't feel hard, they feel impossible.
Speaker A:Not because you lack discipline, because your brain has cut the power to the exact circuit responsible for starting things.
Speaker A:I see this story over and over.
Speaker A:Picture someone who sets 15 alarms.
Speaker A:They build elaborate, color coded to do list.
Speaker A:They genuinely want the outcome they're working toward.
Speaker A:They've tried every productivity system, every accountability app, every every morning routine they found on the Internet.
Speaker A:And despite the entire infrastructure of effort they've built around the task, still cannot begin it.
Speaker A:That's not a character problem, that's a nervous system problem.
Speaker A:And it requires a nervous system solution.
Speaker A:Now, the second way the freeze response shows up is quieter, and I would argue it does more damage to people's lives in the long run.
Speaker A:This is social freeze.
Speaker A:And it's not to be confused with introversion.
Speaker A:It's not choosing solitude because you genuinely recharge alone.
Speaker A:Social freeze is when your nervous system decides that human connection, that very thing that research consistently shows is the most powerful driver of healing, is a threat.
Speaker A:Here's what social freeze looks like.
Speaker A:In real life, you stop replying to chats not because you don't care about the people in them, you love them.
Speaker A:But because every unanswered message represents a social demand and your system cannot process another Demand you start declining invitations, even if you want to go at first, Just the ones that feel like too much, then all of them.
Speaker A:You tell yourself you'll re engage when you feel better, when life settles down a little, when you have more bandwidth.
Speaker A:But here's what nobody tells you.
Speaker A:Bandwidth does not return while you're in freeze.
Speaker A:This nervous system does not self regulate in isolation.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:It co regulates with others.
Speaker A:It heals in relationship, in the presence of safety, with other regulated nervous systems.
Speaker A:This means that the very thing your brain is telling you to avoid that safe human connection is the exact biological mechanism your system needs to begin to repair itself.
Speaker A:The third way the freeze response shows up is one that concerns me most as a clinician.
Speaker A:And the one that scared me most when I recognized it in myself.
Speaker A:This is emotional shutdown.
Speaker A:And it is the quietest, most invisible face of avoidance.
Speaker A:Because it doesn't feel like paralysis, it doesn't feel like dread, it doesn't feel like anything.
Speaker A:That's the point.
Speaker A:The person in emotional shutdown has been in what's called sympathetic dominance or high voltage threat activation for so long that their nervous system has shifted.
Speaker A:It's what Dr. Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist behind the polyvagal theory, calls the dorsal vagal state.
Speaker A:The dorsal vagal complex is the oldest branch of the vagus nerve, evolutionary ancient and shared by reptiles and mammals alike.
Speaker A:But when the nervous system determines that a threat is inescapable, that neither fighting nor fleeing is possible, it drops into this state as a last resort survival mechanism.
Speaker A:It disconnects.
Speaker A:Heart rate drops.
Speaker A:Muscle tone decreases.
Speaker A:Breath shallows.
Speaker A:Total shutdown.
Speaker A:In us, it looks like dissociation.
Speaker A:It looks like emotional numbness.
Speaker A:It looks like sitting across the table from someone you love and feeling nothing and being quietly terrified by the absence of feeling.
Speaker A:Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge something that lives underneath all three of these manifestations of freeze.
Speaker A:A force that isn't talked about enough in the context of recovery.
Speaker A:And a force I spent years trapped inside before I understood what it actually was doing to my biology.
Speaker A:That force is shame.
Speaker A:And it is the subject of our next section.
Speaker A:Because until you understand how shame interacts with the freeze response at a neurobiological level, every tool we discuss will hit a wall before it can reach you.
Speaker A:I could tell you the answer, but it wouldn't land.
Speaker A:I need to stop here and tell you a part of my story, A part I'm not proud of.
Speaker A:When I was in my addiction, I was frozen in many areas.
Speaker A:I was afraid to answer my phone, afraid to meet with my boss and discuss the project I love dearly.
Speaker A:I was even afraid to watch television because the shows were too triggering for me.
Speaker A:It was at this time where a very painful part of my addiction showed up.
Speaker A:In my inability to practice basic hygiene and self care.
Speaker A:I've always held myself to a standard of cleanliness that worked for me, but not when I was frozen.
Speaker A:It deteriorated greatly in a very short period of time.
Speaker A:I stopped showering frequently.
Speaker A:I think I was even afraid to do that.
Speaker A:I stopped cleaning up after meals.
Speaker A:The dishes piled up as well as old food containers and scraps.
Speaker A:I stopped regularly doing laundry and I stopped caring for my home.
Speaker A:The more I looked at the problems as they continued to pile up, the more stuck I became.
Speaker A:I felt like I was worthless because of the mess I had created.
Speaker A:I genuinely, with everything in me, wanted to clean up and take care of myself.
Speaker A:I just couldn't do it.
Speaker A:I felt completely broken.
Speaker A:At the end, my condo became so dirty that the people helping me clean it up while I was in treatment had to wear protective gears and masks just to be able to come inside.
Speaker A:What I didn't understand was that my nervous system was screaming because it thought I was under attack.
Speaker A:My threat detection system was on overlook.
Speaker A:My biology didn't care that I should be doing these things and taking care of myself.
Speaker A:It was responding to active threats, but there wasn't any danger.
Speaker A:My system of interning personal safety was hacked.
Speaker A:That is the system that has to be reprogrammed.
Speaker A:And until it is, the freeze follows you into your recovery just as reliably as it followed you when you were using.
Speaker A:And what made it worse, what I now understand made it dramatically worse, was the shame I felt about my situation.
Speaker A:Because here's what shame does to the nervous system.
Speaker A:When you recognize that you are frozen.
Speaker A:When you see yourself staring at the task, avoiding the call, and withdrawing from the people you love, how do you respond to that?
Speaker A:With self contempt.
Speaker A:You're not motivating yourself.
Speaker A:You're triggering a second amygdala hijack layer directly on top of the first.
Speaker A:It.
Speaker A:It becomes a painful loop that is paralyzing.
Speaker A:The neuroscience of shame is clear and it's brutal.
Speaker A: The: Speaker A:What they found out should stop you in your tracks.
Speaker A:Shame consistently activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the anterior insula, and the thalamus.
Speaker A:Why is that important?
Speaker A:Those are the exact same regions your brain uses to process physical pain.
Speaker A:When this region lights up in response to shame, your brain is not using pain as a metaphor.
Speaker A:It's actually running the pain program.
Speaker A:Your nervous system does not distinguish between a broken bone and a moment of self contempt.
Speaker A:Both are processed as injury.
Speaker A:Both trigger the same downstream survival cascade.
Speaker A:Shame is not metaphorically painful.
Speaker A:It is painful.
Speaker A:Renee Brown's research at the University of Houston extends this even further.
Speaker A:Shame is the intensely painful feeling of believing we are fundamentally flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Speaker A:And critically, that belief activates the same threat response as a physical predator.
Speaker A:The amygdala fires, cortisol floods the system, and the prefrontal cortex goes offline.
Speaker A:This means the moment you look at your freeze, recognize it and respond with something like what's wrong with me?
Speaker A:Or why can't I do this?
Speaker A:You've just added a second complete nervous system threat response on top of the existing one.
Speaker A:You have taken a car that is already stuck in neutral and flooded the accelerator.
Speaker A:I call this the double hijack, and I lived inside it for years.
Speaker A:Here's where I need to say something directly to those of you who are in recovery or who have been everything I have just described.
Speaker A:The freeze response, the double hijacked, and the shame that pours gasoline on the fire.
Speaker A:This is also the architecture underneath addiction itself.
Speaker A:Because for many of us, long before we had a name for the freeze, we found something that stopped the noise.
Speaker A:Something that at least temporarily gave our nervous system permission to come offline.
Speaker A:Alcohol, opioids, whatever it was for you, it worked.
Speaker A:That's the truth nobody wants to say out loud.
Speaker A:It worked because it interrupted a nervous system that had no other circuit breaker.
Speaker A:That's not a moral failure.
Speaker A:This is a nervous system finding the only solution it knew.
Speaker A:We're going to go deep on that mechanism in the next episode, but I need you to hold that piece right now as we build the toolkit.
Speaker A:Because the tools I'm about to give you are not just coping strategies.
Speaker A:They are biological replacement for what the substance was doing.
Speaker A:They are the circuit breaker your nervous system was always looking for.
Speaker A:My daughter and I connect through movies and music.
Speaker A:Concerts especially.
Speaker A:They've always been our thing.
Speaker A:When I was in my addiction, one of her favorite bands was coming to town and co headlining was one of my all time favorites from when I was her age.
Speaker A:The perfect show for the two of us.
Speaker A:We'd been talking about it for weeks, she had a special outfit.
Speaker A:She'd even planned makeup, custom for the night.
Speaker A:When the day came, I was too drunk to drive.
Speaker A:I can still see the tears in her eyes when she realized we weren't going.
Speaker A:I carried that image into early sobriety.
Speaker A:And here's where I need to tell you about the double hijack.
Speaker A:Because I watched it happen to me in real time.
Speaker A:She was active in high school band.
Speaker A:She wanted me to see her perform.
Speaker A:They had worked hard and made it into a national competition, and she asked me to go.
Speaker A:At first, I was excited.
Speaker A:She wanted me to be there.
Speaker A:Then the guilt set in.
Speaker A:The voice in my head reminded me that I was a terrible father and that I did not deserve to be there.
Speaker A:When I went to buy my airline tickets, the voice got louder.
Speaker A:It told me she didn't really want me there.
Speaker A:The band was her mother's thing.
Speaker A:Because I felt like a worthless father, I froze.
Speaker A:Every time I tried to move toward her life, to show up, to be present, the shame hit harder than before.
Speaker A:I wasn't just frozen from the addiction anymore.
Speaker A:I was frozen from the shame.
Speaker A:The shame of what the addiction had already cost her.
Speaker A:I missed her entire high school band career.
Speaker A:Not because I didn't want to be there.
Speaker A:Because wanting to be there and knowing what I had already taken from her made me feel more worthless every time I tried.
Speaker A:And worthless kept me frozen.
Speaker A:And frozen kept me away.
Speaker A:That is the double hijack, and that is brutal.
Speaker A:Here's the thing that changed everything for me, both as a person in recovery and as a clinician sitting with clients trapped in the same loop.
Speaker A:Shame is not a motivator for people with dysregulated nervous systems.
Speaker A:It's an accelerant.
Speaker A:It does not help you show up.
Speaker A:It physically prevents you from showing up by keeping your survival brain in charge and your thinking, logical brain offline.
Speaker A:This is not a philosophical position.
Speaker A:This is a neuroscientific fact.
Speaker A:The only productive response to freeze is not shame.
Speaker A:It is curiosity.
Speaker A:Approach your frozen state with different questions.
Speaker A:Not what is wrong with me?
Speaker A:But what is my nervous system protecting me from right now?
Speaker A:Not judgment, but investigation.
Speaker A:Not self attack, but self study.
Speaker A:The shift from what is wrong with me to what is happening inside me is the difference between a second hijack and the beginning of a reset.
Speaker A:Now, here is the phrase I want you to embed in your brain before we go any further.
Speaker A:The phrase I return to personally, the phrase I use with clients, and the phrase that is the philosophical foundation of everything we build together on this show you are not broken, you are hijacked.
Speaker A:There is a difference between those two statements that is more than just word choices.
Speaker A:Words have power.
Speaker A:Nobody can actually confirm Bruce Lee said this, but a quote the Internet has pinned to in keeps coming back to me.
Speaker A:Don't speak negatively about yourself.
Speaker A:Even as a joke, your body doesn't know the difference.
Speaker A:Well, he was right.
Speaker A:It is biological.
Speaker A:Broken implies permanent structural damage.
Speaker A:It implies that the problem lives in your character, your worth, your fundamental design.
Speaker A:Broken is a verdict.
Speaker A:Hijacked, on the other hand, implies a system that is working exactly as it was designed, just running the wrong program for the current context.
Speaker A:Hijacked is a programming issue, and programs can be fixed.
Speaker A:Your nervous system learned to freeze because at some point in your history, freezing was the most adaptive response available to you.
Speaker A:It was correct then, and it protected you then.
Speaker A:The problem is not that your system learned to freeze.
Speaker A:The problem is that it hasn't yet received the message that it is now safe to run a different program.
Speaker A:And that message cannot be delivered through thinking.
Speaker A:It cannot be delivered through motivation or shame.
Speaker A:It can only be delivered through your body.
Speaker A:We talked in episode two about the trap of misattribution, the brain's tendency to build a narrative to explain raw physical and neurochemical data.
Speaker A:When a glutamate storm hits and your nervous system is in panic, your brain scans the environment for a target to blame.
Speaker A:Your marriage, your boss, your bank account.
Speaker A:The freeze response triggers the same misattribution trap.
Speaker A:But the difference is in freeze.
Speaker A:Your brain doesn't blame the outside world.
Speaker A:It blames you.
Speaker A:Today we're dismantling the three most common self directed misattributions I encounter in clinical sessions, in recovery rooms, and in the messages that arrive in my inbox from my listeners.
Speaker A:Three specific lies.
Speaker A:The freezing brain is telling you about what the freeze means.
Speaker A:But until you can name the lie, you cannot stop believing it.
Speaker A:The first misattribution is laziness.
Speaker A:I'm a lazy person.
Speaker A:I simply don't have the discipline that other people have.
Speaker A:The people succeeding around me, they're doing so because they chose to work hard and I chose comfort over effort.
Speaker A:I'm flawed in my character.
Speaker A:Let me explain why.
Speaker A:That story is neurologically impossible.
Speaker A:Laziness as a meaningful construct implies that the capacity to initiate action is present, but that the person is choosing not to initiate it.
Speaker A:But in the freeze response, the capacity to initiate action is not present.
Speaker A:It has been biologically removed.
Speaker A:When your prefrontal cortex drops offline due to sympathetic dominance, the executive Function required to convert intention, the I want to do it into action.
Speaker A:Well, it doesn't exist.
Speaker A:It's not being withheld.
Speaker A:It's unavailable.
Speaker A:You cannot accuse someone of choosing not to turn on a light when the power is out.
Speaker A:Laziness requires a functioning power grid.
Speaker A:A freeze response cuts the power.
Speaker A:The task does not feel hard to the frozen person.
Speaker A:It feels impossible, not as a perception, but as a biological factor, their current neural organization architecture.
Speaker A:The second misattribution is not caring.
Speaker A:I must not actually love my partner, because if I did, I would return their calls.
Speaker A:I must not actually care about my recovery, because if I did, I would show up consistently.
Speaker A:I must not actually want the life I say I want, because if I did, I would be living it.
Speaker A:This is the misattribution that does the most damage to relationships and is one of the cruelest tricks that hijacked nervous system plays.
Speaker A:Because the people most trapped in social and task freeze almost universally care deeply.
Speaker A:The avoidance is not evidence of the absence of love.
Speaker A:It's evidence of the presence of overwhelm when the brain is in chronic sympathetic dominance.
Speaker A:Dopamine dysregulation occurs in the mesolimbic pathway, the circuit responsible for motivation, reward, anticipation and the capacity to feel connected to outcomes we care about.
Speaker A:The system normally says, this matters to me, I want to move toward it is suppressed by the threat response.
Speaker A:The result is a person can genuinely care about something, can love someone with everything they have and still find themselves neurologically unable to close the distance between intention and action.
Speaker A:The love is real.
Speaker A:The care is real.
Speaker A:The freeze has temporarily severed the pathway between feeling and the behavior.
Speaker A:A third misattribution is the heaviest one, and it is the one I sat inside the longest in my own recovery.
Speaker A:Being broken not I made a mistake, I'm struggling right now.
Speaker A:But the deep, quiet, bone level conviction that something inside me was permanently and fundamentally wrong, that other people have something built into them, a resilience, a consistency, capacity for life that you are simply not assembled with.
Speaker A:I want to speak directly to that belief right now because I know it from the insight I have lived there.
Speaker A:And I need you to hear this from someone who has been on both sides of that conviction.
Speaker A:The experience of being broken is real.
Speaker A:The the truth of being broken is not.
Speaker A:What you are experiencing is the felt sense of a nervous system that has been in chronic threat activation for so long that it cannot imagine a baseline of safety.
Speaker A:This feels permanent because the nervous system, in its effort to protect you, has stopped looking for evidence that safety is possible it has generalized the threat to include everything, including including the possibility of change.
Speaker A:That is not a fact about your character.
Speaker A:That is the predictive coding of a survival system that learned to expect the worst because at some point the worst is what arrived.
Speaker A:And neural pathways that were trained well, they can be retrained.
Speaker A:Every neuroplasticity researcher in the world will tell you the same thing.
Speaker A:The brain that built the freeze can build something else.
Speaker A:That is not optimism.
Speaker A:That is the mechanism.
Speaker A:When stress hits and your nervous system goes into survival mode, you can't think your way back.
Speaker A:To calm, your body needs a circuit breaker, not a journaling prompt.
Speaker A:PocketRecovery app developed by licensed addiction counselor, trauma professional and recovering alcoholic Vance Hansen delivers immediate body based resets tools clinically shown to lower your heart rate and bring your logical mind back online.
Speaker A:Just relief when you need it most.
Speaker A:Find it at PocketRecovery app.
Speaker A:Welcome back.
Speaker A:Let's dive in and build the toolkit, shall we?
Speaker A:What I'm about to give you is not a list of tips.
Speaker A:It's a hierarchy of body based interventions, each designed for a specific depth and type of freeze.
Speaker A:One of the most common mistakes people make with somatic tools is using the wrong tool for the wrong state.
Speaker A:So before I walk you through each technique, I want to give you a simple map.
Speaker A:If you are in high activation state, raising heart, shallow breathing, restless energy, urgency or panic, your system is in fight or flight.
Speaker A:The tools for that state need to slow the gas pedal and engage the brake.
Speaker A:We'll start there.
Speaker A:If you're in a lower activation state, a flat, numb, dissociated version of freeze, your system has dropped into the dorsal vagal state.
Speaker A:The tools for that state need to gently reactivate the social engagement system without triggering another alarm.
Speaker A:We'll go there.
Speaker A:Second, use the right tool for the state your body is in.
Speaker A:The first tool is the physiological side.
Speaker A:It's your high activation emergency brake.
Speaker A:When you're in a panic state, when your heart is slamming, your thoughts are racing and your system is at a 10 out of 10.
Speaker A:This is the first tool to reach for.
Speaker A:Here's the biology.
Speaker A:In a high activation state, the small air sacs in your lungs, your alveoli, they partially collapse due to the shallow rapid breathing pattern of the stress response.
Speaker A:Carbon dioxide accumulates.
Speaker A:Your brain stem reads the Rising CO2 as a secondary threat signal.
Speaker A:The physiological sigh re inflates these alveoli and rapidly offloads the excess CO2.
Speaker A:This triggers the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagus nerve Research consistently shows measurable reductions in heart rate and self reported anxiety within minutes.
Speaker A:Here's the technique.
Speaker A:Drop your jaw.
Speaker A:Let your tongue release from the roof of your mouth.
Speaker A:Relax your shoulders.
Speaker A:Inhale through your nose, one full deep breath and then immediately stack a second sharp snapping inhale right on top.
Speaker A:Double inhale.
Speaker A:Hold for one beat, then release a long, slow, heavy sigh through your mouth.
Speaker A:Let it be audible and let it be complete.
Speaker A:Do this twice.
Speaker A:The second tool where the physiological side targets high activation freeze something called vu breathing targets the deeper lower activation free state that flat numb nothing feels real.
Speaker A:Experience of dorsal vagal shutdown.
Speaker A:Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, identified that producing a low frequency vocal sound during exhalation creates a vibrational wave that travels down the length of the vagus nerve and directly activates the parasympathetic response.
Speaker A:It is that response that you need to come back online.
Speaker A:The vibration is the message it says in only language the brainstem understands.
Speaker A:The emergency is over.
Speaker A:You can come back.
Speaker A:Here's the technique.
Speaker A:Take a normal breath in through your nose and on the exhale allow a slow, low, resonant sound to vibrate from deep in your chest.
Speaker A:Not your throat, your chest.
Speaker A:The sound should feel like it is coming from behind your sternum.
Speaker A:Let it last the full length of the exhale.
Speaker A:Sustain it.
Speaker A:Let it ring.
Speaker A:Do three complete V breaths.
Speaker A:The third tool.
Speaker A:This tool works by deliberately engaging the brain's natural safety detection system in a threat state.
Speaker A:Your visual system narrows and your gaze fixes on the perceived danger.
Speaker A:Your peripheral vision contracts, your head and neck tighten and goes still.
Speaker A:This signals ongoing danger to your nervous system.
Speaker A:The orienting response reverses this.
Speaker A:When an animal successfully navigates a threat and determines the environment is safe, it naturally scans its surroundings, slowly moving its head, widening its gaze and taking in the full panorama of its environment.
Speaker A:This slow, deliberate visual exploration signals to the brainstem the threat has passed, the coast is clear.
Speaker A:The technique Let your eyes go slightly soft, unfocused and wide angled.
Speaker A:Let your gaze expand to the entire room without fixing on any single point.
Speaker A:Then slowly, without urgency, let your head begin to turn.
Speaker A:Move from left to right, up and down, following your visual curiosity.
Speaker A:Notice colors, shapes, lights.
Speaker A:Don't rush, don't try to feel anything, just look.
Speaker A:Notice the moment when a small involuntary exhale arrives.
Speaker A:That exhale is a sign that your brainstem has received the safety signal.
Speaker A:The final tool is the most targeted in the kit.
Speaker A:It's designed for one specific type of freeze.
Speaker A:The freeze that is being driven not just by a body state, but by a story, by a looping thought, by a shame spiral, by the replay of something that was done to you or something that you did.
Speaker A:It's called bilateral stimulation.
Speaker A:It is the foundational neurological mechanism behind EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Speaker A: late Dr. Francine Shapiro in: Speaker A:The butterfly hug variation I'm teaching you was developed by trauma therapists Luciana Artigas and Ignacio Herrero.
Speaker A:The science when we're processing traumatic or threatening information, the two hemispheres of the brain can become functionally disconnected.
Speaker A:The right hemisphere, which processes emotional and somatic data, gets flooded and overwhelmed, while the left hemisphere, language, logic and narrative, goes offline.
Speaker A:Bilateral stimulation reintegrates the two hemispheres.
Speaker A:It allows the brain to begin processing what it has been stuck on.
Speaker A:Here is the technique.
Speaker A:Cross your arms over your chest, open your fingertips and place your fingertips gently on opposite collarbones.
Speaker A:Close or soften your eyes.
Speaker A:Begin to alternate.
Speaker A:A slow, gentle tap.
Speaker A:Right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand.
Speaker A:As roughly as one beat per second or slower.
Speaker A:Breathe naturally, though.
Speaker A:Don't try to stop the thought or the shame loop.
Speaker A:Just let the bilateral rhythm continue while you allow the thought to exist without fighting it.
Speaker A:Continue for one to three minutes or until you notice the emotional intensity beginning to decrease.
Speaker A:You're looking for a subtle softening, a reduction in the irritants.
Speaker A:Welcome back to the final stretch of the Pocket Recovery Show.
Speaker A:I'm your host, Vance Hansen.
Speaker A:If you've traveled with me through this entire episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the distance we've covered before we land.
Speaker A:We've identified the faces of freeze, task paralysis, social freeze, and emotional shutdown.
Speaker A:We've looked at why shame doesn't motivate the nervous system, it hijacks it a second time.
Speaker A:We've dismantled three specific lies the freezing brain tells about what the freeze means.
Speaker A:And we built a body based toolkit with four precise interventions, each designed for a specific type and depth of freeze.
Speaker A:You now know more about what has been happening inside your body than most people will learn in a decade just talking about it.
Speaker A:Before I hand you your assignment, I want to say one honest thing about the timeline of this work.
Speaker A:Because culture does you a significant disservice by suggesting that the right tool applied for a week will fundamentally resolve a nervous system pattern that you may have been building for years.
Speaker A:Your nervous system did not learn to freeze overnight.
Speaker A:It built that architecture through repeated experiences of overwhelming threat across months or years.
Speaker A:The rebuild, it takes time too it takes patience, and it takes the kind of compassionate persistence that is the exact opposite of shame.
Speaker A:The goal this week is not transformation.
Speaker A:The goal this week is data.
Speaker A:You're a scientist studying your own system.
Speaker A:That is enough.
Speaker A:Here's your assignment for this week.
Speaker A:Seven days, five steps.
Speaker A:No pressure to be fixed, just the discipline to pay attention.
Speaker A:I've placed links to templates and daily instructions in the episode notes for this show.
Speaker A:Days one and two are Name it.
Speaker A:When the freeze arrives in any of its faces, I want you to simply name it.
Speaker A:Out loud, if possible, silently.
Speaker A:If not, say this.
Speaker A:This is Freeze.
Speaker A:This is my nervous system in threat mode.
Speaker A:Don't try to interrupt it, don't try to fix it, and definitely don't shame it.
Speaker A:Just name it.
Speaker A:Naming activates the prefrontal cortex.
Speaker A:Even in a partial freeze state, it begins to separate the observer from the experience.
Speaker A:That separation is the first millimeter of space between you and the loop.
Speaker A:And that millimeter is everything.
Speaker A:Days 3 and 4 are name it.
Speaker A:Then psi.
Speaker A:The moment you notice the freeze.
Speaker A:The jaw tightening.
Speaker A:The avoidance impulse.
Speaker A:The task you're opening and closing.
Speaker A:Name it.
Speaker A:And immediately run two complete physiological sigh cycles.
Speaker A:Double inhale through the nose.
Speaker A:Then long, heavy exhale through the mouth.
Speaker A:Twice.
Speaker A:Then notice.
Speaker A:Did the weight shift at all, even slightly?
Speaker A:Write it down, if you can, on the template or on a piece of paper or in your journal.
Speaker A:You're building a data set about your own nervous system, and the data Requires records.
Speaker A:Days 5 and 6.
Speaker A:Name it PSI.
Speaker A:And then choose the right tool.
Speaker A:You now have the map.
Speaker A:High activation.
Speaker A:Racing thoughts.
Speaker A:Urgency.
Speaker A:Panic.
Speaker A:The physiological sigh.
Speaker A:Low activation.
Speaker A:Flat.
Speaker A:Numb, Dissociated feelings.
Speaker A:Full breathing.
Speaker A:Shame loop.
Speaker A:Or the intrusive thought loop driving the freeze.
Speaker A:Butterfly hug.
Speaker A:Mild freeze and need to re enter presence gently.
Speaker A:The orienting response.
Speaker A:This week is about learning which drawer to open for which kind of stuck.
Speaker A:You will not always choose the perfect tool, and that is fine.
Speaker A:The act of reaching for a tool is itself a reset.
Speaker A:In day seven, find one moment of evidence.
Speaker A:At the end of the week, I want you to find one moment, just one, where you notice that you showed up despite the freeze.
Speaker A:Or where a reset shifted the weight even slightly.
Speaker A:Or where the freeze cleared faster than it did seven days ago.
Speaker A:One moment of evidence that your nervous system is beginning to receive the message.
Speaker A:That moment is not small.
Speaker A:That moment is a new neural pathway.
Speaker A:That moment is the first brick in a foundation that will hold you for the rest of your life.
Speaker A:Collect it.
Speaker A:Believe it.
Speaker A:Build on it.
Speaker A:You are not lazy.
Speaker A:You are not cold.
Speaker A:You are not broken.
Speaker A:You are a human being with a nervous system that has been working incredibly hard to keep you alive in an environment it was never designed to navigate.
Speaker A:And it is ready, even if you cannot feel that way, to begin learning something new.
Speaker A:One name, two breaths, one data point at a time.
Speaker A:Run your intercept.
Speaker A:This week, let your body lead your brain back home.
Speaker A:Thank you for being here on the Pocket Recovery Show.
Speaker A:I'm Vance Hansen.
Speaker A:Breathe slow, stay grounded, and I will see you right back here next time.
Speaker A:That wraps up today's episode of the Pocket Recovery Show.
Speaker A:Remember, change doesn't happen in giant heroic leaps.
Speaker A:It happens in the tiny, invisible spaces between a trigger and a reaction.
Speaker A:Every time you choose a deep exhale or a somatic automatic reset, instead of running for an escape hatch, you are rewriting your nervous system.
Speaker A:If these strategies brought you some clarity or relief today, please hit subscribe, leave an honest review and share this episode with just one person in your life who always seems to be running on empty.
Speaker A:Let them know they aren't broken either.
Speaker A:For real time support and the daily tools we talked about today, head over to Pocket at Recovery app.
Speaker A:Your scaffolding is waiting for you there.
Speaker A:Until next time, keep your feet on the floor, listen to your system, and be remarkably gentle with your biology.
Speaker A:We'll talk soon.
