This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How Our Dysregulated Nervous Systems Are Impacting Us with Victoria Albina | 244

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

This episode is all about reconnecting with and healing our nervous systems, so we can better access our inner wisdom and live more authentically. Victoria Albina is a Master Certified Somatic Life Coach, Family Nurse Practitioner and Breathwork Meditation Guide with a passion for helping women realize that they are their own best healers by reconnecting with their bodies and minds, so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism and people-pleasing and reclaim their joy. She is the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, is trained in Somatic Experiencing, holds a Masters degree in Public Health, and has been working in health and wellness for over 20 years. Our dysregulated nervous systems explain the way we understand and react to the world even more than our conscious minds or our inner knowing.  And that is something I’d love for us all to heal.  I speak for many of us when I say it feels like all of our systems are nervous nowadays, and I doubt the medical community would change the name, but wouldn’t it feel great to have a confident system instead? Connect with Victoria: Website:  https://victoriaalbina.com/ Feminist Wellness Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/feminist-wellness/id1454980022  IG: https://www.instagram.com/victoriaalbinawellness/  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Breathe better with AirDoctor, the air purifier that filters out 99.99% of dangerous contaminants (allergens, pollen, pet dander, dust mites, mold spores and even bacteria and viruses) so your lungs don’t have to. Visit airdoctorpro.com and use my promo code: TIWW to get up to $300 OFF air purifiers and a free 3 year warranty (and additional $84 value).

I'm Nicole Kalil, and you're tuning into the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where together we're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing woman's work in the world today, with you as the decider. Whatever feels true and real and right to you, that is how you do woman's work in the world today with you as the decider. Whatever feels true and real and right to you, that is how you do woman's work, which sounds kind of simple, right? But how do you know what feels true? How can you tell if something is right or real for you? How do you distinguish between your inner knowing and all the other noise from other people's opinions or the beliefs that you've borrowed and made your own along the way. It shouldn't be all that challenging to know and

listen to yourself, right? But the reality is it is very challenging because over time and through all of our experiences, we've likely become disconnected and dysregulated from our inner knowing, our authenticity, our emotions, our minds, and our bodies. This dysregulation can make it hard to trust ourselves and to navigate life in a way that feels aligned with who we truly are, to do our version of woman's work. So today we're going to talk about how to reconnect and heal our nervous system so we can better access our inner wisdom and live more authentically, as I believe we're meant to. Victoria Albina is our guest and is a master certified somatic life coach, family nurse

practitioner, and breathwork meditation guide with a passion for helping women realize that they are their own best healers by reconnecting with their bodies and minds so they can break free from codependency, perfectionism, and people-pleasing and reclaim their joy. She is the host of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, is trained in somatic experiencing, holds a master's degree in public health, and has been working in the health and wellness industry for well over 20 years. So Victoria, thank you for joining me.

And because I am not a health and wellness expert by any stretch of the imagination, I'd love to ask you to explain what a dysregulated nervous system even means. What are we talking about here? And how do we know if our nervous system is dysregulated or regulated in the first place? Thank you so much for having me, Nicole. I'm super happy to be here to talk with you and your audience. So when we talk about the autonomic or automatic nervous system, it's the nervous system that responds to

threat. It's like constantly scanning the environment with the one and only goal, which is to keep its human safe. When we are little kiddos, ages zero to seven, is when we get this initial understanding of what is safe in the world and what is not. Herein, we're talking about authenticity, hearing our intuition, trusting ourselves, right? Many of us learned growing up in our families, in our societies, and the conditioning we all got in the patriarchy and white settler colonialism, that it's not safe to trust ourselves, that that's as scary, bad, dangerous, deadly as an actual lion attack, right? And so our nervous system responds in this really binary black and white, yes, no way through the limbic system. Lion, question about what I want for dinner. Both will kill me. Oh,

I'm fine. I'm fine. Whatever you want. It's fine. I'm cool. Don't worry. Do you want sushi? Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. We'll do what you want. Yeah. Because it's dangerous to respond otherwise. So that is our nervous system responding appropriately to misinformation. When our nervous system is unable to settle, to ground, to come back into a grounded, calm state, like how I feel now. I'm talking with a really nice human. You're giving me all these cues of safety. You're smiling. I can see little crow's feet, which are one of nature's most important signs of safety. Isn't that cool? We got to stop Botoxing them because when we smile and our eyes crinkle.

Thank you. I love my wrinkle lines around my eyes. They're like happiness. I've been smiling so much. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. I think it's an important point, right?

Our bodies go into what's called ventral vagal, which is the safe and social part of the nervous system where we have the most capacity to be our authentic selves, to show up and trust ourselves and our intuition and the people around us. And when we are dysregulated, we are unable to come back to neutral, right? We're constantly sort of revved up or shut down or bouncing between the two. I would imagine for many of us, the bouncing back or being dysregulated is sort of our normal state today's day and age. How do we even begin to know what that grounded place is if we haven't visited there in a while? Yeah, that's such a great question. And in my programs, I spend weeks and months working with exactly this because it

is so sadly uncommon. And I want to just like in saying that really normalize that for people, you not knowing what a steady state of calm, grounded safety is, there's nothing wrong with you. Nothing's gone wrong. Like you didn't do anything bad. You're not a mess up. It's all too normal in this day and age. So we start by getting quiet, by getting still, by finding small moments of mindfulness and presence, I hear so often, gosh, I just need to work on my nervous system. But the actual most literal opposite is what is true for most of us. We actually need to be with our nervous system, right, to quietly attend and attune to it. Meditation is not for everyone.

Studies show that very clearly. It can heighten anxiety and stressune to it. Meditation's not for everyone. Studies show that very clearly. It can heighten anxiety and stress for some people. And I haven't met anyone yet for whom mindfulness, right, gentle presence cannot be helpful to some degree, if not radically change your life the way it has for me. What does that mean? It means when you wake up in the morning and you go to your kitchen and you put the kettle on, instead of just reaching for the coffee or the tea or whatever you normally have, pause. Orient to your surroundings, meaning look around where you are, let your nervous system know I'm here and now, right? Because usually we're, you know, at six in the morning, you're zooming off to that meeting. You have it too. You're in the past. Did you file that

thing appropriate, right? We're, we're somewhere else. Bring your nervous system into the here and now. If you can, you know, say the date, you know, hi, my name is, and if you want to go in Dingo Montoya and you killed my father prepared to die, go for it, but it's not going to help your nervous system. Just for funsies. I mean, it's a good way to start the day, but come let your nervous system know when and where you are, and then ask yourself this pivotal and life changing question. What do I actually want to drink? And I know it's like, okay, that you studied for how long to give us that banal question, but it's so important because we're not asking, right? My passion is to work with folks,

women in particular, living in what I call emotional outsourcing, our codependent perfectionist and people pleasing habits. And we don't know what we want. We don't know what we need. We don't know what we prefer because it's never been okay to have a preference, right? What was really important was to kowtow to everyone else. So start with something banal, right? Do I actually want to take a shower today? Is that just what I do in the morning? Do I actually want to wear those pants or is, I don't know, I just grab them, right? So it's the shift from, I don't know, I just do it, unintentional living, to really allowing ourselves to be present in a way that doesn't freak out our nervous system. Right. So I'm not starting with like, gosh, do I really want to be married to this person today? Oh my God, babes, no. Not the best place to start. I mean, that's like month six,

maybe. No, right? Give us a minute here, but start with some BS. Do I want to wear those sneakers to the gym or the gym? Ask yourself tiny questions and listen into your body for the responses, right? And everyone's body is going to respond differently. Some will be sensation or heat, or you'll actually hear yes or no. Who knows? I don't know. But listen into you. I really like this idea of starting small. I think, I don't know if this is a woman thing or a me thing, but I feel like we've sort of made it where it has to be big in order for it to count. Like we need to jump into the deep end of the pool as opposed to, it's really the small, quiet steps that we take often that people don't see or observe that make the biggest impact in whatever it is that we want to do or create. But what we see on the medias and all of that are like the big, you know, final step.

Yeah. I also love the phrase, I think I got it right, emotional outsourcing. Is that what you called it? Yes. Ugh. It literally like hit me in my gut because that is whatever flavor, perfectionism, people pleasing. It's all the same thing. Yes. Right. It's all the same thing of living unintentionally outside of presence and making everyone and every.

OK, here's how I define it. When we chronically and habitually source our sense of safety, belonging, worth, and value from everyone and everything outside of ourselves instead of from within. That's how I define emotional outsourcing. We're all doing it. We're all doing it. I think you coined a phrase that every one of us can look at and be like, I know I have that, right? Do you think this is something nuanced, different or bigger with those that identify as women versus any other genders? Because I'm not saying that men don't emotionally outsource as an example, but. I think it's, it's less about the identity and it's more about the socialization and yeah, there's a million flavors of girlhood, right? Of course. And when we are speaking in broad strokes, I do think it's part of, of being assigned female within the patriarchy is being told you matter less than your brother. Like I can't, it's these little things that are enormous.

Like the number of women I've coached who were fed less than their brothers, right? Like, Oh, your brother gets seconds, but, but he has football and you're like, yeah, but I have gymnastics, ballet, and you know, 12 other sports, but right. Like, or like dinner's over the girls, clear the table and help mom with the dishes while the guys go watch football or whatever. Right. Right. Yeah. It's a million little things that add up that for many of us are unconscious. Like we're not even aware it's happening when it's happening. Right. And that's the crux of this work, right? I describe, I talk about how baby steps are way too big. Please don't take baby steps. There's, what's that, an inch and a half? That's insanity. Kitten steps, newborn, little teeny tiny kitten steps, towards having presence in those small moments, so that we can start to understand what the what is. Because that's, I mean,

what socialization is, is the invisible hand you don't see puppeteering your life. And so we have to come into consciousness and awareness and presence if we are to change the way we respond and react in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I have to be upfront. I have a weird pet peeve about words because there are certain words that I think just get thrown around a lot. And mindfulness is one of those words for me because I feel like it's just a buzzword that everybody's throwing around and it means different things to different people. And it's sort of been hijacked and becomes an answer for a lot of things. But the way you explained it, the word that popped up to me, like associated, that made it made sense.

And by the way, I'm not anti-mindfulness. It's more like that intentionality was the word that as you were talking kept coming up. It's being aware, mindful of the times where we default or habit or unconsciously do what we do, say what we say and having, and I would argue the courage and the choice to, I don't even know if question is the right word. Again, intentionality. Yes. Intentionality. What are your thoughts or reactions to that? First of all, English is my second language. I love a person who is neurotic about the minutia of words because semantics matters. So I love your carefulness. I hear you very much in,

like I said, in defense of, in a protective energy towards mindfulness. I meditate most days. I'm married to a Tibetan Buddhist. Meditation and mindfulness are a very big part of what we do and how we do around here. So I super appreciate it. And I'm going to get really curious about my own linguistics there. I do mean intentionality. I mean, thoughtfulness. I mean, here's a great word, paying attention-ness. I like that word better. Right? Like, where are my feet? Right? So that's a heuristic I use with my clients in my program, the somatic studio, where are my feet? Find your feet, find the ground, right? It's a way to snap the brain back into presence, into mindfulness, where the mind is full of this present moment. And you're aware of how and when and where it may not

be full of this moment, but rather when you might be time traveling, right. And you may be in a different moment that doesn't actually exist. Well, I think that was really beautiful. The mindfulness being filled with the present moment, as opposed to being somewhere where you're not, you know, and we do that a lot where we are thinking about, like, I often, I'm thinking about work when I'm at home. I'm thinking about home when I'm at work. And it's the, I love that. And you're right. There is a protectiveness of it.

It feels so important that I hate how it's just being tossed around. But what you said really spoke to me. Okay. So yeah, I feel the same way about regulation and the way folks who, you know, when I first started talking about the nervous system over a decade ago, my sort of business manager who I adore, and she was correct, said, girl, you can't say regulated. Nobody knows what the hell they're going to think you're talking about, like legislation or like you're the municipal government. Like no one knows what you're talking about. So I had to come up with all these other words. And now it's, it's in many ways being extracted from its true meaning and is being used in ways that really actually quite worry me. Right. Because people are being taught to like calm themselves and shut their nervous system down

as though that were the end all be all. Meanwhile, resiliency, right? Being able to be with, to be mindfully with your emotions is actually the true goal, right? It's about presence and being, not managing. Okay. So I have a question I'm going to ask before the question that came up while you were talking. And the first question is, what are the signs that we're dysregulated? How do we know? I'm sure there's a laundry list. Yeah. Yeah. So we can split it up into sympathetic activation, which is the fight or flight. It's a lion. I'm prepped to punch it in the snout or bust a move. Side note, humans,

we are built to bust a move. We are really small. And don't come at me. Mayhem's been six, four. He's not a rhino. Okay. He's not an elephant. He's not, right. We are, we are small. So as small animals, our bodies prep with blood leaving the digestive system thyroid, right? The trunk and really go in heart, lungs, heart, lungs, fists, feets, run and punch. The brain, meanwhile, cognition slows. You can't think so goodly. Because you're all razzed up. Nicole, let me ask you a question. If you were face to face with a lion, would you want your body to do calculus and digest a cheeseburger? I need a yes or a question. If you were face to face with a lion, would you want your body to do calculus and digest a cheeseburger? I need a yes or no. Yeah. Who cares, right?

Do you want yes or no? I say, who cares? I love it. This show is mostly giggles, folks. Two nerds giggling. Yeah. You don't want your body to do anything but focus on getting the hell out of there. Right. And survival. And so when we are dysregulated towards sympathetic activation, when we are on a hair trigger to go to there, it's all the things of attack outward. Yeah. So that the energy is I have to i have to right it's it's revved up it's spinning it's fast it's okay i gotta go i gotta do this i gotta write it's very new york city says the new yorker like it's very fast and moving and moving and fast it's anxious it's worked up it's i don't know i don't know where i put it where did you put it where did you did you do it did you come on i can't

believe you didn't remember and that's our go-to. We can't sit still and watch a movie. We can't relax. Meditation? Are you freaking kidding me? Get the fuck out of here, kid. Absolutely not. Right? I went a little more Boston with that one, but it still works. It still works. That's where I'm sitting. All right. Okay, great. You got it. Get out of here, kid. Right. Where everything's heightened. We can't find our chill because chill may not have come not factory installed, and we may not have gotten it in childhood. So the opposite direction is called dorsal vagus. That's the shutdown response. There's many levels. And just to say this out loud, we're talking about a broad spectrum. It's not an on-off switch. Yeah. So in my work, I teach ventral vagal, calm and safe and social is zero. And we go all the way up to 10 of

sympathetic, which is panic attack and negative 10 of dorsal, which is catatonic, right? Like fully vegetative catatonic, you're, you're shut down to the world. And so within that broad spectrum, dorsal is, I don't know. I just, I can't, I don't know. I just wait, what? No, yeah, no, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll get it. I'll, I'll, yeah, I'll get it done. No, it's fine. No, I don't want to, I don't, it's, we can go where you want. It's okay. Yeah, no, I'm fine. So that's dorsal. And we can, yeah, have a million flavors in between, but it's shut down, checked out. Freeze is one part of it. And so we know we're dysregulated when we cannot go from there back to where you and I are now. Again, smiling, nerding, giggling, just like being present, being here and now in the here and now.

It is natural and normal to go towards sympathetic and dorsal. Without sympathetic, we wouldn't get up in the morning. We wouldn't put pants on or put the kettle on. And if a car comes whipping around a corner, you know those Massachusetts drivers, without sympathetic, we wouldn't jump out of the way. So sympathetic is not a problem. Dorsal is not a problem. The concern is when we don't know how to balance them and we don't have the skills and tools to shift our nervous system in ways that are supportive of our overall wellness. While you were talking, you kind of think of these scales. Yeah.

I think there might be the inclination in today's day and age to think we're just supposed to be in the middle. But what I'm hearing is we're going to navigate throughout all of the scale at different times, but the opportunity in mindfulness and in regulation of our nervous system is the opportunity to get ourselves back to, I don't know, the middle and to experience where we're at when we're there. Right. And to stay present with it. Right. So to not feel like, oh, I'm getting a little anxious. I need to do a calming exercise and come out of it. No baby sting when it's safe. So I talk about there's sort of two settings.

One is you're at the PTA meeting. You're driving on the highway. You're, right, like at a board. You're not in a moment where it's safe or okay to actually feel your feelings, right? You're at a massive airport and they just change your gates and you have 10 minutes to grab the kids and you're boiling hot coffee and run. Please don't have feelings right then. That's when you do a calming exercise and find your ground and frigging run without spilling the coffee or spilling the children, you know? Right. And then there's other times in life when it behooves us to be able to

stay with the anxiety, right? So like I am in a very sane, safe, happy marriage, which is quite the gift. I recognize that deeply. And we just moved. So it was like three days ago when we got here and I got to turn to my wife and say, I'm feeling like I'm getting kind of anxious and I don't want to shut it down because I think it's a teacher. I'm going to go upstairs and like sit with us. Can you handle, like you've got this with the movers? And she was like, yeah, of course. See you in 10. It's like I went upstairs and let myself move through the anxiety, let it be present. Because I now like to come full circle, I know myself, I trust myself, I trust my nervous system. I've had times where I was anxious or depressed and felt like it was going to take over the world and destroy me and everyone I've met. I think many of us have felt

that. But I now know it's not true and I know how to support me. Right. So I was able to allow the feelings to be and to, you know, all the work I've done the last 20 years to build the resilience, to trust my body. So there's an element of being with it and also curious about it. You didn't say that, but that kind of, so what is this teaching me about me or this situation or what I'm bringing forward from the past or whatever it might be? Right. Okay. So when we talk about regulating the nervous system and healing the nervous system, are we talking about the same thing here or is. This is the fun part where science is like, yes. And, um, right. So I calming the nervous system

is what you do at LAX when you have to run with the kids and the coffee and healing is what you do when you go, when you, you know, go to wherever you need to and give your nervous system the time and the space to be in process, to be with it, to move it through so it doesn't stagnate within. There are times in life where we need to do one or the other. Every time we calm our nervous system with intentionality and consciousness, that is healing. So it's the difference of saying, okay, no feelings. That's fine. My feelings are too much. Shove them down. Let's go. That's a calming that doesn't heal. It re-traumatizes. Versus, okay, I'm having really big feelings about needing to run across LAX right now. And with love for myself and my

family and everyone around me, I'm going to put those little feelings in like a safe place where I promise to come back to them. Not because they're wrong or bad, right? Like the no judges part of mindfulness, right? I'm not judging it. I'm not judging me. And with consciousness, oh my goodness, not right now. No, thank you. Next, please. Right? Yeah. And so that's healing. Okay. So in my mind, I'm differentiating. Regulating is sort of the individual choice you make in the moment, whereas healing is more of a practice or consistency of

those individual choices. Is that- Yeah. That's a beautiful way to put that. Okay. I like your brain a lot. I feel like our brains are like cousins and I really am really loving talking with you about this. Yeah. I'm so glad I probably overthink some things too much,

but that's one of my go-tos. So what am I not asking that I should be asking? Sure. So how does this actually impact my day to day? Why should I, why should I frigging care at all? That feels like an important question. Yeah. Like what's the practical magic of this?

And the why is because we are so disconnected from the spark of magic in life. We get so wrapped up in the doing and the doing and the doing, and we forget that we're actually here to be. Right? The other day I looked out my window and there was a chipmunk sunning itself on a log. Why am I not sunning my furry underbelly on a log? Okay. Why do I not have racing stripes is the next question i'm actually pretty grumpy about that i'm yeah i'm gonna be real yeah got ripped off i got ripped off yeah so that's a whole other segment come back folks make sure you're subscribed we're going to talk about why why aren't we chipmunks but um our goal here our purpose our raison d'etre is to be

right and i and i can hear every busy every busy working woman out there being like girl please who's got time to be but that's the point right when we're not spinning and overthinking and ruminating and overreacting and underreacting and we're not in that dysregulated spinny spin. We free up time and energy to sit in the sunshine, to lie in the park, to like, you remember those kids of yours that you just shuttle around? Maybe you could just sit with them

and Play-Doh or Lego, right? And just be. So that's the sort of overarching reason why. Two, you apologize a lot less when you're regulated because you F up less. And I'm being silly in my language because I think we need to be because most of us are so mean to ourselves and so intense. So like we just, you do less oopsies when your nervous system is regulated. Right. And so there's a lot less of, oh, I'm so sorry. I totally lost it on you and screamed at you or through that plate. You know what I mean? Like verbally, emotionally, energetically through the plate. I think every mom knows what you mean. Right. But anyway, it, um, it strengthens

our relationships, right? Because again, we started by talking about emotional outsourcing as this loss of, of self-trust, uh, connection with intuition and authenticity. Right. And so as we regulate more, we regain that newborn connection with who we really are under our socialization and our conditioning so we can hear our intuition. We can actually hear that little voice. And I think that's underneath what it is that we all really want and what we claim to want, is our authenticity, our confidence, our relationships, our connections. And all of our busyness is sacrificing those things that we want. The beingness is where we get to find those things that we've become disconnected to or forgotten about or,

you know, haven't listened to in a while. That's what I'm hearing as you're talking. And if for no other reason than that, it is worth the practice. Yeah. It's also amazing for our health. So we can come back and talk about blood pressure, diabetes, thyroid, reproductive function, fertility, digestion, IBS, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Okay. So big, big things. Yeah.

Big things. NBD, your heart function. Right. Yeah. Right. No big deal. I mean, if you care about those things. Whatever.

If you're like, oh, I'm into having a functioning heart, whatever. All right. Victoria, if people want to learn more about you and your work, where is the best place for them to go? So Nicole, I have a surprise present for you. It's so exciting. I made a suite of meditations, inner child guiding, soundtracks, orienting, which is a nervous system exercise, all sorts of little treats just for your listeners. If you go to Victoria Albina, A-L-B as in boy, I-N-A.com slash womanswork, you can download that whole suite for free. They're yours to keep forever to thank you for listening in. Nicole, you do such a great job. So

a little treat for your listeners. And my podcast is called Feminist Wellness. It's available free every Thursday. And on behalf of my listeners, thank you. That is amazing. I love that they have one place they can find to get all the goods. So we will put that link in show notes as well as the Feminist Wellness podcast and all the social medias and all that fun stuff. Victoria, thank you for an incredible conversation. And I feel like I came full circle on mindfulness and have some real tactical tips and a good reason to do it. Lots of good reasons to do it and practicing mindfulness. So thank you. Thank you. I think it's fair to say that most of us live our days based on habit, not intentionality. We do what we've always done or what we've been taught to do without stopping to ask if it's serving us or the things and people

we care about. And friend, our dysregulated nervous systems explain the way we understand and react to the world even more than our conscious mind or our inner knowing. And that is something I'd love for all of us to heal. Because I think I speak for many of us when I say it feels like all of our systems are nervous nowadays. And I doubt the medical community would change the name, but I feel like it'd be pretty great to have a confident system instead. I don't really care what we call it, but I do care that we heal it. Because being connected, listening to, and living from your truth and your health, well, that is woman's work.