020 - Mini Musing: Integrating the Update
In this week’s Mini Musing, I share reflections from my time as an athlete, sports trainer, and yoga teacher to offer insight on how we can actually change unconscious patterns in our lives.
Listen in to learn why it’s important to observe, process, and upgrade in the moment. And to unpack what John Frappier teaches us — that “We can’t learn new patterns in a state of fatigue.”
I end with reflections on burnout and how necessary self-care is if we want to move from familiar patterns to optimal patterns. And I invite you to join my 21 Days of Untapped Support to begin inviting small moments of rest and of challenge into your days.
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💛 Join A Mother's Intuition on June 6th at 6 pm CST to learn from holistic nurse practitioner and former doula, NICU nurse, & lactation consultant Jen Ciszewski about creating the motherhood experience of your dreams! Click here to register
Episode Transcript
Sarah Tacy [00:00:00]
If you or someone you love is about to cross over that threshold into motherhood, Jen Sazewski, a holistic nurse, is offering a very accessible holistic pregnancy program based on her decade of experience as a NICU nurse, labor and delivery nurse, doula, and certified lactation consultant. She's seen beautiful and heartbreaking births. She's seen the impossible made possible in pregnancy. She's here to give you scientifically empowered and unbiased education about all possible interventions and outcomes, while helping you to hone your intuition to guide you through the conception, birth, and breastfeeding experience. Both mom and baby have better outcomes this way.
Sarah Tacy [00:00:57]
On June 6th, she has a free webinar called A Mother's Intuition. The link is in the bio. And again, it's totally free. If you or a person you love that you're sending this to can't be there on the day, they can get the recording. There is no downside. I know I was so grateful to have this type of support going into my first birthing experience. And I actually wish that I had more layers of support, like the ones that Jen is offering now as I went into my second. I'm so grateful for this, and I hope it serves those who need it. Cheers. Hello, welcome.
Sarah Tacy [00:01:42]
I'm Sarah Tacey, and this is Threshold Moments. It's a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and life-saving tools. Join us.
Sarah Tacy [00:02:11]
Hello, friends. If you've been listening for a while, then one thing you know about me is that I can be a bit tangential. I love to give a story or two to back up the thing I'm about to say. So I may start to say something, tell a story, and come back to that something. So congratulations if you're able to follow along. I think this next episode is pretty clear, but I thought maybe giving you a little bit of context and almost like a table of context could help a little bit. So in this episode, I'm talking about the way that we re-pattern a nervous system and how, if we can make an adjustment in the moment of activation, then usually we get to keep that change in patterning. And so I give an example of how we used to train athletes to upregulate their nervous system. I first mentioned that, but then how, if we could make the adjustment while they were in their movement, then they often get to keep the change. In the next example, I spoke about yoga and how a teacher used to yell something. at the class in the middle of it and it helped me. Like if in the moment I could take her cue and make the adjustment, it was a psychological adjustment, but there are obviously physical ones too, then I could start to keep that change so that later when I came up against that same psychological challenge in lacrosse, I could make the change really quickly because I had practice at making the change while in a state of activation. The last part is when I had this realization that, oh my God, this is what somatic exploration is too, is that we're not in peak activation at any of these points of making an adjustment. We're at a place of just enough activation where we can still get feedback.
Sarah Tacy [00:04:15]
And I just, it was like this huge aha moment when I realized that the same principles that I fell in love with in my 20s were in the work that I was doing now. And I'm not sure that I quite realized it until a conversation I had with Amina. And so I wanted to share it with you. And I share a few more pretty cool pointers about the way our bodies learn. And I think you're going to like it. I hope you enjoy. I just had a revelatory moment. I was on Amina Altai's podcast called I'm going to Change Your Life. She's an amazing woman. And she was asking me questions about pacing and about somatic exploration. And I spoke to her about how when I used to train athletes, so right out of college, I was recruited to be the director of research and development for Blue Streak Sports Training. And I worked about 80 hours a week. So I think I got, you know, double the number of years of experience is what it felt like. And what we were learning was how to upregulate the nervous system, how to make the body move faster than it could normally without overspeed training. This looked like an athlete holding onto a bar that was connected to a treadmill. Unlike any treadmill you've seen before, it goes up to 28 miles per hour. It goes up to a 40 degree incline, which is almost like a triple black diamond type slant. The idea is that over a four-week period, you can get your muscles and the reflexes in your muscles to start firing faster. So when you hold onto the bar and the treadmill goes faster than you can go yourself, your body is learning new reflexes and new speeds. When you let go of the bar, it's not uncommon that you can start to run faster, even if just for a moment or two than you were able to run before holding onto the bar.
Sarah Tacy [00:06:27]
So it takes about four weeks for this upregulation to happen. And a study, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm remembering this, I believe by Walpole that did this with mice, not on a treadmill, said that it would take an extra two weeks to help get these patterns to stick. So part of this is the idea of integration, the idea of repetition, of an upgraded pattern, and how that gets it to stick. The other thing that we were talking about is how when one can make a change, so there's a mirror directly in front of the treadmills, and often there's also a camera that's on a 15-second delay, one, five, 15-second delay. that if the athlete can receive feedback and make a change in the moment, they're more likely to integrate the change and keep the change. And especially if they can do it either in the moment or 15 seconds within the event happening. So the further away you are from the event, the harder it is to integrate a new pattern, to remember to do it the next time, to understand how to do it. So if they're on the treadmill, and I put my hand at hip height in front of them and say, Try to get your knees all the way up into my hand, and they start feeling it in the moment, then there's gonna be an understanding, a somatic understanding of what I'm looking for, and they can start to feel it in their body integrated into their nervous system. So when I started yoga, I was originally under the understanding from the time I was a very young girl that I would be a psychologist. Many people said that to me as I was growing up, oh, someday you will probably be a psychologist. And it seemed that a lot of friends would come to me. My babysitters would sometimes come to me and tell me their life story. And I thought that was my path. I had my injury, my back injury in high school that completely derailed me, helped me to understand the mind-body connection, that when my body was hurt, my mind was hurting, that it would take my mind to help heal my body. And when I started yoga, I got to have this experience. I had a particular teacher in college and she, I'm going to say she would yell because that's what it felt like. She would yell, are you doing this to prove something to somebody or are you doing this out of love? And it's such a good question. Am I holding warrior two to prove something to somebody or am I doing it? Because it's what's right for me now to see how strong I am, to see how long I can last, to see that I'm stronger than I think or that I thought I was. Or am I doing it just to please the teacher or to not look like the weakest one in the class? To actually get to check in time and time again, it felt like what I was calling applied psychology. So then when I went to play lacrosse, I used to be such a head case.
Sarah Tacy [00:09:33]
If I missed one goal, I would be playing on the field, but having a conversation in my head about what I was going to tell the people on the sidelines who had come to watch. What was going to be my excuse for missing the goal? What was going to be my excuse for missing the past? And I would be ruminating in the past about the thing that happened and what I will say in the future instead of being present on the field. And so since I had this applied psychology, this practice of, am I doing this out of love? Am I doing this to prove something? I missed a goal. I would take a breath and I would remind myself of why I was out there because I almost didn't come back to the sport because I got injured so many times that I thought, is it worth it? Is it worth the psychological stress? Is it worth the physical pain? And I had to really feel it out. Why do I play? And if at any point I was out there to prove my worth, I had to like have a coming home to myself moment. And it would only take a breath because I had practiced with it over and over and over again in yoga. And I knew then, I knew then that I would not become a psychologist and I have nothing against psychologists. I'm so happy that you're out there. But if I were to say what was important for me or what worked for my body, I knew that getting immediate feedback that I could adjust in the moment was so useful. And this is part of why I went into yoga. I'm just having this recognition now that the somatic exploration that we do, that I do, that I lead people in, and that I also receive sessions from other professionals, we're going into the body. We go back to a time where a conversation happened or a conversation that's going to happen. Where do you feel it in your body? How can we widen your perception in this moment? What layers of support can we add?
Sarah Tacy [00:11:41]
And so in the moment we are practicing the thing and we are doing repetitions of the thing so that it becomes embodied and it becomes known. Because the thing is, when we hear something, when we're in a regulated state and we're in a session with a counselor, with a coach, with a friend, with a teacher, with a parent who says, Hey, next time that this happens, you really need to keep your cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. I totally, I need to keep my cool. I shouldn't have lost it. I'm going to work on that. And then a week goes by, two weeks go by. Three weeks go by. Something super triggering happens. You get activated. As soon as you get activated, there's a really good chance that your amygdala gets hot. When the amygdala turns on, that reactionary place, anger, fear, frustration, your access to the prefrontal cortex is almost gone. So that thing, that advice that somebody gave you three weeks ago, it was so good. But will you have access to it? And when there are unconscious patterns, the process of first even just seeing them, but then being able to make an in the moment change. So as I was talking to Amina, I realized, oh my God, this work is not all that different than the work I did when I was 22, or I did from age 25 to 35 when I was so invested in helping people in a multi-dimensional way through the avenue of yoga, which involved the mind, it involved the body, it involved the breath. And now that my work is working a little bit more towards the somatic exploration, I realized, oh, same thing. We're looking to help upgrade patterns. And it's applied. It's in the moment. We get repetitions in the moment in a safe place. What I shared with Amina off camera, off recording, was this other thing that I learned at Blue Streak. that I learned from John Fapier. So John Fapier was the head physiologist for Athletic Republic, originally for peer acceleration. In 1982, he went and studied with some of the top physiologists in Russia at the Goodwill Games. This is where he learned about the overspeed training. The other thing that was very clear was that we can't learn new patterns in a state of fatigue. I wish we could like highlight that and put it on a billboard.
Sarah Tacy [00:14:35]
We can't learn new patterns in a state of fatigue. So in my other episodes with the creating conditions, or if you've heard me talk about the window of tolerance or this idea of when we have more resources than demands, we'll feel stable. When we have more demands and resources, we'll feel stress. If you have more demands and resources, this is going to be a hard place to create new patterns. So this highlights the importance then of self-care, or maybe even tuning in to the 21 days of support that I offer that's free, that you can download, that's in the links, of finding pause, of finding choice, of finding right distance. We can't learn new patterns of state of fatigue. So we would have athletes go really, really hard for six seconds, sometimes 20 seconds, and then we would wait for their heartbeat to come back down to 120. I know that can change person to person, but that's generally it. In yoga, I thought it was so interesting because there was so much philosophy about the tapas and letting things burn and realizing that we're so much stronger than we think we are if we can just push through. And I think there's something to that. Even in John for Pier's training, there were two days in the protocol where you work into these longer endurance periods. But I realized that on a day-to-day basis, if I had my students doing a ton of Chaturangas, holding Warrior 2 forever, and then going from Warrior 2 into Triangle into half moon pose, which would then be still, you're still in the same front leg, and you're fatiguing that muscle, that you begin to fall into familiar patterns instead of optimal patterns. So not only are you not learning something new, you're falling into the most energy efficient patterns, which aren't always the most optimal patterns. This is so true in life as well. When we are fatigued, we just You know, we want that ice cream to give us a little bit more energy. We stay up a little later to get the dopamine from Instagram or a show. We're going to do what feels like easiest, maybe what's most habitual, what's most familiar.
Sarah Tacy [00:17:13]
When we start to tune in to self-care a little bit more, when we start to realize that our stability, our energy is our greatest resource and that when we have it, we can do small touches into new patterning, new patterning that involves a body that's in present time. And over time, that begins to integrate. And over time, we begin to have more capacity for more things. Amina was saying that because she works with people who are challenged with burnout, that this theory would say. But therefore, when working with people with burnout, that it makes sense to come in at a slightly slower pace, not one that's going to trigger their body security system of, I can't go that slower, I'll die, but at a slower pace in which there can be some recovery, and then small doable pieces, and then recovery, and then small doable pieces. Peter Levine often talks about titration. And if you had an acid in a base and you put them together, they would blow up. But if you had a base and you put just one drop of the acid in and you give it time, and then another drop, and then you give it time, over time, it becomes neutral without the explosion. So you get the little pieces. If you were to think into your own life into times in which you've been totally overwhelmed, I can think of myself as very sleep deprived, for example, or stacking on so many schedules and so many needs of so many people that I thought my memory was really suffering. But what it was is that there's no room to learn something new. There's no room for an upgrade if I'm in a place of fatigue. And that goes for my body, it goes for my mind, it goes for my entire system. I hope this serves to be of use, maybe of motivation for self-care, for doing little pieces of challenge when possible, and coming back to self-care. And if self-care seems like an impossibility and kind of like two middle fingers to me for even mentioning it, I'm so sorry. I've also been there. And I leave it there as that north star of I wonder what it would look like to have a little bit more resource and not immediately fill it with another thing to do. Here's to our wise, wise bodies whose messages sometimes feel like a complete pain in the **** that may ask us to completely reroute. but to lean into this idea that our bodies may be our no BS GPS. And that as we work to learn, as we learn to work with them, that perhaps we get to feel more support, wellness. Ooh, I don't know why I want to say this word and juiciness in life. Thank you so much.
Sarah Tacy [00:20:35]
Until next time. Thank you for tuning in. It's been such a pleasure. If you're looking for added support, I'm offering a program that's totally free called 21 Days of Untapped Support. It's pretty awesome. It's very easy. It's very helpful. You can find it at sarahtacey.com. And if you love this episode, please subscribe and like. Apparently, it's wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens. when you scroll down to the bottom, subscribe, rate, maybe say a thing or two. If you're not feeling it, don't do it. It's totally fine. I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.