What Rewiring Your Nervous System Really Means
Rewiring your nervous system is a concept that gets discussed a lot in the mental health and wellness spheres. It’s a really important concept and I’m glad it’s reaching the awareness of the collective.
Every time I think I know what rewiring my nervous system means, I go a deeper level in and realize how small my perspective and depth is on the whole topic.
If you asked me five years ago what I was doing to rewire my nervous system, this would be the list:
Attempt to take naps, but struggle with actually deeply sleeping
Attempt to sleep early, but struggle with my brain shouting out to-do reminders for the next day as if I’ll forget
Do yoga and feel guilty for taking the time to just be quiet and “non-productive”
Identifying the “big three” things I wanted to get done in my day, but always feel like I secretly have more priorities I am sneaking in to my expectations list
This sample list indicates that I was making the initiative to slow down, reduce stimuli, and engage my body in a restful state. What it also shows is that my system was very unaccustomed to these new interventions and was providing a lot of resistance.
Why it’s called Rewiring
Our bodies have already been conditioned and programmed to operate in a certain way. For most people, they have survival conditioning which requires them to productive per society’s standards. There is the condition of your upbringing or your lived experience. There is identity-based conditioning, where certain populations have learned and internalized that their bodies need to continuously work harder than is healthy for them due to their identity positioning in society. Lastly, there is ancestral conditioning, which can be identity-based or upbringing-based, but is ultimately in the spiritual ancestral field and also genetic.
Your nervous system tells your story and here, I’ll tell mine.
Programming through Upbringing
I was raised in a competitive immigrant Asian American community where the main goal was to outperform others academically in order to attain a successfully and high paying career. I was trained by my school setting, family setting, and community setting to compare myself to others, work myself harder in order to be better than others, and also fear my peers if they found me to be competition. There was no concept of real rest because slowing down would mean that a peer would overtake you academically, and thus in your life. By the time I was in high school, my body had acclimated to operating on five hours and 30 minutes of sleep. That was the fuel I used to get straight As, attend several extracurricular activities, and maintain required social and familial dynamics in a way that pleased others but didn’t make them feel threatened. I did not have a full day of rest. I went to school Monday to Friday, Chinese school on Sunday, and Saturday was my day to ‘leisurely’ do the rest of my homework. I enjoyed Saturdays a lot because I did not have to perform socially to others’ expectations. On the times where we had school breaks, I would actually break down in tears by the third day due to the lack of ‘productive stimuli’. That is how conditioned my body was, that it perceived rest as a threat to my wellbeing.
Programming based on Identity
As an Asian American woman, I internalized that I always had to perform and achieve excellent outcomes, but never incite conflict or make anyone mad. This essentially means that any type of experimentation or risk always coded as danger to me. You can repeat your successes if you do predictable or replicable things. But if you want to explore new experiences or ways of being, you will try new things and run the risk of making someone else uncomfortable. The Asian Patriarchy has long been accustomed to treating woman like chattel and domestic slaves. Chinese women were domestically abused and had their feet bound (bones in the feet broken and folded under from an early age) in order to be attractive on the marriage market, but truthfully, so that they could always be controlled. Chinese girls always run the risk of being thrown out of the house if a household experiences poverty or food scarcity, but the boy is rarely every given up. My nervous system internalized that in order to be accepted enough to survive, I had to prove my worth constantly with everything I did. Everything had to be productive if I was going to matter enough in my community. In my family line, we have a very humorous pattern of the women always working hard, getting the degree, and getting a job and the men who are sporadically unemployed or can’t seem to focus on their education.
Programming based on Ancestry
This insight is one of the recent ones I’ve been processing. I recently spent more time learning about the White Terror Period and the 228 Incident in Taiwan. My ancestors have lived in Taiwan for 200+ years, so my bloodline is well connected in the land. These two incidents occurred when my grandparents were kids and teens. I was never explicitly told about these incidents by any family member or in Chinese school. I vaguely gained awareness of 228 because I had learned of a 228 monument space in Taiwan. But this is a big gap in my ancestral education that I felt I should’ve been taught, given what I now understand is the nervous system ramification on my body.
I will not go deeply into the White Terror Period or the 228 Incident, because I still feel I am just learning about it. But I can tell you how it makes me feel, because my blood and my bones know. What I understand is that my grandparents witnessed violence on a mass scale, from the Republic of China party and incoming mainlander Chinese against the Han Taiwanese that had been living on the island since the 1600s. I can feel the feeling of powerlessness as they watched their people on their island be controlled and murdered by outsiders. I can feel the rage flowing through their bodies that had nowhere else to go, because expressing your rights meant certain death.
Taiwan had a period of martial law from 1947-1987, which from my interpretation means that everyone walked knowing that if they stepped any toe out of line, there would be severe consequences for themselves and their families. Walking on eggshells doesn’t even begin to describe it. When the shells crack, violence occurs. This is the period of time that my parents were born in and lived their formative years in. It was a surveillance state where it was paramount to have the right political attitude. My parents went to schools that banned use of Taiwanese Hokkien, our ancestral language, and promoted the use of Mandarin Chinese, which is a Northern Chinese dialect. They learned to perceive themselves as citizens of the Chinese empire, and learned to distance from all things that made them uniquely Taiwanese.
My grandparents experienced high levels of societal danger and their nervous systems channeled all their unprocessed emotions into workaholicism, financial drive, and abuse towards their children.
My parents learned in order to be safe, they couldn’t love their authentic themselves. That is so heartbreaking, I’m not sure which is worse – what my grandparents received or what my parents received.
And all the fear and terror and emotions from 80 years ago… still lives in my body until I lovingly process it. And I didn’t even know all this existed until three weeks ago.
Rewiring the nervous system does involve active rehabilitation for rest, deep breathing, and reduction of stimuli. But it also requires recognizing the ways in which our bodies were made to compress into the stressed workaholic machines they are today. It’s identity work and its ancestral puzzle piecing. It’s recognizing the full story that connects the dots between oppression and nervous system dysregulation.
All those times I tried to take a nap, but my body fought me.. that was the ancestral part of me fighting so hard to stay alive in the only way it knew how. By not resting. By perpetually working.
To unlearn that programing in order to heal, requires deep love and deep space for the grief that has to flow.
