108: Why You Can't Slow Down + Somatic Practice to Show You How

Chronic skin picking, hair pulling, & nail biting are the result of a disregulated nervous system.

So it only makes sense that part of healing involves learning how to regulate it.

This means learning how to slow down. AKA - Rest.

Easy peasy, right? Right??

Unfortunately, for people like you and me, we didn't really learn how to switch off.

Our system is constantly on go, and so it never feels like the right time to stop, or when you do manage it, it's accompanied with anxiety, restlessness, and guilt.

Don't panic. You're not broken. You just need an actual system and practice that can help you to learn how it's done. 

In this episode, we dive deeper into:

• The science behind why you can't slow down
• Where the real problem lies
• Experience a 5-minute guided somatic practice to help you learn how to switch off, slow down, and rest.

This has allowed me to go from a chronic overworker who has no time for self-care or leisure unless forced, to someone who now has an abundance of time for the things that make her heart sing... And I'm even more successful, efficient, and effective than when I was constantly on "go".

Allowing yourself to rest does not mean you get lazy.

Listen-in to heal xx

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My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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Do you feel a constant sense of urgency? Do you feel guilty around taking time for yourself? Or do you feel restless when you're sitting alone in silence? These are key indications of a dysregulated nervous system. And it's really hard to slow down when you're feeling dysregulated. And when we do try to slow down by watching our favorite TV show or movie or reading a good book, we find ourselves scanning and picking and pulling and biting at our body subconsciously. Healing from chronic skin picking, hair pulling, or nail biting means that we need to learn to slow down because slowing down means that we are allowing our body to truly regulate itself. But it's a hard thing to do if it's not your normal. It feels wrong, like it's not the right time, or you've got to get some things done before you can actually have that. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you how a dysregulated nervous system only fuels your need to pick, pull, and bite in your body. And learning how to truly slow down and regulate yourself is one of the major keys to healing. Not only that, but at the end, I'm going to share with you a really simple, guided, somatic practice that will help you to slow down when you feel like it's not possible or when it's just too uncomfortable and feels weird and wrong. You are listening to episode 108 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling. This is the place to be. If you want to learn how to address the root cause of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body. My name is Raphaela Marie. I'm your host. I've healed from 15 years of chronic skin peeking through addressing the root cause and taking a holistic approach. And now I'm a coach and I help others to heal as I did. I share with you everything that I know on this podcast. And if you appreciate what it is that I do, please don't forget to hit like and subscribe. Make sure you leave a five-star review and also leave your thoughts about what came up for you in this episode in the comments or in a written review. Also, I would love to hear your story and support you in your healing. To every single person like you that I come across, I love to offer a free support call where you get to share your story with someone who really understands. And then through a really beautiful and wholesome conversation, I get to share with you my insights into what may be the root causes of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body, and what you can do right now to help yourself to heal, to take real, true steps, tangible steps in your healing. This is an opportunity that is so hard to come by. So if you're feeling drawn to it, make sure you click on the link in the show notes. I'm so looking forward to hearing your story. When we are dysregulated, we are automatically, subconsciously going to seek out comfort. Because comfort is soothing. And that looks like scrolling, watching Netflix, snacking or binge eating, drinking some alcohol, smoking a cigarette, gaming, skin picking, hair pulling, nail biting. For some it's watching porn. For others, it's online shopping. What these actions, these behaviors give to us is either comfort, stimulation, or numbing. If you think about it, when you fall into a really long picking, pulling or biting episode, how does it feel? It feels comforting in the moment. It's stimulating as well. It's kind of exciting, it's satisfying. And then afterwards, we feel a bit numb. Or scrolling on your phone. If you've ever scrolled on your phone for a really long time, afterwards you feel kind of fried. Like your brain is fuzzy. And we do this because when we are dysregulated, we have a lot of emotion that is unprocessed inside our body, both from the external world, so lots of so information overload, lots of noises, lots of people, lots of questions, lots of things to do, and then also the internal world, lots of emotions, emotions that we don't understand, don't know what to do about, don't know how to feel and regulate. And so we become dysregulated. And if we don't consciously and intentionally help ourselves to really feel and regulate and calm down, then our subconscious is going to take over and it takes over in these really short-term solution ways. But it's not as simple as, okay, well, I'm just going to meditate instead. Knowing how to calm ourselves down, how to regulate ourselves cannot just come from the mind. It cannot just come from what sounds good. It also has to come from the body, the intuition, the knowing of this is what I need right now. And we cannot just decide that with our mind. But it's typically what we try to do. We think, well, I'm just gonna meditate, I'm just gonna do some breathing exercise, I'm just gonna do go for a walk and hopefully that fixes something. It's kind of like what's the saying? Throwing paint at a wall and seeing what sticks. I don't think that's it, but you know what I'm saying. Now, the fact that these behaviors provide comfort, stimulation, and numbing also explains why things like willpower, so just trying to stop wearing gloves, using fidget toys, covering mirrors, getting someone to be around you and stop you from engaging the behavior, it's why these things don't work. Because they don't provide us with comfort, stimulation, or numbing. And they also don't help us to healthily regulate ourselves. They don't do either of those things. They're just kind of like barriers. And barriers can be helpful in certain moments, in certain times when they are used intentionally. But as used as a long-term solution, they don't do shit. Now, here's where the real problem lies with a dysregulated nervous system. And let's be honest, most people I speak to, in fact, I think pretty much everyone I speak to inside this community are chronically dysregulated. For most people, that is their baseline. Maybe for you, it's also your baseline. Not to feel calm and relaxed and to feel okay and well, that feels weird. But to feel like I gotta get stuff dumb, to be on go, to be constantly doing something, that feels good. That feels familiar and normal. We know how to function and we know what to do in that state. We don't know how to function from a calm, relaxed, grounded state. We think that that will end up in laziness, complacency, procrastination. And the reason why we become so chronically dysregulated and we struggle to know how, what do I actually need right now? How do I actually calm myself down is because we've become disconnected from our body. Our body holds the intuition, the knowing of what I actually need right in this moment. And this happens because emotion lives inside the body. When you get excited or nervous, you might feel butterflies in your stomach. If you're sad, you'll feel a lump in your throat. If you're anxious, you might feel a tightening in your chest. In fact, there have actually been studies done where they have noticed that certain emotions for most people show up in the same parts of the body. This isn't just an idea. So to really feel our emotions, we must be connected to our body. We need to be able to feel that anxiety in our chest and really feel it to process it. But instead, what happens is we might notice anxiety and we get straight in our heads. This happens because when you are young, and a lot of this happens between the ages of zero and seven, but it can also happen older into our teenage years, when you experience a difficult emotion, whether that's anger or rejection or sadness, more of these difficult emotions. If you didn't have a grounded, regulated adult to help you to understand and process that emotion, then you wouldn't have been able to process it. Children cannot process emotion on their own. Their brains are simply not developed enough. They need to borrow the regulated nervous system of an adult to help them to do that. And let me tell you, most of the people inside this community didn't have that. Even if you have amazing parents and you love them so much and you're really grateful to them, how do they handle their emotions? How did they handle stress and anxiety and anger and frustration, fear? Can you remember any times where you saw them in those states and you saw how they handled it? Or did they try to hide most of their emotions? Were there moments when there were big explosions of emotion and things kind of got swept under the rug? Parents cannot help children to do what they cannot do for themselves. And unfortunately, over the past 60, 70 years, there has been some horrific advice on parenting and how to raise children and how to respond to children's emotions, which have really impacted generations of people. Not to mention war and famine and things like that that have an impact on the generations that follow. But just think of the cry it out method. Allow a child to cry it out so they learn to be self-sufficient. Children, babies cannot be self-sufficient. They need an adult to help them to regulate themselves. They can't handle sadness on their own. So just imagine that alone, the impact that has had on the following gen generations. And I bring this up because so many people try to dismiss this and say, Yeah, but I had a great childhood and my parents love me a lot. If you were left alone with difficult emotions, those emotions get stored as pain. And each of those moments of pain creates disconnection from our mind and our body. Because to exist inside our body with that pain is too painful. It's hard, it's too hard, it's too confusing and overwhelming. And so we disconnect and we escape into our minds, into our imaginations, into thinking and planning and logic. So we spend almost 24-7 inside our heads. So we don't have to feel the pain that we felt in the past. This is true for every single human being. It doesn't matter how amazing your childhood was, everyone carries pain. And pain gets stored in the body. This comes from Dr. Bezil's book, The Body Keeps a Score, which you may have heard of. If you have not, isn't it is an excellent book that I highly recommend you read. And essentially what the book is talking about is that emotions become tracked trapped in the body because unresolved trauma leaves the nervous system stuck in a chronic state of fight, flight, or freeze. That means stress hormones continue to circulate and muscle tension persists, and the body reenacts trauma rather than processing it. And here's a quote from that book. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past. The more we hold on to the past, the more we have disconnected from our body, the more of a dysregulated state we are going to find ourselves in. And one doorway in helping ourselves to slow down, to regulate, to heal, and to release that pain from the past, the tyranny of the past, is in somatics, because somatics is centered on the mind-body connection, exactly what this book was talking about. Somatics believes that traumatic experiences can become trapped in the body. Let me run you through a little example of what it looks like when we get stuck in our heads and we get caught in a trauma loop or a pain loop. If trauma feels like too big of a word for you, you can use pain loop. It can look like this. I receive constructive feedback at work. The feedback is reasonable and it's not overly critical, but it highlights an area where I could improve. I feel a bit bad about this. I go home and I start thinking about all the reasons why I feel bad. I start to ask myself, maybe haven't been working hard enough? Do people like me? Is this a subtle sign that I'm going to lose my job? Then we feel worse. And that pushes us back into our head. Oh man, I must be about to lose my job. I need to try harder. What can I do to do better? It must be because of that mistake I made two months ago. Or maybe it's because I didn't smile at the person or I said no to going to that event. Clearly, people don't like me. Clearly, I'm not good enough. I don't know how I feel like I'm trying so hard. I don't know how I could do better. I feel worse. And that pushes me back into my head and more stories. And then there's more stories and more beliefs and more thinking that just make me feel worse and back into my head. And we go in this loop until we feel horrible and exhausted. And we end up scrolling or picking, pulling, biting at our body, binge eating, watching porn, going online shopping to help us not only to deal with the distress that that constructive feedback caused inside of us because it triggered old wounds, but also to help with the distress that our own thoughts and stories built on top of that experience. It's a lot. Somatics helps us to interrupt that pattern because it helps us to get out of our minds and into our bodies. Because I'm sure that you notice in that example, which we can all relate to, there's a lot of time spent in the head and maybe just half a second spent in the body. Or it's maybe just an afterthought. It's like a it's like something that's running in the back of the mind, noticing it and feeling worse, I'm feeling worse, I'm feeling worse, I'm feeling worse, and I'm feeling worse. Now it's too much and I'm exhausted. So let's try and do something to distract and numb out from this. This is something that I do when I am deeply triggered by my lovely husband. If we are having an argument and it's triggering some of our core wounds, and I'm feeling very dysregulated and unable to have a mature adult conversation to work through our differences. If I can, you know that real, you know, that feeling where that heat is rising inside you, and you're feeling that tension in your chest and you're seeing that person as the enemy, that's when I know I need to take a break. And the way that I help myself to actually calm down is not to try and think through all the things that are happening and all the things that were said, and maybe all the ways that I could have done better, or all the ways that my husband is wrong and I'm right. I take myself into a private space and I sit down. And every time I feel myself getting into my head, doing all the things that I just mentioned, I bring myself back to my body and I feel into and I breathe into where the pain is showing up. It's often in the stomach, in the a cramping in the stomach or a tightness and a burning in the chest, maybe a big lump in the throat. And I just allow myself to sit with and feel and observe those feelings so that I can actually feel them and process them. Because the whole idea of getting stuck in your head means you don't have to feel it. But if we don't allow ourselves to feel it, we're also not going to process it and we're going to stay in a dysregulated state. We want to allow ourselves to feel fully. So I'd love to walk you through an exercise that can help you to strengthen your mind-body connection and can also help you to feel fully those really intense emotions to help you to get out of your head. Now there are four things we're going to be looking for because what we're doing is we're really just observing. We're becoming a curious observer of what is happening inside our body. We're letting go of our assumptions, of our stories, of our beliefs, and we are just being in the present and getting curious. And having these things to look for can help us to get curious and let those things go. And these are the four things that we're going to look for. We're going to look for intensity. So when you locate a sensation in your body, you can ask yourself, how strong or mild is the sensation? Is it a gentle pressure or a sharp pain or a dull ache or whatever other way that best describes the sensation, the intensity of the sensation you're feeling? The second is location. Where is it actually showing up in the body? Do you feel it in your chest, your stomach, your shoulders, in your throat? Then the third thing we're looking for is the quality. What does it feel like? Is it tight, tingling, throbbing, heavy, warm, cold? And then number four is the duration. Does this sensation last or is it coming and going, ebbing and flowing? And something I sometimes like to throw in there is does it have a shape? Does it show up as a circle or a sphere or a square or a triangle or a star or something pointy? For some people who are very visual, a shape will come to mind immediately. For other people, no shape comes up, and that's totally fine. It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It just really depends on the way your brain functions. But before I just mentioned the intensity, location, quality, and duration, these are things that every person has access to noticing. And now I would love to walk you through a short exercise to connecting your mind to your body and helping you to feel fully in times when you're getting stuck in your head so that you can regulate yourself and slow down. Now, if you are, of course, driving a car or doing something that requires your focus, just listen along and take note and listen back into this later when you can really sit down and follow along properly. Otherwise, those who are going for a walk or sitting in the train or the bus or at home, just take a deep breath in. The biggest breath you've taken all the day and very slowly let it out. And just allow your awareness to drift down towards your body. Getting curious for what sensations are there? Noticing if there are some strong sensations inside your body or mild ones. Is there pressure or sharpness or aching? Just becoming a curious observer. And any time some thoughts hook your attention, just say thank you for the thought. And return to getting curious about the sensations inside your body. Returning to a curious observer. Now I wonder where the loudest, the biggest sensation is located in your body right now. Are you noticing something in your throat, your chest, your shoulders, maybe your stomach. And just allowing your focus to settle on that location. And to any thoughts that wander in, just say thank you for the thought. And return to your observation, sending deep breaths into that location that you've become aware of. And now we're getting curious for the quality of that sensation. What does it feel like? Is it tight, tingling, is it throbbing or heavy? Is it light or warm or cold? Or maybe it's just numb. Just getting curious for what's there and letting go of assumptions or thoughts or ideas, or trying to figure out why. Becoming the curious observer. Saying thank you to those thoughts, returning to observing the sensation. Now I wonder what the duration is like. Does the sensation you're observing last? Or does it come and go, ebb and flow? Is it getting stronger or weaker as you observe? I'm just taking a deep breath into that space. We're not here to do or fix or even understand. We're just here to observe and get curious. To feel, to feel fully what's there, which you are doing right now as you observe and get curious. And it doesn't have to be perfect, it can be messy and feel incomplete. And if you're noticing maybe frustration or irritation, get curious for where that is showing up for you. Whatever is in the way is the way. And just noticing how the sensation shifts. Maybe it's changed since you first noticed it. Or maybe it's the same. All is welcome. All is as it should be. Then again, taking a deep breath into that space. Send a thank you to that sensation. Thank you for being here. Thank you for allowing me to be here with you. And just bring yourself back to the space that you're in. That is a very simple somatic practice that can help us to get out of our head and into our body. And you don't have to follow it perfectly. The one rule for this practice is to just get curious, but that's it. To notice when your mind is wandering and return back to getting curious and observing what's there and breathing. Into that space and allowing yourself to feel what's there without trying to fix it or figure it out. Because the fixing and figuring out is us getting back into our head because we don't want to feel what's there, because it's too confusing or it's too much or it's too annoying. When I do this, when I'm deeply triggered in a conflict with my partner, this is literally the only way for me to get out of my head and into my body and truly calm myself down so that I can have a healthy and loving interaction that helps me and my husband come closer together and to repair and to build an even stronger and safer foundation in our relationship rather than going the other way of dysregulation and disconnection that just slowly destroys that safety and foundation inside any relationship. And it's not only the relationships that you have with other people, it's also the relationship with yourself that gets strengthened and becomes more safe. So the connecting to your body gets even easier. And the better we can connect to our body, the better we can understand what I actually need. What would actually help me in this situation rather than just slapping some meditation on it and saying, well, hopefully that'll work. And sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. It's really hit and miss, honestly. But when you're connected into yourself and you get to know yourself so well, you're like, I know me. I know I know what I need right now. You can be flexible and adaptable and loving and kind and compassionate. And you can also decide for yourself that, yeah, maybe I'm feeling this way. Yeah, maybe I don't really want to do this work. But this work does have to be done. And we can be okay with the resistance that we're feeling. For example, like today, I didn't really feel like sitting down and recording this podcast episode. I'm getting into the luteal phase of my cycle, and you know that kind of I'm getting the more cozy, put my headphones on and listen to classical music and do some writing and work in that form, not getting on camera and bringing energy and structure and presenting an idea, but it is a responsibility that I have. And instead of spiraling thinking, what's wrong with me that I don't want to do this? It's so hard. How can I make myself want to do this? I'm just able to accept that I don't really feel like it, but I can do it. And in all honesty, I've really enjoyed recording this for you, and I hope you found it really valuable. This is how we can slow down. We can't slow down by using our mind more. We must connect to our body more. That's what real regulation is. That's what real slowing down is. And it's gonna feel really uncomfortable and weird and wrong if dysregulation and being on go has been your baseline for a really long time. So this is a practice that I've just shared with you. It's not a quick fix, it's not a one-time thing. Oh, I'll give that a go or try it and see if it works. It's I'm gonna commit to myself. I'm gonna dedicate myself to connecting to me. Because I deserve that effort. I deserve that connection and that dedication and that care and that focus. Me, myself. I deserve that for myself. And if you're feeling like you really need to be heard, you really need to be understood, you really need to be seen in this struggle, because we all know this can be really isolating and a lot of people really don't understand it. Then please do book in your free call with me, your free road mapping session where you get to share your story with me and receive insights that maybe you hadn't noticed before, but you've had an inkling might be the truth. Or maybe there's something totally new that you never considered that just blows your mind. I've had these calls with people, and just simply being truly deeply seen, heard, and understood changes so much for them. If there is something inside you that is craving that, that is feeling drawn to that, go to the show notes and click on the link. I'm so, so looking forward to meeting you and hearing your story. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit like and subscribe. Let me know in the comments what came up for you. Thank you so, so much for hanging out with me. And I look forward to seeing you next week on the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling.