Under Pressure: A Love Letter to You

I'm sending love to all performers – not just performers on a stage, but anyone who feels that they are being scrutinized, labeled, and judged. What comes to mind are auditions, asking for a raise, pitching an idea, looking for investors, going to a party, meeting new people. May I take a guess and say that most of us have felt like performers at one time or another in life?

We all want and need approval of some kind from the other people in the room. Getting the job, finding your tribe, belonging - all of this creates some amount of internal pressure. These are real and legit needs. We can not exist alone, we are designed to be in community, giving and receiving support to our fellow humans. So when that support even hints at being threatened, our bodies react.

It is not your fault if your body gets triggered into fight/flight/freeze/fawn when under pressure. You, my dear, are human. This is our biology. This wiring in our bodies is good. It is protective. It is helping us stay safe. This is what we do when our bodies and our nervous systems do not feel safe.

This stress response wiring in our bodies is older than bones – it is observable in cartilaginous fish and thought to have evolved before bones evolved. Gosh, that bit gives me comfort, knowing that my body's automatic functions are a production of such a long history. 

This stress response might show up as adrenaline, shakiness, sweating, feeling out of control, feeling sleepy, feeling frozen, incapable, non-responsive, thick tongue, dry mouth, fingers heavy, unable to be and feel authentic.

No matter the conditions that led to fight/flight/freeze/fawn, it is the body’s stress response, saying “I do not feel safe.” The body does not lie - this is an automatic and unconscious reaction. If your nervous system feels stressed and unsafe, that’s just the truth of the moment and that is normal and ok to feel that way. (And of course, other energies inside us might hate that it happens, and that is normal too.) It might be a signpost to pay attention to, a trailhead of further inward exploration if you feel so called to explore and heal.

We might look at this nervous system response as energies or parts within that do not feel safe, but it is not our whole being that feels this way. It feels comforting to me to separate these threads, so that I can witness all the conflicting energies inside me - the ones that wish to be in the situation and those that wish to be hiding under a blanket. 

There are a few things we can do to feel safer in a high pressured situation – like practice and prepare effectively, get the support you need to feel as good as possible, give your day enough space to feel unhurried. This might save you from a certain level of flipping into fight/flight/freeze/fawn, and the energies within that drive this preparation deserve appreciation. 

But there are so many things outside our control – our previous trauma history, our history in similar high pressured situations, our neural wiring predispositions, the way the people in the room treat us, look at us, talk to us, ignore us. And many of these are outside of our cognitive awareness, which makes it overwhelming to deal with in the moment.

It is so, so hard to feel triggered, tripped, flipped. I’ve been met with judgment for simply feeling nervous, I’ve been told to practice more. I've been told to focus on my breath, focus on the positive, ignore people. What else do well-intentioned but misguided people around us say and do? I’m certain I have been on both sides of this, receiving unasked for advice, and giving unhelpful advice! (My deep apologies to those I have given the unhelpful advice.)

Instead, what we deserve is love and compassion for having been flipped into the body’s automatic stress response. We deserve support people around us giving us kind listening and loving emotional space. It feels bad inside and takes energy to process and recover, no matter what circumstances led to this state.

I’m sending you oodles of love and a deep heart for those times that you’ve felt this normal, human way, for your entire being, all energies and parts within you.  

Marta