The Five Values of Becoming mBODYed: Safety (part 2)
The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS): The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is responsible for the bottom-up functioning of our nervous system, which ensures our safety. Autonomic is synonymous with automatic, so we can best describe our ANS as automatic, functioning in the background of our consciousness.
The ANS has two branches: the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. Our parasympathetic nervous system is made up of several cranial nerves (the vagus, the oculomotor, facial, glossopharyngeal, and trigeminal) that come directly out of the brain and innervate your eyes, throat, face, and the major organs of your body (heart, lungs, digestive system, sexual organs). Our sympathetic nervous system is a series of nerve ganglia that come out of the spinal column and innervate the major organs in the body as well. The parasympathetic system is our “rest and digest” system and helps us maintain our vital life systems. The sympathetic system gets us up and moving, helps us respond to the stressors and stimuli around us, and monitors and engages our threat/panic systems of fight/flight/freeze/disassociate when needed. These systems generally self-regulate throughout our day to ensure healthy bodily functioning.
As our nervous system modulates between our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, the ways in which our brain functions change, particularly how sensory information is perceived and interpreted and how we access reasoning and creative pathways.
As we progress into our sympathetic responses, our perception of sensory information will sharpen for a period of time. This sharpening increases our performance; our bodies are designed to perform well under stress.
The problem is how much stress the body can handle. As stress increases, our system becomes overwhelmed and overburdened, either collapsing into fatigue/failure or moving us further into our panic responses.
As we move into the active responses of panic (fight or flight), our reasoning and creative pathways shut down, and our sensory appreciation system modulates into survival. While this is experienced in all systems, hearing is particularly interesting for musicians. Our ability to be sensitive to frequencies in the middle range of our hearing changes as we are more acutely aware of the highest and lowest pitches in our hearing range. We are designed to listen for the snapping of a twig, the crinkle of a leaf, or the growl of a predator – not the quality of 3rds, 6ths, and 7ths. We lose access to the skills required to be sensitive musicians, much less creative in a performance.
If the stress continues, we move further into the immobilizing responses of the parasympathetic system – freezing, fawning, and dissociation. How many of you reading this can describe a performance where you remember being backstage before and after the concert but nothing from the actual performance? This is likely because your panic responses were in charge, and you may have been in autopilot/survival mode because the nervous system believes catastrophic danger is imminent.
I had a teaching experience a few years ago where this came up. A student began talking in class about their hatred of performing by themselves, mentioning their performance anxiety as the cause. They described a similar response mentioned above, that they can be backstage or outside a jury room, and then suddenly come to the same place with no memory of the performance itself. As the conversation continued, they said, “Yeah, and I know all the lies that I am supposed to be telling myself, that I’m safe, this isn’t going to kill me, it just one performance and doesn’t matter in the long run, and I’m prepared.” We paused to validate this student’s experience, who was revealing something intensely profound for them. We honored the space we had created for this kind of sharing and recommitted to the sanctity of our teaching/learning space; what is shared here does not leave the confines of our group.
As a teacher who is particularly interested in somatic, trauma-informed teaching, my priority is tending to your nervous system. If your safety is in question, you lose the ability to learn. You also lose the ability to be creative in performances and the ability to enjoy the act of performing. Truthfully, we, as performers, bring profound experiences alive for our audiences. We deserve to enjoy those experiences ourselves, and I mean enjoy the activity of creating the art, not just the applause that happens following.
What, then, can you do if any of this sounds familiar?
1. Find a qualified therapist, even if you don’t think that you’ve suffered from a traumatic event. The nervous system has a way of interpreting our circumstances that isn’t always logical. Working with a qualified therapist can help sort out everything happening under the surface.
2. Use breathing exercises to help you intentionally calm your nervous system. There are many in this category, but box breathing and the whispered Ah are two of my favorites. Any exercise where the exhalation is longer than the inhalation will work to calm the nervous system.
3. Mindfulness and Positive Self Talking (Narrative Therapy) are both skills that can be helpful in the moment if you’ve cultivated these skills outside of the practice room or stage. And mindfulness doesn’t necessarily mean meditation. There are many ways to cultivate intentionality of thought, and the Alexander Technique is a great example. But these are skills that you have to work on without the instrument before you trust bringing them on stage with you.
4. Conditioning your nervous system to function well under intense stress. This you can do through exercise. Get your heart rate up to an aerobic level appropriate for your age and fitness level, and then intentionally slow your breathing down while breathing through the nose without slowing your pace. Over time, this will condition you to handle more stress without moving into failure.