My Trauma Self Care Routine Checklist
This is advice on self care activities you can do, after experiencing trauma or chronic stress, that will help calm you, restore balance, and heal your mind, body, and spirit.
Note that I’m not a clinical or medical professional. Discuss any medical issues or questions with your doctor.
Below, you’ll find a list of the practices I do regularly to continue healing from complex trauma and chronic stress that was really compounded by the pandemic. All items in my list revolve around restoring balance between the mind, body, and spirit as well as restoring agency to your whole self. Many of these self care practices, that have become routines over time leading to an overall healthy lifestyle for me, create multiple benefits in your life, from reducing anxiety to having more energy everyday. They’re all really about showing up for yourself, which creates confidence and self love, and also empowering yourself to heal and live the life you want.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Screenshot this list and print it out. Use it! Physically check items off the list once you complete them.
As you read through the list, remember that one size doesn’t fit all. So, absolutely feel free to take what you want from this self care checklist and leave the rest. Also feel free to modify or add items as needed.
You always want to be sure that the practices you’re adding into your self care routine are upgrades to past coping mechanisms now that you’re not in an actively traumatic situation.
After you go through my list, the most important thing is to start making changes one step at a time. You may even need to break down one step into even smaller, more achievable steps.
Related: Managing the Overwhelm of Everyday Tasks
Integrate one step and then once you feel it’s completely part of your normal routine, start working on the next.
Know that as you do this, your lifestyle will begin to shift. Changing your lifestyle takes time, so channel your inner patience as you get started.
Remember to take stock of and celebrate your progress regularly to help your new routine stick.
Talk to your inner circle about what you’re doing and what you need so your support system can help you along the way with encouragement, perspective, and accountability.
And also remember, I’m not perfect at these self care activities at all times. You don’t have to be either to get started and to keep trying your best. That, my friend, is better than doing nothing.
Now, let’s deep dive into each self care practice, all of which combined create a lifestyle primed for healing trauma.
This article assumes you are currently in a safe environment — you’re not in an actively abusive environment or circumstance, for example. If you’re currently not safe, the number one thing to do is get to safety. This can be easier said than done, but it’s the most important thing you can do to even begin healing.
Getting to safety can mean going somewhere you won’t be physically harmed or in danger. It can also mean setting boundaries with mentally and emotionally abusive people, even if they wouldn’t dare lay a finger on you.
Even if you’re in a place of safety, away from abusers, it can often feel like they still run your life.
Ask yourself, do they really have any control over me? Do I really have to be afraid of them?
While you’re working through this, you might be safe but not feel safe. That’s exactly how I felt when I started changing my lifestyle to support healing trauma and chronic stress.
How long it takes to start feeling safe again after you are safe depends on you, what you’ve been through, how you reacted to it, and how far along in your healing journey you are. Whether or not you feel safe in one situation or another is different for everybody.
It’s up to you to know the difference between actually being safe whether you feel safe or not.
Exercise:
Grab a journal and answer these questions:
What does safety mean to you?
What are some actions you can take to start establishing safety within yourself?
There are a lot of options, but two impactful ones myself and my clients have been using are communicating safety to yourself and limiting exposure to re-traumatization.
Part of starting to feel safe again is telling yourself that you are.
The most important thing to keep in mind about telling yourself you’re safe is to tell yourself the truth. If you’re truly safe, then telling yourself you’re safe is important. If you’re not actually safe though, don’t tell yourself you are. Tell yourself the truth and get to safety. Now, if you’re safe…
You can tell yourself that your safe simply by saying the words aloud or inside your head. Really hear what you’re saying and keep telling yourself you’re safe as much as need to. Another way of doing this is saying, “I’m okay. I’ll be okay,” as long as that’s the real truth.
I mainly need to tell myself I’m safe when I feel myself elevating. That is, my sympathetic nervous system is activating, also known as being triggered.
You can tell yourself you’re safe anytime you feel like it though - whether you know your triggers or not.
Aside from straight out talking to yourself (which is not weird), there are other ways you can tell yourself you’re safe too without talking at all. For instance, you can:
Ground into nature
Spend time in nature
Walk barefoot in the grass
Meditate and/or visualize peaceful places
Take clean CBD
Drink plenty of water
Get plenty of sunlight
Shake your body (this helps regulate your nervous system)
Connect with safe people and community to reinforce positive experiences that prove safety in relationship
Let go of or set boundaries in toxic relationships
Let go of or set boundaries in toxic jobs
Let go of or set boundaries with toxic family members
Acting in these ways sends signals of safety through your biology in various ways.
After initially removing yourself from the traumatizing experience(s) you had no control over, limiting exposure to re-traumatization can mean taking action where you do have control, such as avoiding conversations, images, and experiences that reinforce the trauma in your brain.
I typically don’t recommend avoidance — it’s a coping mechanism based in fear and generally does more harm than good. However, it can be useful when you’re first trying to calm your nervous system and get to a baseline where healing is even accessible. Use avoidance sparingly, however. Know that it’s not the end goal.
In my mind, the end goal would be to eventually be able to observe yourself being triggered and change how you react so that you can reclaim your power and change the world. As in, make the world more compassionate, conscious, kind, loving, and trusting so we can limit trauma for future generations. We do not have to be a traumatized people, period. It’s a big goal, I know, but it’s what makes your traumatic experiences meaningful. They weren’t for nothing.
But, to get there, you have to first stop becoming re-traumatized so you can start healing the trauma responses.
Also, it’s important for me to acknowledge that if you’re part of an oppressed or marginalized group of people, while there’s no way I can personally know your experience, I’ve learned that it can feel impossible to be completely safe. The complexities of enjoying your life, taking care of yourself, and finding ways to cope while also being marginalized can be more complex — especially if a re-traumatizing environment (like living in a widespread oppressive culture or needing a job but most of your options take part in oppressive systems) seems inescapable.
So, finding creative ways to limit your exposure to re-traumatization can be added to this list for you to build signals of safety in what may feel like an unsafe world.
I really went for a big one at the beginning of the list, right? I’m not tee-totaling on you, promise. Hear me out…
If you’re anything like me, you drank during the pandemic — a lot. Having a drink here or there, even, might seem like self care at certain points in your life. For real though, I actually used to consider it self care. Jack and Coke was my go to.
But, trauma, especially childhood trauma (source), and prolonged chronic stress already creates inflammation in your body.
Drinking alcohol adds to the inflammation in your body (source). Inflammation has all kinds of negative consequences if left unchecked and it becomes chronic.
Not only does alcohol add to inflammation throughout your body (source), but if you’re using it to numb emotions, it at best also stunts your healing and at worst becomes an addiction. Addiction can bring with it more trauma and stress that perpetuates the cycles of wanting to numb the trauma and stress with alcohol, and you get caught in a pretty difficult loop to break.
Does this mean drinking is inherently bad? No. There are plenty of times and places when it’s okay and not unhealthy to drink in moderation. But those times and places are most certainly when you’re not suffering from the affects of trauma and chronic stress.
Assuming you’re not in active addiction, it can still be incredibly hard to stop drinking. It’s hard to stop doing something you enjoy that’s probably been part of your whole adult life, and that there’s a lot of social pressure to do in group gatherings.
Here are some of the things that worked for me when I was stopping:
When I wanted a drink, I drank something that would have a minimal impact on my blood sugar, calorie intake, and inflammation from food sensitivities as advised by an amazing functional diagnostic nutritionist I’ve been seeing. (More on that in the “Assemble Your Healing Support Team section).
Think gin and soda water (NOT tonic, which is loaded with sugar).
The effect this had was almost immediate, as in, the drinks tasted so bad I didn’t want them, lol.
When I’d go out (mostly to a live music show in Nashville or somewhere similar where it seemed like everyone was drinking), I’d order a soda water with lime to drink. I still got the fizzy feeling and something to drink, but skipped the alcohol.
I ate ice cream once a week instead of drinking. Now, this isn’t advised, mainly because loads of sugar can also cause inflammation (source) and some nasty cravings and mood swings, but… it was yummy and helped temporarily. (Eventually, I was able to work on the sugar cravings too.)
Exercise:
Take a few minutes to write down three healthy replacements that might help you. They could be totally different.
Is it going to the gym? Working in your garden? Drinking a cup of tea? Drawing in your sketchbook? Why not pick up that hobby you’ve been ignoring (you’re not too old for any of it!)
I’m at the point in my own healing journey now when I do have a rare drink every now and then and don’t feel physically ill after, like at my recent 20th high school reunion, for example. But, I keep those instances super limited — 99% of the time, I’m turning drinks down.
On the other hand, if you are in active addiction, a reputable recovery program is the best place to start your self care. Eventually, alcohol can be 100% off limits. And that’s totally okay.
I love coffee so much. I mean, it’s insane how much I love coffee. Partly because it tastes good, but also because I just go nuts over nostalgia. I love remembering how my grandma would have the coffee pot going all day and the smell of a fresh pot of coffee brewing in her kitchen. Right before she passed away, she told me one of the things she’d miss the most about life on Earth was the smell of coffee. I told her that surely there’s coffee in heaven, since it’s heaven.
But, let’s get real — there are downsides to coffee. One of those is that it can trigger anxiety if you’re drinking too much of it or it can make existing anxiety worse. If you have adrenal fatigue and your sleep cycles are messed up due to an imbalance of cortisol from being in a constant state of fight or flight, then coffee (or any caffeine, think sodas, energy drinks, black teas, and even tension headache medications, etc.) can actually drain your energy and turn low grade anxiety into unmanageable spiraling.
In my experience, I even would breathe faster, almost going into a panic and my heart would beat hard and fast in my chest.
I won’t get into the different types of caffeine here, but know that some is man made and some occurs naturally. Natural is always better. When it’s not mixed with chemicals and loads of sugar, it’s also better for you. However, any caffeine can exacerbate your anxiety.
When you first start eliminating caffeine from your diet, you’ll probably get a headache.
It’s temporary, I promise. In time, as you start to balance other parts of your diet, sleep schedule, and movement of your body, your natural energy will start coming back as your cortisol starts to function normally again. Once that happens, you can probably start working small amounts of caffeine (the natural kind) back into your diet. Don’t overdo it though.
Limiting caffeine may not completely stop your anxiety, but at least you’ll be doing something to not make it worse. Combine limiting your caffeine with other grounding and natural anxiety-reducing practices, and you’ll feel more normal in no time.
For reference, it took me about six months of no caffeine to achieve lower anxiety. Now that’s it’s managed naturally, I’m back to drinking coffee.
The first three list items already help you with taking care of your liver. But, there’s more you can do and here’s why that’s important:
Stress, especially the chronic kind that you feel when you’ve been traumatized, can damage your liver. The damage occurs through your dysregulated nervous system. To say it more plainly, your fight or flight response can cause too many stress hormones to be in your body. When this starts to happen, your liver becomes inflamed and your immune system suffers. (source) This can also cause adrenal fatigue, which is important to learn about for trauma survivors, but is a topic for another day.
So, it’s incredibly important to take care of your liver after trauma. Three ways you can do that are:
Reduce your stress levels as much as possible
Detox your body
Detox your environment
Our modern life is full of systems that keep us going at such a fast pace, it’s difficult to keep up. Going at this break-neck pace at all times, skipping vacations, skipping doctor appointments, and the like, isn’t sustainable. In fact, it’s the main source of our daily stress. And if we’re spending time with people who are constantly stressed out, this exacerbates it even more. Stress is a toxin, in and of itself.
Our modern life is also loaded with toxins. They’re all around us. You could argue that they’re a product of our consciousness, because we created ways of life that produce toxins as a result of our inner, collective state as a humanity.
Whatever your belief system, it’s still evident that it’s difficult to be toxin free whether you’ve been through trauma or not.
Not only are trauma and chronic stress toxic, but living in a toxic world can create trauma and chronic stress. It’s a loop. From the food we eat to the substances we use to “protect” ourselves (like sunscreen) or numb the pain (like alcohol and drugs), or even our methods of travel and the technology we use - we’re bombarded.
Let’s dive deeper into each way to take care of your liver.
10 Natural Ways to Reduce Your Stress and Anxiety (coming soon)
Several of my favorite ways to detox your body are going to the infrared sauna, dry brushing (a method of lymphatic self massage), and buying clean products when possible.
Go to an infrared sauna
The infrared sauna helps unblock your body’s natural detox pathways and circulate your lymphatic system. It also helps attune your energy for certain types of healing that you need the most. For example, sometimes I choose violet light to help with inflammation and other times I choose blue to help with stress. The green light has antiseptic properties. They’re all wonderful. There’s something about the different wave lengths of light that align your body and energy to healing vibrations. There are colors for your urinary tract, nervous system, eyes and ocular areas, muscle stimulation, and so much more.
All you have to do is find a location that’s convenient to you, show up, strip down (as much as you want to — you’re typically in a private cabin), pick your color(s), and sit for 40 minutes. You can stretch or mediate while you’re there too. It’s a great way to get some peaceful you time.
The place I go to has a tablet in the cabin so you can listen to music or watch Netflix. They also provide towels and a cold eucalyptus soaked rag to wipe down when you’re finished.
Start Dry Brushing Before You Shower
Dry brushing is pretty new for me, as introduced to me by my Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist (FDN) (she’s so great and has helped me change my life tremendously!) — I’m still working on making it a habit that becomes part of everyday routine and eventually, lifestyle. It’s supposed to help your lymphatic system circulate (which reduces swelling) and I hear it smoothes out cellulite and is great for exfoliating your skin, to name a few benefits.
If you have a sedentary lifestyle, eat a lot of processed foods, are exposed to a lot of chemicals, and don’t drink a lot of water, your lymphatic system most definitely needs support with circulation.
Your lymphatic system is part of your immune system and, among its many beneficial functions, it helps remove waste products from your body (source).
Dry brushing helps your lymphatic system drain by moving fluid toward exit areas in your body. That means, the direction in which you brush different body parts matters.
So, you start by getting a brush with natural fiber bristles so they doesn’t create tiny cuts in your skin — in other words, the natural bristles help you avoid further inflammation and irritation.
Then, you brush toward your heart, no matter what body part you’re brushing. Covering your entire body only has to last for a minute or two — don’t overdo it. And then make sure you get in the shower afterwards to wash off any toxins that may have exited your body.
Buy Clean Products
Pay close attention to the products you put on your body, such as personal care, beauty, and hygiene products, as the ingredients absorb into your skin and circulate through your body. A clean product is one with minimal ingredients and no toxins.
For example, buy bar soaps and shampoos with less exposure to plastic. Ensure they only contain ingredients that are actually from nature and that you know what they are. Avoid common allergens as well as GMO soy and corn in your products. Those ingredients, while they do come from nature, have been tampered with so much and have such widespread use, it’s likely you have developed sensitivities to those, which also causes inflammation.
One good rule of thumb is if the product is good for the environment, it’s probably good for you too, and vice versa. Healing our bodies is inextricably linked to healing the planet and vice versa.
One way you can be sure you’re buying clean products that work for you is to check with the Environmental Working Group. They have consumer guides, a searchable database of verified products, and a free Healthy Living app with the searchable database. Find it in the Apple or Google app stores.
Run your products like sunscreen, make up, soap, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, bug repellant and more through their database to see the ingredients and learn about what they are. They’ll give you different ratings on the product so you can see what each one does well and what it doesn’t in terms of health for you and the environment.
This takes some time at first, but eventually, you’ll know what’s good for you and what’s not without having to look everything up. It’s an investment in your health.
Ultimately, using clean products helps decrease the toxic load that you’re absorbing into your body. When you have a lot of inflammation, as trauma survivors typically do, reducing the toxic load helps alleviate some inflammation. This lets your body catch up so its natural detoxification process can be successful.
Get an air purifier or a few to spread throughout your home. Get plants to help with the air quality as well. Make sure you’re using natural cleaning products (they do make some that work!). And make sure there isn’t mold in your home.
Decluttering also falls in this category. Declutter and organize if you have the time. Purge things that weigh you down.
Other examples include storing your food in glass containers instead of plastic and drinking out of glass water bottles instead of plastic.
Remember how we talked about toxic load earlier? Many harmful toxins come from our foods and water supply. From pesticides to air pollution and litter, we become what we eat. Then, when you add in the chemicals like synthetic dyes and flavors or artificial sweeteners (don’t even get me started on how Splenda was originally developed as a pesticide - I learned that in college), processed foods are slowly killing us. They add to the inflammation in our bodies and alter our gut bacteria, which impacts our immune system (source). The cascade of negative impacts to our health is huge.
So, changing what we fuel our bodies with can be medicine!
A balanced diet helps balance your body. It helps reduce inflammation (like so many other items in this self care check list), supports natural detoxification, and provides proper nutrition — all of which helps our bodies to function properly with energy and sharpness. In my opinion, a variety of whole foods are the only way to do this. And they must be organic (when possible) to avoid introducing proven toxins, like pesticides, into the body.
Long-term exposure to pesticides can cause asthma, cancer, cognitive impairment (from nerve damage), and reproductive problems (source).
And, if you have leaky gut (caused from chronic inflammatory states, which trauma and prolonged stress can create), whole, organic, clean foods can help heal your gut. There are specific foods, such as cabbage and aloe juice that may assist more in healing your gut. Either way, a healthy gut decreases food sensitivities, thus decreasing inflammation. It also strengthens the gut’s connection to your mind and spirit — you can start trusting it to guide you. It’s part of your intuition.
Note: If you can’t go completely organic, be sure to check the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists. (Check them periodically, as they change.) If a food is on the Dirty Dozen list, definitely try to get organic. If it’s on the Clean Fifteen, you’re safer to buy the conventional version.
Now, I know it takes a lot of privilege to be able to buy all organic food. However, it is so, so important for your health. So, I ask you — how can you prioritize buying organic and deprioritize something else in your budget?
It will decrease your medical bills in the future, which can be astronomical. Investing in your health is always a good investment.
This can get expensive, just like eating organic. But, it’s worth it to try.
There are a lot of benefits to eating pasture-raised and wild-caught meats around the environment, the ethics and morality around animal welfare, getting more nutritionally dense food (so you can eat less and still get what your body needs) and reducing toxic load in our bodies. Those are all really important.
However, the bottom line for me on this when it comes to your wellness though is energy.
If an animal is in pain, is miserable, and has dis-ease or disease, and you eat it, that transfers to you.
On the other hand, if an animal is free, healthy, happy, taken care of, and has lived a good life, that transfers to you as well.
Which one is better?
We are made of about 60% water (source).
Our cells need water to function properly. Our bodies need water to function properly. Water is essentially life — without it, we can’t live.
The need for it to be clean is also really important. Not only must our water be clean so we don’t get sick and become more dehydrated, but if water has toxins, it adds to inflammation and disease. This goes for the water we swim in, the water our food swims in, the water we cook with, and the water we drink and bathe in.
Not only does water keep us moving and functioning at our peak performance, but remember all the info about the lymphatic system that we talked about earlier? Being hydrated enables your lymphatic system to move its fluid around your body (source). It also enables your digestive system to move more freely. This supports your natural detoxification process — a crucial component of decreasing inflammation.
Healing trauma can have a lot of moving parts and pieces. It can imprint on your mind, body, and spirit, which all must reconnect during your healing process. Ideally, as part of your healing process, you’d acknowledge every part of yourself, even the parts you ignore or hate, and reconnect those parts too in a new existence of self love and fulfillment.
Because of the complexities of doing what I just described, you’ll likely need more than one healing modality as part of your healing support. It’s up to you to know which modalities you need at any one time.
Here are some suggestions you may find helpful to get your brain going on options: Holistic Modalities for Healing Trauma
In addition to those options, find doctors you trust and keep your appointments — look for doctors who believe you, listen to you, and don’t jump straight to prescribing if you don’t actually need a prescription.
As a coach, I can help you identify different modalities to try based on what’s coming up for you as well. But here are two professionals I recommend adding to your support system that I want to highlight because they’ve been instrumental in my own healing journey.
The benefits of coaching are enormous. It’s a life changing process. I’ve officially worked with a total of 4 in my own healing.
Coaching helps you build self awareness, see things in different ways, and take action toward behaviors and things that are fulfilling to you.
I’d love to be your coach, but I also understand that a great fit is top priority. So here are some options for you:
Learn more about coaching with me here.
Learn more about other trauma informed coaches I know and highly recommend by reading: My Favorite Trauma Informed Coaches (Coming Soon).
This is especially important if you’re experiencing physical symptoms and ailments that stem from chronic stress or trauma or that you suspect do. If you have an ailment that doctors are having a hard time diagnosing and it’s been a while since you started down that rabbit hole, adding an FDN to the mix won’t hurt anything, but it could help resolve your mystery symptoms. You can’t really lose here, in my opinion.
That’s because functional diagnostic nutrition is all about using food as medicine, eliminating consumption of what causes disease, healing the gut, and balancing hormones — all areas that can be thrown out of balance by trauma and chronic stress.
The focus is really finding the cause of underlying disease and treating that holistically and naturally rather than treating symptoms.
It’s not a quick fix, but it’s the best one I’ve personally ever invested in. It created a harmony within my body that I didn’t realize I could ever get back. However, I did combine it with trauma-informed coaching to work on the emotional side of healing to make it easier to integrate nutritional changes into my life. It may have gone slower without that emotional processing, which in my case, was around letting go of nostalgia and habits that weren't working for me. I still have a lot of work to do around emotional eating, however.
If you’re interested in feeling out the FDN I work with, check out Samantha Lander at See Fit.
Cool fact — back before I was a coach, I was a podcaster, and I actually met Sam through the podcast.
You might like this interview I did with her: Optimizing Health the the Gut, Your Second Brain
For this one, I decided to become a trauma-informed certified coach. I was at a point in my healing that it was time to give back and help you overcome the effects of trauma and chronic stress. However, that’s not the route you have to necessarily take, of course.
Other ways to get informed about how trauma effects you include:
Take a course on trauma and its effects. (I have one that I’m putting out this year. I’ll let you know when it’s live!)
If you have a trauma-informed therapist or coach, ask them questions.
Read books like (I don’t make money from these links, btw):
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Mate, M.D.
You can choose to follow a few credible sources on social media for trauma education. But try not to over do it. Too many social media experts can create overwhelm and add to your scrolling habit, which can become a form of numbing or avoiding your thoughts or emotions.
Learning to trust yourself again after trauma and chronic stress is typically part of the healing process. This is true for myself and my clients. This isn’t because becoming traumatized was your fault — far from it. It’s because depending on the type of trauma you’ve experienced, your body, mind, and spirit starts acting in ways that you may not recognize in an attempt to protect you. If you don’t recognize or realize what’s going on, it may make you feel like you’re “crazy” or disoriented. Also, if you have a history of emotional abuse, the gaslighting and manipulation you’ve been through can also cause disorientation and make you severely doubt yourself.
Part of rebuilding trust in yourself involves reconnecting to your mind, body, and spirit. You can start doing this by processing your emotions fully and noticing physical sensations in your body. Then, you can choose to take action based on what you observed. The more experiences you have like this where you listened to yourself and prove that you knew what you needed, the more you will trust yourself again over time.
Emotions are inextricably linked to your body. They originate there, from your heart, gut, and then your mind may want to chime in with thoughts. The ultimate goal is to be able to pause and observe your emotions before reacting. This enables you to eventually be able to balance them and regulate your reactions to them. By observing your emotions, you can let them be what they are without attachment to an outcome and start to process them. Without attachment, you can think about what lesson or guidance the emotion is bringing you, why you feel the way you do, what it actually feels like, and how you want to respond. Then, the emotion can pass through you and be released because you’re not suppressing it. That means it doesn’t get stuck in your body causing all kinds of ailments. Learning how to feel and release your emotions is a powerful part of healing trauma and breaking trauma cycles. On the other hand, if you refuse to experience your emotions, you’re likely stuffing them down or ignoring them. This causes them to keep flaring until you have to pay them attention and the outcome is typically even harder to deal with than observing, feeling, and releasing them in the first place.
To process your emotions, you may have to fight the urge to become overly busy, engage in risky behavior, or self medicate to numb your emotions.
Remember, even though every emotion isn't pleasant, they all have a purpose to serve your highest interest.
Exercise:
To get started on processing your emotions, follow these instructions every time you feel a strong emotion that you have the urge to ignore, numb, or suppress:
Pause.
Take at least 10 minutes to answer these questions:
What are you feeling? Try to name the emotion or emotions.
Where in your body do you feel it/them?
What’s happening there? Describe the physical sensation. (More on that below).
What’s the emotion trying to tell you?
What else?
What have you learned about yourself from it?
What do you want to do with this information?
Everything you feel in your body can be viewed simply as information.
It’s always trying to communicate with you.
It’s trying to protect you.
It’s trying to keep you alive.
Listening to your body tells your inner self that you’re there for yourself. When you’re able to notice what’s going on and give it attention, you’re refusing to abandon yourself, which is healing. When you force your body to push through something it doesn’t want to do or doesn’t have the capacity for, either because you didn’t know your body was saying no or because you ignored it, you could be deepening an old abandonment wound and reinforcing to your internal self that you can’t trust yourself.
Your body will keep escalating certain sensations and feelings if you don’t listen the first (or second, or third) time. The more you ignore your body, the louder it will get until you hear it.
Do a Body Scan
One way to get in the habit of noticing your physical sensations, especially if you’re used to ignoring them, is to start doing a body scan as part of your morning routine. And as a result of what you learn during the body scan, you take an action to give your body what it needs.
TRIGGER WARNING: If you’ve been through physical trauma and connecting with your body in a body scan brings up too many big emotions and feels too overwhelming, you can try to start gently reconnecting through movement like yoga or walking. Take the relationship with your body as slowly as you need to.
Exercise:
When you wake in the morning, take 5 to 10 seconds on each step:
Begin by taking a full breath in and a long breath out.
Now bring awareness to the top of your body, your head, face, neck, shoulders.
Notice any sensations, movements, and/or any places of holding.
Now move down to the arms and the hands.
Sense the back of the body, the front of the body.
Sensing yourself lying down.
Feel the contact of your body with the bed or the surface you’re resting on.
Now sense your upper legs, your lower legs, and the feet.
Notice if there are any particular places that call out for attention.
Places where sensations feel most vibrant or dynamic.
Scan to see if there are places where there is a lack of sensation or only very faint sensations.
Now sense the whole body, breathing.
You are one complete organism.
Finish with a full deep breath in;
and a long breath out.
Once you’ve done the scan, what action will you take to answer what your body is asking for?
Prioritize answering your body.
Do this regularly. At best, you’ll may have less physical pain. At minimum, you’ll eventually notice that you start to trust yourself more. Yes, trust. That’s huge.
Once you learn to listen to your body, it becomes easier to know when you need to rest. Rest is a requirement for productivity and health. Rest doesn’t mean you’re lazy. In fact, it’s essential to productivity.
Rest and relaxation is where the trendy image of self care can come in — the bubble bath, the massages, the face masks, the manis and pedis. But resting and relaxing doesn’t have to be that at all.
Perhaps resting means taking a break from social media or news that’s re-traumatizing you; leaving systems or work places where you can’t be yourself (easier said than done, I know); or allowing yourself to sit with your emotions instead of staying busy, for example.
It’s perfectly okay to clear your schedule when you need to clear your schedule, even if you feel pressure not to. There are a lot of societal and social pressures to go, go, go, but it’s not working. It’s not working because the busier we keep ourselves, the more we suppress other basic human needs. And suppression actually makes things worse.
Your number one tool in being able to prioritize rest and relaxation is boundaries. You must be able to set and maintain boundaries so you have the time to rest. You have to be able to say no to any non-essential thing that comes up when you need rest.
And of course, weigh your priorities and values in your decision making process too.
For example, if adventure is your top core value, don’t pass up a once-in-a-lifetime vacation if you know you’ll spend more energy regretting it later.
But then if you keep your boundaries and prioritize rest and relaxation when you really want and need to at other times, it’ll balance out. It’s okay to choose sleep over scrolling or decompressing at home rather than caving to pressure from your mom to go to your 3rd cousin once removed’s wedding even though you haven’t seen her in ten years.
Your health and wellbeing is more important than the conflict that may arise from saying no to someone who’s used to you saying yes. If they truly care for you, they’ll adapt. And when you’re well rested and more relaxed, you’ll naturally be able to adapt and care for your connection with others as well.
Boundaries aren’t about being selfish. They’re about loving yourself, which enables you to more deeply love others, despite what they’re able to give.
Another major part of rest that we oftentimes overlook and sacrifice for our modern grind culture is sleep.
Try to get plenty of sleep. Here are some boundaries you can set to help with that:
Stick to a normal sleep schedule every day of the week, ideally between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am.
Stop looking at your phone well before it’s time to go to sleep so the blue light won’t interrupt your sleep cycle.
Put your phone on Do Not Disturb so notifications don’t wake you up.
Take the TV out of your bedroom. (I haven’t done this yet…)
If you’re one to wake up and your brain starts going a million miles a minute — like, I see you person I might have offended in 8th grade and I’m sorry, but why am I thinking about you now and omg, my deadline at work is coming up, and did a I feed the cat…
Literally integrating items 1-8 in the list into your life will help with that. Good quality sleep will come as a natural side effect of calming your nervous system and healing your imbalances caused by chronic stress and trauma.
If you’re a new parent, all I can say is, do your best. I know sleep can be difficult to come by. Just know that you’ll eventually get back to sleeping.
Note: When you are sleep deprived, it can be easy to slip into old habits that may not be the most healthy. For example, this could involve anything from what you’re eating to how you respond to triggers from loved ones. It may even be harder to recognize triggers.
Give yourself grace and go easy on yourself when you’re sleep deprived. It’s okay to be who you are, where you are.
The ultimate goal here is to eventually be able to control your thoughts. Your thoughts aren’t magical things that are all knowing and all truthful. They are products of your brain — that is, body. They will run on autopilot if allowed. But you have the power to put intention into guiding them and directing them onto a course that helps rather than hinders your wellbeing.
To start having a different relationship to your thoughts, realize that:
Not all thoughts you have are credible.
Not all thoughts you have are important.
Not all thoughts you have are representative of who you are.
Some thoughts are important and can be acted on.
How can you tell if the thought you’re having is truly something you want to act on? Here’s an exercise you can do over and over to retrain your thoughts.
Exercise:
Run your thoughts through two filters:
Does your thought align with your core values as a person? If yes, that’s a good indicator you can act and it will be in alignment with your true self, not somebody else’s expectations.
Is it loving? If yes, then it’s likely important.
If the answer to the above two questions is no, then simply notice the thought without judgement and move on. If it’s fear-based or beating you up, you can pause, observe it, appreciate the part of you that wants to protect you (because behind that is actually a love for self), and then either choose to let it go or reframe it into a more obviously loving thought.
This takes conscious intention and effort at first, but over time will help rewire your brain.
A traumatic event creates trauma in our minds, bodies, and spirits. That trauma expresses itself in the form of stuck energy.
For example, stuck energy can look like fragmented memories that could be scary but don’t always make sense or no memories at all. These memories can be contained in all of your muscles, organs, and senses and sensory reactions, even if you don’t see them visually. And, they impact behavior, oftentimes keeping you stuck in loops of behavior or repeating patterns that you wish to move on from.
All that to say is that one of the major components of healing trauma, whether it’s in the mind, body, or spirit, is movement.
Exercise and stretching, at its very core, is movement of your body.
So, not only does exercise and stretching offer benefits (source), such as:
Physical strength
Sharp thinking
Sharp judgement
Better sleep
Weight management
Lower risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers
But, exercise and stretching also offers an outlet for nervous or traumatic energy to be released. This not only reduces anxiety, but it helps decrease the severity of the traumatic imprint. (I’ve learned this from experience at different points in my lifetime and observing that the traumatic imprint on my body was less severe in time periods when I was highly active.)
To understand how, let’s look at the traditional explanation for fight or flight:
In the olden days, when we were hunters and gatherers (arguably, we still are), we needed to be able to run from a tiger or bear. So our bodies used instinct to flood our system with a cocktail of hormones and stress chemicals while at the same time decreasing blood flow to non-essential systems, like logic and digestion. This enabled us to act quickly and escape. Once we arrived at safety, our body recognized that the threat was gone and all systems came back online. The stress hormones dissipated and equilibrium was restored in a short time. The movement and then the escape let our bodies know we were safe.
In our modern world where we’re not moving away from the threats that bombard us, our bodies don't know when to stop sending the stress response. And even if we do move away from a threat or perceived threat, if it immediately comes back, our body hasn’t had enough time to recover and goes back into fight or flight on top of a body already washed in stress hormones. Over time, this creates a lot of strain on our bodies and disease.
So, in addition to managing the amount of threats that come into your world (in all the various ways we’ve discussed throughout this article), you must exercise (move your body in some way) to release that energy created by the initial fight or flight response.
Essentially, indicate to your body that you escaped the apex predator — that email that’s sending you into fight or flight or that toxic interaction with your in laws, for example.
Personally, after the school shooting in Nashville, I didn’t force myself to eat if I wasn’t hungry because the food wouldn’t have been digested easily. I also went to a rally, chanted, and raised signs. Then, I walked until I felt myself start to settle.
When I was younger and left everything I had and everyone I loved behind while fleeing an abusive situation (which is a story for another day), I joined a marching band as part of the color guard. I’m sure that moving my body in practice and performance saved me from having physical ailments as a result of struck trauma. It wasn’t until later, during the pandemic, that my sedentary lifestyle combined with trauma and chronic stress really wreaked havoc on my health. So remember, move that energy out.
Exercise:
Let’s do a quick brainstorm. What other outlets besides exercise can you think of to release nervous energy?
The self care items in this checklist are all ways you can support your natural healing abilities and let the innate wisdom of your body do its magic.
Once you take the first step, you can slowly but surely work new self care items into your daily, weekly, and monthly routine. Eventually, these practices will become habits. Once they’ve been habits for a while, they’ll become a lifestyle.
Caring for yourself after trauma can seem like a full-time job, but my best advice is to enjoy the journey. Yes, that sounds cliche, but slow and steady wins the race. Because you won’t get instant gratification, finding ways to enjoy the journey helps you be patient with yourself and stay motivated to make lasting, lifelong change.
To give you an idea, it has taken me about two years to integrate all the practices above into my lifestyle while still trying to be a great mom, wife, friend, and entrepreneur.
Grace and compassion for yourself will be two of your most important tools when making change.
That’s because once you’re at the routine or lifestyle level, does that mean an old habit or craving or coping mechanism won’t pop up at times? No. And when they do, you’ll win some and you’ll lose some.
Simply give yourself grace when you make a mistake and make a different choice next time. I’m not perfect and have to do this quite a bit, honestly. Mistakes are learning opportunities, not failures though. Regardless…
Living a trauma-informed lifestyle full of ways to regulate your nervous system and support your body, mind, and spirit in reducing the load so you can naturally heal will improve the quality of your life tenfold.
Questions or Comments?
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions in the comments, or you can schedule a free consultation.
Related Posts
Hey there!
I’m Brandi Fleck, TICC. I’m a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. All genders, sexualities, and races are welcome here. I primarily serve clients via one-on-one coaching and self-paced trauma education.
Find More on the Blog
Recent Posts