Stuck in Survival Mode at Work? Make Friends with Your Nervous System
Posted on March 18, 2022 by Candice Reffe, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
The workplace can provoke a survival response more at home in the wild than the office. How do you right-size reality and your response to it?
The 21st-century workplace is not the savannah of our hominid ancestors, yet work can provoke a survival response that would be more at home in the wild than the office (remote or otherwise). Is your instinct to run at the speed of a gazelle from a hostile boss? To confront a direct report who criticizes you behind your back—or do you flop on the ground like an ostrich and pretend to be a rock?
THE FIRST QUESTION our nervous system asks when encountering a situation is: Am I safe? That isn’t a cognitive question, says Deb Dana, clinician, and author of Befriending the Nervous System, it’s a biological one. Tuned to survival, our nervous system doesn’t make moral judgments, Dana says. Our reactions to “cues of danger” don’t make us a good or bad person—our nervous system is just trying to keep us safe.
When cues of danger outweigh those of safety in a work environment, it can feel as if your life is at stake. But despite the reaction that hostile boss calls out, she isn’t a lion—so how do you right-size reality and your response to it?
THE FIRST STEP: get to know your nervous system. Our autonomic responses begin below conscious awareness. When we start to pay attention, our awareness increases—we’re more able to calm our system and shift how we react.
Here’s the exercise Dana begins with. My coaching clients have found it a useful starting place; I hope you do too.
• Divide a piece of paper in two columns.
• On one side write Cues of safety. On the other side: Cues of danger.
• If these words don’t resonate, Dana advises, find a pair that does (her examples: connection/disconnection, welcome/warning).
• Jot down one cue of safety and one cue of danger for each of three domains:
1. Inside your body. One client feels her throat tighten when she feels threatened; another openness in the chest when they feel safe. What do you sense in your body?
2. Outside your body in the environment around you? Start with the room you’re in and expand out. (These days the gas pump can invoke a sense of danger, despite Ukraine’s geographic distance).
3. In-between yourself and another—in relationship?
When we feel safe, we want to draw closer, to connect. When we don’t, our nervous system mobilizes to fight back, to run—or it shuts down, collapses. Each of us tends to favor one of these responses. There’s nothing wrong or right about any of them—our tendencies are simply ours, to get to know. When we “befriend” our nervous system,” says Dana, we begin to feel “safe enough to take the risk of living”—a gazelle grazing with fellow creatures at the office, an ostrich who no longer needs to camouflage who she is.
Candice Reffe, a former C-Suite exec, is an executive and life coach who specializes in transition and leadership development. Her award-winning book of poems, Live from the Mood Board, explores the world of work.
