Why Throwing Everything at Your Nervous System Can Keep You in Functional Freeze

When someone realizes they are in functional freeze or even nervous system dysregulation, the knee jerk reaction is to head straight for counseling, therapy, treatments, supplements, courses, programs, light therapy, essential oils, patches— all tangible things that will help heal the functional freeze.

Totally reasonable. Totally understandable.

With all of our Babylonian brainwashing, we can’t seem to help running to the thing we hope and believe will fix our physical problem.

But when you pause long enough to consider the fact that our bodies are energetic, you quickly see that throwing fixes and remedies at the energetic being that is now depleted will have the opposite desired effect.

Remember the movie Brave, when Merida attempts to reverse the curse she just ingested?

She’s frantically throwing in all the potions and concoctions she can think of just to get the healing she needs— with epic disastrous consequences.

The cauldron bubbles up, voices are chaotically chattering from the original spell, and eventually the whole thing, house included, explodes.

If you are throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at your nervous system, your body may respond like that.

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The First Step to Healing Functional Freeze

What I have learned as an emotion coach, and more importantly, as a woman who has been healing her own nervous system, is that there is only one thing that can begin the thaw of Functional Freeze:

Stop doing what got you there in the first place.

Understand that the speed of healing from functional freeze, or any nervous system situation, is directly tied to how gently the nervous system is treated.

When people throw too much at it or push too hard, they often prolong the freeze state rather than heal.

As a reminder, functional freeze is a chronic dorsal vagal state where someone is still functioning outwardly, but their nervous system is partially shut down from long-term stress, trauma, or over-responsibility.

The body, being incredibly resourceful, learned that slowing down and conserving energy was the safest option.

Hence, the freeze portion.

Healing is less about “fixing” something and more about teaching the nervous system that it is safe to come back online.

When someone piles on too many tools (supplements, protocols, exercises, therapies), their body can interpret that as just more pressure to perform, which ironically reinforces the freeze response.

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Why “Normal Life” Isn’t the Goal

In my coaching practice, I won’t take on clients who only use coaching as a means to get back to their “normal” life.

My philosophy is simple:

If your normal life was working so swell you wouldn’t need a coach in the first place.

You see, the nervous system heals best with predictability in the form of consistent rhythms, small daily microdoses of safety, and massive reductions of responsibility loads.

The Nervous System Thaws Like Spring

As Spring ebbs closer, I am reminded of how it mirrors the nervous system.

Take the Northeast, for example.

We just had a historic blizzard, followed by more snow on top of that.

This weekend has been a delightful 46 degrees, then high 50s, and today is a blistering 63 degrees.

Over the past few days, the once covered frozen ground turned to a semi-hard state, to more pliable ground, and now to outright mud and gloop.

Amid the gloop, little signs of green life are beginning to poke their heads out to say, “Hello!”

Those little signs of life wouldn’t come if a massive blast of heat and blow torches were applied to the snow.

The sun has to slowly warm the snow, melt it away, soften the ground, making it possible for the grass to cut through the surface.

An interesting correlation is that here in the northeast, it’s likely to snow again, making all the delightful green we see today a memory by Sunday.

Too much warmth too soon can do the same thing in the body.

What Healing From Functional Freeze Actually Looks Like

Healing from functional freeze isn't measured by productivity.

It's measured by capacity.

Being able to rest without guilt.

Saying “hard pass” to panic.

Having energy that lasts throughout your day.

And especially feeling present in your life rather than a spectator.

If you’ve been in this freeze state for years or God forbid, decades, relief can take two to three months.

But lasting change — a full nervous system stabilizing reset?

Six to twelve months.

Here’s the thing.

If you are approaching this gently, then you absolutely should feel relief within those first few months.

But…

If you haven’t felt even somewhat better, or you’ve actually gotten worse, then let me say this as kindly as I can:

You might be doing it wrong.

Chances are, you have simply been throwing all the things at your body in a desperate attempt to get healed and get on with it.

The Burdens You Were Never Meant to Carry

Many of you are in a state of Functional Freeze because you are carrying burdens that you were never meant to bear.

When you begin to live out what Jesus invited us into,

“Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

This was a passage He quoted from the ancient text in Jeremiah.

In other words, God's way of healing is tried and true — something He has been asking us to step into for millennia.

Your nervous system needs to know and believe that you are not the savior of everyone, and you are meant to be the one being carried.

Plain and simple.

You can’t rush the body into a healed state.

It needs to have a sense of safety before any sort of tools and protocol can be applied.

We don’t thaw through force.

We thaw through micro signals of safety to your nervous system.

A Gentle Place to Start

My Unfreeze Functional Freeze series is designed to do just that.

It is an email series for women who’ve been doing all the things — including throwing all the known protocols at the problem — only to still be carrying more than they were ever assigned.

If you’ve been waiting to join the series but are now ready, find the Unfreeze Series here and I will add you to the list.