The self-help industry sells doing as the cure, more habits, more discipline,

more effort, and that makes sense.

Change doesn't happen unless you do something different, right?

So it comes down to what that different thing is and whether it will lead

to the change that you want or not.

I'm gonna explore five common self-help things that you might be doing already

that maybe aren't helping or are making things worse without you realizing it.

For a nervous system that's already overwhelmed, already in sympathetic

flight fights, freeze overdrive or shut down collapse, more

doing is not necessarily helpful.

More doing might be more overwhelm, more frustration, and more defeat.

Hey, I'm Justin Sunseri.

I'm a therapist and coach and the author of the Stuck Not Broken Book series.

Welcome to The Stuck Not Broken, the podcast.

Uh, this is of course not therapy or personal life advice.

This episode is also not an attack on these self-help practices universally.

Some of these were great for people who already have the capacity.

It's those who are stuck in a defensive state that I am more

concerned about when it comes to these self-help habits in this episode.

Self-Help Habit number one is forced positive affirmations or toxic positivity.

This can look like standing in front of the mirror, repeating.

I am worthy.

I am safe.

I am enough while your body is screaming the opposite.

It can look like replacing every negative thought somehow with a positive one.

It can look like gratitude journaling as like an emotional override

or conjuring positivity from the universe through your thinking.

"Positive thinking, Justin? What could be the issue with positive

thinking?" Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that it's not real.

No, just thinking even repeatedly, something positive does not make it so.

Trying to replace negative thoughts somehow with positive

one sounds absolutely exhausting and frustrating beyond belief.

And no, you can't summon positivity through universal conjuration.

That's called wishing.

Is it okay to wish for things?

Yeah, sure.

Go right ahead.

Uh, especially if it's your birthday.

If you have a wish, if you have a want, go right ahead.

Um, journal about your gratitude.

If you have gratitude to journal about, think positively.

When you have positive thoughts, tell yourself something nice when

you see yourself in the mirror, if you have something nice to say.

In other words, when it's real, yeah, do those things Go right ahead.

Otherwise, when your body's in a defensive state like flight, fight, shutdown, or

freeze, you probably lack positivity.

Nice things to say to yourself and gratitude.

This is true when you're triggered into one of these defensive

states, but I'm more focused on your baseline defensive state.

When you attempt to tell yourself the opposite- so.

Say, like saying something positive.

When you don't really feel that way, it creates a mismatch between your

thoughts and your nervous system state.

Your brain says, I'm fine and everything's gonna be okay, but

your body doesn't believe it.

In, in essence, you're lying to yourself.

You cannot trick your body into safety through changing the words in your brain.

This mismatch is not just neutral.

I, I say it's disrespectful.

You're essentially telling your body to shut up.

That's not safety, that is invalidation.

And invalidation only adds friction to the process, making things worse.

I would bet that you have received or are receiving this type of

invalidation from somebody else in your life, so the sooner you can stop

doing this to yourself, the better.

Instead of force forcing positivity practice, honest acknowledgement-

"my body feels tense right now. That makes sense given what I've been

through." That's not negativity.

That's accuracy.

And accuracy is what builds trust between you and your nervous system.

I hear from so many clients and Unstucking Academy students that.

Simply acknowledging and normalizing their experiences helps to reduce

the intensity of those experiences.

Potentially unhelpful habits, self-help habit number two

is controlled breath work.

I feel like I need to tread carefully with this one because people absolutely loved-

love their controlled breathing methods.

What is your, uh breath, control of choice.

Is it Wim Hof?

Or intense pranayama?

Holotropic breath?

Work box breathing with long holds?

Something else?

There are so many and they all carry so many promises.

So, uh, what's the problem with this, Justin?

Well controlled breathing suffers from the same essential problem

that forced positive thinking does.

It rejects your body's natural state.

Your conscious mind tells your body, I know better than you do.

You are breathing wrong.

If we were to give it- the two of these- personality.

If you just think about this for a moment, I think you'll see just how silly it is.

Do you, in your conscious thinking mind right now, do you

know how much oxygen you need?

Or do your unconscious autonomic biological processes know

better than your thinking brain?

I think the answer is obvious, personally.

Your body is in a dominant defensive state- flight fight shut down or freeze.

And your body breathes based on that state's current needs.

So I know logically we assume that if we change our breathing,

then we change our state.

And yeah, kind of.

Uh, but the dominant defensive state comes right back, doesn't it?

In this specific moment.

If you extend your exhale, it might help you settle a bit

more into stillness and calm.

In this specific moment if you breathe into your chest bigger, it might

help you increase your mobilization, but your body may not need these.

And again, you're adding friction to the process.

You're rejecting the natural state of your body and what it needs now.

I've begun guiding my clients, um, and academy students to just

notice their natural breath.

And once they do that, you know what happens?

It changes by itself in a fairly predictable way.

People with higher levels of sympathetic flight fight who breathe tightly

into their chest will eventually notice their breath going more and

more into their belly, naturally.

And people in shutdown who breathe shallow and into their belly will notice more

expansion into their chest eventually.

But they don't plan it.

These changes happen on their own once we pay attention and remain

connected to the present moment.

Habit number three is journaling about trauma or painful emotions

without the capacity for it.

People will sit down and write detailed counts of their worst

experiences or meditate on it.

"Get it all out on paper," they say.

Prompted journals that ask, what's your earliest painful memory?

Or write a letter to your former former self right now after

the traumatic incident, or write a letter to your abuser.

This looks like deep exploratory work, and maybe some people are ready for it, but

there's a good chance that they're not.

But since it looks like deep exploratory work, you might

be pushing yourself to do it.

This is memory excavation without a regulated baseline.

You're asking yourself to jump into the pool without knowing how to swim

or where the ladder is to climb out.

Writing about traumatic details activates the same neural

networks as experiencing them.

The body doesn't really distinguish between remembering and reliving.

If you don't have the ventral vagal capacity to stay anchored in the present

moment, you're not processing your potentially re-traumatizing yourself.

My previous podcast episode spends more time on this topic

of telling the trauma narrative.

So if you wanna spend more time on that in particular, just listen

to the previous podcast episode.

Journaling about painful memories and emotions mirrors the same problem with

approaches like EMDR or trauma-focused CBT when applied without sufficient

emotional regulation skills.

The method isn't inherently bad, it's the sequence that's the problem.

We need present moment grounding first.

We also need more capacity.

Ideally, before going into painful experiences.

There are a couple super easy alternatives if you'd like to start journaling or

alter your current journaling practice.

Um, just try journaling on the present moment.

What do you hear?

What do you see?

How's your body breathing?

What thoughts, uh, pass through your mind?

Is there an emotion that you have within you right now?

You can also write about difficult things, but keep it contained.

Just write less with less detail.

As you build capacity and you want to delve into details, go ahead, but listen

to what your body can handle currently.

As you're writing about the past, ensure that you're remaining

anchored to the present.

So write a little.

When you notice you have activation rising, pause or stop, recover.

And then when ready, continue, but pause or stop when you need to.

This could be a great means to build capacity over time.

Uh, over time you'll know you'll need to pause less as you successfully

recover and reregulate when you need to.

Pausing and recovering after writing a few words is way more beneficial than

forcing your way through five pages of past traumatic agony and just feeling

it all over again in the present.

The fourth potentially unhelpful self-help habit is rigid morning routines.

Listen, there's nothing wrong with routines and structure that

might be exactly what you need.

I have, I have my own little routines and structures that I like to follow.

Nothing's wrong with that.

However, I want you to ask yourself what your motivation

is for your morning routine.

Are you suppressing emotion through controlled routines?

That's okay for coping, but not helpful for actually making

change, which is kind of the entire thing behind self-help, right?

Do you really need your 6:00 AM smoothie or is that just something to focus

on instead of what really needs your attention, like stress and overwhelm?

Do you really need to gratitude journal at 6:15 AM or is it okay to look out the

window silently and admit to yourself that life kind of sucks right now?

Are you taking a cold shower for the potential health benefits question

mark or to shock your emotions temporarily out of your system?

Are you doing all of this and more because it feels right or because someone who's

popular online does the same thing?

For a regulated nervous system or one with mild dysregulation,

these routines can be grounding.

It's fine.

But for a dysregulated one, these routines are at best, a coping skill

I'd argue, and a potential source of yet another demand on a system

that simply cannot take anymore.

It's another thing to get excited about and then fail at

or feel like you're failing at.

Another performative thing that looks like actual wellness,

but is well, it's just not.

And then what happens when you don't measure up?

Or if you miss a day of the morning routine or you blend the wrong

stuff into your morning smoothie?

A shame spiral kicks in, and now the thing that was supposed to help you is

generating the exact sympathetic arousal and dorsal collapse it was probably

supposed to prevent in the first place.

These emotions like shame and regret and pressure, they aren't, they're not new.

They're already within you being masked by the morning routine, and when you miss

it, the emotions surface that have been waiting around but have been suppressed.

Again, nothing wrong with a morning routine and or any routine.

And I think their overall good idea, yes, leave the house on time to to

get for work- to get to work, and to get the, uh, kids to school.

Yes, wake up at a certain time to have enough time to get ready for the day.

Yes, have breakfast every morning.

Basic stuff, and a routine helps for that.

But within that routine, check in with your body and what it actually needs.

You might wanna start the day super productive, but if you're

sluggish, it's not gonna happen.

Maybe you need silent time and, and dim lights to wake up.

You might want to start the day nice and slow and calm, but if you wake up

with stress, that's not going to happen.

Maybe you need movement first thing in the morning instead.

You gotta listen to your body.

So, uh, be open to your morning, uh, and how it needs changing.

You might need slow and steady for a few weeks and then it changes

to more active and energized.

You don't decide it.

Your body's state does.

If this can change over time, as your nervous system becomes less stuck

and has more capacity for movements or connection or slow mindfulness,

it can also change based on the seasons and daylight savings time.

So instead of being fixed and rigid, allow some spontaneity in

between your basic morning routines.

The last self-help habit that I can think of that may be making things worse

for you is just feeling your feelings.

Yes, I, I also want you to feel your feelings, but only when you're

sufficiently connected to the present moment and are ready to, if not, you,

risk opening the floodgates and drowning.

Feeling your feelings assumes you have the ventral vagal capacity to stay present

while also experiencing your emotions.

It assumes, in other words, your window of tolerance can handle

it and maybe it just can't yet.

So you end up in the same spot as when you began.

The alternative is to practice very simple emotional balancing.

Touch the edge of the feeling and then come back to safety in the present moment.

Back and forth, like dipping your toe in the water instead

of diving into the deep end.

So instead of feeling your feelings as sensation in the body, maybe just

start with acknowledging your feelings as factual things that exist without

denying them, instead of diving into the deep end of depression and spending time

submerged in heaviness and emptiness and loneliness and numbness and so on.

Just acknowledge truthfully, I feel depressed.

And then shift your focus back to the present moment, like the sounds around

you and the view out your window.

If you could acknowledge it, then you can start going deeper into the waters

through identifying how it shows up in your body generally, and then more

specifically, and then sensations but all the while balancing with safety.

The ability to feel your feelings- to sit with it- is built progressively

through consistent short practices, not through, uh, one cathartic

explosion or release, I don't think.

What commonalities do these all share?

Each of these asks you to go beyond what you may be capable of.

My recommendation is no matter what you're doing to work on yourself, whether through

these five or going to therapy, working with a coach, chatting with a pastor,

or even joining the Unstucking Academy, you need to work within your capacity

and not push things too far or too fast.

And remember, self-help gurus are teaching you from their own capacity.

They have the capacity to think positively.

Good for them.

Although I don't typically believe it personally.

They love to control their breathing and they get something out of it.

Whatever.

They have it within them to journal about their pains.

That's fine.

They adhere to their strict morning routine for whatever

reason, and that's cool.

They feel their feelings through prolonged meditations.

Outstanding.

I am so happy for them.

I don't care if you do these things or not.

It's up to you.

I'm mostly concerned with you working within your capacity.

The other thing that these have in common is they put your

thinking brain as the expert, uh, compared to what your body needs.

Your thinking brain knows best regarding your breath or your morning

routine or whatever, when really your body might be saying, "You know,

actually we need something else."

This is something that's been coming up.

Uh, a lot within the Unstucking Academy recently, as we go through some recent,

uh, Self-regulation Simplified cohorts.

I lead students through lessons and practices that are designed to

gradually help someone to connect with safety and relieve defense.

But in a cohort, things are very templated.

Structured.

So I implore the students to listen to their capacity during

our self-regulation practices.

Even though I am leading, they need to pause when their system tells them

it's time to pause, not just during live practices in the cohorts, but

also during homework where they listen to prerecorded meditations that are

also designed to widen their capacity.

I'm actually hosting, uh, capacity Builders Live- these are like live

meditations that you can join.

It's 50 bucks and we meet for an hour-ish, and I lead you through skills

that anchor you into safety, acknowledge defense, feel that in your body, and

even help you to pendulate back and forth between safety and defense.

There's a link in the description to learn a bit more about the

Capacity Builder Live meditations.

If you're an Unstucking Academy student, you get access to every Capacity

Builder live event at no extra charge.

To wrap it up, if you're listening to this- which you are- and recognizing

yourself in any of these five habits, that's not a reason to feel shame,

especially if you like doing them.

If you could acknowledge that they're unhelpful, that's also

not a reason to feel shame.

That's just awareness.

And awareness is the first step toward doing something different, right?

Thank you so much for joining me on Stuck Not Broken.

Bye.

This, another content I create is not therapy, not intended to be therapy

or be a replacement for therapy.

Nothing in this creates or indicates a therapeutic relationship.

Please consult with your therapist or seek for one in your area if you're

experiencing mental health symptoms.

Nothing should be construed to be specific life advice.

It is for educational and entertainment purposes only.