#because people who care about you shouldn't derive pleasure from your fear and anxiety.

[neverendingford]

Re tag talk - How do you practice reducing your startle response? I have a really bad startle response that I want to change but I have no idea where to even start

oooh hi how's it going? this is a fun topic because it relates to a few things so I'm gonna toss a read-more and then just kinda talk through what I know and have practiced.

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basic context: everything said here is my opinion based on stuff I've learned and personal experience which is largely trauma-based so take it with a grain of salt. I'm no expert but I do know some stuff about psychology and shit and specifically childhood reflexes (introductory reading here) and a lot of that is vaguely relevant since trauma creates a sort of fixed mindstate (hence flashbacks and inability to grow past specific things from that trauma-point) seen in children who experience trauma by things like prolonged bed-wetting and thumb sucking, as well as emotional areas such as disordered attachment styles.

the startle we're talking about though (later on reflex not the baby moro reflex) is connected to your fear response and kind of kicks off your fight or flight response (there's more than just fight or flight, personally I freeze instead but most people know fight or flight) and in my experience it's really connected to tension. Hyper-vigilance leads to being always on edge, tensed up waiting for something bad to happen. The first step to changing anything is noticing it. paying attention to it. pay attention to where you hold tension in your body, notice which muscles tense up, which direction you jump, do your hands clench? do they push away? how long does it take you to relax again afterwards, can you relax at all? basic mindfulness meditation shit like that.

personally the place I first saw and addressed that tension was when being tickled. I'm massively ticklish and so ofc I got tickled a lot as a kid. I noticed that I'm more susceptible when I tense up. the energy catches inside, builds the tension, and you can only suppress the pressure for so long before it cracks you open and you laugh. deliberately relaxing allows the energy to flow through you instead of building up inside.

now, I'm not a big religion person, not into natural healing, not into energy and auras or any of that shit, so I think about zuko from atla learning to lightningbend instead; allowing the energy to enter and redirecting it out another way.

I've got a meditation practice I do to work on drawing out tension like that when I'm too stressed out. I find any comfortable position, you can do the traditional cross-legged sit, lean against a wall, lie down on the floor, whatever works. then I just start at my toes and work on gathering up all the tension and slowly moving upward collecting tension as I go. I collect it at my chest since that's where my tension typically rests, and then I pull it from my fingers and arms, finally externalizing it by breathing it out through my mouth.

for actual practicing of relaxing through the startle process, I started working on not startling at loud sounds. I'm a big social anxiety haver and loud sounds are my most common thing I flinch at so that was an easy way to work on it. notice when you flinch, practice relaxing after you tense.

important thing to remember: you're not killing the startle. you're not tensing up and powering through it. you're relaxing and allowing the tension to flow through you. tensing up makes you brittle, fragile. instead you need to learn to relax, to bend, to allow the energy to flow out of you instead of trapping it inside a fragile glass prism. you can't always fix the fear or nervousness or whatever, but you can change how you respond to it, and that can improve even just a small but consistent piece of your life.

you will still startle especially at first, but practice regaining your balance faster. you will still flinch but work on relaxing your muscles more quickly afterwards. you might not entirely eliminate the behavior but if you can learn to regain your equilibrium sooner and sooner after you can start catching it before it happens instead of after.

your body is beauty and soul but it's also a machine made up of a thousand million moving parts and if you can get an idea of how they work, then even just by paying attention to the things your mind does you can start affecting how it behaves. It's not about rigid self control, it's about learning how to guide your body in the ways you need it to go.

#color says shit #text post #self care #trauma #fight or flight #feel free to ask about anything specific if i didn't touch on it enough #or also feel free to let me know however you feel comfortable if I my info didn't really apply to you. #I maybe assumed a bit when talking about trauma at the beginning but you didn't specify so I kept it vague. #I believe in you. it fucking sucks when your body does things against your will and you feel out of control over it. #sucks when the world drives you and pushes you and you feel like you can't control how you respond to it. #and it's hard. it sucks. but by slowing down. calming down. breathing deeply. noticing your body. notice your pulse. your breath. #by paying attention to your body you can start to recognize the patterns and you can start getting ahead of them. #It took me a very long time to learn how to anticipate situations where my stutter would be an issue but I finally did. #and so I'm able to know ahead of time when a situation will be rough. #and similarly. you start to be able to anticipate the startle.. #also I recommend basic things like if there's someone in your life who likes to scare you you can tell them to fucking stop it please. #because people who care about you shouldn't derive pleasure from your fear and anxiety. #but it if's situations where you jump at stuff. that has much more potential for you to be able to anticipate it.