Trauma Recovery Starts Here: Back to the Basics

No trending trauma hacks—just simple, grounding practices that lay the foundation for nervous system healing

Photo by Vlada Karpovich on Pexels

Aloha Lovelies,

I feel so much better after the string of panic attacks that started after my bathroom flooded six weeks ago. I haven’t had a new one for a few weeks, and the attacks have decreased in length and intensity. The constant fear has dissipated, and I feel like my usual self again.

My go-to resource for trauma healing, Irene Lyon, MSC, says anxiety is rooted in nervous system dysregulation—it’s in your biology, not exclusively in your mind. Anxiety is a stuck fight-or-flight charge, an unresolved sympathetic survival response. Panic attacks can also be the release of stored survival stress.

This may not be the prevailing psychotherapeutic view of anxiety, but it makes sense to me. Learning this made me realize I need to return to the foundational practices I’ve learned for nervous system healing. As someone who has trouble with consistency, I had gradually let them fall away.

Let’s take a moment to look at how anxiety can be rooted in trauma, even if you don’t recall a traumatic experience from childhood. Then I’ll share the three nervous system regulation practices I’m using daily. I also want to tell you why I’m not using popular online bio-hacks (there are many) at this stage of my trauma healing.

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Pre-verbal Trauma

Many different types of early trauma can occur that you may or may not remember, especially since they can happen pre-verbally.

For example,

• Trauma can occur in utero. If a mother has too much of the stress hormone cortisol running through her system, it can impact the unborn child.

• Birth trauma is not uncommon. The umbilical cord can be cut too soon, removing the child prematurely from its sustenance. Or there can be a long and complicated birth process.

• Babies don’t know how to regulate their nervous systems. They must learn this ability from their primary caregiver. If your parents suffered from trauma, they may have been unable to teach you how to regulate your nervous system. Instead, you learned their anxious ways and lived in a state of dysregulation.

Accidents, physical and verbal abuse, and medical procedures at an early age can all lead to trauma. The list of possible trauma causes is endless.

So, you may find yourself an anxious adult, yet be unaware of the trauma that precipitated your nervous state.

Or, like me, you may be well aware of your traumas but have tried to push them into the background. For the better part of my life, I put on a confident face, hid my fears and anxieties (as much as I could), and became a workaholic.

Learning about the connection between trauma, anxiety, and panic attacks has inspired me to return to nervous system healing, beginning with the basics.

3 Foundational Practices for Regulating Your Nervous System

I learned the following practices from nervous system and trauma expert Irene Lyon, MSC, and highly recommend her courses. These foundational practices won’t heal your trauma on their own. But they’ll help gradually regulate your nervous system so trauma healing can begin in a healthy, titrated (small doses) way.

1. Follow Your Biological Impulses

As infants and young children, we counted on our primary caregivers to attune to and respond to our biological needs. They fed us when we were hungry, changed our wet diapers, and wrapped us in a blanket when we were cold.

How do you attune to and respond to your biological needs as an adult?

I tend to override my biological impulses. They can wait five minutes, ten minutes, or until it feels urgent.

Since the advent of my panic attacks, I’ve gotten back on track with listening to and responding promptly to my biological impulses—all of them.

Listening to and responding to our biological impulses is a way to pause and reset. But equally important, it cultivates the ability to listen to what your system wants, whether it’s to get up and move or lie down and rest. It fine-tunes the skill to listen to even more subtle cues of the body, which can be essential for releasing stored traumatic stress in a titrated way.

This isn’t an emergency hack that we use to reduce stress, anxiety, or trauma. Responding to our biological urges needs to become a default part of our daily routine.

2. Utilize Your External Resources

An external resource is anything that soothes and settles your system, helping you connect to the present moment. It can be used daily and whenever you begin to feel yourself slipping out of regulation into anxiety, fear, or trauma.

My resources include:

• Listening to a spiritual teaching

• Journaling

• Reaching out to a friend

• Walking in nature

• Coloring in adult coloring books

An external resource could involve hugging a body pillow, holding a stuffed animal, or enjoying the warmth of a hot water bottle. It could mean going to a place where you feel safe and at peace—a room in your home or your favorite park. It could be listening to music, creating art, or crocheting.

External resources typically involve an action or movement rather than sitting still.

Using external resources helps you stay in or return to a regulated state. Ideally, they are activities you engage in regularly rather than hacks you only use when you’re highly activated.

3. Orienting to the Environment

Lyon says orienting means reconnecting to the world around us in real time.

I first learned how to orient to the environment from my therapist.

Whenever I began to feel nervous system activation during a session, he would prompt me to gently look around the room, rest my eyes on an object or area for a while, and then, when I felt ready, move to another, and so on, until my system resettled.

You can visually orient:

• To something near to you, such as your coffee cup on the coffee table or your hand holding a cup.

• To something further away, like a lamp sitting across the room, the corner of the opposite wall, or any object that’s sitting further away.

• To the view from a window of flowers, buildings, or the sky.

You can also practice orienting when you’re outside at a park, beach, or in your backyard. If you’d like, you can experiment with shifting from a micro to a macro orientation.

As you orient, notice whatever changes occur in your body.

In addition to visual orienting, you can orient with any of your other senses:

• Hearing

• Smelling

• Tasting

• Physical Sensation

But the key is to pause and orient throughout the day, not just when you feel anxious or on the verge of a panic attack.

For example, since I restarted the practice, I often pause and feel the sensation of my bum on the chair or my feet on the floor. When I’m driving, I enjoy the sensation of the textured part of my steering wheel cover against my hands.

About Trauma Hacks

Healing the nervous system takes time, but often we look for quick fixes. Lyon warns against using popular bio-hacks that are currently circulating on the internet. They can have adverse effects on people who have high levels of stored traumatic stress.

These trauma hacks aren’t inherently bad and may have a place in your healing program. But they need to be used in a titrated way once you have a solid foundation in nervous system fundamentals.

Examples include:

• Trauma release exercises

• Tapping

• EMDR

• Vagus nerve exercises, like toning

• Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve

• Cold plunges

• Breathwork

I know I risk angering people who have used these techniques successfully. I’m glad if they worked for you. Just be aware that they could have negative consequences for someone else.

Listening to the Wake-up Call

My initial panic attack, after the bathroom flooded, initially led to shock rather than fear. But fear arrived soon thereafter and took over my life for several weeks.

I’m not sure if everything happens for a reason. But I believe I can learn from whatever happens. The panic attacks have been a wake-up call to pay more attention to healing my lifelong trauma.

Thus, I’ve returned to the basics of the nervous system healing and am utilizing these three regulating modalities daily.

1. Following my biological impulses

2. Utilizing my resources

3. Orienting to the environment.

We all have different needs when it comes to healing trauma. I don’t know what’s right for you. However, I feel that starting afresh with the basics is exactly what I need right now.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

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Until Next Time

What a difference six weeks can make. I had moments when the intense fear felt like more than I could tolerate, but here I am. I hope what I’ve learned can be of help to others grappling with trauma and anxiety.

Thank you for reading, supporting my work, and encouraging me. I’m so grateful for your presence!

Much love and best wishes to you, always.

xo Sandra

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