Do you feel on guard all the time – like you’re almost always scanning your environment and the people in it? Unable to relax, overly concerned, hyperaware? Do you notice an increased startle reflex or tension related to previous events and experiences? Do you feel like you keep people at arm’s length or have trouble connecting and being vulnerable with others because of previous relationships? Has a heath concern began to take up too much time in your thoughts?
If you’re nodding your head, there’s a good chance that you’ve become hypervigilant in one of these areas. A common symptom of PTSD, hypervigilance can show up following any overwhelming event. If you look at your patterns of behaviour around events, people, and within your own body, you might start to become aware of central themes that you are always scanning for…worried about… prepared for… avoiding.
We globalize and stay on high alert scanning for threat and lose the ability to differentiate between something or someone that is just novel (new) versus something that is actually a threat. Staying in active alert like this actually compromises our ability to perceive things accurately and reduces our ability to respond appropriately. What begins as a defence mechanism actually makes us more vulnerable.
This ‘scanning’ activity is in part initiated from our RAS (Reticular Activating System) that moves us not just from sleep to wake but also into levels of high alert for survival. This is why insomnia is such a common symptom with hypervigilance – the RAS is unable to come out of high alert and allow us to let down enough to sleep. Also why it’s very common for people to have symptoms of anxiety when they are just starting to relax and fall asleep. What was a previous threat, what we are currently focused on, and what is familiar, particularly if negative, is high on the radar of the RAS. We can be stuck in high alert and constantly scanning even when a real threat is not present. What results is distorted perceptions of people, heightened responses to triggers, and an overall inability to let down.
Some areas this is common in that you might notice your own patterns in…
1. Post-Trauma. Hypervigilance is common residue after trauma. The threat has passed and we might have recovered, but our nervous system is still stuck in a scanning mode to try and assess and prevent future trauma. This is an indication that we haven’t fully completed the fight or flight cycle that happens in all trauma. When stuck in high arousal like this we lose the ability to differentiate between novelty or threat, while draining our system of energy and resources and eventually impacting our mental and physical reserves. This can result in symptoms of anxiety, insomnia, adrenal fatigue, chronic pain, reduced immune capacity, increased startle reflex, and more. We need to complete those cycles of fight/flight/freeze to come back to baseline. When we do this in session with SRT we see a reduction in tension, hyperawareness, and see an increased ability to relax and feel grounded. Being stuck in high sympathetic arousal means we can’t flexibly respond to novelty or threat in the most optimal way and actually increases our chances of having a similar accident, experience, fall, or injury. SRT is recommended work for all trauma to help resolve the neurobiological responses to significant overwhelming events.
2. Relationships. Relationships often mirror or unresolved personal work. Where we see hypervigilance in relationships is in the patterns we form to protect us in new relationships and connections with others. Any intense emotional experience that is overwhelming to the nervous system can leave us feeling the need to be more aware of red flags in others so we won’t get wounded again. What then happens is the RAS gets fixated on potential red flags or any reminiscent quality of previous pain – locked in on all negative qualities or things that might overwhelm us. But again, our perception has been distorted and so what we focus on which is already magnified, gets even bigger. Soon everyone is a potential threat and every behaviour or mannerism could be a potential red flag. The level of alert and hypervigilance keeps rising.
We continue to look for any recognizable behaviours in people that were present in the one(s) that hurt us in hopes of being able to avoid emotional pain in the future. The problem is that our focus and scanning is stuck in the negative and what we are focused on, we begin to see more of – whether it’s actually there or only in our perceptions. This offers opportunity for creating layers of disconnection from people – either keeping people at arm’s length and not being able to be vulnerable or relax in our relationships (where we should most easily be able to let down) – or making short work of all new connections and exiting quickly in a simulated flight response. Our perceptions can become so distorted that everyone new is the same as the old that hurt us – even if they don’t possess the same traits – we’re waiting for them to appear.
Eventually, we paint them all with the same brush and soon everyone is the crazy, mean, spiteful, lying, cheating, hurtful, whatever that we used to know. Enter the highway to victim land. Once you’re here you’ll start to feel like “why is everyone … crazy, mean, spiteful… etc.” or even “why do I always attract crazy, mean, spiteful, etc.”. As soon as you feel this way you know that you’re stuck in some patterns and these are signs your perceptions are distorted and a reality check is needed. You can see this in new connections also – if a person talks about their past friendships, coworkers, relationships and everyone is the same in a negative way, you know that likely the person has been wounded and now is scanning and seeing the same patterns in everyone when in reality, they might only be in their perceptions.
If we got bitten by a German Shepherd, then every German Shepherd could bite us and we start to notice tension and even fear with every one we see… in fact would could feel afraid of every dog in general. We lose again, this ability to differentiate new people from the one that hurt us.
3. Health. Recovering form a serious health crisis can put us on high alert for every symptom, ache, twinge, discomfort that we can occur. The fear and overwhelm of our first encounter with a serious illness or life threatening event can make us hypervigilant not for threat on the outside, but for threat on the inside. We can feel like germaphobes, hypochondriacs, or become overly cautious with disease prevention and overly focused and over-informed on every health concern particularly the ones we have experienced before. We try and out think the concern and challenge the scanning but here again, the nervous system is overwhelmed, it’s struggling to regulate, and thoughts alone cannot ease the fear. Sometimes this can create psychosomatic responses where we experience very real symptoms but have no correlating disease. When this area goes out of balance we exist in a state of paranoia, like the others, waiting for the next piece of bad news and feeling a foreboding sense of mortality to the point where we can forget how to enjoy life and health!
All three of these areas are significant and examples of common places where we can become stuck – hypervigilant, and always on guard. It is exhausting. Even more exhausting is our inability to reason ourselves out of it. The part of the brain that works with reason is not able to compete with the deeper survival part of the brain that is keeping the nervous system on alert.
SRT can work in specific ways to help you complete fight/flight/freeze cycles and bring you back to baseline where that survival part of your brain can come out of high alert. Working with hypervigilance and these patterns neurobiologically helps the nervous system feel less overwhelmed, giving a sense that the threat is over, and the event is complete and allows it to function in a more regulated way – resolving the patterns, scanning, and symptoms that can otherwise feel crazy-making.
