Coming out of a High-Intensity Push

Coming out of a high intensity push

Sometimes, for whatever reason, it is necessary to push ourselves out of a zone of equilibrium to get something done. This kind of exertion can happen in our work or personal life, for a variety of reasons. We might need to push through fatigue to finish a project, or to help someone. This might happen in the context of a deadline, or of caregiving.

In either case, the physiological signature of this kind of high intensity push is that we over-ride our bodies' requirement for rest, that we push through it. Let’s take the example of pulling an all-nighter. In order to do this, we might rely on caffeine or some other kind of stimulant that helps us push through the night. The following day, we may notice that we feel jittery or wired, and the following night, when it is time to go to sleep, we may discover that we do not ‘feel tired’. I’m using air quotes around ‘feel tired’ because, after having pushed through fatigue, we have succeeded in altering the baseline of our autonomic physiology, and are in a more sympathetically-driven state. There's more electricity running through the body. We lay down in our bed, knowing at some level that we should be exhausted, but what we feel instead is momentum and velocity, and we cannot turn the mind off. In this state, which is a state of heightened alertness, our interoceptive experience has shifted, and instead of having access to calm and settle, as we might ordinarily, there’s another visceral experience driving. Our system has gone into a kind of over-drive. We might have this experience in our body that’s like - I’m not tired. I could do it again, bring it on, even as some wiser part of us knows I need sleep!

This following night, when it is now ok to sleep (we finished the task), we might actually find that our bodies don’t succeed in downshifting, and we have a second, and now involuntarily insomniac night. A couple nights of this, and we might make the decision to start self-medicating more intensely, either with sleep aids, or something else from the pharmacopeia, which can intensify a dys-regulated cycle.

So let’s rewind to the day after pushing through. Once we’ve pulled the all-nighter, and can return to a schedule of rest, we need to help coax the body back into a state where it can rest. Sleep is such a strange and mysterious phenomenon. Really. Sleep science teaches us that there are ten centers in the brain that keep us awake (vigilance), and only two that permit us to sleep. In order to successfully sleep, we have to quiet all ten of the centers that keep us awake (what's that noise?), and which have tremendous evolutionary significance for having kept us alive (threat detection!), while activating the two centers that allow us to rest (it's safe enough here that I can let down my guard.) And, even though these centers are in the brain, their activation/disactivation is not a cognitive, but an embodied process. Having pushed through fatigue may have flipped the switch on some of those ten centers firmly to the ON position, and now we have to turn them back off. We’ve essentially spent the previous night telling the brain and body that it doesn’t have to sleep, and the fact that we succeeded means we convinced it that this is true. Now we have to coax it back into right relationship with rest. As we’ve explained at other places in this website (see the first seventeen minutes of Turning on the Connection System), we don’t have to make any particular effort to get stressed out, but we do need to exert effort to turn on the connection and relaxation systems. In this situation, we essentially stressed ourselves out, on purpose, and now we have to bring ourselves back into relaxation. In this particular case, one of the most effective methods we’ve discovered is to actively rehydrate.

What you will notice, when you move into a sympathetic state, is that your thirst just goes away. Your body stops craving water. When you are in a ventral (connection) state, the body is thirsty. There seems to be some kind of set point that shifts when we go sympathetic, and the body moves into survival mode. Our thirst disappears. So often, when we have pushed through, if we think about it, we realize that we have stopped drinking water.

On the day that you can now rest, start hydrating intentionally. Drink, you guessed it, water. Do this initially in cup-sized increments. If you can exercise, do it as you exercise. Begin to drink four to eight ounces of water every ten or fifteen minutes. As you drink, pay attention to the way that the water feels as it comes into your body. Notice, at a sensation-level, what happens internally as you begin to feel more hydrated. Don’t drink mechanically, but in a cadence of listening to your body’s response. There isn’t a formula for how much you should drink, and we don’t recommend that you sit down with a gallon of water and just chug it all at once. Instead, take deep sips periodically for several hours. As you are going to bed, drink a big glass. Keep water with you on a bedside table throughout the night.

This simple act of rehydration can help the body make the shift back out of a sympathetically driven push. If you like, you can accompany this rehydration with a variety of relaxants.

Our team likes a product called Natural Calm (by Natural Vitality), which is a magnesium supplement (there is a well-documented relationship between magnesium deficiency and stress. )

We recommend that you, after a push, increase your consumption of Vitamin C to support your immune system, as you are at greater risk of getting sick after a high intensity push.

It can be useful to increase your consumption of probiotics (beneficial bacteria) to support digestion and the gut microbiome.

There is an art to listening to what your body needs, but when we are stressed out, and we listen to the body, what we hear is the stress talking. We hear the interoceptive (inward sensations) of stress, so it important to listen behind or through this in the direction of remembering the feeling of a body that feels relaxed. If we don’t do this, we end up feeding the stress, which can lock us into a cycle of stimulants, caffeine, sugar, salt, fat (comfort foods that address the altered blood chemistry of stress) and pushing through. This is congruent with the sympathetic death spiral, as one of our mentors calls the modern momentum in the direction of the 24/7, always-on, lifestyle. Coming down from a high-intensity push is about learning to help the body come back into a cadence that rises and falls, like everything in nature. If we don’t learn to do this, we enter the modern rhythm, which isn’t in fact a rhythm at all: it is push push push, crash. In order to not keep crashing, we have to deconstruct the momentum that keeps us turning the flywheel of stress. Consciously applying hydration is a simple and highly effective mechanism for helping us disrupt this flywheel.

For however many nights your sleep was disrupted, attend to recovery and rehydration. So if you had two nights where you didn't sleep, or sleep well, attend to rehydration and recovery for two nights. Once you've re-established sleep, after the first night, you may find yourself really tired. If you can rest during that day, slow down, take a nap, etc., that's good. Continue to downshift, gear down, slow down if possible. Continue rehydrating the following night, as well as supplementing for your immune system and digestion. This should help move you into full recovery.