Trauma is an emotional response to an extremely distressing event such an accident, natural disaster, personal assault, or childhood sexual abuse. Ongoing life situations like chronic homelessness and hunger or childhood neglect can also cause trauma. Trauma is not tied to specific events or situations, but your response to them.
Trauma can cast a long shadow over your life. It can shatter your sense of security, leaving you feeling helpless and vulnerable in a world that you see primarily as threatening or dangerous.
From a psychological standpoint, trauma disrupts your brain’s ability to process and integrate information. It can lead to various conditions, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. A central feature of trauma is hypervigilance, characterized by an exaggerated state of alertness and sensitivity to potential threats.
Hypervigilance is a heightened state of arousal where you are excessively scanning your environment.
A lot of energy goes into looking for perceived danger as a way to protect yourself before something bad happens. This is not just excessive worry or anxiety. If you have experienced trauma, hypervigilance is rooted in your brain’s mechanisms for survival.
For example, think about a child who has experienced chronic relational abuse and neglect. They are living in an unpredictable environment. If the parent or caregiver is struggling with their own mental health challenges or substance abuse, their behavior toward the child can be erratic. Will they be loving and supportive or will they be upset and angry? The child cannot leave. They cannot fight back.
Instead, the child is constantly scanning the environment for perceived danger. They become acutely aware of subtle changes in how the abuser is acting. It might be a change in the tone of voice or a hand gesture. It might be the look on the face. This hypervigilance can be generalized to the abuser’s mood. Again, these behaviors are not normal worry or anxiety. They are part of a person’s fight or flight reflex that allows them to survive.
But hypervigilance keeps you stuck in a fight or flight response. The hypervigilance shows up in non-threatening situations. Any situation can have a perceived threat. This can impact you in several ways.
One, it can lead to chronic stress or burnout.
It takes a lot of physical and emotional energy to be on the alert for threats in almost every situation in life. You feel fatigued or irritable. You lose your sense of joy in life.
Two, it impacts your relationships.
This irritability can impact the way you relate to others. Friends and loved ones may not understand your extreme reactions to words or actions that seem trivial or unimportant. They can become frustrated with you, which can make you more hypervigilant. They may stop spending time with you or avoid you, which can make you feel isolated.
Some simple strategies to help with your hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance happens because the emotional part of your brain senses there is a threat, and it begins to send stress hormones through your body. There are several practices that can help you return to the parts of your brain that control rational thinking and executive function.
1. Notice the sensations in your body.
Hypervigilance leads to racing thoughts about the threats you are facing. It begins to name and categorize them. Instead, notice and name what is happening in your body. I am feeling a knot in my stomach. My hands are sweating. My head is pounding. All you are doing is noticing these sensations. You are not trying to get rid of them or figure them out. This simple awareness grounds you in the present moment.
2. Name and call out your hypervigilance.
After you’ve noticed the sensations in your body, tell yourself that you are being hypervigilant right now. Giving the sensations a name, instead of getting caught up in them or trying to control them, grounds you.
3. Slow down.
You can slow down your body by taking a few deep breaths. You can help the executive part of your mind take over by slowing looking around the room and naming ten objects. Spend a few seconds just looking at the object before you move on to the next one. If you realize you’ve gotten caught up in the hypervigilant thoughts, just return to the objects in the room.
One of my goals with clients is to help them realize that their hypervigilance is a normal response to trauma. It helped them survive the trauma, but it’s not working now. On my trauma treatment specialty page, you will learn more about how counseling can help you with your trauma.