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Show Notes

In this episode, we continue the Summer Somatic Skills series with the practice of downshifting — learning how to ease off the gas without coming to a complete stop.

We explore how busy seasons, summer energy, and the pressure to do more can leave us operating in a constant state of urgency. Rather than focusing on stopping altogether, this conversation looks at how we can find more sustainable rhythms by noticing when a slower pace is available and allowing ourselves to move into it.

Along the way, I share examples from long days in the mountains, the nervous system's response to reaching capacity, and why downshifting can sometimes be more helpful than either pushing harder or quitting entirely.

We also explore the often-overlooked moments when our bodies naturally downshift on their own — and why bringing awareness to those moments can be surprisingly restorative.

This episode is an invitation to find your pace, notice the moments when things soften, and remember that moving steadily is often more sustainable than sprinting.

Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction to the second summer somatic skill: downshifting
01:30 — Summer energy, busyness, and urgency
03:30 — Why downshifting matters during busy seasons
05:00 — Activation isn't a problem
06:30 — Long days outside and finding sustainable pace
08:00 — The gear-shift metaphor
09:30 — When we're running out of capacity
10:30 — Fight, flight, and freeze responses to overwhelm
12:00 — Creating more options than "push" or "stop"
13:30 — Downshifting as a nervous system strategy
15:00 — Breaking the habit of urgency
16:00 — Noticing natural moments of slowing down
17:30 — Why downshifts are medicine for the nervous system
18:30 — Moving in and out of activation
20:00 — The importance of embodied awareness
21:30 — Moving is winning: finding your sustainable pace
23:00 — Closing reflections + preview of next week's skill

Submit your questions for the Q&A [here]

Photos and links from this episode:
www.mindandmountain.co/podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00
Hi there, welcome back to Co-Regulation Conversations. I am out for a little walk, and it is beautiful. You might hear some kids playing baseball in the background, having a really nice little neighborhood walk, and today we're in part two of the summer somatic skills series, which are, yeah, just little snippets. I'm making short episodes this season because it is what the summer requires. We're busy, we've got a lot going on, and I want to give you little snacks that you can experiment with and take out into your life without spending quite as much time on the deep dives as we do in the winter season. So far, that's been working really well for me to keep these episodes coming, and I hope that it also helps you engage with them in a way that works for you. So, okay, somatic skills for the summer. Last week we started this series, and the first one was about having a pleasure anchor, and now this week I want to bring forward the idea of downshifting. Downshifting is a critical skill in somatics in nervous system work all the time. Little river I'm crossing. If you're watching video here, you can see where I'm walking on a little boardwalk across the river, and then back on a little boardwalk on these neighborhood trails. Really nice. Yeah, and if you're listening, maybe you get some of those audio clues about what kind of terrain I'm on. Hopefully this is working for people to engage with this material in different ways, ways that work for you. So yeah, downshifting. Okay, the simplicity of the downshift is that it is just what the name implies, and I would say that the magic of it, particularly for summer, is that if you have a lot going on, if you are in a busy season, if there is a lot that you want to do, and maybe not enough time to do it all in, or you know, this thing that happens to so many of us in the season, where we end up running from one thing to the next and trying to squeeze a lot in, in Alaska. Here we have the concept of summer mania, because there just like really is just logistically more that we want to be able to do than we actually have time and energy to make happen, so that with the combined with the reality of 24 hour daylight and the shortness of the summer season, all of that often comes together to create an environment where we are moving quick, lots to do, and can bring on this sense of urgency and anxiety for a lot of people, so the thing I love about the downshifting skill somatic strategy is that it doesn't require stopping and of course, that's not to say that you're not going to stop and take breaks throughout the summer. I hope that you do, and that is, you know, some of what we'll be touching more into in the fourth skill in this series, but in this for today I want to help us land and access the downshift skill as a way to keep going and keep doing the things that we want to do and maybe squeezing a lot in and be able to do that like high output time of life without burning out without frying our nervous systems and without getting stuck in a high activation mode I. Okay, okay, so the basics of this strategy are that we want to be able to access and notice times that are a little bit less intense, where we're able to move at a slower pace and maybe like take a little bit more of a breath, take a little pause, and those moments are kind of like gold in these seasons when we're moving fast, and there's just a lot to do. I gotta also say, while I'm here, that this is not only something that happens in the summer, maybe there are other times of the year or phases in your life where there's just a lot to do, just a lot going on, and it requires a faster pace inside our bodies, inside our nervous systems, not a problem. It's like more of a problem if we make it one, and we start to think that, like, we're supposed to be calm and blissed out and have abundant rest all the time.

Speaker 1 6:15
That might not be the way that some phases of the year go, so yeah, that's what I have in mind here with this summer somatic series, is really trying to bring some of the strategies forward that I lean on when I'm in a busy phase of work. Do you hear that squirrel? And then I just swallowed a bug. Oh my gosh, definitely having some summer mode. Okay, so the downshift. All right, so one way you can think about downshifting, if you're someone who's like spent a lot of time outside and has the experience of doing like a long day with your body in the mountains. This is something I came to realize was very helpful on long days outside when start to run low on energy or feeling like this, particularly happens for me, at least when I'm with other people who are moving at a, at a fairly good clip, and then I'm ending up trying to match my pace to theirs, and eventually that starts to, you know, if I kind of sustain a faster pace than feels good for me, then maybe at some point that's going to be less doable, and I realize that I'm kind of pushing to sustain one pace and starting to run thin on the energy for that, and we might find ourselves tempted to stop and take a break when we feel like that, when we're starting to run thin on energy, you might need a break, might be the right thing to do, and then also there might be times when it works just as well, maybe even better in some ways to continue moving, but to find a different pace, to find a downshift, and I, for me, it actually helps quite a lot to think of it as shifting gears in a car and coming into a slower pace, so that, yeah, so that I'm actually at a pace that works a little bit better for sustainability inside the body, so you might get a sense for what I'm talking about here through that little explanation. Hopefully, you do. You know that's the idea that there might be a way to keep moving forward, keep doing the things, all the things, but sometimes we might really benefit from noticing the pace that we are at and seeing if there's a different pace down a downshift, if like taking it back a notch in the pace that you're working at that you're asking of your body might might be really welcome, so there's one way, one application of this skill is just that it's the looking for times when your body could, is maybe like. Operating out of urgency or in at a pace that isn't as sustainable as it needs to be, and bringing the question forward about if we need to stop completely, and that actually, okay, that's something that can happen. There's a way that a flight response can show up in those moments. Let me tell you what I'm talking about here. If we're sustaining a pace or working harder than our body can sustain sustaining a pace that isn't right for us, if we've been pushing it or working really hard over time, then at some point we start to run out of gas to fuel that sort of effort, which, like in the body, another way to say that would be not using a car metaphor, would be that we're running out of energy or capacity inside our nervous system to sustain that level of activation, and so sometimes what happens there is this flight response, which is like, I hate this, I'm never doing this again. It's a thought pattern that is very common in these situations, and okay, I came to a kind of a swamp here. Hold on. Navigate around, yeah. It's the flight response sense of like this sucks. I'm never gonna do this again, or the stop, like I have to stop. I can't, I can't sustain this, like have to come to a stop response. There could be a version of a freeze or a fight, even like I won't do this anymore. Like, if you feel yourself kind of putting the brakes on the situation, could be a bit more of like a fight type of response.

Speaker 1 11:58
All that to say, when we start coming up against the edges of our capacity, usually one of those responses will come forward, like one of our defaults or something that the body might reach for in those moments, and then the question is, What do we do with that, because I think it is, you know, it's never - there's never one right answer. Basically, another little creek to cross, maybe you can hear the water, really pretty, I so those default responses, they really never are wrong. They often have some really useful information in them, and they might be the thing that feels right to follow in the moment, and they might also be kind of habitual, so that's one of the things we are maybe working here to build some self-awareness around and help our physiology help our body have access to more than one option in those moments when it's reaching capacity and I find that a downshift can be one of those kind of magic, helpful strategies. In those moments, we might find if the idea appears in those moments, we might find that there's a way to take it down a notch, and then that might allow for a different relationship with the process that you're in. You might not actually need to stop and take a break, and instead, what would it be like to shift to a slower pace, and maybe that's more sustainable, maybe that feels more within your capacity. So, okay, that's one of the ways I want to consider using this strategy is looking for times when we might default to an option that is stopping, or you know, freezing up, or thinking that we never want to do it again, and opening up possibilities to a different pace instead, and then the other thing, the other way that this skill is very important in the summer is in catching, in bringing into our awareness the times when we do downshift, whether it's conscious. Us an intentional something we did on purpose or whether it's just something that the body did naturally because the moment is less intense, so in the first strategy, first way we're using this, I'm talking more about things that are, you know, inside of a busy time. Do we get maybe caught in that busy, in that fast rhythm, and in a way that we don't need to? And can we maybe invite in a different pace? It's like breaking an urgency habit, which can be very much reinforced in the summer. It's also reinforced by so many of the systems we live in. Another squirrel, that one spooked me. Okay, gotta take a notice my system here as it like settles from that little squirrel surprise activation wave and I want to get back to this second application, which is bringing to conscious awareness the times when there is a downshift. This one's so good and so important, because it's like it's already happening, and there are, you know, even in the busiest seasons, even in the busiest phases of our life, it's we're almost never just like sustaining high like sprinting pace over time, right? There is almost certainly moments where things get a little bit more chill, where we are able to take a breath, able to pause. These are the moments that I'm, yeah, just wanting to encourage, you know, if we're going to try to bring this skill forward this summer, all we're needing to do then is to notice the body when it experiences a downshift. These are amazing, because this is like we're not having to cognitively make anything happen, we're just trying to be embodied enough to notice when the downshifts occur, and I'm guessing they're usually pretty pleasant. They're usually something that feels like pretty good, like there's a deeper breath, or our shoulders are able to soften a little bit, or we're able to rest back in the chair or enjoy the experience of having a slower pace to your thoughts for a while.

Speaker 1 18:07
All of that is again, that's like medicine for a nervous system, especially one that's under a lot of pressure and running at a fast pace, and the thing I want to, like, really reiterate to try to drive this home is that our nervous system is designed for movement, for change, for moving in and out of activation cycles, and so it's really powerful when we're able to inside of a busy season that's asking a lot of activation of us to catch those moments when we're actually able to downshift organically when things slowed down a little bit and the body's able to receive the information that we did slow down a little bit, but things don't, we don't need you to be moving at that sustaining that high activation place, and then when the body's able to notice that, oh, things did slow down a little bit, oh, I am like able to downshift here, and oh yeah, that does feel good. That's the nourishment that the nervous system needs to kind of gather itself up and potentially even move back into more activation later. It's the sustaining of high activation, like sprint mode, over time that wears us thin, and the thing is, we're actually rarely doing that, but we feel like. We are, because we're often not as skilled at noticing and catching these moments of downshift. We might catch the moments when we're like in a rest all the way done, but these little moments where things are less intense, gold. Okay. Really, really important. Wow. looks like they're building a jump up there. Okay, I don't know what's gonna happen with that, but that's a big jump. Okay, if you're listening to this and not watching it, there is a.. I'm looking up a hill and there's a platform being built that looks like it's maybe going to be a bike jump, but the hill is quite big, so that's probably not the kind of trail that I'm going to want to ride on, but maybe somebody will. It's always amazing what people can do on their bikes with a different kind of risk tolerance than I have. Okay, I'm not sure if that is going to tie in to this episode. Let me take a moment and see if there's anything more that wants to come through here, I Yeah, I think it just feels like I'll close off that final thought there, speaking about how important this piece of the attention work inside of somatics can be, because if we are able to notice those moments when we naturally downshift, we don't have to change anything in your lifestyle, in the pace at which you're living in your like the amount of things that you want that you're getting done during your days, but all we need to do is bring awareness to the times when there are downshift moments and embody them, notice the somatics of it, the sensations and the body experience, and that in itself can be very powerful for supporting you in a busy time, in a busy summer season, and yeah, even like very physically tangible, if you're out doing long days outside. This is one of the go-to somatic strategies that I lean on on long trips, where we need to keep going, but maybe we can get there through remembering it's like the tortoise and the hare kind of idea, or the mantra that is so often a part of ski babes and summer strong and balance training, moving is winning, meaning we don't have to go super fast necessarily, but we can get very far if we find a pace that works and is sustainable and is really something that our body wants. Okay, nice chatting with you today. I hope you enjoyed this episode, got something from it, and we'll be coming back in next week with part three of this series, where we'll talk about the somatic skills of expansion of creating more room and more capacity, all of these things that summer stretches us into. Until then, take really good care,

Unknown Speaker 24:12
you.