Working With the Nervous System: Coping State and Growth State

Think of a time you were extremely activated — like Level 11 stressed, with heavy breathing, heart racing, and skin flushed. Would that have been a good time to have a difficult conversation with your boss about some tough feedback, or with your partner about something that's upset them?

Of course not. When we're highly activated, we're not in the best state to be reflective, open, or curious. Being able to recognize our emotional state helps us meet our own needs and better support our teenagers. When I share this with teenagers, I use the language Coping State / Growth State:

When our nervous system is calm, we are in a position to grow.

When our nervous system is activated, we are in a position to cope.

Being able to recognize our emotional state helps us meet our own needs and better support our teenagers.

Coping State

When we’re highly activated, we can’t access our full range of thought or insight. This is when we turn to self-soothing behaviors — we cope.

When your teen is in distress, their primal brain takes over. The sympathetic system, which controls the “fight or flight” response, is wired to keep them safe from harm. This part of our brain kept early humans alive — it alerted us to danger and prepared us to run away or fight. And when this part of our brain is engaged, the parasympathetic system cannot be.

The parasympathetic system is responsible for “rest and digest” functions — when we are in a state of rest, we can digest food, fall asleep, and our heart rate lowers. And, we can access our frontal lobes, the part of our brain that processes information to determine if there is actually a threat.

When your teen is highly emotionally activated, they literally cannot access the thinking and analyzing part of their brain.

Soothing our system

Our requirement for basic needs to be met before we can access advanced capacity is a widely known principle. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — we can’t attend to our “higher level” needs like self-actualization if we are not fed, warm, and safe.

Similarly, your teen needs their system to be relaxed and open to begin processing, have a productive conversation, or take on a new perspective. Different things will work for different people — some enjoy making art, sprinting, taking a cold shower, a hot bath, punching a pillow, ripping up a piece of paper, etc. Your teen will discover what their body and system need to feel nurtured, expressed, held, and safe.

My personal favorite practices for soothing my sympathetic system: dancing, hugging a tree, smelling essential oil, and breathing into my belly — something sensory, something active, or something centering.

Moving beyond coping

Sometimes your teen is at level 10 emotional activation. In that state, they can’t unwind a trigger or process their experience because their body is in overdrive. That’s when they need the tools for nervous-system regulation.

That said, when I first started getting help for self-harm, my therapist was primarily focused on helping me cope. She asked me to keep a journal of when I cut, and declared a week a success if there were fewer instances than the previous.

She gave me coping skills: I could squeeze an orange, or draw on myself with a red marker. And while those tips can be helpful, they didn’t help me get to the root of anything.

Too often, treatment approaches aim on getting rid of problem behaviors by designing alternative behavioral strategies, without excavating and unraveling what beliefs and needs are behind the problem behaviors.

Growth state

When our nervous system is calm, we are in a better position to engage, process, and reflect. In a growth state, your child is more reachable and present. They can have a conversation, be more introspective about their behavior, and move through challenges.

Safety and security are prerequisites for growth.

I needed a treatment strategy that went beyond the moments of acute anguish and urges. I needed to understand why these urges kept coming, instead of just pushing them off. I needed a treatment strategy that helped me move beyond coping, into growing.

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