Daily Tip #24: Five Minute Journaling for Little T Daily Tip #24: Little T Trauma
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VARSHA: [00:00:00] Welcome to Functional Medicine with Dr. Var. Reset your health and reclaim your life podcast. Today's daily habit has to do with little T trauma.
Has this ever happened to you? You've been sitting at your desk and suddenly your heart starts racing out of nowhere even though nothing stressful is happening at the time.
Or you wake up with tight fist and a clenched jaw, even though you had a nice dream. Maybe you constantly live with this on edge feeling and you're constantly in defense mode waiting for something bad to happen, even if you're having a good time. Here's the truth. Your body may be responding to dangers that aren't there anymore.
When we think of trauma, we often picture big events like an accident, losses, breakups, but trauma can also come in little t traumas, which are small, repeated forms of traumas of everyday moments [00:01:00] where you may feel unseen, dismissed, criticized, unheard.
You feel like you have to walk on eggshells.
And you just feel like you don't matter.
Those little T trauma moments may seem small, but over time they can add up and your body keeps score. Every stressful moment gets filed away somewhere in your muscles, your gut, your nervous system.
But here's the catch. When those stored responses never get released, they just don't fade into the background. They run like a computer program, draining your battery and your brain, your stress system stays on high alert and you pump out stress hormones because you feel like you're in constant danger.
Your brain is always trying to keep you safe, so it's looking for the danger. It's looking for the negative parts of the situation. So you may always feel like you're on defense mode.
These very patterns that once protected, you are now holding you back. Hypervigilance, may have kept you safe at one [00:02:00] point, but now it blocks you moving forward
emotional numbness may have helped you in the past, but now it could be preventing you from fully experiencing joy and connection with others. How do you break the cycle? You can teach your nervous system that it's safe again.
VARSHA: This leads me to today's daily habit challenge, which is the five minute journaling reset. Here's how it works. Set aside five minutes or more in the morning or evening, write down what you feel in that moment in your body. Don't just write your thoughts, but be aware of your sensations. Do you feel like your heart is beating a little faster? Are you feeling fatigue? Do you feel brain foggy?
Do you feel tense in your muscles? Just write it down. Next, write down one worry or frustration or stressor that you want to release. Don't edit it. Just let it flow. Then write down one to two [00:03:00] things that you are grateful for
no matter how small it is. It could be that you were grateful that you had a nice, fluffy pillow while you were sleeping, . This may seem silly to write down what you're grateful for, but this helps train your brain to start looking for things that are going well in your life.
If you can write down the frustrations and worry, you get them out of your brain and you can start to work on letting them go. So I encourage you to take that step and just write five minutes.
Why does journaling work? 'cause writing slows down the racing mind and engages your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates your emotions.
It signals safety to your nervous system, allowing cortisol to drop and your body to shift from survival mode into repair mode. And over time, journaling helps
untangle those stored files of little T traumas
so they stop running in the background. And [00:04:00] here's the beautiful part. This isn't about perfection. Even if you only journal a few sentences,
you're building a consistent practice of telling your body the danger has passed. It's safe to rest, and it's safe to thrive.
And I know these are daily habit challenges, but I challenge you to try it for seven days and if you can even go a whole month, I think that will really make a difference and will help your brain to start rewiring to to make you look for the good things about a situation and not always looking for the bad things and looking for safety.
I hope you found this helpful. Please share with someone that you think may benefit. Please follow or subscribe. Thanks for listening or watching, and have a fantastic day.
