the science behind why you don’t want to leave your house anymore

[00:00:00]What does it mean if you don't want to leave your house anymore? You used to love to spend time with friends, but now you self-isolate as much as possible and you can barely respond to a text. When you go through a lot of stress or trauma for a prolonged period of time, your body, your emotions, and your nervous system can start to shut down. At a certain point, you're so overloaded from all of this stress and all of the trauma that the shutdown is protective, causing you to self-isolate. And at first, that self-isolation feels relieving, quieter, and less overwhelming. But when you self-isolate for months or years, your nervous system starts to deactivate the social engagement system in your brain called your ventral vagus nerve. This nerve runs from the base of your brainstem all the way down into your stomach. This isn't your fault. This is an autonomic reaction to the amount of stress or trauma that you've been through. But after a certain point, you'll start to notice that self-isolating isn't making you feel better anymore. So, if you're sitting in your room right now wondering why you stopped leaving your house and why you stopped being social, your nervous system has been overwhelmed for long time. To heal from this, don't force yourself to go out and be social at first. It'll feel like too much and it'll feel really awful. You want to start by teaching your nervous system that it's safe again, and you can do that by doing tiny, lazy movements in bed called somatic exercises.