Within this analogy of water, think of yourself as a water droplet.

Any stressful experience that you have had temporarily shifted some molecules of that droplet into steam or ice. If you were able to fully metabolize that stressful experience, you were able to shift those molecules back to liquid water.

To the extent that they remain vapor or ice, you are accumulating stress.

Most people are very aware of the steam they accumulate because it manifests as symptoms like muscle tension, pain, high blood pressure, irritation, anxiety, and other things that feel activated and unpleasant. We call this HOT STRESS.

Most people are unaware of the ice they are accumulating because it manifests as an absence of awareness. Numbness, feeling stuck, collapsed, shutdown, vacant, dissociated, or indifferent. We call this COLD STRESS.

Over time, if we accumulate HOT and COLD STRESS that we cannot metabolize, the center of gravity of our nervous systems moves in these directions until it changes the baseline of how we feel.

We experience these shifts in baseline AUTONOMIC TEMPERATURE as existential. If we find ourselves living in a body where we have accumulated HOT STRESS we start to think of ourselves as anxious or angry people. If we find ourselves living in a body where we have accumulated COLD STRESS we start to think of ourselves as depressed or withdrawn.

Although these shifts become psychological, their deepest roots are physiological– meaning in the autonomic nervous system settings.

If we are going to work with this layer of our nervous system, we need to understand several concepts.