Major life events can contribute to both physical and emotional imbalances due to the significant amount of stress that they produce. Working on vagal tone and neurological organization can create more resilience when you’re faced with these events, and may even help you come out stronger than before.

Dealing with the ups and downs of life can be challenging, especially if, like most people, you're already stressed and overwhelmed.

Major life events that create significant disruption in your day to day can have downstream impacts on your relationships, work-life, social life, and all-around feelings of wellbeing.

While these events can't always be avoided, there are ways to make them much more manageable. In this article, we'll discuss the big five major life events, how they impact your emotional and physical health, and what you can do to strengthen your resilience, so they don't take you down.

What Are Considered Major Life Events?

Major life events, like graduating from school or getting married, can bring with them a great deal of joy and excitement. However, in this article, we're focusing on the five major life events that are most well known for causing distress in one's emotional and physiological state[*].

These events include:

Death of a loved one
Divorce
Moving
Major illness or injury
Job loss

These events have been linked not only to emotional upheaval and trauma but also physical disease. In fact, research shows that stressful events can impact almost all disease states but are particularly harmful in[*]:

Depression
Cardiovascular disease
Infectious disease

There are a handful of reasons that these stressful life events may impact your physical and emotional health. But underlying all of them is a dysregulated stress response.

For instance, alterations in emotional regulation can directly increase feelings of depression, fear, and anxiety.

As a result of this dysregulation, many people find it more difficult to take care of their health with nutrition, sleep, and exercise, so healthy habits go out the window. Instead, unhealthy (escapism) habits often enter the scene like smoking, drinking, staying up late, and eating junk food.

From a physiological perspective, these events push your nervous system into sympathetic mode with the release of norepinephrine. This may also lead to changes in hormonal balance, with levels of hormones like cortisol, estrogen, and testosterone getting out of whack.

Taken together, a stressful event can impact almost every system in your body, including immune, endocrine, cardiovascular, and more[*].

Here are a handful of examples:

Depression

Research shows that individuals who develop depression are estimated to be between 2.5 and 9.4 times as likely to have experienced a major stressful life event prior to the first onset of depression[*].

Cardiovascular Disease

Numerous studies have shown that increased stressful life experiences are associated with the development of risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including[*]:

Increased central adiposity
Dysregulation of lipid and glucose levels
Heightened exposure to inflammation
Elevated resting blood pressure

Moreover, experiencing chronic stressors predicts both faster progression of cardiovascular disease and increased mortality from cardiovascular disease.

Infectious Disease

Due to the impact of stress on your immune system, research shows that experiencing stressful life events, especially chronic enduring events, can increase an individual's risk of developing illness in response to exposure to an infectious agent[*].

How Vagal Regulation Can Help

Life stressors are inevitable; whether large or small, you will come against some unpleasant happenings every now and then.

How you handle these events, however, is well within your control.

While many of these events can catch us off guard, understanding how to work with your nervous system to manage the emotional upheaval can make a world of difference in how you emerge from the storm. This is especially true when you're dealing with one of the big five.

Vagal regulation is another way of saying "to calm the vagus nerve." Your vagus nerve is responsible for your parasympathetic response, the nervous system response that opposes the sympathetic response.

During a stressful event, your sympathetic nervous system is activated because this ancient mechanism allows your body to shift into a "fight or flight" mode. Acute sympathetic activation is actually quite useful when you are in the presence of danger. However, all too often, life events that throw us off course activate a chronic sympathetic mode, where our mind and body cannot relax, and we are constantly primed to either "fight or flee," or if left unmanaged "freeze or fold[*]."

By working with your vagus nerve, you can tone the balance of your autonomic nervous system so that your stress response can calm down faster, and you can find your way back to equilibrium[*].

This doesn't take the stressful event away, but it helps you manage it from a place of calm and groundedness instead of a place of fear and anxiety.

How Neurological Organization Can Help

Stressful events often have a significant impact on our emotional health because, unfortunately, as a society, we are chronically stressed. Aside from the stress that the event itself brings, most people are already dealing with a handful of life stressors that go unmanaged.

When a significant event occurs, like one of the big five, it's just enough to push you right over the edge.

Neurological organization is a step that follows vagal regulation because it offers a way to rewire your anxious brain so that it works more efficiently. Stress, fear, anxiety, depression, and so on are really just symptoms of a disorganized brain.

Instead of your neurons firing in a sequence that allows you to process incoming information, in a disorganized brain, your firing sequence is chaotic and doesn't allow for optimal processing. This can look different in everyone depending on your personal traumas and history. However, almost everybody could benefit from allowing their brain to reorganize[*].

The science of neuroplasticity has shown us that your neurological pathways can adjust themselves at any age, given the appropriate input. This means that it's never too late to shift the way you process information[*].

As an example, something with an organized brain that processes events appropriately may experience a stressful situation, take in the data, feel all the feelings, and then be able to let it go or find a resolution.

In a disorganized brain, the same person may get stuck in a stressful situation, start creating loops of thoughts that feed into a negativity spiral, and end up in either a fight or flight or freeze and fold response.

Where Brain Harmony Comes In

At Brain Harmony, we've worked with thousands of people dealing with all kinds of neurological and emotional issues. What we've found is that regardless of the trigger, the first step to bringing the mind and body back into balance is vagal regulation.

By far, the most effective tool we've found for enhancing vagal regulation is the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). The SSP works by introducing calming vibrations through specifically designed music that reaches your vagus nerve and sends a signal that you are safe.

In our clinic, we've found that a staggering number of people walk around feeling unsafe and grounded. For most, they don't even realize that this way of being isn't their natural state because they've been in sympathetic mode for so long.

It's impossible to work on neurological organization if you are stuck in sympathetic activation. Until your mind and body get the message that you are safe, there is really nowhere to go.

For this reason, step one of our protocol is always working on vagal tone.

Once we've achieved vagal regulation, we begin with neurological organization. Again, the vast majority of people we work with have some levels of neurological disorganization -- it's become commonplace.

Using tools and systems that help to reorganize the brain like the iLs Focus Unit or Apollo, we work with your individual needs to bring your brain back into its natural organized state.

Major life events can trigger disorganization in the brain, but more often than not, the stress of these events simply pushes a disorganized brain over the edge. Therefore, working on vagal tone and neurological organization isn't something you should wait to do until a stressful event occurs. Rather, setting the stage for healthy processing can make all future events a lot less damaging to your physical and emotional health.

For many people, major life events like the big five leave them depleted, anxious, and depressed. At Brain Harmony, our clients have shared that when going through a stressful life event with our tools, they not only managed the event with more groundedness, but in the end they felt even stronger than before.

Moving Mayhem Success Story

Jeff and Sandra were caught entirely off guard when they learned unexpectedly that they had to move from an apartment they had spent decades in. Incredibly overwhelmed and stressed, the duo had no idea where they would go or how they would be able to organize such a thing.

At first, they weren't sure if they should start the Brain Harmony program in the middle of the move, but they were desperate for help.

We started them off with calming and grounding input daily, and after one week, they showed up on the video call absolutely elated. They were both wearing matching purple shirts with the words, "Be realistic, expect miracles," with big smiles on their faces.

Jeff laughed and smiled, with Sandra doing the "happy dance" while talking to their therapist. Sandra thanked the therapist and even cried a bit while explaining how impactful Brain Harmony has been for their marriage. With gratitude, she explained, "I was able to see and feel our new condo! It's getting real, and we are actually excited."

Jeff was taking control and getting organized, just moving from one task to the next to get things done. And Sandra expressed that he had started sharing insights in a deeply humbling way, making their bond even stronger.

At one point, Jeff stated, "the ability to get more work done dovetails nicely where we are now in our lives with the move. I read a dissertation in a few days! I've been telling everyone about you. We just wanted to thank you so much!"

Sandra and Jeff are just two of the hundreds of people who have soared through big life events with Brain Harmony. If you're going through a big life event right now, schedule a Free Consultation with us today to see how our program can help you.

Tackling “Major Life Event” Stress