Morganton collaborative strategist to speak at App State

For Christy Shi Day, the human nervous system has acted as a two-sided coin: first stalling her public-speaking and personal life for years and then providing the tools necessary to serve the community going forward.

On Thursday, Oct. 30, the collaborative strategist — and Morganton resident — plans to discuss nervous systems and the way they shape leading, learning, and living in daily life at the Appalachian State University’s University Forum Committee’s lecture series.

Day’s lecture will be her first of its size in more than fifteen years. Following a public-speaking hiatus due to a nervous system shutdown, she developed her knowledge of the ins and outs of the nervous system’s effects through real-life experience.

Now, she interweaves that neuroscience-based knowledge into her work.

“Through that journey,” Day said, “I started toward trying to recover my own personal health. I started realizing that when I walked into a room in a community setting and there was already heightened energy, I was stepping into a lot of activation in people’s nervous systems.”

She said that the body’s stress response can be regulated in reaction to others, meaning that communication between two people can quickly fluctuate depending on physical indicators such as speech rate and tense muscular activity.

“What happens to most of us, because we’ve never been taught to notice, is we jump into our head and we start getting argumentative or we start trying to do things — evasive tactics — to get out of the tension without really understanding what’s happening in our own reaction,” Day explained.

Day spent 10 years working in Carteret County on the coast, comparing their island communities to western North Carolina’s hollers and highlighting the similar reduction in specialized industry. In a coastal area plagued by storms and little mental health advocacy, Hurricane Florence unearthed a lot of underlying stress.

There, she worked with others in developing a four-year initiative to bring resilience training into local government and communities to combat growing suicide and overdose rates.

She said they were “trying to help people see that some of what was causing so much friction and stress — collectively and individually — was tied to nervous system dysregulation… Intellectually, they understood that they were dealing with trauma, but they didn’t have the tools to be able to work within their own nervous systems to be able to have better outcomes when they were trying to do outreach or trying to educate.”

After moving to Burke County and continuing similar work, a colleague at Appalachian State spread the word about her, earning her a nomination to speak at the lecture series.

Along with a workshop for tutors the day before, Day’s lecture will help students connect their awareness to their own needs, developing the tools needed for resilience in stressful situations through storytelling and exercises.

“There are techniques that many of us have never been taught that can allow us to discharge that stress so that it doesn’t accumulate in our bodies,” Day said. “I’m going to talk about what that looks like, why that matters, why learning all about this can help you have a life with greater connections to other people and less stress.”

One exercise, Day explained, involves pushing down on a seat as if trying to lift the body. After holding that position for 20 seconds and focusing on the sensations in the muscles, participants can relax but should continue paying attention to those same areas.

She explained that the subsequent softening experience is the parasympathetic nervous system giving the body a break. The exercise functions similar to muscle-building, but through the development of neural pathways in lieu of muscular construction.

Day plans to provide other similar exercises during her lecture, starting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30, and at the Plemmons Student Union, Parkway Ballroom (Room 420) at 263 Locust St. in Boone.