Nervous System Regulation: Why It's Not Just About Relaxing
“Why can’t I stay regulated?”
I hear from so many people feeling frustrated because they’re “doing all the things” to calm their nervous system but they’re still dealing with constant anxiety and stress.
They do their breathing exercises, go for walks, eat fairly well, try to get enough sleep… but nothing seems to be making a long term difference.
This is because there is a difference between calming yourself in the moment, and actually rewiring your nervous system.
When you are having a stressful moment and you stop and take a few deep breaths, that can help tremendously in calming your body in that moment and prevent your nervous system from escalating any further. But it won’t necessarily prevent you from having that same stress response again.
This is what I see missing from a lot of the content around nervous system regulation. There are so many tools shared to use in the moment which is definitely needed, but not as many people talk about the things that will prevent you from having those moments in the first place.
Think of your nervous system like a smoke alarm. You want to have a smoke alarm in your house, and you want it to go off when it detects smoke.
But for anyone with a dysregulated nervous system, it’s more like their smoke alarm is so sensitive that it goes off when their neighbor down the street is cooking bacon. It’s overreacting to what it perceives as a potential threat.
Doing some deep breathing exercises when you’re feeling some anxiety can turn the alarm off, like you’re waving a towel in front of it to get it some fresh air. But it doesn’t always change the dial. That smoke alarm is going to keep going off for minor things that aren’t actually threats until you change its sensitivity.
And the tools you need to truly change that sensitivity is often different than the tools you use to calm it.
To rewire your nervous system response, there are a few key components that made all the difference for me:
Understand how your nervous system works
So often we get stuck in anxiety loops because the fear of our anxiety brings up more anxiety and then the reality of our anxiety makes us feel even more anxious because we feel so out of control.
That’s exactly how I was. My anxiety just caused even more anxiety.
It wasn’t until I understood what was actually happening in my body in those moments that I stopped that anxiety loop. I know what it feels like to have a cortisol and adrenaline dump and I’m not afraid of it anymore. I’m not afraid of it because I understand what it is, why it’s happening, and that it’s going to go away. And most importantly, that it’s not going to kill me. That it’s not because my body is broken, it’s just because my nervous system is sensing a threat.
It sounds so simple, but truly understanding my own body removed an incredible amount of anxiety.
Teach your nervous system that you are safe
The nervous system will continuously keep you in a stressed state as long as it thinks you are not safe. But safety is very much about perception.
One person could walk up to a cliff, trusting the ground and trusting the people around them, and also trusting their instincts, knowing they won’t get too close or trip and so they feel perfectly safe standing next to that cliff.
Another person might be twenty feet back and still feel incredibly unsafe because they don’t trust the ground they’re on, and they’re thinking about all of the “what if’s” that could go wrong to cause them to fall off that cliff.
Same situation, but one person feels safe and the other doesn’t.
Safety is not about reality, safety is about perception. So in order to feel safe, you have to address your perception. And this isn’t always easy to do.
But here are two great places to start:
Fulfill your basic needs. Food, shelter, water, etc. And you might think, “But I have plenty of those things and they’re not being threatened, so that doesn’t apply to me.” You might have full access to those things but your nervous system doesn’t know that, it only knows whether or not those needs are being met.
For instance, if you’re intermittent fasting and skipping breakfast, your nervous system doesn’t know that you have plenty of access to food and that you’re not eating on purpose, it only knows that you’re already under threat and stressed, and now you don’t have any calories coming in either. Skipping breakfast can cause your nervous system to dump a bunch of cortisol which causes your liver, muscles, and organs to dump their stores of glycogen so you have enough energy to run or hide. This raises your blood sugar, which is also a threat to your body and it creates a stress cycle that can last all day.
Fasting is a wonderful tool for health, but not when you’re already dysregulated and your nervous system is on high alert for threats.
In order to feel safe, you must start with taking care of your most basic needs.
Become aware of your thoughts.
So much of our perception comes down to the stories we’re telling ourselves. And often we’re completely unaware of those stories. Our life experience has taught us that people are rude and don’t care about us, so we only see that reality everywhere we look.
There is a part of our brain called the Reticular Activating System that actually decides what we will pay attention to and what we won’t. It makes us notice that person who didn’t hold the door open for us walking into the store and the fact that our new friend didn’t call when they said they would.
But it won’t let us notice the people in the store that smiled at us and were friendly, or the fact that that friend called later and apologized. We hold onto the information that already fits the narrative in our own head, because that makes us feel safe and protected.
Rewriting those stories can be incredibly difficult and often requires the help of a professional to root out those deeply entrenched beliefs. But it’s absolutely possible to do.
Becoming aware of our thoughts and emotions is a major step toward finding safety. When we can understand that our thoughts and feelings are not us, but simply information, we stop judging ourselves and we break free from so much anger and shame.
Teach your nervous system that uncomfortable is okay.
One of the signs that our nervous system is dysregulated is reacting to something that is simply uncomfortable as if it is life threatening.
That’s exactly where I was.
When I first started going live on Instagram, my body reacted as if it was one of the most dangerous things I could possibly do. I even had to cut one video short and blamed “technical issues” because my body started shutting down. My heart was racing so fast and I started getting tunnel vision like I was going to pass out.
That reaction was on purpose, because my nervous system was so convinced that going live on Instagram was a threat to my survival, it needed to do what it could to stop it, which meant shutting my body down.
The reality though, was that it was not in fact a threat to my survival, it was simply uncomfortable. It’s normal to be nervous about public speaking, but my body’s reaction did not match up with that threat.
So to train my nervous system that this was not a threat, I did more of it. I starting going live once a week.
The first few times were rough. I had to have a script that I read and followed. I was a bucket of anxiety, but I kept on doing it. And the more often I did it, the easier and easier it got.
Eventually, I got to the point to where I could start a live with a vague plan of what I was going to say and not get at all nervous about it.
I showed my nervous system that uncomfortable was still safe, that this was not a threat that it needed to react that strongly to.
The key in this is that I did this intentionally. I had full control and I was, in reality, very safe. You want to start this with something easy. This is why I love using cold showers* in this way. If you still haven’t started this practice I encourage you to start! It really can be a powerful way to retrain your nervous system.
*Don’t just jump into cold water! Follow my instructions on how to start a cold shower practice effectively in THIS FREE PDF.
I know all of this is a lot! It took me many years to figure out each of these things and how to implement them in my life.
And this is exactly why I created the course Regulate + Thrive: Learn to rewire your nervous system with safety and self-care. In this course I cover all of these points, and walk you through how to do them.
You get 12 video lessons that dig deep into each of these topics plus so much more, along with worksheets to make practical application in your own life.
If you want real change, you have to lower that dial on your alarm system. These are the tools that completely changed my life and helped me to break free of that constant anxiety state.
Click below to learn more about Regulate + Thrive and whether or not it’s right for you.
