I wish I could tell you nervous system regulation is the solution to all your problems. But guess what. At the end of your regulation practice, the human experience is still there.
Emotions don’t go away. Maybe you feel calmer, but your challenges are still there. You might feel even higher levels of emotional discomfort, paradoxically, you think. You’re still prone to your coping strategies and you still get triggered!
And that's exactly the point.
The role of nervous system regulation isn’t to achieve a constant state of bliss. It’s to grow our capacity to meet life’s challenges and feel the spectrum of our emotions, safely, without collapsing.
And even so, collapsing will still happen. And that’s more than ok.
So what can nervous system regulation can actually give us?
Safety to feel
We are primarily sensing, feeling beings. Thinking beings second. Our subconscious—our nervous system—decides what's safe through bodily sensing, not rational thought.
If big emotions were’t historically safe for us to feel, we learn to disconnect from them and automatically from our bodies. Our bodies become unsafe places to be. But we are emotional beings, and what we repress returns with overwhelming intensity, again and again.
So, by reconnecting to our bodies we re-establish a sense of safety that lets us feel difficult emotions incrementally. We learn to pendulate between safe and comfortable, to uncomfortable and intense—without burning out.
Compassion for our humanity
We also learn to rationalise, instead of feel. We talk about emotions, write about them, endlessly analyse them - all to avoid feeling them.
Below is a personal journal entry from before I understood nervous system work. Reading it now, I can sense the mental loop I was in and the layers of shame and judgment toward my flaws. The content of my thoughts isn't helpful, but it was my reality in that moment:
I find myself controlling, grasping, holding on, wanting reality to be in a certain way. There is fear of another mistake, another poor judgement, another poor decision. What is the issue, the fear, the problem? What can happen?
A teacher I learn from, Sara Baldwin, says: “Our state creates our story”. And with experience I know that to be true now.
I won't sell you the lie that I no longer have negative thoughts or that I can always catch my overwhelm before it snowballs into a meltdown. These things still happen.
The difference is that now I have tools to return to. A different perspective that isn't "something is wrong with me." A compassionate attitude toward my experience. And ultimately, the ability to come out of it quicker.
Knowledge of our biology
This is incredibly empowering. It puts choice back in our hands. It shows us that just as we navigate a large spectrum of emotional and life experiences, we have a variety of responses we can choose from.
It teaches us that just as we adopted overwhelm and collapse as our go-to patterns (not by choice), we can train new pathways in our brains and bodies that create different behaviors. (Our Polyvagal World by Stephen Porges is excellent for learning more.)
So yes, regulating your nervous system is important - because it creates safety. Safety creates capacity. And capacity makes space for the kind of life you want to live.
If you want to get a sense of how these concepts apply practically, I host a FREE class next week - no prior experience needed - just an open mind. Learn more here.
I love this! Thank you for writing this. Also, nervous system regulation helps us better use our brains/mind once our physiology decompresses beyond a certain point. So we need the feeling of safety but we also need an ability to think through our ongoing problems. Nervous system regulation helps us get a bit of both.