Why Is Everyone Talking About Nervous System Regulation?

When did we all start talking about nervous system regulation?

Apparently, we should all be doing it.

Regulating, resetting, calming and let’s not forget the vagus nerve too.

It was one quiet Sunday afternoon when I finally got curious enough to open up the book that has been lurking in my Audio Book library for two years – The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges.

I wanted to make sense of this research that has been hugely influential in conversations and even debates about the nervous system and our responses to safety and threat.

It was fascinating.

But it was also complicated.

I love research.  I’m fascinated by complicated ideas. I have two Master's degrees.  And yet there were moments when this book really made my head hurt.  I wondered if I really needed a medical degree to get to the bottom of it.

That's certainly not a criticism of the work.   It’s complex because humans are complex.

But sometimes we are looking for answers.  Simple ideas that help us navigate stress without the need to qualify as a neuroscientist first.

So let's make it simpler.

What Is Nervous System Regulation?

Let's start with the good stuff.

Our nervous systems have been regulating themselves for our entire lives.

We run for the bus – our heart beats faster.

We walk into sunlight – our pupils adjust.

Something startles us – our mind and body move into a state of high alert.

Heart rate, breathing, sweating, digestion, pupil size – hundreds of processes are influenced by our nervous system without us having to consciously manage them.

The autonomic nervous system helps to regulate many of the processes we don’t consciously control.   Amongst its many activities are two important jobs:

• Mobilising us when something requires action.
• And helping us settle when that action is no longer required.

We don’t need to analyse every nerve and neurotransmitter to understand the principle.

The gist is a lot simpler:

1. Something happens.
2. The brain and body assess what's going on.
3. If action is needed, our state changes.

It’s down to our nervous system to increase our heart rate, alter our breathing, tense our muscles and generally get us into that state of high alert so we’re ready to respond.

This isn’t evidence of something going wrong. 

It's evidence of our system working as it was designed to work.

So Why Does Everyone Suddenly Need to Regulate It?

This is where I think some of the current conversations can be confusing.

The language around nervous system regulation can imply that calm is our correct setting.  And when we’re not calm we're somehow "dysregulated".

But we weren't designed to be calm all the time.

Here I’d usually mention being threatened by a tiger, because for our ancestors that was a real possibility.  Luckily, I have a rather challenging relationship with a cat called George.

As long as I fulfil George’s demands within seconds of them being made, George and I coexist quite happily. But occasionally he decides that my ankles represent an unacceptable threat to national security.

When we first acquired George, he jumped on my head in the middle of the night. 

These are not moments that call for beautifully calm nervous systems.   When I notice this small furry predator heading in my direction I need to react.

I may not see George as a tiger, but he's certainly aspiring to big cat status. And while my nervous system isn't literally mistaking him for one, an unexpected attack from George is quite capable of producing a very real stress response.

Nervous System Activation isn't a failure of regulation.

It's the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The more interesting question is what happens five minutes later, when George has sauntered off, with his aloof tail pointing skywards, looking perfectly innocent and I'm still muttering about him in the kitchen.

Our ability to automatically ramp up in response to challenges is fundamental. We need that burst of energy and focus.

But what happens when the challenge has passed?

Ideally, as the threat passes, our system begins to adjust again.

Our heart rate can slow. Muscle tension can ease. Attention can broaden. Resources that were temporarily prioritised for dealing with the challenge can shift again.

We don't necessarily move into a perfectly calm state. We simply begin to move out of the state that was needed to deal with the threat.

And this is the beauty of nervous system regulation. It's not about being in one state or another. It's about our ability to move between different states depending on what life requires from us.

That's a useful way to think about nervous system regulation.

Does Everyone Need to Learn to Regulate Their Nervous System?

So, if all of this happens automatically, why would we need to learn to regulate our nervous system?

The simple answer is that sometimes a difficult situation ends, but our stress response doesn't immediately end with it.

The original stressor has gone.

But mentally, we may still be living in it.

Maybe the difficult meeting finished at 11am, but you're still replaying it at 8pm.

Maybe you finally sit down after a busy day, but can't quite settle.

Maybe an email from your manager arrives saying:  "Can we have a quick chat tomorrow?" and within minutes your mind has whipped through six possible explanations, four imaginary conversations and one entirely hypothetical redundancy.

Our stress response is influenced by the information the brain is working with, and what isn't always obvious is that some of those triggers are coming from our own thoughts.

How Can Our Thoughts Affect the Nervous System?

This is where understanding stress and nervous system regulation becomes interesting.

In Why Thoughts Can Trigger the Stress Response, I explored something we tend to underestimate.

We don't have to be experiencing a difficult situation in the outside world to have a physical reaction to it.

We can remember yesterday.

We can anticipate tomorrow.

We can replay a conversation.

We can imagine an outcome that hasn't happened.

And those thoughts can carry enough meaning and emotion to influence our physical response, including activating our nervous system and putting us on alert.

Is That What People Mean by a "Dysregulated Nervous System"?

"Dysregulated" has become a popular way of describing everything from feeling anxious or overwhelmed to being exhausted, irritable or unable to switch off.

Those experiences are real.

But we should be cautious about labelling every uncomfortable emotional or physiological state as evidence of a faulty nervous system. 

Sometimes we're activated because life is demanding.

Sometimes we're tired because we've been doing too much.

Sometimes our minds are trying to solve something that can't currently be solved.

And sometimes we simply haven't noticed how long we've been carrying an experience that technically ended hours, days or even weeks ago.

So perhaps the more useful question isn't:

What's wrong with my nervous system?

It's:

What's happening for me right now, and what is keeping this experience going?

That gives us a much more practical starting point.   And the next logical step:

Can We Influence What Happens Next?

Yes we can.

And it doesn’t require us to "hack" our nervous system.

There are many gentle ways we can influence our physiological and emotional state. Breathing, movement, attention, rest, social connection and mindfulness can all play a part.

But there's another important piece that can easily be overlooked.

Awareness.

When we don’t recognise that we’ve spent the last hour rehearsing tomorrow's meeting, we can't make a different choice.

If we don't notice that our shoulders have tightened while replaying yesterday's conversation, we simply experience the reaction.

Once we’re able to notice what’s happening, something changes – there’s an opportunity to interrupt the pattern.

Not suppress the thought.

Not force ourselves to calm down.

Not to tell ourselves that everything is fine.

We simply recognise that experience in the mind and body and ask ourselves if this reaction is still useful.

Nervous System Regulation Doesn't Mean Being Calm

This is the part of the current nervous system conversation that I find most useful and empowering.

Regulation isn't about achieving a permanently calm state.

Life doesn't work like that.

There will always be those difficult meetings, unexpected emails, deadlines, arguments, disappointments and periods when we genuinely need to mobilise.

And our nervous system needs to be able to respond to those things.

The opportunity is learning to recognise when that state of high alert is no longer needed.  This is the core principle of the Stress Interruption Method.

• We NOTICE what's happening.
• We learn to INTERRUPT patterns that are unnecessarily keeping the stress response going.
• We RESET, giving the mind and body an opportunity to settle.
• And through practice, we begin to REWIRE some of the patterns that previously happened automatically.

For me, that’s nervous system regulation made simple.

Not striving for a perfectly calm life. 

Not interpreting every uncomfortable feeling as there being something wrong with us.

And definitely not needing to understand an entire neuroscience textbook before we're allowed to begin.

Just becoming a little better at recognising what state we're in, what's keeping us there and when we have an opportunity to move on.

Stress is part of life. Living in it doesn't need to be.