Nervous system regulation. Lets demystify it. These words get thrown around quite often and they can leave you scratching our head.

In a nutshell ...Nervous system regulation is the ability of the body to go from feelings of stress to saftey appropriately.

What does that mean exactly? Staying flexible is key. When in a stressful situation knowing how to react appropriately. And once its passed being able to go back to a balanced calm state. You dont want to be in rest mode when you need to run to save your life...or high altert when its time to go to bed.

Here's a hypothetical scenario.. Lets imagine, back in caveman days...a saber tooth tiger is about to eat you. Your body goes into high alert. Do you Run, Fight, or Freeze?

If you need to do something to save your life these chemicals play a role in you taking approriate action.

Luckily (in this made up scenario), an even more appealing prospect appears and the giant feline goes for that instead. So now your body is surging with a cocktial of chemicals and your nervous system is in over-drive.

Unfortunately if you arent able to let your body fully move the energy it can get trapped in your system, overloading you casuing pain, anxiety, or shutting down. Left unadressed this energy can cause all kinds of unpleasant symptoms. From physcial conditions to one of the most common of them all the inability to feel pleasure any longer, the inability to get sexually aroused, or achieve orgasam.

Lets consider a possibility, that we we'rent meant to wake up, drink 4 cups of coffee, work 8 hours sitting, and rinse and repeat from the time we are in our early twenties to retirement. Thats 40 years for some of high alert putting our bodies in a level of high stress. These demands alone over time could be enough to make someones sense of well being seem like a thing of the distant past.

We get so stuck in this patter of being "on" all the time that anything else feels strange. So we caffinate more to feel "normal" and the can lead to adrenal fatique and burn out. It's a viscous cycle.

Now add life onto that, experiancing a divorce, a loss, heartache, or even something so little as holding in crying, or physical like a car accident. Its not the incident themselves that are the culput of "trauma' (I will go into this in another post). But the residual energy, essentially trauma is the unprocessed emotions from stressful incidents.

The American grind has created a recipe for disaster.

But how do we regulate ? you ask...

A few simple yet effecve things you can do are use breath, awareness, using sound by humming or toning, or. movement such as tense or relaxing, or even dancing.

We have two ends of the spectrum. Being hyper aroused, or being shut down also known as colapse. Being hyper-aroused you may always be looking for danger feeling unsafe. Or being colapsed could look like not feeling anything at all, disacociating.

This often is tied to early attachment styles. We will go into that in another post. As babies we are not able to self-regulate, we depend on our caretakers for that. If a child was not properly co-regulated this could result in avoidance, hyperindependence, or detachment as an addaptive survival mechanism.

So lets recap. Nervous System regulation is the ability to go between states of stress and ress appropriately. A regulated nervous system is one that is calm when the situation and the enviorment are a refelection of that.

We can reguate with such tools as breathwork, toning, movement, and mindfulness practices

Warmly,

Dakini Inanna Magdalena.