What is nervous system regulation?

You may have noticed the term “nervous system regulation” popping up all over the internet lately. It’s the latest “buzz word” in the personal growth world, and it’s often a confused topic. We talk about regulating our nervous systems, but there are many who don’t really understand what that actually means, and what that work looks like in practice.

It’s compelling to immediately think, because the word “regulate” can often feel oppressive or controlling in other contexts, that to regulate your nervous system means a sort of oppressive self-control that turns you into a stoic robot who never expresses their feelings.

Let’s deconstruct that!

Emotional and nervous system regulation does not imply or mean suppression of feelings. Just because the word “regulate” means a sort of oppression or policing in other contexts does not mean it does in all contexts. Nuance matters a lot here. Regulation is not some external imposition (though people definitely try to make it that way by being manipulative and almost always when that’s happening it’s because they also haven’t managed to regulate their own nervous systems) but rather an indicator of a level of healthy self-restraint.

Feeling your feelings and inhabiting yourself as a sentient being is incredibly healthy and the byproduct of nervous system and emotional regulation. Reacting to your feelings is not.

Regulation in this case has more to do with where and how energy is being allocated. Dysregulation means energy is being misallocated and sensory input is being misinterpreted. Amygdala arousal to sensory input is miscategorized by neural pathways and as a result we fight/flight/freeze/fawn. A dysregulated response looks like behaving or reacting as though you're being chased by a tiger because your partner leaves you on read.

When we regulate our emotions (which means regulating our nervous system), the bulk of that work looks like questioning our habitual interpretation of sensory input. It means building energetic capacity by stripping away sensory overload elsewhere in our lives and learning to sense nervous system arousal and dysregulation in ourselves WHEN it arises without thinking we need to unload that heightened sensation onto other people through all of the shades of blame. It's having resilience and an energetic freedom to make ample use of both parts of the autonomic nervous system with ease, rather than being energetically over-reliant on only one of the other (which creates a whole storm of problems in other body systems like endocrine and immune).

Nothing about this physiological process has ever implied acting like a robot. In fact quite the opposite. Being dysregulated is actually a more robotic and inhumane response in this case because we are operating in the binary where either things are safe or they are life threatening and as a result we think we must control our external circumstances when actually it’s a broad spectrum with a lot of nuance and mostly managed in our internal landscape. Our human bodies have way more power (and energy!) available that remains locked up until this piece gets resolved and we learn to transmute energy. This is why everyone orienting in this way would be such a game changer for humanity. Because it leaves significantly more room for the nuances of our existence than our current behaviors of offloading charge could ever afford us.