5 Fresh Tips to Help You Regulate Your Nervous System with Nervous System Clinician Jessica Addeo
Learning how to regulate your nervous system can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you regulate your nervous system, so you can handle life's ebbs and flows with more resilience and less STRESS with nervous system clinician Jessica Addeo.
Jessica Addeo is an occupational therapist and specializes in the nervous system. Her role involves guiding women in understanding their nervous system in their daily lives, helping them feel more present, connected, and less burdened by guilt. Our nervous system operates behind the scenes, running the show, and once you grasp its intricacies, everything shifts. It's like peering beneath the hood of stress. She offers one to one coaching, small groups and workshops.
You can learn more about Jessica Addeo on her Fresh Starts profile.
5 Fresh Tips to help you regulate your nervous system:
Being calm is not the goal, that is not what regulation means (to me). Regulation is a verb not a state. It is a set of tools that you can call on to help you when you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, burnt out, etc. The goal is to feel "in control" and resilient in the face of daily stressors. For many people the goal is to slow down and feel safe enough to even define "calm" for them. But no one is regulated all of the time. The goal is feel good about your life, which you can't do without your nervous system being regulated.
Nervous system reframe is EVERYTHING! When you are dysregulated your thinking brain goes offline (that is just plain science). So if you aren't your best self in one of those moments, it isn't a character flaw, you aren't an awful human. You got dysregulated (basically you can drop the guilt!). What can you do about this? Start to learn your signs of dysregulation.
Knowing all the states of your nervous system is super helpful. What do you look like when you are super activated (a fight or flight response), what do you look like when you are regulated or in your "window of tolerance", what do you look like when you are in a freeze or shut down response? Being inside our window of tolerance often feels best, but it isn't necessarily the "superior" nervous system state. It's about knowing how your nervous system communicates with you so you can grab the right tools. And sometimes being dysregulated is the APPROPRIATE response. Again, it's not getting stuck there, the bounce back, that will support you in feeling better.
We all have different thresholds for sensory input. And we actually have 8 sensory systems, not just the 5 outward facing ones we think of. Sight, taste, touch, sound and smell are your exterior facing senses. Proprioception, Vestibular and Interoception are the senses that tell you about the inner state of your body and where you are in space (two things that are really important for survival and therefore important for your nervous system). Finding your just right level of these different sensory inputs is SUPER regulating for a nervous system. It is also really important to know your thresholds, maybe a certain space is too loud or bright for you. That doesn't mean you don't go that space (unless you don't want to), but it does mean you plan accordingly for YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM. I teach something called the "nervous system bank account"- where you basically learn how to balance the input going in and out of your nervous system.
Nervous system regulation is about communication. Your nervous system is always communicating with your brain, we often miss the messages (because we haven't been taught to listen in this way) and then the nervous system speaks louder. The louder could be things like panic attacks, adult temper tantrums, elevated heart rate, difficulty taking a deep breath, chronic inflammation, chronic stress, difficult sleeping and so on. When you live in a chronic state of fight/flight you often end up feeling like one misstep and you will came crashing off a cliff. Your nervous systems job is to keep you safe and alive, so it is trying to protect you. Learning to speak this language is a game changer. So next time you "freak out", afterwards, instead of judgement get curious. What is your nervous system saying to you in those moments?