We’re thinking about “nervous system regulation” all wrong

Lately, through my own somatic learning, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we actually mean when we talk about nervous system regulation. It’s a phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot right now, especially within yoga and  wellness culture. And yes, I think there is so much value in understanding our nervous systems and learning ways to support ourselves when we feel overwhelmed, anxious or disconnected. But I also wonder if we’ve taken the idea of regulation and turned it into another thing we are supposed to be constantly achieving.

Am I regulated? What state am I in? Is this anxiety? Am I activated? Should I be resting? Should I be doing something to bring myself back down? Do I need a bath? A new product? 10,000 steps?

There seems to be an expectation, that the mastery of the nervous system means that we should always be calm. Zen. That we should be grounded, centred, emotionally balanced and able to regulate ourselves back into some kind of peaceful baseline whenever life becomes difficult. But it risks becoming just another thing when we have so many things to optimise already; our sleep, our nutrition, our movement, our hormones, our productivity, our stress levels. In short, it can often feel as though even the way we experience our emotions needs to be managed properly.

And I’m not sure I want that for myself or to teach my yoga students about it. Because for me, letting myself feel and shifting through those feelings, sitting with them IS regulation. It’s not the absence of emotion, feeling or overwhelm, it’s being comfortable with those experiences.

The more I learn about the body and somatic practices, the more interested I become in listening to my nervous system rather than trying to control it. Because what if the sensations we experience aren’t always problems that need fixing? What if they are also ways that our bodies are communicating with us?

The tightness in your chest when something doesn’t feel right, the knot in your stomach before a difficult conversation, the restless energy that makes you want to move, the heaviness that comes with sadness, the heat and tension that can accompany anger. We can be very quick to label these sensations as something we need to regulate away. We feel anxious, so we need to calm down. We feel angry, so we need to ground ourselves. We feel overwhelmed, so we need to breathe until the feeling passes.

And sometimes we absolutely do need that. There are moments when our nervous system becomes overwhelmed and we need to support ourselves back towards a greater sense of safety with rituals and habits and practices that make us feel safe. But I think there is a difference between supporting ourselves through an experience and constantly trying to prevent ourselves from having the experience in the first place.

Sometimes calming down simply isn’t the goal, sometimes we just need to listen. Experience. Shift through the sensation.

This has been one of the things I’ve found most interesting in my somatic learning. A regulated nervous system isn’t necessarily one that is always calm or one that never becomes activated. We are human beings and we are going to experience the full range of being human, which is a unique and beautiful thing. We are going to feel grief and anger and fear and excitement and joy and disappointment and desire. We are going to have days where we feel completely at ease and days where everything feels like too much. That doesn’t necessarily mean that something has gone wrong.

I like to think that regulation is less about how little we feel and more about our capacity to move through what we feel without abandoning ourselves in the process.

There is something quite different about asking, “How can I make this feeling go away?” compared with asking, “What is this feeling trying to tell me?” The second question invites curiosity, a deeper relationship with oneself. It allows us to become interested in our experience rather than immediately judging it.

I believe our bodies offer us information that our conscious minds haven’t quite caught up with yet. At the same time, that doesn’t mean every sensation is a message that we need to act upon, or that we should blindly follow whatever our nervous system tells us. But I think there is value in becoming curious enough to listen before we immediately try to change what we’re experiencing.

I don’t want somatic practice to become another way of telling ourselves that we are doing ourselves wrong. Personally, the most beautiful part of this work is the possibility of developing a relationship with my body rather than constantly trying to get it to behave differently. To notice what is happening. To create enough space to actually feel what I’m feeling. To become curious about the sensations that arise instead of immediately labelling them as good or bad, regulated or dysregulated.

Regulation, at its kindest is developing the capacity to stay connected to ourselves while life is happening. To know when we need to slow down and when we need to move. To know when we need rest and when we need expression.

So forget about what’s expected, or what’s portrayed as “regulation”. Stoic, calm, zen, above it all control, that is unshaken by anything around it. We don’t need to approach our emotions with another technique, another rule or another expectation to be better at feeling them. We just need to listen in, sit with them and learn from the process.