10 Signs Your Nervous System is Regulating

“Nervous system regulation” is everywhere right now. Cold plunges. Breathwork. Morning routines. Supplements. Apparently we are all one ayahuasca session away from becoming completely unbothered. Except, in my opinion, that isn’t the goal.

A regulated nervous system does not mean you are calm all the time. In fact, that would be a pretty useless nervous system. Your nervous system is dual designed to respond. When something scares you, your body should react. When you exercise, your heart rate should increase. When you’re angry, excited, nervous, grieving, overwhelmed or wildly happy, your physiology changes with you. Stress is stress, whether good or bad. Regulation is not the absence of those responses. It is the ability to move through them. Think less - “I never get stressed” + more “I can get stressed and eventually find my way back.”

When we spend long periods under stress, we can become so accustomed to tension that we stop recognizing it as tension. A clenched jaw goes unnoticed. Shoulders live somewhere near the ears. Rest feels strangely uncomfortable. Silence needs a phone. A difficult interaction follows us home and somehow joins us for dinner.

Sometimes the signs that things are shifting are surprisingly ordinary. You realize you’re sitting on the couch and your body is actually soft. You notice you can be still without immediately looking for something to do. Something upsetting happens, you feel it fully, and eventually it passes instead of consuming the next three days. You begin noticing subtler signals from your body again: hunger, fullness, fatigue, tension, ease. You encounter a difficult person and, miraculously, their mood does not become your evening project. You rest and it actually feels like rest. You find yourself signing up for Yin with Tori again, because it doesn’t feel like a chore anymore.

None of these things mean you’ve achieved some permanently “regulated” state. Humans don’t work that way. We move continuously between activation and recovery depending on what is happening around us + inside us. The capacity to make those transitions is the important part.

And this is one place where yoga gets interesting. Physical Yoga isn’t valuable because it magically switches your nervous system into relaxation mode. Depending on what you’re practicing, it may do exactly the opposite for a while. A challenging posture requires effort. Balance demands attention. Strong movement increases respiration and heart rate. Holding still can occasionally feel harder than moving. Then you release the pose. Your breathing slows. Muscles soften. You notice the floor underneath you. You recognize what effort feels like and what happens when that effort is no longer necessary.

Yoga gives us a place to experience sensation, effort, discomfort, breath, stillness and recovery while paying attention to what is happening in the body. Over time, we become better acquainted with our own signals. Not because the goal is to float through life completely unfazed, but because the goal is to have access to more than one gear. To know when to push + when to soften. To recognize when you are holding tension you no longer need. To experience stress without assuming you need to live there.

Sometimes progress looks profound. Sometimes it looks like realizing your jaw isn’t clenched. I’ll take both.

xo,

🧘🏻‍♀️🧪

Lindsey