Last year, I sat in a room full of strangers, all of us there because chronic pain had, in one way or another, brought us to our knees. I’d expected the course to teach me pain management techniques — maybe some exercises and a few coping strategies to get me through the harder days.
What I hadn’t expected was to leave with a fundamental shift in how I understood my own body. Because what the course actually taught me, more than anything else, was that I had a nervous system that had been running in crisis mode for so long that crisis had started to feel like home.
And you don’t need to be living with chronic pain to recognize that feeling (though, given how strongly the two are linked, you might).
Many of us are walking around with nervous systems that are overwhelmed, and we have absolutely no idea. We chalk it up to stress, or personality, or just “being bad at relaxing.” We’re told to practice self-care, so we run a bath or book a massage, and those things feel lovely in the moment, but somehow nothing fundamentally shifts.
That’s because we’re treating the symptoms while missing something far more foundational.
Nervous system regulation — genuinely understanding what it means, why it matters, and how to actually support it — might be the single most impactful thing most of us aren’t doing. And once you understand it, so much of your life, your reactions, your relationships, and your struggles, will start to make an entirely different kind of sense.
What does “regulating your nervous system” actually mean?
Your nervous system is, at its most basic, your body’s surveillance and response system. It’s running constantly, beneath conscious awareness, scanning your environment for threat, communicating with every organ and system in your body, and making rapid decisions about whether you’re safe or not. It governs everything from your heart rate and digestion to your mood, your ability to think clearly, and how much patience you have left at the end of a long day.
When most people hear “fight or flight,” they think of dramatic moments — running from danger, reacting in a crisis. But your nervous system isn’t only activated by dramatic events. It responds to emails that feel threatening, to the relentless ping of notifications, to a slightly sharp tone in someone’s voice, to accumulated tiredness, to pain. It’s responding, recalibrating, and responding again, all day long, largely without your input.
Regulation, then, doesn’t mean being calm all the time. This is probably the most important misconception to clear up right away. A regulated nervous system isn’t a flatlined one. It’s a responsive one — able to rise to meet a challenge, and then, crucially, return to baseline once the challenge has passed. Think of it like a well-tuned instrument. It can play the full range of notes without getting stuck on one, and without the strings snapping under the pressure.
Before my pain management course, I had a vague understanding of what “the nervous system” was, but it had always felt slightly abstract to me — important, probably, but not entirely relevant to my daily life. Sitting in that course, learning about how chronic pain and nervous system dysregulation are locked in a self-reinforcing loop, was the moment it stopped being abstract entirely.
Chronic stress amplifies pain signals. Pain activates the stress response. Over time, the nervous system becomes sensitized — its threat threshold lowers, it takes less and less to trigger a response, and the baseline state of the system shifts. Not metaphorically. Physiologically.
When your nervous system is chronically dysregulated, everything else is harder. Everything.
So how do you know if yours needs attention?
The honest answer is that if you’re human and living in the modern world, your nervous system almost certainly deserves more attention than it’s getting. But that said, certain signs indicate when your nervous system is perpetually trapped in a threat response.
Dysregulation shows up at two extremes. At one end, there’s hyperarousal — the state most of us recognize as anxiety or stress, but which runs deeper than those labels suggest.
You might notice a persistent low-level restlessness, like you can’t quite settle. A racing mind that won’t slow down, even when you’re exhausted. Physical tension you carry without realizing — in your jaw, your shoulders, your chest. Perhaps you have chronic pain and/or many and varied physical complaints like me.
You might frequently snap at people over things that don’t warrant it, and know, even as it happens, that your reaction is disproportionate. You may feel wired but utterly depleted at the same time, lying awake at 3 am, heart beating slightly too fast, unable to identify exactly what you’re worried about.
At the other end is hypoarousal — the shutdown response that gets talked about less, but is equally significant. This looks like numbness, disconnection, and a strange flatness that settles over everything. Decisions feel impossibly heavy. Things you normally enjoy feel distant and uninteresting, like watching them through glass.
You’re going through the motions of your life without feeling particularly present in it. Procrastination becomes almost total, not because you’re lazy, but because your system simply cannot generate the activation needed to begin.
What makes this particularly complicated is that you can alternate between the two, and both states can feel entirely reasonable when you’re in them. Your hyperaroused nervous system insists that everything really is urgent. Your hypoaroused one quietly convinces you that nothing really matters anyway.
And here’s something that took me a long time to understand: when dysregulation is your baseline, you stop recognizing it as dysregulation. You just think that’s who you are. You think you’re an anxious person or a lazy person. Someone who is bad under pressure or who struggles to feel things. When actually, your nervous system has been working so hard for so long that it’s simply doing what nervous systems do under sustained pressure — trying to protect you, in the only ways it knows how.
Some people start from a different baseline, and that’s not their fault.
Before we go any further, something important needs to be said.
Everything we’ve covered so far assumes a reasonably level playing field, and the reality is that the playing field is anything but level. Some people’s nervous systems are operating under significantly greater baseline demand, not because of anything they’ve done or failed to do, but because of how they’re wired, what they’ve experienced, or what their body is managing every single day.
Neurodivergent individuals — such as those who are autistic, have ADHD, AuDHD (that’s autism plus ADHD), sensory processing differences, Tourette’s, and/or other neurotypes — are a clear example. Research shows their nervous systems are inherently more prone to stress and strain, and this is then compounded by the neurotypical world we live in.
Open-plan offices, fluorescent lighting, rigid schedules, relentless social performance, sensory environments that assault rather than soothe — all of this creates chronic nervous system activation in people who were simply never built for it. They’re essentially being asked to run software on hardware it was never designed for, every single day, often with minimal or no accommodation for what that costs them.
People with trauma histories face a different but related challenge (but it’s worth noting that a lot of neurodivergent folk also experience trauma). Early or prolonged trauma can quite literally reshape the nervous system’s baseline, creating a threat-detection system that is permanently sensitized — once protective, now exhausting.
People with chronic illness or pain, as I know from my own experience, are often already operating at the edge of their system’s capacity before the day has even properly started. And it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, because a heightened nervous system also triggers chronic pain in the first place.
Then there is a group that doesn’t always get named in these conversations, but absolutely should: women.
And girls, long before they become women.
From a very early age, many women are socialized into a set of behavioral expectations that are, bluntly put, pretty devastating. Be agreeable. Be accommodating. Make others comfortable. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t ask for too much. Be good.
It’s so common that it’s been informally coined “good girl syndrome,” and most of us perpetuate it without even realizing. It shows up in families, in schools, in workplaces, in relationships, and even in our own internal voices. And it trains girls and women to systematically override their own nervous system signals in service of others’ needs and others’ comfort.
Tired? Push through. Overwhelmed? Smile anyway. Boundaries being crossed? Don’t say anything or you’ll be labelled “difficult”. Need rest? There’s too much to do.
This chronic pattern of self-abandonment — and that is what it is — is a form of sustained nervous system dysregulation. When your body sends you a signal, and you learn, over years and decades, to ignore it, override it, or feel ashamed of it, you are training your nervous system to exist in a state of constant internal conflict.
You are simultaneously activating a stress response and suppressing the natural completion of that response. Over time, the cost of that accumulates in ways that show up as anxiety, exhaustion, chronic pain, emotional dysregulation, and a pervasive sense of disconnection from yourself that can be very difficult to name.
I’m not trying to lay blame and shame — certainly not to the women like me who learned these patterns, and not even, entirely, of the systems that taught them. But I do want people to understand and acknowledge it for what it is. Because the reality is that a great many women arrive at adulthood carrying a nervous system that has been specifically trained to put itself last.
Personally speaking, I see the intersection of many of the above factors in my own life. I’m a woman, living with chronic illness, caring for a daughter with additional needs, who navigates the world with a nervous system that processes everything more intensely than most. And as a mother, one of the acts of resistance I am most committed to is making sure she grows up knowing that her needs are valid, that her signals deserve to be heard, and that being good does not have to mean making herself small.
Why modern life is working against all of us.
Even for those starting from a relatively even baseline (ha!), modern life presents a formidable challenge to nervous system health.
We were not designed for this. We were not designed for the 24-hour news cycle, for the psychological weight of being reachable at all times, for social media feeds that have been deliberately engineered to keep our stress responses activated.
We were not designed for the financial pressures that keep the threat response humming in the background, or for the erosion of genuine community that once helped us co-regulate naturally with each other.
And then there’s the accumulation effect, which is, in my experience, massively underestimated. It’s rarely one big thing. It’s the difficult email before breakfast, and the traffic, and the meeting that runs over, and the pounding migraine, and the skipped lunch, and the child who needs more than you have left to give, and the inbox that hasn’t emptied in three months.
Each of these is, individually, manageable. Together, they pile up throughout the day, the week, the month, narrowing your window of tolerance, that is, what your nervous system can handle, until something entirely minor becomes the thing that breaks you.
Why this matters more than you might think.
A dysregulated nervous system doesn’t stay neatly contained within your own experience. It radiates outward, affecting virtually every domain of your life in ways that are easy to misattribute to other causes.
In relationships, dysregulation is particularly corrosive. When you’re in hyperarousal, you misread neutral expressions, react defensively to innocent questions, and lose access to the patience and empathy that your relationships depend on. When you’re shut down, the people who love you feel it.
I’ve seen this play out in my own life with painful clarity. When my own window is narrow, I have less to offer my children, whose nervous systems need mine to be as steady as possible, because, believe it or not, a heightened nervous system is contagious.
Beyond relationships, chronic dysregulation affects concentration, creativity, decision-making, and the ability to experience genuine joy. It affects physical health in ways that are well-documented but still underappreciated. And, as I learned through my own experience with chronic pain, it can create self-perpetuating cycles that are extremely difficult to interrupt without understanding what you’re actually dealing with.
As I mentioned, the nervous system, when chronically dysregulated, becomes progressively more sensitized over time. The threshold for triggering a stress response lowers. What once required a significant stressor now requires almost nothing.
And so the window narrows further, and life gets harder to navigate, and we often blame ourselves for not coping better, when the reality is that we’re coping with something we don’t have the right tools to address.
What actually helps, and why most of us are approaching it all wrong.
When we feel overwhelmed, most of us reach for things that offer short-term relief without actually regulating our nervous systems. Scrolling through social media. A glass of wine. Pushing through on adrenaline and caffeine. Collapsing in front of the television and calling it rest.
And of course, most of these things aren’t without their place. But they are much like putting a band-aid on a major wound. They don’t actually address the root problem. They just pause it or mask it (and in some cases even add to it), and then we wonder why we never quite feel recovered.
So what does actually help?
Living authentically and honoring your actual needs is, in my view, the place to start — and it’s the one that gets left off most lists of nervous system tools, which is a significant omission. All the breath work and cold showers in the world (which we’ll get to in a minute) will only go so far if you are fundamentally living in a way that is misaligned with who you actually are and what you actually need.
If your nervous system is already working harder than average, and you are also consistently overriding its signals to meet external expectations, you are essentially pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.
This was one of the most confronting and most liberating things I learned on my pain management course. The connection between consistently ignoring your body’s signals and your body eventually finding louder and louder ways to make itself heard is real, is well-documented, and it was, when I first encountered it, uncomfortably recognizable.
Living authentically, in this context, doesn’t mean grand gestures of self-reinvention. It means getting honest about your needs and beginning, however slowly, to honor them. It means recognizing that your nervous system has been sending you signals all along, and that learning to listen to them is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation.
And it means, with particular urgency for those who recognize themselves in the good girl conditioning described earlier, learning to set boundaries. The kind of boundaries that involve disappointing people. The kind that require you to tolerate someone else’s discomfort rather than immediately rushing to resolve it. The kind that feel, at first, almost physically wrong, because your nervous system has been trained to treat the withdrawal of approval as a threat.
It’s also worth pointing out here that this needs to be very gradual, otherwise you risk shocking your nervous system even more. People pleasing is a nervous system response. One that you learned, at some point, because keeping others comfortable was the safest available strategy at that time. Unlearning it is therefore not simply a matter of deciding to be more assertive. It is nervous system work, and it deserves to be treated as such, with small steps, extreme patience, and without self-judgment.
This takes time. It takes practice. And for many people, it benefits enormously from professional support, which we’ll come to later. But first, some other regulation strategies.
Hobbies. When my pain management course put hobbies on the agenda, I’ll admit my initial reaction was mild skepticism. What I came to understand was that hobbies do something quite specific and significant for your nervous system
Certain activities, particularly those that require just enough focus to fully absorb your attention without overwhelming your capacity, create what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed a flow state.
A state of engaged absorption in which your nervous system is, quite simply, too occupied to monitor for threat. This is not passive distraction like doom scrolling. It’s active, generative engagement that genuinely interrupts the stress cycle. It requires enough of you to prevent your mind from wandering back to everything it’s worried about. You cannot ruminate effectively when you are fully present in something. That is not a small thing.
And activities that are both absorbing and rhythmic, if you can find one you enjoy, carry an additional benefit. Here we’re talking things like knitting, painting, playing an instrument, gardening, baking, etc. These kinds of activities combine focus with repetitive physical movement, and that has a direct regulating effect on the nervous system that goes beyond the mental absorption. The rhythm itself does something. Many people describe these activities as the only time they truly feel calm without trying to be calm.
Then there’s the identity piece, which connects directly back to the authentic living point. Hobbies that reflect who you actually are — that you pursue purely because they bring you alive, with no productivity to justify them and no one to perform them for — are a form of self-affirmation that your nervous system registers.
Just be aware that, as with boundary setting, small steps are crucial here so as not to alarm your nervous system. Because the guilt will be real. Especially for caregivers. Especially for parents. Especially for people who have spent years at the bottom of their own priority list.
The feeling that time spent on something enjoyable is time stolen from something more deserving is, in itself, going to temporarily heighten your nervous system because it has learned to treat your own pleasure as a threat to your safety or your worth. It is not. Still, building up very gradually is going to be key here. Your nervous system needs time and patience to unlearn its conditioning.
I will add that I know it’s not as simple as “making time” for these things. Most of us live in a state of time poverty. But what I will also say is that learning to make little pockets of time for these activities is something you have to work at consciously.
For me, it’s a 5-10 minute break each day to read a novel. I don’t spend hours indulging in it because I do not have that time free, but I absolutely can make 10 minutes by subbing out something else, like mindlessly scrolling through my phone or letting go of my need to have a perpetually tidy house.
Breath work (yes, really) is probably one of the most immediate and accessible tools available, and it works because it directly influences your nervous system rather than just distracting you from it. Specifically, extending your exhale longer than your inhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the rest-and-digest counterpart to fight-or-flight — and signals safety to your body. Even a few minutes of this, done consistently, can cause shifts.
Movement matters enormously, and I’m not talking about intense workouts (unless that’s your thing). Even gentle, rhythmic movement — walking, stretching, a mindful movement sequence, slow rocking — helps to metabolize the stress hormones that accumulate in the body. Why? Because your nervous system, when activated, is preparing your body for physical action. Movement is, in a very literal sense, completing the cycle that stress begins. You don’t need to run a marathon. You just need to move.
Co-regulation is perhaps the most underappreciated tool of all, and it’s one that modern life has stripped away from many of us. The concept is simple but pretty epic: our nervous systems regulate through safe connection with other nervous systems. A calm, warm presence genuinely helps a dysregulated nervous system find its way back to baseline.
This is why a hug from the right person can dissolve tension that an hour alone couldn’t shift. It’s why being truly heard by someone who isn’t panicking alongside you is so deeply settling. We evolved to regulate together, and the modern epidemic of loneliness and disconnection is, among other things, a nervous system crisis.
I see co-regulation in its most concentrated form in my relationship with my daughter. On her harder days, when the world has been too much, and her system is overwhelmed, the most powerful thing I can offer her isn’t a solution or a strategy. It’s steadiness. It’s sitting side by side doing coloring together. It’s stroking her tummy whilst we watch TV. My regulated nervous system, quite literally, helps hers find its way back. Which is, of course, its own powerful reminder of why my regulation matters — not just for me, but for her.
Sensory tools are another avenue that tends to get dismissed as too simple to be meaningful, but the research and the lived experience both suggest otherwise. Cold water on the face activates the dive reflex and can rapidly slow the heart rate. Warmth (like a hot drink, a bath, a heated blanket) signals safety. Grounding, self-soothing techniques that bring your attention to physical sensation in the present moment interrupt the nervous system’s tendency to project into imagined future threats. These aren’t woo. They’re physiology.
Rest (actual rest) deserves its own mention because most of us aren’t actually getting it. Lying on the sofa watching television while simultaneously monitoring your phone is not nervous system rest. It’s a form of stimulation. True rest involves genuine disengagement from input — time in nature, stillness, sleep that is actually restorative.
Many of us have forgotten what this feels like, or feel too guilty to prioritize it. For me, it felt indulgent before it felt necessary. Now I understand that it is, in the most literal sense, foundational.
And finally, the most important principle of all: consistency over intensity.
Your nervous system is not transformed by extremes. It’s shaped by the small, repeated practices that become the background hum of your daily life. This can be particularly hard if, like me, your brain is wired for all-or-nothing thinking. And all-or-nothing thinking is not inherently bad. It brings with it passion, amongst other benefits. But it’s also a massive contributor to behaviors that drive nervous system dysregulation because it makes us do things in extremes.
Instead, it’s all about micro changes done consistently. Five minutes of breath work every morning. A 10-minute walk each day. Saying no to one additional demand each week. You are working with deeply ingrained patterns here — patterns that may have been forming for decades. Be realistic, be consistent, and above all, be patient with yourself. This is not a quick fix, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
When self-help isn’t enough.
There is no medal for doing this alone. If your nervous system feels consistently overwhelmed despite genuine self-care efforts, if you’re spending significant amounts of time outside your window of tolerance, or if your relationships, your work, or your daily functioning are significantly affected, professional support is not a last resort. It’s an intelligent next step.
Trauma-informed therapies are particularly worth seeking out, since unresolved trauma is so frequently at the root of chronic dysregulation, often in ways we aren’t consciously aware of. Approaches like EMDR have a strong evidence base for trauma specifically, and nervous system-focused therapeutic work is a growing and exciting field.
For neurodivergent individuals, those with chronic illness, and those with significant trauma histories, it’s also worth noting that generic self-help advice was largely not designed with your needs in mind. A therapist who understands your specific nervous system profile can offer something far more tailored and effective than a one-size-fits-all approach. You deserve support that actually fits.
I was fortunate enough that my local area has an amazing chronic pain clinic, which is neurodivergent affirming, but I appreciate that not everyone will have such ready access to this. If you can find the energy to locate one, it’s well worth doing, though.
And if intense emotions ever feel genuinely unsafe — whether that’s rage that frightens you, panic that won’t resolve, or thoughts of harm — please reach out to a professional without delay. This is not failure. It’s your nervous system telling you it needs more specialized support than any article can provide.
Final thoughts…
Understanding nervous system regulation changed the way I experience my own body, my own struggles, and the struggles of the people I love most. It replaced self-judgment with curiosity and confusion with compassion.
The goal was never to be unshakeable, or to achieve some impossible state of permanent calm. That’s unrealistic. The goal is a nervous system that can respond, recover, and return. One that works with you rather than against you. That understanding, however you come to it, has the power to change everything. And you deserve to have it.
