1. Complete Emotional Reflex Arc
Allow emotions to fully process and discharge from your body, similar to how animals shake off stress, to prevent emotional debt and the buildup of allostatic load that drains energy and reduces your window of tolerance.
2. Welcome Full Emotional Spectrum
Cultivate emotional fluidity by learning to welcome the full range of human experience, understanding that resistance to feeling emotions causes prolonged suffering, not the emotions themselves.
3. Utilize Bottom-Up Self-Regulation
Leverage physiological levers like breath, humming, and expansive awareness to quickly shift your state and create a sense of safety, especially during acute stress or anxiety.
4. Regain Internal Body Sensitivity
Practice interoception, which is relearning to listen to and interpret the constant feedback signals coming from your body to understand your internal experience.
5. Rewire Reactive Stress Responses
Recognize that your nervous system is neuroplastic and can be rewired with practice to change maladaptive responses to stress, much like doing reps at a gym.
6. Experiment with Regulation Practices
Approach self-regulation techniques with curiosity, experimenting with various top-down (cognitive reframes, mindfulness) and bottom-up (breath, humming) practices to find what works best for you.
7. Expand Your Peripheral Vision
Broaden your awareness to include the space around and behind you, expanding your peripheral vision, as this creates a sense of spaciousness in your system and can reduce stress.
8. Practice Exhale-Emphasized Breathing
Engage in breathing practices where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale, such as the 4-7-8 technique, to induce a calming effect and downshift into a parasympathetic state.
9. Use Movement to Release Stress
Engage in physical activity like walking, running, or going to the gym, as movement can help complete the stress response and discharge accumulated energy, contributing to mental well-being.
10. Hum to Increase Nitric Oxide
Practice humming, as it significantly increases nitric oxide, a vasodilator that helps with eye strain and aids in shifting into a parasympathetic, calming state.
11. Long Hold Stretches for Calm
Incorporate long hold stretches into your routine as a bottom-up technique to leverage your physiology and help downshift your nervous system into a calmer state.
12. Notice Nervous System Dysregulation Signs
Pay attention to signs like knee-jerk anger, fatigue, lethargy, sleep difficulties, relationship challenges, or early burnout symptoms, as these indicate a dysregulated nervous system.