Why Regulate our Nervous System?

My Nervous System journey started in 2009 when I birthed a child with a sensitive nervous system. He was colicky, fussy and uber-sensitive to light and sound. This catalysed the Enneagram 5 deep diver within me to search for greater understanding so that I could parent him in the way his nervous system most needed. I read and watched whatever I could and even flew from South Africa to LA to undertake an immersion week with Dr. Dan Siegel in LA in 2015. Dr Dan is not only a preeminent psychiatrist and leader in the mindfulness movement but is also the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, which is a very fancy way of saying the science of Connection.

This refers to how your nervous system dances with mine. This was the beginning of my learning and teaching around connection and relationship and how the nervous system impacts how we communicate, how we express and how that flows and interchanges between us whether it is at home, work or school. Nervous System dysregulation adversely impacts how we show up and how we relate to others in ways that can be far-reaching for our relationships, our bodies, our hearts, our minds and our spirits.

So what is Nervous System Dysregulation? At its essence it compromises our communication mechanism. Our nervous system communicates with everything in our body, including the people around us. It’s driving our thinking, feeling, and thus our behaviours and actions. It’s driving our operations within our bodies, and it is doing all this based on inputs it receives and its interpretation thereof. When there is dysregulation, the instructions and expressions are compromised. EEK! Communication breakdowns in our inner and outer worlds are never going to be for the good. This affects the psychosocial, emotional, and physical parts of us, which is why so much of what we deal with in our lives can be tied back to the nervous system. This may appear in the form of a conflict with somebody that we can’t resolve because the nervous system is dysregulated or a health issue is manifesting in our body, and healing seems elusive or incomplete because the nervous system state is not conducive to healing.

Nervous System regulation requires flexibility which is the ability to move from a state of dysregulation back into regulation, avoiding a chronic stress condition. I see this regulatory process in terms of our 4 centres of intelligence and how they are showing up, and those are the mind, heart, body, and spirit.

This multi-dimensional version of us means that we need a multi-dimensional approach to bringing nervous system regulation. A rigid, stuck, stressed nervous system means compromise in our mind, compromise in our connections with people, compromise and our body compromise in our spirit.

So what are we looking for? We are looking for nervous system flexibility. So what tends to happen, and I know this all too well on my own journey, is that we run around trying to fix things. If stress is showing up in our body, we might be running around from Functional Doctor to Homeopath to Fascia Release Expert– that is certainly my journey. If we are more mainstream, we might be running from the GP to the Rheumatologist to the Gynaecologist to the Gastroenterologist.

We bounce between fixes. One of those things might be the right fix. The problem is that we tend not to stick to it. Secondly, quick fixes may offer temporary relief but don’t always address the root cause. I know this from my own 20-year health journey & I know this for my daughter with years of dysautonomia. Over the years we have bounced around from person to person, modality to modality, therapist to therapist. It’s exhausting. It’s expensive, It’s disheartening. What happens is that we lose faith in our ability to heal. Within this process, we hand over responsibility to somebody else, saying; ‘Fix me!’ When they can’t we feel like we are never going to get better.

In her truly wonderful book, Heal Your Nervous System, Dr. Linnea Passaler discusses a five-stage plan for Nervous System regulation. I have summarised these chapters in my podcast and on my YouTube channel. Her five-stage plan is aligned with my work, where the model is Know yourself, Grow yourself, Show yourself. Know yourself—self-awareness, Grow yourself—self-development, Show yourself—self-expression.

Her Five-Stage Growth Plan is awareness, regulation, restoration, connection, and expansion. So awareness is to know yourself, regulation and restoration are to grow yourself, and connection and expansion are to show yourself. Our work quite literally parallels.

Within these 5 stages of nervous system regulation we become our own best healer. Through learning the tools within each phase we don’t have to take ourselves to somebody else to have to fix us. As Dr Linnea says, ‘you are the best person to lead your healing journey. When you take control of your healing journey, you regain a sense of agency and autonomy.’ Isn’t that beautiful and something to aspire to?

Working with clients I guide people to become the project manager of their own life, and health. We are the CEO of our own wellbeing. In project managing our health ourselves, we mobilize the resources and we pull it inwards, regaining agency and autonomy, depositing us in the driver seat of our own lives.