“Nervous system regulation is the ability to feel strong emotions and sensations, not get lost and stuck in them, and return to a baseline state that is balanced and alive and present.” - Michael Roesslein

Nervous system regulation has become one of those phrases we hear everywhere, but there’s still a lot of confusion around what it actually means. We tend to associate it with things that make us feel calmer, like breathwork or meditation, but feeling calm in the moment and having a regulated nervous system aren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s normal to feel anxious sometimes. We’re supposed to get angry, excited, sad, and overwhelmed. Nervous system regulation is about having the capacity to experience all of that without getting stuck and to come back to a place where we feel present and connected again.

Understanding this is especially important when we’re working with women who have spent years dealing with chronic illness, pain, or medical gaslighting. By the time she gets to us, her nervous system may have had years of experiences where she didn’t feel heard, believed, or safe. On top of that, we bring our own nervous systems into the treatment room too. If we’re overwhelmed, activated, or uncomfortable with what a patient is sharing, she may feel that. So this work isn’t only about giving our patients more nervous system tools. It’s also about building our capacity to stay present, get curious about what safety looks like for each person, and become better co-regulators for the people we serve.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Michael Roesslein, founder of Anima, to dig into what nervous system regulation means and why it’s so much more individualized than we sometimes make it sound. We talk about fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and shutdown states, why constantly trying to calm an activated nervous system can actually be counterproductive, medical gaslighting, trauma, the ways women learn to experience safety from a very young age, why doing all the “right” things for your health sometimes still isn’t enough, increasing our capacity for difficult emotions as well as joy, working with our own nervous systems as practitioners, learning to recognize what each individual patient may need to feel safer and more supported, and more.

Enjoy the episode, and let's innovate and integrate together!

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Learn more or watch the video version of this conversation at https://integrativewomenshealthinstitute.com/what-really-is-nervous-system-regulation-with-michael-roesslein/.

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