🧘 Regulating Your Nervous System (While Parenting)

🌀 Overview

Parenting is full of noise, demands, and emotional overload — which means your nervous system often ends up in survival mode. Learning to regulate isn’t about being calm all the time. It’s about recognizing your stress response and giving your body what it needs to feel safe again.

You’re not broken — your nervous system is just asking for help.

🧠 What’s the Nervous System?

Your nervous system controls how your body reacts to stress. There are 3 main states:

State
Description
Example
🏃‍♀️ Fight or Flight
Alert, tense, reactive
Yelling, rushing, snapping
🧊 Freeze
Shut down, numb, detached
Zoning out, going quiet, dissociating
🌿 Regulated
Present, responsive, safe
Able to think clearly, connect calmly

You move in and out of these all day — especially as a parent.

🔍 Signs You’re Dysregulated

  • You’re yelling when you don’t want to
  • You feel tight in your chest, jaw, or stomach
  • You get stuck in “I can’t do this” loops
  • You stop caring — or care too much
  • You feel disconnected from your body or child
  • You act in ways you later feel guilty about
If you’ve ever said, “That’s not like me,” this is likely why.

🛠️ Quick Regulation Tools (2–5 Minutes)

📦 For Fight/Flight (Overactive, anxious, overwhelmed):

  • Box Breathing: Inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4
  • Shake it out: Literally shake your arms, legs, or whole body
  • Cold water: Splash your face or hold something frozen
  • Name 5 things you can see, hear, and feel (grounding)

🧊 For Freeze (Shut down, numb, stuck):

  • Small movement: Stand up, sway side to side, touch your skin
  • Humming or singing: Vibrates the vagus nerve
  • Sunlight or nature: Step outside, even for 1 minute
  • Touch something warm: A mug, your chest, a soft object

🧩 Longer-Term Practices

  • Daily body scans — “What’s tense?” “What feels heavy?”
  • Gentle exercise: walking, yoga, stretching
  • Journaling what you felt before reacting
  • Nervous system “anchor rituals” (e.g. same tea, breath, or scent each day)
  • Therapy or somatic coaching
  • Limit overstimulation (noise, clutter, news, screens)

💬 Self-Talk That Helps

  • “My body is overwhelmed — not failing.”
  • “I can come back to calm.”
  • “It makes sense I feel this way — and I can support myself now.”
  • “This moment is hard. It’s not forever.”

❤️ Reminder

  • You’re not expected to be calm all the time
  • You can repair after dysregulation — that is the work
  • When you learn to regulate yourself, you teach your child to do the same
  • Your nervous system deserves care, not shame

📚 Sources

  1. Dr. Stephen Porges. Polyvagal Theory & The Nervous System
  2. Deb Dana. Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System
  3. Dr. Becky Kennedy. “Calm is a Skill — Not a Personality Trait”
  4. Harvard Health. “Stress, the Nervous System, and Parenting”