CHECK OUT PART 1, EXPLAINING WHAT SELF-REGULATION IS AND HOW IT WORK HERE

Examples of Common Ways to Self-Regulate

Note: this is not a post about showing you templates for how to self-regulate (that’s coming in another chapter). This is just to throw out some ideas in case you wanted to know what self-regulation practices could look like.

A lot of this may be things you are already doing or things you have tried in the past. What’s important here is incorporating your autonomic nervous system into these experiences to get the most out of it. You are using your growing somatic awareness to make your natural coping skills/hobbies/self-care tactics even more effective and helpful from a somatic POV. You are trying new things or picking up things you always wanted to try once you know you are in a right place to do so. And you are learning how to tell when it’s time to stop doing things that no longer benefit you.

Writing/Art/Nature

Using art and writing to explore and regulate emotions

I probably don’t have to tell you that there’s healing in creation. Creating your own art of any kind – visual, written, performance, etc. has something special to it. From a neurobiological perspective, your instincts are picking up on something very, very real. And did you know that even looking at and enjoying art and nature has its own healing benefits?

The Facts:

• Most, if not all art, typically involves some kind of bilateral stimulation, which I’ll explain in Unit 4. But the basics of this is that alternating side-to-side (or left-right-left or right-left-right) movements activate parts of the brain connected to the ANS. Done right with intention, bilateral stimulation aka BLS can help your body process information, emotions, memories, and even trauma. That’s part of why doing your art feels so good, freeing, cathartic, connecting, spiritual, and the like for you. Art literally helps you release and connect with who you really are.
• Journaling (& writing in general) is also bilateral stimulation and self-regulating. The act of writing usually involves your hand moving from side to side across a page and your eyes are also following that side-to-side movement. Something I usually suggest to clients who love to journal: You can use the body scan and write down what you notice physically in your body and what stress response you are experiencing. Noting that at the start of your journaling will help you get more clarity and understand why you are thinking or feeling the emotions are you experiencing over time.
• Writer’s block is a sign that your ANS is deregulated. Let’s get curious. What part of your ANS is activated when you are experiencing writer’s block? Is it Freeze? Is it a Shutdown? Once you know, you can use your somatic toolkit and the processes I mentioned above to break out of it.
• You can (obviously) use art for safer emotional self-exploration. You can use art as a way to explore and self-reflect on dorsal and sympathetic related physical sensations and feelings in a safer way without becoming potentially overwhelmed. You can also use art to connect with the ventral vagus and savor those related feelings without becoming potentially overwhelmed.
• Even enjoying art you didn’t make is self-regulating. Reading, watching, or otherwise participating in someone else’s creation can help you connect with your own emotions, realize things about yourself, find some release, brighten up your day, etc. Your ANS helps you enjoy art deep in your core even if you didn’t create it yourself.
• Taking a picture does in fact make it last longer. Looking at pictures and videos of art (concert footage, dance performances, visual art prints, art installation pictures, etc.) helps to activate positive physical sensations, emotions, and memories as if you are reliving those moments again. You could use that glimmer in the future as a way to give yourself a nice dopamine boost whenever you want, once you have the hang of it somatically.

Nature and Awe

Like I asked in Chapter 6 Part 3 on Awe, when was the last time something made you pause and go, “Wow”? What does that specific combination of ventral vagus and dorsal vagus activation feel like in your body? What physical sensations let you know that you are experiencing awe – that time has stopped for a moment and you are fully locked into the present moment?

The Facts:

• Being in Nature can be very good for your health. Spending time in nature or looking at pictures or videos of nature can create moments of awe in our bodies, which is important for our mental and physical health. Moments of awe release dopamine, giving us a mood boost, a moment of relaxation, and a break from stress by taking you out of a moment and bringing you into a new one. You can use your somatic toolkit to really enjoy Awe to its fullest extent (I’m going to cover how to intentionally savor something from a somatic POV in the next Unit).
• Being in Nature can help you put things into perspective. Awe can introduce you to new ideas and experiences. A moment of awe can happen whether you are watching an ant in a park do something you’ve never seen before, watching a video of a pride of lions existing together or even just observing the beauty of a glacier. The awe we experience in nature can build our curiosity, challenge how we think, and even remind us of our places in the universe.

Movement

Moving Your Body is More Important Than Exercise (TM)

I am emphasizing movement and not just exercise for a reason. Exercise, especially exercising for weight loss, is treated like the only kind of movement worth anything by most of society and that’s just not accurate. In fact, I don’t encourage clients to work out for weight loss as part of their somatic journey. Instead, I encourage clients to reframe/re-orient/completely switch-up their relationship to moving their bodies. The goal for any kind of self-regulation is to relieve stress and help you feel even more connected to your body. I want any movement you decide to do to center what your body is specifically asking you for, not what fitness gurus and social media is telling you to do. That’s the difference between forcing yourself to go to the gym even though you don’t want to (or physically can’t or shouldn’t go) vs being excited to start an activity. That’s the difference between stopping right when your body tells you and feeling energized vs pushing yourself to fit other people’s expectations and then vomiting in the gym. And that’s the difference between listening to your body and adjusting due to your body’s needs in real time vs shaming yourself because you didn’t/couldn’t meet rigid expectations.

The socialization around weight and fatphobia actually tends to trigger a stress response in bodies that is the opposite of ventral vagal regulation. Intentional movement grounded in the call-and-response relationship you are building with your body is so essential. Centering your ANS and moving your body with self-regulation as the main goal helps you move at the pace your body needs and engage in the kind of movement that your body is literally asking you for.

The Facts:

• Moving your body helps to clear your mind. Movement (particularly movement that includes bilateral stimulation, which I will explain in more detail in Unit 4) helps to release energy and reduce your body’s stress response. When you release that stress, your prefrontal cortex (and your critical thinking) turns back on.
• Moving your body can improve long-term memory. Physical activity 3x a week also helps a part of your brain called the hippocampus regenerate (aka grow back like a plant), which supports our long-term memory. And moving your body regularly also increases a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which also supports long term memory.
• Stimming is an essential kind of movement and self-regulation. Everyone stims. Stimming is not just something only Autistic people do. Bouncing your leg in class. Twiddling thumbs. Drumming your fingers on a desk. Playing with your hair. That’s all stimming too. Stimming behaviors serve as a release for the nervous system. It helps us manage when our bodies are feeling the restlessness and/or overstimulation of a stress response. Stimming can comfort and soothe us. If someone is stimming in a way that is harming them, they just need a replacement stim that satisfies the same somatic self-regulation need for their ANS.
• Motion is lotion and all that. Moving your body regularly helps to lubricates joints and improves mobility.
• Movement can help you get out of panic attacks, freeze, fawning, and even shutdown. Once you are more aware of your body’s different stress responses, you can use movement to specifically address your body’s needs in real time. The body scan helps you notice enough physical sensations to figure out which parts of your ANS are activated. With that information, you’ll learn what to do and how to do it. Like, for example, using slow movement to work through dorsal shutdown related feelings or faster or more intense movement to release pent up sympathetic nervous system related energy. Again, it’s about noticing what your body needs and meeting the moment.

Sound/Music

Setting the Right Vibes for Your ANS

You might be wondering how sound is even related to the ANS. Your vagus nerve is connected to nerves in your inner ear muscle. So sound can have a big impact on your stress levels, mood, and general feelings of safety. Part of learning yourself is learning how different sounds affect you. What sounds irritate you? What does that feel like in your body? What sounds get you hyped? How do you know that? What do you notice in your body? What sounds soothe you? How does that soothing feeling show up in your body?

The Facts:

• Talking to yourself is actually a good thing. Talking, singing, humming, and chanting to yourself exercises and strengthen the vagus nerve by releasing the vagal brake to receive enough sympathetic energy to make the sounds and by engaging the vagus nerve so you can listen to yourself. Strengthening your vagus nerve reduces the sensitivity caused by stress over time.
• Giving yourself permission to avoid sounds or to find workarounds is good for your health. Noise pollution and ignoring your sensory needs adds to the stress your body experiences. Chronic stress builds over time – small, big, and in-between. Why add any extra stress onto your ANS if you don’t have to?
• You can use music to activate different parts of your ANS. Music can affect our ANS and cause physical reactions. We can use music to activate and explore our different stress responses (fight/flight, Freeze and Fawn, and shutdown. You can also use music to boost the ventral vagus.
• Music gives you a dopamine boost. Music is what they call “dopaminergic” because it is relatively predictable while also giving us those little problems our nervous system loves so much by setting up tension in the music and resolving it via sound. That tension followed by that resolution releases dopamine in our brains.
• Suddenly setting the vibes becomes a mental health intervention. You can intentionally make playlists to:
  • • Activate just your ventral vagus to keep the good feelings and glimmers going.
    • Activate only your sympathetic nervous system or dorsal vagus-related feelings to safely feel, process, and review emotions before giving yourself some somatic aftercare.
    • Using music to help with motivation or otherwise make a task or situation more interesting by intentionally getting some dopamine from the right song.

Self-Touch

Do you know what kind of self-touch feels good to you?

Self-touch is something that often gets neglected for many people. Being mindful of how you touch yourself is an important step in being more intentional with your relationship with yourself. Are there times that you are kinda rough with yourself? To what extent do you enjoy that? How you touch yourself could activate your ANS’s stress response, give yourself a release, or it can be soothing and regulating. This is a great time to be open and curious as you get to know yourself from a somatic perspective. Over time, you can use your somatic toolkit to figure out what kinds of self-touch activate which parts of your ANS and learn different ways to bring yourself back to a regulated place with touch, if you want that as an option.

The Facts:

• You can use self-touch as another way to regulate your ANS. And then incorporate this into different parts of your daily life to make grooming, mealtimes, your nighttime routine, etc. as pleasing as possible.
• Self-touch can be used as a tactic to reduce touch-starvation. Touch-starvation is another stress to the ANS so it’s important to notice which parts of your body you feel that starvation in and what parts of your ANS are activated. And then you can use self touch to guide yourself out of your stress response as well as an expression of self-appreciation.

Warmth

Temperature as a sensory need

Part of doing its best to keep us regulated, our autonomic nervous systems are also continuously adjusting to temperature in search of homeostasis aka that unique sweet spot for each of us. Shivering from the cold to create heat or sweating to help us cool down naturally is part of that process. Part of the reason the ANS does this is because temperature actually has a significant impact on our sense of safety and health. Warmth is often perceived by our ANS as a sign of safety. Think about the warm fuzzy feelings that we tend to associate with being at peace, appreciated, and loved.

That said, being too hot or too cold can trigger a neurobiological sense of danger, meaning it can set off your fight/flight response or even overwhelm you. Think about how irritated people can be during the summertime without ventilation or air conditioning. Also being too hot or too cold is a major distraction because your body reads it as a stress and, like we know by now, stress turns your prefrontal cortex off and that makes it harder to concentrate. This is all important because it’s part of the process of learning yourself somatically and building your neuroception. By bringing the workings of the ANS into your conscious awareness, you are able to intentionally explore all the ways you can manage stress and boost pleasure.

The Facts:

• Our physical temperature affects our ANS and influences how we see the world around us. Physical temperature affects how we see and interact with others. Physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Our bodies want to be comfortable, not too hot and not to cold, so we can think clearer.
• Our ANS responds to loneliness and being too cold in the same way. Because both sensations move along similar pathways in the brain, the same parts of our brain that regulate physical warmth also regulate social warmth.
• When we are lonely, we might unconsciously try to self-regulate with physical warmth. Physical warmth ultimately cannot take the place of social warmth (i.e. being warm won’t permanently solve loneliness), but it can lessen the intensity of the experience and help you think more clearly. Warm environments, hot showers/baths, holding hot drinks, wearing warm clothes, wrapping yourself in warm blankets, holding hot packs, etc. can help start to bring your ANS out of an overwhelmed state.

So, stop pushing through unnecessary discomfort. If you notice you are too cold, put on a robe and drink some tea. If you are too hot, get some air, switch your clothes, and eat/drink something cool. Your sensory needs are just as important as your stress levels. Noticing when you are starting to be overstimulated by temperature, for example, and making an effort to do something about your body’s discomfort is an important piece of self-regulation and nurturing your relationship with yourself.

Mindful Activities/Small Problems

We All Need a Hobby

Let’s bring it back to the chapter on Play (Chapter 6 Part 1). Hobbies are basically playtime for adults. Play activates the sympathetic nervous system and ventral vagus so you get both that boost of energy and the presence of mind to connect with others and think clearly. Just like with any other kind of play, it’s important to remember that due to the sympathetic nervous system activation via adrenaline and cortisol, it’s easy for a hobby or a game to go from being fun to being stressful or scary. Especially in a new situation, around new people or in public, or just otherwise not being in the right state of mind. So building up that neuroception, that somatic awareness, is really important with the help of the body scan.

The goal is to learn how to respond if your body starts getting too stressed or overwhelmed so you can take a moment and regroup. The cool part about play and hobbies is that it’s usually low stakes. Your housing isn’t at risk and in most scenarios, not being an all-knowing, perfect, magical savant out the gate won’t end your life. So finally you have a moment where you don’t have to be perfect and you can solve fun little problems, learn new things, and feel all kinds of feelings without it being a big deal in a stressful way AND while letting yourself enjoy the somatic benefits of the activity. Awesome, right?

The Facts:

• Solving problems gives our brain a dopamine boost/rush. That’s 1 reason why having hobbies and watching yourself get better and better at them over time feels so great.
• The brain uses glucose to solve problems. That’s why you need some sugar and carbs in your diet. That’s also why you might crave sugar and/or carbs while engaging in your hobbies (or while doing any kind of critical thinking). Your body is asking you to restock what you are using up.

Examples of Hobbies that Involve Low-Stakes Problem-Solving (for that dopamine boost):

• • Video games
  • Cooking and baking
  • Arts and Crafts
  • Building/making something
  • Solving a puzzle (literally or a real life problem with no to low stakes)
  • Playing an instrument

Thanks for reading. The next chapter will cover co-regulation: what it is, why it’s important for personal relationships and community building, and ways you can intentionally practice co-regulation with the people in your life.