Regulation does not always feel "better" in the moment, but it will probably feel better in the long term

On why nervous system regulation & emotional regulation sometimes feel absolutely awful.

Describing what regulating is in words that come from my brain and will be read by the brains of others is challenging. It’s difficult because regulating is not something the brain does. It’s not the brain’s job to understand regulation. It’s a body thing.

But what I’ve realized is, most people (myself included) have brains that really like understanding things before they give us permission to let the bodies experience them. For many of us, our brains act as a sort of bodyguard… literally a body guard lolol that screen out new information to discern if it’s going to help us or not before it ever lets the body try it.

So, here’s my attempt to provide some such brains the clarification they need!

Because it’s a body thing and not a brain thing, some people mistake regulating for feeling better. And unfortunately that’s actually a take that has been popularized by many instagram pop psychology accounts and out-of-touch wellness practitioners. Well-meaning people, I’m sure, but it’s unfortunately misleading.

It’s true that when our bodies get into the habit of regulating themselves on the regular, we will find that we feel better most of the time. This is because our nervous systems aren’t overworking and burning themselves out by keeping us stuck in freeze all the time—which is actually extremely draining on our bodies. But while there are lots and lots of benefits to returning to a state of flow, that doesn’t mean regulation is always pleasant. In fact, learning how to regulate is often a very unpleasant experience.

This unpleasantness is actually because we are allowing ourselves to feel things that we previously experienced as too uncomfortable or too much.

Think of it this way: when we are dysregulated, what that actually means is, our nervous systems at one point encountered a situation in which too much happened too fast, and our bodies were unable to react in the way they naturally wanted to. For example, if we were in a car accident, our body might have wanted to run away from the danger… but we couldn’t, because we were stuck inside a car. Maybe our feet wanted to run but they were trapped. Maybe our hands wanted to rush in front of our bodies and shield our faces from the incoming shattering glass, but it happened too fast for our hands to react.

These physical desires of our feet running, our hands wanting to move out in front of our faces, snap back inside our bodies and get stuck. They’re frozen in time. This is what trauma is. Trauma is not the event itself that happened to us—trauma is not the car accident. The trauma is when the naturally occurring reactions our bodies have do not get the chance to express themselves and instead become stuck (frozen) in the body.

You can think of these stored reactions like something that has tension when you tighten it up together. Take this plastic hanger, for example, in the following photos. It has a natural shape that it wants to be in. This shape doesn’t require any effort to maintain. I don’t have to do anything, it just is that way. It takes up the size and shape it naturally wants to take up. If I squeeze it together, it creates tension. My hand squeezing the hanger is like our bodies preparing for a natural response—the hands wanting to reach up in front of our faces, for example, or our feet wanting to propel us forward and run. Both of those responses start by me squeezing the hanger. Now let’s imagine my hand gets stuck here, holding the hanger together. It never completes the cycle of letting it go so it can complete its response—and return to its natural, whole shape.

In this photo, you can see the hanger in its natural, whole shape. It doesn’t require any effort on my part to maintain this shape—it just is.

In this photo, I squeeze the hanger together. You can see this creates tension. If I let go, this hanger will have a natural reaction and bounce back to its original shape. In order for this shape to remain squeezed, I would need to keep holding it. It requires a lot of effort on my part to keep holding the hanger in this shape. If I kept holding it for a long time, especially if I held it for years, or decades, you can see how that would create all kinds of pain, numbness, and other issues in my hand.

The following video is what happens when I release the hanger. You can see how it returns to its natural, full shape.

How long do you think I could keep holding the hanger like this before I got tired?

If I keep holding the hanger like this for years, or like for many of us, decades… what is that going to be like for my hand? I might start to feel cramps at first, or soreness, and then after a while it might start to really hurt. I might develop chronic pain. And then, when the pain’s been going on for far too long and I still haven’t let go of the hanger, numbness might start to set in. We can only experience pain for so long before it becomes too much for us to handle and our bodies start to numb it out. Then we might loose feeling in our hands, followed by stiffness.

Now imagine this is you. For many of you, it is you. We have these stored reactions in our bodies, and it takes a LOT of effort to maintain them. We have to constantly be squeezing this coat hanger to keep them in frozen-mode. When we do this for a long time, we start to develop all kinds of other symptoms, pain, soreness, numbness, stiffness… etc. It’s a lot of work on our bodies and it makes us very tired. This is also what causes the low-energy people associate with depression. There are a lot of reactions being stored in the body in freeze mode and this is a fuck ton of work to maintain. If someone is experiencing extreme tiredness but doesn’t “do much” throughout the day, this is why. They are actually doing a whole heck of a lot behind the scenes in their body and all of that work is exhausting.

Ok, so now you might be thinking… great let’s release that coat hanger! Let’s let it go! Let’s stop putting all that effort into holding it squeezed together!

And yes that’s great! That’s one of our intentions in somatic work, and we usually do feel a whole heck of a lot better afterwards. Letting go of the coat hanger usually is followed by immense relief. After we get some rest and recover, we tend to have way more energy than we had before, because we’re not wasting all that energy trying to squeeze the coat hanger constantly. Pretty cool, right?

But here’s the thing that sometimes surprises people at first—there’s usually a reason why we stored that reaction inside of us to begin with, and it can be scary to consider letting it out when our previous belief system was dependent on it not being let out. For example, let’s say Nathan is someone who grew up in an environment where it was never ok to say no to someone hugging him. Let’s say Nathan’s parents taught him that you have to hug Aunt Jeanie every time you see her. Let’s say Aunt Jeanie is a little too exuberant with her hugs and as a little kid this was overwhelming for Nathan. It always happened too fast for him to process what was happening and her intense perfume was disorienting and made him dizzy and his nose hurt. He was such a small little human and her hugs would totally envelop his body and he would even loose balance and sometimes lost his footing. The world would spin around him as he was picked up and squeezed unexpectedly. Aunt Jeanies hugs felt quite scary for him!

Nathan’s initial natural reaction as a kid might have been to want to run away, scream “no,” or push her away. But when his no wasn’t listened to, and he was picked up anyway, he might have had more natural reactions such as screaming, crying, or even fighting back and trying to push her away or push himself out of her arms. Then he might have realized these didn’t work. She didn’t listen to his “no,” and he was too small to fight Aunt Jeanie off. And let’s say all of these normal, natural reactions to such an overwhelming situation only made Aunt Jeanie and Nathan’s parents more stern or even angry at him. Perhaps they told him his reactions were rude and hurt Aunt Jeanies feelings. Maybe they taught him that it’s “polite” to hug your family when you greet them and he slowly learned that he has to do it, even though he doesn’t want to.

Nathan slowly learns how to hide his natural reactions. This doesn’t mean they go away. The reactions still happen but instead of completing themselves (being expressed) they get frozen in time and stuck in the muscle tissue. Stored in that tissue are now all kinds of different natural responses to hugging someone you don’t want to hug: screams, cries, “no’s,” our feet wanting to run, our hands wanting to push.

This becomes exhausting for Nathan to hold all of that in. Decades later, Nathan is now an adult and he regularly hugs people he doesn’t actually want to hug. Sometimes he even hugs people he doesn’t feel safe with at all. But he’s become so used to it at this point, he doesn’t even realize he’s storing all of these reactions in his body. For Nathan it’s just “the way things are.”

But now in his mid-thirties, Nathan eventually becomes depressed. At this point, the body’s started to reach it’s maxing out point of too-much-stored-reactions in the body that it can’t keep storing anymore. That’s where all of that mysterious exhaustion comes from that isn’t actually so mysterious at all.

Nathan’s started realizing he finds social settings absolutely exhausting but he doesn’t really understand why. He’s not conscious of how many reactions he’s storing in his muscle tissues that increase when he’s around more people. He still thinks he has to hug everyone to be polite, because that’s what he’s been taught. His exhaustion is a mystery to him.

Let’s say Nathan comes to me for somatic work. He says he feels lifeless and finds hanging out with his friends exhausting. But he’s also lonely, and this contradiction confuses him. He actually really wants to hang out with his friends and go out on the weekend sometimes, but he just can’t figure out how to make it through the night and always feels burnt out the next day and needs days to recover. He’s plagued with chronic exhaustion and a vague unhappiness he can’t put a reason to.

As we’re working together to help his nervous system return to a state of flow, we pick up on these stored reactions in his body. We don’t know what they’re all about yet, but we can feel them. “I’m ready to release whatever this is!” Nathan says, because he wants to feel better. He knows this will help. He knows he’s in freeze mode and he’s learned enough about somatics and the nervous system to be down to give it a try even if he doesn’t know where we’re going yet.

Let’s use the hanger example again here to help paint the picture. So, let’s say we start to help Nathan slowly unclench his hand that he has wrapped around this hanger. Sounds easy right? He just has to let go!

But as he begins letting go just a little bit, he experiences a very unpleasant sensation that totally surprises him and freaks him out and before he even means to, he clenches his hand up again.

What was he feeling?

As he started to unclench his hand around the hanger, the hanger began to release and expand. The stored reaction started to move forward, and express itself. The hanger moved towards wanting to take up its full size and shape again.

That’s what Nathan was feeling. It’s not going to hurt him, and it’s not dangerous, but it was unfamiliar, and this surprised Nathan. Remember, it’s been decades since Nathan felt the sensation of the hanger moving and the experience of it being at its full size. He’s used to it being small and squeezed up like that. That unfamiliarness was unpleasant just because it was unfamiliar.

There are some other reasons why it might have been unpleasant, too. Part of the hanger releasing and reacting is that he might come into contact with some of the stored reactions from the original experience for example screaming, crying, a desire to push his hands, a desire for his feet to run. He might even experience unexpected resurfacing of memories of his Aunt Jeanie. He might have no idea why he’s thinking of Aunt Jeanie right now, and that could be disorienting, too. He might even get a whiff of her perfume and feel dizziness. The room might feel like it starts to spin.

All of this is possible in these moments when we start to let go of the coathanger.

It might take a long time for Nathan to process all the things that come up for him when he lets go of that hanger. There are also changes that might need to take place in the physical world and his environment for him to feel safe enough to unclench his hand. For example, he might need to become more comfortable with saying no and he might actually need to practice this a few times with safe enough people before he feels ready to allow the hanger to take up its full shape. And there are some physical changes in his body that he might need to get comfortable with experiencing before he feels safe enough to let go. For example, he might need to become more familiar with the physical sensation of crying. Crying is something that happens throughout the body and if we’re not used to it, the sensations can be quite scary and overwhelming. Of course, crying is not actually dangerous for us, but we might need some time to acclimate before it doesn’t scare us anymore. Otherwise we might think we’re having a panic attack, or a heart attack, or we’ve become deathly ill, because we’re experiencing something in the body we’re not used to feeling.

Of course, we cannot accomplish all of this in a single day. This is why regulating doesn’t always make us feel better in the moment. We might actually first experience some pretty unpleasant or uncomfortable sensations in the process of returning to a natural state of flow. Part of why being in flow eventually does actually feel so much better and way more comfortable and pleasant is because we’ve learned that it’s ok to experience a variety of sensations in the body that we previously found threatening.

So rather than those unpleasant sensations going away, they become integrated. And oftentimes they do eventually become quite pleasant to feel. For example, I love the sensation of crying nowadays. I find it very pleasant and even pleasurable. But at first, it was very overwhelming and scary because it was unfamiliar.

This is why regulating doesn’t typically involve making sensations go away. And while they do eventually start to feel better, they won’t necessarily feel better immediately.

Having a well-regulated nervous system means having a nervous system where our natural reactions are in a state of flow. As you can see from this example, learning how to allow our nervous systems to flow freely while also navigating the very complex nature of our environments is an ongoing practice that takes care and intention. For example, Nathan might not want to loudly scream “no!” and aggressively push his boyfriend’s mom away as a 30 year old when she leans in for a hug. Even though this is what he might feel on the inside at first, and this is what his 3 year old body would have done with Aunt Jeanie, now as a 30 year old in this new context he needs new tools at his disposal that provide the same function. With practice, we learn how to express our nervous systems reactions in ways that make sense for our current context. For example, he might say “no thanks, Nancy, I’m not feeling the hug today but it’s so good to see you! How have you been?” while he gently turns his body away from Nancy and backs up a little and lightly puts his hands out in front of him. When this works, and provides the same protection, his body no longer stores the reaction frozen inside his muscles and he gets to experience a flowing, regulated nervous system! His hands, feet, and voice all got to express themselves and this is very, very freeing and way less taxing on his body.

I would absolutely love it if folks could comment with any more questions they have about the nervous system and stuck reactions! I’d like to know what types of things people need to understand better, or what you’re interested in hearing more about. This will help me to know what more I can say on this topic in future essays.

It’s one of my goals to make nervous system tools more accessible to a wider range of people and I hope that my writing and examples help do just that!

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