Understand how your nervous system works to actively manage your responses, engage with the world with more awareness, and create healthy relationships and self-care practices.
Learn to identify when you’ve moved out of regulation into a survival response (sympathetic or dorsal) and practice finding your way back to the ventral state of safety and connection, building nervous system flexibility.
Actively look for and stop to savor micro-moments of regulating energy or ‘okayness’ (glimmers) throughout your day, bringing them into explicit awareness to build ventral capacity.
Identify specific people, places, objects, or times that predictably bring you moments of okayness and intentionally engage with them to strengthen your nervous system’s ventral pathways.
Reflect on a simple experience by interpreting it through the lens of ventral, sympathetic, and dorsal states to build awareness that your autonomic state creates your story.
Use intentional sighing to disrupt dysregulated states like despair (dorsal) or frustration (sympathetic), and to savor moments of relief or contentment in ventral.
Change your breathing ratio so that your exhale is longer than your inhale, as this directly contacts the nervous system to bring more ventral energy.
Practice resistance breathing, such as blowing through a straw or bubble wand, to encourage a long, slow exhalation that brings more ventral energy to your nervous system.
Find a movement that feels regulating (often rhythmic or circular) and practice imagining or enacting it to connect with and strengthen your ventral-regulated nervous system.
When experiencing overwhelming, chaotic sympathetic energy, allow jagged and disjointed movement to come to life, then slowly guide it towards rhythm and regulation to transition back to ventral.
In dorsal shutdown, gently invite subtle movement or notice bodily sensations like breath or rubbing your feet on the floor, to bring awareness back to the present moment and re-engage.
Select music to help you find your way to ventral states of joy or awe, or to healthily engage with and process sympathetic (fight) and dorsal (despair) feelings without feeling alone.
Be on the lookout for everyday moments of awe, which involve feeling small yet connected to something larger than yourself, to foster self-transcendent experiences and ventral connection.
Engage in activities that require you to speed up and slow down, or engage and disengage (e.g., playful interactions, alternating walking speeds), to increase the efficiency of your vagal break.
When you feel something coming from another person’s nervous system, be curious about what’s going on for them rather than making immediate assumptions.
If you sense dysregulation in an interaction, name your observation (e.g., ‘I’m noticing something interrupted our flow’) and ask curiously about the other person’s experience to open a conversation.
After a relational rupture caused by dysregulation, consciously make repairs by returning to connection (nervous system to nervous system, brain to brain) to strengthen the relationship.
After regulating and reshaping your nervous system, explicitly re-story your experiences through words, art, or movement to appreciate the new narrative that emerges from your changed autonomic state.
Actively seek out and build a small, dependable ‘micro community’ of people with whom you feel safe, welcomed, and understood, even in your moments of messiness and dysregulation.
Evaluate relationships that consistently dysregulate your nervous system and consider downsizing them, while actively seeking out new connections with people who foster regulation and welcome.
Use your capacity to stay in a ventral-regulated state as a ‘public service’ or ‘human responsibility’ to offer benevolence and healing to others, especially in a world where many are dysregulated.
Create your own menu of regulation practices, including easy and challenging options that vary in time commitment, to ensure you have true choices that fit your nervous system’s needs at any given moment.