When your capacity for self-regulation increases, you spend much less energy on trying to manage your feelings, physiology and emotions.
How your nervous system responds when you face challenges, meet demands and when you’re pushed outside of your comfort zone, will profoundly influence your life.
Stress affects your physical, emotional and cognitive energy reserves. You only have a limited amount of energy you can expend each day. It’s quickly depleted by overwhelm and being flooded by emotions like anxiety and shame.
With self-regulation you can reshape the nervous system and break this cycle.
Then when challenges arise, your emotions don’t leave you depleted, exhausted and unable to put energy towards what it is you truly want.
With greater self-regulation and stress resilience you free yourself from constantly trying to calm yourself back down when you feel anxious, reactive or unable to switch off. In this state, you’re flooded by emotions and your cognitive processing becomes disorganised, so you don’t make good choices. It’s hard to work towards your goals in this state.
With greater self-regulation you don’t have the continual struggle of trying to bring yourself back up because you feel flat, shut-down, numb or depressed. Your cognitive processing slows down in this state so it’s harder to think clearly. Communication is also affected making it hard to speak up, ask for help, set boundaries or build relationships.
Moving into the states of anxiety or shame is not something that you’re choosing. This process happens outside of conscious awareness in the lower regions of the brain. It’s not you - it’s what your nervous system learnt from your past experiences. With neural exercises it’s possible to teach it new ways of responding to challenges and demands.
Increased self-regulation allows you to put more of your precious energy into the things that matter most to you.
This happens by accessing the vagus nerve to slow your physiology back down. When you don’t need to manage nervous system dysregulation, you’re far more likely to be successful – all of that energy can be redirected into your passion. You can grow, flourish, thrive and reach your potential.
You can spend more time enjoying life rather than swinging between the highs of anxiety and overdoing, down to the lows of shame and not feeling good enough. Self-regulation leads to greater resilience, and you learn to work on an even keel.
If you’d like to learn more about the vagus nerve, neuroscience and balancing the nervous system, the eight week Vagus Nerve Program.