What A Regulated Nervous System Actually Looks Like
A few weeks ago, I completely shut down.
It’s hard to describe unless you’ve felt it before.
I lay there paralyzed, unable to connect my brain to my body, listening from the other room as my husband wrangled our crying baby and tantruming toddler to bed.
Burnout, they call it.
Feels more like a blown fuse, everything going dark.
Sleep helped, but not enough to reset weeks of constant input with no exhale.
I needed a break.
I’d needed one for a while.
But alas, I’m a mother. We prevail.
Through illness upon illness.
Through hormonal swings from weaning and the first postpartum cycle.
Through blizzards and impossible decisions about the family dog.
Through an arctic January with a teething baby, a deeply feeling toddler, and a husband who travels for work.
Through carrying the ache of witnessing cruelty and suffering you can’t fix and injustice you can’t ignore.
Even if the mind is strong and hopeful enough to keep forging on, the body keeps the score.
The next day, the depletion turned into irritability.
Everything grated on me - the noise, the needs, the unrelentingness of it all.
My system was already stretched past its capacity.
I finally snapped.
I grabbed a pillow and screamed into it, loud and raw.
I screamed until my throat hurt.
The screams turned into sobs.
And honestly?
It felt good.
In the past I would have beaten myself up for this reaction - called myself too sensitive, too angry too weak.
Not anymore…
The Myth of the “Always-Regulated” Person
The more I live this, the more I realize how misunderstood nervous system regulation really is.
Somewhere along the way, “regulated” became synonymous with calm, patient, unbothered.
As if a well-regulated person is someone who moves through life with a soft voice, a slow heart rate, and endless patience.
But that’s not how the nervous system works.
Your nervous system is designed to respond to your environment.
It’s constantly scanning for cues of safety and threat - not just physical danger, but emotional and relational stress too.
A crying baby, chronic sleep deprivation, conflict, overwhelm, uncertainty, grief, world events - your body registers all of it.
Dysregulation isn’t a character flaw.
It’s a biological response.
When your system feels overloaded, it may shift into:
Fight (irritability, anger, snapping)
Flight (anxiety, restlessness, urgency)
Freeze (shutdown, numbness, disconnection)
Fawn (people-pleasing, overextending)
These aren’t failures. They’re adaptive survival responses.
And if you are a highly sensitive person, your system is wired to take in more information and process it more deeply.
Research on sensory processing sensitivity shows that HSPs notice subtleties, emotional cues, and environmental stimuli that others can filter out.
A regulated nervous system isn’t one that never enters a stress state.
That would be impossible for a human living a real life.
A regulated nervous system is one that can move through these states and eventually return to baseline.
It’s about flexibility, not perfection.
It’s about having enough support, awareness, and compassion to come back when your system gets pulled out of balance.
What Regulation Actually Looks Like
Regulation is not the absence of reaction.
It’s the relationship you have with your reactions.
Real nervous system regulation doesn’t always look like deep breathing and a calm voice.
Sometimes regulation looks like:
Noticing you’re overstimulated and turning down the noise
Saying “I need a minute” instead of pushing through
Letting yourself cry instead of holding it together
Screaming into a pillow instead of directing that anger at your child
Canceling a plan because your system needs rest
Naming what you feel instead of judging it
Repairing after you’ve been short with someone
Lowering expectations on hard days
Asking for help before you’re completely depleted
Offering yourself compassion instead of criticism
None of these are signs you’re failing.
They’re signs you’re listening.
A regulated nervous system isn’t quiet all the time.
It’s responsive.
It moves.
It recalibrates.
For me, that pillow scream was my nervous system discharging what it had been holding for too long.
Different Seasons
A few weeks have passed since that day.
Since then, my husband traveled all of last week for work.
The horrors in our country continue to escalate.
And as I chip away at writing this post, our whole family now has RSV.
Sleep is broken again.
My days have been filled with suctioning little noses, comforting warm clingy bodies, and being needed all day while my own body is running on empty.
My nervous system is still in survival mode, and I will likely snap or shut down again.
Not because I’m doing something wrong.
Not because I’ve failed at regulation.
Not because I’m a bad mother.
But because this is a season that asks a lot of a body and a heart - especially a highly sensitive one.
What’s different than years ago is this:
I don’t meet those moments with shame anymore.
I notice sooner when I’m stretched thin.
I name that I’m in a high-demand period of life.
I lower the bar on hard days instead of raising it.
I let repair matter more than perfection.
I listen when my body asks for rest instead of pushing past it.
And I remind myself that needing support doesn’t mean I’m failing.
It means I’m human.
If your nervous system is in survival right now too, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.
It means you’re human too.
Want some extra support with understanding and caring for your nervous system, especially during intense seasons of life? I’m here for you.