Reactive Regulation in Real Life (Part 6: B2B Series)

This morning I wanted to flush my kid down the toilet, it was just one of those mornings. It made me realize that while last week we had a great chat about reactive regulation, it was a bit heavy on the theory vs practical application. I'm extending that conversation today to share some real life examples of how I use these tools in my everyday life, how I used them this morning with my son. So, here's Part 6 of my Back to the Basics Series.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How a challenging morning with a 4-year-old demonstrates simple regulation techniques that prevent reactive parenting
• Using activating breathwork to overcome the 2pm energy slump instead of reaching for caffeine
• Navigating grief with grounding techniques that help process emotions without becoming overwhelmed
• The three ways reactive regulation tools support us: physiologically shifting our state, creating awareness and pause, and building confidence and agency

3 Takeaways (about why reactive tools work). It’s because…

1. They can directly impact your physiology - Breath work, movement, temperature changes, and vision exercises actually shift your autonomic nervous system state. 
2. They help us create awareness and pause - Even if you don't shift states completely, the simple act of noticing and pausing creates space between stimulus and response. That morning with my child, I still felt frustrated, but the pause allowed me to respond intentionally rather than react automatically.
3. They build confidence and agency - Having these tools counters the helplessness that often comes with dysregulation. Instead of "I don't know what to do," you begin to think, "I have tools I can try." This builds a sense of agency over time.

Next Episode Preview: Next week, we will move on to proactive regulation and explore how creating a more regulated life sets the stage for long-term healing and well-being.

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Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. Hey friend. 

Welcome back to my Back to the Basics series. This is technically part six, but it's a bit of a surprise episode, because if you've been following along, you know that I ended last week's episode by telling you that we were going to move on today with a conversation about proactive regulation. But par for the course, I've changed my mind, and this came after this morning's event. I had a particularly activating morning with my young son and I had a thought, an epiphany, if you will, while driving home from school drop off this morning that I was not done talking about reactive, regulation, averse, that I still had a little bit more to say. And the thought that I had was that last week's conversation, we talked about reactive regulation conceptually, what it is, how it works. But concepts only get us so far, and so my goal today is that I want to bridge the gap between theory and application by sharing how I actually use these tools in my everyday life, how I used these tools this morning to not completely blow my gasket with my kid, because it's one thing to understand concepts that reactive tools are things you can use when you're activated or shut down. It's another thing to see, or in this case, to hear how these play out in real life. 

And before continuing, I still want to put a plug in for the conversation we are going to have next week that the majority of my healing, definitely the majority of my deep and lasting healing, has come through various categories we'll talk about next week in proactive regulation. But no matter how far I get in my healing journey, I don't think I will ever be done using reactive tools. I just don't depend on them as often. I don't use them as frequently. But I think that no matter how much healing we do, none of us become robots. That's never the goal, and at least for me personally, I don't think that there is a place in this life where I get so zen that situations or life are never overwhelming, and it's in those moments that I am really, really grateful, not just to have a conceptual understanding of reactive tools, but a practical, practiced and integrated toolbox of them for myself in those moments. And so that's what I want to share with you is how I use these tools to show up more intentionally in my life. 

Now, a quick recap of our conversation from last week. Reactive resourcing or reactive regulation are in the moment, tools that help you to either support yourself with whatever emotion or nervous system state that you're experiencing, or they can be used to help you actually shift and change your state, to help you go from feeling really activated or shut down to feeling more regulated. Is one example of that, and in a story I'll share in just a little bit, you'll hear another example of how we can use these tools to shift our state. So these tools can help you take the edge off the intensity the bigness of what you're experiencing, thinking or feeling, to help you show up more intentionally in that moment. These tools can help you to feel more supported in the bigness of an experience, so that you can stay with it long enough to process it, to complete it. 

Now I want to tell you about my morning, my morning with my four just weeks away from five year old son, where I was so grateful to have my reactive regulation toolkit, because in the moments where I need it most, in the moments that are really important to me in my life, for example, the way that I show up in my role as a mother, these tools help me show up in more intentional and authentic ways. They help me show up in ways that I don't have to regret. So this morning started a little bit later than normal, so there was a little bit of urgency in my system that I noted even just a few minutes into getting the kids breakfast, getting them up, and then my two sons sat at the table. My two year old loves, right now to take his metal cup and just bang it on our table. Then there was my older son, who just had so many, so many opinions the breakfast table this morning. Then as we were trying. And get his jacket on, take it out the door. He insisted on wearing the same sweatshirt that he has been wearing for many days now. He really likes this particular sweatshirt because it has really big pockets, and I quote mom, so I can collect things without them falling out again, very typical for almost five year old boy stuff. But this sweatshirt, friends, oh my gosh, it's so filthy, so filthy. And I have let him wear it filthy already for many days. And today I just made the decision that this was my limit. I was going to do a load of laundry. Anyways, he was going to need to pick a different jacket, and oh, the meltdown that ensued. And one thing led to a meltdown about another thing, we were already running a little bit late. I didn't want to miss the drop off window, and I just felt my body progressively tensing, progressively activating. It started in my stomach that my chest got tight my shoulders, and then I felt it in my throat, and I know I have a particular feeling it's almost like that, like a yell, a yell is

just caught. It's stuck right there. And I could feel almost every part of me wanting to yell, just force another sweatshirt onto his body, throw him over my shoulder and put him in the car, and I will be the first to admit that that's probably not far from what I've done once or twice in the past, but it is not what I wanted to do today. It's not what I want to make a habit of moving forward. It's not the mothering that I feel good about afterwards. I, in general, I have just decided that I don't want to be the mom who yells because she can't settle the bigness inside her. So in this moment, I am basically crossing the threshold into his room. I am under the door frame, and I can feel the yell. It's so close. But because I have proactively practiced my reactive tools so frequently, or I have practiced them in lower stake moments often enough that I now actually have pretty automatic access to them when I have a micro moment of awareness, so the minute I noticed the the felt sensation of my shoulders rising and the yell in my throat, I know when I get to this point that I need to physically take a step back, because as I've mentioned in previous episodes on this podcast, my default survival mode is fight, and I don't really want to fight my kid. That's not the goal this morning. So what I did was I physically took one step back. I inhaled as I clenched my fists, and then I exhaled as I released my hands and let my shoulders drop down that step back was communicating to my nervous system, we don't want to move in towards this take a beat. 

Clenching my fists was a way of communicating and validating to my nervous system. Hey, yes, I see this urge. I feel the fight response, and now with us exhale, let's physically release our hands and shoulders so that you can know that is it's okay to ease up, because this isn't a tiger, this isn't war. This is your young child. There is nothing to fight here. What you need to know is that your body, your nervous system, does not speak a verbal language. I can tell myself to calm down with my thoughts 100 times. But unless I do something to sensationally communicate safety or release to my nervous system, it's unlikely to make a bit of difference. How many times have you told yourself you're overreacting? Calm down, calm down. And that almost makes it worse. It almost makes it worse, because it's such a disconnect between what you're thinking in your head and what you're feeling in your body. So this experience of, Oh, I feel the yell in my throat, I'm going to physically take one step back, inhale, clench, exhale, release. Five seconds. If that, that was all I needed to be able to step back into that situation. Stern, but kind instead of yelling and escalating the power struggle, stern, but kind a clear boundary was set, an option was given. We've got to go, we are going, and here is your option. 

Now with that reactive tool, did it get me from feeling frustrated and like I wanted to flush my kid down the toilet to feeling like calm, cool, collected, easy, breezy, Cover Girl, Mom, no, no, it didn't, but it took the edge off enough so that I didn't regret the way that I showed up in the situation or in this relationship with a person that's really important to me. 

And that is what these reactive tools so often can do, is they can take the edge off the intensity in the moment so that you can have even just a little bit more access to. Your logical brain a little bit more access to your authentic, regulated self to show up in a way that feels better for you, to show up in a way that you really want to not the way that your reactionary self is is pulled to in this particular situation. 

The proactive work here could be to ask myself, Is this a pattern? Why was this so particularly activating for me in the first place? Was it just an accumulation of a busy morning and not the best night's sleep? Or did this ping on a particular internal wound of mine? And those are all things that I can choose to look at and step into at a later time, but in that moment, this morning, as this was all unfolding, that was not the time to ask those questions. That's not the time to look at all of this in that moment. It was the time to get a grip, to be present with him and myself in the situation, and reactive regulation tools are exactly what can support you in doing that. 

Let me give you a few other examples of how I have turned to my reactive toolbox in the past week or couple weeks. So let's start with a few days ago, I hit that 2pm energy slump that many of us, many of us know so well, many of us, when we feel that we tend to reach for another cup of our caffeinated beverage of choice, or maybe we get pulled into social media to zone out and doom scroll when we have that energy slump. But here is what I know for me, that when I turn to caffeine that late in the afternoon, it impacts my sleep, which makes me more likely to feel this energy slump again tomorrow. I also know that if I reach for my phone to scroll number one, I'm going to end up being on my phone way longer than I want, and I'm going to when I get off my phone, I am going to have even less motivation than when I grabbed it for my my little break on this day, instead of falling into either of those default reactions or patterns, I used activating breath work to help me jump start and energize my nervous system. I looked at the situation and I said, Okay, what state Am I in? And I was like, I am feeling not completely shut down, but I definitely have some red zone energy right now. I am slumping. I am immobilizing. I was like, okay, like, where do you want to be? Where do you want to be because you have an hour and a half left to child care. This is the your to do list. Where do you want to be? And I was like, I want to be focused. I want to feel energized and focused on this task. I wanted to shift my physiological state. 

So I said, Okay, what tool is going to do that? What tool is going to take me from being a little bit exhausted, immobilized to having the energy to be focused, and we talk a lot about breath work in the context of helping us to calm down, but you can also use breath to alive in to judge and activate your nervous system. So while a deep, slow breath or an extended exhale, breath can calm your system, a breath pattern that I call double breathing can actually help you to awaken, to encourage focus, to activate your system. So the breath practice that I turned to was a quick double inhale through my nose with a kind of a forceful, quick exhale out my mouth. It sounds like this, in and out, in and out, in and out. Now, if you're feeling anxious, don't do this. This might take you over the edge. But if you're having this energy slump and you want to really come to 30 to 60 seconds of that had my insides buzzing. I looked up and I was like, Yeah, I might even take this last hour and go work from my walking pad. It helped me to actually physiologically shift my autonomic nervous system into a more kind of sympathetic and regulated state. 

So again, helping to segue our understanding of reactive versus proactive. Work. I am not currently regularly experiencing these 2pm energy slumps. I just happen to feel it that day. But if I were to notice that this was a pattern that almost every day I was crashing midday, then I would likely do some proactive digging to figure out what was contributing to that. Am I not getting enough sleep? Is that my body's way of saying I've had too many consecutive hours at a computer that we need a break? Is my blood sugar crashing and I need a snack? Do I not feel purpose around the work that I'm doing or navigating my day, I would do some experimenting, because reaching for a cup of coffee at 2pm every day is a band aid. It's a band aid, not a solution. That afternoon exhaustion is a symptom, trying to communicate something to you. And so while that activating breath is totally a tool. I could turn to pretty much every afternoon without a ton of side effects. I don't want to use it to bypass the signal that my body is telling me again. Like I said, this isn't a pattern for me. It was a particular day I did know that I didn't get great sleep that night, so it was a tool that I used in the moment to get what I needed to done, to shift me into a more ideal state to face the next hour and a half of my work day. So again, this is an example of me using reactive tools to shift my physiological state. I pulled on some levers, using breath to stimulate a change in my autonomic nervous system. 

Amazing. Like, what a cool thing that we can do that when we understand our physiology enough to work with it, I also hear, as I'm talking about this, want to remind you the importance of understanding tool layering. When your goal is to change the state that you're in, remember that you cannot get there too big or too fast, or it will backfire when your goal is to shift and change your physiological state using reactive tools, be it vision tools, breath tools, vagal toning, other somatic practices that can have real influence in shifting your state. Remember we need to meet yourself where you are, and then layer tools to shift to where you might rather be and because I knew for me that this energy slump was pretty purely physiological. There wasn't a lot of emotion, there wasn't a lot of the other signs and symptoms of me being in the red zone, certain types of thinking patterns, certain types of behaviors. It was just my body was tired, and I just, instead of grabbing for caffeine, judged it with some breath work, I could go to that activating tool pretty quickly. And so this is all about building familiarity to your nervous system, knowing where you are and what tools work best for you in certain situations. 

And I want to talk about another reason why these tools work. Why reactive tools work is because they are so tied to this interceptive awareness. They are tied to you building more awareness of your emotions, your sensations, your behaviors, your thoughts. And it is amazing how we can become more intentional and show up differently when we build a habit of not so quickly or automatically reacting like this morning, reactionarily. I wanted to yell, I wanted to dismiss I wanted to pick up my kid, throw him over my shoulder, throw him in the car. But because I've built enough awareness around what it feels like in my body when I'm being pulled down that nervous system ladder, that awareness, that noticing gave me the space to pause and choose something different. 

and so early on in our clients journey with these tools and with nervous system awareness, that's a really fun thing to see happen, is that this just invites them into consistent conversation with their body. Where am I on that nervous system ladder? Let me try this thing. Did that shift? Did that change anything? Because so many of us have become so disconnected from our bodies, from our sensations, from paying attention in this way. And so building out your toolbox part of that process is that we're inviting that mind body conversation online again. And one more reason that having this toolkit is so valuable is because of the autonomy and confidence that it can give you in what might have felt like previously helpless feeling situations. So no longer is it I'm so activated, I'm so shut down, I don't know what to do. Instead, it becomes I'm activated. And here are some things I can try or here are some things that I know have supported me in the past, and having this go to toolkit for our clients really helps soften their stories of helplessness or hopelessness that often happen in those anxiety or depression spirals. 

And even here, though, because I love to bring some of the nuance into the healing journey, is I'll caveat this that we absolutely have clients that we've been working with for a while who have built out their toolboxes, who have evidence that their tools work. And sometimes when life either hands them too much or something happens, it's particularly tied to a wounded or protective part in them, or maybe they just got out of the habit of paying attention, and they got really deep into a state of activation or shutdown, they might still sometimes have these old stories visit them. Maybe I'll always be like this. Do these tools really work? Maybe I can't heal, and that's okay, too. I want to normalize this non linear part of healing that sometimes our old stories still creep in. The biggest difference that I find for our clients who have a toolbox usually is that they reset from that place more quickly, or they turn to their coaching, or the community inside the membership, and they share this experience. They share these thoughts, these old stories, openly and vulnerably in a space that gets them where they then, often quite quickly, receive support and validation, which also acts as a form of reaction. Resourcing, because all of us it is resourcing. It is regulating for us to not feel so alone or unsupported in the hard things that we experience. 

Now I want to offer you one other example, like I said, the 2pm slump. That is an example of reactive regulating, where the goal was to shift my physiological state. But what about that other option that I've talked about? Because with reactive resourcing, the goal isn't to change anything, but instead to in the moment, just resource yourself, to offer yourself support in being right where you are. And for this example, let's talk about grief. At the end of last year, I lost my soul, dog of almost 13 years, and his what would have been next birthday was last week. And I think the first of anything after loss can bring up a lot for us, and something that I also have not yet mentioned. So unless I do a post on social media sometime before this episode goes live, this is my first public announcement that we're pregnant. We're pregnant again, we're expecting and right now, I am just a few days away from the same stage of pregnancy where we lost our son a few years ago, and so the last week or two has felt pretty tender for me, as I just really miss my dog. I miss my dog and having that shadow in my everyday life, and I have been noticing some apprehension with my current pregnancy, and as we get closer to to that 16-17, week mark, I've been revisiting a lot of those final moments in my mind with my son. And the reality with this is, is that there is nothing, there's nothing here to fix or change, and yet grief is hard and heavy and can be all consuming in moments where I don't want to drown in it. And so I turn to my reactive resourcing tools, as my anchors, as my buoys, to let myself feel and be with while also still being able to stay afloat. 

And so some of those things for me have looked like just letting myself cry and then pausing to look up to do some visual orienting. I have taken these big feelings out for a walk more than once. I've crawled into bed at the end of the day and shared some of my heaviness with my husband seeking co regulation friends, connection is one of our most powerful regulation tools, especially when we were dealing with more of a shutdown state. Another time that this showed up for me, in the middle of my work day, I just stood and I did some swaying. I did some bilateral tapping. This helped me to stay grounded in my body while processing and being with that emotion. And in these experiences, I often will layer in some self validation, sometimes speaking literally aloud to myself, something like this is grief moving through and it makes sense that you feel this. You don't need to rush it. It's okay that it's here. And so when grief hits like this, it can be really tempting to push it away, to distract from it, or feel like you need to get over it. But through this nervous system lens, I recognize grief as a natural response that needs respect and space, and my reactive resourcing here wasn't about trying to fix the grief or make it go away. Instead, I use tools to help me stay present with the grief without becoming overwhelmed by it, and this is what reactive resourcing can look like in those moments too. What I want you to notice in these examples is that we can approach reactive regulation from different entry points. We can access it and approach it through the sensations in our body, noticing tension, heaviness, shallow breathing. We can have that awareness that we might want to turn to those tools through emotion, recognizing anxiety, frustration or grief, we can also notice it through thought patterns or beliefs, catching ourselves in these specific narratives. 

And this ties directly back to what we discussed in part two of this series, the process of nervous system mapping. It's one thing to know about the nervous system you need to get to know yours, and the more familiar you become with how you uniquely experience these different states, the more effectively you can regulate and resource when you find yourself there. And I have a worksheet that we use with all of our clients to help them explore and map out their nervous system states. So again, my hope with this conversation was to take last week's conceptual conversation about reactive regulation and resourcing and make it more real. My hope is that you might be able to find some parallels between the examples that I shared and experiences. From my life to circumstances or experiences in your own life. Because here's the thing, I teach you a lot on this podcast, lots of concepts, lots of science, but it doesn't matter what you know. It is what you do with what you know. It is how you apply this information in your real life, in your healing in a personalized way that is going to change things for you. 

People don't sign up for our one on one coaching program or join the membership very often to simply get more information. There is so much information already out there. There's so much information here on this podcast for free, our clients sign up to work with us one on one because they want personalized support in taking this information and putting it into action in a meaningful, deep and strategic way, so that they can finally move the needle in their healing journey. And that is exactly what happens for people in that program. As part of our restorer which is our one on one coaching program, we have our clients do a pre and post anxiety and depression symptoms assessment, and what the last couple years of data has shown us is that our clients see an average symptom reduction of 38% in just 16 weeks. And that's been a really, really exciting thing to see numerically, and it's so validating to approaching and understanding and working with healing through a nervous system lens, and the folks in our membership, there's absolutely information and education there, likely in a more organized way than this podcast, but those folks are more often there for community, to be in a place with people who get it, to be in a space where they can share their stories, ask their questions, to feel Seen and supported and safe as they navigate their healing journey. 

To summarize, here are three takeaways about why reactive tools work. It's because, number one, they can directly impact your physiology. Breath work, movement temperature changes, visual exercises can shift your autonomic nervous system state. 

They work because, number two, they help us create awareness and pause, even if you don't shift states completely, the simple act of noticing and pausing creates space between stimulus and response. This morning with my kid, I felt frustrated, but that pause allowed me to respond intentionally, rather than to react automatically. 

And number three, they work because they build confidence and agency. Having these tools counters the helplessness that often comes with dysregulation. Instead of that story of, I don't know what to do, you begin to think I have tools that I can try, and this builds a sense of agency self efficacy that supports your healing in the long run. 

And so as we wrap up this extended look at reactive regulation, I have a simple invitation for you. I invite you to notice one opportunity today or tomorrow where you can try a reactive regulation tool. Maybe it's a moment of frustration, overwhelm, irritation, just try one small tool, a deep breath, a gentle movement practice. Maybe it's just simply naming the state that you're in and see if anything shifts, see if it makes a difference, and don't worry about doing it perfectly. The practice itself, of noticing and trying builds the neural pathways that make regulation more accessible over time. 

And now next week, I promise we will move into our conversation around proactive regulation, that deeper work that addresses the root causes of our dysregulation and builds our capacity for well being over time. In the meantime, I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear how you're using these concepts, how you're putting this information that you learn here into action in your own life. You can always send me an email. Reach out on social media. I love, love hearing from you. All right, friend, until next time I am sending hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai