Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

How I Turned a Potentially Really Bad Day Around With Regulation

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 127

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I woke up anxious today and this conversation is about what I did to not let it ruin my day. 4am kid wake up, a bad dream, excitement, crappy sleep, all had my system wired from the minute I opened my eyes. I'd love to tell you I used this magic tool to regulate my nervous system and get on with my day, but instead what I want to share is the roller coaster of regulated, and re-regulated, and re-regulating that my day called for.

ps. This is an episode re-post from 2024. It got deleted in a tech glitch and I wanted to give it back a place on the podcast.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • How to do a quick nervous system check-in when you wake up activated
  • The difference between "urge parenting" and "regulated parenting"
  • Why your system might default to urgency even when you're not actually running late
  • How to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic states using breath, vision, and movement


Three takeaways:

  1. Having a regulated nervous system doesn't mean you're regulated all the time. Part of regulation means having the ability to notice and ride those waves throughout the day.
  2. Moments of activation aren't points of failure, but points of practice. If you've spent a lot of time in survival mode, it's normal that your system is still primed for urgency—rewiring takes time and repetition.
  3. Your state determines your story. When you're dysregulated you  sees problems, when regulated you see solution and collaboration.

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Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast

Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

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Amanda Armstrong  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. 

Amanda Armstrong  0:28  
Let's dive right in today to talking about my day. So once again, I had a different plan for this week's podcast episode, and then I had today, and I shared a little bit about it on the stories on Instagram, and it was really well received. And I figured, you know what? Let's go there. Let's have that conversation. Hmm, where to start? Let me start by giving you just a little bit of context for the events that I had going on. Once a month, I go to a meetup for mother business owners, and it's this really incredible meetup hosted by one of my amazing friends, where we learn, we network, we have a good time. And for me, it's really just like where I get to see two of my good friends. One is the facilitator of the event, the other one takes photographs of the event. And I just, I get so excited because this is like the one day a month where I am with my friends and not trying to juggle, like business and mom and everything. It's just, it's something I'm really excited about. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:30  
So let's talk about the morning that led up to me stepping foot in the door to this event, and some of the regulation that I needed to do, we had a 4am wake up, a baby that had a poopy diaper and a kid who wet the bed. And so 4am wake up, it took all of us a little bit longer to get back to sleep than maybe just like a normal wake up in the middle of the night is with my kids, which led to us sleeping in a little bit. We had a later start to the morning before our nanny gets there for my youngest son, and my older son goes to his preschool. And how our morning usually goes is, I do a lot of the like getting kids ready. Dad gets ready because he works outside the home, and then he will take my son to preschool, but because my husband was working from home, this is probably way more detail about my day than you need to know, but I think it sets the stage. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:32  
Let's set the stage for this. My husband's working from home today. I'm leaving for this event, so we just decide that I will drop my son off at preschool, and then, you know, head on my way. Anyways, as you can guess, the morning was just a little bit chaotic. And on top of all of this, I had an awful, awful dream, anytime that your dream involves like, if you're a parent, need like you needing to protect your kid in any way, you just wake up and your system is already on high alert. So what is, I think my saving grace, day after day after day after day is that, over time, I have developed a practice that now just pretty much happens automatically on its own, where I wake up, and within the first few moments of me being awake, I do a quick self check in, how full is my stress bucket? What state is my nervous system in? Where am I on that nervous system ladder? And so I'm doing my check in, and I'm just like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty activated, knowing for me that it's like, it's not going to take much for me to feel really overwhelmed. So I do this check in I feel activated. And I again, because I've been doing this practice for a really, really long time, when I can consciously notice pause enough to notice the activation, I immediately know that I need to settle my body. So in that moment, I take just a few deep breaths, I shake it out really quick. I turn to specific polyvagal nervous system regulation, somatic tools from my toolbox. So I know the tools that have the highest payoff for helping to settle my system. And I'd love to tell you that, like I did this perfect morning regulation routine, and it like set me up for success for the rest of the day. That's usually really far from from how this actually looks. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:32  
So this morning's regulation was not a one and done. It let me regulate myself to step into the next few minutes of my day and over the course of the next 45 or so minutes that it took us to get up, get fed, get ready, get out the door. Uh, was a little bit of a roller coaster for my system. So I would notice that I'd start to activate. You know, my kid does what kids do. He didn't want to put on socks or make a decision about breakfast or whatever. And I would notice my my urge parenting. So the language that I use often with myself is I kind of have this, what I call an urge response, my urge parenting, and then I have my regulated response, my regulated parenting, my urge partnering when I want to get really defensive or go into that fight state. And then I have my regulated partnering, where I'm able to show up and have more calm conversations. And so my urge parenting is really snappy. It is let's go, let's get it done. It's very controlling, and my regulated parenting is much more present. It can be firm, but it's kind and so the whole morning, I felt like I was writing this roller coaster of noticing my system activate, feeling that urge, intentionally choosing to regulate with one of my tools. And then I would feel it settle. I'd be able to show up as I wanted to, and then it would rise. And it was that you can think about it like a roller coaster or waves just kind of coming up and down. And I'm so grateful for my tools that allow me to have this awareness of my system, to be in conversation with my body, so that I have that opportunity to notice that rise, and then that I have access to well practiced tools to re regulate and settle in to that present moment, to see that there is no imminent danger here, that I was safe, that my kids were safe. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:49  
When I'm activated, my system feels like there's no time like we gotta go. We're running late. But the reality was this morning, my kid was not late for school. I was not running late for this event. And so much about this awareness this conversation is noticing where reality and how you feel about reality don't match up. And this is another moment where your state determines your story. You've heard me say this so many times here on this podcast, but when you are regulated, you see solutions. You see connection. When you're dysregulated, you see problems. And this awareness I have of what it feels like in my system when I'm activated, the ability I have to go to my toolbox and regulate in the moment helps to bridge that disconnect between the reality of you're safe, your kids are safe, you have time and differentiate that reality from the urgency that I feel inside, which is like, we gotta go. We gotta go like, I don't know if everything's okay. 

Amanda Armstrong  7:59  
So just remembering that, that your state determines your story. And when we're regulated, we are primed to see all the problems. And if we can get ourselves regulated, we are, we have so much more access to solutions, to collaboration. And the other piece here is that my kids are not old enough to regulate their own nervous system, and they are. I predominantly was working with my almost four year old. He is entirely dependent on CO regulation, on the ability of the adults in his life, me, this morning around him to be able to self regulate, and so me being able to stay regulated enough this morning, and I don't. I don't do this perfectly every morning. But even though what you're hearing is this took effort, this was a roller coaster, what he was able to experience was mostly a regulated mom and me being able to and having the tools to self regulate made our morning that sounds pretty chaotic go much smoother than it could have we avoided what could have been more meltdowns, bigger feelings and the things that would have made it harder to get Out the door, the things that would have added stress load to my nervous system.

Amanda Armstrong  9:26  
So spoiler alert, we make it out the door. We get in that car. My kid gets dropped off at school. Everything is good. And then what you might assume is that I get in the car alone, headed to this event that I'm excited about, and my system is settled. But I'm about 10 minutes into this drive and I realize that I am death gripping. I'm like white knuckling the steering wheel. My shoulders are raised up towards my ears. My heart is racing, my mind is spiraling out so. Uh, to all of the ways I feel like I'm behind on my to do list right now, and I catch this, I'm not sure. I mean, it was like 10 minutes into the drive, so I don't know if that tension was building, or if I just got in the car and was right there, and it took me 10 minutes to notice it, but I noticed it. I was able to catch this, this tenseness, this activation, this really, I mean, early kind of anxiety in my system. And again, turn to my toolbox. I was able to take a big breath in, and on that long, extended exhale, drop my shoulders, release my grip, and I spent the next, you know, 510, minutes or so, just really focusing on settling, because this was another place where there was mismatch. I was not running out of time. I felt like I was in a hurry, but my GPS was telling me that I was going to get to this event 20 minutes early. 

Amanda Armstrong  10:56  
But here's, here's the thing that I know about me and my lived experience is that for over a decade, I lived a life that was so go, go, go, go, go. I was constantly rushing from class to practice to work to volunteer to this or that. I remember looking at my calendar one day in my 20s with three overlapping events, and feeling so proud of how packed my schedule was, how much I was fitting in, and so confident that I'd be able to leave this one thing the perfect amount of minutes early to make it to the next thing, just the perfect few minutes late. And I lived like this, day after day after day. And what this did was it normalized this sense of urgency. It primed my system for constant urgency, for rushing, and that programming is still very, very, very much in a rewiring process. But this awareness that my system's default setting right now is still to rush, to hurry to be activated helps me to catch it earlier, especially when that rush and that hurry is unneeded. 

Amanda Armstrong  12:18  
So again, how this played out for me was that I noticed this. I took that big breath on that extended exhale, dropped my shoulders, loosen my grip. I noticed I was so tunnel visioned on the road, so I let my visual system soften. I looked around more, looking at things, you know, across my windshield, and just focused on taking deep, slow breaths, having open panoramic viewing in the car, I did some swaying side to side again, all of the tools that I know are particularly useful to help my system go from this Often default sympathetic state of activation to a more parasympathetic calm state, and you can change your physiology relatively quickly when you know how to work with it, especially through your breath or visual system. And those tools are so much easier to access in those heightened moments that you need the most when you practice them proactively, consistently in your life, you build those neural pathways in your brain that says, Oh yeah, that's an option too. That's something that we can do in moments where we feel like this. Because again, what could have happened this morning, and what has happened to me many other mornings, was waking up and just jumping into the morning feeling on edge and rushed snappy at my son to get ready faster, which likely would have caused more defiance. It would have escalated my system. There might have been a meltdown. We'd have been just basically running out the clock at that point where I'd have just All right, we gotta go, get in the car. I might have dropped him off at school crying. Now I'm driving away feeling like a terrible mom. There's a death grip on the steering wheel that I just don't even notice because I'm so in my head ruminating during that hour drive. I get to this event and like, I'm there, but am I really there? I put on a happy face, but I'm, like, still feeling stressed and on and on and on. 

Amanda Armstrong  14:24  
We've all played out that day. If you're listening to a podcast about anxiety, you've played out that day. But because I was able to be in conversation with my body to offer myself compassion this narrative of like, of course, my system was anxious today. My sleep sucked. Last night, I had a really stressful dream. I'm excited about this event, and when you have a history of anxiety, excitement and anxious is a really thin line. Sometimes both involve a little bit of that sympathetic activation in your system. But. It's because of this awareness and my well practiced toolkit that today went well. It was a fine day. I was able to ride those waves settle my system before the event, so that I could get into a state where I was able to connect with my friends, to be fully present, to be creative in the conversations that we were having about business ideas, and it's this process of noticing and then having a toolkit that's essential, and it's something that I wish each and every one of us just had in adulthood, because we grew up with well attuned, self regulated parents who set this example, facilitated co regulation, and then as we moved into adulthood, really showed us how self regulation looked, gave us these tools and these practices. But the reality is that many, many, many of us didn't get that, and now we're here as adults, many of us with our own kids, trying to figure this out. And this is the work that I'm in every single day. It's the work that I feel like is so, so rewarding. And I want you to know that there's nothing special about me. There's nothing special about my brain. There's nothing special about my nervous system. And so if I've been able to learn how to do this, every single one of you can in your own way too. Self regulation is a skill. It is a skill, and it's often just knowing where to start. 

Amanda Armstrong  16:40  
So anyways, this was my day. I got home from that event. I had some discovery calls for who will be some new one on one, coaching clients for us and my family, finished our day, reading some books at the library like today was a good day. Today was a good day. And had this day have happened a handful of years ago for me, before I had this this ability, this capacity for regulation. It may not have gone. It wouldn't not it may it would not have gone like this, and I would be pulling the covers over my head tonight thinking, what a train wreck. And I shared some of this story on my Instagram stories in real time today, and I got two DMS from current members of ours that I wanted to share. And the first read this was so helpful to hear again, and I'm so grateful to know I'm not the only one whose system is a roller coaster sometimes. And the other message said, I love you sharing about a real experience of being activated and how you use your tools. It's nice to know that even though you are the quote teacher, you go through it too regulated living does not mean a life where you're regulated all the time. It means a life where you are intentional about regulation. You understand the impact of basic health habits, things like sleep, movement, sunlight, breakfast, on your overall state and your well being. It means that you can recognize tension or disconnection in your body, and you have some tools to do something about it if you choose regulated living. Means that you understand how these basic holistic health practices can seriously throw you off or support you, and you can create this narrative of compassion.

Amanda Armstrong  18:31  
My story today, every time I noticed this was like, of course, of course, that's not a story that comes easily to me. The story that comes most easily to me is, you suck, you're not good enough. I've really had to practice, and it's through learning about my nervous system that compassion is so essential, and there's so much research. I think we'll do a whole episode on compassion and the importance of compassion, on, on, on and in are healing, and so much of this is one of the driving purposes behind this podcast is I want to support you in cultivating this capacity for yourself. And I've been thinking so much the last couple weeks about upcoming episodes, because, first of all, friends, I have to stop recording podcasts the Monday night before they come out on Tuesday morning. 

Amanda Armstrong  19:28  
So side note, we finally have childcare, which feels like a huge win for me, because it has been a journey. I became a mom almost four years ago, and I have built my coaching practice these last four years without any kind of consistent childcare. How I've done it, I have, honestly no idea, a very, very supportive husband and probably way too many late nights. No, not, probably, definitely my. Number one health goal this year is to prioritize my sleep. And we are officially on week two of what seems to be the most wonderful nanny. She's here until 2pm every day. I'm just feeling very, very, very grateful because, man, childcare, no one tells you what a roller coaster that can be. And I'm so excited to be able to be more fully present in my work when I'm working, and then also more fully present with my family when I am doing, doing family, because I have, I have more support. Support is So, essential. We were never meant to do all of it. 

Amanda Armstrong  20:43  
But tangent aside, I've been thinking a lot about the flow of episodes and what I want to help you do most with these conversations. And really, what it comes down to is I feel so passionate about continuing to untangle the pathology model of mental health to help you understand that your anxiety and depression symptoms aren't some life sentence or brokenness, but oftentimes this natural result of unhealed trauma. Too much social media, toxic hustle culture, not enough sleep, poor nutrition, not enough walks outside or play in your life. And what is it that I can do to help you take small steps in each of those areas towards more regulated living, and I also want to continue to demystify nervous system regulation, to pull it apart to its most basic and actionable parts to share with you, the science and buy in to making oftentimes small but impactful changes in your life. So some upcoming conversations that I want to have with you here are how, how how I help you heal, pulling back the curtain and giving you a behind the scenes glimpse of rise as we what we do, how we do it, why we do it, I want to help answer the question of, how do I get there? What's the road to more regulated living look like? What does the path look like to go from being the anxious hustle culture, worshiping burnt out, always saying Yes, girl of my 20s, to where I am today, not somebody who never feels anxious, but somebody who can recognize it for what it is. Usually identify what's contributing to it and who has the tools to settle and reverse that spiral before it absolutely consumes me, and I'm still a pesky human very much walking this road just maybe a few steps ahead of some of you. 

Amanda Armstrong  22:56  
So just thanks for being here week after week, and stay tuned, because I've got some fiery episodes coming, some really cool research to share with you. And always, always trying to make these conversations as tangible and as applicable for you to take action on as I can. And I want to hear from you. I want this to be a living and breathing community. So if there are conversations that you want to hear me have, if there's something that you're struggling with that I can support you with in these conversations, send me a DM, send me an email. I'll also link I have a form. It's my Ask Me Anything, form where you can share those things with me, and they will show up in future podcast episodes. They can help guide these conversations. And then, as always, it means so so much when from these conversations here, you decide to join us at rise, as we whether it's inside Rise, my mental health membership and nervous system, healing space that community or inside, restore our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, because I love getting the chance to hear your stories, to learn about your lives and to provide more personalized support. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:17  
So let's sum up today with three takeaways. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:22  
Number one, having a regulated nervous system doesn't mean that you're regulated all the time. Part of regulation means that you have this ability to notice and ride those waves throughout the day. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:37  
Number two, if you've been stuck in survival mode for a really, really long time, or spent a lot of your life there. It's normal. It's natural that your system is likely still primed for this urgency. Rewiring comes with more frequency and duration and. Of periods in that green zone of periods of regulation. And so moments of activation or shutdown are not points of failure on this journey, but instead points of practice. And so I just want to offer you that reframe, because what I heard from those two DMS that our members sent was this idea that, Oh, you must be the teacher. You must have this figured out. You must never ride this roller coaster. And just what I wanted to illustrate for you, pretty candidly today, is that absolutely I still ride this roller coaster, and these moments of activation or shutdown of my system part of what has allowed me to get as far as I have in my journey is that I've been able to reframe those moments of dysregulation, not as points of failure, but instead as points of practice, as information to maybe future healing, or just that I've taken on too much, and It might be time to do a little editing of of my stressors. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:05  
And TAKEAWAY NUMBER THREE is just that reminder that when we are dysregulated, our system sees problems. When we are regulated, it sees solutions and collaboration. When we are dysregulated, our system filters out anything but the problems. It is so so essential that we learn how to live from a more regulated lens more often, so that we aren't filtering out all of the good parts of our life. 

Amanda Armstrong  26:42  
And I'll finish with just offering you an invitation to take a minute to reflect and ask yourself if there was one small change that I could make today to contribute to more regulated living right now, emphasis on the small change. What might that look like, and what I'm really hoping is in these episodes that are coming to help you sort through some of that, and to really provide you the science and then the breakdown of how to take that science and create these small, layered changes in your life, and if you want support in that, work, friends, you know where to find me. Thank you for being here and until next time, sending you so much hope and healing. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:34  
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.

Amanda Armstrong  28:20  
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