The Mind-Body Couple

Take Manual Control of Your Nervous System

• Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson • Episode 121

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Have you ever felt stuck in anxiety, shutdown, or constant stress despite your best efforts to feel better? Your nervous system may need manual intervention—and waiting for automatic regulation might not be enough.

In this deeply insightful episode, Tanner and Anne tackle the crucial concept of manually regulating your nervous system when it's not naturally returning to states of safety and connection. They begin by contrasting the ideal—a flexible nervous system that moves easily between high energy and low energy states, while staying anchored in safety—with the reality many of us face: persistent dysregulation driven by trauma, lifestyle factors, and societal pressures.

Tanner vulnerably shares his own journey through chronic dysregulation, describing how he remained stuck in fight-or-flight and eventually shutdown during his experience with neuroplastic pain. His healing required intentional practice across multiple domains—embodiment work, movement, social connection, purposeful action, and proper rest—highlighting that regulation often requires consistent, manual effort before becoming automatic. The hosts also share a compelling story from their producer, who transformed his physical pain and energy levels by consistently pushing himself to establish a gym routine that eventually became second nature.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is the practical emphasis on taking control rather than waiting for change. For anyone experiencing chronic pain, illness, anxiety, or persistent dysregulation, the message is clear: your nervous system might need your conscious guidance to establish new patterns. Start small, remain consistent, and remember that creating a regulated nervous system is work worth doing—even when the results aren't immediate. Which regulation practice will you try today?

Tanner Murtagh and Anne Hampson are therapists who treat neuroplastic pain and mind-body symptoms. They are also married! In his 20s, Tanner overcame chronic pain and a fibromyalgia diagnosis by learning his symptoms were occurring due to learned brain pathways and nervous system dysregulation. Post-healing, Tanner and Anne have dedicated their lives to developing effective treatment and education for neuroplastic pain and symptoms. Listen and learn how to assess your own chronic pain and symptoms, gain tools to retrain the brain and nervous system, and make gradual changes in your life and health!


The Mind-Body Couple podcast is owned by Pain Psychotherapy Canada Inc. This podcast is produced by Alex Klassen, who is one of the wonderful therapists at our agency in Calgary, Alberta. https://www.painpsychotherapy.ca/


Tanner, Anne, and Alex also run the MBody Community, which is an in-depth online course that provides step-by-step guidance for assessing, treating, and resolving mind-body pain and symptoms. https://www.mbodycommunity.com


Also check out Tanner's YouTube channel for more free education and practices: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Fl6WaFHnh4ponuexaMbFQ


And follow us for daily education posts on Instagram: @painpsychotherapy


Discl...

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the MindBodyCouple podcast.

Speaker 2:

I'm Tanner Murtaugh and I'm Anne Hampson. This podcast is dedicated to helping you unlearn chronic pain and symptoms.

Speaker 1:

If you need support with your healing, you can book in for a consultation with one of our therapists at painpsychotherapyca or purchase our online course at or purchase our online course at embodycommunitycom to access in-depth education, somatic practices, recovery tools and an interactive community focused on healing.

Speaker 2:

Links in the description of each episode.

Speaker 1:

Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Hi everyone, we had a big morning. It was first day of kindergarten and grade three for our kids.

Speaker 2:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1:

Oh, and it was overwhelming. It was overwhelming for me as a parent to be sending our second child off to kindergarten. That's a big deal.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, she was, she was nervous.

Speaker 1:

A bit some tears, for sure.

Speaker 2:

Our son was okay, though he was a little nervous, but no tears ready to go.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it makes me think of our topic all about nervous system and nervous system dysregulation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we're going to talk about today manually helping your nervous system.

Speaker 1:

I wish we had that for our daughter right now. How can she manually help her nervous system right now?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think we've done lots of work as best we can with her in the sense of feeling emotions it's been an emotional couple days and helping her out as best we can. But at that age I think she gets confused of why she's so dysregulated.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Can't put that together Well. As adults we get confused sometimes why we're dysregulated.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes, though, as adults, we have a bit more awareness, and that's all about what we want to talk about today.

Speaker 2:

So, if you've been following our podcast, our YouTube content, instagram content, our clinic and our course, we really focus on nervous system regulation. Yeah, we see this as a crucial part of healing neuroplastic pain and symptoms, which makes sense because with neuroplastic pain and symptoms, there's no damage or disease in your body. Your brain has just been generating them due to feeling this heightened sense of danger, and so this means we need to not only think safer thoughts about our body. We need to help our nervous system feel safe bottom up, and in this episode, we're going to discuss why sometimes we need to manually make changes to help regulate our nervous system if it's not regulating on on its own yeah, and that's the biggest piece that we want to kind of focus on today is that almost making changes and manually regulating with intention.

Speaker 1:

I'm like, okay, I need to shift here, I need to put something into action.

Speaker 2:

Yeah so we're going to start off by imagining a perfect world.

Speaker 1:

Ah, yes.

Speaker 2:

We all like to believe that maybe one day we'll live in a perfect world. We can get caught in fantasies about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so in a perfect world, your nervous system would be regulated most of the time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and if you were dysregulated sorry, my stomach growls. Okay, and if you were dysregulated in a perfect world, it'd be brief. You'd be briefly in fight or flight, briefly in fawn or briefly in freeze, shut down.

Speaker 1:

Would that mean in the case of our daughter when she entered the school doors? Oh, briefly, she's in fight or flight and then shift to kind of ventral vagal exactly, and you know your lifestyle in a perfect world.

Speaker 2:

Social supports would just naturally guide your nervous system back to this safe and connected state. Most often, you would be anchored to this ventral vagal energy that we talked about, which is that feeling of safety and connection.

Speaker 1:

Each day, you move up in energy, becoming active in blended states of play and purposeful action, without getting too stressed, frustrated or overwhelmed.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And also, within your day, you'd move down in energy, you'd start to feel more of these relaxed sensations when we're in blended states of stillness or close connection. And you know, this is the idea. In a perfect world, your nervous system would just be flexible, it'd be going up and down in energy as it needed to, and you'd always be anchored to safety. The problem is, our life is far from perfect, right? There's so many forces that can lead to dysregulation.

Speaker 1:

Well, and I think if you listen to our discussion of the perfect day and you're shaking your head of like, oh no, I don't relate to that at all. Many of us struggle with that, or don't relate to that, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Like for a lot of us, like we face trauma or childhood adversity, and this is going to sensitize your nervous system, it's going to make you feel more easily triggered in the future and get stuck in these dysregulated states of fight, flight, fawn or freeze. And I think the other big thing to discuss here is cultural influences, because there's a lot of social danger that we can face.

Speaker 2:

This can include, like financial issues with like cost of living, parenting as me and Anne experienced workplaces that drive overworking or toxic, and so there's all these factors socially that are not perfect and that do keep us perpetually dysregulated.

Speaker 1:

And so we want to discuss how it's not automatic.

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker 1:

We can't always just shift into a regulated or flexible state.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think for a lot of us we're waiting for some big life change to occur to then feel regulated. But we want people to take back control where they can, because if you face trauma, that's likely going to need to be processed. If there's been lifestyles or habits that have developed that are creating this sense of danger, it's not just going to change automatically. For a lot of people, they struggle to feel relaxed or calm. We're going to practice. We're going to need to practice being in those states and it can also feel really hard when people have that low energy to get purpose back in their life. And for a lot of people that we work with pain and symptoms, they act as these barriers to having a more healthy, regulated lifestyle.

Speaker 2:

So now I want to discuss what my life looked like right before. I developed pain and symptoms because I was lost in perfectionism, high achieving. I was working excessive hours in school. I wasn't hanging out with friends. As a result, I was perpetually in fight or flight and I wasn't doing anything to really take care of myself. I was always pretty consistent with exercise, but outside of that, all these healing practices I use now, I wasn't doing any of that and as a result, like I was just constantly in this dysregulated state for years.

Speaker 1:

It was kind of like you're normal, like that's what you knew.

Speaker 2:

And then, when I developed pain, I was in fight or flight for a bit, but I just shut down because I could no longer move or I didn't think I could move. I isolated even further from friends and my pain and symptoms took away the one thing that was maybe unbearable good about my life beforehand maybe a little too extreme, but it took away purpose. I couldn't. I couldn't work and achieve the way I was achieving before, and so, as a result, I just completely shut down and was disconnected from the world, and this led to a lot of depression for me and, and, I feel, for anyone around this. But it's important to understand when people are looking at this. You know what was your life like before you developed pain, but then also what was it during? Pain and symptoms like you all might be going through right now, because there's probably dysregulating factors taking place in both.

Speaker 1:

And understanding that, like developing awareness of what that is, is important, like, okay, where have I been stuck in this dysregulated state before and during? Because that gives us more information about that manual shift that we want to do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and one thing that was really clear for me before I developed pain and symptoms and during is I had almost no access to a safe, calm, connected state, and my main strategy to deal with things was avoidance. So I would avoid emotions, I would avoid stress, I would avoid any sensation inside that felt unsafe and I would avoid things externally. But this over time just actually made me more dysregulated Now that I've healed my pain and symptoms, and when I was first healing, I had to shift this, so I Were you aware of that at the time, Tanner?

Speaker 2:

Once I started to learn about a mind-body approach, I knew I could look back and I could tell that I wasn't going to be able to heal if something didn't shift.

Speaker 1:

Was that overwhelming for you? Because I think probably a lot of listeners are in that space where they know, but it feels like, okay, but now what do I do?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it can feel really overwhelming and I'm going to list off some things that I did, but I want to be clear, they didn't happen all in the same day, Like you can start with smaller shifts and then you're going to be more motivated to make bigger shifts over time. But I feel for people because it can be scary, even though we know our lifestyle and how we're working with our internal world and external world, even if we know that that's dysregulating, it's familiar to us and our brain likes what's familiar, that's what it perceives creates safety, and so change is difficult as a result. But I've seen so many clients make some courageous shifts that started to take control back in regulating their nervous system. Now, for myself, I did a lot of embodiment practices, which I worked on processing and creating safety with pain, symptoms, emotions and nervous system dysregulation. So there was a lot of body awareness and breath work that I was tying into that.

Speaker 2:

I also did my own trauma processing, which was really key for me. I started to use somatic movements such as qigong or yoga and for me, especially at the end of my pain and symptom journey, there was such a lack of movement. I really drove towards increasing movements, increasing exercise and that was difficult, that took many months, but that was a big key. I remember the first time I went for a 20 minute walk. It took me like a month or a month and a half to work up to that because I was basically not walking. But that that first walk I remember sitting down on the couch after and just feeling all these endorphins that I hadn't felt in years.

Speaker 1:

And was this like when we think of that kind of purposeful action in terms of, like nervous system kind of shift and regulation? Were you doing these trying to kind of get that flexibility back, trying to shift states? Yeah?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there was definitely. I was practicing. Not just being in a safe, calm state Cause I think that's where people get lost is like okay, if I need to heal my pain and symptoms, I know they're neuroplastics, so the solution is just perpetual calmness. But what I practice is I practice purposeful action. I started to work on my career. I started to even visualize what we're doing now, Ann, like the companies that we own, and like providing a lot of support for people around the world.

Speaker 2:

I started to be playful. I remember I would play like badminton in the backyard with one of my good friends that we live with, so there was like play that was starting to take place. I was socially connecting with you more, but I was also doing this with friends, and I also made sure that there was downtime. So, as things picked up and I got more mobilized energy, which I needed I was also ensuring that I had time for rest and relaxation. Now, this is really what my healing work in a nutshell kind of looks like. But I want to be clear it wasn't just one strategy that I did. There was a whole range of things that I utilized to start to regulate my nervous system over time, and so we want to install a new system, and we can do this manually. And so we want to install a new system and we can do this manually. We sometimes refer on this podcast, probably more than we should. We refer to the work of healing.

Speaker 1:

Well, but it is a bit of work. It's a bit of there's thought put into it and there's action and we are doing something.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and this process is manual at first.

Speaker 1:

It's going to take effort before it becomes automatic. And so our producer, Alex, wanted to share an example, and it's about his experience of the gym. And so he wants to say three years ago he was in his late 30s, he was feeling a lack of energy, experiencing neck and back pain and often feeling anxious in the evening, with kind of like a workaholic energy which I think Tanner can relate to. Probably lots of people can relate to.

Speaker 1:

But that was difficult for him to put away. He felt guilty and restless when trying to chill out. He had a good practice of mindful meditation that he had developed a healthy social life. But he recognized that there was something missing. His nervous system wasn't automatically regulating. He realized he was too sedentary. So back to that kind of example where we can get kind of really lethargic, not doing much, that isolation a little bit. For Alex it was causing dysregulation, aching in his body and physical fitness was declining. He was also missing healthy higher energy nervous system activation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this kind of goes into. What we were just talking about is that it's not just all about calmness, and in Alex's story you know he was missing some of that playful, purposeful energy that can be really essential for people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so he recognized that he needed to take manual control by this. He started talking with two of his friends who were experienced in the gym. They gave him tips. He went with one of his friends a number of times to learn different exercise and he built a sense of comfort at the gym the first dozen times. He talks about how he really had to push himself to get there and he built a sense of comfort at the gym the first dozen times. He talks about how he really had to push himself to get there, and so it was a bit hard. It wasn't easy for him, so it helped that his friends were going. He says he's never enjoyed working out or running. All his previous experiences weren't great, but he started making it playful. He noticed his nervous system didn't automatically want to go to the gym so he kept taking that manual control that we're talking about.

Speaker 2:

And this is the thing. As he kept going, he noticed changes. It started to become easier and easier to go to the gym. He was developing a new habit and his body would just start to click into workout mode, which is great. That's what we're kind of looking for with any of the practices we use with clients that their body starts to just click into automatically doing it. And all of a sudden he started to enjoy working out and what he noticed is his back and neck pain that couldn't be released with massage or stretching. It started to reduce, it started to dissipate, so his energy levels increased. He felt stronger, more confidence, and now it's just an automatic thing for him. Working out is just part of his week and he installed a powerful new habit. So I like this story because it showcases that he had a lot of wisdom to understand what his body maybe needed and that's the thing about nervous system regulation is everyone needs something different.

Speaker 1:

And I think something that's interesting here is for him. He had that awareness and then it started with a decision of like okay, I need to pit in that manual action and do something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and so we want people to take manual control. As you've been listening to this episode and our examples, you may have realized hey, there's some habits that you need to manually build in. Consider how you can guide your nervous system to regulation. Don't wait for this to be automatic.

Speaker 1:

You need to take manual control of this, and it's okay to start this early on in your journey. This isn't something that you have to kind of wait for as you heal more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and there's lots of things we've discussed that you can start to instill and start small and then over time just expand it. But this can include a practice of embodiment, working with sensations inside, working with emotions, mindfulness, meditation, somatic tracking, qigong or yoga. You could start connecting more socially consistently with people around you or friends or family.

Speaker 1:

You can start engaging in regular movement or exercise, adjusting your diet, caffeine consumptions or substance use scheduling time for creativity, arts or projects. Scheduling downtime to relax recharge with activities that might feel right for you maybe getting out into nature or processing trauma with the help of a therapist.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or many more that we're not listing Again. Your nervous system is unique and it's gonna need unique practices or different lifestyle changes to lead you to regulation.

Speaker 1:

Something I think to remember that Alex's story highlighted pretty nicely is that might take time. It might take like consistent effort that feels hard at first for kind of these things to start being regulating for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one thing where I see people go wrong is say I work with a client, I give them a practice, they do the practice for two weeks. They don't notice change. They stop doing the practice. Yeah, that's human nature, I get that. But your nervous system is going to take time to regulate, as you just said, anne, and so, as a result, it's like we're going for a long-term change, not short-term change, and so you're going to have to do things consistently before you start to see a shift.

Speaker 1:

Well, one thing I love about our course is that it's kind of this like there's a ton of practices in that but it's designed to create this like long-term over the long game. It's designed to like people take time going through that course, because we know it takes time and consistency to kind of embed these practices.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so our task for everyone is today pick one small action you can take to guide your nervous system back to safety Again. Take back control. Do this manually Now in our course, as Anne said, there's a ton of practices. It's almost like a buffet we've created where people can pick what they need to and work towards regulation that feels right for them.

Speaker 1:

Well, and I think back to our story about our daughter and one thing I'm hoping is I'm picking her up a little bit early to practice some regulation, to do some connection with her, to spend time one-on-one, and I'm hoping to build this in of a practice of ours to help with regulation for her.

Speaker 2:

Exactly yeah, we need to support our kids in this and spend lots of effort creating this emotion corners for our kids.

Speaker 1:

I like to call it the calm corner because it's catchy, but it's really emotion, because it's not always about being calm. It's not about being calm all the time mad. No, I know, I made her call it emotion. Uh, it doesn't sound as good, but yeah, to kind of spend time with regulate process, um. So we'll see how it goes today yeah it might just be playing, which is also fine still something yeah we're working on it, so thank you everyone for listening. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2:

And we'll talk to you all soon.

Speaker 1:

Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. For more free content, check out the links for our YouTube channel, instagram and Facebook accounts in the episode description.

Speaker 2:

We wish you all healing.