Dear Regulated Nervous System

What does it actually mean to have a regulated nervous system, and why does it matter more than most people realize?

This episode explores the nervous system not as a personality trait or wellness goal, but as the foundation for perception, capacity, and choice. When your system can stay, you can see clearly. When you can see clearly, you can choose differently.

This is a grounded look at what regulation really is, what it requires in real time, and why it shapes every decision you make.

For some, it is not a bonus. It is everything.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

I really struggled with this episode this week. Um, and yesterday I just started crying. If I'm being honest, I just started crying. Um, and not even for one clean reason. Like in this week, okay, can I tell you because I'm sure you can hear that I'm also losing my voice. Um, but I got into a car accident. I got a car accident with my baby in the car, um, which yeah. Um maybe I'll reflect on the emotions of that microsecond in another episode, but I got into a car accident. Um I got into I got a lot of good news this week too. So it all shakes out, but I just found myself being very emotional. Um and not just for one reason, but just moving things through me. And somewhere in that, it became actually really clear what I wanted to record this week, what I wanted to talk about. And this episode has been sitting in drafts. I wrote it two months ago, and then I just kind of kept it as an episode in the background in case I ever got sick and I could release it. And then I went back to read it and it didn't fit where I was emotionally. I wanted the topic did, but how I wrote about it originally didn't. And so uh instead we let in on this grand irony where instead of it being my backup episode for if I'm sick, it is the episode that I most want to record while I have no voice. And I literally I've canceled therapy today, I've done, and that's not the week to be doing that. Um, but I wanted to do everything possible to preserve my ability to speak at all. Any shred of voice that I possibly have left is uh in dedication to Dear Sovereign Self and the listeners of Dear Sovereign Self. So I saved it for you guys. Um, but yeah, I wanted to talk about my regulated nervous system this week, especially when I felt really, really, really low in moments, more so than I have in a really long time. Um because in those moments, and especially now, I feel like my regulated nervous system is the only thing that I have to show for my life. Um and I don't, I absolutely don't want to go back to how I was feeling earlier in the week, mostly because crying on top of a dying voice is just an awful listening experience for you. Though it is my audio journal, but still um I acknowledge that's not a fun listening experience for you. So, but yeah, there are there are days where I feel like the only thing I have to show for my life is my regulated nervous system. And I know how that sounds because there are people who are building things, achieving things, becoming things in ways that are easy to point to. Um, and I'm on that journey too. Have been for a while, but this is something that I am just deeply, deeply proud of. Um, not in comparison to anyone else, but just within myself. And I think what's interesting is when I started these entries, there was a lot more emphasis um on the loneliness of this path, a lot more emphasis on emotional preparation for everything that I was about to share with you. And some of that was just emotional memory of what it's taken to become regulated and to speak from this internal place publicly. But some of it was me learning how to sit inside those emotions long enough to find something true in them, to mine them, um, and to distill them into something that I could actually use. Now I have the advantage of looking back and seeing what I built out of those moments of discomfort, or even the memory of those moments of discomfort. Because it is a deeply emotional experience to reorient your life around what's true, to keep choosing it, to keep standing in it, and then one day to look around and realize you're standing in the grass you watered. And for me, this ability to stay, to hold myself, this ability to not leave my own discomfort, has been the thing that I am most proud of. It is not small, it's not just a preference, and it's not something that I quote unquote worked on. It is the thing that has made literally everything else possible. This work, this voice, not this voice, but this voice, this journal. So I don't just want to talk about the regulated nervous system today. I want to acknowledge my own. I want to thank it. I want to be really honest about what it's given me. Because we talk about regulated nervous systems, like they're a personality, like it's calm. Like it's just a person who's calm. Like it's something you have or you don't, a temperament. So this episode isn't just an explanation of what uh biologists mean by the term regulated nervous system. It's a recognition of what a regulated nervous system actually is, what it requires, what it makes possible, and what it unlocks. Because it's not a personality, not an identity, but a physiological system. A system that moves between states. Ventrovagal, sympathetic, dorsal. Ventrovagal is what people are usually referring to when they say regulated. It's the state where you can connect. Your body is open, your breathing is steady, your attention is flexible, you can listen, you can respond, you can be present with what's in front of you. Sympathetic activation is what most people know as fight or flight. Your system is mobilized, your heart rate goes up, your focus narrows, your body is preparing to act. This is where urgency lives, this is where reactivity lives. This is where everything starts to feel like it needs to be handled now. Then there's dorsal. Shutdown. This is not calm. This is where your system goes offline. Low energy, disconnection, numbness. I think I had no adrenal pulse for like seven years straight. Yikes. This is when things feel hard to engage with. Now, here's why this matters because when you move between these three states, you're not just feeling different. You are functioning differently, you are perceiving differently. You are literally thinking differently in each state. The thoughts available to you in the ventral state are not the same thoughts available to you in a sympathetic state. The conclusions you come to when you feel safe are not the same conclusions you come to when you feel under threat. So when we talk about a regulated nervous system, when we talk about the ventral state, we are not talking about comfort. We're talking about access. Access to a version of yourself that can actually see what's in front of you. Because if your state changes what you can perceive, then it also changes what you believe is true. Which means you don't have one consistent self moving through the world. You have state-dependent access to yourself. The version of you making decisions depends on the state you're in. And if you don't understand that, you will confuse physiology for personality. You will call something who you are that is actually just the state that you most predominantly operate from. Right? So once you understand that your state determines what you can perceive, what you can think, and what you believe is true, then the question becomes: why don't people stay there? Why isn't everyone walking around regulated? And the answer is simple because it requires something most people have not practiced. Regulation is not automatic, it requires behavior under pressure. Regulation is not intention, it is practice. And not practice when things are easy, practice when your system is activated. Because that's the only time it counts. Do you understand? You don't become regulated when you understand something. You become regulated when you handle it differently. When something happens and your body starts to move toward reaction, toward urgency, toward shutdown. That's the moment that you build regulation. Not after. Not when you've had time to think about it after you've uh reacted. In that moment, it's whether you react or you don't. It's whether you send the text or you pause, whether you escalate or you hold. It's whether you leave or you stay. And most people think regulation is something you achieve, something you get to. But it's not. It's something you do over and over again. In moments that do not feel good, in moments where your system is telling you to move and you choose stillness. A regulated nervous system isn't built conceptually, it's built behaviorally, and that's why it's rare. When people do things like meditating, that helps train their physiology to slow down, to claim moments, micro moments, to bend time. Bend time in the sense that you buy yourself a beat. We've talked about this in many other episodes about the importance of buying yourself that extra moment. But the extra moment is the regulation. You don't build the practice of taking the extra moment when it's calm. You build it when it would be easier not to. It's not what you say you'll do, it's what you actually do that matters. So actually taking that pause every time. As much as possible. Not intending to be someone who's unaffected or performing calmness as a form of feigning regulation. Regulation is as simple as requiring, demanding, commanding, stealing a moment before you react to decide. And when you can do that, when you can actually stay in a moment of discomfort, you make something possible that most people don't even realize they're missing. Capacity, not calm, not softness, capacity. Regulation is not calm, it's capacity. You don't remove intensity when you regulate your nervous system. You become able to hold it. A regulated nervous system expands what you can hold without collapsing. You're not less affected, you're less destabilized. You're able to be in the middle of something difficult without losing access to yourself inside of it, which means you're not constantly trying to escape the moment. You're available to it, to what is actually happening. And dare I say available to reality, that's a whole other thing. And that availability creates something most people don't even realize they're missing. The pause. The between what happened and what you do next. And inside of that pause we talked about, there is observation. And inside that observation, there is choice. If you can't pause, you are not choosing, you are reacting. Regulation creates the space for choice to become possible. You understand? Most people don't choose their lives, they react through them. But when your nervous system can hold you in the moment long enough, you get to decide. And that is where power begins. So this isn't about me being really proud of my ability to stay calm amidst the turbulence that life will bring. In an especially turbulent week, it's about being able to stay in fear, in discomfort, and dis ease, so that you can unlock the ability to choose your life. Choose sovereignty. Because a regulated nervous system is not the reward, it is the requirement. The requirement for clarity, the requirement for capacity, the requirement for choice. It is what makes it possible to stay with something long enough to live it differently. It is what makes it possible to stay with something long enough to actually see it clearly, to not distort it, to not rush it, to not react your way out of it. That matters more than most people realize because most people are not making decisions from clarity. They're making decisions from urgency, from discomfort, from a body that is trying to get out of the moment as quickly as possible, and then calling that instinct, calling that intuition, or worse, truth. But if your system can't metabolize discomfort, you don't actually ever know what's true. So when I say this matters, I don't mean in a general sense. I mean very specifically. The relationships you choose, the things you tolerate, the way you respond, the way you leave, the way you stay, all of it. And if your system cannot hold you in those moments, you will keep choosing from a place that is not actually aligned. Not because you don't know better, but because you cannot stay long enough to do better. So this isn't about becoming calmer, like I said. It's about becoming someone who can stay long enough to choose what's actually true, like I said. And with all of that being said, I do want to come back to where I started because this isn't just something I understand. It's something I have lived and am practicing day in and day out till it it drops me to my knees day in and day out. And there are days where this this regulated nervous system is the thing that I am most proud of. The thing that has carried me 37 years, the thing that has held me when I didn't have anything else to stand on. But I stayed rock solid. Because I'm standing on this, standing on this practice that I built. So I want to take a moment to acknowledge my nervous system to thank her for the moment she stayed with me when I I didn't really know how to stay with myself, for the moments she held the line, when everything in me wanted to react, to leave prematurely, to collapse for the clarity she's given me, for the space she's created, for the life that she has made possible. Because this isn't small. It's the foundation of everything I'm building, and it's the reason I can see clearly enough to keep building at all. Thank you to her. Shout out to her, shout out to you, whoever made it to the end of this uh entry. Despite my voice, thank you. I love and appreciate you, and I hope that you at least love and appreciate my dedication to getting this out weekly, even though some weeks I don't we need better systems, but there will be an episode on that. So I'll leave you with this. What is your default nervous system state? Is it sympathetic? Do you live mostly in fight or flight? Is it dorsal? Adrenals just dead, like mine were. Or are you honestly and truly defaulting mostly to ventral? Are you choosing your reactions? Or are you just relieving yourself in the moment? Let me know.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.