Co-Regulation: The Secret To Borrowed Calm

You can schedule the board game, line up the film, even promise yourself you will be calm this time, and still end up in a tense, snappy, everyone-is-annoyed mess. There is a reason that has nothing to do with your teenager being “difficult” and everything to do with nervous system regulation. 

We talk about co-regulation and “borrowed calm”: the idea that our bodies constantly read each other for cues of safety, then respond automatically. I share a simple metaphor of the parent as the personal hotspot in the home. If I arrive stressed, rushed, or braced for an argument, my teen is not just hearing my words, they are feeling the nervous system behind them. That is why connection can collapse before we even start, and why shouting so quickly becomes more shouting. 

We also dig into what helps. A dysregulated nervous system cannot create regulation in another, so the most powerful move is not the perfect script, it is finding a steadier state in your own body. We cover what “calm” looks like in real life: slower pace, softer voice, breathing, curiosity, and the skill of repair when you do lose it. Those small choices create emotional safety, help teens ride out big feelings, and gradually build a more resilient family culture. 

If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a parent who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to their body.

Transcript

Welcome And Core Message

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer. Hello and welcome to episode 33. Thank you so much for joining

The Teen Arc And Parenting Pressure

Naomi Mills 0:47

me. This is the teen arc of the You Are the Answer podcasts, where I am using the nervous system lens to try and shed new light on the growing teenage person, families, and how we can all create environments that make life just that little bit simpler for each other, let's say, or at least approach as parents, our young people with greater understanding. And quite a lot of what comes up during this arc, and why I'm so interested about it, is it's where I am in my life as well as a parent to a young person who's just beginning their adolescence journey. And I will say, as a full-time working mum, that it is particularly difficult, and you might be able to resonate with some of this.

When Planned Family Time Backfires

Naomi Mills 1:43

There will be times that I have put aside in my brain and in our diaries where everybody's going to be at home, everybody is going to be spending time together, and we're going to have a nice time, darn it, because this is you know the time I've put aside for all of this to happen, and I really want us to enjoy it. And guess what? When I diarise things like that, because as you can hear from my tone and the way that I'm saying it, it's not really organic. Sometimes when I'm an overwhelm, I can be like, well, things happening organically can sound like a lovely idea, but it's not very kind of realistic, is it? So when we when I approach things from that place, usually not realizing that's what I'm doing, what do you think happens? We sit there and we're all gonna play this board game, we're gonna have fun, or we're gonna watch this programme together, or do this drawing, or go to this place, or go for a walk. And I am met with usually quite a lot of resilience, resistance, even, maybe some attitude, not just from my young person, but maybe my husband as well. And then I get a bit touchy, and the dog's barking at somebody, and the birds are really loud, and everybody starts to just and then I'm like, Well, why have I done this? I've created this space that we're all meant to be having fun, and nobody's having fun. Yeah, and suddenly everybody's just very stressed, and this beautiful time we had planned together is neither beautiful nor relaxed, and you might think that's happening just through how things go, but actually our nervous systems are co-regulating together, and potentially in this in this case from mine, so children are not only listening to the words that we use, they're listening to the nervous system that is delivering those words. And actually, one of my favorite pieces of research from Brene Brown was that our children do what we show them, not what we tell them, which is another terrifying but very true piece of information that if we show our children that we don't slow down and we don't relax, we don't take care of ourselves, but we tell them to do it, guess what? They don't do it either. And so today I want to delve into co-regulation

Co-Regulation And The Hotspot Metaphor

Naomi Mills 4:18

in borrowed calm. And the way I explain this to my young people in modern terms is that it is as though, as a parent, okay, you are the personal hotspot for your child. They are think of them as like little mobile units themselves, putting out their feelers, their little Bluetooth signals, and they are looking to latch on to these antennae. And as the parents in the room, you are the ones setting the regulation, the tone for your household, believe it or not. And that's what I mean by co-regulation is how can we use this natural phenomenon to the benefit not only of our children but of ourselves and the whole family experience too. And just from that experience that I was sharing in the beginning, when I usually unconsciously, you know, make space because I know we want family time, I crave it, I'm craving connection, fun, re-regulation. But if I show up not quite in the right way, I can also kind of drag that experience in the wrong direction because I am being sometimes called the primary oscillator, the one that is setting the energy and the mood or the vibe or whatever word you want to use in the space, and people are regulating from me, I am becoming the hotspot that people are tuning into. And so before language, you know, babies sense your tension, they sense calm.

Borrowed Calm From Bodies And Animals

Naomi Mills 6:03

As my husband actually was always great in our pediatric practice because he has an incredibly slow heart rate. So if any mums were getting adjusted or babies were getting overwrought, I would put them on his chest to hold them in his heart rate. He is so naturally calm, actually, that the babies would regulate to him. So we literally borrow regulation from other nervous systems. And I did read some research once because as humans we have a measurable electromagnetic field. And when we are in ease, connection, when we're in our heart space, if you want to call it that, when we are grounded, when we are at peace, you can measure that electromagnetic field coming up to six feet outside the body, it's really wide and feels lovely, and everyone's like, Yeah. And then if we're in fight-to-flight stress, that the electromagnetic field shrinks, becomes much, much smaller. So I find that very, very interesting. And some of this came from the Heart Maths Institute in America, and they found that we actually co-regulate so we can share our electromagnetic fields and influence electromagnetic fields with dogs and with horses, which might be why we as human beings have such an affinity with these particular animals. And I, for one, do love an Instagram video of you know, the horse healing. That's why horses work so much with people with disabilities. They're very intuitive, they're very in tune. And so co-regulation and us tuning into each other is something that exists in nature. And once we can understand it and use it to our intended advantage instead of unintended disadvantage, it's really helpful for our nervous

Why Conflict Escalates So Fast

Naomi Mills 7:53

systems. And to put it back into the context of parenting, you will all have seen it or been in it where a child is really challenging you. And if you lose it with the child, well, you know, all hell might break loose. And sometimes the only way to get through is to get really calm and to get really slow, and that is a way to keep the child and the whole situation within a certain more positive bound because especially when the child's incredibly dysregulated and potentially going into like so I work with a lot of neurodiverse children, into either self-harming or just losing their ability to be in control in that situation. A more calm, consistent parent can really help that child regulate better, to latch on, to stay more present and more in control of themselves as they go through these wild, totally felt short-term emotions. Last episode, um, I talked about the wiring of these teen brains and how they are very different to adult wiring, which is why co-regulation is so important, because actually, our brains have developed the capacity and the tools to think long term, to remain calm, to see different sides of the situation. We don't have to live completely within our emotions, and so it can be very helpful for a child to have their adult gift them, if you like, that ability, give them something to latch on to and to regulate from to stop them feeling completely out of control. But as humans, we did evolve in groups, and so if one member of the tribe noticed danger, this is how this was explained to me, everybody benefits from noticing. So somebody says, Oh, potential danger, that awareness spreads around the group. And we are wired, as I said, to detect each other's emotional states, both positive and less positive. You can walk into a room and sense like a frisson in the air, or it could be anger, it could be despair. You we can walk in and be like, oh, you notice the mood in a room. Yawning spreads, laughter spreads, panic spreads, anxiety spreads, because we are wired to detect each other's emotional state. I see it a lot when I do the holotrophic breath work. Crying might go around the room, laughter might go around the room. It's almost like a wave of emotion that when people are entrained and in deep state, it comes out that literally is extremely interesting. And so, as a family, you're a tiny little ecosystem of your own nervous systems. And so, for example, shouting will escalate more shouting. If your child shouts at you, you feel disrespected. I might shout louder, the child feels threatened, so the child shouts louder. Nobody's winning in that situation because each nervous system is just reacting to the previous nervous system and it's pushing our brains into that survival sense. Again, the limbic system, the one that's not thinking it through, it is responding. So here's the most important thing, okay, because nobody is regulated in that situation

A Dysregulated Parent Cannot Regulate

Naomi Mills 11:36

because a dysregulated nervous system cannot create regulation in another nervous system. A dysregulated nervous system cannot create regulation in another nervous system. So me turning up dysregulated, stressed, tired, grumpy, right, I'm here, I'm here, let's all play and have fun is actually not creating fun and play. Because here's the other part of this nervous system regulation science is everybody's nervous system wants to be regulated. Actually, if you put a regulated and a dysregulated system in a room, the room will gravitate towards the regulated person, which is super cool, right? That's that's the gift. If you are that calm, grounded, heartfelt, you know, it's so attractive in people. And you might have noticed this yourself because they seem so calm and they're happy, and you know, these traits we organically want to move towards, they feel safe. But that regulated nervous system needs to be in the room for that to happen. So when I think of my tiny ecosystem, and if there's only three of us and none of us are in that state, we're not getting there. We're just gonna feed off of each other. So, co-regulation is this idea that we do feed off each other, and the cool thing is that when someone is regulated, grounded, their electromagnetic field is spread. We all want some of that. But it has to be

Fear Underneath Teen Pushback

Naomi Mills 13:23

there in the first place in order for this to happen. So I gave an example last time about when I gave my daughter some feedback. But what she experienced was both her parents being unhappy with her, she experienced threat. Think she's not good enough, I'm disappointing you. She goes into fight, flight, freeze. We saw that reaction, we got annoyed with her, she experiences more threat, and you get stuck in this cycle. And what we were seeing was her attitude of fight, flight, or freeze, but she was experiencing fear, and there's a huge distinction there. And now, with that little bit of insight, with that little bit of knowledge, as the more developed human, brain structure-wise, experience-wise, age-wise, I could now revisit that experience, hopefully in real time, and see myself as the safe anchor point for her, where we remove the shame of getting stuck in a cycle because I certainly feel this is a parent, and then thinking we're doing something wrong, or it's our fault, or you know, something's not right because this is just going round and round and round. But when you learn how to and practice, because it's not just gonna happen overnight, you can practice finding calm in these heightened situations because you're never going to be calm all the time or never stressed or perfect. But when you're in the eye of the storm, you're still able to have one foot on the ground that may bring your whole family back. And I would say it's probably unlikely to work perfectly or even resolve in a way that you think it's going to. But actually, you being able to pause, take a breath, ground yourself helps everybody else's nervous system find a more balanced place to land as well.

Repair After You Get It Wrong

Naomi Mills 15:52

And actually, one of the great things I've learned to speak of Brene Brown again and her gifts of imperfect parenting, which I would highly recommend. I learned from that is your ways are not set. You can always circle back and say, I didn't respond in the best way there. Can we talk about what happened? Even when your teen isn't mega responsive, they will be hearing you when you acknowledge how things went and you can repair and change as you go along because we're human as well. Misunderstandings and conflict and stress are going to happen to all of us. But there's some real magic in being able to repair it too. So I will go back and say, I'm really sorry I shouted at you like that, or can we start again? That's not how I wanted to handle it. And you're actually then teaching your child how to be accountable, how to feel safe emotionally, you're giving them resilience and permission when they become parents and they make the same mistakes, which we all do. They've also witnessed how to repair, and that's important for every aspect of the relationships that they have. So,

What Calm Looks Like In Practice

Naomi Mills 17:07

what does calm actually look like? What does being this calm hot spot really mean? I'm just talking about taking a few deep breaths, maybe speaking a little bit more softly, pausing, coming in with curiosity, and then owning the mistakes. So these are not, you're not a Zen monk, you're not perfectly regulated, you don't have to become something that you are not. Like I said, you're now awareness of this is what is happening to us all through our biology and our design, and my sheer awareness of this means that I might have a bit of a chance of shifting the dynamic. That I believe is the best you can possibly be, because you cannot set the dynamic perfectly all the time. Because you too are human, and that's what you know, many, many more of the episodes of this podcast, both before now and after now, will be about us humaning, parenting, being grown people that are living in a very challenging world ourselves. It's not just our young people. But what I would love you to do is just bring some of that awareness to your family situations today. Don't wait for things to escalate because it's far harder to put this work into practice in heightened situations. And that's a little takeaway I give to teens every day, especially if they're using my daily nervous system check-in cards. And I'm like, yes, these give you tools in hard times, do not use them in hard times in the beginning, use them in easy, good times because then you will actually be able to implement them when you're under stress. So I'd like you to bring that awareness and then play with I am the hot spot. How do I want everyone in this room to be? And putting yourself in a calm, regulated state where you take a few deep breaths, you soften your voice, you speak more slowly, and just consciously drop your shoulders and release your jaw, and just be aware of what your nervous system is doing. That is a beautiful practice for you to start playing with now and see where it brings your family. So if there's one thing I hope that you take from this episode, it's that you do not need to be a perfect parent. Your child does not need one, but they do really benefit from a parent who isn't afraid to keep returning to connection and curiosity, to repair and to calm. Because remember, they're not only listening to your words, they are picking up on your intention, they are listening to your nervous system. And every time that you set that new tone for your family, you're showing them that they can do that too.

Takeaways And Closing Invitation

Naomi Mills 20:27

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparks something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have it.