5 Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System

His silence was deafening.

I was dating someone new, and he said he’d call me after dinner with his parents. I anxiously checked my phone for any notifications from him.

But the screen remained blank.

In the unexpected space, my mind started swirling. Did I say something wrong? Was he pulling away? Had he changed his mind about me?

By the time the clock struck midnight, my nervous system was in full-blown panic mode. My chest was tight, my stomach in knots. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t just worry—it was dread.

Shortly thereafter, I finally called him.

“How was your evening?” I asked, doing my best to sound casual. “I was a little anxious after not hearing from you.”

“I actually just got home. Dinner ran late, and my parents kept suggesting we have one more round of drinks,” he said. “I’m really sorry about that.”

“Thanks for saying that,” I said. “I’m really glad we’re connecting now.”

“I am too. And I can’t wait to see you tomorrow,” he said. I could hear his smile through the phone.

That was it. No malice. Just life—and two parents catching up with their son.

But to my body, it felt like abandonment.

That moment—like so many others before it—wasn’t just about the guy I was dating forgetting to call. It was about the years of emotional inconsistency I’d been through leading up to that. The unpredictability of my parents growing up. The betrayal in past relationships that taught me I should always be on guard. My nervous system didn’t know the difference between delayed communication and emotional danger.

Truth is, it took me many years to differentiate between the two, to realize that I wasn’t “too sensitive” or “too much”; I was dysregulated.

Once I learned about the nervous system and how it relates to anxious attachment, everything started to make sense. I finally understood why I reacted the way I did, and more importantly what I could do to actually feel safe in my body again.

If you’ve ever found yourself spiraling over a text, obsessing over someone’s tone, or feeling completely hijacked by anxiety in dating and relationships—this post is for you.

Let’s talk about what nervous system regulation really is, how trauma wires us for panic, and how you can start to feel more secure from the inside out.

What is nervous system regulation?

Simply put, nervous system regulation is your body’s ability to return to a state of balance after experiencing stress—to find your way back to steady ground, both physically and emotionally.

It’s what allows you to stay centered when you’re triggered, to remain present during conflict, and to bounce back from emotional upsets without going down a rabbit hole. A well-regulated nervous system helps you respond to life instead of reacting to it.

Think of your nervous system as an internal barometer for safety. When it’s working properly, it helps you adjust to what’s happening around you and settle back into equilibrium. But when it’s been shaped by trauma, chronic stress, or emotional unpredictability, it can malfunction. Your system stays stuck on high, reacting to everyday moments as if they’re emergencies, even when there’s no real danger.

Regulation, then, is the ability to bring your system back to balance. It’s the process of quieting the internal alarms and restoring a sense of inner steadiness—even when the outside world feels unpredictable.

Regulation isn’t just an inside job. We also need others—because we heal through connection. While self-regulation is essential, co-regulation—feeling emotionally safe with others—is a powerful and necessary part of the healing process too.

It also doesn’t happen in the mind; it happens in the body. You can’t think your way out of anxiety or rationalize your way out of fear. You have to feel it. Process it. Let the energy move through you.

That’s the heart of regulation: Feeling what’s happening in your body and gently bringing yourself back to center.

Regulation isn’t about never getting triggered. It’s about expanding your capacity to sit with discomfort without losing yourself in it—and gently grounding yourself again and again, even in the midst of uncertainty.

To do that, you first need to understand how your nervous system operates—what drives your stress responses, and what helps bring you back to safety from the inside out.

How your body responds to stress

There are two components to your autonomic nervous system—the sympathetic one and the parasympathetic one. Together, these two systems help you manage stress, respond to challenges, and return to a place of safety. But when you’ve experienced trauma or live with an anxious attachment style, these systems can become dysregulated—leaving you stuck in stress or survival mode.

The sympathetic nervous system is your internal alarm. It kicks in when your body senses danger and prepares you in the form of the fight or flight response. Your heart starts racing, your breathing gets shallow, your muscles tense. You get ready to act in order to stay safe.

The parasympathetic nervous system helps you slow down and recover. It’s responsible for rest, digestion, and restoration. But when you’ve been overwhelmed or felt powerless for long stretches, this system can also send you into shutdown or collapse—what’s commonly known as the freeze response.

When both systems are activated simultaneously, we experience a mix of urgency and shutdown, which is commonly referred to as the fawn response.

Here’s how these survival responses often show up in day-to-day life:

• Fight: You get reactive or defensive, and try to regain control of the situation.

• Flight: You escape into busyness or distraction. You might overanalyze or throw yourself into work to avoid feeling discomfort. You might physically leave the room.

• Freeze: You shut down. You might go numb, disconnect from your body, or feel stuck and detached.

• Fawn: You abandon yourself to maintain connection with others. You might apologize too much, say yes when you mean no, or mirror someone else's emotions so closely that you lose touch with your own.

These responses were once protective—but now, they may be the very patterns keeping you stuck.

To shift into a more regulated state, you first have to recognize when you’re dysregulated—and that starts with noticing what’s happening inside your body.

What are interoception and neuroception?

Interoception is your ability to notice and interpret internal signals—your heart rate, muscle tension, gut sensations, or the tightness in your chest when you’re anxious. It’s what allows you to recognize not just physical states, but emotional ones, too.

In simple terms: interoception is how you feel your feelings from the inside out.

If you’re anxiously attached or healing from trauma, this internal awareness can be disrupted. You might be so focused on other people’s emotions or energy that you lose touch with your own. Or you might push through your day without realizing how activated, overwhelmed, or exhausted you are—until you crash.

This is where neuroception comes in. Neuroception is your nervous system’s unconscious ability to detect cues of safety or danger in your environment—without involving your thinking brain. It’s what allows your body to instinctively react to a subtle tone of voice, a facial expression, or a shift in someone’s energy.

Neuroception detects the threat. Interoception is the rush of sensation that follows.

That’s why nervous system regulation starts with awareness. You have to notice what’s happening in order to work with it. The more attuned you become to your body’s internal cues, the sooner you can catch dysregulation—and the easier it becomes to pause, reset, and return to a place of stability.

Building this awareness also helps you understand what shaped your nervous system in the first place—and why it continues to react the way it does now.

How trauma impacts the nervous system

Your body’s most important job is to keep you alive—and your nervous system is built to help it do just that.

When you go through chronic stress or emotional trauma, your nervous system doesn’t just move on. It adapts. It wires itself for survival based on the experiences it’s been through. If your environment growing up was unstable or unpredictable, your system learns to become hypervigilant.

Over time, this creates what’s known as nervous system dysregulation—a state where your body becomes hypersensitive to stress, even when the threat is no longer present. In a state of dysregulation, you’re likely to overreact to minor triggers, shut down in moments of vulnerability, or stay activated long after the stressor is gone.

This dysregulation doesn’t just affect how you feel in high-stress moments—it becomes your baseline. You may walk through life with a subtle—or sometimes intense—sense of urgency. A hum of tension that never fully quiets. Even joy or calm might feel unfamiliar or suspicious, because your system has learned that safety is short-lived and can’t be trusted.

That’s why lasting healing isn’t just about insight or mindset—it’s about retraining your body and nervous system to tolerate and accept safety, presence, and connection without bracing for impact.

And for those of us with an anxious attachment style, that wiring runs deep. Our survival responses don’t just impact our bodies—they rewrite our beliefs about love.

How nervous system dysregulation relates to anxious attachment

If you have an anxious attachment style, nervous system dysregulation is not just part of your experience—it’s at the heart of it.

Anxious attachment develops from emotional inconsistency and a lack of attunement, typically originating in childhood. Maybe you had to work for love. Maybe your needs were minimized. Maybe connection came in waves—there one moment, then gone the next.

The message your nervous system received was this: Love is uncertain. Safety is conditional. I have to stay on high alert to hold onto it.

That wiring doesn’t just go away on its own.

It lives in your body. In your breath. In the way your palms get sweaty when someone (like an avoidant attacher) pulls away. In the way you question your worth the moment someone’s energy shifts.

Anxious attachers often live in a chronic state of nervous system activation—constantly scanning for signs of abandonment, overanalyzing conversations, or self-abandoning to avoid disconnection. These aren’t conscious choices. They’re survival responses.

Until you address the nervous system patterns underneath your attachment style, no amount of therapy, relationship advice, or self-help will bring lasting change.

You might know why you’re reacting the way you are—but you’ll still feel powerless to stop it in the moment.

That’s why regulation is such a powerful turning point. It helps you create safety from within, so your sense of worth isn’t held hostage by how someone else feels or behaves.

Healing anxious attachment isn’t about becoming perfectly detached. It’s about learning to stay with yourself—especially in the moments you’ve been most likely to leave.

Want support to integrate the changes needed to heal your nervous system dysregulation and anxious attachment style? Check out my Anxious Attachment Style Healing Toolkit and my new book, Needy No More: The Journey From Anxious to Secure Attachment.

How nervous system dysregulation affects relationships

When your nervous system is dysregulated, it doesn’t just affect how you feel—it impacts how you try to connect.

Especially in close relationships, dysregulation can shape your behavior, your communication, and your entire sense of emotional safety. You might find yourself clinging, overexplaining, shutting down, or monitoring for the slightest sign that something is off.

And the moment you sense that shift? Your body reacts before your mind can catch up. You start spiraling and imagining worst-case scenarios. Your body isn’t reacting to the present—it’s reacting to the emotional blueprint it created based on the past.

In that moment, your ability to connect gets hijacked by your instinct to protect.

You may start over-functioning—taking on the emotional labor of managing other people’s moods or people-pleasing to avoid conflict. Or you may suppress your needs entirely, convinced that expressing them will drive people away. The fear of abandonment is so loud that your nervous system treats even minor disconnection like a life-or-death emergency.

It becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between discomfort and danger.

That’s the hidden cost of dysregulation: It makes you feel unsafe in moments that are actually safe. It confuses love with threat. And it wires you to chase connection in ways that push it further out of reach.

Without regulation, your relationships can feel like a tightrope walk—where any misstep means rejection, conflict, or even breaking up altogether.

But when you build the capacity to stay present with yourself, even when things feel uncertain, everything starts to shift. You begin to relate from a place of groundedness, not grasping. You speak up without spiraling. You stop abandoning yourself to hold onto others.

Because when your body feels safe, you stop chasing safety from others. You carry safety into every boundary, every conversation, every connection.

But even with that internal safety, triggers can still catch you off guard—especially when they echo old wounds.

Why triggers feel so intense (especially for anxious attachers)

A trigger is anything that causes your nervous system to react as if you're in danger, even when you're not.

It might be something subtle: A delayed text, a change in tone, a canceled plan, someone forgetting to check in. It can also be something more substantial: Being left out of a group chat, feeling dismissed in a conversation, noticing someone’s energy shift.

And just like that, you’re not in the present moment anymore—you’re in a past emotional landscape that feels eerily familiar.

That’s the thing about triggers: They’re rarely about what’s happening right now. They’re actually a reflection of what’s been happening in your nervous system for years.

They’re reminders of previous wounds that were never fully tended to—wounds created by experiences of abandonment, rejection, unpredictability, and invisibility.

If you have an anxious attachment style, your nervous system is already wired to be on high alert in relationships. And it can make your relationships feel emotionally volatile, even when nothing major is actually occurring. 

Here are some of the most common triggers I see with anxious attachers:

• Exclusion: Feeling left out, even unintentionally, can hit hard. If a friend forgets to invite you or a partner doesn’t mention a plan, it can feel like rejection—even if it wasn’t meant that way.

• Communication Shifts: A perceived shift in frequency, consistency, or tone of communication can send your nervous system into overdrive. You might start obsessing over what you did wrong or start catastrophizing.

• Lack of Prioritization: When someone else becomes the focus of your partner or friend’s time, it can feel like you’ve been demoted—like you’re not being chosen. Even if you can chock it up to what they have going on with their work, their family, or their mood, your body reads it as abandonment.

• Inconsistency: Are they close one day and distant the next? That kind of unpredictability can be emotionally destabilizing. Your system craves reliability and consistency—and when they’re missing, panic sets in.

These triggers may not seem “logical.” But they don’t need to be. They’re physiological. They live in your body, not just your mind.

The goal isn’t to eliminate triggers—it’s to understand them. To pause in the moment and ask: What past wound is this activating? Is my response about this moment—or about something I haven’t healed yet?

Regulation helps you meet your emotions without losing yourself in them. It softens the urgency and creates space for grounded clarity. 

That’s why building a wider window of tolerance isn’t just helpful—it’s necessary.

Why building your window of tolerance matters

When your nervous system is dysregulated, even small stressors can feel overwhelming. That’s because you’re operating outside your window of tolerance—the zone where your body feels safe enough to stay grounded, connected, and emotionally present.

If you have an anxious attachment style, your window of tolerance may be much narrower than someone who grew up feeling emotionally safe. What feels manageable to others might feel completely destabilizing to you.

The goal of regulation isn’t just to calm yourself down after a trigger—it’s to expand your capacity for discomfort so you aren’t overwhelmed by it when it arises. This is what it means to build your window of tolerance.

Now that you understand the importance of expanding your nervous system’s capacity, let’s explore five tools that can help you do exactly that—gently and consistently.

5 Proven Techniques to Regulate Your Nervous System

Healing your nervous system doesn’t require a complete life overhaul—but it does require daily attention. Small, consistent choices create long-term, lasting change. These are some of the tools that helped me move out of survival mode and into a more grounded, secure version of myself:

1. Tend to the basics

Sleep, hydration, nutrition, and movement are your body’s baseline needs. When these are off, everything feels harder—emotionally and physically. If I’m underslept or skipping meals, I feel it immediately in my anxiety levels and reactivity. Regulation starts with making sure your system has the fuel it needs to function.

2. Check in with yourself

Ask yourself: What do I need right now? What would help me feel safer in my body in this moment? Before you reach out for reassurance, try coming home to yourself first.

I used to bypass my own experience and prioritize how others felt. But checking in with myself taught me something crucial: How I feel matters more than how anyone else feels about the situation. It’s how I began strengthening my intuition and building self-trust. Instead of managing others, I started understanding myself.

I realized I’m allowed to trust my read on a situation—I don’t have to outsource that clarity to someone else.

3. Breathe through it

Your breath is one of the fastest, most powerful tools for regulation. I use a technique called the physiological sigh—a deep inhale through the nose, a second short inhale, and a long, slow exhale through the mouth. I usually do five of these in a row when I’m feeling overwhelmed. It helps reset my nervous system and signal to my brain and body that I’m safe. 

When my thoughts start racing, this technique brings me back to the present moment.

4. Try cold exposure

Cold showers or ice immersion may sound extreme, but they’ve been surprisingly helpful for me. Intentionally placing your body in short bursts of physical discomfort trains your nervous system to stay calm under stress. Over time, this builds resilience—not just physically, but emotionally. 

And expands your window of tolerance, too.

5. Build a daily regulation practice

Regulation isn’t something you do when you’re spiraling—it’s something you prepare for proactively instead of responding to reactively. I walk the walk myself, with a daily routine that helps me strengthen my ability to regulate. I now help my coaching clients do the same, integrating a regulation practice on a day-to-day basis.

Consistency is the language of safety. The more you show up for yourself, the more your nervous system learns: I’m safe here. I’m not in danger anymore.

The 6 Cs of nervous system regulation

As I worked to regulate my own nervous system and move toward secure attachment, I started noticing certain patterns that helped me stay grounded.

I call them The 6 Cs—a simple framework I now use with my coaching clients to make emotional regulation feel more accessible. A way to build emotional resilience one moment, one breath, one choice at a time.

The more you integrate the 6 Cs into your life, the more your nervous system begins to recognize: I can handle this. I know what to do.

1. Compassion

This work is not easy. It requires you to face old wounds, sit with discomfort, and build new responses where old reactions once lived. You will have moments when regulation feels harder—when old patterns resurface—and that’s okay.

I used to spiral in shame after a dysregulated moment, convinced I had regressed—or worse, that I wasn’t healing fast enough. I’d wonder, Why am I still struggling with this? Shouldn’t I be past this by now? But now, I pause and offer myself gentleness: It’s okay that this is hard. I’m doing my best. I’m learning.

Self-compassion is what keeps you moving forward when the work feels heavy.

2. Consistency

Regulation is a muscle, not a moment. You build it through repetition.

For a long time, I waited until I was anxious or overwhelmed to try and regulate. But healing happens faster when you create structure that supports you before you need it. That’s why I built a daily practice with breathwork, movement, and grounding—because showing up for myself consistently creates the stability my nervous system needs.

Consistency is how your nervous system learns to trust: This is safe. I know what to expect.

3. Clarity

Anxious attachers often wait for others to “figure out” what we need. We drop hints, hope they’ll read between the lines, and then feel crushed when they don’t.

One of the most regulating things I ever learned to do was to get clear about what I need—and to say it out loud.

Not with anger. Not with blame. Just with clarity: "When I don’t hear from you, I start to feel anxious. Can we agree to check in more consistently?" The clearer you are with yourself and others, the less likely it is that your anxiety will fill in the blanks for you.

4. Communication

Bottling up your feelings is a fast track to dysregulation. I know because I did it for years.

I thought staying quiet would make me easier to love. But all it did was make my nervous system more dysregulated—until my emotions bubbled over and manifested in behavior I was most certainly not proud of.

Now, I practice communicating what I’m feeling in real time—even when it feels scary. Because expression is an antidote to anxiety. It helps release what I used to suppress and creates space for connection, not confusion.

5. Collaboration

Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. We regulate best when we feel seen, supported, and emotionally safe with others.

When I feel dysregulated, I don’t try to white-knuckle it alone anymore. I call a friend. I ask for a hug. I lean into safe people who help me co-regulate and come back to myself.

If that feels hard, start small. Say: "Hey, I’m feeling a little off today. Can we talk?" Even just naming the feeling in the presence of someone safe can soften the edges.

6. Curiosity

Curiosity creates a pause between what you feel and how you respond. Instead of spiraling into judgment or shame, you can gently ask yourself: What’s really going on here? What might this feeling be trying to tell me?

When I started approaching my emotional responses with curiosity instead of criticism, everything shifted. I stopped viewing dysregulation as failure and started seeing it as feedback. That shift opened the door to deeper healing, because I was finally listening to what my body was trying to communicate.

You can heal anxious attachment through nervous system regulation—I’m living proof!

It’s natural for regulation to feel challenging—especially if no one ever taught you how to feel your feelings, sit with discomfort, or come back to safety in your body.

You’re not behind or broken. You’re learning a new way of being—one that’s based on presence, not panic. And every time you pause, breathe, or check in with yourself instead of spiraling, you’re doing the work.

Healing anxious attachment isn’t just about changing your thoughts. It’s about building a relationship with your body that feels steady and safe—that’s self-led but other-supported.

This is the heart of the work I do with my coaching clients. I help you stop outsourcing your emotional safety to other people—and start creating it from within. Through structured daily practices and ongoing support, we focus on nervous system regulation as a foundation for healing anxious attachment and building self-trust.

A single missed call used to unravel me. Now it reminds me of how far I’ve come. And how far you can, too.

Over the years, I’ve supported thousands of people across six continents in healing anxious attachment and learning how to feel safe in their own bodies. If you’ve been struggling, please seek support. It’s more than okay to need assistance along the way. In my experience, we can only take ourselves so far before we need someone to walk with us—to help us feel held, seen, and supported while we do the work.

If you’re ready to stop living at the mercy of your emotions and start feeling safe in your own body, I’d be honored to assist. Book your free 15-minute consultation with me here or via the module below.

And take a giant step toward secure attachment—from the inside out.