Nervous System Support
For all the sensitive souls that need some extra support moving through the big feels
Do you ever feel like your emotions are too big or too much to deal with? Do you find yourself getting really stressed over small things, or maybe you find yourself feeling easily frustrated with yourself and others. If you do, know that there's nothing wrong with you, you just need a little bit of nervous system support.
What is Nervous System Support?
Nervous system support which is often called nervous system regulation, is in its simplest form a skillset that helps your mind and body work together instead of against one another so that you can better support yourself through challenging emotions such a stress, sadness, anger, and more.
Think of your nervous system as a giant super computer. It’s the thing that keeps everything running—your thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions. When it’s working well, your computer (you!) can handle tasks smoothly and efficiently.
But over time, just like a computer, your nervous system can get overloaded. Too many programs running (stress), old files taking up space (past emotional baggage), or unexpected viruses (unhelpful patterns) can slow it down, make it crash, or leave it stuck in an endless loop.
Learning to support your nervous system will help you to:
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Release old emotional “data” that’s clogging up your system.
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Create new responses to emotionally challenging and or triggering situations.
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Learn how to pause and reboot when things feel overwhelming, so you don’t burn out.
With regular nervous system support, your “operating system” runs smoother, you can process things more clearly, and you feel more capable of handling life’s challenges without crashing.
How to know if you need nervous system support
Although everyone needs nervous system support if you find yourself:
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Getting very easily stressed (even with small things)
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Crying easily or feeling more sensitive than you used to
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Getting easily frustrated or angry with yourself or others
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Taking things personally or to heart easily (feeling defensive)
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Feeling like you have low to no energy left at the end of your day
These are all signs that your nervous system needs support. Although there are other signs and symptoms of nervous system dysregulation, if you find yourself dealing with one or more of these things on a regular basis than you're in the right place.
What Tools Work
You want to know some really great news? There are so many tools that you can use to start supporting your nervous system starting today! The specific tools I use can teach you to work with include:
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Vagus Nerve Techniques
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Nerve and Muscle Decompression Techniques
- Creative Arts Therapy Techniques (drama, art, music)
- Working with plants to support your nervous system
- Play!
After spending years researching, trying, and teaching the techniques I know and love, the biggest lesson I've learned is this: trying to heal any aspect of ourselves without incorporating play not only sucks, but it can also be retraumatizing and even reinforce the unhelpful patterns that we're trying to change.
The Power of Play
If you look at both kids and animals you'll notice that they do something that many adults no longer do. Once they've calmed down after having a sad, frustrating, or stressful moment, they go and play.
Play is one of the best ways of letting our nervous system know that we're safe and without it, our nervous system can stay stuck in a state of lingering low level stress, sadness, or frustration for far longer than it needs to.
Play - to me at least - is one of the most bad ass forms of rebellion (along with kindness, compassionate honesty, & bravery).
Choosing to incorporate play into our days is choosing to not just exist from one stressful moment to the next; it's choosing to actually enjoy life in spite of the challenges that are going on.
That's why I choose to personally practice play every day and why I also choose to incorporate it into the nervous system support tools I'll teach to you too!
How I know these tools work
The tools that I teach hold an incredibly special place in my heart because without them, I wouldn't be here. For most of my life I suffered from extreme nervous system disregulation due to growing up in a highly disfunctional home.
Although I worked so hard to try and manage my stress levels, with time, the stress on my nervous system became so bad that I ended up having a mental breakdown and wound up spending a week in a crisis center barely holding onto life.
It was hard for me to do pretty much anything without feeling like something really terrible was about to happen. It was terrifying for me to simply sit next to people. It was terryfying for me to simply be by myself.
I had no idea how to deal with the extreme highs and lows that I was going through because of coming out of a lifetime of psychological and emotional abuse. Until one day, I met a magical unicorn (a.k.a Amanda) that taught me vagus nerve techniques.
I'll never forget the relief I felt the first time I used the vagus nerve techniques she showed me. I felt so much hope and a lot less like - it was all in my head - and a lot more like - maybe it was in my body.
The more I practiced the techniques the more improvements I started seeing and the more passionate I became about sharing them with others.
