If you’re having trouble with your mood, with your focus, with your energy, there’s one word that’s buzzing all around social media that you have to know about, self-regulation. A lot of what you’re hearing, I don’t think really passes muster in terms of what you need to do to self-regulate. Let’s talk about it. Everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist. I do a lot of therapy. I spend a lot of time with people working on self-regulation.
Now, let’s just start with a basic definition. What is self-regulation? This is our ability to notice what’s going on inside ourselves, inside our minds, in our bodies. And then this is the part I think is tricky, respond in a way that brings us back into balance. Self-regulation is about the fact that often when we have triggers, we’re anxious, we’re terrified or catastrophic, we’re really down and sad and have no motivation or energy. Those states, those mood states are something that we have to work on regulating.
Now, first of all, I’m a therapist. I like all of your feelings. In no way do we want to suppress or ignore or say that some feelings shouldn’t exist. We want to get rid of them more than we want to notice them and respond. If you’re having a grief reaction, sitting with sadness, loss and grief is a really important part of it. So the ability to self-regulate in some ways, to tolerate and sit with a lot of these feelings and hopefully some of the lessons and some of the meaning of them that become more apparent when we approach them and meet them in a state that helps us honor our feelings by using them to better self-regulate.
How do you know if you’re dysregulated? Let’s talk about some of the symptoms.
Now, a lot of times these fall in these classic clusters where people talk about flight, fight, freeze, and fawn as being these classic nervous system and emotional system responses when we become dysregulated, when we sense a threat, when we become anxious or catastrophic. Let’s talk a little bit about these.
Flight is when we want to flee. And all of us can see this in situations where, whether it’s emotionally or physically arduous, we’d just rather not handle it. The extreme version of this of course is we get very avoidant and we do flee.
Along with flight, the classic response of fight, this is when we get dysregulated, agitated, oftentimes we tap into our aggression, our voice goes up, we want to intimidate or dominate, we’re ready to fight. Well, that oftentimes on the other side doesn’t feel really that good when we’ve mobilized all that aggression and not thought through, self-regulated, gotten back into balance and think about what it is actually that’s upsetting us.
Next up is freeze. This one can be very uncomfortable. I’ve experienced it a lot. It’s terrifying. You just your body freezes up, you can’t move, you often have this experience of watching something happen in slow motion and you just don’t do anything. And so this is a very classic response that happens when we’re overwhelmed. Part of the self-regulation is noticing that, almost like numbing and dissociation that happens, noticing times when you really have to pay attention or you’ll get into a mild type of freeze dissociative response when there’s stress or anxiety.
Then a fourth one, you hear about some on social media, but also in the literature is fawn. This is when you’re in a dysregulated spot, you begin to become a real people pleaser. You want to fawn on people, you want to give a lot of others attention, you kind of in some ways dissociate or ignore the self by focusing on the service of others. So those are some of the ways that you might notice that you’re becoming dysregulated. If you see in yourself flight, fight, freeze or fawn responses.
Now, it seems obvious, why do we want to regulate? Well, it feels better to be in that state. It feels like a sense of mastery for people. But also our ability to self regulate really is at the core of our ability to communicate more effectively, to have healthy relationships and to connect with people. You’re really showing up with a measured sense and a good sense of who you are, how you’re acting and responding and communicating according to your set of values as well as what you’re hoping for in these relationships.
When we don’t self-regulate, we all know where that shows up. It’s when you get a critical comment at work, instead of hearing that constructive criticism, taking it in, thinking about the real pearl of truth in there, we fire off that angry email. Or when we’re in a fight with our partner or our spouse, and instead of really sitting back counting to 10, thinking and choosing about our words somewhat carefully, we say something mean or hurtful that doesn’t promote connection, doesn’t promote the conversation. So we can see really quickly where more regulation is so helpful again, not to deny that we get angry or sad or sometimes we’re obnoxious or even a little bit rude, but more so that we want to self-regulate. So we’re choosing our words. We’re being more thoughtful and meaningful in our encounters with others. So we’re working to build connection, closeness, and safety over time within our relationships.
So with those couple of examples, then it’s clear to see why we want to have a great toolbox for self-regulation, right? We can’t just be like, hey, box breathing. I love box breathing but we want to have a lot of different tools because we need to self-regulate in a lot of different settings in our professional lives and in our personal lives.
Let’s build your self-regulation toolbox. Number one is breathing. I don’t mean to throw any shade on box breathing. It’s one of the many types of breathing that’s so helpful when we’re dysregulated. When you take slower, deeper breaths, particularly a longer exhale, you’re signaling safety to the body. You’re activating that parasympathetic rest and digest and be calm part of your nervous system. You can do it right now. A nice inhale through the nose. Ideally, I like to hold there for a few beats. I like to feel my heartbeat, especially if I’m anxious and it’s pounding. Boom, boom. I like to really, again, self-regulate to first sense that. Then the long exhalation. That long exhalation gives you a feeling of mastery. It right away induces into your body a sense of calm. So controlling your breath and being able to control your breath for anyone, a performance athlete, race car drivers, astronauts, teachers, anyone who’s suddenly in the public and suddenly confronted with a lot of anxiety or a lot of anxiety inducing situations, breath and breath control is key to self-regulation.
The next tool in your toolbox would be the five, four, three, two, one sensing technique you want to ground in your senses especially if you’re prone to the freeze response and so quickly when you when you notice that coming on and you’re in a spot where you can use your senses to better self-regulate you want to think about seeing five things. What are five things that you see? Use your senses. What are four things that you feel? It can be the feeling of your your sweater on your arm. What are three things that you hear? Two things that you smell? And what’s one thing that you taste?
Grounding in your senses allows you to be more present in your nervous system. It also reminds us our nervous system has a lot of different functions that we can use to calm ourselves down. For example, the smell or scent of lavender, studies have shown has very calming effects and can help with some of that acute anxiety or situational anxiety. So use your senses to self-regulate your nervous system.
Your third, free amazing tool is movement. It’s one of the tenets of mental fitness and I don’t call it exercise for a reason because movement is medicine. All of this stress response signals to our body via all these stress hormones, that we need to move, we need to do something. So it’s very important, especially if you’re in a period in your life with a lot of nervous system dysregulation, you’re feeling a lot of stress, it’s very important to move your body and to broaden your definition. Stop sitting with a bunch of guilt that you don’t exercise and start moving. It can be a walk, it could be right now, shaking your hands in your arms. One of my favorite mentors, Jim Gordon, does these kind of jumping, shaking meditations. You do that for two minutes and it completely shifts how your nervous system is feeling. So using movement or stretching is another great one. Others include playing sports, going out with someone, hitting a ball back and forth. When I have patients who are oftentimes having a lot of agitation, a lot of struggle, I’ll recommend things like kickboxing, where you’re moving your body and you’re hitting things, you’re discharging all of that agitation. Use movement to help you self-regulate your nervous system. I know you know this one, but I always want to say it just to remind you, we all need encouragement to get out there. Move our bodies to take care of our minds.
Our next tool is co-regulation.
This is where we want to use other people or even animals in our life to help us settle our nervous system. Making eye contact, shaking a hand, even holding the door for someone are all things that you can use in terms of co-regulation with other people. In particular, with my patients, I recommend that you think about the people in your life who are naturally supportive or calming to you. They can be people in your family. They can be friends, they could be a therapist or a coach. Sometimes in a bounded way, some of these people at work, especially with work problems or professional mentors are really helpful. But making sure that you co-regulate, it’s really helpful when you’re upset and you see somebody who hears the same fact pattern and they’re not that upset by it. That’s curious. You see that they’re regulated and you settle down a little bit. I also like co-regulation because part of regulation isn’t just settling down. It’s also when we freeze, for example, like at a funeral and we don’t sit with grief, a very powerful, meaningful and important human emotion. Part of one of those phenomena of going to a funeral or going to a wake and mourning with people is naturally more of that emotionality, more of that sadness comes out, that healing, it’s so good for you. And it’s another example I see of co-regulation, right? When we’re together, when we’re connected, when we’re sharing in this emotional journey that we’re all on, we just do so much better in terms of our self-regulation, our ability to be present, our ability to communicate better and have more meaningful relationships.
And then lastly, naming your emotions. This is one of the major goals of psychotherapy and one of my favorite definitions of psychotherapy, putting our feelings into words, finding the right words to describe what’s going on inside of us. A lot of dysregulation happens, and I see this often in my practice, when people don’t know why they’re so panicked, they don’t know what they’re feeling. They haven’t maybe put a few things together that, of course, it makes sense that they’re really upset, really sad or really anxious. So being able to name your feelings and get specific about them allows you to begin to uncover more of what’s going on. And then of course, more of what you can do about it. It’s one of the most powerful muscles in your emotional health that you can build and really one of the most important parts of your toolbox, learning to get better at naming your feelings and understanding more of what’s going on inside of you.
Check out my other video on journaling and make sure and sign up for Mental Fitness Mondays, which is our tips that come in every Mondays, prompts, ideas, little tiny assignments. It’s kind of like therapy homework, things for you to do to better enact and improve your ability to self-regulate, improve your mental fitness, and live a whole and meaningful life.
Self-regulation isn’t just a buzzword that you hear on social media. It’s a really important set of tools that you build to help you better be present, help you have compassion for yourself, to help you better understand what’s going on with your emotional health, and most importantly, make good choices and do things about it.
These are some tools of self-regulation that we see in our practice help people do a better job. What we see over and over again is the more you practice these skills, the more you try to enact good self-regulatory practices, the better you get at it. So don’t get frustrated. It’s not like a good deep breath always works, but the more you do it, the more it will. The more words and more clarity you have with where you’re struggling in your emotional health and your ability to self-regulate, the more you’re clear about when this happens.
A lot of times there’s a specific context that we really struggle with in terms of our regulation. That’s great. Hone in on that. That becomes your therapy at homework, kind of your arena to get better at your self-regulation. Step into that challenge. Step up to all of your nervous systems ability and all of your ability to self-regulate, to connect, to have deep relationships, to build your mental fitness.
Everybody, that’s self-regulation. Thank you so much.
I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Please sign up for our newsletter and subscribe here. Leave a comment or a question. It’s such a treat to get to spend a little bit of time with you encouraging you to do a better job with self-regulation and taking care of yourself to build your mental fitness. I’ll see you in the next video.
