I have been proactively practicing nervous system regulation in one form or another since 2013.
For the first 7 years, managing how my nervous system responded to stress was summed up in one practice—meditation. At the time, I knew nothing about the nervous system and how it worked, I just knew that I struggled with anxiety and meditation helped.
Then in 2020, a month before lock down kicked off, I started working with a therapist, Kate, who changed my life.
I had tried therapy before and grown from it, but this was different. Kate introduced me to my nervous system and the different states it could be in, which can be summarized in the following framework, the polyvagal theory:
Ventral vagal - safe and social - home base
Sympathetic - fight or flight - my go-to, “home” away from the home base of ventral vagal
Dorsal vagal - shutdown and collapse