how to regulate your nervous system

the short answer

to regulate your nervous system is to change its state on purpose: bring a racing system down, lift a flat one, or carry a heavy day without tipping over. there are many answers to how to regulate your nervous system, and they do not all have the same effect (Gross, 2015).

most lists of nervous system regulation techniques skip a step: knowing what state you are in, and what you usually do about it. that step is observation, and it is the one this article is about.

ways to regulate your nervous system right now

three nervous system regulation exercises to try before reading the rest:

1. slow your breathing to under ten breaths a minute, and make the exhale longer than the inhale. the evidence for this is still emerging, and it is covered below.
2. name what is happening in one plain word: tight, fast, heavy, flat. naming a state has measurable effects in lab studies, also covered below.
3. write down what you noticed and what you did about it. one moment becomes something you can read back later.

the rest of this article explains why those three, and where the research behind them runs out.

what nervous system regulation actually acts on

the autonomic nervous system runs your heart rate, digestion and much of what your organs do without asking, and it shapes your breathing too. it is easy to picture it as a dial with calm at one end and stress at the other. a standard textbook on the subject describes something else: many separate pathways, each driving a particular organ for a particular job (Jänig, 2006).

that matters if you are trying to calm your nervous system. a racing heart and a tight stomach can arrive together or one at a time, so "calm down" covers several separate jobs.

in this article, activation means your system shifting up from its usual baseline: heart, breath, muscles or thoughts speeding up or tightening. it is not a problem in itself. it is the state that regulation acts on.

regulation, in the research, is what you do to influence which states you have, when, and how strongly. James Gross treats it as a set of strategies with different costs and different results (Gross, 2015). which strategy you use matters, not only whether you use one.

one distinction matters before going further. most of the research cited here studies emotion regulation, which is a defined field. "nervous system regulation" is a popular term with no settled scientific definition, and it borrows from that work. so this article reports each finding for what it actually tested, and says so when it applies one to the body more broadly. for the emotional side on its own, see how to regulate emotions.

why a list of techniques is not enough

three things explain the gap.

1. you cannot choose a strategy for a state you have not noticed. if you only see the activation once it is already driving what you say or do, the choice has been made for you.
2. some default strategies carry more risk than others. a large meta-analysis found that avoidance and suppression were associated with mental health problems more strongly than acceptance was (Aldao et al, 2010). the data is correlational, so it shows a pattern, not a cause. it still says the habit you already have is worth looking at, and habits have their own mechanics (how habits are formed).
3. your own explanations are a weak witness. people's explanations of their own behaviour often miss what actually drove it, particularly for judgements and choices, and when asked, they supply a reason that sounds right (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). ask yourself on friday why tuesday went badly and you will get a story rather than a record.

what the evidence supports

• write it down close to the moment. recording experience near the time it happens reduces recall bias (Shiffman et al, 2008). a structured reconstruction of the previous day, done once, produced results close to sampling people through the day (Kahneman et al, 2004). you do not need an alarm every hour.
• monitoring changes outcomes. across 138 experiments, monitoring progress toward a goal made people more likely to reach it, and the effect was larger when progress was physically recorded (Harkin et al, 2016). those studies tested goals, not nervous system states, so applying them here is an analogy.
• naming a state has measurable effects, at least in a lab. in a brain imaging study, people who put a word to the emotion in images they were shown had lower amygdala activity and higher activity in the prefrontal cortex (Lieberman et al, 2007). the effect does not seem to need any intention to regulate (Torre and Lieberman, 2018). how far this carries over to naming your own state in daily life is less tested. there is more on this in how to control your emotions in the moment.
• your behaviour can show what introspection misses. a review of the self-knowledge research argues that looking inward has limits, and that observing what you actually do may improve self-knowledge, a route it treats as promising rather than proven (Wilson and Dunn, 2004).
• breath is one lever you can reach at any time. in a review of fifteen studies of healthy people, none of them randomised trials, breathing slower than about ten breaths a minute went with higher heart rate variability while people were doing it, and in some studies with lower anxiety (Zaccaro et al, 2018). in one randomised trial, five minutes a day of cyclic sighing, two inhales followed by a long exhale, lifted mood more than mindfulness meditation and lowered daily breathing rate over a month (Balban et al, 2023). it is a single, exploratory trial, with small groups.

where the evidence stops

• the breathing findings are emerging. small studies and one trial are a reason to try it. they do not settle it.
• a daily log is self-report. it records what you noticed, which is not the same as what your body did. in one study of 80 people, how accurately they could detect their own heartbeat was only partly predicted by how they rated their own body awareness (Garfinkel et al, 2015). interoception covers that gap in more detail.
• we found no study that has tested a daily log of autonomic state as a way to regulate it. the case rests on the neighbouring findings above: recording near the moment, monitoring, and naming. that is an inference, and it should be read as one.

how to regulate your nervous system long term

short-term relief and long-term change are different questions. in the moment, many things bring you down, including some you would rather not rely on. over months, the question is what you reach for when activation arrives, and whether that changes. you cannot answer it from memory, for the reasons above. you need a record.

a plain one is enough. once, or more a day, write a line for each of these:

1. breath. slow, fast, shallow, held, uneven, or nothing you noticed.
2. body. settled, ready, restless, locked, or nothing you noticed.
3. mind. going round the same thing, jumping between things, or clear. (if it is mostly the first, see how to stop overthinking.)
4. what you deliberately did. started something, stopped something, held off, or changed direction.
5. what brought you back, if anything. breath, movement, rest, food, another person, a screen, or nothing.

describe and do not explain. "shallow breath in the afternoon" is an observation. "shallow breath because of the meeting" is a theory, and theories are what we produce when we explain ourselves after the fact.

how to regulate your nervous system naturally

if "naturally" means without a product or a supplement, the two options above with research behind them cost nothing: slowing your breathing, especially the exhale, and putting a name to the state you are in. both sit inside the five lines. the record tells you which one you actually use, and when.

try this

tonight, write one line for each of the five, for today only. if you did not notice your breath at all, write that down. not noticing is information too.

where the aware system fits

the aware system is a record built on these five lanes, breath, body, mind, command (what you deliberately did) and regulate (what brought you back), read back against itself over time. it is not a medical device, and there is no diagnosis. it opens on iOS and Android in february 2027.

read next

• 01 the autonomic nervous system
• 03 the stress response in the body coming soon
• 17 emotional triggers coming soon
• 10 how to get out of fight or flight mode coming soon
• 20 a mood tracker for your nervous system coming soon

references

1. Jänig W (2006). The Integrative Action of the Autonomic Nervous System. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511541667
2. Gross JJ (2015). Emotion regulation: current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry 26(1):1-26. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781
3. Aldao A, Nolen-Hoeksema S, Schweizer S (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: a meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review 30(2):217-237. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2009.11.004
4. Nisbett RE, Wilson TD (1977). Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84(3):231-259. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
5. Shiffman S, Stone AA, Hufford MR (2008). Ecological momentary assessment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 4:1-32. doi:10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415
6. Kahneman D, Krueger AB, Schkade DA, Schwarz N, Stone AA (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method. Science 306(5702):1776-1780. doi:10.1126/science.1103572
7. Harkin B et al (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin 142(2):198-229. doi:10.1037/bul0000025
8. Lieberman MD et al (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science 18(5):421-428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
9. Torre JB, Lieberman MD (2018). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review 10(2):116-124. doi:10.1177/1754073917742706
10. Wilson TD, Dunn EW (2004). Self-knowledge: its limits, value, and potential for improvement. Annual Review of Psychology 55:493-518. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141954
11. Zaccaro A et al (2018). How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12:353. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353
12. Balban MY et al (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine 4(1):100895. doi:10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
13. Garfinkel SN, Seth AK, Barrett AB, Suzuki K, Critchley HD (2015). Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology 104:65-74. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2014.11.004