Co-Regulation: How the People Around You Impact Your Nervous System
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Our nervous system, and thus our stress levels, are deeply impacted by the people around us
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Jessica Maguire explains how co-regulation works, and how to better understand your nervous system
One of the most influential things on your stress levels are the people around you.
Your relationships and your interactions with your community impact on your emotions, thoughts, and physiology in either nourishing or depleting ways.
Belonging and nourishing relationships where you feel truly seen, felt, and heard are perhaps the biggest influences on the quality and length of your life.
Nourishing relationships can help shift your nervous system back to a state of safety, especially after experiencing trauma. How? Through co-regulation.
Co-regulation: a resilience superpower
Co-regulation is the influence of one nervous system on another. It can help to bring you back into balance and feel safe in times of stress.
Co-regulation is a feedback loop between two people that creates synchronisation of emotions and bodily states. It’s also what allows you to offer safety and connection to another person who is distressed.
When you don’t feel safe, you might experience nervous system responses like fight, flight, flop or freeze. These states make it challenging to be calm, creative, collaborative and kind.
When you’re hypervigilant to threat one of the first places it shows up is in your personal and professional connections. Within your relationships you might find you become reactive, critical, interrupt, start arguments, want to ‘storm off’ or quit your job. This can be from the fight-or-flight energy of your sympathetic nervous system.
Your dorsal vagal state conversely can leave you feeling disconnected, flat or stuck on ‘off.’ This looks like feelings of apathy, a lack of motivation, procrastination and wanting to self isolate.
You might withdraw, find it difficult to reply to messages and emails, stonewall those closest to you or generally annoy loved ones with your flakey behaviour.
Only through a regulated state of our nervous system can we offer co-regulation to others. This connection arises from a state of safety, calm and kindness.
The vagus nerve
Connection, attunement and regulation play out through the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve makes up the bulk of your nervous system’s ‘brake’ or what slows you down. Interestingly 80% of the vagus nerve fibres are afferent, meaning they relay sensory information from the body to the brain (whereas efferent nerves relay information from the brain to the body).
The vagus nerve innervates the gut, heart, lungs, throat and facial muscles – and through your facial expression, voice, touch, gestures, listening and breath we can send messages of safety to our own nervous system, and then offer the same to others.
Not only does this improve your emotional health, but it also supports recovery and repair of the brain and body. It happens via the vagus nerve, powerful chemical processes, especially the release of the hormone oxytocin, and changes to the immune system that reduce inflammation.
Who are your co-regulators?
Co-regulation can happen with the people you’re closest to, health professionals and those moments of connection with people in your community. If the connection feels safe and promotes belonging, rest, recovery and repair of the brain-body system take place.
But without healthy connection in your community, you may leave the present and go into the defensive sympathetic mobilisation, or you disappear into dorsal vagal shutdown and disconnection.
Segregation, marginalisation, lack of social support, loneliness and poverty can all trigger survival responses. Left unchecked they can lead to anxiety, depression, PTSD, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, inflammation, compromised immune functioning or gut disorders.
Connection or protection
The need for connection and support doesn’t make you needy, co-dependent, too emotional or too sensitive. Biologically it’s essential.
Even with healthy self-regulation your nervous system still longs for co-regulation. You’re not wired to flourish on your own, or in systems that marginalise you.
Research shows that supportive social networks not only improve your psychological wellbeing, but they can also prevent the incidence of disease.
Strengthening your own relational web and being able to support another person in their web, is what makes you resilient and builds healthy communities. It’s in a regulated state we are our healthiest and do our best learning and working.
Although you may isolate yourself in difficult times, co-regulation can help you find your way home again. Shifting from the state of longing to belonging improves emotional and physical health.
Even brief interactions can have a lasting effect.
Other ways to support your nervous system:
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Start with an awareness of the body: if you start to feel your jaw clenching, your entire body is tense or you feel out of control, take a pause. Simply recognising that your nervous system is a little out of whack is might be all it takes to bring yourself back to a regulated state. Once you do it again and again, you’ll find the stress activation that is stuck will dissipate.
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Connect your body to your sensory experience: proprioception, i.e. knowing the position of your body in space, can help calm down a dysregulated nervous system. Try focusing on the connection of your feet on the ground and move that attention up through the body, concentrating on each of your joints. Staying connected to the body will help calm down the fight or flight response.
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Educate yourself on the nervous system: unfortunately, our brain and nervous system isn’t optimised for calm, it’s optimised for survival and procreation. As a result we have a negativity bias which primes us to think something dangerous is going to happen.
Recognising this allows us to shed the shame and blame we often place on ourselves for feeling natural human responses. And with this knowledge we have the agency to make healthier decisions that will serve us over the course of our lives.
Jessica Maguire is the author of Nervous System Reset – watch our interview with Jessica here:
