Three Common Beliefs About Regulation
none are wrong. some might be costing you.
Most men who end up doing this kind of work didn’t arrive because they heard the phrase “nervous system regulation” and thought: that sounds great, where do I sign up?
They arrived because something stopped working. A relationship. A body. A way of moving through the world that used to feel like strength and started feeling like a cage.
And when they start to understand what regulation actually is — not relaxation, not checked-out, not weakness — a few things come up. Beliefs they’ve been carrying, usually without examining them.
Here are three I hear most often. I held some of them myself.
“If I calm my nervous system down, I won’t be ready.”
Ready for what changes. The ambush. The crisis. The moment when real threat shows up and you need to respond.
The logic makes a certain sense: if I stay sharp, stay alert, stay primed — I’ll be prepared. Down-regulate and you’ll be caught sleeping.
Here’s what I’ve found instead.
A nervous system that’s been running at high alert for months or years doesn’t make you more prepared. It makes you more reactive. The distinction matters. Reactivity isn’t readiness — it’s a system that’s so sensitized to threat that it starts finding threat everywhere. In the tone of an email. In how your partner said your name. In a news headline at 7am.
You’re not more prepared. You’re exhausted from fighting things that aren’t actually attacking you.
The most capable men I’ve known on the water — fishermen who could work in genuinely dangerous conditions and make good decisions under real pressure — weren’t running hot. They were settled. Loose. They’d learned to rest between the hard moments. When the hard moment actually arrived, they had something to give.
A jacked nervous system is a depleted one. The hyper-vigilance is real. So is the cost.
2: “Regulation is a privilege. Some of us don’t get to be calm.”
I’m not going to argue with this one, because there’s truth in it that deserves space to breathe.
Some people experience more threat, more economic stress, more systemic harm — and their nervous systems reflect that reality. The idea that everyone has equal access to calm is naïve at best. There are reasons some bodies are harder to settle than others, and those reasons aren’t personal failures.
There’s also a legitimate question about what we’re supposed to do with our outrage. Some people would say that fear and anger are appropriate responses to a sick and broken world, that they should be channeled, not soothed. That if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
I hold that tension too.
What I keep coming back to, mostly through parenting, is that grounded connection is what actually moves things when energy gets big and wild. You cannot outrage someone into being more peaceful. You can’t force regulation on anyone — a child, a partner, a political opponent. But you can model something different. Sometimes people pick up on it. Sometimes they get more activated. You don’t control the outcome.
What I’ve found is that moving toward acceptance — not trying to accept, which is its own form of resistance, but actually landing in what is — shifts something in the body. Not bypassing. Not tuning out. Receiving what’s real, including what’s hard, and letting your system settle around it rather than brace against it.
The third: “Who would I be without this?”
This one’s the quietest and the hardest.
It shows up once men start to see a way through their pain. Sometimes at the beginning, when they hear what’s possible. Sometimes deeper in, when they’re close enough to feel it. There’s a hesitation. A pulling back.
The story of what they’ve carried has become part of how they understand themselves. Their struggle, their survival, their wound — these aren’t just things that happened to them. They’re identity. And the idea of regulation, of settling the nervous system around those old experiences, feels like it might erase something essential.
I held this one the longest.
What shifted it wasn’t a reframe. It was feeling safe enough to actually go in. To approach the experiences I’d been circling for years and let my body learn that I could be present with them without being destroyed by them.
What I found wasn’t erasure. The memories didn’t disappear. The past didn’t get rewritten.
What changed was my relationship to those things. I had more ability to speak about those experiences without being consumed by them whenever I thought about them. Have you ever witnessed someone telling a story that they haven’t fully processed yet?
There’s a difference between a wound that runs you and a wound you can sit with. Between a story that floods you every time it surfaces and one you can offer to someone else because it might help them.
Going into my deep dark stuff didn’t take those initial experiences from me. Though I may have wanted that at some point. I’m actually grateful for each and every experience of humans being absolute bastards around and to me.
Why? Because trauma isn’t what happens to you. It’s how you respond to what happens. And when you can choose how to respond to something, even decades later, it becomes a gift that you can give away instead of just being something that you survived.
What’s the belief you’re carrying that you haven’t examined yet?
Boom. Metabolically hypervigilance is so expensive - it is guaranteed to wear us down and make us less effective.
Really enjoyed this piece. When I was growing up I always heard that some peoples had hundreds of words for snow. It feels like the English language desperately needs more words for acceptance. It was only recently that I learnt that the word didn't mean "I wholeheartedly agree with all of this, sign me up". I wish there was a better way of talking about peaceful reconciliation with our feelings.