“I’m so dysregulated. What can I do?” (Part Two)

“I’m so dysregulated. What can I do?” (Part Two)

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 15, 2023

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Multi-Sensory Hypoarousal Toolbox:

• Take a HIIT ride on the Peloton (or any vigorous exercise).
• Listening to Rage Against the Machine (or any high-energy stimulating music).
• Smelling cinnamon oil or rosemary oil (something sharp and bracing).
• Chewing crunchy hard food like popcorn.
• Watching an action movie or action-packed TV series.

Again, all of these tools in the toolbox are designed to “get the brain back online” (in other words, regulated and the prefrontal cortex accessed again) and get back into the Window of Tolerance.

They are tools that strengthen our ability for self-regulation resiliency when we notice we’re outside of the optimal arousal zone.

RESEARCH EVIDENCE

Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:

• Heightened ANS activity related to increased PTSS during stress tasks (r = 0.07) (PMID: 35078039)
• HF-HRV reduced in PTSD vs controls (Hedges' g = -1.58) (PMID: 31995968)
• RMSSD reduced in PTSD vs controls (Hedges' g = -0.38) (PMID: 32854795)
• SDNN reduced in PTSD vs controls (Hedges' g = -0.64) (PMID: 32854795)
• LF-HRV reduced in PTSD vs controls (Hedges' g = -0.27) (PMID: 32854795)

How do you build your own multisensory self-regulation toolbox from scratch?

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

VIKTOR FRANKL, MD, PhD, Psychiatrist, Neurologist, Holocaust Survivor, Author of Man’s Search for Meaning

Let’s take a moment and have you build your own multi-sensory self-regulation toolbox via these prompts:

• What’s a tool you could use that engages your physical body to dispel excess energy when you’re in hyperarousal?
• What’s a tool you could use that engages your physical body to increase energy and blood flow when you’re in hyporarousal?
• What’s a scent that calms you down?
• What’s a scent that activates you and energizes you?
• What’s one food you can eat that feels soothing and calming? (hint: think creamy, cold, sweet, smooth)
• What’s one food you can eat that feels a little more engaging? (hint: think spicey, crunchy, sharp, bitter)
• What’s a kind of music/exact song that just calms you down when you play it?
• What’s a kind of music/exact song that activates you when you listen to it?

• What’s a texture and/or thing you could touch or surround your body with that feels calming and soothing? (hint: think weighted blankets, soothing lotion, sunshine, hot tubs)
• What’s a texture and/or thing you could touch or surround your body with that feels energizing and activating? (hint: think cold plunges, being in the rain, laying in the grass.)

When are self-regulation tools not enough, and what do you do then?

Now, I do want to say that if all of what I’ve in today’s essay shared sounds and feels like magical thinking – like you couldn’t even imagine remotely being able to do this, do this consistently, let alone do it well – I want to be frank that there may be variables at play that require you to get additional support in order to regulate your own nervous system and help get you into the Window of Tolerance (or experience it for the first time).

Related reading: Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections

The biggest variable I see that prevents this is when we come from relational trauma histories and have unprocessed trauma in our pasts — including post traumatic stress disorder or complex PTSD — that is still significantly distressing our nervous systems. It’s also worth naming that conditions like bipolar disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, or substance abuse can significantly interfere with emotional regulation and may require professional assessment alongside any self-help tools.

Another variable might be a very unhappy, strained, and brittle marriage that triggers you and your attachment wounds daily.

And yet another variable might be having a child in your home with trauma of their own, undiagnosed neurodivergence, or other variables that create additional strain and stress for you.

In these cases, seeking out a trained mental health professional – whether this is a child therapist, a trauma therapist for you, or a terrific couples counselor to help mend your partnership – may be a proverbial “power tool” you want to employ to support your emotional regulation and well-being at home.

Building Regulation Capacity Through Professional Support

When self-regulation toolboxes feel impossible to implement or barely make a dent in your dysregulation, trauma-informed therapy provides the foundation necessary for these tools to actually work. A skilled therapist helps identify why your nervous system defaults to extreme states—often tracing back to relational trauma that wired hypervigilance or dissociation as primary survival strategies.

Through approaches like EMDR or somatic therapies, you process the underlying trauma that keeps your window of tolerance narrow, gradually expanding your capacity to stay regulated even when triggered.

The therapeutic process involves more than learning regulation techniques; it addresses the root causes of chronic dysregulation. Your therapist might discover that hyperarousal developed because chaos was your childhood normal, making calm feel dangerously unfamiliar, or that hypoarousal became your escape when emotions meant danger. Understanding what to do when you’re dysregulated becomes more effective when you also understand why your nervous system learned these patterns and what it’s still trying to protect you from.

Related reading: Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

In session, you practice regulation tools with professional support, experiencing co-regulation with your therapist that teaches your nervous system what safety actually feels like. This isn’t just cognitive learning but somatic rewiring—your body gradually learns that you can return to baseline after activation, that numbness isn’t the only escape from overwhelming feelings.

Over time, the toolboxes you build become genuinely accessible because your nervous system develops enough baseline regulation to actually use them, transforming emergency interventions into reliable resources for navigating life’s inevitable dysregulating moments.

And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

What tools went into your hyper- and hypoarousal toolboxes? What are the tools, tactics, and tricks you employ to help get back into the Window of Tolerance?

So, if you feel so inclined, please feel free to leave a comment and share your wisdom and experiences. You never know who you’ll help when you write.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

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• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• my therapy clients

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How Dysregulation Shows Up for Driven Women

In my work with clients, dysregulation in driven, ambitious women often looks different from what the clinical literature describes — because these are women who have learned, with considerable effort, to appear regulated even when they’re not. The external presentation stays intact far longer than the internal experience does. And that gap — between what’s visible and what’s felt — is itself a source of significant distress.

Shalini is a 36-year-old management consultant who came to therapy because she was “snapping” at her team and then feeling profound shame about it afterward. On the surface she was performing exactly as expected — producing excellent work, meeting every deadline, navigating complex stakeholder dynamics with precision. Underneath, she was running at about 115% of her nervous system’s sustainable capacity, and the cracks were appearing in her most intimate relationships first, then in her professional ones.

Shalini’s dysregulation didn’t look like a breakdown. It looked like irritability, then a migraine that wouldn’t resolve, then a strange flatness when she tried to enjoy her weekend. It looked like lying awake at 3 a.m. running through tomorrow’s meeting. It looked like a crying episode in her car in the parking garage that she immediately suppressed so she could walk into the office composed.

What I see consistently is that the women who most need titration — the practice of approaching difficult experience in small, manageable doses — are often the ones most convinced that the answer is to push through harder. Titration, and the dysregulation-management strategies in Part One of this series, aren’t signs of weakness. They’re the technology of durability. Working with a therapist can help you develop a personalized toolkit for your specific nervous system.

Dysregulation and the Nervous System: What’s Actually Happening

When we talk about dysregulation, we’re talking about the nervous system moving outside its window of tolerance — that optimal zone of arousal where we can think, feel, and respond flexibly. Dysregulation isn’t a character flaw or a failure of willpower. It’s a biological event, driven by the autonomic nervous system’s threat-detection machinery.

Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Indiana University and developer of Polyvagal Theory, has provided one of the most useful frameworks for understanding why dysregulation happens and what helps. His research describes a hierarchy of nervous system states — from ventral vagal (social engagement, the “safe” state) through sympathetic activation (fight/flight) to dorsal vagal shutdown (collapse, dissociation). Dysregulation is the movement between these states in ways that feel uncontrollable or disproportionate to the situation.

What’s significant about Porges’s framework for the practical question of “what can I do?” is that it points toward specific interventions matched to specific states. When you’re in sympathetic overdrive — racing heart, racing thoughts, jaw clenched — you need to activate the ventral vagal brake: slow exhales, cold water on the face, humming, connection with a regulated other. When you’re in dorsal shutdown — flat, disconnected, unable to move — you need gentle mobilization: slow movement, warmth, sound, gentle orienting of attention to the present environment.

In Part Two of this series, we’re building on the foundation of Part One with more advanced strategies — because the toolkit needs to be robust enough for your actual life, not just for a calm Sunday afternoon. Fixing the Foundations is a course that provides structured support for building exactly that toolkit.

Both/And: Your Dysregulation Makes Complete Sense AND You Can Build More Capacity

Here’s the both/and that I want you to hold as you build your self-regulation toolkit: your dysregulation makes complete sense. It is not a character flaw, a weakness, or evidence that you’re somehow more broken than other people. It is the predictable, neurobiologically coherent response of a nervous system that learned to survive difficult circumstances by staying on high alert, or by shutting down when the overwhelm became too great. Your dysregulated states are not symptoms of a broken system. They are a well-calibrated system responding to what it learned.

AND. You also have more capacity than your current baseline suggests. The nervous system is plastic — it changes in response to repeated experience. Every time you use a self-regulation tool and it works, you’re building new neural pathways. Every time you notice you’re dysregulated without judging yourself for it, you’re strengthening your prefrontal cortex’s capacity to observe rather than just react. The toolkit you’re building isn’t just for acute moments of overwhelm. It’s literally rewiring your nervous system over time.

Rebecca, a corporate attorney I worked with, came to me convinced she was “just an anxious person” — that her daily spiraling thoughts and sleep disruption were simply who she was. Over months of work with somatic tools, breath work, and EMDR, her baseline shifted measurably. “I still get dysregulated,” she said, “but I come back faster. And the intensity is lower. It’s like my baseline moved.” That’s what nervous system healing actually looks like — not the absence of dysregulation, but a wider window and a faster return.

The Systemic Lens: When Individual Tools Aren’t Enough

Building a personal self-regulation toolkit is essential work. AND it’s incomplete if we don’t also name what the tools can and can’t do when the source of dysregulation is systemic rather than purely individual.

Driven women in demanding professional environments are often dysregulated not primarily because of unresolved childhood trauma, but because they’re operating in systems that are genuinely dysregulating. A workplace culture of chronic urgency, emotional unavailability from leadership, hypervigilance requirements in high-stakes decision-making, insufficient rest, impossible expectations around performance — these aren’t things a breathing exercise can fix. The deep breathing helps you get through the day. It doesn’t change the conditions creating the dysregulation.

For women of color navigating predominantly white institutions, the dysregulation load includes the chronic physiological cost of code-switching, of managing others’ biases, of being “the only one” in rooms. Research by Cheryl Woods-Giscombé, PhD, professor at UNC Chapel Hill School of Nursing, documents the specific ways the Superwoman Schema — the expectation that Black women be strong, suppressive of emotions, and resistant to help — creates chronic physiological dysregulation with measurable health consequences.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build the toolkit. You absolutely should — it will help you, measurably and meaningfully. But building the toolkit inside a conversation that never addresses the structural sources of your dysregulation is incomplete. As you develop your self-regulation capacity, I also encourage you to look at which environments are chronically dysregulating you and ask whether they are ones worth remaining in, and on what terms. The executive coaching work I do often includes both: building internal regulation capacity AND helping driven women assess and navigate their external environments more strategically.

Building Long-Term Regulation Capacity: Beyond the Toolkit

The multisensory toolbox we’ve been building is essential work — it gives you immediate resources for the moments of acute dysregulation. But I also want to speak to the longer game: building actual nervous system regulation capacity over time, so that dysregulation becomes less frequent, less intense, and quicker to resolve.

The research on nervous system healing is clear: capacity builds through repeated experience of completing stress cycles, through attuned relational connection, through regular somatic practice, and through the gradual processing of stored traumatic material. This is the work of trauma-informed therapy — not just developing coping strategies, but actually changing the nervous system’s baseline. Peter Levine, PhD, psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing therapy, has spent decades documenting how the body can complete unfinished stress responses and build genuine resilience, not just management of dysregulation. (PMID: 25699005)

Here’s the truth I want you to hold: the goal is not to never be dysregulated. The goal is a wider window of tolerance — more capacity to stay present under stress, and a faster return to baseline when you do get knocked outside your window. And both of those are genuinely achievable, even for nervous systems that have spent years operating in states of chronic activation or shutdown. The toolkit helps you today. The deeper work changes what tomorrow looks like. You deserve both.

If you haven’t yet explored what professional support for nervous system regulation looks like, reach out here to explore working with Annie, or explore Fixing the Foundations for structured self-paced work.

The Role of Co-Regulation in Building Self-Regulation Capacity

There’s something important I want to name about the self-regulation toolkit we’ve been building: while all of these tools are genuinely helpful, self-regulation in isolation is only part of the picture. Human beings are fundamentally co-regulating creatures — our nervous systems evolved to help each other regulate, not to operate as sealed, independent units.

Co-regulation is what happens when one person’s regulated nervous system helps another person’s nervous system settle. It’s why a hug from a trusted person can do what twenty minutes of breathing exercises can’t always accomplish. It’s why the therapeutic relationship itself is healing, not just the techniques that happen within it. Tina Payne Bryson, PhD, psychotherapist and author of The Whole-Brain Child, writes about how humans never fully outgrow our need for co-regulation — we just need it in different forms as adults.

For driven women who have learned to manage their dysregulation entirely alone — who were never able to rely on caregivers to help them settle, and who as adults have continued that pattern of solo management — this is worth sitting with. The toolkit matters. AND building the relational capacity to let another regulated nervous system help you settle is itself part of the healing. That’s what therapy, genuine friendship, and intimate partnership all offer, when they’re working. You don’t have to regulate alone.

Practical Guidance: When to Reach for Your Toolkit

One question clients frequently ask is: how do I know when to use which tool from my toolkit? The answer depends on which state you’re in — hyperarousal or hypoarousal — and that requires you to first pause and check in with your body before reaching for a tool.

If you’re in hyperarousal — heart racing, thoughts spiraling, muscles tight, feeling overwhelmed or like you want to run or fight — you need tools that activate the parasympathetic brake: slow, extended exhale breathing (the out-breath is longer than the in-breath), cold water on the face or wrists, vigorous movement that allows the fight/flight energy to discharge, gentle but firm pressure on the body (heavy blanket, tight hug, pressing hands together). The goal is to bring activation down.

If you’re in hypoarousal — feeling flat, numb, disconnected, shut down, heavy, like you can’t think or move — you need gentle activation: slow rhythmic movement, mild cold stimulus, small controllable actions that create a sense of agency, making contact with your five senses to orient to the present environment. The goal is to bring activation up to a manageable level.

This distinction matters because using the wrong tool for the wrong state can actually make things worse. Vigorous movement when you’re already hyperactivated can escalate rather than calm. Stillness when you’re dissociated can deepen the shutdown. Learning to read your own state — which is a genuine skill that takes time to develop — is as important as the toolkit itself. A trauma-informed therapist can help you build this self-awareness more quickly than working alone.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Begin Healing: Practical Steps When Dysregulation Is the Starting Point

In my work with clients who are chronically dysregulated, the first thing I want to establish is this: dysregulation isn’t weakness. It isn’t immaturity. It isn’t evidence that something is fundamentally broken about you. It’s a nervous system that is working exactly as it was shaped to work — often by experiences that were overwhelming, unpredictable, or lacking in the kind of co-regulation that a developing nervous system needs. The fact that your system activates easily, or struggles to return to baseline, is information about what your nervous system learned — not a verdict on who you are.

What healing dysregulation actually looks like in practice is the gradual expansion of your window of tolerance — the zone in which you can function, think, connect, and respond rather than just react. That window probably got narrowed over time by stress, trauma, or a nervous system that never had enough consistent safety to fully develop its regulatory capacity. The good news is that the nervous system is plastic. It can learn new responses. It can build new pathways. But it does that through repetition, safety, and titrated exposure — not through willpower or insight alone.

Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine, is one of the most targeted modalities for dysregulation work. SE is specifically designed to help the nervous system complete stress cycles that got interrupted — to discharge the activation that’s been held in the body, often for years. In SE sessions, we work slowly and carefully, tracking small shifts in your physical experience — the unclenching of a jaw, a spontaneous exhale, a moment of warmth — as signs of the nervous system settling. What I see consistently with clients doing SE is that over time, regulation stops being something they have to consciously manage and starts to become more of a baseline.

Polyvagal-informed therapy is another framework I draw on heavily in this work. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory maps the different states of the autonomic nervous system — the ventral vagal (connected, present, regulated), the sympathetic (fight or flight), and the dorsal vagal (shutdown, collapse). When clients understand which state they’re in and why — and learn to recognize the triggers that move them between states — they develop what I’d call “nervous system literacy.” That literacy is genuinely powerful. It takes what felt like random emotional chaos and gives it structure and sense.

One concrete skill I teach clients in the early stages of this work: glimmers. While triggers are stimuli that activate the threat response, glimmers (a term coined by Deb Dana) are small, specific cues that signal safety to the nervous system. A particular piece of music. The texture of a familiar blanket. Your dog’s weight on your lap. A specific view from a window. Identifying and deliberately seeking your glimmers isn’t self-indulgent — it’s neurological medicine. You’re building the ventral vagal resources that allow your system to have a home base to return to.

For driven, ambitious women specifically, I want to name one pattern I see frequently: the attempt to cognitively manage dysregulation. To think your way into regulation. To understand yourself into calm. And while insight genuinely matters, the top-down approach (thinking → feeling → body) has limits when the nervous system is significantly activated. Bottom-up approaches — starting with the body, with breath, with sensation — are often more effective precisely because they bypass the parts of the brain that get taken offline during dysregulation. Therapy that integrates both approaches tends to move the fastest.

If you’re ready to build real regulatory capacity with skilled support, I’d encourage you to explore therapy with Annie. This work is specific and learnable, and you don’t have to keep white-knuckling your way through your own nervous system. You can also take the quiz on my site to identify the type of support that fits best where you are right now. Regulation isn’t a destination you reach once. It’s a capacity you build — and it’s absolutely worth building.

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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Medical Disclaimer