18. You’re Regulating Your Nervous System. So Why Isn’t Anything Changing?
Episode 18 | You’re Regulating Your Nervous System. So Why Isn’t Anything Changing? | 29th September 2026 | 25 min
Watch the full episode on YouTube
The Nervous System Emergency Kit: a circuit breaker for the moment your nervous system feels overwhelmed or hijacked. Free emotional regulation tools → grab your kit: https://minddrophq.com/emergencykit
So your regulation tools aren't really changing anything?..
Nervous system regulation is everywhere right now, and a lot of that shift is a good thing. But it's gone from being one important piece of the puzzle to being sold as the whole answer. So when you've done the breathing and the grounding and the same patterns keep running, it's easy to decide you're the problem.
You're not. In this episode Jodi pulls apart the different jobs hiding inside real change: changing your state, building your capacity, and the deeper work of processing what's underneath so you can create something new. Most of us are using one tool and quietly expecting it to do all three. When you know which job you're actually asking regulation to do, you can finally reach for something built to do it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Regulation is one piece, not the whole puzzle
Understanding that your physiology is tied to your mental health was a needed correction. But it's tipped into treating nervous system regulation as the answer to everything, from anxiety to burnout to relationship patterns. Regulation is integral. It's also not the same thing as processing old hurt, changing a belief, learning a skill, or building a new pattern.
Sometimes the tool worked, it just did a different job
"I've tried everything and nothing works" is often the wrong conclusion. The breathing changed your state. The journalling created insight. Neither one was ever going to heal the wound underneath or rewire a conditioned response. Different jobs need different tools, and expecting one to do all of them is what leaves you feeling stuck.
Calm was never the goal, capacity is
The point of nervous system work was never to feel calm one hundred percent of the time. You're meant to have range. What you're actually building is the room to experience more, more emotion, more pressure, more real life, without losing access to yourself inside it. You can be angry without saying the thing you regret, anxious without abandoning what you wanted to do.
Capacity changes everything, but capacity isn't everything
Building capacity gives you the room to do the deeper work. It doesn't do the deeper work for you. It won't process the grief, resolve the attachment wound, or teach you the skill you never got to learn. It's the foundation that makes all of that possible, which is why it's where the work starts, not where it ends.
NOTABLE QUOTES
"Without it, we'd be a puddle on the floor or bouncing off the walls, sometimes both before lunch."
"Sometimes the tool actually did work. It just didn't do the job you expected it to do."
"Capacity changes everything. But capacity isn't everything."
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 The Spark
00:13 Intro
00:53 Nervous System Regulation Is Everywhere
06:20 So What Do Regulation Tools Actually Do?
08:35 When Regulation Becomes The Goal
11:14 Calm Isn't The Goal
12:41 Capacity Gives You More Room
14:45 Capacity Changes Everything, But Capacity Isn't Everything
17:33 Change Is Bigger Than Regulation
20:13 Maybe The Tool Did Work
21:45 The Real Goal
23:16 The Takeaways
24:09 Outro
Hey Gorgeous, Your Next Step Starts Here...
💌 The Glow-Up Gazette: your weekly dose of inspiration and momentum. Come for the personal growth, stay for the stories, rabbit holes, recs and occasional overshare. Plus a monthly Glow Getter prize draw. You in? → https://minddrophq.com/glowupgazette
The Nervous System Emergency Kit: a circuit breaker for the moment your nervous system feels overwhelmed or hijacked. Free emotional regulation tools → grab your kit: https://minddrophq.com/emergencykit
KEY REFERENCES
Akbari, M., Seydavi, M., Hosseini, Z. S., Krafft, J., & Levin, M. E. (2022). Experiential avoidance in depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive related, and posttraumatic stress disorders: A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 24, 65–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2022.03.007
Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691613504116
Farris, S. G., Derby, L., & Kibbey, M. M. (2025). Getting comfortable with physical discomfort: A scoping review of interoceptive exposure to bodily sensations in physical and mental health conditions. Psychological Bulletin, 151(2), 131–191. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000464
Shao, R., Man, I. S. C., & Lee, T. M. C. (2024). The effect of slow-paced breathing on cardiovascular and emotion functions: A meta-analysis and systematic review. Mindfulness, 15, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-023-02294-2
Stapleton, P., & van Elst, A. (2026). Clinical emotional freedom techniques for psychological and physiological stress reduction: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Explore, 22(5), 103474. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2026.103474
Werner, K. M., Preece, D. A., Berkman, E. T., & Gross, J. J. (2026). Regulatory flexibility and psychological health—Is more always better? Journal of Affective Disorders, 398, 120893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2025.120893
COMMON QUESTIONS
Why isn't regulating my nervous system working?
Often it is working, just not at the job you're expecting it to do. Regulation tools change your state in the moment. They don't process old hurt, rewire a conditioned response, or teach a skill you never learned. When the same pattern keeps repeating, the issue is usually that a state-change tool is being asked to do capacity work or deeper processing work it was never built for.
What's the difference between regulating and processing?
Regulating shifts the state your nervous system is in right now, so you can come back online and think clearly. Processing is working with what's underneath that state: the emotional charge, the belief, the pattern, the hurt. Regulation makes processing possible. It doesn't replace it.
Is nervous system regulation actually enough on its own?
It's essential, and it's rarely the whole picture. Regulation sits alongside your experiences, beliefs, learned patterns, relationships, environment, and skills. Change tends to need more than one of these, which is why regulation alone can leave you feeling like something's still missing.
What does it mean to build capacity?
Capacity is how much life you can stay present for. It's the amount of emotion, pressure, uncertainty and vulnerability you can hold while still having access to enough of yourself to choose what happens next. Building it means more can affect you without everything being taken from you in the moment.
Can nervous system tools become avoidance?
They can. There's a concept in psychology called experiential avoidance, the attempt to suppress or escape uncomfortable internal experiences. Using a tool to get enough room to stay in a hard moment is meeting the moment. Using every tool you know because you believe you can't tolerate the feeling at all is avoidance wearing a wellness label. Context and intent are what separate the two.
Should the goal be to feel calm all the time?
No. Emotional range is part of being human. Anger, grief, and a pounding heart before something that matters are all appropriate. The goal isn't constant calm, it's the flexibility to feel what's happening without losing yourself inside it.
If I've tried everything and nothing works, what do I do?
Ask a different question: what job am I actually asking this to do? You might need to change your state, build your capacity, or process something underneath and practise something new. Often it's a combination. Matching the tool to the job is usually what's been missing.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] The Spark
If you've been regulating your nervous system and the same things are still knocking you sideways, your tools might not be failing you. You might just be asking them to do a job that they were never designed to do
[00:00:13] Intro
[00:00:53] Nervous System Regulation Is Everywhere
Nervous system regulation is absolutely everywhere right now. Open Instagram and somebody is teaching you how to regulate your nervous system. Same on TikTok, YouTube, podcasts. Yep, even this one. Wellness, therapy, and coaching spaces alike.
We're breathing, grounding, shaking, tapping, humming, walking barefoot, putting our legs up walls. I believe that a lot of this is actually a really positive shift, 'cause for a very long time we've been treating human behavior almost entirely like a cognitive or a thinking problem.
Change your thoughts, think positively, reframe it, use more discipline, make a better choice. And meanwhile, the body is in, like, full survival mode going, "Dude, or dudette, we have bigger problems right now." So understanding that our physiology is tied to our mental health, and that the state of your nervous system greatly influences what you can access cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally, is really important stuff to know.
And in some ways, it's a piece of the conversation that mainstream psychology spent a long time paying less attention to.
If you look back through the history of psychology, early schools of thought, people like Freud and Jung, they were deeply interested in the unconscious mind. Then through the early and middle parts of the 20th century, the pendulum kind of swung heavily towards behaviorism. If we couldn't directly observe or measure it, then psychology became much more cautious about treating it as something scientifically useful.
Then came the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and '60s, which brought our internal mental processes back into the conversation. Behavior therapy emerged, cognitive therapy followed, and eventually those two ideas kinda came together and are now as we know them as CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy.
And those were really enormously important developments. We're not throwing rocks at CBT here. It's done a lot of good over the years. But through all of that, the body itself often wasn't center stage.
More recently, research into trauma, psychophysiology, interoception, and bodied experience alongside approaches like EMDR and other body-orientated therapies has helped bring the physiology back into psychological conversation in a much bigger way.
And I think that's a really positive shift because we aren't just brains floating around in jars.
What happens in your mind affects your body, and what happens in your body affects what becomes available to your mind. They're constantly talking to each other.
That part of the nervous system conversation needed to happen, but I think we kind of overcorrected because somewhere along the way, the nervous system regulation went from being an important piece of the puzzle to being positioned as, like, the missing part or the whole thing.
You have anxiety, regulate. Burnout, regulate. Relationship problems, regulate. People pleasing, regulate. Trauma, regulate. Can't rest, regulate. Scared to put yourself out there? Regulate. It's just a little bit crazy. And I think we need to put the brakes on that for a second. And yep, that is coming from a neuroregulation coach.
Here's the thing. Nervous system regulation is integral. Without it, we'd be a puddle on the floor or bouncing off the walls, sometimes both before lunch.
But regulation is not the same thing as processing. It's not the same thing as healing old hurt, or changing a belief, or learning a new skill even, processing trauma, or creating a different behavioral pattern.
And this is actually why I'm an integrative neuroregulation coach, because I don't believe you can pull one piece of the human apart from everything else and expect to understand what's going on.
Your mental health doesn't exist separately from your physical body. Your brain is a physical organ. Sleep, stress, physiology, movement, nutrition, hormones, metabolic health, all of these things can influence how that brain of yours functions and how you feel and therefore behave
So wellness and your nervous system are important, but so are your experiences and your beliefs and your learned patterns, relationships, your environment, and the skills that you've developed, or sometimes never had the opportunity to develop in the first place.
And that's why my body of work integrates functional nervous system education and regulation, plus wellness, coaching, and evidence-informed frameworks that are drawn from my training in paramedicine, psychology, and counseling.
And just to be really transparent with you, I work from the scope of an accredited coach practitioner.
I'm not a psychologist or a paramedic, and I don't present myself as either of those things. What I do bring into my work is the knowledge and skills that I've developed through my education and training in those areas, alongside my qualifications in coaching, all integrated within my coaching practice.
For me, that's really what integrative means, looking at the whole person and drawing from different evidence-informed disciplines while staying within the scope of the work that I'm qualified to provide.
Because human beings are multifaceted. We're so cool. And change is multifaceted too, which is why nervous system regulation can be incredibly valuable and still not be the thing that actually needs to happen next.
[00:06:20] So What Do Regulation Tools Actually Do?
So the question is, what do regulation tools actually do? Let's start here because I don't want this episode to become, "Throw all your nervous system tools in the bin." That's not gonna help. Please don't do that.
They have a super important job to do. If your nervous system is highly activated, and that could mean that you're panicking, or you're furious, or overwhelmed, or even spiraling, or maybe you've gone the other way and you've started to shut down, you may have significantly less access to the parts of you and your brain that can help you reflect, problem solve, and make deliberate choices.
You know that moment. You can practically hear yourself saying the thing that there's another part of you going, "Why are you saying this? Stop talking."
Or your brain just disappears completely and the comeback arrives like four hours later and you think, "Man, where was that when I needed it?" Not necessarily the best way to go about things, but it happens.
And that's why state change and, which are emotional regulation tools or nervous system regulation tools, actually are really good because breathing, moving, grounding, amongst other tools, can all shift your physiology and help you orient back into where you actually are, like coming back online
EFT tapping, sensory input, different forms of breathwork, depending on the person and what's happening, can help change the state that you're currently in. And some tools like tapping can also have the added benefit of working a little deeper with some of the emotional material as well.
Sometimes you really do need to change the state before you can work with what's underneath the state that you're in.
And this is actually why I built the Nervous System Emergency Kit the way that I did.
And as the title suggests, it's an emergency kit. It's like a rapid response center for your nervous system. If something has just happened and your nervous system has, like, gone through the roof, you don't necessarily need a 12-week personal development journey in that exact moment. You need something that helps you get back to yourself and bring your brain back online, and that's exactly what the Nervous System Emergency Kit is there for.
It's practical tools you can reach when something is happening and you need help, like, shifting that state that you're in. You can grab it for free too at minddrophq.com/emergencykit. I'll pop the link in the show notes for you as well.
But interestingly, here's where things start getting a little muddled
[00:08:35] When Rgulation Becomes The Goal
If every time we feel uncomfortable and our automatic responses become, "I need to regulate this away," we can create another problem
I feel anxious. Make it stop. I feel angry. Calm down. I feel embarrassed. Get rid of it. Who likes feeling that? I feel grief. Shift the state. Somebody's disappointed in me, or something feels uncertain. Regulate. And all of a sudden, what began as a tool for helping us move through states can become another way of trying not to feel them.
There's a term in psychology called experiential avoidance. Essentially, it's the attempt to avoid, suppress, or get away from uncomfortable internal experiences, which are your thoughts, emotion, memories, and even physical sensations.
Avoidance can work in the short term. Think about it. If I do something and the uncomfortable feeling reduces, my brain learns pretty quickly, "Oh, good, that worked. Let's do more of it." Which is why we need to be really careful about making this into another black-and-white rule.
Using a regulation tool when you're activated does not automatically mean that you're avoiding your emotions. The context, intent, and the meaning what happens afterwards is what we need to be paying attention to.
So I might be using a breathing technique because I'm activated, and I want enough room to stay in a difficult conversation, so that tool is helping me meet the moment.
That's useful
Or I might use every technique I know because I believe I can't tolerate feeling anxious, and the anxiety has to disappear before I can function or do anything.
It's the same breathing technique, but with a completely different job and intent. And from what I'm seeing online and around the interwebs, that distinction is getting lost. People are being taught how to change their state, but not always being taught when changing the state is helpful, and when the real work is learning how to stay with what's there. And as it stands right now, I'm not down with that.
Our emotions, they're our guide. They're super useful sparks of information that can help us determine what matters to us, what feels off, what might need attention, where a boundary has been crossed, or what we might need more of. They're not always telling us the whole truth, and they're not always telling us what to do, but they are giving us very useful and sometimes vital information.
And if our automatic response is to shut them down every time they appear in the name of being calm, we can miss the message that they were trying to give us in the first place.
[00:11:14] Calm Isn't The Goal.
The goal of nervous system work was never supposed to be feeling calm 100% of the time, because you're a human being. You're meant to have an emotional range. There are times when anger is appropriate, and the same as grief. There are moments that should make your heart pound and race. You should probably feel something before having a vulnerable conversation with someone you deeply care about.
Starting a business, falling in love, speaking on stage, having a difficult conversation, setting a boundary, losing someone, doing something you've never done before.
All of these things create different levels of activation within our body, and activation isn't automatically dysregulation, and discomfort isn't automatically danger either. What we actually want is more room, more range, more ability to experience what is happening without completely losing access to ourselves within that moment.
And by that, I mean you can still notice what you're feeling, remember what matters to you, think clearly enough to make a choice, and behave in a way that still feels like you after the fact.
You can be angry without saying something you regret, anxious without abandoning the thing that you wanted to do, hurt without immediately shutting down, or people-pleasing your way out of it.
And this is where capacity comes in
[00:12:41] Capacity Gives You More Room
If you've listened to Human Evolution for a while, you know I talk about capacity a lot, with good reason. Capacity is basically how much life you can stay present for.
How much emotion, uncertainty, visibility, disappointment, excitement, conflict, pressure, and vulnerability can be present while you still have access to enough of yourself to choose what happens next.
Because two people can experience exactly the same external event and have very different amounts of internal room for it.
So one person gets really uncomfortable, notices it, stays present within themselves, can think and respond well. Yet the other person hits their threshold, like, almost immediately, and suddenly the guard dog is sounding the alarm, the CEO has lost the wifi, and the apps are firing, and we're canceling Christmas.
The same situation, but different available capacity
And when you build that capacity, you're not becoming emotionless, or you shouldn't be. You should actually become capable of experiencing and moving through more emotion. You build more range. We're not going after the nothing affects me and we're staying calm and zen 24/7 kumbaya kinda thing. If nothing could affect you, my friend, you'd be closer to some hypothetical speck floating through the universe than a human actually having the full human experience.
The goal is, however, more can affect me without everything being taken away from me. My ability to think, choose, communicate, lead myself and others, and remain connected to who I am is there, and that's the kinda work that we do inside of Inner Spark.
It's not the emergency kit. We're not waiting for everything has gone pear-shaped and then trying to get your brain back online again
We're consistently building the nervous system capacity underneath your life so there's more room in the tank for when life happens, because life will happen. No regulation strategy is gonna prevent that
[00:14:45] Capacity Changes Everything, But Capacity Isn't Everything.
Now, this is where I'm also going to challenge my own work just a little bit, because you know one of the things that I say all the time is capacity changes everything. I say it, I mean it, I believe it. I stand by that 1000%, But capacity isn't everything because otherwise all we've done is replace one oversimplification, Regulate your nervous system and everything will change, with another one build capacity and everything will change Nope, not it building your capacity does not magically process trauma. It doesn't automatically resolve grief. It doesn't change an attachment wound or teach you how to communicate better. It doesn't suddenly repair your marriage or change what you believe about yourself either. It doesn't help undo what happened to you, and it doesn't make every old pattern that you have disappear.
Capacity is the foundation, however, that gives you more resources to work with what is actually there. So that's where we start.
Think about it like this. Imagine a cupboard that's absolutely, like, jam-packed. You know those cupboards where if you open the door just, like, three centimeters and you realize you made a terrible mistake, so you kinda try and close it again really gently?
That's sometimes what deeper emotional work can feel like when somebody has very little capacity available. There's already so much going on internally that trying to open that door means that everything starts falling out at once, and you feel like you're going to break into a thousand pieces, or the stuff is gonna go everywhere, and you won't be able to put yourself back together again.
I hear this time and time and time again from clients and friends and family.
Building capacity doesn't empty that cupboard, but it gives you enough room to open the door and start dealing with it, what's actually inside without it falling out. And that's why capacity is such an important part of deeper change work, and why it matters so much in everyday life, business, and in leadership as well.
Because once you have more room, you can sit with things differently. You can process something without becoming completely overwhelmed by it. You can notice the old response firing and have a slightly bigger gap before you can follow it. You can have the difficult conversation and remain present and not end up with regrets after saying something you didn't mean, 'cause you didn't say it in the first place when you have enough capacity. You can practice the new behavior even though the old one still feels more familiar, and every time you do that, you're creating new evidence and new experiences and learning. You're creating better conditions to facilitate change that actually sticks long term
[00:17:33] Change Is Bigger Than Regulation
So if regulation isn't the whole process, what is?
The way I tend to think about change is that there are a few different jobs happening, and we get into trouble when we use a tool designed for one job and expect it to do all of the others.
So first up, you wanna change the state. What does my nervous system need right now so I can have enough access to myself to deal with whatever's happening? That's your immediate regulation work. That's the nervous system emergency kits lane.
The second is to build capacity. How do I increase the amount of emotion and activation and real life that I can stay present for without immediately tipping into overwhelm or shutdown? That's ongoing work. That's what Inner Spark's purposely designed for. But then we need to go one step deeper.
So the third thing is process what's there underneath and create something different. This is the deeper change work. This is where we work with the emotional charge that's still active. The conditioned responses that keep firing and beliefs and meanings that were built around past experiences. This is where we work on the hurt that still needs processing and patterns that keep repeating, plus develop skills or behaviors that may need to be learned or strengthened.
Then we start building what comes next. What do I want instead? How do I wanna respond? What does this version of me choose? What beliefs support that? What skills do I need to become this person that I wanna be? What behavior do I need to practice? And how do we practice it enough that when real life happens, 'cause we know it does, life throws us curve balls all the time, but the new response is actually available for us to use.
And that's where something like Sonic Success and Desire Rewire come in. Sonic Success is a flexible async one-on-one coaching, and basically it's like having a coach on speed dial. You can reach out as things happen, as often as you need, without waiting for a scheduled session. That means we can catch the pattern in real time, regulate what's needs regulating, work out what's underneath it, and choose your next move whilst it's still in the present moment, not weeks later waiting for an appointment.
Desire Rewire is a more structured one-on-one process across eight sessions. It's focused on one of three tracks: trauma, performance, or integrative. Depending on the track, we can work more deeply with past hurt and emotional patterns, focus on where you're trying to grow and perform differently, or combine tapping and dynamic coaching based on what's actually needed as we go.
So they're different applications and depth, But the same bigger job. Process what's there and build what comes next.
[00:20:13] Maybe The Tool Did Work
And this brings me back to something I hear a lot of lately, "I've tried everything and nothing works." and sometimes that can be indeed true. Something genuinely wasn't the right approach. But sometimes the tool actually did work. It just didn't do the job you expected it to do.
The breathing exercise helped change your state But if you had the expectation that it would heal the wound that kept creating the activation, probably not gonna help there.
The journaling you did created some insight, but you can't necessarily expect insight to change a conditioned response. You built more capacity, and then wondered why the grief was still there.
You may have even processed something from the past and then wondered why you hadn't automatically learned the communication skills that you never had an opportunity to develop, so the pattern keeps repeating itself.
Different jobs, tools, and states of change.
And this is why I think the conversation around therapy and coaching can get really interesting, because people sometimes stay in one type of support for years, expecting it to eventually start doing a completely different job.
And this does depend and can vary on the therapist or the coach, depending on what they're trained in, what methodology they like to use. I'm gonna dedicate an episode to this topic 'cause there's actually a lot to unpack there in how to choose a coach, a mentor, a therapist, and which one's which and why. But for today, the important thing is this, human change isn't one-dimensional
[00:21:45] The Real Goal
So yes, learn how to change your state. There are moments where that skill can completely change what happens next, but don't stop there.
Build your capacity so you have more emotional range and space to work with
process what needs processing. Learn what you were never taught. Create the beliefs and behaviors and choices that belong to the life you're actually trying to build. Same as a business. Then practice them, integrate them, have them become second nature to you. The goal isn't to become so good at nervous system regulation that nothing ever bothers you again. It's definitely not to spend the rest of your life monitoring your internal state, wondering whether you're regulated enough. At some point, we actually have gotta go out and live
Enjoy things, take risks, love people, build things, laugh until our stomachs hurt. Isn't that the whole point of getting help and doing the personal development work in the first place? Growth that actually translates into a life that you enjoy living, a life that you love, that loves you right back.
For me, the goal is to build enough flexibility and capacity that you can experience being human, like the full range of being human, while still having increasing access to choice, agency, autonomy, and a whole bucket ton of fun along the way. I believe that's the difference in what we should be aiming for
[00:23:16] The Takeaways
So if you've been doing all the nervous system things and wondering why the same patterns are still there, it might be worth asking a different question. What job am I actually asking regulation to do?
Maybe you need to change a state or build your capacity. Maybe there's something underneath it that needs processing, or you already know exactly what's underneath it, and now it's just time to create and practice something different.
Sometimes it's a combination of all of them.
Regulation matters. Capacity changes everything. But neither one is the entirety of change.
I hope this episode has helped and inspired and sparked a little something, something inside you, and cleared a few things up along the way. I will see you for the next episode of Human Evolution next week
[00:24:09] Outro
Explore: Nervous System Emergency Kit || Inner Spark || Sonic Success || Desire Rewire || The Glow Up Gazette
