Your Nervous System Regulates Itself. So Should You Stop Trying to Regulate It?
What the science actually says about regulation, repetition, and the idea that we should just “leave the nervous system alone.”
Hi, I’m Teresa, a trauma-centered somatic practitioner translating neuroscience into practical nervous system regulation. I share evidence-based articles, somatic practices and insights to help you understand why your body does what it does.❤️
A few days ago, a member inside my community asked me a question that I think deserves a much bigger answer…
The sentence sounds incredibly convincing, but I need to be up front this:
Your nervous system DOES regulate itself.
That’s literally part of what it does. So the bigger question is why would we need to “regulate” something that is already regulating?
And considering that a huge part of my work involves nervous system regulation, somatic practices, breathing, movement and helping people understand what is happening inside their bodies, I think this is a very fair question to ask.
But I also think we’re dealing with another one of those situations where something can be technically true and still lead us to a conclusion that isn’t.
So naturally I went back into the research and there are actually two completely different conversations getting mixed together here.
One is:
Does the nervous system regulate itself?
Yes.
The other is:
Does that mean we shouldn’t intentionally do things that influence our physiology?
No.
And THAT distinction changes this entire conversation.
Your nervous system is regulating all the time
Let’s start with what isn’t controversial.
Your autonomic nervous system is involved in regulating cardiovascular function, digestion, thermoregulation and many other processes largely outside conscious control.
You don’t manually adjust your heart rate every time you stand up.
You don’t consciously coordinate changes in circulation when you start exercising.
You don’t have to remember to keep breathing while you’re asleep.
And thank God, because I have enough things to remember. 😂
What I am saying here is that a huge amount of physiological regulation happens automatically but here’s where I think the language starts messing with us: automatic does not mean uninfluenceable.
And we have an incredibly obvious example happening inside your body right now:
Breathing.
You can spend the rest of the day completely ignoring your breathing and your body will continue doing it because it IS our life force. But right now, if you wanted to, you could intentionally slow your breathing down, you could speed it up, you could hold your breath, you could change how deeply you’re breathing.
Respiration is automatically generated AND voluntarily modifiable. (Fun Fact: the lungs are the only organ in the body that can do that) and intentionally changing it can produce measurable physiological effects.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 31 studies involving 1,133 adults practicing slow-paced breathing. Researchers found immediate changes including reductions in systolic blood pressure and heart rate and increases in certain measures of heart rate variability. So here we have an automatically regulated physiological process that we can intentionally influence. There is NO contradiction.
And I think this is the first important piece that gets lost in the “your nervous system regulates itself” conversation. Your body regulating itself doesn’t mean your behavior is somehow standing outside your physiology watching it happen.
Your behavior is one of the many things your physiology responds to. Examples are:
Move your body and physiology changes.
Change your breathing and physiology can change.
Go from lying down to standing and physiology changes.
Walk into a freezing room and physiology changes.
Drink caffeine and physiology changes.
Go to sleep and physiology changes.
Encounter a stressor and physiology changes.
Your body is continuously adjusting to changing internal and external conditions. So the question isn’t really: Should I influence my nervous system?
You already do. All day long.
The much more interesting question is: What are we actually trying to accomplish when we intentionally use a “nervous system regulation” practice?
Because this is where I think some of the criticism is completely fair. Let´s get into it…