The Unsexy Thing That Actually Regulates Your Nervous System

Here's what I used to do when I got overwhelmed.

I'd get really activated — that spinning, pressured, nothing-is-okay feeling — and instead of stopping, I'd go on the computer and try to look up a program to enroll in, to fix my life or to get on the right track. I'd make a plan. I'd make a list. I'd frantically scurry around. And I'd just put more and more oxygen into that fire until I was so activated I'd need to go ride my bike for 30 miles or run 10 miles just to find some relief.

I stayed in that cycle for years. Because I couldn't regulate. I couldn't actually hold the energy of it — and I didn't even know that's what was happening.

What was running me was what I now call the meaning train.

The meaning train

When activation comes up — that rush of intensity, pressure, urgency, dread — the mind immediately goes to meaning. It'll never get better. I'm not going to live my life. Am I going to die like this? You can have the story of your whole world and the whole universe in a matter of seconds.

And meaning feels urgent because it promises resolution. If I can just understand this, I can survive it. That's what a really intelligent child does, especially when there's no one there to help them feel what they're feeling. The child makes early agreements cognitively, because that's the only tool available.

But here's the thing: meaning doesn't regulate. It escalates. Rather than disengaging the meaning, it takes you on this wild rabbit chase of trying to resolve something that can only be resolved through the felt sense.

It's like you're climbing higher and higher on a high dive. And then all of a sudden you're at the very top looking down like, shit, I'm really fucked, aren't I? You're outside your window of tolerance. And then you either collapse, dissociate, check out, or just say fuck it.

What actually works

What actually regulates is so unappealing that most people never do it.

You let the meaning blow up. You push play on the jukebox and feel the whole thing erupt — let it stir up the full activation and the whole constellation of what the meaning says. And then you disengage the meaning. You stop. You go into the body and you feel it fully. You just track.

That's it. That's the unsexy thing. Get out of meaning and go directly into sensation. From there, track what happens. How does the sensation shift? Does it expand or diminish? Does another part of the body come online?

It's almost like you're ordering a big meal and then just letting the food come. You stay with the food. You take your time. And in that tracking, your system settles. You're digesting that mountain of intensity. The body might get fatigued. And then you land — a little more fully in your seat, breath deepens, there's a little discharge, and you come back. The meaning shifts. The intensity softens.

The trick is to not engage the meaning further once it's stirred up the correct amount of activation.

Why it's so hard

It's so unappealing to try and feel the body when the mind and the meaning is saying you've got to act, you've got to look, you've got to do more. To go to the felt sense from inside that storm is going to feel like: what the fuck is this going to do?

And that's the whole thing. It's going to feel completely unsatisfying. It's going to feel like you're doing nothing. Like you're ignoring the problem. Like you're wasting time while your life falls apart.

But it's what actually allows the system to come down, rather than just continuing the patterning — which is climbing higher and higher on that dive until you're outside your window and there's nowhere left to go.

The broader context

This isn't just about individual dysregulation. In the dominant culture, we’ve lost so many of those traditions — the collective structures for regulating, for ritual, for grieving — that would help us feel the immensity of our feeling. Being together. Healing together. Grieving together. 

And so we're all trying to self-regulate in isolation, with only the cognitive tools we cobbled together as children.

We're at an evolutionary edge right now. Learning how to heal. Learning how to actually hold the energy of our own experience — and then let it move through.

The felt sense is a direct route back into the heart of regulation and simplicity, something this mind of modernity seems to resist so viciously.