(IMAGE: Amanda Paul Photography)
by Catherine Roscoe Barr, neuroscience-based wellness coach
This holiday season, my daily intention is to be a generous co-regulator.
Co-regulation is the influence of one nervous system on another, to help regulate, bring into balance, and feel safe.
It’s basically contagious calm-and-kindness that flows back to us in a positive feedback loop.
I’m sure, like me, you’ve had the experience of you and your child or partner escalating a negative situation, where one person is dysregulated and the other just adds fuel to the fire.
Co-regulation gives you power to de-escalate a situation and extinguish the fire.
Co-regulation allows you to offer safety and connection to your distressed loved one.
When we don’t feel safe, our fight, flight or freeze mechanisms are activated and we’re less able to access the higher part of our brain – our prefrontal cortex – reducing our ability to be calm, creative, collaborative and kind.
When we don’t feel safe, we can’t truly connect.
This heightened and often chronic alertness to threat – triggered by everything from violence, climate crisis and financial stress to criticism, comparison and loneliness – can fracture our social connections.
Social connections are critical to our well-being. They are the greatest predictor of health and longevity, according to numerous studies [1, 2], and fill our lives with love and meaning.
SELF-REGULATION
Only by self-regulating can we offer co-regulation to others, so that we can connect in a state of safety, calm and kindness.
“If you are in fight or flight, you won’t be able to do the most important thing, which is to stay open and connect,” says psychiatrist Julie Holland in her book Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics [3].
In order to regulate our nervous systems, we must practice maintaining inner balance by regularly – and intentionally – returning to a state of rest following a state of stress.
“Living systems maintain inner balance, harmony, and order through their capacity to self-regulate via feedback loops between particular functions and systems,” says the founder of MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) Jon Kabat-Zinn in his book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness [4].
“Self-regulation is the process whereby a system maintains stability of functioning and, at the same time adaptability to new circumstances,” says Kabat-Zinn.
OPPORTUNITIES TO OFFER CO-REGULATION
As parents, our co-regulation teaches our children how to self-regulate in new and challenging situations – a skill critical to personal and professional success throughout life.
As partners, our co-regulation can help soothe our beloved’s worries and tension, and open the door to intimacy.
As leaders, our co-regulation can help diffuse our client’s or employee’s disagreements and insecurities, and provide the neural environment for collaboration and creativity.
As citizens, our co-regulation can offer flustered strangers a micro-moment of love [5], changing the trajectory of their day toward more calm and kindness.
“Across multiple dimensions and types of relationships, research shows that we can, with the proper attitude and intention toward co-regulation, have a stabilizing effect on the emotions and health of others,” says a recent Psychology Today article [6].
VAGAL TONE & RESILIENCE
This stabilizing effect comes from our ability to engage our autonomic nervous system by activating our vagus nerve – practices that we’ll explore together below.
“Your autonomic nervous system constantly scans the environment, including your social environment, for cues of safety, danger, or threat to your physical survival or psychological well-being,” says psychotherapist Linda Graham in her book Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster [7].
The autonomic nervous system is part of the peripheral nervous system and comprises the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system (see NERVOUS SYSTEM diagram below).
The vagus nerve makes up the bulk of parasympathetic nerve fibres – 80% of which are afferent, meaning they relay sensory information from the body to the brain (whereas efferent nerves relay information from the brain to the body).
The vagus nerve innervates the gut, heart, lungs, throat and facial muscles – and through our breath, voice, engagement, intention and physicality we can send messages of safety to our own nervous system, and then offer the same to others.
Vagal tone describes the activity of your vagus nerve.
“Your heart rate speeds up a bit when you inhale and slows down a bit when you exhale. This is the pattern that reflects your vagal tone, the strength or condition of your vagus nerve,” says psychology professor and researcher Barbara Fredrickson in her book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection [8].
“People with higher vagal tone, science has shown, are more flexible across a whole host of domains – physical, mental, and social,” says Fredrickson. “They simply adapt better to their ever shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. Physically, they regulate their internal bodily processes more efficiently, like their glucose levels and inflammation. Mentally, they’re better able to regulate their attention and emotions, even their behaviour. Socially, they are especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others. By definition, then, they experience more micro-moments of love.”
In a word, people with higher vagal tone are more resilient.
Resilience is our ability to cope with and recover from adversity, whether physical or psychological.
USE YOUR BRAKE TO SELF-REGULATE
A great analogy is to think of the sympathetic nervous system as our accelerator and the parasympathetic nervous system as our brake.
We have control of these pedals – to help us speed up or slow down – and through building our own control, we can offer this skill to others.
We need energy and forward motion to meet our needs and achieve our goals, but we don’t want to go so fast that we’re out of control (fight-or-flight).
We need rest and stillness to meet our needs and recover, but we don’t want to be immobilized or disconnected (freeze-or-faint).
Deb Dana – clinical social worker, coordinator of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium and founding member of The Polyvagal Institute – introduced me to the concept of blended states [9] (see NERVOUS SYSTEM diagram below for reference):
Ventral-Sympathetic (playful, passionate, productive)
Ventral-Dorsal (“sacred still”, awe, contemplative)
Sympathetic-Dorsal (fearful but frozen)
We want to be grounded in our “social engagement system” (ventral vagal activation) where we feel safe and connected – so we can offer this to others via co-regulation.
We can do this with the following practices that stimulate our vagus nerve and help us self-regulate.
5 TOOLS TO HELP YOU OFFER SAFETY, LOVE AND CONNECTION
1. Breathing meditation
The diaphragm is my favourite muscle in the human body!
It’s a muscle that unconsciously does its work, via the autonomic nervous system, but it’s also under our conscious control.
By slowing down and expanding your inhale (via diaphragm contraction) and exhaling completely (via internal intercostals and abdominals) – both through your nose – you can not only activate your rest-and-digest response, you can increase your lung capacity (which has been shown to increase longevity).
Breathing is so hot right now! From James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art [10] to The Wim Hof Method [11], many different techniques are out there for you to investigate.
Here’s a simple one to begin with.
>>> THE PRACTICE: BIG SLOW INHALE, BIGGER SLOW EXHALE
Sit in a comfortable position with a long neutral spine, cross-legged with your sit bones slightly elevated (by a cushion or folded blanket) or seated in a chair with your feet flat on the floor.
Inhale in 3-dimensions, as deep, wide and tall as you can (especially into the back of your ribs).
Exhale in 3-dimensions as though you were first shrink-wrapping your pelvic floor up, then shrink-wrapping your transverse abdominis toward your spine (like a corset tightening evenly around your waist), then shrink-wrapping your ribs toward your spine (this order is important).
Breathe this way a few times and once you’ve got the hang of this expansive 3D expansion and contraction, begin to lengthen both your inhale and your exhale, making your exhale a few seconds longer than your inhale – working from a ratio of 3:6 to 5:8 to 7:10 and 9:12.
Lastly, take a few breaths without forcing the inhale or exhale, noticing the greater capacity of your breaths, and feeling the relaxation this practice brings you.
2. Move your body
Moderate physical activity that feels good stimulates healthy parasympathetic activation, so get your body moving – whether it’s a walk, dance, run, swim, bike or yoga practice!
Every minute counts, so just do something even if you only have 5 minutes.
You can also move your (regulated!) body toward those you love and offer a hug, a back rub, or a shoulder massage.
I love to have a good long spoon with my husband at the end of a hard day! Even if we’re both a bit frazzled, a lengthy cuddle almost always helps us drop into a place of regulation.
>>> THE PRACTICES: MOVEMENT AND TOUCH
Move your body to help achieve self-regulation.
Use your body to offer co-regulation through loving physical touch.
3. Emotional intelligence
“All those seeking to heal – or to remain healthy – need to reclaim the lost capacity for emotional truth-recognition,” says trauma, addiction, stress and childhood development expert Dr. Gabor Maté in his must-read book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress [12].
Indeed, our ability to recognize and manage our emotions – our emotional intelligence – is absolutely critical to our physical and psychological well-being.
"Experiencing a broad spectrum of emotions is adaptive and beneficial to health because it means having a more balanced and nuanced appraisal of daily life,” say the authors of a new study on emodiversity.[13]. “Emodiversity is a term used to describe rich and balanced emotions. Emodiversity was broken into 13 positive emotions: cheerful, in good spirits, extremely happy, calm and peaceful, satisfied, full of life, enthusiastic, attentive, proud, active, close to others, belonging and confident, as well as 14 negative emotions: worthlessness, nervous, restless or fidgety, hopeless, afraid, jittery, irritable, ashamed, upset, lonely, angry, frustrated, that everything is an effort and so sad that nothing could cheer you up.”
And, says a recent article in The Atlantic [14], “Psychologists say that people who exhibit emodiversity—the capacity to experience a lot of emotions—are better able to regulate themselves.”
In his book The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work [15], happiness researcher Shawn Achor says, “Experiments show that when people are primed to feel high levels of distress, the quickest to recover are those who can identify how they are feeling and put those feelings into words. Brain scans show verbal information almost immediately diminishes the power of these negative emotions, improving well-being and enhancing decision making skills.”
>>> THE PRACTICE: EMOTIONAL EXPLORATION
Boost your emotional diversity and intelligence by identifying and expressing how you feel in the moment (even if only silently in your head – “I feel angry” or “I feel proud”) and by writing down in your journal a “balanced and nuanced appraisal of daily life” a few days per week.
4. Somatic intelligence
Notice what your body is communicating to you.
“Embodiment is a prerequisite for peace and joy,” says Holland in Good Chemistry. “That negative voice in your head isn’t the truth. The truth is in your body. ”
Do you feel safe and secure, or anxious and on alert?
Where are you holding tension?
Is that tension from anger or worry? Or is it from sitting too long and not stretching enough?
“[The] practises of breath, touch, movement, and visualization [help] strengthen your somatic intelligence so that you learn to recognize, interpret, and manage the signals sent by your nervous system to your higher brain,” says Graham. “You can return to your baseline physiological state of well-being – your range of resilience, your window of tolerance, your equanimity.”
>>> THE PRACTICE: BODY SCAN MEDITATION
Sit in a comfortable position with a long neutral spine, cross-legged with your sit bones slightly elevated (by a cushion or folded blanket) or seated in a chair with your feet flat on the floor.
Spend one inhale and exhale mentally visiting each part of your body, from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes, as you “recognize, interpret, and manage the signals”
Talk to your body about the tension you are feeling, and release it, so that you can return to your baseline physiological state of well-being.
5. Be present
Get off your device, arrive in the present moment, and get in sync!
“A central mechanism underpinning human sociality is biobehavioral synchrony, the human capacity to coordinate physiological processes between interactive partners during moments of social contact, including the coordination of heart rhythms, hormonal release, neural oscillations and brain activations,” says a new study in the Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience [16]. “A key tenet of the biobehavioral synchrony model is that physiological coordination is triggered in a bottom-up way and depends on the coordination of social action, such as motor activity, facial mimicking or the synchrony of nonverbal interactive signals, including shared gaze, joint laugh or mutual expression of positive affect and that such behavioral synchrony provides the template for the synchrony of neural processes.”
We can’t synchronize with each other if we’re immersed with our devices, plus stressful messages, bad news and the perceived social isolation exacerbated by social media [17] can activate our fight-or-flight response, putting us in a state of dysregulation.
“Just as with couples, children want to feel seen, heard, and understood. You can use mirroring and validating language to help with this,” says Holland in Good Chemistry.
>>> THE PRACTICE: BIOBEHAVIORAL SYNCHRONY
When you’re in the company of others you care about, create the circumstances for biobehavioral synchrony to flourish:
Put away your device
Make eye contact
Make physical contact, if appropriate
Smile genuinely
Maintain relaxed, engaged and open posture
Use mirroring and validating language
I hope these tools will help you be a generous co-regulator too!
By offering safety, love and connection to others, we can uplift our most important relationships – and improve our own lives at the same time.
REFERENCES:
1. Susan Pinker, TED2017: The secret to living longer may be your social life
2. Robert Waldinger, TEDxBeaconStreet: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
3. Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics by Julie Holland
4. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn
5. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson explains why shared positive emotions matter for Greater Good Magazine
6. Psychology Today: Improve Your Relationships by Using This One Skill
7. Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster by Linda Graham
8. Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection by Barbara Fredrickson
9. Sounds True Podcast with Deb Dana on Befriending Your Nervous System
10. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
11. The Wim Hof Method
12. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté
13. ScienceDaily: There’s a bright side to being a ‘Debbie Downer’
14. The Atlantic: The Benefits of Emodiversity
15. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor
16. Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: The integration of social and neural synchrony: a case for ecologically valid research using MEG neuroimaging
17. Psychology Today: Face-to-Face Connectedness, Oxytocin, and Your Vagus Nerve