Why You Can’t Just “Calm Down”
You know you're overreacting. You can see it in their face: he confusion, maybe the frustration. Your partner said something innocuous, or your manager gave you feedback that wasn't even harsh, but your heart is pounding, your throat is tight, and you feel like you're either going to explode or disappear.
“Just calm down", they say. Or worse, you say it to yourself.
But you can't. And then you feel ashamed for not being able to.
If this sounds familiar, you're not broken. You're not weak. You're experiencing what happens when your nervous system gets dysregulated, when it slips outside the range where you can think clearly, feel your emotions without being overwhelmed, and respond to situations with choice rather than pure reaction.
Understanding nervous system regulation isn't just interesting psychology; it's a roadmap back to yourself when everything feels too much or completely shut down. It's the missing piece that explains why willpower, positive thinking, and "just relaxing" often don't work when you need them most.
![The nervous system constantly assesses safety and threat, often beneath conscious awareness.]
What Is Nervous System Regulation?
Nervous system regulation is your body's ability to match your level of arousal (activation) to what's actually happening around you. When you're regulated, you can:
Think clearly and assess your problem-solving abilities
Feel your emotions without being consumed by them
Connect with others in meaningful ways
Respond to situations with flexibility rather than rigid patterns
Move through the natural ups and downs of the day without getting stuck in extreme states
Regulation doesn't mean feeling calm all the time. It means your nervous system can flow appropriately, ramping up when you need energy or protection, settling down when you're safe, and moving fluidly between states as circumstances change.
When you're dysregulated, this flexibility disappears. You get stuck in states of high activation (anxiety, panic, rage) or low activation (shutdown, numbness, disconnection), and you can't seem to shift out of them, no matter how much you want to.
The Three States: A Simple Map
Psychiatrist and researcher Stephen Porges developed Polyvagal Theory, which helps us understand three basic nervous system states:
Ventral Vagal (Safe and Social): This is your window of tolerance, where you feel connected, present, and able to engage with life. Your thinking brain is online. You can feel emotions without being overwhelmed. You can connect with others. This is the state where healing, growth, and genuine connection happen.
Sympathetic (Mobilisation): This is your fight-or-flight response. Your body mobilises energy to deal with threat. Your heart races, muscles tense, thoughts speed up. You might feel anxious, panicky, angry, or hypervigilant. In small doses, this state is adaptive; it helps you respond to actual danger. But when you're stuck here chronically, it's exhausting.
Dorsal Vagal (Immobilisation): This is your shutdown or freeze response. When the threat feels overwhelming and escape seems impossible, your system collapses into conservation mode. You might feel numb, disconnected, foggy, exhausted, or like you're watching life from behind glass. This state protects you from overwhelm, but when it becomes your default, you lose access to joy, connection, and vitality.
The key insight: these aren't personality types or choices. They're automatic nervous system responses shaped by your past experiences, particularly early experiences of safety, threat, and whether your distress was met with comfort or left unattended.
The nervous system constantly assesses safety and threat, often beneath conscious awareness.
Why You Can't Just "Calm Down"
When someone tells you to “just relax" or “stop overreacting," they're asking your thinking brain to override your nervous system. But here's the problem: when you're dysregulated, your thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) goes partially or fully offline.
Blood flow shifts away from the parts of your brain responsible for reasoning, perspective, taking, and impulse control. It moves toward the parts that handle survival, the amygdala and brainstem. This is adaptive when you're facing a genuine threat, but it means that in moments of dysregulation, you literally cannot access the cognitive skills you'd use when you're regulated.
This is why:
You can't remember your breathing techniques when you're panicking
You say things in arguments that you'd never say when calm
You forget important information when you're anxious
You can't "just think positive" when you're in shutdown
Logic doesn't work to talk yourself out of a trauma response
Your nervous system is running an ancient program designed to keep you alive, and that program doesn't care about your rational understanding or your good intentions. It only cares about survival.
What Shapes Your Nervous System Patterns
You weren't born dysregulated. Your nervous system developed its patterns based on your early experiences, particularly whether your environment felt safe, predictable, and responsive to your needs.
Childhood and Co-Regulation
As infants and children, we don't have the capacity to regulate ourselves. We rely entirely on caregivers to help us move from distress to calm, what therapists call “co-regulation." When a baby cries and a caregiver responds with soothing, the baby's nervous system learns: Distress doesn't last forever. Help comes. I'm safe.
But when caregivers are inconsistent, frightening, absent, or overwhelmed themselves, a child's nervous system learns different lessons:
The world is unpredictable. I need to stay vigilant.
No one comes when I'm upset. I have to shut down to survive.
Expressing needs makes things worse. I have to manage everything myself.
Connection is dangerous. People who are supposed to protect me hurt me.
These early patterns become your nervous system's default settings. They're not conscious beliefs—they're embodied states that your system returns to automatically, especially under stress.
If you grew up in an environment where you had to be hypervigilant, your nervous system might still default to that state even when you're objectively safe. If you learned that shutting down was the only way to survive overwhelming situations, that might be your system's automatic response to conflict or intimacy, even in relationships where you're not in danger.
If this resonates and you're recognising patterns from your childhood, my blog on Adult Children of Alcoholics explores how growing up in unpredictable environments shapes your nervous system and relationships in lasting ways.
Trauma and Nervous System Dysregulation
Trauma, whether a single overwhelming event or chronic experiences of threat, neglect, or abuse, fundamentally changes how your nervous system operates. Trauma teaches your system that the world is dangerous, that safety is fragile or nonexistent, and that you need to stay in survival mode to protect yourself.
This is why trauma survivors often struggle with:
Hypervigilance: constantly scanning for threats, unable to relax even in safe environments
Emotional flooding: small triggers leading to overwhelming emotional responses
Disconnection: feeling numb, foggy, or absent from your own life
Difficulty with intimacy: closeness feels threatening because vulnerability wasn't safe in the past
Physical symptoms: chronic pain, tension, digestive issues, or fatigue that don't have clear medical causes
These aren't character flaws or signs of weakness. They're your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive. The problem is that what helped you survive then might be making it hard to live now.
If you're recognising these trauma patterns, my blog on Why Thinking Your Way Out of Trauma Doesn't Work explains why understanding alone isn't enough and what actually helps change these deep patterns.
Your Window of Tolerance: Why It Matters
Imagine your nervous system has a range—a zone where you can function, think, feel, and connect effectively. Trauma therapist Dan Siegel calls this your “window of tolerance."
Inside your window: You can handle stress, process emotions, think flexibly, and stay present. You might feel challenged, but you're not overwhelmed.
Above your window (hyperarousal): You're in fight-or-flight. Everything feels too much, too fast, too intense. You might feel anxious, panicky, angry, or overwhelmed. Your thoughts race, your body is tense, and you're in survival mode.
Below your window (hypoarousal): You're in shutdown or freeze. Everything feels muted, distant, or impossible. You might feel numb, exhausted, disconnected, or like you're moving through fog. You can't access motivation, joy, or even much feeling at all.
Trauma shrinks your window. What might be mildly stressful for someone with a wide window can push you outside your range entirely. This isn't because you're not trying hard enough—it's because your nervous system learned to have a narrow range of safety.
The good news: your window can widen again. It happens through repeated experiences of going slightly outside your window and coming back in, in the presence of safety and support. This is what much of trauma therapy is actually doing—gradually expanding your capacity to handle activation without collapsing or exploding.
My blog on Window of Tolerance goes deeper into this concept and offers specific practices for recognising when you're outside your window and how to find your way back.
What Helps: Building Nervous System Capacity
You can't will yourself into regulation, but you can create conditions that support your nervous system's natural ability to find balance. Here's what actually helps:
1. Learn to Notice Your States
The first step is awareness without judgment. Start tracking:
When do you feel most regulated (safe, connected, present)?
What pushes you into hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, anger)?
What sends you into hypoarousal (shutdown, numbness, disconnection)?
What helps you return to your window?
You might keep a simple log: “This morning after meditation, I felt grounded. After the meeting with my manager, my heart was racing, and I couldn't focus. After lunch with my friend, I felt more settled."
Noticing patterns helps you predict and prepare. You start to see: This situation tends to dysregulate me. I need support or skills here.
2. Practice Grounding in the Present Moment
When you're dysregulated, your nervous system is often responding to past threats as if they're happening now. Grounding techniques help your system recognise: I'm here. I'm now. That was then.
The 5-4-3-2-1 technique: Notice 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste. This anchors you in sensory present-moment reality.
Orienting: Slowly look around the room. Notice colours, shapes, details. This engages your social engagement system (ventral vagal) and helps you assess: Am I actually safe right now?
Body scan: Notice sensations in your body without trying to change them. Where do I feel tight? Where do I feel open? What temperature am I? Attention itself is regulating.
Movement: Gentle stretching, walking, shaking, or swaying can help discharge activation or bring energy to shutdown states.
3. Work With Your Breath (Carefully)
Breath is one of the few aspects of your autonomic nervous system you can consciously influence, which makes it a powerful tool. But breath work needs to match your state:
When you're hyperaroused (anxious, panicky): Longer exhales than inhales help activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Try breathing in for 4 counts, out for 6 or 8. Or try "physiological sighs"—two quick inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth.
When you're hypoaroused (shut down, numb): Longer inhales than exhales can help bring energy and activation. Try breathing in for 6 counts, out for 4.
Important: If breath work makes you feel worse (more panicky or more dissociated), stop. For some trauma survivors, focusing on breath can be triggering. That's okay, use other tools instead.
4. Find Co-Regulation
Remember: you learned to regulate (or not) through relationships. You also heal through relationships.
Co-regulation means borrowing someone else's regulated nervous system to help stabilise your own. This might look like:
Being with a friend who stays calm when you're activated
Working with a therapist who can hold a steady presence while you process difficult emotions
Sitting with a pet whose calm presence helps you settle
Being part of a community or group where you feel genuinely seen and safe
Co-regulation isn't dependency; it's how human nervous systems are designed to work. We're not meant to regulate entirely alone. Over time, you internalise these experiences of being helped back to your window, and they become resources you can access within yourself.
5. Identify Your Glimmers and Practice Resourcing
Trauma therapist Deb Dana talks about “glimmers", small moments of safety, connection, or peace. These are the opposite of triggers. They are moments when your nervous system softens, even briefly.
Your glimmers might be:
Morning coffee in a quiet house
Your dog's greeting when you come home
A text from a friend who gets you
Sunlight through the window
The feeling after a good stretch
A song that makes you feel held
Start noticing and collecting these moments. When you're dysregulated, you can bring them to mind (or recreate them when possible) as anchors back to safety.
Resourcing means intentionally building up these anchors—places, people, memories, sensations, images that help your nervous system remember: Safety exists. I have experienced it. I can access it again.
6. Build Awareness of Your Triggers
Triggers are stimuli that send your nervous system into survival mode, often because they remind your system (consciously or unconsciously) of a past threat.
Common triggers include:
Certain tones of voice
Conflict or perceived criticism
Being ignored or dismissed
Feeling trapped or without choice
Specific smells, sounds, or places
Intimacy or vulnerability
You can't always avoid triggers, but you can:
Recognise when you've been triggered (rather than believing the threat is current and real)
Have a plan for what helps you return to your window
Communicate with safe people: "I'm triggered right now. I need some time to regulate."
Work with a therapist to process the underlying wounds, so triggers lose their charge over time
If you're struggling with triggers related to past abuse or gaslighting, my blog on How to Trust Yourself Again After Gaslighting addresses how these dynamics specifically impact your nervous system.
7. Consider Professional Support
While there's much you can do on your own, working with a trauma-informed therapist can accelerate healing significantly. Approaches specifically designed for nervous system regulation include:
Somatic Experiencing: focuses on releasing activation held in the body
EMDR: helps reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer dysregulate you
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: integrates body awareness with traditional talk therapy
Polyvagal-informed therapy: explicitly works with nervous system states
Internal Family Systems: works with different "parts" of you, each with its own nervous system states
A good trauma therapist won't just talk with you, they'll help you build capacity to feel, process, and regulate in real time, within the safety of the therapeutic relationship.
What Regulation Actually Looks Like
It's important to have realistic expectations. Nervous system regulation doesn't mean:
Never feeling anxious, angry, or sad
Being calm and centred all the time
Never getting triggered
Controlling your emotions perfectly
Instead, regulation looks like:
Recognising when you're leaving your window of tolerance
Having tools to help yourself come back (or knowing when to ask for help)
Recovering from dysregulation faster than you used to
Having moments of genuine calm and connection, even if they're brief at first
Trusting that difficult feelings will pass, not last forever
Experiencing your emotions without being consumed by them
Progress often shows up in subtle ways:
You notice you're anxious before you're in full panic
You can name what you're feeling instead of just reacting
You pause before responding in conflict
You stay present in a conversation that would have sent you into shutdown before
You feel your anger without it controlling you
You can ask for what you need without apologising for existing
These small shifts are evidence that your nervous system is learning something new: I can handle this. I don't have to stay in survival mode. Safety is possible.
Living With a Sensitive Nervous System
Some of us will always have more sensitive nervous systems than others. If you experienced early trauma, chronic stress, or didn't receive consistent co-regulation as a child, your system may always be a bit more reactive, a bit quicker to move outside your window.
This isn't a life sentence, it's just reality. And there's something important in accepting it: you're not failing when you get dysregulated. You're having a normal response given your particular nervous system and history.
What you can control:
How much you understand about your patterns
What tools you build to support yourself
Whether you seek help when you need it
How much compassion you offer yourself when things are hard
The environments and relationships you choose (as much as possible)
What you can't control:
That your system is wired this way
That healing takes time
That triggers will still happen
That some days will be harder than others
The goal isn't to fix yourself or become someone with a “normal" nervous system. The goal is to understand your system, work with it rather than against it, and gradually expand your window so you have more access to the life you want to live.
A Final Thought
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. If it's hypervigilant, that's because vigilance once kept you safe. If it shuts down, that's because collapse once protected you from overwhelm. If it struggles with connection, that's because closeness once came with danger.
These patterns made sense then. They might not serve you now, but they're not evidence that something is wrong with you. They're evidence that you survived something hard, and your system adapted brilliantly to impossible circumstances.
Healing doesn't mean overriding your nervous system with willpower or positive thinking. It means slowly, gently teaching your system through experience—not through words—that safety exists, that threat is not constant, that connection can be nourishing rather than dangerous.
It means borrowing other people's calm until you can access your own. It means widening your window one millimetre at a time. It means celebrating the small victories: the moment you caught yourself before spiralling, the conversation you stayed present for, the time you felt your feelings without drowning in them.
Your nervous system is not your enemy. It's the part of you that has been trying, in its imperfect way, to keep you alive and connected. With understanding, support, and practice, you can help it learn that you're safe now, not perfectly, not always, but enough.
Need Support?
If you're recognising yourself in these patterns and want support in understanding and working with your nervous system, I'm here.
At Safe Space Counselling Services, I offer trauma-informed therapy that works directly with nervous system regulation—not just talking about your experiences, but building your capacity to stay present with them. In a first session, we can explore your patterns, identify what helps you feel regulated, and begin building the skills and safety your system needs to heal.
Whether you prefer online or face-to-face sessions in Murrumbeena, you're welcome here.
📧 kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
📞 0452 285 526
