Management Strategies vs Nervous System Regulation

I've been fascinated and doing a deep dive this year around management strategies vs actual nervous system regulation. Coming from the yoga and meditation space this has absolutely blown me wide open.

I want to start by saying management strategies can be such a beautiful and powerful thing, life saving and life giving. I think these strategies have an important time and place, and I am unsure if we ever get to a place in life where we don’t/won't rely on them at least a little bit. But I do believe through somatic experiencing and actual nervous system regulation and integration we will need these management strategies less and less and instead of them being life lines, maybe they can have a different life giving intention around them and can be for joy instead of survival. 

Some examples of management strategies that I use or even teach are yoga, breathwork, meditation, tapping, venting, cathartic experiences… and many many more we can also lean on not so supportive management strategies such as wine, substances, mindless scrolling….. 

We are human beings and like I said management strategies are a beautiful and often life saving thing, they are also something to get curious about. 

We often move into management strategies at times of overwhelm, feeling frazzled, ungrounded, angry, distraught, grief stricken. And we often find that they give us some type of relief, there is some pay off that we get from it. But often it is a short term relief, we feel better for a few hours or maybe for a few weeks, but then we may find we need these management strategies to reground and resettle again, and the cycle can continue. 

So yes we feel some temporary relief from our management strategies such as breathwork or tapping, but it's not actually regulating or allowing the nervous system to fully regulate. 

We look at the activation of our  nervous system like a wave. We become activated and the crest rises and as we deactivate it comes back down. We often lean into our management strategies in a higher state of activation - after completing a few minutes or maybe an hour of the management strategy (including venting and catharsis) we may feel some relief, we have moved down the wave and have had a slight deactivation, but we have not come all the way to the bottom of the wave and completely deactivated and regulated our nervous system. So our nervous systems are actually still in a state of activation - though yes it may be slightly less activated - which is what creates the feeling of relief. 

And in many moments in life relief is such a beautiful and life saving thing. 

And when we utilize somatic experiencing and are guided in an intelligent and methodical way we can come into activation and follow it all the way back down deactivating without using management strategies. Completing a cycle of activation and deactivation. Which actually then supports a regulated nervous system, and we are allowing the nervous system to move in the way it was intended to, in and out of activation and deactivation on its own. When we work with somatic experiencing and completing cycles of activation and deactivation the nervous system learns and creates new opportunities and creates new possibilities that things can be different. That perhaps we may need our management strategies less frequently. Our nervous system now has a greater capacity and ability to choose something different, breaking our habits and patterns.