A bit different from the religious stuff I've been posting lately, but figured this might interest some people here. I've briefly brought up emotional work / somatic practices and folks have asked me about it before. As always, full link to Substack here for pictures and such, but all the text is below: https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/p/learning-to-regulate-my-nervous-system
For folks who’ve read me before, you know that I’ve dealt with a lot of chronic pain. I’ve had spiritual crises, struggled with depression and anxiety, and for a long time felt like I was just treading water. I put in a lot of work without making any real headway, and fell into what is, sadly, really common in our society: using drugs and alcohol to deal with the painful parts of life.
It took me a lot of work and a lot of exploring to figure out what was going on, and what I want to do here is try and lay out a bit of the path I’ve walked in terms of various techniques, in the hopes that it may interest or help others dealing with similar issues. If you’d like a more complete list without all the background from my story, I’ve got a list here:
https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/p/chronic-pain-resources-research
So, how did I get into nervous system regulation in the first place?
Late 2023, about three and a half years ago, I left a job at a brutal startup that really wrecked me physically and emotionally. I decided to take a sabbatical because, thank God, I was lucky enough to get some money from trading away my equity in the company.
It wasn’t some crazy life-changing amount, just around half a year’s income. But it was enough that I felt comfortable taking six months off looking for a job to focus on healing, figuring out my chronic pain issues, and generally trying to get my life back together.
At the time, I was really struggling with carpal tunnel (pain in the wrists/hands) and had been for years. Of course, working a computer job makes that especially brutal. I was using a program called Talon Voice, which I’ve talked about here a few times before, and in that community there are a lot of people dealing with chronic pain, RSI, and carpal tunnel. Someone there pointed me toward a course called Nervous System Mastery by Jonny Miller.
To be honest, I was very hesitant. The course was kind of expensive, and I remember thinking, “Man, you want me to pay hundreds of dollars for an online course? That’s insane lmao.” But a couple people I talked to said it had genuinely changed their lives, and I was desperate, so I went for it anyway.
In the course, Jonny goes over a variety of techniques for regulating your nervous system. I actually don’t like the phrase “mastery.” It feels a little gross to me. I think it’s more accurate to say that he introduces people to a variety of techniques and practices that can help them regulate or soothe their nervous systems.
(If you want to know what a nervous system actually is, Jonny has a podcast episode with Joe Hudson, another great teacher in this space, on defining ‘nervous system’)
I want to emphasize again that I was pretty skeptical when I first got into this stuff. Most nerdy, intellectual, rationalist type folks are. But over just a couple years they have absolutely changed my life.
Now, it’s worth mentioning up front that these techniques didn’t instantly solve all of my problems. A lot of times I’d try something and think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Other times I’d think, “Oh my God, this is life-changing. I’m going to do this every day forever.”
Then I’d do it for two weeks, stop completely, forget about it, and come back six months later only to find that my experience of it had changed.
So if you’re exploring this territory yourself, I’d encourage you to experiment, circle back to things, and revisit practices that didn’t click the first time around. A lot of these methods are worth keeping in your back pocket, even if they don’t wow you the first time around.
Emotional Work
The first broad category of practices is what I’ll call emotional work or emotional inquiry. There are a lot of different approaches to this. Some people like the method of Gendlin Focusing. Jonny talks a lot about interoception, which is basically a fancy word for feeling into your body.
The bones of the practice are simple. You sit down, lie down, or otherwise get comfortable and move your attention into your body. Honestly, you can stop right there. That’s a complete practice in itself. A lot of somatic work is just about feeling the body, becoming aware of sensation, and creating states of safety, peace, and connection.
The emotional inquiry side goes a step further. You’re feeling into your body, trying to settle into a relatively safe state, and then you start trying to connect with your emotions.
Now, a lot of teachers recommend actually having conversations with your emotions. They might encourage you to ask your anger what it wants or ask your sadness what it’s trying to tell you. Not gonna lie, that approach hasn’t worked particularly well for me. I don’t tend to communicate with my emotions through words. For me it’s more of a vibe. I just feel into my body and try to connect with whatever is there.
It’s hard to explain exactly what this is like. One of the challenges with this whole area is that people often try to put the process into words more than the experience warrants, in my opinion.
You might journal beforehand and write, “I want to get in touch with anger,” then sit quietly and look for what anger actually feels like in your body. Where is it? What sensations accompany it? How does it move? What happens if you pay attention to it?
This stuff sounds incredibly basic, and maybe for some people it is. Maybe some people naturally grow up doing this. I didn’t! So even this very basic level of emotional awareness can be surprisingly helpful.
From there, emotional work branches out in all sorts of directions. You can work on expressing emotions, for instance.
Anger is the easiest example. You can intentionally practice expressing anger by yelling into an empty room, punching the air, hitting a pillow, or yelling into a pillow. People do this sort of thing in movies all the time, but you can actually get a lot of mileage out of practicing it deliberately.
You can also practice crying. You can sit there and try to connect with grief or sadness. See what brings you closer to tears, see what makes your heart close up and go stiff. Play with going back and forth between the two states.
Really the possibilities are endless here. Again, just experiment!
Anyway, that’s emotional work in a nutshell. It sometimes seems to basic and obvious to be not worth mentioning, but the practices have been very impactful for me.
Also, it’s more necessary than ever in the modern world. Especially for intellectual, nerdy types like myself. More than almost any other time in human history, we’re up in our heads and disconnected from our bodies and emotions. That’s partly technology and partly modernity as a broader socio-cultural and historical phenomenon.
Good luck. On to the next!
Breathwork
Another broad category of nervous system regulation techniques is breathwork.
Now, working with the breath can be dangerous. Just saying, you’ve been warned, don’t sue me, et cetera.
Breathwork is complicated. You have the basic meditation instructions where people tell you to focus on the breath, and honestly those have never been particularly helpful for me. (I mean to be honest I think a lot of the “just focus on the breath” advice is extremely retarded, unhelpful, and basically makes people worse, but that’s beside the point.)
There are all sorts of different styles. Wim Hof is one of the most popular…. but I’ve also heard a lot of people recommend avoiding it because it’s apparently more dangerous than a lot of other techniques.
Then you’ve got box breathing, extending your inhale or exhale, pausing between breaths, and about a million other ways of relating to the breath. Again, just research some stuff and experiment.
One thing that’s been surprisingly helpful for me lately is the Buteyko method, which is actually about breathing less and intentionally creating what they call air hunger. Basically, you take shallower breaths and pause more often between them while trying to maintain a sense of safety, warmth, and calm in the body. It reliably seems to stimulate a low level of fear.
For me, that’s actually been useful. It gives me a chance to work with fear directly while remaining grounded, and it generally leaves me feeling energized. What’s funny is that for almost a decade I tried to take deeper breaths because that’s what everyone says you’re supposed to do. Then, somewhat counterintuitively, shallower breathing ended up helping me more. It’s interesting how that works.
If you want to read more on Buteyko breathing specifically, I recommend this article:
A related category, which maybe deserves its own section, is humming and singing. You’ll sometimes hear people talk about polyvagal exercises. My understanding is that the vagus nerve runs throughout the body, but there are ways of stimulating it through vibration in the throat and neck.
Humming at certain frequencies can stimulate the vagus nerve, and be surprisingly soothing. Just learning to hum deeply and comfortably can have a calming effect, I’ve found it to be quite pleasant.
Singing belongs here too. I joined my church choir about a year and a half ago, and singing, especially collective religious singing, has been really good for regulating my breathing, my emotions, and my nervous system more generally.
Learning to Rest
The third broad category is related to meditation, albeit a little more passive. This practice goes by various names, but the basic idea is simply learning to rest.
It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish from meditation. You can almost think of it as a kind of Zen “do nothing” practice. It’s called “active rest” in the Alexander Technique, which is often used by people dealing with chronic pain and chronic muscular issues.
The practice is again, quite simple. You sit or lie in a comfortable position. A common setup that I especially like is lying on your back with your lower legs elevated on a couch or chair so that your knees are bent at roughly ninety degrees.
Then you just stay there for ten or fifteen minutes. Unlike in other meditation styles, you’re not trying to manage your breathing. You’re not trying to focus your attention like in Vipassana, or meditate on the impermanent nature of all things. You’re not trying to generate a feeling of boundless love for yourself or all beings, like in metta.
You’re legit just laying there, chilling, resting.
Again, this sounds incredibly basic, but there are a lot of nuances to it, and I’d recommend trying it. Over time you’ll begin to notice habitual patterns of muscular tension, and learn to release them. You’ll find areas of what’s called “parasitic attraction,” like when your shoulders tense up whenever your neck tenses up.
Eventually, your body will slowly learn to carry the rested, relaxed, safe state more and more in your day to day life. But to start, it’s crucial to have a foundation of stillness and rest.
Movement and Exercise
The last major category I want to mention is exercise and movement more generally. This one is obvious. Anyone dealing with chronic pain, depression, anxiety, or really anyone who isn’t deaf eventually gets told to exercise, lift weights, go to the gym, and so on. (…you know what deaf people probably get told to exercise too.)
The distinction I’d suggest is to think about exercise less like powerlifting and more like dancing. For years I tried forcing myself through stretches and exercise routines that I didn’t enjoy. At the same time, I was also a dancer.
At one point I had a realization: what if I just treated cardio like dance?
I started putting on workout videos with music I liked. Sometimes I’d do the exercises the instructor was doing. Sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d just dance around the room and move however I felt like moving.
That mindset shift unlocked something for me. For the first time, I was able to exercise consistently without feeling like I was constantly forcing myself. It became fun. It gave me energy. It felt good in my body. And now I’d say it’s one of the most important practices I do for daily nervous system regulation.
Over time, you build it up. Years ago I started with just 5 or 10 minutes of light cardio a day. Nowadays I’ll do more like 20 or 30 minutes of cardio a day, go to the gym twice a week, and dance at least once a week. But I didn’t get there by telling myself “YOU’VE GOT TO GET TO THE GYM YOU LAZY FAT ASS!” I got there by learning to have fun with it, and slowly building up.
Closing Out
There are plenty of other practices that deserve a short mention as well:
Eye contact exercises can be surprisingly powerful. Sustained eye contact with another person, especially while talking about difficult emotions, can be deeply regulating. It’s also intense, and you probably want some guidance if you’re exploring it seriously.
There’s therapy and coaching, though the challenge there is finding someone who is both competent and a good fit for you.
There’s journaling, writing about your experiences, writing about how you want your future to be.
There’s art more generally. Creative expression can be a powerful way of processing emotion, regulating the nervous system, and discovering things about yourself that are difficult to access via other means.
So, those are some of the main techniques that I’ve found helpful, along with a few observations about how I’ve worked with them. I want to repeat: none of these practices are magic bullets.
Most of them work differently at different points in life. But collectively they’ve given me a much larger toolbox for dealing with chronic pain, anxiety, difficult emotions, and the general pain and suffering of living as a human being.
If there’s one thing I want to emphasize, it’s experimentation. Try things. Come back to them later. Don’t assume a technique that didn’t work six months ago won’t work today. A lot of this is less about finding the perfect method and more about slowly learning how your particular mind and body actually function.
And remember that it is absolutely, unequivocally achievable to feel WAY better than you do now. You can feel better than you ever believed possible. It’s not always easy, and it may take a while, but don’t give up hope.
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