What Does Nervous System Dysregulation Actually Feel Like?

A couple of years ago, I was doing what all good people do: binge-watching television in my own very dysregulated season.

I was also deep in my somatic training at the time, which meant I was spending an enormous amount of my life thinking about the nervous system. Then I turned on the first season of Netflix’s BEEF and heard this exchange between two moms:

Mom 1: “Yeah. They called her dysregulated.”
Mom 2: “Ew. Oh, my God.”
Mom 1: “I know.”

I remember laughing, partly because dysregulated was being treated like something vaguely scandalous you might be horrified to hear someone say about your child. Apparently, nervous system language had made it to Netflix.

At the time, I didn't think of dysregulation as language that had really entered the cultural vernacular. A few years later, it unquestionably has. We talk about being regulated and dysregulated, activated, triggered, in fight-or-flight, frozen or shut down. We regulate before meetings, notice dysregulation in our relationships, worry about it in our kids, and increasingly use the language of the nervous system to understand our everyday lives.

So what are we actually talking about when we say we're dysregulated?

What Is Nervous System Dysregulation?

There isn't one universally accepted scientific definition of nervous system dysregulation as we commonly use the phrase. In research, you're more likely to encounter more specific concepts such as autonomic regulation, emotion regulation, stress-response regulation, allostasis, or regulatory flexibility.

As a somatic practitioner trained in Somatic Experiencing®, I can only tell you how I understand dysregulation through this particular lens. And before we can define dysregulation, there are two other words we need: activation and capacity.

Activation is an increase in physiological arousal or response as the nervous system reacts to something happening inside or around us. It can show up as changes in heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, attention, sensation, emotion, or impulses toward action.

Capacity is how much activation or experience we can hold while still maintaining enough stability, flexibility, and access to ourselves. In my own work, this is part of what I mean when I talk about staying human.

Which brings us to dysregulation.

For this article, from a Somatic Experiencing® perspective, I'm using dysregulation to mean: when the activation we're experiencing exceeds our current capacity to respond flexibly, leaving us overwhelmed, stuck, or with less access to choice.

Let's say I get a text from my boss asking if I have five minutes to talk sometime next week. Before I've even figured out what I think about it, my heart starts racing, my stomach drops, and I feel heat rush into my face. My body has responded before I know what the conversation is even about. That's activation.

Fortunately, in this hypothetical, I have been seeing a very good somatic practitioner. I've learned to notice activation when it happens and have developed some skill in working with it. Maybe I orient to the room, feel the support underneath me, notice what's happening in my body, or move a little. None of this tells me what my boss wants, and the goal isn't to convince myself that everything is fine. But I may be able to stay with the activation long enough for something to shift, settle, or move through.

This is a nervous system growing its capacity to be with what's there.

Someone with less capacity for that particular activation might have a very different week. They may replay their last five conversations with their boss, check their email obsessively, struggle to concentrate or sleep, and spend the weekend bracing for Monday. Then Monday comes, the boss tells them they did a great job, and their body finally settles.

You could also describe what happened in the first example as nervous system regulation, which brings us to another phrase we use constantly without necessarily being very clear about what we mean.

So What Does Nervous System Regulation Actually Mean?

This is where things get a little messier.

If dysregulation is what happens when activation exceeds our current capacity to respond flexibly, it would be convenient to say that regulation is simply the opposite. But I don't think it's quite that clean. Regulation isn't the absence of activation, and it doesn't necessarily mean being calm. In Somatic Experiencing®, we're often talking about things like increasing capacity, containment, coherence, integration, flexibility, and the ability of the system to recover and reorganize.

Even the language of being regulated can make regulation sound more fixed than it actually is. A nervous system can become highly activated and still retain organization and flexibility. It can also become overwhelmed and later find its way back. In SE, we're continually working toward greater capacity to be with what arises, which means regulation starts to look less like a state we finally achieve and more like an ongoing ability to respond, reorganize, and recover.

What Can Nervous System Dysregulation Feel Like?

One assumption I think we make when we hear the word dysregulated is that we're going to be able to see it. We imagine the person whose heart is racing, who can't sit still, who is angry, anxious, hypervigilant, or visibly overwhelmed. Sometimes dysregulation absolutely looks like that.

But it can also look remarkably calm.

This is the part I understand particularly well from my own nervous system. There are times when what looks like calm from the outside is actually much closer to numbness or disconnection on the inside. I can become very still. I may not feel particularly emotional. In fact, I may feel very little at all. Someone looking at me might reasonably assume that I'm handling the situation beautifully when the reality is that I have less access to myself, not more.

This is one of the reasons I don't think we can use calm and regulated interchangeably. Stillness can be part of settling and regulation, but it can also accompany a defensive immobilization response. Likewise, visible activation doesn't necessarily mean someone is dysregulated. A person can be angry, excited, intensely focused, running hard, having a difficult conversation, or experiencing enormous emotion while still retaining significant capacity to be with what is happening.

The question becomes less How activated do I look? and more What happens to my access to myself as activation increases?

And even that varies enormously depending on what we're talking about.

Capacity isn't one global tank that we either have or don't have. I can have tremendous capacity around something I've spent years working with and surprisingly little capacity around something else. Trauma can make this especially specific. A person who appears incredibly capable in most areas of their life may encounter a particular kind of touch, conflict, authority, uncertainty, anger, or loss and suddenly have much less room to stay present with what is happening.

So sometimes the more useful question isn't simply How much capacity do I have? but Capacity for what?

Dysregulation Is Human

There will be experiences that exceed our capacity. Someone dies. A relationship ends. We get frightening news. Something happens to our child. We are humiliated, betrayed, blindsided, threatened, or simply asked to carry more than we can carry in that moment. Sometimes life overwhelms us because life is overwhelming.

That doesn't make the nervous system defective.

In fact, some of the patterns we eventually experience as limiting may have begun as extraordinarily useful adaptations. A child who becomes exquisitely attentive to the mood of an unpredictable parent may be doing something very intelligent. A person who learned that expressing anger made a dangerous situation worse may become very good at inhibiting anger. Someone who couldn't leave may have found another way of getting through what was happening.

The difficulty is that our physiology doesn't always update simply because the circumstances around us have changed. A response that once helped us navigate one environment can continue showing up somewhere it is no longer as useful. And because those responses are embodied, understanding intellectually that my boss is not my father, my partner is not the person who hurt me, or I am allowed to say no now doesn't necessarily mean my body will immediately respond as though it knows that too.

This is where I think the language of dysregulation becomes useful when we don't turn it into pathology. The question isn't whether our nervous systems react. Of course they react. The question is whether we have enough flexibility for our responses to change as our circumstances change.

What Does Dysregulation Cost Us?

This is the question that interests me much more than whether somebody can successfully identify which nervous-system “state” they're in.

Because the answer can be: a lot.

Sometimes the cost is obvious. We can't sleep. We panic. We can't concentrate. We avoid something we desperately need to deal with. But sometimes the cost is quieter. We want relationships but have very little capacity for vulnerability. We want to rest but can't stop moving. We want to set a boundary but lose access to our no when someone is disappointed in us. We love our kids and still find ourselves yelling because by the end of the day we have very little capacity left for one more demand.

And sometimes what becomes unavailable isn't simply our ability to cope. It is pleasure, play, curiosity, creativity, desire, spontaneity, connection, even delight.

This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the question of access. I don't particularly care whether someone can become calm on command. I'm much more interested in how much of themselves they can access while they're living their actual life.

Can I feel anger without being consumed by it or immediately making it disappear? Can I remain connected to another person while we're in conflict? Can I experience uncertainty without spending three days trying to solve something that hasn't happened? Can I feel excitement without immediately shutting it down? Can I say no? Can I change my mind? Can I recover after something really does knock me over?

Those questions tell me much more about capacity than whether someone appears relaxed.

Your Nervous System Comes With You

Unfortunately for those of us who would sometimes prefer otherwise, we don't get a different nervous system depending on which part of our life we're in.

The physiology that shapes how available we are with our partners, children, friends, and ourselves also comes with us into meetings, difficult conversations, sex, parenting, conflict, rest, visibility, uncertainty, and play. The contexts change, and our capacity may change with them, but we don't stop being embodied people because we've walked into an office—or because we've walked back out of one.

Someone can be enormously competent at work and still have very little capacity for disappointing another person, which might show up as overcommitting rather than setting a boundary. Someone else might navigate enormous professional pressure beautifully and then find themselves completely overwhelmed by conflict with a partner. We can have plenty of capacity for being needed and very little for receiving care, plenty for performing and very little for resting, or plenty for solving problems and very little for being somewhere there isn't anything to solve.

That's why I'm less interested in whether someone has a “regulated nervous system” in the abstract. I'm interested in what becomes available—or unavailable—to them in the life they're actually living.

How Much of Yourself Is Available to You?

I don't want to become so regulated that life stops affecting me. I don't think that's possible, and I'm not sure it would be particularly human.

I want to be affected by the people I love. I want grief to matter when I lose someone. I want anger available when something is wrong. I want excitement to move through me when something is wonderful. And there will almost certainly be moments when what happens exceeds my capacity and I lose access to parts of myself.

What I want is enough capacity that more of me remains available while life is happening, and when I do lose that access, more ability to find my way back.

Maybe that's the question underneath all of this nervous-system language:

How much of yourself is available to you for the life you're actually living?