Parenting is one of the most consistent nervous system challenges available. Here’s what’s actually happening when you lose it, and what helps. Most parenting advice focuses on strategies for managing children’s behaviour. What it tends to skip over is the parent’s nervous system, which is doing as much work as any strategy and failing just…
Most people asking this question already have some sense of the answer. The harder part is trusting it. There’s a version of this question that’s relatively straightforward. A relationship that involves consistent abuse, coercive control, or patterns that are actively dangerous is not one to fight for in the sense most people mean when they…
Being highly sensitive isn’t a flaw in the nervous system. It’s a different calibration, and it comes with specific needs that most regulation advice doesn’t account for. The term highly sensitive person, or HSP, was coined by psychologist Elaine Aron in the 1990s to describe people who process sensory and emotional information more deeply than…
Loneliness has been called a public health crisis. The nervous system science explains why that framing is accurate. Loneliness is often treated as a mood, an unpleasant feeling that passes when circumstances change. The research tells a different story. Sustained loneliness has measurable effects on the immune system, the cardiovascular system, the HPA axis, and…
Most emotional intelligence content focuses on the mind. The research suggests it starts in the body. Emotional intelligence gets talked about mostly in terms of the mind. Recognizing emotions, managing them, and reading other people’s. The assumption embedded in most EQ content is that emotions are primarily mental events that can be understood and regulated…
Loving someone with anxiety is its own kind of hard. Here’s how to be genuinely helpful without making their nervous system your full-time job. If you’re in a relationship with someone who has significant anxiety, you probably already know that the usual advice doesn’t quite cover it. Be patient. Be supportive. Listen without trying to…
Exercise gets recommended for everything, and the recommendation is usually vague. Here’s the specific nervous system science behind why it works. Exercise gets recommended for anxiety, depression, stress, sleep problems, trauma recovery, and general mental health with a frequency that can make the recommendation feel hollow. Of course movement is good for you. Everything is…
The patterns that show up in your relationships aren’t random. They have a logic, and understanding that logic is where change begins. Most people who find themselves in repetitive relationship patterns know they’re in them. That’s often not the problem. The problem is that knowing doesn’t seem to change anything. You recognise the pattern mid-cycle,…
Mindfulness has been oversold in some ways and undersold in others. Here’s what the research actually shows happens when you practice it consistently. Mindfulness has had an interesting journey. It went from a contemplative practice with roots in Buddhist tradition to a clinical intervention with its own research base to a corporate wellness buzzword, all…
Boundaries get talked about as though they’re confrontational by nature. They don’t have to be. Boundaries have become one of those words that carries so much freight it’s almost lost its usefulness. In some corners of wellness culture they’ve become a kind of identity statement, a signal of self-respect, or something you either have or…