Keeping as regulated as possible has a lot of upside. The main one is that you will have plenty of room to move when stressful stuff inevitably happens. 

This graph shows two people – blue and red’s– regulation over time. They experience exactly the same stressful stuff, but they have different baselines (the dotted lines).  A baseline is the level of regulation you generally run at. For example, if you were a car— how hot is your engine running? Are your idling too fast? Or, in terms of regulation—Are you generally pretty stressed all the time? Or, pretty relaxed and grounded on average? Out of 10, where are you?

Everyone has different ways of releasing stress, grounding, centering and regulating. Some people like a bath, others prefer a run. Some like to socialize, others need a bit of solitude to process their thoughts. The important thing is that it works well for you. 

Not all methods of regulating are equal. They can involve a trade-off, or incur a cost or a downside. For example, a weekly massage can be expensive; a tv binge can take hours and leave a person feeling a bit flat; and having a few drinks can be followed by a hangover. 

It can be useful to notice and refine the things that regulate you, to get as much restoration and as little downside as possible. 

Strike while the iron is cold.

It’s generally most effective to use your ‘regulation tools’ before you need then, than it is to wait until everything is going sideways.

This is a bit like how a person rides a bike– they make a lot of small, constant adjustments to keep themselves upright and balanced. They do not wait until they are almost falling off the bike to correct. Instead, they do it a little bit all the time.

Studies by the Center for Mindful Self Compassion demonstrate that treating ourselves as kindly as we treat the people we love is not only more fun for everyone, but also achieves higher performance results, offers protection against trauma, builds resilience, flexibility and can be a practice that lasts a lifetime. It can also be regulating. 

How you talk to yourself can stress you out. 

You can test this now if you like, by closing your eyes and saying something untrue, negative or painful to yourself over and over a few times, then noticing how you feel. 

Another brain-scanner-tested regulation tool is naming what’s up. In the tests, a person in a brainscanner is shown a picture that triggers a feeling in them, often a high-charge feeling, like fear, anger or sadness. If their system responds with stress, when they name their feeling, their system calms and regulates. 

There’s lots to be explored working with the breath, obviously. You’ve probably read James Nestor’s fascinating, best selling book Breathe. Among other things, he advocates for nose breathing, and incited the recent fashion of taping the lips closed during sleep .

More simply, for purposes of regulation, deep, easy breathing is one of the body’s in-built means of restoring calm. Brainscans show that a few, nice, full breaths immediately relax a stressed person.

There can also be a lot of restorative rest and ease available from a practice of  slow, deep stretches of the muscles and fascia. The body is 80% liquid. Fascia is all the connective tissue and fluid parts of the body– which is most of it. Fascia can hold a lot of tension.  And stretching it can bring a great deal of ease, relief and rest to the body. Yin Yoga is one way to do this. And doing it two or three times a week can be a game-changer. Here’s someone else’s take on the benefits of yin.

In this category, there are a few different ideas:

There’s sleep— how to get good, ‘restorative’ sleep, and ideas around  ‘sleep hygiene’. This includes suggestions like maintaining a dark, quiet, cool sleeping space, regular bed times, a wind-down period before sleep, zero caffeine, sugar or stimulants after a certain time, as well as teas, supplements and guided imagery recordings that support sleep (Here’s one of mine: Relax-a-dupa, named after Wellington’s Cuba Dupa festival.)

There is mounting evidence showing that getting enough sleep is vital for wellbeing. A recent study demonstrated that it even increases life-expectancy.