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Imagine having a front-row seat to your nervous system.
How would your experience change if you could see, in real-time, how the billions of cells and neurons of your brain and body orchestrate your engagement with your environment, how they respond to your thoughts, emotions, and actions, and how they render love, joy, grief, and rage possible?
Such a comprehensive dossier on what it means to be human might not yet be available to us.
However, we can do much with the body-mind data that is already within our reach.
Psychologist Inna Khazan is a biofeedback expert. Biofeedback—often conducted through instruments that measure functions such as heart rate and muscle tension—allows us glimpses into the intricate pairing of physiology and well-being. It turns out we can help our nervous systems do what they’re designed to do.
“Through simple exercises, we can produce powerful effects that propagate throughout the whole body and mind,” says Dr. Khazan. “This can make the task of regulating ourselves and our emotions a lot easier than it otherwise appears.”
Here are three questions and three tools for self-regulation from Dr. Khazan:
What is self-regulation?
Self-regulation is the nervous system’s ability to achieve the sweet spot of activation, which varies depending on the circumstances we are facing. Once the challenge is over, self-regulation helps us to fully recover to a homeostatic state.
No matter what we are doing, the body needs to surf a wave of cognitive, emotional, or physiological activation. Since our activation levels are constantly changing, we are continuously adjusting to our circumstances. Managing through that wave of activation effectively and efficiently tends to produce our best results.
Why is self-regulation important?
The nervous system is at the core of our experience of the world. What comes in through our perceptions is not under our control—it’s just what’s happening. But how we respond is where we have choices.
A dysregulated nervous system—when the heart rate variability is low, the vagal nerve is not activating, and the thinking part of the brain is not properly connected to the limbic system—makes it difficult for us to use all our other skills, including mindfulness or compassion. A well-regulated nervous system underlies everything else.
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Source: GDJ/Pixabay
How can we befriend our nervous system?
One way is by working with your breath. If my anxiety is making me overbreathe, I won’t have sufficient oxygen going to my brain. It becomes impossible to make good decisions, since the activation has moved away from the thinking part of the brain to the back of the brain, where the amygdala and the limbic system are.
The first thing to do is return blood flow and oxygen to the brain by balancing your breathing. Without it, most attempts to feel better are likely to be unhelpful.
Three self-regulation tools
These techniques can train the nervous system to be more resilient:
1. Breathe low and slow.
What: This is a way of using the breath to regulate the nervous system and to balance the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood.
Why: If our breathing is not optimized, the brain will not be getting its basic needs met. When the brain isn’t functioning properly, self-regulation becomes a challenge.
How: Bring attention to your breath. Try breathing low and slow (not deep breathing). Slow down your breath by extending your exhalation, maybe even pausing a little at the end of the exhalation, before inhaling again. Take normal-sized breaths in through the nose (like you are smelling a flower) and exhale as fully as you can—either through the nose or through pursed lips (like you are blowing out candles).
2. HRV is a superpower.
What: Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the time difference between heartbeats. HRV (high vs. low) can be an indicator of the nervous system’s current state.
Why: The Inverted U of the Yerkes-Dodson curve demonstrates the relationship between activation and performance. As a foundational skill for self-regulation, HRV training can help the nervous system get to the sweet spot of activation at the top of the curve. By activating the vagal nerve, HRV training can produce both physiological and emotional regulation. This is because the vagal nerve innervates every organ in the body, as well as has projections into the brain, including the limbic system and prefrontal cortex.
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How: The simplest way to do HRV training without biofeedback equipment is to do breathing at six breaths per minute (breathe in for 4 seconds and breathe out for 6). That will get close enough to most people’s ideal breathing rate and will activate the vagal nerve.
Muscle contraction is another way of doing HRV practice. Simultaneously tense your arms and legs in the same rhythm of 6 contractions per minute, 10 seconds per round (count for 2 seconds doing nothing, then contract for 3 seconds, relax for 3 seconds, then count for 2 doing nothing). This will activate the vagal nerve in a similar way that breathing would.
3. Practice the FLARE technique.
What: Feel, Label, Allow, Respond, and Expand awareness is a self-regulation technique that helps the body stay in an optimal state of activation. It can also be used as a guide for the nervous system to return to a state of homeostasis after moving through a challenge.
Why: An optimal state of activation—not too rigid, not too lax—is key to effective performance. When we feel our bodies activating (e.g., heart rate and breathing rate speed up, muscles get tenser), our minds often dramatically interpret this as stress. We deem it as “bad” and begin to direct our efforts into trying to make it go away. In actuality, the body is merely doing what it’s supposed to do. When mind and body enter into a battle with each other, we end up in an over-activated, suboptimal state.
How: Let’s say you are experiencing anxiety on an airplane. Going through the FLARE steps would look something like this:
Feel — Become aware of what’s happening.
Label — There’s anxiety, discomfort, and fear. Your labels should be brief, descriptive, and non-judgmental. Labeling will begin to re-route the neurological pathways in your brain by decreasing the activation of the fight-or-flight response and increasing the activation of the thinking part of the brain.
Allow — It’s OK to feel this way. Disengage from the negative self-talk (“You’re such an idiot! What’s wrong with you?”) and futile attempts to control or eliminate anxiety. Allowing yourself to feel whatever you are feeling frees up resources that were being wasted on trying not to feel your emotions.
Respond — Use your resources to explore what’s in your best interest in the moment. This can be HRV breathing to create a greater sense of safety or other kind of self-care. At this point, since your body is regulating itself better, it’s much easier to connect with the meaning of why you’re on the plane to begin with.
Expand your awareness — Take a step back and realize that anxiety is not all but just one part of your experience. There are also other things happening in the moment. You can hear people around you, feel your seat, and remember the things you look forward to on your trip. When you let go of the need to make anxiety go away, it becomes a manageable part of your experience.
Many thanks to Inna Khazan for her time and insights. Dr. Khazan is a clinical health and performance psychologist, board-certified in biofeedback. She is also a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the author of Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life (2019).
