How Nervous System Regulation Changes Your Marriage & Motherhood: 2 Real-Life Examples

Ever wonder why you snap at your husband, get overwhelmed by mess, or flare up when your child has a big emotional meltdown? Because your nervous system is stressed! While it’s only doing its job, the reality is that we spend so much of our precious time and energy being upset about things that are actually in your control once you know how to work with—instead of against—your nervous system.

In this episode, I’m sharing two recent real-life moments that show what nervous system health and emotional regulation actually look and feel like in marriage and motherhood. I also share the three questions I use with coaching clients to interrupt stress spirals in the moment so you can stop feeling helpless, stop living in survival mode, and start feeling more connected to those you love.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Safety and capacity change everything: when your nervous system feel safer, you’re less likely to interpret everything as a threat
• Resentment and overwhelm aren’t about the situation; they’re an INTERNAL problem based on the meaning your brain assigns to something
• Holding space beats fixing; rescuing, lecturing, or shutting emotions down only backfire long-term
• Stress resolves faster when you don’t add more stress by reacting from your default fight/flight/freeze/fawn patterns.
• Three key questions to ask yourself every time you feel stressed so you can feel better faster

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Book a free consult to learn more about healing your nervous system so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult)

Get on the waitlist for the next round of my 6-week program, Moms Made NewTM to learn the six most powerful life coaching tools every mom needs so that you and your family can flourish: https://solutionsforsimplicity.myflodesk.com/mmn-waitlist

HOMEWORK:

 Recall a recent interaction with someone else where either you were upset at them, or them being emotional made you uncomfortable. How did you handle that moment? Why do you think that was? To what extent might your nervous system have been perceiving a threat that caused you to react from stress, rather than as your ideal self? How would you like to handle those types of moments differently in the future? Share your thoughts with me via email through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. 

 COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern to learn more about the five default “F” responses so you can break free of nervous system patterns that only perpetuate—instead of resolve—your stress.

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

 We spend so much of our precious time and energy being stressed, feeling overwhelmed, feeling helpless, getting mad at all the things outside our control, and the reality is that so much actually is in our control and we are able to change. We are able to escape the stress that is sabotaging our life, our relationships, our health, our dreams.

You can do that when you know how to work with instead of against your nervous system.

Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in.


Nervous system health and emotional regulation are such buzzwords these days, but I really wanna give you some concrete examples of what it looks like and really more importantly, what it feels like in your own body when your nervous system does feel safe and capable of holding space for not just your but other people's emotions, and then you're not making the stressful situation you are in wrong.

The more I have learned about the nervous system, the more I realize it is truly at the root of everything we experience and it's there to protect us. But if you don't know how it works and you don't know the signals it is sending to you,

you're gonna keep falling into these very vicious cycles from the stress of perceived threat that then trigger these default tendencies in you based on how your brain and body learned to handle past threats and reestablish safety and capacity, when confronted by something new or hard or dangerous.

The beauty of this work is that the more you harness the power of neuroplasticity to re-pattern your nervous system

You truly change the subconscious thoughts that then rise to the surface and dictate your present responses

Here are two examples of little things that happened to me in the past week that help me see what a wholly different person I am after the last couple of years of doing this deep work, and it is just amazing to realize how differently I handled these situations versus how I would've handled them in the past.

That's not to say there is a right or wrong way to think or to feel or to have handled these moments, but I'm gonna show you how my reaction was so different than how I would've responded even months ago.

The reason this is all so important is because we spend so much of our precious time and energy being stressed, feeling overwhelmed, feeling helpless, getting mad at all the things outside our control, and the reality is that so much actually is in our control and we are able to change. We are able to escape the stress that is sabotaging our life, our relationships, our health, our dreams.

You can do that when you know how to work with instead of against your nervous system.

First example is I came downstairs for a lunch break in the middle of the day last week. It happened to be a day that my husband was off work

I was instantly overwhelmed by how much was out of place, and we hadn't caught up on the dishes over the last couple of days because we had.

Date up late watching the Olympics with our kids and different school activities and of course our busy work schedules. So on the one hand I was noticing all the things that needed to be done, like especially cleaning the kitchen so that we could make dinner and get on with our life later that evening.

Then I realized my husband was in the guest room taking a nap , and I kid you not. The very first thought that went through my mind was. I'm so glad that he is honoring his body's needs and I was wishing that I would give myself permission to do the same, right? Because he really is so great at living out his priorities and not only taking care of his physical health, but I always love the way he is cultivating relationships.

By making time for the people he wants to be close to. He really does so many things that I often find myself jealous

but in that moment, I was truly happy for him and I was genuinely seeing what he was doing as an example of what I could be doing, of what was available to me. Then the second thought was, oh wow, this is new and different, that I am responding to him taking a nap in a positive light instead of feeling angry or resentful, or wishing that he was cleaning up all the mess,

feeling like he was wasting his time or my time, and that he should have been using his time differently. I promise you that was not my first thought, and I was so proud of myself when I realized the thoughts I used to have versus the true, genuine thought that my brain now offered me in response to the same kind of circumstance.

It's crazy.

Then because I was so full of love and gratitude and I felt good about him in that moment, it wasn't about what he was doing. It was all about the thoughts that I had in my head that were then controlling my feelings and my actions. I went back to work and I didn't make it mean anything, that the kitchen was still a mess.

I finished out my workday. I came downstairs and this was just icing on the cake, but he had cleaned the kitchen without me ever having said anything, nagging him or criticizing him or feeling bitter in my body that he was taking a nap instead of cleaning earlier, it all just drove home to me.

How much time and energy I used to spend on being mad at him for doing things that I didn't think he should be doing, here, what did it matter? He's an adult. He's a grown man. He saw the same needs that I did in terms of the work that could be done in the kitchen, and he prioritized his health and wellbeing and then still did the amazing service for our family.

And he had energy to do it because he had filled his own cup first. For many, many, many years I used to really be so judgmental of how he spent his time, and I always felt that it was unfair or that so much fell on me or that he should be doing more.

I truly don't feel that way anymore. I honestly now am so grateful because I see him leading by example. He does do so much that I never used to give him credit for. And regardless, like his job is not to make me happy. It's not to do the work that I don't wanna do, like cleaning the kitchen. I don't love him for what he does.

I love him for who he is, and I feel like I'm so able to do that now like I never could before because of all the things I've learned and the way I have built this, this new sense of self in my own body so that I no longer threatened by how someone else uses their time, especially my husband,

when it feels like there's so much to do at home and never enough of me to go around. I don't know if you can relate to that or not. I'm not trying to claim like I've got it all together and that I'm the, the better person. There's no holier than thou attitude here at all. I really am just in awe that my first thoughts were not what they had been. I didn't even mention any of this to him. He doesn't even know that I know he was taking a nap or that I was having these thoughts after the fact about, well, he could be cleaning the kitchen, and how amazing it was that he did.

The second example of how my nervous system has been fundamentally changed by all of this inner work and the neurosomatic healing I've been doing is that one of my sons had a choir performance last Wednesday, that ran pretty late. So then he hadn't gotten dinner between practice and the performance, so he asked if we could stop and get him Qdoba for dinner on the way home. We walked in, he put all his stuff away and he sat down to eat. But he was wanting to watch the Olympics that his other brothers were watching, and so he sat up on the ledge behind the sink and kind of turned his chair towards the living room because we have this rule that you can't eat in the living room.

Between being tired and out of it because he was low blood sugar, and then being preoccupied with the tv, I didn't see it happen, but all of a sudden I just heard this piercing scream followed by all kinds of tears, and it turned out that he must not have had his dinner bowl placed firmly on the counter.

So then it tipped over and fell all over the floor and his food was wasted. I came down to the kitchen and I just felt in my body such compassion for him because we all know how painful it is when you're so looking forward to something and then it gets ruined or broken or destroyed. I also felt in my body, the very familiar, um, I guess anger, almost trigger of, wow, we spent money on this dish.

In that moment, my brain was offering me all kinds of thoughts, like wanting to not reprimand him, but remind him sternly that this is why we sit at the table, or this is why you need to watch what you were doing, but also.

You know, seeing him so distraught and he's a very expressive child. So when he's upset, his emotions are very loud and honestly could feel confronting to someone that isn't able to tolerate them so I again, felt this, um, I guess like urge to comfort him and make him feel better, because then that would've made me feel better, right? If he's not crying and screaming, then I don't have to feel the discomfort in my body of him being upset because nobody likes it when other people are upset.

So often our first reaction is to try and take away their pain and swoop in and rescue them and get them back to a calm regulated state so that our nervous system can re-regulate. But knowing what I know, I realized very clearly that it was not the moment to lecture him. It was not my job to fix the problem or try to deprive him of the right to feel his emotions that I actually would've been causing extra harm in the long run if I swooped in and tried to make him feel better by offering to make him something else to eat, or taking him back to get another meal or whatever else, I really had this opportunity to just be there and be quiet and really control myself, right? Allow my nervous system to refrain from doing what it wanted to do in that moment. And then hold that proverbial space for my son to have his outlet of emotion without making it wrong, without shutting him down, without making him feel worse that he was upset, letting the moment

ride out as long as it needed to be, which surprised me. It ended up being quite a while. We went and we sat down at the table and I tried so hard to just empathize with him. When he looked at me just saying, I'm here with you. I know this is really hard. You didn't get what you wanted.

It's so disappointing. Validating his emotions, but letting him have them. I was so proud of my husband here too, because both of us together, right, we are, we're not trained, we're not taught as children. At least not, you know, in our parents day and age, they never taught us and modeled for us what this looks like to really let your kids be emotional because you feel it in your body and you naturally want to make those hard feelings go away.

Again, overarching theme is that I surprised myself with how I was able to handle this moment, both of these moments and, with how different I handled them versus how I would in the past. I offer these to you as small examples of what is possible, and the very incredible lesson I've learned through all of it is that when we learn to.

Take care of our own needs. Allow ourself to feel what we feel and. Are able to hold space for others' negative feelings without taking on the threat in our own bodies. Then the stress really resolves itself so much faster. We get out of the stress state faster. Others do as well when we don't get caught up in perpetuating the stress by responding to it, or rather reacting out of our default tendencies, right?

Not consciously responding, but just getting triggered and then reacting from our lower more primal brain,

every time we are stressed, our invitation is to come back to ourself and ask what am I making this mean? Is that true? And what evidence do I have? To the contrary, those are three questions that I am always reminding my coaching clients of because our brains are so gifted at perceiving threat and then trying to rescue us from the threat in very unhelpful ways.

Our brain means so well, but more often than not, we are just going to. Fall into a stress state that then causes us to act in ways that make the situation worse. It is incredible to see and feel what it's like on the other side.

As always, I invite you to see how powerful this is for yourself. Book your free 60 minute call from the link in the show notes so we can talk through what is bothering you and get you started on your own healing journey.

Your homework for this episode is to think about the most recent interaction you had with someone else where either you were upset at them or they were upset and emotional, and it caused you to feel discomfort in your own body.

Think about how you handled those moments, not to judge yourself, not to think that you got it wrong, but just to get curious about why that was, how you reacted, and whether you would prefer to have handled the situation differently now that the stress has passed. Right. We often look back and have these different perspectives.

We realize after the fact that. We could have handled things perhaps better, but in the moment, those options are not accessible to us because you cannot think clearly. You cannot access your rational prefrontal cortex when you are stressed. That's why you need to know how to work with your nervous system, identify when you are perceiving a threat, and then getting swept up in these stress states.

So much more to come and in fact, I think next episode would be the ideal time to really pull back the curtain on these five default stress responses that are so prevalent for all of us. We each have one. That tends to be our main mode of operation when we get stressed. But I can't wait to run through these in more detail.

It's gonna open your eyes to so much.

Definitely join me back next Tuesday at 5:00 AM Eastern for all that goodness. And until then, remember, nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are.

Have a great day.