Sensitivity & Nervous System Regulation as a Spiritual Path

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 15 years on the spiritual path, it’s that all the meditating, reading, and healing techniques in the world don’t mean shit if you’re ignoring the body.

Yes, some of these “top-down” (aka, mind-to-body) techniques create shifts. But many others reinforce dissociation, and some even encourage ego inflation and spiritual narcissism (non-duality, anyone?).

What I want to emphasize here is that starting with a “bottom-up” approach to healing (aka, body-to-mind) is a smarter, more effective, and more sane approach to any form of spirituality or trauma healing path.

Why? Because the body is your foundation, your anchor, your tether to this world. It carries more wisdom and intuitive capacity than you may know or give it credit for.

In the words of trauma specialist Peter Levine, quoting poet D. H. Lawrence,

“My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos.”

So, where do you start with nervous system regulation (aka, having a calm body and mind), especially if you’re a highly sensitive, deep-thinking person? Let’s dig into that. 

First, I want to share a little about why and how this topic is so important to me:

My Experience With Overwhelm, Burnout, and Bypassing the Body’s Wisdom

The irony is that for most of my healing spiritual path, I’ve overlooked the wisdom of the body, bypassing it to favor more ethereal and ‘mental’ paths. (Religious trauma that conditions you to see the body as evil as the root cause, anyone?)

I have written about the vagus nerve, somatic bodywork, and the meaning of muscle tension before – but it was never something I pursued further or went too deeply into. 

I even had life-changing therapy with a somatic therapist for over a year and did training with a nervous system expert … but it never “clicked” in my mind that, “Wait, I need to stop the top-down healing approaches and shift gears to actively incorporate this bottom-up approach into my life.” 

This is an example of just how long mind-body integration can sometimes take, especially if you’ve experienced intense dissociation and identity loss as a child. For me, it took about five years to start shifting gears.

When the Wake Up Call Finally Came … 

The final “wake up” push came when I became a parent and started having more chronic fatigue flare-ups – despite doing all the usual healing routines that “worked before.”

I realized that as a highly sensitive person, my nervous system was deeply dysregulated, overwhelmed, and starting to burn out. 

Scrambling to parent, do housework, run a business, breastpump 4-10 types a day for my son, deal with toxic family members, listening to the news (Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files, I mean what the f*ck), grieving for the loss of endless lives in the wars, keeping on top of chores, maintaining a relationship, and all the other million tasks of everyday life was just … becoming too much.

Once I started researching “burnout symptoms,” I began connecting the dots. It was then that I stumbled across the words of Dr Claire Plumbly in her book The Trauma of Burnout, where she described burnout happening “when stress is inescapable, then we are stretched to maximum for too long, causing our nervous systems to get stuck in survival mode.”

Bingo. I had found the missing link. And thanks to actively starting to regulate my nervous system, I’m finally starting to recover my energy, vitality, and soul again.

20+ Ways to Start Regulating Your Nervous System as a Sensitive Person (What I Do)

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Burnout, exhaustion, and existential overwhelm are almost inevitable to experience at some point in life, especially as highly sensitive people. 

When you process, feel, and experience life 10-50x louder than a neurotypical person, you need to practice more care and make it a fundamental part of your daily life.

This isn’t a nice-to-have routine. This is an essential-and-non-negotiable part of daily life for the highly sensitive person.

Without learning to regulate yourself every day, stressors start piling up to the point of physical and mental illnesses. Without taking care of your body every day and bringing it down to parasympathetic calmness, the result is a dysregulated nervous system that looks like:

• Brain fog
• Lack of concentration
• Lack of motivation
• Overthinking and rumination
• Anxiety and nervousness
• Feelings of existential dread
• Mood swings
• Emotional numbness
• Fatigue and lethargy
• Muscle tension
• Poor sleep
• Digestive problems
• More illness

So, where to start regulating your nervous system? Here are some things that I currently do (not every one all the time, but at different times and frequencies):

1. Predictable routines (not glamorous, but the nervous system loves familiarity)
2. No social media usage at the beginning or end of the day (I try to only use it for work midday)
3. Lots of water 
4. Healthy, home-cooked, and simple meals 
5. Reading before bed with a soft light, such as a salt lamp or Turkish mosaic lamp
6. Soft blankets or handmade crochet ones
7. Cuddling with pets or loved ones whenever possible during the day (usually beginning and ending)
8. Taking a slow walk in nature
9. Drinking hot herbal tea (I love adaptogens like Holy Basil or digestives like Peppermint)
10. Grounding meditation at the start of the day, before chores/work
11. Deep breathing meditation for 5-10 minutes, lying on the ground before bed
12. Self-massage or acupressure
13. Simple yoga and stretching
14. Orienting to sources of joy in the environment (a bird, flower, cloud, painting)
15. Noise-cancelling headphones when out
16. Journaling by candlelight 
17. Incense or natural oils like lavender
18. Listening to sounds of nature, Tibetan singing bowls, or chanting
19. Humming or whistling
20. Going to places where human connection feels enjoyable, such as the park
21. Playing with fur or human family (board games, throwing the ball, etc.)
22. Having technology-free days
23. Moving more slowly and multi-tasking less
24. Creating checklists to reduce mental strain
25. Mirror work gazing after a shower for a minute, saying affirmations
26. Comforting the inner child through doing things they love
27. Setting boundaries with others by having prepared “scripts”

I wrote an article on Soul Recovery a couple of weeks back, and it’s a perfect complement to this post (with many more soothing suggestions). Obviously, there are so many other things I could write here. But this list would be fifty pages long, so I’m keeping it short and simple to give you a taste of what’s possible.

Nervous System Regulation IS a Spiritual Path

Learning to calm, ground, and regulate your nervous system is a spiritual path itself because the body is your ever-present field of wisdom.

The fire in your belly, the contraction in your chest, and the dullness in your head all reveal what you need to know about a person, situation, or inner shadow.

Your body is a thermometer of truth, a transmitter of wisdom, and an oracle of guidance. 

As a sensitive person, you have both the blessing (and the curse at times) of feeling these physical sensations in an enhanced way. 

That is one of your greatest gifts. Now it’s time to harness it.