Somatic March 2025 · 4 min read By Your Name, MFT
Simple, body-based tools you can use anywhere — no meditation cushion, app, or quiet room required.
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We talk a lot in therapy about "regulating your nervous system" — but what does that actually mean, and how do you do it when you're standing in a grocery store parking lot feeling inexplicably on the verge of tears?
Your nervous system has two primary modes: activated (sympathetic, fight-or-flight) and settled (parasympathetic, rest-and-digest). Regulation means helping your system shift from one to the other — or, more precisely, expanding your capacity to move fluidly between states without getting stuck.
The good news: your body has a built-in interface for doing this. Here are three techniques that actually work, drawn from somatic therapy and polyvagal theory.
This one comes from neuroscience research out of Stanford, and it's the fastest nervous system reset I know of. It takes about ten seconds.
How to do it: Take a normal inhale through your nose, then at the top of that breath, take a second, shorter inhale to fully expand your lungs. Then release in one long, slow exhale through your mouth.
The double inhale fully inflates the air sacs in your lungs, which triggers a parasympathetic response. The long exhale activates the vagus nerve. Research shows a single physiological sigh reduces physiological arousal faster than any other breathing technique.
You can do this in a meeting. In traffic. In the middle of an argument. Nobody will know.
Orienting is what animals do instinctively after a threat has passed — they lift their heads, move their eyes around, look for safety. It's one of the primary ways the nervous system signals "the danger is over."
How to do it: Slow down. Let your gaze move around the room without rushing. Notice colors, shapes, textures. Let your eyes rest on something that feels neutral or even pleasant. You might feel your jaw soften, your breath deepen, your shoulders drop slightly.
This works especially well when anxiety has a "stuck" quality — when you're looping the same thoughts and can't seem to get out of your head. Orienting moves attention from the inside to the outside, which interrupts the loop.
When the nervous system is activated, we often lose connection with the lower half of our bodies — we go "upstairs" into thought, worry, and planning. Grounding is about coming back down.
How to do it: Press your feet firmly into the floor. Wiggle your toes. Notice the sensation of the ground beneath you — the temperature, the pressure, the texture if you can feel it. Take a few breaths and notice whether the floor can hold your weight (it can).
"The body always comes back to now. It can't be anxious about next Tuesday the way the mind can."
You can do this standing in line, sitting at your desk, or lying in bed at 2am when your brain won't stop. It's low-tech and surprisingly effective.
These tools are exactly that — tools. They work best when practiced regularly, not just pulled out in moments of crisis. Like any skill, they become more available the more you rehearse them in ordinary moments.
They're also not a substitute for addressing the underlying sources of dysregulation. If your nervous system is chronically activated — if you're always on edge, never quite settled — that's worth exploring more deeply, whether in therapy or other supportive contexts.
But as a starting place, these three things can make a real difference. Try one today, in a moment when you don't particularly need it. That's how they become available when you do.
Somatic work in therapy can help you build a more resilient, flexible nervous system over time — not just in moments of crisis. I'd love to talk.
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