In this episode, Dr. Eric Osansky sits down with Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge to explore nervous system dysregulation and why it has become increasingly common in both adults and children. Dr. Roseann explains what happens when the nervous system has difficulty shifting from a stress state back into a calm, regulated state, and introduces her “stress cup” analogy for understanding how everyday stressors can accumulate until the nervous system becomes overwhelmed.
Dr. Roseann discusses how sleep deprivation, chronic health challenges, financial concerns, relationships, travel, sensory stressors, and even positive excitement can add to the body’s overall stress load. She also explains how living in a sympathetic-dominant state may affect the immune and endocrine systems and why nervous system regulation can be an important piece of the puzzle for people who feel stuck in their healing journey. Most importantly, she shares simple strategies that can be incorporated throughout the day—including diaphragmatic breathing, Tai Chi, somatic techniques, prayer, grounding, and other “micro resets”—and explains why consistency matters more than spending long periods of time on stress-management practices.
Dr. Roseann also discusses co-regulation in children, why parents’ nervous systems can influence their children, and how creating more capacity in the nervous system can help both adults and children respond more effectively to stress. In the post-episode chat, Dr. Eric expands on Epstein-Barr virus, thyroid health, Tai Chi, cortisol, insulin, and how frequently to practice nervous system regulation. If you want a clearer, more practical understanding of nervous system dysregulation and how small daily practices may help you become more resilient to stress, you’ll get a lot out of this episode.
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Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am super excited to chat with Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge. We will be talking about nervous system dysregulation. Really excited to have this conversation. This is an issue that so many people, both children and adults, have. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Roseann. Really excited to have you here.
Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge:
I am so grateful for this conversation. I’m so glad we’re going to talk about why everyone is so dysregulated and what we can do about it.
Dr. Eric:
You’re releasing a book, The Dysregulated Kid. This conversation will benefit both parents and children. Let’s start by discussing what motivated you to write this book. I know you have been doing this for so long, so that probably is the main reason. You have worked with so many people, and it’s such a big problem.
Dr. Roseann:
I have been supporting kids, adults, and families for three decades. I have seen such a dramatic increase in people being incredibly dysregulated, which we can talk about what that means. Really struggling with overwhelm. People having layers of clinical issues, autoimmune diseases, thyroid problems. All these things all at once and feeling so trapped and not getting better.
For three decades, and I’m no longer in clinical care, people would come to me with a shopping cart full of different physical and mental health diagnoses. How I helped them was by resetting their nervous system.
Since the pandemic, and shortly before the pandemic, the last 10 years exactly, I really saw that people didn’t seem like they should be struggling. Nothing massive happened. There wasn’t a trauma. People were exhibiting the same kind of behaviors and mental health issues and struggles as someone who had a horrible trauma.
I also did over 10,000 brain maps, which shows us if the brain is regulated or not. If it’s sluggish or overactive, I got to see exactly where that was happening. What really happened is I see this crisis. We have one shooting a day in America. We have one in four Americans on psychiatric medication. We have a surge in clinical diagnoses. Medication and surge in clinical diagnoses, people say, “We’re getting better at diagnosing.” I will tell you no. This is truly an increase in these problems. People aren’t getting relief with medication and talk therapy.
I just became increasingly worried. I said to myself, “This is amazing. People come in all over the world to see me. I can get people better if they do what I told them to do.” We guided people. We really helped them. We started really simple. You have to reset the nervous system. We won’t do anything else. Unless there is something urgent happening on the medical side, we are just putting blinders on, and you’re just doing this. All this magic would happen.
I had to step away from that to be on this mission. A couple of years ago, this book was like a divine download. I wrote it in 14 weeks. This is my mission. This is what I have to do. I wanted to bring the simple science of how to reset yourself and why it has to happen first before you do other treatments, before you do talk therapy, before you have a conversation with somebody who is maybe dysregulated or help your child.
The science of what happens when the nervous system dysregulates and when it regulates and how simple it is, that’s what this is all about. What can you do today? How can you get some relief and create capacity in your nervous system in just a couple minutes?
We are making things really hard for people. What I knew from people who were struggling, who I couldn’t ask to do everything, I had to give them the simplest thing, so their nervous system would settle enough to do harder things. It’s about bringing the simple science of how to regulate yourself for everyone, for every age, no matter what is going on.
I talk about what I’m doing as agnostic of whether you have trauma or clinical issues. It doesn’t matter. The nervous system does not know the difference of why it is stressed. It doesn’t know if it’s from good stress or a wedding or a new baby or if someone punched you in the face or you lost your shoe. We know the difference cognitively, but your nervous system can’t tell the difference between bad and good stress, which is surprising to people.
I like to point that out because when you have chronic medical issues, you can feel pretty hopeless. This is about the science and hope in what nervous system resetting does for everybody.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned over 10,000 brain maps. I know you’re no longer in clinical practice, but that’s telling me you probably did it on about everybody for a number of years. That emphasizes how important you felt the brain maps were?
Dr. Roseann:
I would do a pre, mid, post. People would come to me. Sometimes, they worked with me in my program. Sometimes, they did other things. I did brain maps pre and post with gluten removal, dietary changes. I had somebody do qigong, and we did pre and post. I worked a lot with people with chronic Lyme and PANS/PANDAS. Sometimes, they did medical treatments. I also did a lot of athletes with brain injuries. We would do multiple brain maps to see what was happening. Were we getting better or not? I like objective data.
Dr. Eric:
Makes sense.
Dr. Roseann:
You don’t always need them. But they were incredibly helpful for me. I was 100% accurate with telling you if you had tick-borne illness. When I would say that, I would send you to a medical doctor, and they would verify this.
What happens is the brain shows very distinct patterns. Only when you really have done a lot of brain maps can you see those patterns. People would say, “I’m going to this person, and they say they don’t know.” They haven’t done thousands of these. You just look at them. I could tell if you had gut dysbiosis, if you had certain nutrients that were low. Again, we would verify it with medical testing. Some people just wanted treatment, not testing. They were awesome. I love them so much. I love me a good brain map.
Dr. Eric:
I got diagnosed with chronic Lyme in 2018. Brain maps weren’t on my radar. I was looking to get the blood test. I went to my primary care, who of course didn’t want to do the test because there was no evidence of a tick bite or a bull’s eye rash. Thankfully, I went to a functional medicine practitioner who focused on Lyme and was able to get diagnosed. Also good to know that the brain map could get an idea.
Dr. Roseann:
Yeah. Just so everyone knows, your physician was wrong. Lyme and tick-borne illness, you don’t have to have a rash, and it is a clinical diagnosis. Testing, because of the way ticks are so evasive, it often doesn’t show up. It might show up later. Testing is there to help us with treatment, not diagnosis. That’s probably shocking to people.
Dr. Eric:
I also had bartonella, too, not just Lyme, which is also common.
Let’s talk more about, if you could explain more of what nervous system dysregulation is. What are common and uncommon causes?
Dr. Roseann:
I love talking about this, especially uncommon things that people aren’t thinking about. Dysregulation in its simplest form is when a nervous system has difficulty shifting between a calm state and a stressed state. Backing up, what is the nervous system? Our autonomic nervous system, ANS, manages stress responses. At its relaxed state, we have our parasympathetic state. I like to call that “the hot tub state.” You come out of a hot tub and are super relaxed. That’s not always the case in real life. When you’re stressed, it goes into a sympathetic dominant state.
When you are in extreme levels of stress, you have fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. That is biological response. Your body is perceiving danger. It could be real or imagined. Real is someone is trying to break into your car. Imagined: you hear a noise at night, and you automatically think someone is breaking into your house, even though you know they’re not.
Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference. It will react the exact same way. When you go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, your frontal lobes go offline. Your thinking brain is offline, so you can react to the danger without thinking. You just start doing.
What happens is you have this stressor. Let’s say you’re walking across the street, and all of a sudden, you jump back because someone ran a red light. You go into sympathetic dominance. You get past it with a couple swears, a Hail Mary, whatever you do. If your baseline is regulation, it goes back to regulation.
What most people don’t know about the nervous system is it doesn’t have unlimited capacity. You can’t just live in stress. We talk about why I was so concerned. We are moving into constant stress in our society and accepting constant stress as a part of regular life without really mitigating it.
When we think about the nervous system, I talk about a stress cup. We have all these things that add to our stressors. Before we got on, I was telling Dr. Eric a story of something bad that happened to me yesterday, so my stress cup got a little full. I am doing things to pull stress out of my stress cup.
Let’s say you’re neurodivergent, or you have chronic medical issues. Your stress cup will have more things in it. It will already be full. That doesn’t mean you give up. It means you have to put more elbow grease around it.
I’m an Epstein-Barr (EBV) girl. My son has a virus. If I’m around people with a virus, I can feel my EBV activating. I have to add some extra things. My stress cup is moving up.
If you are constantly adding things the day before, the week before, the day of, what happens when you’re overloaded is your stress cup overflows. What people don’t know, and I am really trying to teach, is there are micro moments you can add into your life, be it breathwork, prayer, or somatic techniques, that pull stress out of your cup. We think we have to do big things. We have to do meditation for an hour or walking or massage. These are amazing things, and I wish people would do them. Are they realistic? It’s the little things that pull the stress out.
What are common things people are dealing with in our modern times? Lack of sleep. People are shortchanging sleep. I have been guilty of that. Junky food causes stress. Financial difficulties, having conflict with your partner, or having conflict with kids. We have a huge rise of neurodivergence in kids. Autism is through the roof. That means parents are parenting kids who are prone to dysregulation. There are all these little factors. Things we don’t think about.
I am filming today. Lights stress my nervous system. I know this about me. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s a time change. Time change messes me up every time. Travel. Annoying mother-in-law. All these little things add to your cup.
What do we tell people, especially women? Power through. There are times you do have to do that. To power through every day, you’re literally going to put yourself into a sympathetic dominant state. That’s what I saw in these 10,000 brain maps. I could see what was happening over the structure of the brain and brain communication, how the brain is talking to itself, which is important. That’s how you get through things.
Einstein had a genetic defect in his brain that allowed him to process with his lines of communication 400 times the rate of a normal brain. That’s why he was so smart. Think of it as having more highways in your brain. He had 400 times the highways in his brain. I would see these brains of all ages, even young kids, and they would be in this spin in their brain of anxiety and overwhelm.
There are lots of things that fill our cup. People sometimes lack awareness. Some people know and they just say, “I will push through it. I can shortchange my sleep. I can deal with this. My husband and I are arguing all the time. I will get through it.” What I know for sure people don’t understand the power of things like diaphragmatic breathing, which is belly breathing, or even prayer or reading a real book, not on a device. These are micro things that reset your nervous system and pull stress out. That’s the missing ingredient in this sauce in our modern life.
I don’t know about you, but I live a life where I am doing micro resets probably 20-30 times a day. It makes me so stress-inoculated that people freak out that I’m so good at managing stress. They always want to know how it is. Honestly, it’s micro resets. Yes, I go for a massage every other week. Yes, I take baths most nights, which are great for me. It’s actually the micro things that are really huge for me.
Dr. Eric:
Awesome. I think we’re on the same page. I tell pretty much everyone that you want to get into the routine of stress handling. Start with five minutes. 15-20 minutes is great, but if you’re not going to do the 15-20 minutes because you’re not getting into the routine, let alone an hour, like an hour of massage or meditation, most people won’t do that on a daily basis. Let’s start with five minutes. If you can’t find five minutes, you need to block out that time.
I agree with that. I love the concept of the stress cup. Five minutes here, five minutes there. Sometimes, you do it longer.
Also fascinating how many different things can cause that stress cup to fill up. Thinking about nervous system dysregulation, a lot of people think about trauma, big stressors. You spoke about sleep, finances, time change, travel, mother-in-law, little things that add up.
Dr. Roseann:
And good stuff, too. Oh my gosh, I found $100 in my pocket. Stuff like that. I can get so excited about a really good meal because I’m so Italian. Everything you think about an Italian, I embody that. My Giancarlo, my youngest, is like a chef. He inherited Nonna Filomena’s skills times ten. It’s pretty incredible. We did this gluten-free turkey dinner last night. He made this gluten-free stuffing. It was so good.
We get so excited about that. You don’t think that’s jacking up my nervous system. I’m not supposed to be excited? Of course we want lots of good things. It’s about balance.
People don’t realize. They think it’s a waste of time, this breathwork, having a prayer for five minutes. No, it’s not. I do two minutes or less all day long. It is incredible. I have doubled down on it in the last year and a half.
What’s happened to me is it’s really lowering my cortisol. It’s really lowering my insulin levels. I’ve lost a boatload of weight, just from micro things. I do a lot of tai chi. I do 100 reps of my tai chi exercise. There are a bunch of them I do. And these different nervous system exercises. It takes me 2-3 minutes in between things. After this, I will go downstairs and might turn on the news or a cooking show, depending on what’s going on. It’s the middle of the summer, so my kid probably has some show on. I will do different exercises. It’s a rebalancer and a resetter. It’s as simple as that.
I tried this, I tried that, I tried whatever, and it doesn’t work. There are some reasons why. You need to be consistent, and you have to do this multiple times a day, not one time. You have to look for the micro changes. People have this sense, “My anxiety is going to be completely gone.” Guess what? Doesn’t happen overnight. It won’t change overnight. That’s hard for people to recognize that.
Patience is not my virtue. We’re both from the NYC area. Everything is fast, fast, fast. People would come to me and want to magic wand it. They’d want it to be done overnight. Just having an expectation. If this is for yourself or your child, and you have concerns, give yourself some grace. Let it happen. Let it move in the right direction and have some patience around it. Within patience comes activation. The more capacity you create in your nervous system, you have more room to do hard things.
People walk into talk therapy and are living in stress. They’re in sympathetic dominance. They go talk about it and feel even worse. “That was a waste of time.” Of course it was a waste of time. You have to regulate yourself first before you even get in there.
It’s never to say those other things aren’t important. It’s an awareness of why maybe it didn’t work. Yes, if you have trauma or other things, it is going to be harder for you. You automatically have more things in your cup. It doesn’t mean you can’t improve things.
I was a provider for people who survived 9/11. I was one of nine approved providers for Sandy Hook. People got better because they did the nervous system work and some therapy and maybe some other things. There were a lot of funds for people to get better, which is incredible.
We have to broaden our mind, but we also have to take consistent action and make it as simple as possible. That’s what I’ve done in all of my work. How can I drill this down? How can I make this so ridiculously simple that a grandmother can do it, a two-year-old can do it, and everybody in between? I know I’ve done that.
Dr. Eric:
I’ve heard you as well as others say that the nervous system can get stuck. Can you explain what that means? Maybe the physiology of that a little bit.
Dr. Roseann:
What happens is the ANS starts living in a sympathetic dominant state. The more dysregulated your nervous system is, the more it’s going to dysregulate. The more regulated it is, the more regulated it will be. It’s called the negative Matthew Effect.
When we start living in a place of dysregulation, what happens? We always have a physical effect. Maybe we feel tension in our chest, or we have a sleep problem, or our skin starts getting bad. We have this stuff that keeps moving in this direction. We also probably have spinny thoughts. We might have avoidance of things. There will be some physiological, behavioral, emotional, maybe spiritual components. All of these things will not work the way they should.
From a body perspective, once you’re in a very sympathetic dominant state, which now you’re understanding little things can pile up in your nervous system if you’re not removing them and creating capacity, you will be stuck here. I hope that’s helpful for people.
People would come in and say, “I don’t understand why my kid is like this. I don’t understand why I’m like this.” You’re living in a stressed state. When you’re living in a stressed state, your immune system cannot work properly. Your hormone system, your endocrine system, your vascular system, neurotransmitters, they are not going to be working properly because they’re dealing with the stressor. You start losing that ability.
Let’s not be doom and gloom here; let’s be positive. When we regulate, and this is what I saw with all my people with chronic health issues, which were the majority of people I treated, all of a sudden, their physical health would get better. Less anxiety, less stress, improved sleep, more flexibility. “My Lyme doctor says we are not seeing this on the test results anymore.” We have to work within the body, but we need the consistency of the routine of daily life to make things better.
Dr. Eric:
A lot of people listening have a thyroid or autoimmune thyroid condition. This could apply to them. If they get stuck in their progress, that is something that might be overlooked, nervous system dysregulation. Maybe they are in that stuck state.
Dr. Roseann:
I have a thought. I have hypothyroid. It came from EBV attacking my thyroid. The friend I don’t want to have, EBV. I keep him in balance. I live a life where I have to. I know exactly what I need to do to keep my EBV okay. I also know that these kinds of things I’m doing on my book tour will strain my body. When I have mental stress or physical stress, my EBV activates. I have a whole ritual and routine around it.
I think people don’t realize how much your endocrine system is affected by stress. We can change that dynamic. We can improve things. Me having weight issues, very much about my EBV and metabolic issues. I had to cut the cortisol. The cortisol was really driving a lot of my metabolic issues.
Eating and exercise really wasn’t my problem, but exercise was in the sense that when I was doing these very long workouts, which I would work out all the time, were jacking up my cortisol. I had to change what I was doing and cut back on my exercise and do these micro things. It was dramatic. I didn’t expect that to create the weight loss it created for me, for somebody who felt very stuck for 20 years.
I share these things because I’ve dealt with people all the time who felt so hopeless. Reducing stress within that body, that’s what the nervous system is doing, has dramatic mental and physical benefits. There’s no way you won’t get benefits from it. It’s so important.
I want to see people do these micro moments of nervous system regulation and treat it the same way they brush their teeth. We brush our teeth not just to have fresh breath but to avoid bad things from happening because our dental health is incredibly important. It can lead to abscesses and illnesses and all these other things. We brush our teeth hopefully twice a day. That’s what I want people to do in their nervous system resets. They sprinkle them in.
Dr. Eric:
Is there a difference in regulating the nervous system between children and adults? Is the approach different? I would imagine, especially younger children, the parent would have to remind them to take the few minutes every so often throughout the day compared to an adult doing it.
Dr. Roseann:
What you do physically doesn’t have to be different. It’s the same techniques. They work in the same way. There are more adult ones that are more coordinated things. Different points on your ears and all kinds of things.
When it comes to kids, we have to set the routine. The #1 way kids regulate is something called co-regulation. They regulate off of us. The loudest nervous system in the room, whether it’s calm or dysregulated, will set the tone physiologically.
What a child will do is I like to think of it as a submarine sonar. They are picking up all the signs. Does my dad have a frowny face? Is my dad grunting? Or is my dad coming home with a nice smile? They pick up your body language, everything about you before you open your mouth. Their nervous system is going to say, “This is safe or not.”
If you have a kid who is prone to dysregulation, which I did, the dysregulated kid is my kid Max. It’s so much more than Max. I share my story in the beginning of this book. Please know he is a regulated adult now.
I love to watch police videos. Don’t ask. I watch all the crime things. I love to watch the videos where people are taping cops, and you get to see someone who is super dysregulated, and the cop who is like, “Okay, Joe, this happened last week. We don’t need to have that. Come on, Joe.” Versus the cop who comes in and slams somebody down.
That regulation person’s dysregulating, dysregulating, they become the calm. The person always calms down, maybe not perfectly. Co-regulation is this superpower we all have. Ideally, we’re using this with our kids. You don’t have to be perfectly regulated, just regulated enough. We never approach another person out of reactivity when we can, and I have a whole system on that.
The power of that regulation is very different in terms of an adult. An adult is thinking about themselves, but when we are approaching children, we are teaching them. The first thing is borrowing the calm.
In terms of strategies and techniques, kids are so open. If you said to a kid, “Let’s do these movement exercises. Let’s breathe.” Even my teenagers, and you make them part of your structure. Kids will do it. Not just with my own kids but the kids I work with, you got to watch them use it in hard moments.
The micro moments are about resetting your nervous system and changing your baseline. It’s also teaching your subconscious brain, “This is the tool I should be using when the poop hits the fan.” You start using it right away. As soon as I’m in a stressful moment, I find myself automatically activating my diaphragmatic breathing. I love a 4-7-8 breath, where you breathe in for four, hold for seven, and breathe out for eight. I don’t even know it, and I’m doing it.
When I did my audiobook, they said to me, “Why do you do this breathing in between?” “What are you talking about?” “Are you anxious?” “I do that all the time.” I’m not an anxious person. That’s not my jam. I get anxious about something that deserves anxiety, but I’m not an anxious person.
Kids and adults, it’s the same. The great part about it is when you regulate, it’s like you just have a superpower. You get to see other people when they dysregulate, and you can use your calm. You are also clear about people you want to avoid that you don’t have to interact with, like your cousin Betty. I won’t hang out with her at Thanksgiving because she is super dysregulated. Or maybe you normally have conflict with her. You know what to do when somebody else is dysregulating.
Dr. Eric:
If someone’s listening to this and has tried different techniques for mind-body, like meditation, deep breathing, maybe even therapy, what would you say would be the next steps in order to incorporate some of the things you’ve discussed so far?
Dr. Roseann:
If you hate breathwork and somatic techniques, you are dysregulated. You don’t like calm. You don’t like that feeling. That probably means your body has had something where you felt unsafe. I hear you, but I want you to know when you do these things that you can feel safe. Don’t say it doesn’t work. That is really important.
I found in my clinical experience that about half the people I worked with actually were breathing wrong. You as well?
Dr. Eric:
Yep.
Dr. Roseann:
They don’t understand what diaphragmatic breathing is. Really simply, when you are taking your breath, you are filling your belly with air. It’s not sucking in. Also, you’re not breathing in your chest. If you’re not breathing, and it’s not filling up in your belly, you’re chest breathing, which is activating your sympathetic dominant. It doesn’t work because you’re not doing it right.
The other part of this is people don’t do things enough. They’re thinking, “I did it for 10 minutes or 20 minutes three times this week.” That’s not enough. Breathwork is the quickest way physiologically that you can calm your nervous system. It’s free. You can do it on the downlow. You can do it in a room. You can do it everywhere, and nobody will even know. I’m doing it all the time, and this was the first time someone said to me, “What are you doing?” I didn’t even know.
What you need to do is you want to do it when you wake up. You want to do it when you go to bed. You want to set your phone for three other times in the day. You want to try to do it when you are regulated. You also should always do it when you feel dysregulated.
When you start to come out of sympathetic dominance, which means your body is saying, “I’m okay. I’m safe,” you will be clear on what your triggers are. When you’re in sympathetic dominance, everything will be danger. A shirt not feeling right or your teenager being a little grumpy because that’s normal, and you’re set off. Everything will set you off. Until you’re regulated, you’re not able to see it for yourself or your child. That’s really important.
Having some structure and consistency is where I would ask people to start. I would say that you have to do this for a seven-day minimum, ideally 30-day minimum. You are not looking for things to completely disappear. That’s not realistic. What you’re looking for is changes in intensity, frequency, and duration.
When I would work with people, certainly people started noticing things in the first week. When they understood it wouldn’t disappear, they really started to see things go away in about 60 days, 90 days, depending on. These are people with very serious issues. They might have something completely disappear in week two. It really depended on what was going on with people. Physiologically, you are going to improve your health. There is no way your health is not going to improve. You just have to stick with it.
“Dr. Ro, I don’t like breathwork.” I hear you. I love somatic techniques. My two favorite somatic techniques are heart hug, where you take your right hand, put it over your heart. You take your left hand and put it on the shoulder and press. Ideally, your feet are on the floor. You’re sitting or standing up. It is a big hug. You tell your body, “Safe, safe, safe.” If you can’t breathe through it, which is what you’re supposed to do, you could hum. You could not allow negative thoughts to come into your mind. You could say to yourself, “I feel safe. I can feel this hug come over me.” You can say the mantra.
Another simple somatic technique is the butterfly tap. You hook your thumbs together, and it looks like a butterfly. You place it on your chest and do a bilateral tap. You could breathe or do a mantra, a thought in your head that says, “I look forward to my body melting away this stress.” Whatever you tell your body, your brain, it’s going to believe.
Don’t do the spinny stuff. The spinny stuff, you have to shift it. It’s very natural to get stuck in a spinny thought, a negative thing. You have the power to stop it.
I worked with people with OCD for so long. It’s the ultimate spin. Being so stuck in intrusive thoughts. You have to talk back to it. You have to say, “No, no, that’s not true.” That’s really what therapy does in that. Pick one of these techniques. The other things are prayer. You have to be careful. You don’t want to be praying on the negative, the positive. Walking outside. Getting outside and grounded. 2-3 minutes.
I was really busy this morning. Just get out on the porch. I sat there with the sun on me and breathed for a couple minutes. My cat came out. Just be mindful of these moments and start doing them.
If you are a mother, a grandfather, you have kids around you, invite them with you. Let them be part of it. It really changes the family nervous system, and it creates this capacity, particularly in kids, to be able to deal with stress. Kids are choking just like adults. They have become stress-avoidant. This is not about avoiding stress. It’s about identifying your triggers, trying to control them, and being able to deal with real things that happen.
If I couldn’t have dealt with this bad thing that happened to me yesterday, I would have had to cancel my entire day. This is what you’re going to do. You will regulate, call your lawyer. It didn’t knock me down because I’m regulated. Other people, it might have knocked them down.
Dr. Eric:
That was really helpful. Essentially a quick summary. Regulate a minimum of five times a day, in the morning, before going to bed, and three other times during the day. Every time you feel dysregulated, I mentioned five minutes, but you only talk about 2-3 minutes, which everyone can do. Helpful.
Dr. Roseann:
Five minutes is great. There are times I do 10 minutes of tai chi. If I don’t have my meeting at 1:30pm today, I will get in some extra tai chi. Do what you can.
There were times I was so frustrated on my cortisol journey. Crazy amounts of insulin. Forget it. I don’t have 30 minutes to work out today, so I wouldn’t do it. You literally are going into the busiest time of your life. You better knock it off, Roseann. Find a way. And I did. This was doing something.
I was shocked how little is. Nobody says to do that. It was tai chi. It’s nervous system resetting. It’s also physical exercise. It was so accessible. Everybody wants to know what I’m doing because I’ve lost so weight. It’s tai chi. They can’t wrap their mind around it.
It’s also helped me calm my EBV. My thyroid levels look good. All the numbers, the metrics. I waited a long time to get my metrics retested. I waited at least six months. It’s exciting to see those micro things paying off, even more than I expected, which is cool.
Dr. Eric:
Amazing. This conversation was amazing. Thanks for taking the time to share all of this. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they get a copy of your new book?
Dr. Roseann:
My book is called The Dysregulated Kid. You can search it. Every major retailer. You can ask people to order it at your local library. You can go to your independent bookstore. I am Dr. Roseann anywhere in the world.
This book is a simple playbook for anybody looking to reset their nervous system, particularly if you have a child in your life. I designed this book to be shared. Get a couple people together. If you are a grandparent, buy it for all their kids. I also have book club with it.
We also have a CALMS certification. We have a personal certification for adults. No matter what track you get, there is an adult only track and an adult track with kids. You get both. I made it accessible for people.
It’s showing you the physical ways of how to reset yourself. The book walks you through it in such an easy way. Use it, share it, buy it for your bestie, create a tribe of people, where you are doing this together. It makes life so much easier.
Dr. Eric:
This was incredible. Best of luck with your book launch. I’m sure it will do awesome. Thank you, Dr. Roseann.
Dr. Roseann:
Thanks for being so supportive. Wherever people are, if they feel stuck, start with one breath.
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Dr. Eric:
That was a really great interview with Dr. Roseann. Emptying your stress cup. There is not really a stress cup, but the point is that the more chronic stress you deal with, the more it will affect your body in a negative way.
What she recommends is having micro moments of nervous system regulation throughout the day. Rather than blocking out five minutes per day, having multiple times. It might not be five minutes a session. It might be 2-3 minutes per session. I’ll talk more about that shortly.
EBV. She mentioned that she became hypothyroid due to EBV. She didn’t mention Hashimoto’s. When it comes to the research showing EBV affecting the thyroid, it’s typically playing a role in thyroid autoimmunity, Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. There is some evidence it could affect thyroid directly. That’s what it sounded like it did with her.
I have spoken about this in the past. I think about EBV as more of an immune system condition, meaning that once you get it, you can’t get rid of it because it’s intracellular. You want to optimize your immune system to live in harmony with the virus. Regulating your immune system is one of the ways you can do that.
Causes of nervous system dysregulation. There could be viruses or mold. We didn’t talk about that. She spoke about some of the basics, like sleep or stress or time change or travel. Obviously, trauma and mold. There are extreme cases that could dysregulate the nervous system.
The point she was trying to get across is you don’t have to have an extreme case. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep for months or years, that can cause nervous system dysregulation. If you’re stressed out not for a few days about finances but month after month, year after year.
Time change, I don’t know if traveling- I know she travels a lot. I don’t know if she meant going from east coast to west coast and vice versa. Or changes from Daylight Savings. I would think that that’s not going to cause nervous system dysregulation if you have a single trip going from the east coast to the west coast or vice versa. If you’re doing that week after week. If you travel regularly, maybe.
Tai chi. I asked her after the interview if she works with someone in person for tai chi. She mentioned Facebook or Instagram, Tai Chi with Mom. That’s what she uses. It’s something online. Not a surprise. There are online yoga programs and meditations. Not a surprise that there is something online for tai chi.
I was interested because I might want to look into it. I am always interested in learning new things to manage my stress and regulate my nervous system.
She mentioned how stress affects the endocrine system. In her case, tai chi helped balance her endocrine system and lower cortisol, helping her lose weight. Insulin resistance was a big factor, too, and that has been helped greatly. Insulin and cortisol are often overlooked, especially cortisol, when it comes to losing weight.
Getting back to regulating your nervous system, how frequently to regulate. When it comes to stress management, I say a lot, not always individually to every single person, but when having lectures and conferences, usually online, I talk about blocking out at least five minutes every single day to get into the routine of managing stress. I still don’t think that’s a bad idea. If we could just do 2-3 minutes. She said to do it in the morning and at night, and three times during the day. Set your alarm. Every time you feel dysregulated. Do it for a minimum of 30 days.
I will say again to get into the routine of it. Maybe you start with two minutes in the morning and at night. Get into that routine. Maybe just for a week or two. You could do that for 30 days and then add more of those two-minute sessions. It’s ultimately up to you. The goal is to get you into the routine of regulating the nervous system.
I think she said during the interview she does it about 20 times during the day. She doesn’t really think about it. It’s not like she is in her case necessarily setting an alarm every 30 minutes, for example. It’s just whenever she has some downtime or feels dysregulated, she does it. It’s all about getting into the routine.
That’s something I need to start doing, too, rather than having a single deep breathing or meditation session. I use what’s called heart math. I have discussed that previously. Either way, not to say I shouldn’t use heart math. If you are blocking out 10-15 minutes for meditation, deep breathing, or yoga, maybe incorporate two minutes multiple times a day to regulate your nervous system on top of that.
Hope you found this conversation to be valuable. Definitely check out her book. I will. I preordered it. Look forward to reading it. As usual, thanks for listening. Look forward to catching you in the next episode.