Stop Trying to Regulate Alone (It’s Slowing You Down)

You've been told to fix yourself. Regulate yourself. Push through yourself. But what if the real reason sensitive nervous systems stay stuck has nothing to do with effort or consistency, and everything to do with trying to do it alone? 

On this Star Wars Day episode, I'm breaking down the hard science of co-regulation and why isolation is one of the most damaging things a sensitive body can experience. Your nervous system was not designed to heal in a vacuum. Biology actually says so. 

I'm also sharing my own turning point, the moment I stopped white-knuckling my health alone and what happened to my HRV, my symptoms, and my sense of self when I finally found the right community. 

May the Fourth be with you, Padawan. This one's for you. 

In this Episode: 

00:00 Preview: Why struggling alone is making sensitive nervous systems worse 

00:43 Happy Star Wars Day and yes, Amanda had a Star Wars wedding 

02:11 Why sensitive people are wired to push through alone (and why that backfires) 

02:40 What co-regulation actually is and how it works in your body 

03:20 Mirror neurons, oxytocin, cannabinoids, and vagal tone: the biology of being around regulated people 

04:40 What isolation actually does to a sensitive nervous system (cortisol, HRV, sympathetic dominance) 

05:50 The Star Wars connection: how Anakin became Darth Vader by isolating himself 

07:31 The snowball effect of feeling unseen and what it does to your health 

08:30 Amanda's personal story: pushing through alone for years and what finally changed 

10:00 Joining Mellissa Seaman's Channel Your Genius program as a turning point in nervous system regulation 

11:10 How the right environment lets you borrow other people's nervous systems 

12:21 Introducing the Cosmic Sensitive Circle: what it is and who it's for 

13:30 Full and new moon briefs, Cosmic Sensitive Types, and what's ahead for sensitive bodies 

15:20 The Release Retreat in Frisco, Colorado: what it is and who it's designed for 

17:20 Closing: stay curious, stay oriented, move with what's real 

Other links mentioned: 

Join the Cosmic Sensitive Circle: https://bwh.thrivecart.com/cosmic-sensitive-circle/ 

Save your spot at The Release Retreat (Frisco, CO, late July): https://bwh.kit.com/55e789970f 

Mellissa Seaman's Channel Your Genius podcast: https://channelyourgenius.com/channel-your-genius-podcast/ 

Joe Dispenza's research on co-regulation: https://drjoedispenza.com 

Maria Yraceburu: https://www.yraceburu.org/ 

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Watch Cosmic Body Shenanigans Podcast on YouTube!

Check out more from Amanda:
Website: Body Whisper Healing
Instagram: @Amanda.G.Smith
Facebook: Body Whisper Healing
Pinterest: AmandaGSmithBWH
LinkedIn: Amanda (Ritchie) Smith

Take the Cosmic Sensitive Quiz to find out what stresses you out most and why. It's fun, it's free, and it's only 7 easy questions. https://www.cosmicsensitivequiz.com/

Transcript

0:01

What if the reason you're struggling isn't your sensitivity? It's possibly that you're trying to do everything alone. Because there's hard science that shows without a shadow of a doubt, isolation makes sensitive nervous systems worse. And there's equally hard science behind why the right environment changes everything. By the way, happy Star Wars Day. May the fourth be with you. And if you're listening to this after May 4th, well, there's also May 5th and May 6th and May 7th. Those are all Star Wars days too, but you know. I'm a total Star Wars geek. Hi, I'm Amanda Smith. I am a former mechanical and aerospace engineer that worked on NASA projects and programs, turned grounded mystical nervous system translator for sensitive bodies. And I am a Star Wars geek. I had a Star Wars wedding and before you go into, my gosh, she wore like the white Princess Leia with the buns. No, I had a traditional wedding dress. It was gorgeous. And our thank you cards had me in the Princess Leia outfit and my husband in the Han Solo outfit to say thank you for coming to our reception that was decorated with Star Wars. Our cake had Han and Leia figurines on top that my best friend made and we had Chewbacca coming out the bottom of the cake and our house is decorated in a whole lot of Star Wars including a huge Millennium Falcon above our fireplace by one of the original artists from the sets. Such a Star Wars geek. So happy Star Wars day to all of you that celebrate and guess what? Part of regulating in community has to do with the force. And it has to do with Darth Vader and how he fell out of the force. He became the dark side. We're going there today. Here's the thing, most sensitive people have been taught to embrace the struggle within. Fix yourself, regulate yourself, do it all yourself, push through yourself. How do I know this? Well, I did it for a very long time and then I didn't do it like that for a while. And biology says we need to do this a different way. Let's get into what co-regulation is. So definition of co-regulation is you do the dang thing with other people and your nervous system actually regulates to the highest frequency in the room. If you haven't checked out any of Joe Dispenza's stuff, he is one of the forefront scientists that is getting the data published and peer reviewed and showing how this actually works. Co-regulation allows your body to regulate your nervous system with another person's nervous system that's at a higher frequency. It doesn't go lower. You don't get drug down to someone's crappy, dysregulated, crappy quote-unquote dysregulated nervous system. they come up to yours if you have a higher frequency than they do, so be smart about who you surround yourself with. Isn't there a rule about this, a theory that you resemble the five people that you surround yourself with the most? I don't know that resemble is the right word, but emulate, probably the better word. Here's how it works in your nervous system. your mirror neurons fire so that you're producing more cannabinoids and oxytocin. If you got to watch the episode quite some time ago about the love hormone oxytocin, you understand bonding from that episode back when this show was the Gutsy Chick podcast. So season two. Your vagal tone regulates to a parasympathetic state. So the parasympathetic side is the rest, digest, relax, recover. That gets activated so that you can go into those states. Your HRV has a measurable shift in a positive direction. A higher HRV score. I have talked about HRV on several episodes. Do a search in Cosmic Body Shenanigans podcast for HRV and you're probably going to find about five or six of those. This all happens when your nervous system co-regulates, when you're in proximity to other nervous systems that have a higher frequency than yours. How beautiful is that? So then the opposite side of this is isolation. Isolation is detrimental for a sensitive body. Isolation raises cortisol baseline. It lowers your HRV score. It increases the sympathetic dominance, which sympathetic is the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. And this is the science behind the chronic on edge feelings that sensitive people carry. That's the unfortunate reality. Now let's, let's drop into this star Wars day and really, really grasp this. So the force was what the Jedi embraced. The force was a trained skill and your body can easily train itself without you trying when you're in relation to other higher frequency nervous systems, other regulated nervous systems. Now, Anakin Skywalker turned into Darth Vader. He wasn't in community. He had the community in the beginning when he was going through Jedi training, but then he isolated himself. He felt isolated. He felt like nobody understood him. He felt like he had to start doing things by himself. And then he fell into the wrong company. And the wrong company convinced him that what he was doing was right. And the Jedi were trying to tell him, no, this isn't the right way. This isn't the way. It's fun how psychology can play into this because when we do feel drug down and not heard and not part of a community that understands us, we isolate. So it's that snowball effect. And then once we isolate, our nervous system gets dysregulated, especially if we're already carrying chronic health conditions. or we're carrying epigenetic conditions that our environment has spiked, where our DNA already has the propensity to go there. but when we're in community. It's so much easier. I want to share why I know this so well. I'm the bruiser in the gutsy chick quiz archetypes. And I was the type of person who pushed and pushed through pain, pushed through sickness, pushed through so much stuff. And I felt alone. I felt isolated. felt like no one understood me, especially with some of the gifts that I have. And I did isolate myself quite a bit. And I still to this day have a very small community that I hang out with. That's just the way I operate. And it wasn't until I joined Mellissa's, Mellissa Seaman's leadership program, channel your genius. If you've never listened to her podcast, I highly recommend it. Such a great podcast. When I joined her community and I was with a small cohort of women who were on a mission to better understand themselves, better understand the business that they wanted to create or the career that they wanted to further and do it with the ability to channel. So that's why it's called Channel Your Genius. This was a turning point in my health. It was a turning point in my nervous system regulation. It was a turning point in my HRV score, actually. It's been such a game changer for me. And before that, I was going to so many specialists. I saw Dr. Desai for years and years, and I was doing it by myself and not seeing any improvement. Just in the last couple of years, I have seen immense improvement because I've immersed myself in community. I've immersed myself in a community where I feel seen, I feel heard, I feel connected. I feel like I don't have to push through. I just have to learn how to magnetize things to me. What a relief. I no longer feel like Anakin before he became Darth Vader. The right environment lets you borrow other people's nervous systems so that you can rise to a regulated state. And what's really cool when you're in the right community is that they can reflect back to you through their own experiences. They can mirror to you what they're experiencing and how that triggers things for you. And in the right community, you feel safe enough to receive their reflections about you. and it doesn't shut you down, you grow. That, that's power. That is where we're headed in this world. That is what so many people are waking up to. The fact that we have to do this in a village. You've heard me say it before, moms understand this and are more and more more open to it. It takes a village. It takes a village to regulate your nervous system. I created a community that I'm building and we're in the ground foundational phase of building that community called the Cosmic Sensitive Circle. And I created it so that other sensitive people, you, you're listening to this. You're a sensitive person. guarantee it. I created it for you so that you can Be in community with others who are going through it, trying to figure out how to up level their nervous system. And it's a community, you just learned how co-regulation works. It's also a space where you're going to learn about what's coming. If you've taken the Cosmic Sensitive Quiz, if you haven't, CosmicSensitiveQuiz.com, and you know what your type is. You're going to learn more about those types so that you can better understand yourself and understand it with common language with the other people in the community. And you're going to hear based off of what type you are, what's coming. I give you a brief, every full and new moon about what's ahead for the next two weeks. It's something that my teacher, Maria Yraceburu has taught me. who does this with me. And I love it so much. She does it on a monthly basis. But to have it every two weeks means that you can pick those days where you know something's gonna show up and you can take a little off your plate so that by the end of the day, you're not fried out. Because you are a sensitive body. You work at high fidelity. You recognize, see the patterns and know There's something up all around you all the time. So the circle is there for you in the show notes. If that resonates with you, come join. Come be one of the founding members and start regulating your nervous system with others. And you might just notice I might call them my padawan. The other thing that I have to mention is the release retreat. If you're the type of person who knows I do everything alone. I bear the burden. I shoulder the weight. I push through constantly. I am an over giver. This release retreat is for you. It's an initiation. It's an initiation into your sovereignty. It's an initiation into not repeating patterns that you learned a long time ago. It's about releasing those patterns. It's about releasing this desire to be in community, but not be in community, but be in community, show up with the mask. That's what this retreat is about. And it's happening here in Colorado, in Frisco. in the mountains in a beautiful mansion log cabin with a total of 12 people. So it's a very small group. And this week I'm opening the early bird pricing. So if that sounds like something you want to do, it sounds like, yeah, that might be the thing. Come sign up, join it. at the lowest rate you can possibly get it at because this rate will end in a couple of weeks and then it'll go up and it'll continue to go up until July 8th when we close the doors because the retreat is at the end of July. If that sounds like something that you want, that you need, Embrace it. If you've been nodding along to this episode, embrace it. You're going to be in a very small community of feminine people. Not necessarily all women, but feminine. They embrace the feminine side. They understand how to move to the feminine side. Yeah, that that's who's invited to this one. That link with the discount, the early bird discount is in the show notes. Happy Star Wars Day. I hope you become one of the Padawan in the circle or at the release retreat. Until next time, stay curious, stay oriented, move with what's real and trust your sensitive body. It knows.