Before showing up and speaking up, regulate

The often-overlooked reason visibility can be so challenging

Often when people talk to me about visibility, they think they need a better strategy, a stronger voice, or a more confident mindset. Often they’re right.

Sometimes though, the real hurdle isn’t strategic or even psychological. It’s physiological. The issue lies in the nervous system.

Behavioural signs of dysregulation

When your nervous system is dysregulated, it can feel like you’re simultaneously stuck in fast-forward and collapse. You can’t sit still. You find it hard to listen or concentrate. You interrupt people mid-sentence. Your mind flicks between a thousand open tabs. You’re disorganised. Not because you’re lazy, but because your system is overloaded. You can’t focus on one task at a time, and settling into systems or routines feels impossible.

I was breathtakingly dysregulated in the six years I spent at university. I remember distinctly how difficult it was to settle into reading my textbooks (a big problem when I needed to read somewhere between 300-500 pages a week). There was just so. much. white. noise to contend with - internally and externally.

When you’re nervous system is dysregulated, you're exhausted but you don’t sleep well. You wake up tired. Your body feels wired, but your brain is foggy. You might overwork and overcommit, then crash and cancel everything. You swing between pushing through and shutting down. When it came to fun, I took an all-or-nothing approach, resulting in extreme highs and lows. Other people talk about feeling distanced from the world - like they’re watching life from behind a pane of glass.

Physical signs of dysregulation

Some of my physical signs looked like a tight chest, shallow breath, clenched jaw. Other people experience digestive issues and headaches.

In what I now see as inevitable, my nervous system dysregulation also showed up as chronic fatigue. My body was desperate for deep rest, but my nervous system didn’t know how to give it. I was living in a state of permanent alert, even when there was no visible threat.

The causes of dysregulation

Dysregulation doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s often the result of prolonged exposure to environments that don’t feel safe; social settings where we have to mask who we are, workplaces where we’re constantly under pressure, family systems where we’ve learned to walk on eggshells.

In my case, dysregulation arose primarily from complex trauma - something I’ve spent most of my life slowly and intentionally healing from. But it was also influenced by living in a world that constantly pulls us out of ourselves. A world that taught me that doing was more important than being, that rewards productivity over presence, consumption over connection.

Our nervous systems are also being rewired by technology. The constant stream of notifications, alerts, and updates trains our brains to be hyper-responsive, always on edge, waiting for the next ping. We become addicted to the dopamine hit of the new and shiny, rarely given space to drop into stillness or deep focus.

For many of us, dysregulation is layered - shaped by systemic oppression, cultural expectations, and digital overwhelm. Over time, the body learns to stay on high alert.

Not because you’re broken, but because you’ve adapted.

But adaptation isn’t the end of the story. If your nervous system has learned to live in a state of constant activation, it can also learn to settle. Regulation is possible through consistent, compassionate tending.

We begin by gently pulling our attention away from the noise. Taking breaks from the endless scroll. Turning off notifications. Reclaiming quiet.

We ground ourselves in the body, through breath, movement, time in nature, or simply noticing where our feet are.

We find rhythms that soothe us: morning rituals, midday walks, evening wind-downs.

We lean into practices that remind the body it’s safe: singing, shaking, hugging someone we trust.

We learn what safety feels like in our body, and we begin to build it, moment by moment.

We also start to notice what dysregulates us. What spaces, stories, or systems send us into hypervigilance or collapse. Which relationships feel like walking on eggshells. The patterns we keep repeating out of fear.

We restore choice to our lives, creating more space between stimulus and response. We consciously build more room to be with ourselves without needing to do anything, without needing to disappear, explode, or perform.

In short, we learn how to shift from a state of doing to a state of being.

Instead of constantly performing for safety or approval, we learn how to be with ourselves. To inhabit our bodies. To trust our pace. To move from presence, not panic. Regulation invites us out of reactivity and into groundedness. It teaches us that we don’t have to do more to earn our place. We can simply be, and that is enough.

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So what does all of this have to do with visibility?

Everything.

Because when your nervous system is dysregulated, visibility feels threatening. Speaking up, being seen, being heard, can register as danger. Your system doesn’t distinguish between a lion in the wild and a room full of people staring at you while you introduce your work. Or hitting ‘publish’ on a post that shares something vulnerable. Or setting a boundary in a meeting. To your nervous system, visibility is exposure. And exposure, when you don’t feel safe, is terrifying.

A dysregulated system will do everything it can to protect you from that perceived threat. You might procrastinate, overthink, shrink yourself, try to be perfect, avoid the spotlight, overexplain, or deflect attention onto others. You might stay silent when you have something important to say. Or speak up but feel your heart race, your voice shake, your brain go blank.

(In fact, we tend to fall into our most unhealthy Enneagram traits when our systems are dysregulated. If you didn’t check our Enneagram series we shared last year, there’s a page here for you to check that out.)

Dysregulation doesn’t just affect our experience of being seen, it makes it hard to truly witness others without judgment or defensiveness. Hard to listen with presence. Hard to stay open to feedback or praise.

Visibility is relational, and if your nervous system doesn’t feel safe in relationship, you’ll struggle to stay in connection, especially in moments that matter.

This is why nervous system regulation isn’t just a wellbeing practice. It’s visibility work.

When we regulate, we widen our capacity. We expand what’s possible in how we show up, how we express ourselves, how we hold space for others, and how we let ourselves be held.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing simple, accessible ways to support your nervous system. Small regulating practices that help you feel safer in your body and more anchored in your visibility.

This isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about remembering what it feels like to be fully here.