Nervous System Regulation: How to Calm Your Reactivity and Reconnect
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Alyssa Blask Campbell
Why You Get Reactive (And It’s Not About Willpower)
Most of the reactivity and shutting-down that wrecks our most important conversations isn’t a character flaw. It’s your nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do, a little too well.
You are trying to talk to your partner about something that actually matters, and within about ninety seconds it has gone sideways. Maybe you are the one who gets flooded, heart pounding, words coming out sharper than you meant them. Maybe you are the one who watches your partner go quiet and far away, and you cannot for the life of you figure out where they went. Either way, you both started this wanting to feel closer, and somehow you are further apart than when you began.
My guest is Alyssa Blask Campbell, the founder and CEO of Seed & Sew and an expert in emotional development for both children and adults. She holds a master’s in early childhood education, co-created the Collaborative Emotion Processing method through research with a Boston-area university, and is the author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions (a New York Times bestseller) and Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. She hands you language for what happens inside you that you have probably never had before.
We sat down to talk through why you flood while your partner shuts down, the nine senses (only five of which you were probably taught), what neuroception is and why some of us feel everybody else’s emotions, how a sensitive-to-seeking scale explains almost every “why don’t you even notice that?” fight, why self-care that actually works has to fit your specific nervous system, and the difference between a coping mechanism that masks a feeling and a coping strategy that actually regulates it.
Quick answers before you dive in
Because your nervous system can flood faster than your thinking brain can catch up. When it does, you are not choosing to snap; your body has flipped into protection mode over something that is not actually a threat.
Interoception (what you feel inside), the vestibular sense (balance and movement), proprioception (where your body is in space), and neuroception (your read on other people’s emotional states).
Yes. Alyssa built a free sensory quiz, and I walk through how I would use it with the couples I see. Details and the link are in the article and in the resources section below.
It is the missing piece for a lot of couples, and it changes the tone of the whole conversation. It also usually takes a real person in your corner to turn the insight into a different Tuesday night, which is what we do at Growing Self.
“Neuroception I call our spidey sense.” — Alyssa Blask Campbell, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Alyssa Blask Campbell: It results in dysregulation in the nervous system, which is adrenaline or cortisol is being pumped from your adrenal gland, shuts down your prefrontal cortex — your rational thinking, problem solving, conflict-resolution brain — kicks on that amygdala, our reactive, primal brain. If you’ve been dealing with patterns in your relationship where maybe you’re getting really reactive or so emotionally flooded, it’s difficult to communicate, or you’re trying to connect with your partner and it feels like they’re either getting really upset and it doesn’t make sense, or maybe they’re shutting down altogether and withdrawing. It is exhausting them. It’s lowering their capacity for regulation, for communication, for problem solving, for conflict resolution.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When you stay in that hug and you have that cry or you get to that feeling — that is where, okay, the adrenaline and cortisol has really pumped its brakes. We’ve got the serotonin and oxytocin taking over.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Restoring the peace and the connection in all of your most important relationships starts with you and your ability to understand and manage your own emotions. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today on Love, Happiness & Success. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome — I’m Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. My background: I’m a psychologist, a marriage and family therapist, a very proud board-certified coach, and I’m here every week helping you.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I’m joined by Alyssa Blask Campbell. She is the founder of Seed & Sew. She has a master’s in early childhood education, and she specializes in emotional intelligence both for kids and adults. She is a two-time bestselling author, a leading voice in emotional education, and author of Big Kids, Bigger Feelings.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Emotional regulation is where it’s at.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It sure is. And it’s a real buzzword these days without a lot of guidance on how one’s individual nervous system works.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: You have been studying this, supporting people in developing this for so many years. Take us into nervous system 101.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah, let’s do it. We all have one. And part of our nervous system includes our nine senses. When we’re growing up, we often hear those first five — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell — your five senses. And those definitely come into play here. And there are four others that are really critical.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We have our interoceptive sense. This is the one that lets us know how we’re feeling inside — like, do I have to go to the bathroom? Am I hungry? Am I tired? Is my heart beating fast? Interoceptive-sensitive humans are often big-feeling humans. They notice feelings in a really high-end way, and so when they feel something, they don’t feel it a little bit. They really feel that feeling, and it can be all-consuming. We see this especially with things like shame. Guilt can lead to it being really hard to have accountability for actions, because the feeling of shame or guilt can feel so big that even acknowledging it or saying “I’m sorry” or repairing can feel really consuming.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is something I’ve been thinking about lately — even a personal share. In my own relationship, I think my husband tends to physically feel things to a larger degree than I do. I tend to be more of a thinking person. And it’s helpful just to say that out loud, because now we have language for it.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: It’s called interoception. It’s so crucial when we can notice this. It can show up as, oh, I start to get a little hungry, and I actually might need to eat more frequently, because by the time my husband and I have the same distance between eating, he’s hangry, because he feels that hunger so much bigger. Versus me — I’ll feel it, feel, feel. Then eventually I have to sometimes put it on my calendar to eat, because it’ll get to the point of, oh, I’m hungry, because I didn’t notice it until I was hungry.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have our vestibular sense. This is located in our inner ear. It’s responsible for our movement and our balance. It keeps us upright. And for folks who are vestibular-sensitive, you might get motion sickness. You might be someone who says, yeah, I don’t want to be on something that spins or swings.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: I am vestibular-sensitive. If we walk into a living room and there’s a swivel chair or a rocking chair or a couch, I’m on the couch 100% of the time. My husband is seeking, and he plops right in that swivel chair and he’s like, oh, this feels good. He sits in an office chair that rotates and moves, and I sit in a stationary chair.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My husband has that too. I grew up on a sailboat. He cannot set foot on a boat. He’s like, I’m dying. He can’t go on a roller coaster.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: For folks who are vestibular-sensitive, when he steps on that boat and it’s rocking, it is draining his nervous system. And it is exhausting him. It’s lowering his capacity for regulation, for communication, for problem solving, for conflict resolution. His access to all of that is decreasing as he’s experiencing that vestibular activity. Versus somebody who is vestibular-seeking, like my husband — that’s actually increasing his ability to access problem solving and conflict resolution, because it’s recharging his battery.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have our proprioceptive sense. This lets us know where our body ends and something else begins. Folks who have low proprioceptive awareness or high proprioceptive seeking — so this is me — we need a lot of movement and input to let us know where things are around us. My bed has not moved in years, and I bump into that sucker all the time. I always have bruises on my legs, because it’s hard for my brain to gauge where I end and it begins. When we see this in kids, it can show up like a bull in a china shop. It’s not that they don’t care about the things; their brain has a hard time knowing what’s the right distance to be from something so I don’t bump into it.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Humans like myself — we need movement. Before I sat down to podcast today, I walked on my walking pad while doing work, because that movement is going to increase my body awareness. It’s going to increase my ability to sit still and podcast. If I hadn’t done that, my fidgetiness is going to happen sooner. I’m going to get irritable sooner. I need that input of walking. Or I could have a massage for four days, and I’m like, I want more. That deep pressure. When I’m upset, I want a hug. I want closeness and proximity.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: For my husband, he has hyper-proprioceptive awareness. He’s never bumping into the bed. It is bonkers to him that I cannot clock where the end of the bed is and where my body begins. But he has a lower tolerance and capacity for proprioceptive input. So for him, if we have two kids and I love to wear our kids when they were babies in a carrier, or if we’re going on a hike, I want them on my body. For him, that drains his body. He only needs a little bit of that proprioceptive input, and then he’s like, I’m good. And if you do too much of it, it’s draining for him. So when we understand where we’re falling on sensitive-to-seeking, it lets us know what type of movement is going to be regulating for us, and how much of it, and how often we’re going to need it.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have one more sense that’s really key here. That’s called our neuroception. Neuroception I call our spidey sense. This is the one where, you know, if you walk into a room and people have been in conflict or arguing and they’re not anymore, but you can feel it — that energy and tension in the space — that is your neuroception at work. It’s like, oh, something’s off here. Or if you say, “Hey, how are you doing today?” and I’m like, “Oh, I’m fine, how are you?” — I said the same words, but my tone, my body language, my facial expression all communicate to your neuroception, oh, something’s off with her. Even though she said she’s fine, she’s not really fine. That’s your neuroception.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Our neuroceptive humans are so aware of how other people feel, they can fall into patterns of codependency, because they need the other person to be regulated in order for them to get regulated. Because they’re so hyper-aware of the energy of the space, they’re often very empathetic humans. The contagious energy of a space is so contagious for them, and they have to do a lot of work usually to regulate when somebody else is dysregulated.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Folks who aren’t as sensitive to this might notice it — like, oh yeah, I heard that tone of voice, I can tell she’s not fine — but they’re not then sitting with it of like, what can I do? How do I fix it? How do I make it feel better? Can I be calm when they are not calm around me?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: This one really changes with trauma. Most of our senses, for the most part, stay the same from when we’re born through our life. They largely stay the same, with the exception of your vestibular sense, which shifts with age. And then our neuroception changes with social experience and trauma.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is fascinating. I had never really thought of these before as being dimensions of perception and understanding, and that people have differences in these, and that it’s important to know what yours are, but also those of other people. If you are not fully aware of your own sensitivity or tendency to seek — much less that of your partner, your kid, your mom, your boss — take us into what happens with that.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We’ll start with ourselves. I found myself being like, oh my gosh, I’m just a bad mom. I watch these other humans who are having a kid climbing on them and talking to them while they’re having a conversation, and they’re still kind to the kid climbing on them. In that moment I want to throw up. I’m screaming inside. I don’t want my kid climbing on me and in my face talking to me when I’m having another conversation. When you pull back and understand that I am a sound-sensitive human — for me, hearing “mom, mom, mom, come watch us” is like conflicting sounds at one time, and it makes my skin crawl. And I can’t fathom a world in which that isn’t annoying to somebody.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When you understand what drains you and what recharges you, it gives you compassion, and it gives you a toolbox to work with — how do I set myself up for success throughout the day for regulation? I know there are going to be parts of the day where I’m going to hear conflicting sounds that are out of my control. I’m going to a conference at work, or I’m going out to dinner at a restaurant where there’s going to be a bunch of noise around me that’s going to drain my battery. What am I doing to recharge before I walk into that restaurant, or throughout the day at the conference? And what you do to recharge depends on what you are seeking or how you tune out those sensitivities.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: So self-care is so unique to the individual, because how you take care of yourself is about how your unique nervous system works. When you can learn how your system works and how to take care of you, then you can start to see another’s around you. Oh, they’re not just trying to annoy you by walking by that pile of laundry on the stairs, or the clutter on the counter. Their brain is not visually sensitive. They don’t notice that pile in the way that you do.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: If you’re wondering how to figure yours out — we have a free tool for you. Go to seedquiz.com. It’s totally free. You can take it as many times as you want. There’s an adult category where you can take it for yourself, partners can take it, and you can take it with kids as well.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I might actually start doing this with the couples I work with. Even as we’re talking, thinking about my own life — I probably have the volume turned down on a lot of these compared to my husband, who is ultra-sensitive. The one thing I have that is really turned up is that neuro one.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: That’s often true of a therapist.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: As I reflect, I have done a lot of work around this. I can say that when I was younger, I would feel the way that other people felt, and that made it even hard to be around people sometimes. It’s almost a tuning fork — you’re just picking up everything. I think as I’ve gotten older, it’s probably more recognition. But this could lead to frustrations in relationships when people don’t even know that there are these sensitivities and abilities, and feel surprised or frustrated when there’s this mismatch or conflict. Is that what you see in your work?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: A hundred percent. And the sensory mismatches are tough. Finding where those mismatches are — like, “how do you not see this?” — is so common, because your brain only knows the way that it sees things. And my son the other day told me…
Alyssa Blask Campbell: …that a sound is the worst sound in the world — and it was Velcro. And I was like, oh, you don’t like the sound of Velcro? And he said, nobody likes the sound of Velcro. And I was like, oh, this is one of those where you really don’t like it, and it feels uncomfortable for your body, and I don’t mind the sound of Velcro. It makes your body feel uncomfortable.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: He’s almost five, and we talk about this all the time — how we can believe somebody else’s truth. That’s a huge part of this work. My experience of this is different, and their experience of this is different, and both of ours are true to us. And that is so crucial.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: With neuroception, I want to be clear it’s not always codependency. We look at it on a negative-two-to-plus-two scale — negative two being the most sensitive, plus two being the highest seeking. At a negative two for neuroception, you just have a higher tendency for codependency, because you’re hyper-aware of how humans feel. When we see this in kids, the feeling of being left out, or is somebody making fun of me, really starts to come into play in elementary school, especially for our kids who are neuroceptive-sensitive. And if you pair it with interoceptive sensitivities — bless those humans, because they’re aware of how everyone else feels and they feel things big.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I could also see how in kids or younger people — and I see this in a lot of my work — there can be efforts to say, “I need other people to feel or be a certain way so that I can feel okay.” I could see how, particularly if there isn’t a lot of awareness or individuation, you can have those codependent dynamics. So fascinating.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Thank you for talking us through these things, and how we can get visibility into what ours are. But also, not trying to change this, but rather honor it, and then practice self-care strategies to minimize that jangly, overstimulated activation. Or the opposite — take us into what “under-stimulated” looks like.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: I’ll give you an example of someone on our team who is the highest-seeking human that I know. She was actually just at my desk before I recorded — she’s got two different types of putty at the desk. I was like, hilarious that you moved into my desk for an hour and a half and you brought two types of putty, because she needs to touch and squeeze. She said, well, they feel slightly different. She’s often chewing something or chewing gum. She has background music playing a lot. We were both pregnant at the same time, and we would be chatting at night — our other kid would be in bed and I’m on the couch ready to binge-watch a show. She’s jumping on a Peloton bike, going for a ride. She needs a lot of movement and input in order to feel calm and regulated.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: This can be a superpower. She can take a lot of stimuli. It takes a lot before she’s overstimulated. She’s like, give it all to me. Crying kids, I can handle it. We’re shifting and going to this family party and then this birthday party — she’s like, let’s go. That energizes her. The idea of sitting still and being just, we’re going to have a slow morning and just be, can be really hard for her.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we launched Big Kids, a lot of our team came to New York City for the press and book launch. We’d get up in the morning, and she’d surface with coffee for everyone and say, “Oh my gosh, I went for a run. Don’t you just love the smells of New York City?” And I was like, that’s not a sentence anyone has ever said, ever. For her, she’s always looking for stimuli, and her capacity for it is high. When we look at this in kids, it’s the kid who can’t sit still at school, or is bouncing off the walls, or can’t stop talking to you or touching you and climbing — nonstop moving and stimuli. They are high-seeking, they have a high capacity for it. So they can be under-stimulated, and then they can’t sit still, they’re fidgety, their brain can’t focus.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: So look at it as capacity. We have a battery. For me, what recharges my battery is going to be different than hers. My husband sounds more like your husband. He would be considered sensory-sensitive. He has more sensitivities than he does things he’s seeking. For him, regulation really comes in the form of, what are the couple things I’m seeking? I’ve got to make sure I build those in. But really, how do I reduce stimuli? When he’s at work, he’s going to pop in AirPods and listen to something so that he’s in control of the sound, and not hearing everything around him that’s going to drain him. Or when we’re at the dinner table and my kids want to climb into somebody’s lap to eat, they know they’re coming to my lap, because he will get touched-out. And that’s just going to decrease his capacity for parenting the rest of the evening.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: One thing that’s coming up for me is the idea that there are different flavors of being neurotypical. I think there’s not as much conversation in our culture, certainly, as things like autism spectrum disorders or ADHD. Have you come across any of those ideas in your work?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Most of our work primarily is with occupational therapists and the academic system itself. One thing we see is that sometimes it can present as high seeking, where this person is doing riskier behaviors or can’t stop moving — and they’re actually in a dysregulated brain because they’re overstimulated. We see this with folks who are really sensory-sensitive; that volume is turned up in the sensitivity scale, and they get so flooded and overwhelmed so fast, their nervous system reaction is more along the fight-mode side. Then they turn to, okay, how can I regulate? And they’re in a dysregulated state doing that.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: That is a different profile and presentation than the person I was describing earlier, who just needs a lot of input and movement, and is operating from a regulated state in that movement and high sensory-seeking tendencies. That’s regulating for her. Versus, oh, I’m sensory-sensitive and I’m dysregulated and I’m just trying to figure out how to come back from that. And so my brain or body is spinning or climbing or jumping off things to try and feel regulated, when really what I need is a reduction in stimuli.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Also, when we’re looking at neurodivergent, I have an autistic child and a neurotypical child. One thing that’s so key is that within these labels, we know it’s also not one-size-fits-all. In schools we use the seed-quiz tool. There’s a paid version that we use with schools; it’ll auto-generate, “These are the types of seating that’s right for this child, or these are certain accommodations for this child,” for everybody, not just somebody who has a diagnosis. We’ll see, maybe we’ve got two kids in a class who have an ADHD diagnosis and they have very different nervous systems. What they need for accommodations is not just flexible seating or the same seating — it’s, oh, this kid is seeking this type of stuff but is sensitive to those. And this kid has the opposite. On the outside they might look like the same presentation, but how their nervous system is getting there is different.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I am just feeling so deeply appreciative for this whole conversation. Your work opens up this entirely other spectrum of assessment and nuance and understanding of kids, but also adults, and the interaction between the two. This is really important.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Right now I’m thinking of substance use disorders or even process addictions in adults, and how many of those behaviors are often designed to either soothe a nervous system, like drinking alcohol, or change consciousness in such a way that it might block some things — cannabis use disorders, but even process addictions, habits that could almost be classified as numbing behaviors: procrastination, watching too much TV. Is there a relationship between what you’re describing around sensitivities versus seeking, and the patterns adults or adolescents can fall into?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Oh yeah. We talk a lot about this in both of my parenting books, and it was part of our research. I co-created, with a colleague, the Collaborative Emotion Processing method, and we researched it across the US in partnership with a university in the Boston area. One of the things we looked at was coping mechanisms versus coping strategies.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Coping mechanisms are what you were talking about. We consider them like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock. We are just pressing snooze on our experience or emotions. This could look like, oh man, I’ve had a hard day, I’m feeling dysregulated, I’ve got a bunch of feelings — I’m mad, I’m frustrated, I’m overwhelmed. It results in dysregulation in the nervous system: adrenaline or cortisol is being pumped from your adrenal gland, shuts down your prefrontal cortex, kicks on that amygdala, our reactive primal brain. When we want to stop feeling that hard thing, we’ve got two choices. We can either pump the brakes on the production of adrenaline and cortisol and start to produce serotonin, which regulates our nervous system and has a pretty long-lasting effect — and sometimes in conjunction with serotonin will produce oxytocin, that feel-good love hormone. Or we can keep that adrenaline and cortisol going in the background, and we can pop dopamine on top of it. The dopamine masks the adrenaline and cortisol. It feels good pretty immediately. Then once that dopamine starts to wear off, you’re going to feel the adrenaline and cortisol again. And you’re going to need more dopamine to keep feeling good.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Coping mechanisms do the masking — drinking, scrolling, obsessively cleaning, exercising, eating. There’s a bunch we list out that have the same effect. It’s all masking of that feeling. My favorite coping mechanism is Facebook Marketplace. I’m like, is it still available? I don’t even need the thing. I’m actually a very annoying person on Facebook Marketplace, because everyone’s like, “Yeah, this is available, do you want it?” And I’m like, oh, I don’t, I just needed to say, “Is it still available?” and get that dopamine hit. So we all have these, and we’re all going to turn to them. Our goal isn’t no coping mechanisms.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When I was a teacher, the first two weeks of school were always exhausting. I remember a time pre-kids where my husband was working full-time and doing his master’s full-time. I came home from school and dinner was made, and I sat down and was eating, and he was like, hey, listen, I have some schoolwork to do tonight. Can you just do the dishes and clean up after dinner? And I just started sobbing, because my battery was empty. I had nothing left to give. Of course I know how to do the dishes. Of course I’m capable of doing that. But when I have nothing left to give, every task feels harder and overwhelming. What I really wanted to do was coping-mechanism my way through the rest of the night. I wanted to lay in bed and watch Grey’s Anatomy and eat Milk Duds, and ignore the fact that I’m feeling overwhelmed right now, and then wake up and try again tomorrow.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Sometimes the goal isn’t that we have no coping mechanisms. The goal is that we know it’s temporary. If we are only relying on coping mechanisms, we’re not processing emotions, and we’re going to keep needing them for that to be sustainable. What happens with dopamine is you need more and more to continue to feel the same level of good. Your tolerance increases.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: The flip side is then turning to our coping strategies. These are sensory-rich activities — for sensory seekers, movement, or the putty, or talking to somebody to connect. For sensory-sensitive humans, it can be a quiet walk, drawing, coloring, journaling, meditating. It’s that decrease in stimuli that starts to slow down. When you tap into activities unique to your nervous system, it pumps the brakes on the adrenaline and cortisol, produces serotonin and/or oxytocin, and calms the body — regulates the nervous system for a longer-lasting effect. But it takes longer to feel the immediate effects, because you’re hitting stop on adrenaline and cortisol, but you’ve still got it flowing through your body. It’s almost like when you’re upset and you ask for a hug — right away, when somebody starts hugging you, you don’t feel better yet. When you stay in that hug and you have that cry, or you get to that feeling, that is where the adrenaline and cortisol has really pumped its brakes and we’ve got the serotonin and oxytocin taking over. It takes longer to feel that than it does to pull out my phone and go on Facebook Marketplace.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is so important — this new dimension of self-awareness. Certainly for me, a lot of it is non-conscious. We’re just doing it, but we’re not really aware of it. When you can bring it into awareness, you can have more control over the ability to soothe yourself in healthy ways. That turns into the difference between having a glass of wine versus doing something that’s more adaptive. And it can escalate — the sex-addict-on-a-motorcycle side versus somebody who has more command over this in an intentional way. That can prevent so many problems.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: It’s huge, and you can pair them. The latest research around ADHD and dopamine shows that folks who have ADHD often have lower dopamine stores. What we know is that if we pair a dopaminergic activity — one of those coping mechanisms — with a coping strategy, it can be hugely helpful. So I might be having a glass of wine while I’m talking to a friend. Or I’ll gamify something — like, okay, I don’t think I can complete this run five seconds faster than my last run. Now I’m tapping into the dopamine from the gamification, but I’m getting that movement in that’s going to regulate for the longer term. Dopamine paired with serotonin can be really helpful. It doesn’t have to be, “oh, I have to sit in this discomfort the whole time and color in my coloring book.”
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We see this with kids a lot. I was in a first-grade classroom where a teacher said, “All right, everybody, you can hop like a frog or slither like a snake over to your spot on the rug — we’re getting ready for math.” And this kid was just sitting at his desk, like, “Oh, no, no thank you. I’m a no for math.” I popped over to him and said, “I don’t think that you could hop from your desk to the spot on the rug in six hops. There’s no way you can do it.” He was like, “I can.” And I was like, “I don’t believe it.” And he was like, “I’m not doing it.” And I was like, “Great, you don’t have to. I don’t think you can.” Then he was like, “No, I can.” So he’s hopping over. He’s getting the movement in, but he’s also getting that dopamine from the gamification.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Alyssa, thank you so much. This has been so rich, so interesting. There is so much more — we haven’t even talked about the intersection between parents and kids and how these things come into play. Tell us where people can go to learn more about your work.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: People often say, for our work, they come for the kids and stay for themselves. If you are a parent, my first book — a New York Times bestseller, Tiny Humans, Big Emotions — is for birth to age six or seven. And then Big Kids, Bigger Feelings, a national bestseller published last year, is for the elementary age range, five- to twelve-year-olds, and for anyone who’s got a brain and a body. The best place to find us is at our website, seedandsew.org. We have a podcast, Voices of Your Village, and Instagram @seed.and.sew. That’s the mothership. If you’re ever looking for something, let us know and we’ll help you find it.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Amazing. Climb aboard the mothership — I love it. Alyssa, it has been such a joy to connect with you today. Stay in touch as you have new things coming down the pipeline. I would be delighted to reconnect.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Thank you. You’re the bomb. This is so lovely.
What to take with you
Reactivity is a nervous-system event, not a character flaw.
When you flood or shut down, the thinking part of your brain has gone offline and the protective part has taken over. Willpower is not the lever.
You have nine senses, and the four you were never taught run your emotional life.
Interoception, the vestibular sense, proprioception, and neuroception shape how you feel and react far more than most people realize.
Everyone sits somewhere on a sensitive-to-seeking spectrum.
What drains you might recharge your partner, which is why self-care is not one-size-fits-all.
Most relationship friction is a sensory mismatch, not thoughtlessness.
The fix starts with believing that your partner’s very different experience is as real as yours.
Coping mechanisms mask a feeling; coping strategies regulate it.
A scroll or a shopping tab buys a quick hit. Sensory-rich strategies actually calm the nervous system, and you can pair the two.
Knowing this is the easy part. Doing it in a real moment is the work.
That gap is exactly what coaching and counseling are for.
Nervous System Regulation: How to Calm Your Reactivity and Reconnect
Here is a scene you might know a little too well. You are trying to talk to your partner about something that actually matters, and within about ninety seconds it has gone sideways. Maybe you are the one who gets flooded, heart pounding, words coming out sharper than you meant them. Maybe you are the one who watches your partner go quiet and far away, and you cannot for the life of you figure out where they went. Either way, you both started this wanting to feel closer, and somehow you are further apart than when you began.
If that is you, I want you to know two things right away. You are not broken, and neither is your relationship. And there is a real, specific reason this keeps happening, with a name: nervous system regulation. Most of the reactivity and the shutting down that wrecks our most important conversations is not a willpower problem or a sign that you picked the wrong person. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do, a little too well. Learning how yours works, and how your partner’s works, is often the missing piece in the couples counseling I do every week, and it is what we are going to walk through together here.
I recorded a conversation this week with Alyssa Blask Campbell, and I want to be honest about how I am going to use it. Alyssa is brilliant, and she is going to hand you language for what happens inside you that you have probably never had before. But language is not the same thing as change. You can understand your nervous system beautifully and still land in the exact same fight next Tuesday at nine at night, because reading an article and rewiring a thirty-year-old pattern in the heat of a real moment are two completely different projects. That gap, between knowing and doing, is the whole reason my team at Growing Self exists. Everything that follows is real and it is going to help. And when you are ready to actually do it differently, with the actual person, in your actual living room, that part is the work we do with people every single day.
Why do I get so reactive and overstimulated with my partner?
The short version is that when your nervous system gets overloaded, the thinking part of your brain goes offline and the reactive part takes the wheel. You are not choosing to snap. Your body has flipped a switch it was built to flip, and it does not care that the threat is a conversation about the dishes.
Here is what is happening under the hood. When your system reads danger, real or not, your adrenal glands pump adrenaline and cortisol. That quiets the prefrontal cortex, the calm and rational problem-solving part of you, and hands control to the amygdala, the older, faster, more primal part. Researchers who study couples call the flooded version of this emotional flooding, and they can measure it in the body: heart rate climbs, and access to reason drops. Once you are there, you are not really having a conversation anymore. You are having a stress response at each other.
I will use my own marriage as the example, because it is the clearest one I have. On most of these senses, I run what Alyssa would call turned down. My husband runs turned up. He physically feels things to a bigger degree than I do. He gets hangry in a way I never quite do, and he cannot set foot on a boat without feeling like he is dying. For years I could file some of that under quirks. What this conversation gave me was the recognition that these are not quirks. They are a nervous system with the volume up, and when his battery drains, his capacity for patience and problem-solving drains right along with it. That is the difference between reacting and responding, and it is almost never about willpower.
If you want the practical version of catching yourself before the flood takes over, I broke down reacting versus responding in its own piece that pairs well with this episode.
Most of the couples I see have been having some version of the same fight for years, and they have been blaming each other’s character for it the whole time. When they finally see it as two nervous systems colliding, the temperature in the room changes. That shift is genuinely hard to make on your own, mid-fight, which is exactly what the work of couples counseling is for.
What are the nine senses, and how do they affect my emotions?
You have nine senses, not five, and the four you were probably never taught are the ones quietly running your emotional life. Beyond sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, you have interoception, the vestibular sense, proprioception, and neuroception.
Interoception is your sense of what is happening inside your body: whether you are hungry, tired, needing the bathroom, or whether your heart is racing. People with sensitive interoception feel their feelings big. When they feel something, they do not feel it a little. That can make shame and guilt especially loud, and it can make a simple apology feel enormous. It is also why one partner is starving and cranky right on schedule while the other has to put eating on a calendar because they genuinely do not notice hunger until it is an emergency.
The vestibular sense lives in your inner ear and governs balance and movement. If yours is sensitive, boats and roller coasters and swivel chairs are a no. If you are a seeker, you gravitate to the office chair that spins because the motion feels good and recharges you. Proprioception tells you where your body ends and the world begins. Low awareness there means you are the person with mystery bruises from the corner of a bed that has not moved in years, and you probably need movement to focus and settle.
Then there is neuroception, and it deserves its own section. All of this, by the way, is emotional intelligence in the most literal sense: knowing what is happening in your own body and reading what is happening in someone else’s. If the term is new to you, here is a primer on what emotional intelligence actually is.
What is neuroception, and why do I feel everyone else’s emotions?
Neuroception is your nervous system’s threat-and-safety radar, the spidey sense that tells you something is off in a room before a single word is said. If yours runs high, you absorb other people’s emotional states, which is both a gift and genuinely exhausting.
This is the sense at work when you walk into a space where people were just arguing, and even though everyone is smiling now, you can feel the tension. It is also what picks up the gap between the words “I’m fine” and the tone that says otherwise. People whose neuroception is turned up are often deeply empathetic, and they can slide into codependent patterns, because they cannot fully settle until the people around them have settled. Unlike most of the senses, which stay fairly stable across your life, neuroception shifts with social experience and with trauma.
This is the one sense of mine that is turned way up. When I was younger, I would feel what other people felt so strongly that being around people could be hard, like being a tuning fork for the whole room. Over the years I have done a lot of work to move from absorbing it to simply recognizing it. Understanding your attachment style can add another useful layer here, because how you learned to connect early on shapes how your radar behaves now.
If you are the one who cannot relax until everybody else in the house has relaxed, you are not too much and you are not doing it wrong. Our coaches work with this pattern constantly, and a lot of the work is simply learning where you end and the other person begins.
Why do my partner and I react so differently to the same thing?
Because you have different nervous systems, and neither one is the correct one. The sound that grates on you, the swivel chair, the pile of laundry on the stairs that you cannot stop seeing and your partner genuinely does not register: those are not character differences. They are sensory differences.
Alyssa maps each sense on a scale from negative two, most sensitive, to positive two, most seeking. Once you can locate yourself and your partner, the maddening question, how do you not even notice that, stops being an accusation and starts being information. Her son once announced that Velcro is the worst sound in the world, and added, with total confidence, that nobody likes the sound of Velcro. That is all of us. Your brain only knows the way your brain experiences the world, so it assumes everyone else is having the same experience and is just being difficult about it.
The move that changes everything is what Alyssa calls believing someone else’s truth. Your experience is real, and their very different experience is equally real, and both can be true at the same time. That is the heart of good communication in relationships, and it is what turns a mismatch into a conversation instead of a standoff. It matters most in the moments when your partner gets upset in a way that does not make sense to you, or goes silent and withdraws.
This is the exact work I do with couples: not deciding who is right about the laundry, but helping two people genuinely take in that the other person’s world feels different from the inside. It is hard to do that clearly from inside your own reaction, which is where having someone in the room with you earns its keep.
How do I figure out my sensory profile and build self-care that fits my nervous system?
Stop copying other people’s self-care. The routine that actually calms you depends on whether each of your senses is seeking input or trying to avoid it, and what recharges your battery might flatten your partner’s completely.
Think of it as a battery. Certain things drain yours and certain things recharge it, and the list is specific to you. If you are sound-sensitive, a loud restaurant or a noisy conference is a withdrawal, so the recharge might be a quiet walk or a few minutes alone with your lunch. If you are a seeker, sitting still is the drain, and the recharge is movement, a run, something to fidget with, background music you control. There is no universal checklist here, which is genuinely freeing once it lands. If you want a starting framework, here is my take on self-care that actually works, and if you are running on empty right now, this one on what to do when you feel overwhelmed is a good next click.
Alyssa also built a free sensory quiz that maps where you fall on each sense, and there is a version for adults, for partners, and for kids. I wrote it down mid-recording, because I am planning to start using it with the couples I work with. You can find it linked in the resources below.
My free training walks you through the specific communication moves that turn a nervous-system mismatch into an actual conversation. Language you can use tonight, no diagnosis required.
Get the Free Training →When couples map their profiles together, the conversation stops being a referendum on who cares more and becomes a practical question of how to set the two of you up for success. That is the kind of concrete, this-week work coaching is built for.
What’s the difference between a coping mechanism and a coping strategy?
A coping mechanism masks a hard feeling with a quick hit of dopamine. A coping strategy actually regulates your nervous system. Both have a place, but only one of them changes anything.
Alyssa compares a coping mechanism to hitting snooze on an alarm. You have had a hard day, the stress chemistry is running, and instead of processing it, you press snooze: you scroll, you clean the same counter for the fourth time, you open a shopping tab. My personal favorite, and hers, is checking whether the thing on Facebook Marketplace is still available when you do not even want the thing. It feels good almost immediately, because the dopamine masks the adrenaline and cortisol underneath. Then it wears off, the stress is still there, and you need a little more next time. Nobody is above this. The goal is not zero coping mechanisms.
A coping strategy works differently. These are the sensory-rich activities that fit your specific nervous system, movement for a seeker, quiet and reduced input for someone sensitive, and they pump the brakes on the stress chemistry and let your body produce serotonin and oxytocin instead. The catch is that they take longer to feel good, the same way a hug does not fix everything in the first second but does something real if you stay in it. And here is the practical trick: you can pair them. Gamify the run so you get the dopamine and the regulation at once. Alyssa got a reluctant first grader across the room by betting he could not hop there in six hops, which, of course, he then had to prove. That is a coping mechanism and a coping strategy working together, which is honestly how most of us can make the healthy thing actually happen.
The reason this is so hard to do solo is that the moment you most need a strategy is the exact moment your depleted brain reaches for the mechanism. Having someone who knows your patterns, who you can debrief with, is what makes the better choice available when it counts. That is a lot of what coaching with our team looks like in practice.
Why Reading This Article Probably Isn’t Enough
I want to be honest with you about something, because you deserve it. Everything above is real, and people’s lives genuinely change when they start living it. But I would be doing you a disservice if I let you close this article believing that reading it was the work.
Here is what almost always happens. You read something like this. Something clicks. You feel a little hopeful, and you make a quiet note to try the new approach next time. Then next time arrives, your nervous system does the thing it has done for thirty years, and you are back in the same fight, wondering why nothing changed. You are not unmotivated and you are not broken. You are trying to override a whole pattern, by yourself, in the exact moment that pattern is loudest. That is the hardest possible time to do anything new, and it is nearly impossible to do alone.
What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns and your partner’s, who can help you debrief after a hard night and recalibrate before the next one. That is what working with a coach or therapist on my team really is. Not lectures, not generic advice, a real, ongoing relationship with someone paying attention to your life. If something here landed somewhere specific, that is the signal to say it out loud to a real person. We do free first conversations for exactly this, and you can schedule a free consultation with no pressure and no commitment.
Where to Start
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: the frustrating differences between you and the people you love are usually two nervous systems, not two characters. That reframe alone can lower the temperature on a fight you have been having for years.
When you are ready to do more than reframe it, that is where we come in. Whether you end up working with one of our senior clinicians or with a therapist completing advanced coaching training on our team, the first step is the same free consultation, and there are options at more than one price point so it can fit real life. You do not have to be in crisis to reach out. That first conversation is exactly where you figure out whether this is the right kind of help for what you are carrying.
xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
P.S. If you want to map your own wiring first, Alyssa’s free sensory quiz is in the resources below, and my free communication training is linked above. Start wherever feels least overwhelming. That is the whole point.
About this episode’s experts
Alyssa Blask Campbell
Alyssa Blask Campbell is the founder and CEO of Seed & Sew and an expert in emotional development for both children and adults. She holds a master’s in early childhood education and co-created the Collaborative Emotion Processing method through research conducted in partnership with a Boston-area university. She is the author of two bestselling books: Tiny Humans, Big Emotions (a New York Times bestseller) and Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. What makes her framework land is that it grew out of child development and classrooms, and yet maps almost perfectly onto adult relationships. As she puts it, people come for the kids and stay for themselves. Turns out we all have nervous systems, and most of us were never handed the manual. Her free Sensory Profile Quiz, built with occupational therapists, is a genuinely useful place to start understanding your own wiring and your partner’s.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894
- Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.
- Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.2.221
- Blask Campbell, A. (2022). Tiny Humans, Big Emotions. Harper Horizon.
- Blask Campbell, A. (2025). Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. Harper Horizon.
Nervous system regulation, answered
Nervous system regulation is your capacity to move your body out of a stress response and back into a calm, connected state where you can think and communicate clearly. It is less about willpower and more about understanding what overloads your specific system and what settles it.
Sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, plus four that are less known: interoception (sensing your internal state), the vestibular sense (balance and movement), proprioception (your body’s position in space), and neuroception (reading safety and threat in your environment and other people).
Interoception is your ability to sense what is happening inside your body, such as hunger, fatigue, a racing heart, or a rising emotion. People with sensitive interoception tend to feel emotions intensely.
Neuroception is your nervous system’s automatic read on whether a person or place is safe or threatening. If yours is highly sensitive, you pick up on other people’s emotional states quickly and can be prone to codependent patterns.
Because your nervous system can flood before your thinking brain catches up. Stress chemistry quiets your rational brain and activates your reactive brain, so you respond from protection rather than choice.
Because you have different sensory profiles. What overwhelms one nervous system can be neutral or even pleasant to another, so the same sound, chair, or mess lands completely differently for each of you.
Use coping strategies matched to your profile: movement and input if you are a seeker, reduced stimulation and quiet if you are sensitive. These take longer to work than a quick distraction but regulate your system for longer.
A coping mechanism, like scrolling or shopping, masks a feeling with a fast dopamine hit that wears off. A coping strategy, like matched sensory activity, actually regulates your nervous system by lowering stress chemistry and raising serotonin and oxytocin.
Yes. Because self-care works by regulating your particular nervous system, the right routine depends on your sensory profile. A generic checklist can miss you entirely.
Often, yes. Seeing conflict as a sensory mismatch rather than a character flaw lowers defensiveness and opens real conversation. Working with a counselor or coach helps you turn that insight into changed behavior.
