My Favorite Daily Habit for Releasing Stress and Regulating Your Nervous System
If I could recommend one simple health habit to do regularly, this would be near the top of the list.
I call it:
The Dump and Rewire.
It is exactly what it sounds like.
You get the stress and emotional upset out of your system instead of letting it build.
Then you work with the brain and nervous system so you are less likely to have the same intense reaction the next time the trigger shows up.
That second part is important.
Because I don't just want you to calm down for twenty minutes.
I want the pattern itself to change.
I Learned This the Hard Way
For a long time, I was extremely good at emotional suppression.
If something upset me, I pushed it down.
I distracted myself.
I told myself it wasn't a big deal.
I got on with the day.
And, to be fair, that can look functional from the outside.
You keep working.
Keep parenting.
Keep handling everything.
Keep going.
But internally, the stress and emotion does not disappear just because you stopped acknowledging it.
Underneath, it quietly undermines your nervous system regulation and your health.
I eventually had to confront how much that pattern was affecting me.
And I see the same thing all the time in people with chronic health issues.
Suppressed Stress Tends to Come Out Somewhere
When you repeatedly push stress and emotion down, it often leaks out in other ways because it dysregulates your nervous system.
You may become:
Irritable
Distracted
Withdrawn
Reactive with people you care about
More symptomatic
Unable to sleep
More drawn to food, alcohol, scrolling, or other numbing behaviors
Tense in your body
More prone to headaches or pain
More prone to burnout
Sometimes it builds quietly for days.
Then one small thing happens and suddenly you explode.
It looks like you're reacting to the thing that just happened.
Really, you may be reacting to the last ten things you never dealt with.
Stress Is Not Only Emotional
This matters from a health perspective too.
Stress responses change physiology in every single organ of the body.
Through the autonomic nervous system stress and emotional upset can affect sleep, digestion, muscle tension, pain, blood pressure, immune function, and other systems throughout the body.
That does not mean every symptom is caused by stress.
And it does not mean you should stop looking for physical contributors.
But it does mean that chronic, unresolved stress and emotional baggage can become one more burden on a body that is already struggling to stay balanced.
For someone with chronic illness, that can matter a lot.
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Expressing Emotion Is Not the Same as Releasing It
This is an important distinction.
People sometimes hear, “Don't suppress your emotions,” and assume the solution is simply to express everything.
Talk about it.
Vent.
Journal for hours.
Tell the story again and again.
That may help sometimes.
But expression by itself does not always resolve the underlying emotional response.
You can tell the same story fifty times and still feel just as angry every time you tell it.
You can journal about the same resentment every night and wake up with the same resentment the next morning.
The goal is not just:
Get it out.
The goal is:
Acknowledge it, express it, and then help the nervous system stop carrying it forward.
That is why my process has two parts.
Step 1: Dump It
The first step is honest expression.
For me, journaling is one of the easiest ways to do this because it forces you to slow down and actually identify what is going on internally.
But there is a specific way I recommend doing it.
Don't turn it into a detailed play-by-play.
Not:
Then he said this, and then I said that, and then he did this, and then I couldn't believe he said that...
The story is not the most important part.
The question is:
How do you actually feel?
Angry?
Resentful?
Scared?
Hurt?
Jealous?
Ashamed?
Frustrated?
Helpless?
Overwhelmed?
Lonely?
Disappointed?
Write that.
Be Unfiltered
This is where a lot of people get stuck.
They only allow themselves to acknowledge emotions they think are reasonable.
Maybe your partner is injured and cannot help around the house.
You understand that.
You love them.
And some part of you is still resentful because now everything falls on you.
Then another part of you says:
That's horrible. I shouldn't feel resentful. They can't help it.
So you suppress the resentment.
But deciding an emotion is unacceptable does not make it disappear.
Often, those are the emotions we most need to acknowledge because we have been working so hard not to feel them.
Your private journal is not a courtroom where you’re going to be judged unless YOU make it one. Stop it!
You are simply telling the truth about what is happening inside you.
Do you remember how unfiltered a child’s emotions are when they’re having a tantrum?
That’s how unfiltered I want you to be with yourself. Use the cuss words!
Acknowledge the feelings that are “inappropriate”. Be childish about it!
Children express easily, and get over things easily. I think those two things are connected.
If Identifying Feelings Is Hard, That’s Normal
If you have spent years suppressing emotion, this may feel surprisingly difficult.
You may know that you're “upset” but have no idea what that actually means.
Give yourself time.
Maybe start with:
I'm upset because...
Then ask:
What kind of upset?
Angry?
Afraid?
Sad?
Rejected?
Overwhelmed?
Disappointed?
With practice, emotional awareness usually becomes much easier.
And the better you get at identifying the real emotion, the easier it becomes to work with it.
Don't Spend the Whole Time Writing About Symptoms
This is especially important for people with chronic illness.
If the purpose of the exercise is emotional release, try not to turn the journal entry into another hour of symptom tracking.
You don't need:
My head hurt at 10:00, then my stomach hurt at 11:00, then I got dizzy after lunch...
Instead ask:
How did those symptoms make me feel?
Maybe:
I'm scared this means I'm getting worse.
I'm furious that I'm still dealing with this.
I'm exhausted from having to think about my health all the time.
I'm afraid I'm never going to get my old life back.
That is the emotional material you want to work with.
Step 2: Rewire the Reaction
Once you know what is actually bothering you, the next step is not to leave yourself sitting in it.
This is where I use neural retraining and memory reconsolidation-based tools.
The goal is to help the nervous system move out of the emotional stress response and, when appropriate, begin changing the learned association that created the reaction.
Because much of the way we react emotionally is learned, and we can unlearn it.
This is what I do one-on-one with clients and also teach them to do on their own. I also provide recorded guided processes to follow along with that do this for them.
Many Stress Responses Become Automatic
Take a simple example.
Imagine someone is terrified of snakes.
They see a snake and immediately feel fear.
They did not consciously decide:
I think I'll panic now.
The response happens automatically.
At some point, the brain learned:
Snake = danger.
And now it runs that program whenever the trigger appears.
The same thing can happen in everyday life.
Your boss says a certain phrase.
Your child starts whining.
You open social media.
Your partner gets irritated.
You have a work deadline.
You feel a symptom.
The trigger happens.
Your brain runs the response it has learned.
Sometimes the response is completely appropriate.
Sometimes it is far more intense than the current situation requires.
Those are the patterns worth looking at.
If You Have Dozens of Everyday Triggers, Your Nervous System Never Gets Much of a Break
This is one reason targeted rewiring can be so useful.
Imagine that you have learned stress responses to:
Work deadlines
Conflict
Traffic
Your inbox
Social media
Your children's moods
Physical symptoms
Doctor appointments
Financial uncertainty
Certain family members
Making mistakes
Being late
Feeling out of control
No single trigger has to be catastrophic.
But if your nervous system is getting activated all day long, the cumulative load can be enormous.
So instead of only calming yourself after each trigger, I would rather help you change some of those patterns.
That is how you gradually stop having so many emotional fires to put out.
Regulation Is Helpful. Rewiring Can Go a Step Further.
Yoga can help you calm down.
Meditation can help you calm down.
Breathing exercises can help you calm down.
Going for a walk can help you calm down.
I use and recommend many forms of nervous system regulation.
But usually, those tools primarily change how you feel in the moment.
Then the same trigger happens tomorrow and you have the same reaction again.
With rewiring work,
we can change the association enough today, that tomorrow's reaction is smaller
And eventually:
we get to the point where this no longer triggers you in the same way at all.
That is a different goal. One that actually frees your from the never ending roller coaster of trigger reactions!
The Ultimate Goal Is to Need the Tool Less
This is one of my favorite things about targeted nervous system work.
At the beginning, you may need it constantly.
I did.
When I first began doing this kind of work, I benefited from a daily stress and emotion dump because I was getting triggered so often.
Over time, that changed.
As I rewired more of my own patterns, fewer things produced those intense emotional responses.
Now I typically do this practice about once a week as maintenance.
Life still happens.
New stressors still appear.
I'm still human.
But I no longer need to put out nearly as many fires because fewer things ignite them.
That is the outcome I want for people.
A Simple Example of How Fast a Learned Response Can Change
I once worked briefly with a woman who had been having panic attacks whenever she went into Costco or other crowded places.
Even imagining walking into the store created an intense response.
During a short demonstration, we worked directly with that learned trigger.
Within minutes, she could picture herself walking through Costco without the same panic response.
Then she went to the store and reinforced that sense of safety in the real environment with specific exercises I gave her.
She was able to shop without the panic she had been experiencing.
And on later visits, the same calm response continued automatically.
Not every pattern changes that quickly.
But experiences like this are one reason I became so interested in working directly with learned nervous system responses rather than only managing them after they occur.
Step 3: Destroy the Journal Entry
This is the slightly unusual part.
Once you have used the entry to identify what you are feeling and have worked with the emotional reaction, I recommend getting rid of it.
Shred it.
Tear it up.
Delete it.
Throw it away.
There are two reasons.
First, what you write during an unfiltered emotional dump may not represent what you actually want to communicate to another person.
You can acknowledge:
I'm so angry I never want to speak to this person again.
That does not mean you should send them a screenshot.
Private emotional processing and healthy communication are not the same thing.
Second, I don't want you going back and rereading the rant repeatedly.
The purpose was to identify and release the emotional response.
Continuing to rehearse it will only keep those intense emotions alive….perpetuating the dysregulation.
So the Whole Practice Looks Like This
1. Express
Write honestly about what you are feeling.
Focus more on the emotional experience than the detailed story.
Let yourself acknowledge the “unacceptable” feelings too.
2. Rewire
Use whatever effective nervous system or neural retraining process you have for helping the emotional response shift and, when appropriate, changing the learned trigger pattern underneath it.
3. Release
Destroy the journal entry.
Let it be finished.
That is the Dump and Rewire.
How Often Should You Do It?
That depends on how much stress is accumulating.
If you are in a very dysregulated period and becoming emotionally triggered frequently, you may benefit from doing it daily.
If you are generally regulated but life has simply been intense, once or twice a week may be plenty.
The goal is not to create another rigid health routine.
The goal is to stop letting emotional stress accumulate until your body, your relationships, or your behavior have to express it for you.
Don't Turn This Into Another Self-Care Chore
If you've read my other work, you know I'm not interested in giving you another twenty-step routine that takes over your life.
This practice can be short.
Sometimes ten minutes of honest writing followed by targeted nervous system work is enough.
You do not have to process every microscopic emotion.
You do not have to become obsessed with your nervous system.
The point is simply to notice when something is building and deal with it before it owns the rest of your day.
Emotional Health and Physical Health Are Not Separate
This was one of the hardest things for me to truly accept in my own recovery.
For years, I kept looking for physical explanations.
Another lab.
Another imbalance.
Another supplement.
Another treatment.
And there were legitimate physical things that needed to be addressed.
But I eventually had to acknowledge that chronic stress and emotional suppression were also affecting my health.
I could not keep treating the body while pretending that what was happening in my brain and nervous system didn't matter.
That realization changed the way I care for myself.
And it changed the way I work with people who have complex chronic illness.
You Don't Have to Choose Between Physical Medicine and Emotional Work
You can treat the infection.
Address the mold exposure.
Support digestion.
Work on hormones.
Correct nutritional deficiencies.
Take medication when you need it.
And also ask:
How are stress, trauma, and emotional patterning contributing to my health issues?
Those questions belong in the same conversation.
Because you are one body.
The Best Daily Health Habit May Be the One That Stops Stress From Following You Into Tomorrow
You cannot eliminate stress from your life.
I don't think that is realistic or even necessary.
Life is going to give you things to be frustrated about.
People will disappoint you.
Work will become stressful.
Your kids will have hard days.
You will have hard days.
Sometimes you’ll be stressed and sometimes you’ll get upset because you’re a human being.
The goal is to stop accumulating stress faster than you can recover from it.
A regular practice of acknowledging what you feel, allowing yourself to express it honestly, and then helping your nervous system move through it can change how much of that stress you carry forward.
And over time, targeted rewiring may help you become less reactive to some of those triggers in the first place.
That is why this is still one of my favorite health habits.
Ready to Change the Patterns Creating the Stress?
If you are constantly getting triggered, carrying emotional tension, or noticing that stress seems to spill over into your body, your relationships, or your chronic health symptoms, nervous system work may deserve a bigger place in your recovery.
My approach uses nervous system regulation, brain rewiring, and memory reconsolidation to help you not only feel calmer in the moment, but change some of the learned stress responses that keep getting activated again and again.
When you're ready to spend less of your life managing stress reactions and more of it actually living, explore working with me and schedule a free discovery call.
Today I’m going to teach you one of my favorite self-care practices which I call the Dump & Rewire….which is all about releasing stress and emotional upset so that it doesn’t build up and harm your health. If you want to hear about it in video format, check out the video below. If you want to read the info, the text version is below.
Medical Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding your individual health needs.
