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It was February and another 3 a.m. moment. I laid in the same bed I used to share with my now-separated, soon-to-be ex-husband. In and out of sleep, my eyes would be wet. By morning, there was a puddle on my pillow. All I wanted was rest. All I wanted was to stop feeling this exhausted.
My brain couldn't think of anything else. Whenever idle, I replayed the small moments. A kiss as he left for work. Coffee out and about on a spring day. Pizza and Netflix on a Friday night. Walks as we watched the trees and seasons changed just days before everything changed. These tiny intimacies looped endlessly in my head.
And my first thought was: Something is wrong with me.
That's what dysregulation feels like from the inside. You think you're breaking. You think your mind is malfunctioning. You think the constant loop, the inability to sleep, the way your body has become a stranger to you think all of it is evidence that you're falling apart.
But here's what I learned when my world fell apart: my nervous system wasn't broken. It was protecting me. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
When something overwhelming happens, something you perceived as safe turns into a threat, a shock to the life you thought you had your body doesn't wait for your mind to catch up. It moves. It goes into high alert. Your thoughts race. Your chest tightens. You can't sit still. You can't stop thinking. You replay the same moment over and over like your brain is trying to solve an equation that has no answer.
Or sometimes it's the opposite. Your body goes quiet. Numb. Disconnected. You move through the day on autopilot, and you can't feel anything, even things you know you should feel.
Both feel like you're losing it. Both feel like proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you.
But there's another way to read what's happening.
Your nervous system has a window, like most things in our bodies they have bandwidth. One zone where you feel safe enough to think clearly, to feel your feelings, to respond to what's in front of you. When overwhelm comes, you step outside that window. Your system typically shifts into one of two zones. the racing thoughts, the obsessive replaying, the panic or it shuts down the numbness, the fog, the disconnection.
Neither is a malfunction. Both are your body saying: I am trying to survive this.
In those 3 a.m. moments, my nervous system wasn't broken. It was hyperaroused, it was stuck in high alert, trying to solve the unsolvable, trying to make sense of a man who didn't make sense. It couldn't rest because it was convinced that if I just replayed it enough times, if I just understood the small moments deeply enough, I could rewind. I could fix it. I could make it make sense.
Of course I know this clinically. The neuroscience is clear: when your brain perceives threat, it mobilizes. It loops. It searches for the answer that will keep you safe. That's not weakness. That's intelligence. That's your system working overtime to protect you.
But knowing it clinically and feeling it in your body at 3 a.m. are two different things.
The permission I want to give you is this: when you're dysregulated; when you're a mess, when nothing feels normal, when you can't remember if you ate or what day it is, when your mind won't stop, when your body has become unfamiliar you are not falling apart. You're not broken. You're protecting yourself the only way your nervous system knows how.
And that changes everything.
It means the racing thoughts aren't evidence of weakness. They're evidence that something real happened to you. Your system is responding proportionally to the size of the loss.
It means the puddle on your pillow isn't a sign you're losing it. It's a sign that your nervous system is processing something enormous, and it's doing the work even when you're asleep.
It means you can stop fighting what's happening and start understanding it. And understanding it is half the work of coming back to yourself.
So when you wake up in dysregulation, when your mind won't stop, when your body feels like it's betraying you pause for a moment. And ask: What is my nervous system trying to protect me from right now? What is it trying to solve?
You might not have the answer yet. But asking the question changes how you relate to what's happening. Something is not wrong with you. Your system is protecting you. And you can learn to work with it.
That's not a small shift.
What does your dysregulation look like right now? And what would change if you treated it not as a sign of weakness, but as evidence that you're strong enough to be affected by something real?
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