Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Regulated Nervous System Fixes Everything
A regulated nervous system is the hidden key that unlocks transformative change in virtually every area of life. When your body's threat detection system operates optimally, you gain the remarkable ability to feel difficult emotions without becoming them. You develop that crucial pause...the space between stimulus and response...where wisdom enters and choices expand. Rather than being hijacked by anger, fear, sadness, or shame, you learn to alchemize these powerful energies into purposeful action.
Throughout this episode, we explore how dysregulation manifests as a biased narrator of your life, interpreting neutral situations through lenses of suspicion and hypervigilance. We dispel the myth that regulation means becoming emotionless or perpetually peaceful. Instead, you'll discover how regulation offers creative power over emotions—transforming anger into boundaries, jealousy into motivation, shame into insight, and fear into focus. The difference becomes clear: without regulation, emotions use you; with regulation, you use emotions.
Most powerfully, we address how regulation changes your relationship with past trauma. By understanding that trauma (what happened) and dysregulation (how your body responded) are separate entities, you gain the ability to approach healing with steadier hands and calmer breath. This distinction alone may revolutionize your healing journey.
Ready to transform reactions into wisdom and survival into thriving? Listen now to discover practical insights about nervous system regulation that could genuinely fix everything—not by making the world easier, but by making you better equipped to navigate it.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Regulate your nervous system and that will fix everything. This is a big promise for today's podcast, but it is so important and it sounds rather dramatic like, okay, calm down, surely can't fix everything, but it actually can fix everything, because a dysregulated nervous system is the hidden root of most of your chaos. It's not your husband, it's not your children. It's not your husband, it's not your children, it's not your boss, it's not your past, it's not even your trauma. It's the state your body is stuck in while trying to make decisions, while trying to deal with all of these things, while trying to set boundaries, while trying to love people more, even while trying to answer emails. Survive injustice. Chase your goals, everything from the minute details of your life to the bigger, visionary goals.
Speaker 1:First, let's define a nervous system. Your nervous system is far more than just a collection of nerves. It's actually a convergence of embodied thinking and mindful embodiment, top-down and bottom-up approach and vice versa. It's where raw sensation meets cognition, body sensations meets thinking. Imagine every thought, every emotion and every physical sensation. All of this intertwined, is your embodied. Thinking is your nervous system. This is your visceral gut level, knowing the way your body interprets and responds to the life's subtle signals. This happens without waiting for the mind to catch up. This is the bottom-up approach and it also includes a mindful embodiment, which is the art of being fully present with your body, acknowledging the sensations, the heartbeat, the tremors, the chills, as it is interpreted by your mind, which contributes to the narrative of who you are. Your nervous system is both your mind and body narrative sentences, meaning making and sensations, experiences, living and emotions.
Speaker 1:And the way I would describe a dysregulated nervous system is this is a hijacked control center. This is when your body's threat detection system is stuck in overdrive, firing alarms for things that aren't fires. You're reacting to a critical email as if you're being chased by a lion. This way you lose the ability to tell the difference between discomfort and danger, because discomfort sometimes is necessary for growth. Danger never is. When you're stuck in this overdrive, everything feels like too much, even the things you prayed for, because they ask for your expansion. A dysregulated nervous system is a biased narrator of your life. This is your internal voice, which is always suspicious, cynical, hypervigilant, interpreting everything through the lens of something's wrong with me or with them, or with this situation. You walk in the room and assume that everyone hates you. Your spouse is quiet and you assume that they've stopped loving you. You're not reading reality. You are reading your own nervous system's script, which, again, is dysregulated.
Speaker 1:Another way I'll describe a dysregulated nervous system is an inconsistent power supply. You're either frozen or numb. You're either charged up and explosive and you can't stay grounded in your own body, or everything feels overwhelming that you shut down. Conversations feel like confrontations. Simple rest feels like an indulgence. Even your joy feels unsafe because your body is just bracing for it to end.
Speaker 1:In a dysregulated nervous system there's an absolute end to nuance. It kills your ability to see the gray areas. You're either a failure or a perfectionist. You're either safe or unsafe. It's all or none phenomenon. It's either all on me or none of this is my fault. Classic black and white thinking. A dysregulated nervous system is where you've outsourced your worth. The self-worth gets handed over to external cues accomplishments. You only feel okay when everyone else is okay with you. Any look from somebody, a word from somebody an email reply. All of that decides your peace. You're not living from the center of your knowing, you're living from the center of survival. This is the differentiation I make in my Empowered Muslim Woman program, where I talk about your soulful intelligence, which is your inner knowing, and the center of survival, which is the Qarin-based primal brain. Okay, so now let me give you a little bit of nuance and detail about what a regulated nervous system is supposed to look like.
Speaker 1:Being regulated does not mean that you walk around like some sort of Zen monk all the time. It does not mean that you're immune to anger or jealousy or sadness, shame or despair all very basic human emotions. You still feel all of that with a regulated nervous system. You will still have the urge to scream when your opinion is dismissed. You'll still feel jealousy when your friend buys a second investment property and your finances are barely hanging on. You still feel shame rise when your in-laws talk over you or when you snap at your child and you instantly regret it. But the difference when you do all of that with a regulated nervous system is that it allows you to feel the emotion without becoming it. You notice the wave rising, sort of, and you ride it and you choose your response, that moment of pause where you catch the first thought and you don't let it run the show. That's the regulated nervous system. You don't avoid pain. You don't become universally peaceful.
Speaker 1:With a regulated nervous system. You do feel the negative emotions. You just alchemize them. Anger becomes a boundary. A regulated nervous system does not act from anger, it alchemizes it. It says I am not available for this kind of conversation with you anymore. Jealousy becomes motivation. A regulated nervous system alchemizes it to say what if this was also possible for me? Shame becomes insight. It says what part of me still believes I'm unworthy. Part of me still believes I'm unworthy. Fear becomes focus. It says this matters to me. That's why I'm scared. Sadness becomes clarity. It says something here needs grieving so I can move forward. Something here needs my attention.
Speaker 1:A regulated nervous system gives you created power over your negative emotions. You make something from them. The contrast with all of these and a dysregulated nervous system is there's no pause, there's no creativity. You are the emotion. You don't feel anger, you become rage. You don't feel shame. You become unworthy. You don't feel fear. You become paralyzed. You're not using the emotion, the emotion is using you and the outcomes become broken conversations, confusion in marriage, broken relationships, reactivity with your kids, awake nights staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, restlessness, anxiety.
Speaker 1:Regulation does not make life completely void of negative emotions. It just makes you stronger. It gives your pain a job to do. It transforms your reaction into wisdom, your emotions into movement, your life into something that you're building instead of something you're just trying to survive. And that is why a regulated nervous system changes everything. Trust me, it will fix everything. Regulation does not mean that peace replaces pain constantly. It means that pain stops deciding your identity. You cannot deal with trauma from a dysregulated nervous system because the outcome will never be in your favor. Your body is trying to evolve out of survival mode while stuck in survival mode, and this is where it becomes a cycle.
Speaker 1:How are you supposed to respond to trauma from a regulated nervous system when the trauma is what dysregulated you in the first place? It's like asking for a drowning person to build a boat. But there are answers, and answers are that you build regulation outside of the trauma through safety, stillness, relationship, breath, connection. You heal around the wound before you touch it. Sometimes you go side by side, resourcing yourself while peeking gently towards what's wounded, what's hurt, trying to address it along the way. And the powerful distinction that might change your entire approach is while one definition of trauma is a dysregulated nervous system, another definition that serves you more is that it sees trauma as its own entity, something that's separate. The trauma is what happened. The dysregulation is how your body responded, and that means you can change your relationship with the trauma. You can come back to it later with steadier hands, a calmer breath, a more regulated nervous system that knows how to stay grounded, even while remembering. And that's the difference. That's where true healing begins.
Speaker 1:Healing is not in the trauma itself, but in the state you're in when you're finally turning back to face it, and that state has to be regulated for you to face it successfully. So, yes, put in the time and effort to achieve a sustained, regulated nervous system, not because you'll become immune to emotion, but because you'll finally stop being ruled by your emotion. That don't serve your life. Regulation does not mean you won't feel anger. It doesn't mean that you won't cry or that you won't feel like you have to be stoic or frozen at times. It just means that you use your anger strategically. It does not become blind rage that burns your house down. Regulated nervous system will turn the fire of anger into a righteous one that will light your way forward. Your sadness and your tears and your crying become a form of clarity, not collapse. Your stoic state becomes intentional, present and wise. A regulated nervous system directs your intense negative emotions towards a meaningful outcome, and I'll leave you with some examples, because this is very important to imagine them in real life and apply it to your situations on a daily basis.
Speaker 1:If you get angry when your husband interrupts you in front of others from a dysregulated state, you might scream or sulk or shut down, but in a regulated state you will admit that that bothered me and let's talk about how we can speak to each other in public next. Now, anger has become a boundary, not a blow-up or a relationship rupture. If you feel sad because your child is struggling with something in a dysregulated state, you'll sprint into trying to fix everything, or you'll spiral into guilt for not being a good enough mother or not being constantly present for him. In a regulated state, you sit with the child, you validate their pain, you make space for them. You do all of that without rescuing, and the sadness all of a sudden becomes connection, you feel an intense fear about starting a new business. In a dysregulated state, fear will sound something like this this is a sign for me to stop. What if I fail? What if nobody likes what I'm selling? I don't know what I'm doing. In a regulated state, fear becomes. This matters to me. Let me prepare well for success and move forward with preparation. Now fear has become a source of your focus.
Speaker 1:If you feel excitement when something big and new and good is about to happen because of the change you're implementing, in a dysregulated state excitement becomes cues for panic. You sabotage your joy before it even begins. But in a regulated state you stay grounded and present with the excitement because it is a high energy emotion. Joy will be an unfamiliar emotion. If you haven't felt it that way, a dysregulated nervous system will flag it as danger. A regulated nervous system will actually let you enjoy the change and the progress you're making. From that grounded state. You'll let it build. You'll move towards the expansion and the abundance. Now your excitement has become momentum evidence for your success, evidence that your duas are being answered.
Speaker 1:So if you're living your life with a regulated nervous system, it's not going to force you to leave a stoic, numb or quiet life. It's going to lead you to finally live a meaningful life, so that emotions don't hijack your purpose. They fuel it, because that's why Allah created all of the emotions. So, yes, I will stand by my original statement Regulate your nervous system and it will fix everything. Inshallah, not because the world becomes easier, but because you deal with it easier. You become the person who responds to the world instead of reacting to it.
Speaker 1:With that I pray to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala. Ya Allah, settle my body when it wants to panic. Guide my breath when I forget how to slow down. Quiet the noise in my mind that tells me it's not safe enough, when it actually is. Ya Allah, let my emotions serve me. Let my anger build boundaries. Let my sadness connect me. Let my fear sharpen my focus. Let my reaction turn into wisdom. Ya Rabbul Ameen, let every feeling move me closer to you. Give me a nervous system that remembers you in the middle of stress, heartache, joy and luxury. Ya Allah, regulate my nervous system so I can rise and use it as a form of worship to you, so I can lead, so I can live with meaning. Ameen, ya Rabbul Ameen, please keep me in your daas. I will talk to you guys next time.