I Wanted to Like “Nervous System Dysregulation.”
Why I can’t embrace the wellness world’s favorite phrase, and what it reveals about our growing fear of discomfort.
There's a term that's been driving me bonkers:
Nervous system dysregulation.
Whenever I see it, I cringe. Which is an odd reaction for someone who treats anxiety disorders for a living.
As far as I can tell, nervous system dysregulation refers to the experience of being in an unpleasant, elevated emotional state. At this point, I'm pretty sure you could write a wellness post about literally anything — sleep, picky eating, your mother-in-law, mahjong — and somehow work in the phrase "nervous system dysregulation."
It has become the Swiss Army knife of the wellness internet.
The ubiquity wasn't the only thing bothering me, but the more I interrogated my reaction, the less sense it made. I'm a clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety; helping people notice their emotional states and cope with them is, more or less, my job description. I also agree that we're better off making decisions from a calm place than an agitated one. And many of the people using the term are colleagues and creators whose work I respect. I should have been completely on board.
And yet…friction.
Real, persistent, couldn't-shake-it friction.
Sometimes I'd catch myself on the cusp of using the term, and recoil. It wasn't that the phrase was always wrong. It was that it seemed to smuggle in a set of assumptions in which I wasn't sure I believed.
I still assumed the problem was me.
Then in July, Emma Rosenblum published an article in the Wall Street Journal: “The Algorithm Says My Nervous System is 'Dysregulated.' Here's Why I'm Skeptical.” I read it immediately and found myself thinking, more of this, please.
Emma described her Instagram feed filling up with dire warnings about dysregulated nervous systems, paired with the wellness industry's expensive answers to the problem, including a $2,995 course from a hypno-meditation coach.
Wonderfully absurd, but the commercialization wasn't my biggest concern. It was what was being sold in the first place.
Emma interviewed psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who was blunt about it: “much of the language surrounding this concept is ‘neuro-bullshit.’”
When people say they're dysregulated, Barrett explained, it often boils down to something simpler: I feel distressed, exhausted, overwhelmed.
I'd like to add hungry, hormonal, and pissed off to that list.
Here’s where the elasticity of the term matters. “Nervous system dysregulation” describes everything from the rage of having to ask your kid to put on their shoes for the fifth time, to a teenager's heaving sobs after a breakup, to the meltdown of a child with a neurodivergent profile after sensory overload, to the physiological changes that can follow genuine trauma.
When one term encompasses everything from ordinary distress to serious danger, it starts to make all distress sound dangerous.
And when discomfort gets labeled as dangerous, fear becomes the logical response.
I realized I wasn't just bothered by what the term meant; I was bothered by what it might teach us to do.
In the explosion of talk about nervous system dysregulation, we've taken the ordinary experience of feeling bad and turned it into something requiring intervention.
That matters, because once every uncomfortable feeling becomes evidence that something is wrong, the feeling itself becomes the problem. And fear of our own feelings is one of the most reliable ways to become more anxious.
That's the irony at the heart of this:a culture obsessed with regulating dysregulation may be teaching us to fear the very feelings we're trying to regulate.
That's why I cringe.
Here's the mechanism: fear, monitor, fix. It's a familiar anxiety cycle, and nervous-system discourse plugs directly into it.
Fear of Fear
First, fear of fear is one of the most reliable predictors of anxiety. People who fear the physical sensations and cognitive experiences of anxiety are more likely to develop anxiety disorders; so are people who believe that anxiety itself is dangerous or harmful (e.g., Cartwright-Hatton & Wells, 1997; McNally, 2002; Reiss & McNally, 1985; Ryum et al., 2017).
The wellness version of “fear of fear” is something like “fear of dysregulation.” If we're told that dysregulation is dangerous — and that we should be doing everything in our power to get back to a regulated state — dysregulation itself becomes something to fear.
The Watchdog Effect
If dysregulation is something to fear, we have a reason to be on the lookout.
The nervous-system discourse gives us an ever-expanding list of signals to track: racing heart, irritability, poor sleep, fatigue. Charge your Oura Ring, ‘cause we’re monitoring them all!
Suddenly, ordinary fluctuations become data points: Is my nervous system dysregulated? What caused this? What do I need to do to get myself back to baseline?
Mindful awareness of our present-moment state is a useful skill. Constant vigilance for signs that something is wrong is a different story.
People with anxiety disorders are particularly attuned to internal sensations, and monitoring can amplify them. You notice your heart beating. You wonder why it's beating so hard. You check again. Now you're more aware of it. You interpret that as evidence something is wrong. Your anxiety rises, your heart beats faster — and there’s your proof.
Monitoring doesn't just detect the sensation; it can amplify it.
Avoidance Fuels Anxiety
If we're afraid of a feeling and watching for it, we're going to want to make it go away. The challenge is that avoidance fuels anxiety (e.g., Barlow, 2002). We become more scared of school after prolonged absences, more scared of dogs when we rarely encounter them, and more scared of anxiety's physical sensations — racing heart, chest tightness — the more we organize our lives to avoid them.
And avoidance doesn't always mean avoiding the situation. Sometimes it means avoiding the feeling itself.
Which brings us to the explosion of “regulation” strategies. I'm not arguing that coping techniques are bad; I teach them myself. The question is what we're using them for: are we using a skill to stay engaged with our lives while we're uncomfortable, or because we've decided we can't tolerate discomfort?
There's an enormous difference between teaching someone how to regulate and teaching them that they must be regulated.
If dysregulation is framed as a “condition” that needs to be fixed, avoidance starts to look like good self-care. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing: fear leads to avoidance, avoidance maintains anxiety, and anxiety becomes evidence that something needed fixing.
That's the cycle at the individual level. Now scale it up.
Cultural Collision
What happens when an entire culture starts interpreting emotional discomfort as something to fear, monitor, and fix?
The wellness industry doesn't just monetize our fear of dysregulation; it legitimizes it.
When you're surrounded by posts, products, practitioners, and protocols devoted to “fixing” your nervous system, their sheer abundance starts to feel like evidence. If everyone is talking about dysregulation, surely dysregulation must be a serious problem.
The solution starts manufacturing the emergency that justifies the solution.
This isn't a critique of individuals who find the language useful. It’s concern about what happens when a vague framework that casts distress as dysregulation — and dysregulation as something to fix — becomes a cultural default.
This only works because we're already primed to treat pain as danger. We're living in an era in which normal, albeit painful, feelings like anxiety, anger, and shame are increasingly framed as dangerous or pathological.
The nervous-system boom didn't create that fear. It found a culture already primed for it, gave it a scientific-sounding vocabulary, and built a business around reinforcing it.
The Parent Trap
Nowhere does this play out more consequentially than in modern parenting.
In our culture of intensive parenting, “good” parents are expected to be deeply attuned to their children's emotional lives, and to shield them from distress. If we're taught that our own distress is dangerous, it's easy to become even more alarmed by our children's.
Parents now feel responsible for managing their child’s nervous system, and a child’s distress at a boundary set by parents becomes evidence that the boundary is harmful.
Take a familiar pain point: your kid gets nervous when you go out at bedtime. If you believe his tears mean you're dysregulating his nervous system, you're more likely to cancel on your friends and stay home to tuck him in yourself.
And it feels like good parenting. That's the trap.
What soothes anxiety in the short term can reinforce it in the long term. All in the service of staying “regulated.”
Here's the alternative. You go out. He cries at the door. You don't turn around. You trust his caregiver to handle his distress, and you let him discover that he can handle it, too.
His crying isn't evidence that you're doing something to his nervous system. It's a kid missing his parent, having a feeling, and surviving it. That’s how resilience is built.
Discomfort isn't the same as danger.
Once you actually believe this, a lot of the rest gets easier. Not because the feelings stop, but because you stop being afraid of them.
I teach children and parents emotion-regulation skills. But I also teach them something that sounds contradictory: you don't have to regulate every uncomfortable feeling.
Our bodies and minds are built to experience painful emotions and, for the most part, come back down on their own. Sometimes you need a skill. Sometimes the situation needs to change. Sometimes you just need time. And sometimes you're anxious, overwhelmed, exhausted, or angry…and nothing has gone wrong.
Which is why a little skepticism toward wall-to-wall nervous-system content is warranted. Not every feeling needs a protocol.
But you don't need to stop using the language. If "nervous system dysregulation" helps you make sense of what you're feeling and respond well, keep it.
The test is simple: does the language help you cope, or does it make you more afraid of your own feelings?
If it's the second, it's worth reconsidering.
Keep this question in your back pocket the next time you or your kid feels that flicker of "nervous system dysregulation": is this situation unsafe, or is it just uncomfortable?
If it's unsafe, act accordingly. But if it's just uncomfortable, you don’t have to “fix” it. You can use a skill, wait it out, or simply let the feeling exist. Discomfort doesn't always require a rescue.
None of this makes my cringe disappear, but it explains it.
In my work, I see what happens when people fear their own feelings. I also see what becomes possible on the other side of unlearning that fear.
That's what I actually want for the parents reading this, and for their kids.
Not a constantly regulated nervous system.
Just the subtle, unglamorous confidence that comes from knowing you can feel something painful and still be okay.
Cringe noted. Back to work.
References
Barlow, D. H. (2002). Anxiety and its disorders: The nature and treatment of anxiety and panic (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Cartwright-Hatton, S., & Wells, A. (1997). Beliefs about worry and intrusions: The Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire and its correlates. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 11(3), 279–296
McNally, R. J. (2002). Anxiety sensitivity and panic disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 51(12), 938–946.
Reiss, S., & McNally, R. J. (1985). Expectancy model of fear. In S. Reiss & R. R. Bootzin (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Behavior Therapy (pp. 107–121). Academic Press.
Rosenblum, E. (2026, July 19). The algorithm says my nervous system is “dysregulated.” Here’s why I’m skeptical. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/the-algorithm-says-my-nervous-system-is-dysregulated-heres-why-im-skeptical-7a3e9831
Ryum, T., Kennair, L. E. O., Hjemdal, O., Hagen, R., Halvorsen, J. Ø., & Solem, S. (2017). Worry and metacognitions as predictors of anxiety symptoms: A prospective study. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 924.