Ep 168: Stop Telling Yourself to Calm Down with Laura Sgro

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Your body reacts before your brain can explain it and that can feel confusing, embarrassing, or downright discouraging. We sit down with licensed therapist Laura Sgro to make the “nervous system” conversation concrete, starting with what people usually mean online: the autonomic nervous system that drives automatic functions like breathing, heart rate, digestion, and your threat response. From anxiety and burnout to shutdown and dissociation, we talk about why these patterns show up and how they can change with awareness and repetition.

Laura walks us through polyvagal theory as a simple ladder you can actually use. We unpack ventral vagal regulation, sympathetic fight-or-flight activation, and dorsal vagal collapse, plus how neuroception can misread safety when you’re exhausted, stressed, or carrying trauma history. We also challenge the idea that one state is “good” and the others are “bad” because each has a purpose. The goal is not perfection, it’s flexibility and choice.

Then we get practical: how to find your baseline, how to map what each state feels like in your body, and why “just calm down” is sometimes the wrong move. We share downregulation tools like the physiological sigh, upregulation ideas like gentle movement and sensory cues, and how co-regulation works in real relationships without sliding into codependency. You’ll leave with a clearer nervous system vocabulary and a kinder way to measure progress. 
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