What Counsellors Mean by Nervous System Dysregulation
If you’ve been in therapy for any length of time, you may have heard phrases like “your nervous system is dysregulated”or “your body is stuck in a stress response.”
For many people, these terms sound abstract—or worse, like something is wrong with them.
When counsellors and therapists talk about nervous system dysregulation, they’re usually describing how the body responds to stress, threat, and overwhelm over time. More specifically, they’re talking about how flexible your nervous system is when life gets hard.
The nervous system’s job: responding to stress, not eliminating it
Your nervous system is designed to respond to stress. Activation isn’t the problem—getting stuck there is.
From a stress physiology perspective, your body is constantly scanning for safety and danger. When it perceives threat, it automatically shifts into a survival response. This happens far faster than conscious thought and doesn’t rely on logic.
This is why you can feel overwhelmed, shut down, or on edge even when you know you’re not in danger.
In therapy, we’re less concerned with whether stress shows up and more interested in:
How intensely it shows up
How long it lasts
How easily your system can return to baseline
How I explain emotional regulation to clients: the window of tolerance
When I talk with clients about emotional regulation, I often introduce the idea of the window of tolerance.
Your window of tolerance refers to the range of emotional and physiological activation where you can:
Stay present
Think clearly
Feel emotions without being overwhelmed
Ride the waves of everyday stress
When you’re within your window, stress is manageable—even when life is challenging.
But that window isn’t the same for everyone.
Why some nervous systems feel overwhelmed more easily
Our life experiences shape the width of our window of tolerance.
For example, imagine two people:
One experienced ongoing adversity in childhood
The other did not
The person who experienced adverse childhood experiences often develops a narrower window of tolerance, not because they’re weak, but because their nervous system learned early that the world wasn’t consistently safe.
Now imagine both people experience a job loss and a relationship ending at the same time.
Both may feel distressed. Both may experience nervous system dysregulation.
But the person with earlier relational trauma is more likely to be pushed outside their window of tolerance much more quickly.
This isn’t about resilience or coping skills—it’s about how the body learned to survive.
What happens when we leave the window of tolerance
When stress exceeds what the nervous system can handle, it often shifts into one of two survival states:
Hyperarousal
This is the fight-or-flight response and may look like:
Anxiety or panic
Racing thoughts
Irritability or anger
Hypervigilance
Difficulty sleeping
Hypoarousal
This is the freeze or fawn response and may include:
Emotional numbness
Shutdown or collapse
Dissociation
Fatigue
Feeling disconnected from yourself or others
Both responses are protective. They’re the nervous system doing its best to manage chronic overwhelm when regulation isn’t accessible.
Trauma and the body: why insight alone isn’t always enough
Because these responses live in the body, understanding them intellectually doesn’t always change them.
Many people know why they react the way they do—and still feel stuck.
This is where trauma-informed therapy that works with the nervous system stress response can be helpful. Rather than trying to override reactions with logic, the focus is on:
Increasing awareness of bodily cues
Gently expanding the window of tolerance
Supporting regulation without forcing calm
Over time, trauma therapy—including approaches like EMDR—can support this process by working with how trauma is held in the body, not just the story of what happened.
Regulation isn’t about never being dysregulated
A regulated nervous system isn’t one that’s calm all the time.
It’s one that can:
Move in and out of activation
Recover more quickly from stress
Stay connected during difficult moments
Nervous system work is less about eliminating symptoms and more about building capacity—so stress doesn’t immediately tip into overwhelm, shutdown, or survival mode.
A more compassionate understanding
When counsellors talk about nervous system dysregulation, what they’re often really naming is this:
Your nervous system adapted to past experiences—and it hasn’t yet learned that things are different now.
That learning happens slowly, through safety, relationship, and repeated experiences of regulation. And it happens at the body’s pace—not through pressure or self-criticism.