How to Regulate Your Nervous System During Conflict: A Brief Guide

Sunday, Jul 13, 2025.

Let’s begin with a hard truth: you can have an advanced degree, impeccable logic, and a meditation app subscription—and still lose your mind when your partner says, "Can we talk?"

This is not a failure of character. It’s a feature of your nervous system.

In conflict, your biology kicks in long before your narrative self catches up.

That eloquent inner monologue?

It sometimes gets hijacked by a system built to scan for tigers, not tone of voice. The question, then, is not whether your nervous system will react. It will.

The question is: what do you do next?

The Polyvagal Plot Twist: You Are Not as Rational as You Think

• Let’s give credit where it's due: Dr. Stephen Porges (2011) gave us the Polyvagal Theory, a user’s manual for the autonomic nervous system. According to Porges, we operate on three primary settings:

• Ventral Vagal (Rest and Relate): Social engagement, compassion, eye contact, and coherent thoughts.

• Sympathetic (Fight or Flight): High-stakes courtroom drama mode.

• Dorsal Vagal (Freeze and Dissociate): The lights are on, but you are psychologically out to lunch.

Conflict often pushes us down the ladder. First sympathetic: you argue like an overcaffeinated defense attorney. Then dorsal: you become a potted plant with a pulse.

The challenge is to learn how to notice and interrupt the descent before you're reduced to sarcasm, sighing, or total shutdown. This ladder isn’t metaphorical. It’s biological.

When Neurotypes Collide: Emotional Regulation in Real Relationships

Neurodiverse couples often experience emotional conflict like it's being broadcast on a different frequency.

For example, an autistic partner may need time and space to process, while their ADHD spouse experiences urgency as a form of love. Borderline traits can turn a mild disagreement into a catastrophe.

Narcissistic traits can transmute emotional vulnerability into contempt.

Those with complex PTSD often carry unprocessed relational trauma that distorts their neuroception. A gentle boundary sounds like abandonment. A request for space feels like punishment. And in families managing bipolar disorder or addiction recovery, the nervous system isn’t merely dysregulated; it’s sometimes hostile to the idea of regulation at all. It has learned that chaos is safer than stillness.

We don’t bring our best selves to conflict. We bring our wiring. We bring our fu*king parents. We bring the ghost of every conversation that ended in rupture. To regulate in real time is to choose present-day consciousness over nervous system time travel.

How Dysregulation Shows Up (and How It Lies to You)

• You feel attacked before your partner finishes their sentence.

• You begin rehearsing your defense before they finish their first breath.

• Your limbs feel electric or frozen.

• You suddenly "forget" what you meant to say, and instead just want it to end.

This isn’t random. It’s your brainstem interpreting conflict as threat. The amygdala activates. The prefrontal cortex goes dim. You begin operating with about as much nuance as a raccoon in a garbage can.

In neurodivergent couples, the mismatch can be even more vivid. A person with ADHD might escalate emotionally, misreading a pause as rejection. The autistic partner might retreat from sensory overload. This isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about regulation mismatch—and the tragic misinterpretations that unfold.

Five Actually-Useful Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System During Conflict

Co-Regulate Before You Disintegrate

Forget grand declarations of calm. Begin with the correct tone, breath, and posture.

Research suggests that shared regulation through breath and gentle proximity activates the social engagement system (Porges, 2011).

• Try mirroring your partner’s breath.

• Rest your hands on the same object.

• Use brief eye contact, then look away. Safety lies in modulation, not in a staring contest.

Orient Your Body to the Present

During relational conflict, your nervous system acts like it’s seen this movie before—and it didn’t end well. Disarm it by giving it different data.

• Look slowly around the room.

• Identify the time, the date, something you like in the room.

• Speak to yourself: “This is new. This is now. This is not then.”

Orientation brings your awareness back from past trauma and imagined catastrophe. You are reintroducing yourself to safety. If need be, get an ice cube and hold it in your fist. You need present moment concrete AF situational awareness.

Use Movement Intentionally

Many therapists forget to tell you that motion metabolizes threat responses. The body does not care how enlightened you are; it wants to shake.

• It’s OK to rock side to side.

• Touch your own arms or legs with deliberate rhythm.

• Try walking a lap around your space without stomping or storming.

Move like you’re narrating your own calming documentary. It sounds silly. It is. It also works.

Speak in a Polyvagal Dialect

Forget “I-statements” for now. Focus on what your face, breath, and voice are doing. A calm nervous system is audible.

• Drop your voice half an octave.

• Use a slower, perhaps a sinificantly slower rhythm.

• Keep your eyebrows relaxed.

You don’t have to be perfectly calm. Just calm enough to avoid sounding like a prosecuting attorney with unresolved maternal issues.

Leave with a Map, Not a Door Slam

If you must exit, take a declared time-out. But do it relationally.

• Say how long you’ll be gone.

• Say why it matters to come back.

• Don’t just leave to regulate—return to repair.

Gottman (1999) found that partners who took short breaks during conflict came back with more empathy, clearer thinking, and less contempt. Regulation is not retreat. It’s preparation.

Advanced Cases: When Conflict Is Weighted With History

When you're navigating conflict amid grief, addiction recovery, or personality disorders, nervous system regulation becomes more difficult and more essential.

• In grief, the nervous system may feel frozen or brittle. Even tenderness feels like intrusion.

• In addiction recovery, the system may be used to chaos. Peace feels untrustworthy.

• For those managing bipolar disorder, emotional reactivity can feel chemically inevitable.

• Personality Disorders also add complexity.

Regulation becomes a slow training, not a quick fix. It may take 30 minutes, not 3 breaths. It may need a walk, a journal, or a phone call to a sponsor.

You can’t reason with a limbic system mid-surge. But you can signal it. That signal should probably come from the body, not the mouth.

Final Word: Why This Actually Matters

Regulating your nervous system isn’t about becoming the calmest monk in the monastery.

It’s about making space for love to survive your most agitated moments.

It’s how a parent stays connected to a teen who just said something cruel.

It’s how a couple stays married when one of them gets depressed.

It’s how siblings talk about a will without becoming estranged.

Regulation is the invisible bridge that keeps us from falling into the same old pit. It is humble, slow, and lifesaving. When done well, it keeps the people we love from becoming our enemies—including ourselves.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Cozolino, L. (2006). The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain. W. W. Norton & Company.

Gottman, J. M. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Crown Publishers.

Lehrer, P. M., & Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: How and why does it work?. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00756

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.