Last Tuesday, an email showed up that made my jaw tighten before I’d finished reading the subject line. My fingers were already on the keys, ready to fire back. Then I remembered the rule I’ve read a dozen times and ignored just as often: never respond to an email that triggered you. Give it a few hours. So I closed the laptop, made tea, and let it sit.
Two hours later, I still sent a response. Same problem, same person, same hurt — a completely different version of me wrote it.
That gap between the jaw-tightening moment and the two-hours-later moment is basically this week’s whole podcast episode.
My guest, Bernadette McCadden, is a writer and health coach who’s spent the last decade helping women work through anxiety, body image, and nervous system dysregulation. Early in our conversation, she said something that stuck: most of us are regulating our nervous system without knowing that’s what we’re doing. Sometimes in healthy ways. Often not. For years, Bern overthought, overate, undereated, drank, spent — not from a lack of willpower, but because her nervous system was so dysregulated that those behaviors were the only relief valve she had.
“Nervous system regulation” gets thrown around so often in wellness content that it’s started to mean nothing. So I asked her directly: what do people get wrong about it? Her answer surprised me. Regulation isn’t about staying calm. It doesn’t erase anger, sadness, or panic — those are just part of being human.
What it gives you is capacity. Bern described it as the difference between rough seas and manageable ones. Dysregulated, a small trigger could send her from zero to a hundred in seconds. Regulated, the same trigger: zero to twenty-five. The feeling still shows up. She just has room to feel it before she has to do anything about it.
That room is the whole game. It’s the difference between firing off the email and sitting with it for two hours.
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The tools Bern uses to build that room are almost insultingly simple, which is probably why most of us skip them. Breath first — not a twenty-minute meditation, just noticing you’re breathing, in a meeting, in traffic, mid-tantrum (yours or your kid’s). Water second. She told me hydration is one of the fastest ways she can tell she’s slipping into dysregulation, and one of the fastest ways back out.
Then there’s the one that stopped me mid-note: she doesn’t drink caffeine until after she’s eaten breakfast. For years she ran the opposite way — cold brew at 5am, a HIIT class, nothing else until noon. It worked, until it didn’t. Coffee on an empty stomach turned her, in her words, into “an anxious crying mess.” Breaking that habit was one of the hardest and most life-changing things she’s done. Now it’s thirty grams of protein first, matcha second.
It shows up in relationships too. Bern told me she’s a recovering people-pleaser, someone who spent years looking outside herself for validation. She still catches it happening — a post that doesn’t get the reaction she hoped for, a guy who goes quiet. But when she’s regulated, none of it lands the same way. “That’s not actually truth,” she told me. “That’s dysregulation.”
None of this is about eliminating stress or becoming someone who never overthinks again. Bern calls the spiral itself “the overs” — overthinking, overworking, overeating, oversleeping, whatever your flavor is. The goal isn’t to shame the pattern. It’s to notice it fast enough to ask a better question: what am I actually feeling, and what do I need right now?
She talked about self-love the same way — not as a finish line where you eat perfectly and never crave wine, but as curiosity instead of punishment. Reach for the chips, pause, ask what’s underneath it. Some weeks the answer is ordering the margarita anyway. The point was never the food.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the reaction you have isn’t the truth about who you are. It’s a readout of your nervous system in that moment. The anxious reply, the phone scroll at 6am, the third coffee before you’ve eaten anything — none of it is a character flaw. It’s data. And data you can work with is a lot less scary than a personality you’re stuck with.
I’m not asking you to overhaul your mornings this week. Just try the version Bern gave me: before you reach for your phone, breathe. Before you reach for the coffee, eat something. Small enough that you’ll actually do it — which is the only kind of change that sticks.
Find Bern on Instagram, Substack, and her website — all under her name, Bernadette McCadden.
Further Listening:
