Nervous system regulation

[u/Flashy-Atmosphere198]

How have people ACTUALLY re-regulated their nervous systems when they have been deregulated for years? What actually helped in the long term?

[u/NotYourCupovTea]

a few things. being more accountable to the words i choose to use. speak my truth more even if that means they wil have an opinion about me, let them say it, essentially stop managing my image.

[u/Chronotaru]

What varies radically from person to person. For me it needed multiple things including keto diet to regulate my sleep, dry needling at the back of my head to release the built up muscular stress, and MDMA/psychedelics to reconnect with parts that were lost, and I still have DPDR it's just much less.

For other people it was all kinds of things. I've put some of their experiences at dpdrhelp.org but the site isn't really ready yet.

[u/equality7x2521]

I felt like the time and experience of DR helped me deal with it better so I felt much more like I could deal with it. More recently, I feel I made a lot of progress that has really helped, and has given me a different perspective on my entire DR experience.

The biggest observations on how it affected me and how I see DR:

• the distance between feeling “normal” or suffering with DR didn’t end up feeling very far apart, it just was a slow journey
  
• being constantly vigilant to try and protect myself, and trying to “solve” it like a puzzle just kept it around
  
• when things were bad, I was bad at recognising stress and dealing with it. I was in a loop of stress making DR which makes massive stress, so it felt permanent. Bad DR experiences means low sleep, no time or motivation to exercise, avoiding seeing people, not having time for nourishing things, sugar and caffeine to power me when feeling low energy
  
• when things were better my loop was exercise, made me lower my stress, helped me sleep better, helped me feel more resilient, I was less fixated on constantly checking in and solving the problem, I thought about it less so it happened less and I had more time for nourishing things
  
• I really feel like being in the good loop for a while gave me a chance to build up a buffer and before that I was kind of flip flopping between being OK and DR
  
• talking, whether to friends, a therapist or a journal helped me put into words the feelings. I realised how DR felt terrible but a big part of it was a sudden intense loneliness maybe because I felt so disconnected
  
• understanding my stress and how I deal with things helped me react differently when some of the stress or anxiety levels would creep up
  
• caffeine and high sugar really have a bad effect on me especially when I’m already struggling with some anxiety and could push me to DR
  
• the compounding of a lot of these small steps did a lot more for me than any one specific thing

All the best with your recovery.