Regulated

Regulated.

It’s a buzzword, but I like it.

There are a lot of words floating around that point toward similar experiences: grounded, calm, integrated, peaceful.

I’ve been thinking about inner work and how sometimes we have several words for what may be happening inside us.

“Do I feel peaceful?” can sometimes be another way of asking, “Do I feel regulated?”

So why are people increasingly using language like nervous system and regulation?

I think there’s a real reason.

Those words are clinical. Science-y. And for some of us, that gives us a different angle from which to understand ourselves.

It did for me.

When I started using this kind of language in relation to my inner work, something shifted. Some of the things I had been experiencing stopped feeling like character flaws and started feeling like... data.

And strangely enough, releasing the blame created more room for personal responsibility.

I could look at what was happening inside me with greater objectivity. I could understand it. Work with it. Heal things I hadn’t been able to face before.

I realized that some of the older words I had been using carried unconscious associations for me. Those associations may not have reflected what the words actually meant, but they still affected the way I experienced them.

Sometimes a new word is simply a new door.

There’s research that helps explain why language can matter so much here.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has written extensively about emotional granularity, our ability to identify emotional experiences with greater precision. Research in this area suggests that having more specific concepts for what we’re feeling can support emotional regulation and influence how we make sense of our internal experience.

Barrett also argues that the brain uses concepts and language as part of the process through which we construct and interpret emotion. (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, 2017.)

This connects with the broader study of linguistic relativity, which explores the ways language can influence thought and perception.

Words are more than labels we attach after an experience has happened. They can become part of the framework through which we understand the experience itself.

So when a word like regulated lands differently than calm or at peace, it may be giving your mind a tool it didn’t have before.

Maybe that’s one reason this ancient line still feels so profound:

“In the beginning was the Word.”
— John 1:1

Humans have understood for a very long time that language does more than describe our world.

It helps shape the way we experience it.