Nervous System Regulation for Beginners: 5 Practices You Can Start Today

Something shifts in midlife that no one fully prepares you for. It’s not just the hot flashes or the sleepless nights – it’s the feeling that your body has become a stranger. The anxiety that shows up out of nowhere. The way a stressful text from your teenager can unravel an entire day. The hunger that isn’t really about food.

In this episode of the Roots & Wings Interview Series, I sat down with my dear friend and colleague, Sue Van Raes, functional nutritionist, food psychologist, and founder of Boulder Nutrition here in Boulder, Colorado. Sue is the author of Food and Freedom, and she has spent decades helping women heal their relationship with food and their bodies from the inside out.

What unfolded was one of the most honest, science-grounded, and deeply personal conversations I’ve had on nourishment and midlife. Whether you’re in the thick of perimenopause or just beginning to feel those first shifts, this one is for you.

What Perimenopause Is Actually Doing to Your Body

Before we can talk about nourishment, we need to understand what’s happening hormonally – because the body you’re trying to nourish is operating in a completely different biochemical environment than it was ten years ago.

As progesterone declines in perimenopause and menopause, we lose one of the body’s most stabilizing and calming hormones. Sue describes what this can create as a “wiry nervous system” – one that’s more hypervigilant, more sensitive to stress, and slower to return to baseline after activation. Add in the unpredictable decline of estrogen, which affects metabolism, insulin sensitivity, sleep, and mood regulation, and you begin to understand why this season can feel so destabilizing even when nothing dramatic is happening.

Here’s the insight that stopped me: as Sue explains, blood sugar is directly influencing your brain chemistry. When blood sugar is off – and in midlife, it becomes much more sensitive – anxiety rises, irritability rises, and everything feels harder than it needs to. Sue calls insulin the “mother hormone” because when it’s out of balance, it pulls every other hormone off course. Getting metabolically stable is not just a nutrition goal. It is a nervous system intervention.

In my own Rolfing® Structural Integration and Yoga Therapeutics practice, I see this constantly. Women come in feeling like their body is working against them. So much of what we do together is help the nervous system find its footing again. Sue’s nutritional framework and my structural work are really arriving at the same place: the body’s need for a deeper partnership with itself.

The Oxytocin Solution: Why Pleasure Is Medicine

This is the part of our conversation I think every midlife woman needs to hear – especially those navigating a season of sustained stress.

When Sue was going through the hardest stretch of her own midlife years, she kept being told to “manage her stress.” She found that advice almost impossible to apply. You cannot always reduce the stressor. What she discovered instead was the biology of pleasure as an active intervention.

Here’s the science: pleasure stimulates oxytocin. And oxytocin and cortisol – the body’s primary stress hormone – cannot both be high at the same time. They operate like a teeter-totter. When oxytocin goes up, cortisol comes down. This is not a metaphor. It is measurable biochemistry.

Research also suggests that oxytocin may support blood sugar regulation. Studies involving people with elevated blood sugar showed meaningful improvements through oxytocin-boosting practices. So when you prioritize pleasure, you are not being indulgent. You are regulating your hormones, calming your nervous system, and supporting your metabolic health all at once.

What counts as pleasure? Putting on your favorite playlist while making dinner. A walk on a trail you love. Deep connection with a friend. Laughter. Sue pointed out that our conversation was actively boosting both of our oxytocin in real time. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Her invitation: think of pleasure as a nutrient – something to consciously include in your day the way you think about sleep or protein.

This reflects what I teach in the 5-Week Nervous System Reset and in 1:1 Yoga Therapeutics sessions: the nervous system responds to consistency far more than intensity. Small, regular doses of what restores you will outperform occasional big efforts every time.

Your Body Is Already Telling You the Truth

One of the most powerful threads in this conversation was the idea of the body as a signal system – and how midlife turns up the volume on those signals, whether or not we’re ready to listen.

Sue described a workshop she ran on a recent retreat built around two simple questions: Where are you being authentic in your life? And where are you not? What the women in the room revealed – through those two questions alone – was striking. The places where they were living inauthentically were often the very places where the body was sending symptoms: recurring stomachaches, persistent headaches, disrupted sleep.

This resonates deeply with the somatic work I do. The body holds what hasn’t yet been processed. When we say yes when we mean no, when we override what we actually feel – it doesn’t disappear. It gets stored somewhere in the fascia, the breath, the posture. Rolfing® and somatic education create conditions for the body to finally be heard.

Sue also shared a hormonal reframe that I found genuinely liberating: as estrogen declines in midlife, it actually becomes easier – biochemically – to stop people-pleasing. Estrogen is a bonding hormone that, when high, can drive accommodation and approval-seeking. As it declines, many women find a clearer, stronger sense of what they will and won’t accept. Sue calls this one of her favorite things about perimenopause – not a loss, but biological permission to finally stand in your own power.

You Are in the Cocoon – And That Is Okay

Perhaps the most resonant moment in our conversation: midlife is a liminal space. You are in the cocoon.

You are no longer who you were – the roles, the identities, the ways of being that shaped you for decades. And you are not yet who you’re becoming. That in-between can feel disorienting, even frightening. Both Sue and I have lived long enough to know: it is also exactly where transformation happens.

Sue shared the story of a friend who had recently emerged from an intense season of identity dissolution. Looking back, the word her friend kept returning to was “magic.” The magic didn’t happen before the dissolution. It happened inside it.

This is the heart of Roots & Wings. The roots – a steady body, a regulated nervous system, a sense of physical groundedness – are what make it possible to stay in the not-knowing without collapse. And from that foundation, the wings become possible: the expansion, the creativity, the purpose of the second half of life.

If you’re in the cocoon right now, you are not lost. You are in process.

Key Takeaways

• Blood sugar stability is a nervous system intervention. When blood sugar is off in midlife, anxiety and irritability rise. Getting metabolically balanced is one of the most immediate levers you have on how you feel.
• Pleasure lowers cortisol. Oxytocin and cortisol cannot both be high at the same time. Consciously including pleasure in your day is biochemically protective. Think of it as a nutrient.
• Your body knows before you do. Physical symptoms – recurring headaches, stomach aches, sleep disruption – often signal that something is out of alignment. Midlife just turns up the volume.
• Declining estrogen makes it easier to stop people-pleasing. This is not a loss. It is a hormonal realignment toward your own power and self-advocacy.
• The liminal space is not a problem to solve. Midlife identity transition is the cocoon. Staying in it – with support, with practice, with community – is where the transformation happens.