What is your thermostat setting?

Whenever I see something more than once I start to pay extra close attention to it. And that is exactly what happened with the concept I am going to talk about today. 

A few months ago, my business coach, the wonderful Meagan Fitzgerald, mentioned this concept of being the thermostat or the thermometer. And then recently I was listening to a money chat with Kate Northrup and she also mentioned our internal setting as our “thermostat”! 

So let's get into here too….

A thermometer takes the temperature of the environment around it. Meaning if you are the thermometer, you are going to be impacted by the mood and energy of those around you. From a science perspective, this happens due to “co regulation”. HOWEVER, you can choose to be the thermostat. The thermostat sets the temperature for the environment, the system may kick on on our off depending on what's going on around it, but the setting does not change. 

Here's the catch, you can do all the things to set your thermostat to cool, calm, collected and still struggle. Why? If most of the time your state of being is hurry, stressed and worried, your nervous system will have a hard time shifting gears. Our nervous systems hold our memories, not just from childhood, but also from we most often see and hear around us. 

Meaning if the rhetoric you always hear is that motherhood is hard, or your job is hard (and/or “sucks”) or this or that thing is stressful, your nervous system stores that and that becomes your “setting”. You cannot just think your way out of this, you must also bring your nervous system along for the ride. 

And this isn't to say that there aren't things in life that are hard and stressful, at times motherhood being one of them. BUT with a different thermostat setting the hard will be there without the anxiety, overwhelm and despair. 

How does one change their internal thermostat? A few ways, from my perspective. First, knowing your nervous system well. What does your nervous system need to feel good? What sets it off? How does your system try to talk to you when it is starting to get dysregulated? And what does it need to recover? 

There are things we can do to be proactive in protecting our internal thermostat (movement, sleeping well, eating well, the company we keep and more) and there are some things we do that are reactive. Meaning, the tools we use in the moments when we are starting to get dysregulated. To me, both are of equal importance to my thermostat setting staying in the range that I want it to be.