This piece originally was shared in my weekly newsletter: Moonday Notes, if you want to be part of the community and never miss a love note, SUBSCRIBE HERE.
I cannot understate what a big deal stress and the way your body handles stress is for your skin.
Truly!
Every single imbalance that you notice on your skin is affected by stress whether it be those breakouts that show up once a month, or skin that feels sooooo dry and dehydrated, wrinkles, sun spots, or even that weird red patch above your eye that shows up every once in a while.
I'm not saying these are all 100% caused by stress, but I am saying that the nervous system affects it all, and its ability to heal.
So I've been thinking a lot about nervous system regulation lately, which I kind of hate that wording because it's like this Instagram hype word that has come to feel pretty flat and often part of a supplement sales pitch
Or like- “you just have to regulate your nervous system.”
Ok but how??? What does that even mean?
Well… I am currently studying Ayurvedic wellness and am about 3 months into a 2-year program, and I have been learning soooo many things that have actually helped “regulate my nervous system.”
I’m always a little skeptical of anything (esp in the wellness world) that feels overly evangelical… but this has genuinely changed my life.
So I wanted to start a little series on the things I've been learning in school that have brought me into deeper regulation than I even knew I could experience.
Ayurveda is one of the world’s oldest traditional healing systems, that originated in India thousands of years ago. It's basically a framework for how to live in a way that supports your body, your energy, and well-being in general.
Think of it as the manual for how to live a full, juicy, and well-resourced life.
You might be wondering what this has to do with nervous system regulation.
I didn't know at first either, but these ancient yogis who developed and refined the system were the OG's when it came to this stuff! It blows my mind that the ideas written in these texts so long ago are still relevant to our modern lives.
This way of living… is what people are trying to get at when they talk about nervous system regulation.
It's not a single practice you do once a day, or a magnesium mocktail you make at night (although I love this), or any single self-optimization protocol.
It’s like this layered way of living that your nervous system is constantly responding to throughout the day.
This is the first in the series and so it needs to be the foundation... which is rhythm.
Rhythm just means giving your body some consistency that it can rely on.
It's so simple that it's easy to write it off- but stay with me here.
Rhythm means:
- eating your meals around the same time each day
- waking and sleeping within a similar window
- moving your body at a similar time each day
- waking up and drinking warm water first thing every morning to help with early elimination at a similar time each day
- sitting for meditation or prayer around the same time each day
This matters because the nervous system is constantly scanning for safety, and predictability is a sign of safety! When your days are all over the place (this was me not that long ago), your body has to keep adapting, which is weirdly taxing over time… and this makes so much sense now, but I had never thought of it before!
If you try this for a few weeks, I think you’ll start to notice a real shift in how your body feels.
Another beautiful way to practice rhythm is with your skincare routine, but if we want to bring reverence, we need products that are energetically attuned to this.
That's what you will find in my curated apothecary- because I only want to put products on my own skin that bring me into that heart-centered yumminess, and I assume you feel that way too!
If you want to explore this through your skincare, I’ve linked a few of my go-to products HERE
