How to Prep Your Nervous System for a Triggering Life Event

Regulate & Rewire Podcast, regulation tools

Episode 11: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
View transcript on Buzzsprout

You have a big life event coming up—maybe a work presentation, visiting family you’ve been estranged from, or returning to a place that holds difficult memories. You know it’s going to be challenging, potentially triggering, and you want to prepare yourself as best you can instead of just hoping you’ll “get through it.”

In this deeply personal episode, I’m sharing exactly how I’m preparing my nervous system for birthing my third son—an event that carries both immense joy and potential triggers from previous loss and trauma. Even if you’re never planning to have a baby, the framework I’m using applies to any significant life event that feels big, hard, or potentially triggering.

This isn’t about eliminating all stress or avoiding triggers completely. It’s about increasing your capacity to hold whatever comes up while staying as regulated and capable as possible.

*Content warning: This episode mentions miscarriage, pregnancy loss, birth trauma, and grief. Please take care of yourself if these topics are sensitive for you.

What We Cover in This Episode

  • The three-part framework for preparing your nervous system for challenging events
  • How to strengthen the three safety determinants: context, choice, and connection
  • Daily practices that build a more regulated baseline before your event
  • Why building capacity for stress is as important as reducing stress
  • How to honor your story with self-compassion while preparing for triggers

My Personal Context: Birth After Loss

Before diving into the framework, I want to share why this birthing experience feels so loaded for me. My first son was born via an unplanned C-section, which didn’t go according to plan. After that, we experienced four miscarriages, including losing a baby boy at 16 weeks—the hardest day of my life. This current pregnancy came through IVF after those losses.

Additionally, we lost my sister-in-law to cancer last year. One of our last conversations was her promise to “send my next baby in the right direction” from heaven. So this birth will hold grief alongside joy, fear alongside hope.

I’m sharing this because your challenging event likely also holds nuance—multiple emotions and experiences layered together. The goal isn’t to eliminate complexity but to build capacity to hold it all.

The Three-Part Framework for Nervous System Preparation

Part 1: Strengthen the Three Safety Determinants

Your nervous system constantly scans for context, choice, and connection to determine safety. Strengthening these before your event helps your system feel more secure when challenges arise.

  • Context: Answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why, How For my birth, this means researching hospital policies around VBACs (vaginal birth after cesarean), understanding my options, learning statistics and science. The more I know about what to expect, the less my nervous system has to guess or fill in gaps with worst-case scenarios.
    • For your event: What exactly will happen? Who will be there? What are the logistics? The more context you provide your nervous system, the less it has to create stories about unknown variables.
  • Choice: Expand Your Sense of Control Even when some things are outside your control, focus on what you CAN choose. I’m choosing to birth in a hospital, choosing my provider, and even if I need another C-section, nobody can impose on my bodily autonomy without my consent.
    • For your event: You’re choosing to show up (you could not). Can you drive yourself? Choose when to arrive and leave? Bring support? Create an exit strategy? Focus on the choices you DO have rather than spiraling about what you can’t control.
  • Connection: Build Your Support Network This includes connection to yourself (self-regulation skills) and connection to others who can co-regulate with you. My husband and I are being intentional about strengthening our connection so he can advocate for me during birth.
    • For your event: Who can be your safe person during or after the event? Who can you process with? How can you stay connected to yourself and your needs throughout the experience?

Part 2: Build a More Regulated Baseline

The key to nervous system regulation is practicing coping skills when you’re calm so you have access to them during crisis. I’m doing this in three ways:

  • Minimize Daily Stress Load: I’m asking for help (not easy for me), stepping back from work instead of working until the last second, and not exposing myself to other people’s birth trauma stories right now.
    • For you: What can you step back from in the weeks leading up to your event? What exposure to additional stress can you limit? What help can you ask for?
  • Daily Regulation Practices: Despite pregnancy sleep challenges, I’m prioritizing the highest quality sleep possible, getting morning sunlight daily, doing breathwork and movement, and practicing mala meditation (breathing with prayer beads)—something I can also bring to the hospital.
    • For you: What daily practices help you feel regulated? Sleep, movement, breathwork, time in nature? Make these non-negotiable in the weeks before your event.
  • Increase Capacity for Stress: I’m going back to CrossFit and doing cold exposure (cold showers) to build physiological and psychological resilience. The idea is that it will take much more stress to dysregulate me—if I used to get overwhelmed at stress level 4, now it might take level 8 or 9.
    • For you: How can you safely challenge yourself to build capacity? This might be physical exercise, cold exposure, or gradually exposing yourself to smaller versions of what you’ll face.

Part 3: Honor Your Story with Self-Compassion

This is about acknowledging what makes this event potentially triggering while building confidence in your ability to handle whatever comes up.

  • Create Space for Nuance: I’m not trying to eliminate the possibility of being triggered or feeling grief during birth. Instead, I’m increasing my capacity to hold both joy and sadness, hope and fear, excitement and anxiety. I use the analogy that my grief is like 50 pounds—I can’t make it lighter, but I can get stronger so I can carry 50 pounds in one hand and a baby in the other.
  • Reframe Anxiety as Capacity Building: Anxiety is an overestimation of threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage that threat. Instead of minimizing potential challenges, I’m building confidence in my ability to handle whatever comes up. Who do I need? What do I need? What support does this situation call for?
  • Practice Self-Compassion: Acknowledging that this is hard and I’m not supposed to walk through it alone. Recognizing that my fears make sense given my history. Honoring both the loss I’ve experienced and the hope I’m carrying forward.

Building Capacity for Life’s Hard Moments

You’ve walked through difficult things before—that’s why you’re here, still showing up, still growing. There will be more challenging events in your future, and some are probably already on your calendar. Instead of just hoping to “get through” them, you can prepare your nervous system to meet them with as much capacity and regulation as possible.

Remember: You’re not trying to become a robot who doesn’t feel anything. You’re building the strength to hold whatever comes up while staying connected to yourself and your support systems.

Three Tangible Takeaways

  1. Use the Framework for Any Big Life Event For any potentially triggering event, strengthen the three safety determinants: context (research and understand what will happen), choice (focus on what you CAN control), and connection (build support before, during, and after). Ask yourself: What does this event entail? What might come up for me? What will I need to feel supported?
  2. Your Daily Practices Carry You Through Crisis What you do on a daily basis when you’re calm is what will be available to you in heightened stress. Identify one thing you can do daily that you know supports your nervous system, and make it non-negotiable in the weeks before your challenging event.
  3. Build Capacity, Don’t Just Minimize Stress While reducing unnecessary stress is helpful, also focus on increasing your capacity to handle stress. This might mean physical challenges, breathwork, cold exposure, or gradually building tolerance for discomfort. The goal is making yourself more resilient, not more fragile.

Looking for more personalized support?

*Want me to talk about something specific on the podcast? Let me know HERE.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *