How Co-Regulation Works
One way we help each other is by coming together—in friendship, love, and other partnerships, in families, groups, and communities. A felt sense of connection and belonging is good for us.
One powerful effect of coming together is what psychologists call “co-regulation.” This has been defined as the "continuous unfolding of individual action that is susceptible to being continuously modified by the continuously changing actions of the partner.”1 (Though not an elegant definition, you can detect in it the presence of the interpersonal field.)
How does co-regulation work? Imagine a child is having a meltdown or that an adult is having a panic attack. You could probably help them if they followed your instructions for how to breathe and where to direct their attention. But it’s hard to follow instructions when flooded by emotion. So, how do you help?
Begin by noticing what’s happening in the field. In other words, start by attuning to their experience and demonstrating your attunement. If you perceive that their posture is rigid and their breathing fast and ragged, demonstrate this by bringing your own posture and breathing closer to theirs. You might speak to what they are experiencing, but more important than what you say is how you embody it. If their speech is tight, pressured, urgent, so is yours as you say: “Oh, you’re feeling overwhelmed. It’s all too much. It’s scary when it’s so hard to catch your breath…”
But wait! Why amplify signals of distress when your aim is to help them calm down? In fact, whether you actually start here will depend on the particular situation—including your relationship with the person. But wherever you start, the guiding principle is the same: If you want to help someone, start by attuning to them and demonstrating that you’re attuned—that you recognize how they’re feeling. Otherwise, it’s like your friend cheerfully telling you to relax when you’re the one who sees the mountain lion coming up fast behind her. You know better than to trust her calm assurances!
By attuning, you’re establishing a limbic resonance between your nervous systems. Resonating with their sympathetic vibrations, as it were, you’re ready to start shifting toward more parasympathetic vibrations: You slow your breathing, sit back, uncross your legs, relax your face, drop the volume and tempo of your speech, make your tone and words more reassuring: “What a relief that’s over. It’s quiet and safe here. We have time to figure out what happened. I’m here, so you can relax. You can take longer and slower breaths, yes, like that.” In effect, your regulated nervous system becomes a beacon of safety drawing them into co-regulation.
Good-enough parents do this with their children as a matter of course, first attuning and empathizing with the situation that led to the meltdown, then inviting the child to hold onto their regulated nervous system, much as the child might hold their hand for comfort.
What we’re doing here is leveraging a core function of our socially minded mammalian limbic systems, which is to sense signals from the external world, and to infer from these signals what emotions are fitting. If there’s a mountain lion out there, be afraid. If you’re freaking out, but others around you are acting as if it’s safe, you can (probably) relax. Similarly, when a deer senses my presence, I can observe its awareness ripple through the local field of the herd, so that in a second they’ve all lifted their heads from grazing to look for the source of the sensed danger. I’m watching the herd co-regulate.
Co-regulation as I’ve described it doesn’t always work. Studies suggest it is less likely to work if the person doesn’t know you or trust you. Organic differences may also play a part. It has been found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less likely to engage in contagious yawning, among other social communications.2 It makes sense that individuals facing challenges to communicating, verbally and nonverbally, would be less susceptible to social “contagions” and thus more isolated in the self. (“Autism” comes from the Greekautos, meaning “self”.)
Whatever the cause, diminished access to the social, interpersonal field makes it harder to experience the calming, belonging effects of co-regulation. This in turn leads to a more isolated, and often more dysregulated, self. Our society’s mental-health crisis has many causes, but the most significant is social isolation, what’s being called the “epidemic of loneliness”. I’m reminded of the tagline of an ad for Meals on Wheels, an organization that helps “homebound seniors know they’re not alone”:
1 Butler, E. A., & Randall, A. K. (2013). Emotional Coregulation in Close Relationships. Emotion Review, 5(2), 202–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912451630
2 Neilands P, Claessens S, RenI, Hassall R, Bastos APM, Taylor AH. 2020. Contagious yawning is not a signal of empathy: no evidence of familiarity, gender or prosociality biases in dogs.Proc. R. Soc. B287:20192236.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2236.