How to use Regulation at work to reach your potential

At Parent Health Hub, we’ve spoken often about the importance of regulation for parents. Being regulated means having more control over your reactions, behaviours, and emotions, a key ingredient for getting through the day, supporting your health, and nurturing your children’s wellbeing and development.

But regulation doesn’t just help at home, it’s just as important in the workplace.

Work brings its own challenges: tight deadlines, demanding projects, difficult colleagues' behaviours, tough decisions, public speaking, and even the strain of sitting or standing too long. No matter your role, work demands can chip away at your sense of balance, leading to dysregulation.

And let’s not forget co-regulation.

If you’ve read our earlier articles, you’ll know this is when our nervous system unconsciously mirrors the emotional states of those around us. So if your team is stressed, chances are that stress can transfer to you too. It’s why tension in the office can be contagious and why even the calmest colleague might snap under pressure.

The result? A workplace that can easily become a hotbed for dysregulation. And when we’re dysregulated, we lose some of our control over how we think, feel, and respond.

But here’s the good news

You can learn to regulate your system physically and neurologically if you know how.

Our Sensory Regulation Course covers this in detail and is available here. But in the meantime, below are some top tips you can try straight away:

Top Tips to Improve Regulation at Work

1. Get outside

A breath of fresh air and a change of scenery can do wonders. Even a short walk or quick coffee run can send calming sensory input to your nervous system and help reset your state.

2. Use under-desk proprioception

Proprioception (your sense of body awareness) is powerful for calming the nervous system. Try subtle movements like squeezing your hands together under the desk, curling and uncurling your toes, or pushing down through your arms into the chair. These discreet strategies help restore control when overwhelm creeps in.

3. Relax your jaw

Before a meeting or presentation, pause and consciously release your jaw. We tend to hold tension there when we’re stressed, relaxing your jaw sends a signal via the vagus nerve that it’s safe to shift out of ‘fight or flight’ mode and into ‘rest and digest’. A simple but powerful tool.

Being a working parent isn’t easy but with the right tools, you can meet the challenges and truly thrive, both at home and at work.

If you would like further support with regulation within the workplace for you and your team please feel free to contact us. We have corporate packages available to support and retain working parents.