9 Micro Habits for Self-Regulation of Trauma or Anxiety
Therapy in a Nutshell
Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam
4.8 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of the Therapy in a Nutshell podcast. I'm Emma McAdam and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. |
| 0:07.1 | And this podcast is all about taking the life-changing, but usually kind of complicated topics of therapy and boiling them down into simple, easy-to-understand concepts that you can use in your daily life. |
| 0:18.8 | If you find today's episode as helpful to you, |
| 0:20.9 | please pass it on to someone else who could benefit from it as well. Each podcast |
| 0:24.5 | episode comes from a corresponding video you can find on the Therapy in a Nutshell |
| 0:28.3 | YouTube channel. Also, these podcasts are educational and don't replace the advice |
| 0:32.5 | or direction you may be receiving from a therapist or other health professionals. |
| 0:36.4 | Now please enjoy the episode. |
| 0:38.3 | It's probably the therapist in me who wonders if this minivan might have trauma. |
| 0:43.3 | But to be serious, when you have trauma or anxiety, it's like your nervous system is an overly sensitive car alarm that goes off if anything gets too close. |
| 0:55.0 | For someone living with trauma or anxiety, stress, hypervigilance, anger and fear can seem to |
| 0:59.8 | dominate your day and leave you feeling triggered, tense, jumpy, and eventually exhausted and burnt |
| 1:05.3 | out. With trauma, it's common for your nervous system to be what's called sympathetically dominant. |
| 1:11.6 | The sympathetic state is the activated state, the anxious state of your nervous system. |
| 1:17.6 | And it's fine for brief spells, but when it's chronic that can lead to some unwanted negative impacts on your mental health and physical health. |
| 1:24.6 | The good news is that we can retrain our nervous systems to be healthier, to be parasympathetically |
| 1:30.2 | dominant. |
| 1:31.2 | That's the calming state of your nervous system, where we feel safe, balanced, and confident. |
| 1:36.8 | Then when things get stressful, your alarm doesn't get triggered as often. |
| 1:40.5 | And when it does, you can come back to a sense of safety more quickly. |
| 1:45.0 | But this retraining isn't something we do in therapy. |
| 1:48.8 | In this video, you'll learn nine micro-habits you can work into each day to retrain |
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