The Magic of Co-Regulation: Your nervous system is the intervention
The Reality of Living in Divisive Times
Across education, healthcare, nonprofits, business, and public service, leaders face immense pressure. Depression, addiction, chronic stress, interpersonal violence, and collective grief are woven into daily life. In these conditions, leadership becomes a living invitation. A leader who sets the intention to slow down, pay attention to the present moment, and speak up for wellbeing begins a chain reaction that reaches colleagues, staff, clients, students, families, and peers. A single leader can rewrite the script for an entire workplace or community by beginning the day with a few mindful breaths, opening meetings with a bell and check-ins, choosing curiosity over urgency, and modeling steady attention in moments of intensity.
Systems of every kind are impacted by trauma. Workplaces carry the weight of performance pressures, unspoken grief, and layers of visible and invisible harm. Many adults carry the cellular memory of threat.
This reality calls for leaders who place wellbeing at the center, welcome their own experience with curiosity and care, and embody the skills and attitudes they hope to cultivate in others. Embodied mindful leadership means teaching by example through presence, non-judgment, and skillful navigation of difficulty. It shows up in the way a leader breathes before speaking, the way meetings make space for appreciative inquiry, the way policies reflect attention to belonging, and the way organizations prioritize human wellbeing alongside productivity.
Our Nervous Systems are Contagious
Our nervous systems are extremely sensitive to other’s internal states, and we have evolved to be able to detect the electromagnetic fields of other people. Your ability to do this may be even more attuned if you were raised in an unpredictable household where you needed to be able to pick up on subtle cues that the environment was unsafe. We are inherently designed to be able to sense and feel each other, without the need for verbal communication and we have mirror neurons that synchronize us with the electromagnetic and non-verbal signals from each other. Our emotional states impact each other and the more regulated we are, the more we can be a source of regulation for others. This phenomenon is called co-regulation.
Leadership is heart work. No matter the sector, the emotional state of a leader sets the tone for the whole environment. When leaders tend to their own nervous systems, acknowledge their humanity, and model healthy coping, those around them gain permission to do the same.
The ripples of this work are measurable. A Harvard study describes happiness as contagious up to three degrees. This means that a single leader influences hundreds, even thousands, of lives through staff, teams, families, and peers. One steady nervous system becomes a community asset.
Just as stress, anxiety, and reactivity ripple outward, so do steadiness, presence, and care. Decades of neuroscience research—including Gabor Maté’s work on stress-related illness—show that unresolved trauma and chronic hyper-arousal do not remain isolated within one individual. They spread through families, classrooms, workplaces, and communities. When leaders neglect their own wellbeing, the impact echoes across entire systems. And when leaders resource themselves, regulate their nervous systems, and model authentic care, that too becomes contagious—creating ripples of collective healing.
Both our positive and negative moods can spread in a ripple effect through our communities, though research has shown that positive moods ripple outward more easily than negative ones[i]. We still need to take care that we are not allowing ourselves to become overwhelmed by a negative emotion because these mood-states do have a significant impact on our environment. For example, if we are under-rested, snippy, irritable, or anxious, the chances are higher that others may pick up on our moods and respond with defensiveness, tension, avoidance, or conflict. Perhaps you have noticed the change in the energy of a group when someone walks in the room in a state of high stress and anxiety. The air bristles with electricity, and everyone shifts in their seats uncomfortably, suddenly on guard and tense. If there are survivors of relational trauma in the room (which there most likely are) this may even send them into their own shame spiral or trigger them into reactivity.
In a six-week pilot program of the Foundations of Mindful Leadership Course, with department heads and advisors at Adams State University, participants reported reduced stress, greater confidence in coping with challenges, decreased irritability, less overwhelm, and a stronger sense of calm and wellbeing. Referrals followed, and more local school and organizational leaders began seeking coaching and staff sessions. Difficult conversations gained skillful containers, and rooms once tense began to feel connective and alive. The presence and efforts of 8 participants rippled outward to impact entire communities, and the effect is still growing.
Leading with Integrity
Collective healing begins inside each of us. When leaders give themselves the gift of attention, they create ripples of steadiness in the systems around them. Meetings can begin with a bell and a breath, agendas can include check-ins and collaborative feedback, and transitions can be anchored with sensation and sound. Staff development can provide the language of regulation, agency, and care. Leaders who offer their nervous systems as the intervention help rewrite the story inside their organizations—a story where wellbeing sits at the heart of culture, where connection guides decision-making, and where communities experience the ripples they most need: steadiness, clarity, and love.
Many of you in caregiving, family, or organizational leadership roles may find that you are frequently in contact with people experiencing acute traumatic arousal, or chronic traumatic distress. Because of how contagious our nervous systems are to each other, it is critical to not only develop skills for managing our own arousal, but also to have the capacity to keep ourselves regulated amid the collective dysregulation that surrounds us. We need to be able to discern what emotional states are arising within our own nervous system and what does not belong to us so that we can stay grounded with our own experience and perhaps even offer our calm regulation to others.
This work honors the complex history of the body, heart, and mind and takes repeated practice over time to integrate. They say mindfulness is “simple” but it’s not always “easy.” Leading to Heal offers evidence based programs to guide you on this courageous learning and soul-tending journey. Transforming your relationship to stress can change your life and the lives of everyone in your circle of care.
“Mindful Leadership” is not a race to completion, a box to check, or another task on your to-do list. Remember that mindfulness practice is not about quick results. It is a way of being—a shift in how you relate to yourself and an invitation to create habits of pausing, slowing down, and meeting what arises with compassion.
When working with trauma-impacted populations or with your own trauma history, it can be incredibly supportive to work with a coach or mentor trained in mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), or a trained mental health professional familiar with this work.
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[i] Positive moods ripple outward more easily than negative ones. Cerretani, Jessica. Harvard Medicine Magazine. “The Contagion of Happiness.” Summer 2011.
