Fall Reset: Resilience, Caregiving, and Three Micro-Practices to Regulate Now

Sep 1 / Jenn Wooten

The Seasonal Shift: Fall as a Chance to Recalibrate

As the daylight shifts and schedules tighten, fall often feels like the true beginning of the year, with new routines and fresh demands we didn’t exactly ask for. At our house, one daughter just moved into her dorm and the other started high school.

In the swirl of those transitions, it’s so easy to slip into push-through mode: check the boxes, keep things moving, hold it all together. But this morning, instead of pushing, I laid down for 5 mins in my daughter’s half-moved-out room, bare walls echoing the change, and I just breathed. And maybe let myself weep for a minute or two.

Because sometimes resilience looks less like powering forward and more like pausing to feel the weight of it all. And to let it move through.

Our culture loves to treat this season as a time to do more and button ourselves back up from the summer months. But does your nervous system need something different? Fall is nature’s way of saying: slow down, notice, and ask yourself, how’s my system holding up?

Watch this short Viasomatic video on resilience:

Resilience isn’t about powering through; it’s about how we move with stress and recover from it.

Juggling Kids + Eldercare: Why That Pushes Us Off Center

In our nervous system coaching practice, we work with so many people who are carrying life in two directions at once, caring for teenagers while also tending to aging parents. This “sandwich generation” is stretched thin, and the toll it takes on the nervous system is real. Studies on caregivers show higher baseline cortisol, disrupted sleep cycles, and lower vagal tone, which means the body has less access to the recovery states it desperately needs.

If you’re the one who handles things, shuttling kids to school, managing appointments for an older parent, keeping work afloat - your nervous system is working overtime. The smaller, often invisible parts of caregiving - micro-interruptions, constant vigilance, emotional labor - shrink the time your body has to complete its natural stress responses. That constant toggling between tasks and emotional demands is a chronic cortisol drip that can wear us down over time. Activation builds up instead, showing up as tension, agitation, sleep disruption, or numbness. This is how burnout takes root.

Naming this process matters. Once you see it, you can start to respond. You don’t need to solve everything at once. Tiny practices to reorient, complete activation, and rebuild capacity can shift the system back toward balance, little by little. 

So in the middle of caregiving in both directions, can you pause long enough to offer even a little caregiving to yourself?

Three Quick Practices to Regulate In The Moment

Each of these has a short Viasomatic video you can follow. Use them as 1-3 minute micro-resets between obligations.

Straw Breath

What it is: Slow inhalation through the nose, then lengthened exhale through pursed lips—like breathing through a straw.

Uses for each stress response:
  • Fight/Flight (sympathetic): Lengthened exhale helps down-shift activation and reduce racing energy. Use 3–5 reps when heart rate is elevated or thoughts feel frantic.
  • Flop/Dorsal Vagal (shutdown): Use very gently—shorter, softer inhales to find gentle tone, then slightly longer exhales to coax a little movement back into the system without overwhelm.
  • Social Engagement/Regulation (ventral vagal): A calm Straw Breath rhythm helps restore vagal tone and a sense of presence when you need to be emotionally available again.

Seated Twist

What it is: A gentle seated spinal rotation that includes breath and subtle attention to vagus nerve.

Why it helps: Twists also help you orient back to the center of your body again after being pulled into cognitive overload and stimulate your vagus nerve, which turns on your rest and digest system. 

Practical uses:
  • When you’re scattered or dissociated (mild flop): The twist brings blood flow and sensory information back into the midline, helping you re-engage with your body.
  • When you’re activated (sympathetic): Use the twist with a longer exhale to introduce easing movement and signal that threat is passing.

The Basic Exercise

What it is: This gem from Stanley Rosenberg combines small movement, breath, and visual orientation.

Why it helps: This practice is designed to move stuck activation safely—useful when anxious or overwhelmed. It provides an embodied way to complete the stress cycle so the nervous system can return to equilibrium. 

Practical uses: 
  • When anxiety spikes: Follow the sequence to move energy through the body rather than amplify it with thought loops.
  • When you feel crowded by tasks: Use the movement to create interoceptive feedback that you can rely on instead of getting lost in your to-do list.

Connection Is Medicine

After your body moves through a stress cycle, what it naturally looks for next is connection. Sometimes that’s a walk with a friend, a long hug, curling up with your pet, or simply placing a hand on your own heart and breathing with kindness. Rest is important, but it’s the combination of rest and connection that allows the nervous system to truly repair and feel safe again.

Reframing Commitments: Capacity, Not Guilt

One practice that can change everything is the way we use language. Instead of saying “I should” or “I have to,” try framing your limits through the lens of capacity. The simple phrase “I don’t have the capacity for that right now” can be powerful.

Why it matters: Those words name a truth about where you are, rather than layering on guilt or shame. They give you permission to protect your nervous system’s bandwidth. You can say them out loud or send them in a message when you need to set a boundary with kindness.

For example:
  • I’d love to help, but I don’t have the capacity for that right now.”
  • I can’t take on more this week. I’m at capacity. I’ll check in next month.”
Every time you practice this, you’re teaching others to see and respect your limits. And just as importantly, you’re teaching your own nervous system that it can count on you to honor its limits and needs.

A 7-Day Fall Reset

  • Mon: 3 Physiological Sighs before coffee or tea..
    (We love coffee but recommend tea as it lowers cortisol.)
  • Tue: 30-second Straw Breath after drop off.
  • Wed: Legs-Up-the-Wall for 5 mins before bed.
  • Thu: Orient to five beautiful things outside.
  • Fri: Hum a favorite song’s chorus once, or sing along in your car.
  • Sat: Take a 10-minute slow walk—notice your feet.
  • Sun: Write one boundary you’ll keep this week.

Gentle Next Steps

If you’re running on fumes, it’s not more grit you need. It’s a pathway toward completion and repair. That’s what Viasomatic is here for: simple somatic tools that meet you right where you are and help your system find its way back to balance.

You can explore Steady Inside: Nervous System Skills for Life for guidedpractices that weave easily into the rhythms of caregiving and daily life: