By Shanna Harding, Food Scientist and Certified Postpartum Doula, Resting Rituals
The baby is finally asleep. Your body is exhausted. And your mind won’t stop.
You’re listening for every sound. You’re running through the list. You’re lying there, eyes closed, willing yourself to sleep, and something in you just won’t let go.
If you’ve experienced this, or you’re expecting to, here’s the thing nobody told you: nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It just hasn’t been told it’s safe to stop.
I’ll be honest with you. I teach nervous system regulation, and lately mine has been asking for attention.
I’ve been on edge. Exhausted by 7pm but lying awake at 11, brain still running through the list. Forgetting things. Half listening while I plan the next thing. So this post isn’t coming from someone who has it all figured out. It’s coming from someone using the exact tools I’m about to share with you. Knowing this stuff doesn’t make you exempt. It just means you notice sooner.
What birth actually does to your nervous system
Birth is a full-system activation. Hormones surge and then drop sharply. The body moves from the extraordinary physical effort of labour directly into the demands of newborn care. With no rest in between. Your body goes from one enormous job straight into another.
And then there’s the baby. A newborn is a genuine biological cue to stay alert. A cry activates the stress response. The postpartum nervous system is doing its job, scanning, monitoring, responding, around the clock. That’s not anxiety. That’s mammalian parenting biology.
The problem isn’t that the system activates. The problem is that without deliberate inputs, it never fully comes back down.
The ladder, a simple way to understand where you are
Polyvagal theory comes from the work of Dr Stephen Porges. But it’s researcher and clinician Deb Dana who made it practical, and she describes the nervous system as a ladder with three rungs.
Here’s the part that makes this actually usable, and it’s how I teach it to my clients. Don’t keep the textbook labels. Name each rung in words that resonate with you. When a state has your name for it, you can spot it faster, and spotting it is half the work. You can’t reach for a tool if you don’t know which rung you’re standing on.
I’ll give you mine. The top of my ladder is Safe. It’s where I’m happy, connected with my toddler, dancing in the kitchen, able to laugh at his jokes. The middle is On Edge. Brain running, snappy, always reaching for the next thing on the list. And the bottom, when I’ve pushed through On Edge for too long, is Dead. Nothing left, going through the motions.
One of the mothers I’ve worked with named hers Sunny, Static, and Underwater. Hers, not mine. That’s the point. The names only work if they’re yours.
The ladder as Deb describes it:
At the top is safe and connected. You feel calm, present, able to think clearly, able to be with your baby. Your body knows it’s safe.
In the middle is mobilised. Heart racing, mind spinning, can’t settle, lying awake at 3am even when the baby is asleep, milk that won’t let down. Your body thinks there’s a threat, even when there isn’t one.
At the bottom is shut down. Flat, foggy, going through the motions. Your body has collapsed inward to conserve energy.
The postpartum nervous system spends a lot of time on the middle rung. Occasionally it drops to the bottom when the cumulative load gets too heavy. Neither state is a character flaw. Both are responses to real physiological demands.
I’ll tell you where I’ve been living lately: on edge, in the middle. Mobilised, doing, scanning for what’s next. With brief visits to the top when I remember to breathe.
And here’s what I keep coming back to. In my own fourth trimester, my nervous system was the most settled it’s ever been. My husband was home full time. I wasn’t thinking about work. My whole world was our baby, our son, the four of us bonding as a family. I was protected, and my body knew it.
Now we’re back in the rhythm of ordinary life, and I can feel the difference. I put pressure on myself over the business. My husband reminds me to just be a mum, and I struggle to stay in the moment.
That contrast taught me something I want you to hold onto: regulation isn’t a personality trait. It’s conditions plus practice. My fourth trimester was calm because it was built to be. Support in the house, pressure taken off, permission to rest. You can build that too. That’s what postpartum planning actually is.
And when the conditions slip, as they always do at some point, regulation tools give you a way back up the ladder. Deliberately, reliably, without needing much from you.
Three tools that actually work
Right now, I’m going back to the basics I teach. Breathwork is back in my day. I stand on my spiky mat in the morning. I walk in nature without my phone. I’ve given my work a set window and when it closes, I close with it, so the hours with my family are actually with my family.
None of it is complicated. That’s the point. Your nervous system doesn’t need impressive. It needs repetition, warmth, and cues of safety, over and over. Here are the three tools I teach, and the ones I’m using this week. Each takes less than five minutes. Each can be done with a baby in your arms.
The first is breathwork. The exhale is the key. A longer exhale than inhale directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch that signals safety and rest. Try an extended exhale breath: inhale for four counts, exhale for six to eight. That’s it. Do it three times. Notice what shifts.
Box breathing is the second version: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. More structured, good for moments when the mind is very loud and needs something to follow.
The second tool is grounding. Bare feet on a cool floor. Five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. A slow deliberate body scan from head to toe, not looking for problems, just noticing. Grounding pulls the nervous system into the present moment and out of the anticipatory scanning loop that keeps so many postpartum mothers awake at night.
The third is rest, and this one needs a reframe.
Rest is not sleep. Rest is a practice.
Sleep when the baby sleeps is unhelpful advice. Not because rest doesn’t matter, but because it sets you up to fail. You can’t always sleep. The conditions aren’t always right. The window is often too short.
But you can always rest. Lying down with eyes closed for ten minutes, even without sleep, has measurable restorative effect on the nervous system. Reducing sensory input deliberately: dimming lights, putting the phone face down, removing background noise. Giving yourself explicit permission to stop, without the internal commentary that you should be doing something.
That last part is not soft. The nervous system cannot regulate while it’s simultaneously processing guilt and urgency. Permission is a physiological input, not just a nice idea.
What to do before baby arrives
The time to build these practices is now, before you need them, when you have the headspace to choose rather than scramble.
Pick two tools that feel natural. Write them down somewhere you’ll see.
Design one rest window per day. Not sleep, rest. When will it happen, where, for how long? Plan it before the baby arrives so it has a place in the day.
Tell your support people what you’ve learned. The people around you need to understand that protecting your rest is protecting your recovery. That conversation is worth having before the baby arrives.
Your nervous system isn’t broken
It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Your job isn’t to fix it, it’s to give it what it needs to come back to safety.
You can learn to do that. And the earlier you start, the more natural it becomes. I’m relearning it myself right now, standing on a spiky mat with a cup of something warm, and I can tell you the tools hold up.
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