Reflecting means developing awareness of what calm and overstress feel like, and learning to recognize the stressors and patterns that move us from one state to another.
Reflect is the development of stress-state awareness: learning what different brain-body states actually feel like and recognizing the patterns that move us between them.
Stuart describes this as noticing what it feels like to be calm and what it feels like to be overstressed, then reflecting on the stressors that contributed to that shift.
This is more than thinking about stress. It involves embodied awareness of signals such as changes in energy, tension, breathing, heart rate, heaviness, agitation, or mental clarity.
The Self-Reg shift is from recognizing stress only after behaviour occurs to gradually becoming able to notice the body’s signals as state is changing.
Stress awareness grows when we learn to notice the brain-body signals that tell us our state is changing.
