Resource, Resilience, and Regulation, Part 5: COPES—A Somatic Toolkit for Nervous System Regulation
Introduction
COPES is a five-part, body-based toolkit I first encountered while offering crisis stabilization support to disaster survivors and first responders. But its value extends far beyond emergencies. In everyday moments—when the to-do list feels paralyzing, anxiety grips the breath, or isolation creeps in—these simple practices can gently guide you back to center.
Each step—Close the Loop, Open the Senses, Pendulate, Engage Socially, and Slow Steps—offers a concrete way to shift state and inhabit the present moment. COPES is a set of invitations: small, physical cues that help you attune to your body and support your nervous system’s natural capacity to settle, rebalance, and reorient toward life.
Practice
The five elements of COPES can be used independently or woven together as a short sequence. The order presented here—Close the Loop, Open the Senses, Pendulate, Engage Socially, Slow Steps—tends to support a natural arc of settling and reconnection, but it’s not prescriptive. Feel free to experiment and discover which elements work best for your system, and in what order.
These practices are designed to support nervous system resiliency—to help you return to a more stable, regulated state when life’s demands or past experiences pull you off center. One essential element of this practice—one I can’t overemphasize—is to stay curious about what’s different after each step. What has shifted, even subtly? This habit of gentle inquiry helps anchor the experience in the nervous system, making its regulating effects both more potent as well as progressively more accessible over time. I suggest pausing and trying each of the exercises out as you read.
1. Close the Loop
Exercise:
Cross your arms over your chest.
Place your right hand under your left armpit, and your left hand over your right upper arm, gently wrapping around yourself.
Turn your head slowly to the left.
Drop your chin slightly, allowing the posture to feel like a gentle hug—supportive but not tight or tense.
Hold for 30–60 seconds, breathing slowly.
Key tips: This posture is especially helpful when overwhelmed—when you feel stuck, indecisive, or overloaded with competing demands. It works by helping your system settle through physical containment and neurological signaling. Let yourself come out of the position slowly, and see if you can name something that feels different inside.
2. Open Your Senses
Exercise: Use your senses to gently reorient to the present:
Look around the room. Name five different colors.
Listen for the farthest sound you can hear, then the nearest.
Touch a nearby surface: the grain of a wooden table, the coolness of metal, the fabric of your clothing.
Smell the air or an object nearby—tea, lotion, even your shirt collar.
Taste something if available (a sip of water works).
Key tips: This is not about judging or analyzing your surroundings. It’s about witnessing with curiosity. When you're stuck in thought loops, orienting through the senses gently brings your attention back to the present. You’re not trying to escape your thoughts—just widening your attention so you’re not trapped inside them.
3. Pendulate
Exercise:
Start with a resource. Bring your attention to a sensation in or on your body that feels okay—neutral, calm, or even slightly pleasant. Oftentimes, the easiest spots to identify are the arms or hands, thighs or feet, or face, but everyone is different. Spend about 20 seconds here. Explore the sensation: Does it have a shape? A temperature? Is it still or moving? How big is it? Is it near the surface or deeper inside?
Shift gently to discomfort. Bring awareness to a sensation that feels difficult—tightness in the chest, a lump in the throat, an ache in the belly. Stay there for just a few seconds. Briefly notice the same qualities: shape, size, texture, movement.
Return to the resource. Rest your attention on the pleasant sensation again for about 20 seconds. Let your breath flow naturally.
Repeat cycling between the resource and discomfort for a few cycles. Make note of changes in sensations with each successive cycle.
Key tips: Always begin and end with what feels resourcing. Shifting the attention between a resource and discomfort encourages the nervous system to pendulate through cycles of activation and deactivation, which is the natural healthy behavior of a harmonious nervous system. If you are new to these practices, pendulation typically works best after you've already completed one of the other elements of COPES first.
4. Engage Socially
Exercise: Try one or more of the following cues:
Make eye contact with a friend or family member. Let the gaze be soft, not staring.
Initiate physical contact if available—like a hug, a hand on the shoulder, or simply sitting close to someone.
If no one is nearby, call or message someone who feels supportive.
You can also connect with another mammal —a dog, cat, or rabbit. Mammals co-regulate across species.
Key tips: This isn’t about having a deep conversation—it’s about shared presence. Even a brief warm exchange can shift your nervous system toward safety. Physical touch and eye contact are particularly powerful, but any authentic connection—even digital—can begin to restore the sense that you’re not alone.
5. Slow Steps
Exercise: Stand up, or walk across the room. Take 10 very slow, deliberate steps. Feel each part of the movement: the lift, the shift of weight, the contact of your foot with the floor. Let your breath follow the rhythm of your body—inhale as you lift, exhale as you land.
Key tips: Use this when you feel panicked or frantic—when your body is going faster than your mind can track. Slowing physical movement helps to reestablish focus. It allows you to begin again, one step at a time.
Final Note
COPES isn’t a rigid sequence—it’s a palette. Here are some examples of how you might use it. Again these examples are jumping off points—not fixed prescriptions. You might use Close the Loop when your thoughts are tangled and you can’t seem to make a decision. Slow Steps when panic rushes in like a wave. Engage Socially when you feel lonely, numb or disconnected. Pendulate when you find your body getting tight or braced. Open the Senses when you’re caught in a mental loop and need help returning to the present.
You don’t need to do it all. Just choose one or two. The nervous system is always listening—and eager to return home, one small cue at a time.
Discussion
Each COPES element engages different facets of the body’s natural capacity to regulate. While their effects often overlap—orienting, co-regulation, interoception—each practice offers a distinct entry point into settling, depending on what’s most accessible or needed in the moment.
Close the Loop draws on a combination of vagal regulation, physical containment, and orienting mechanics. Crossing the arms and turning the head to one side engages both proprioceptive feedback and the cardiac branch of the vagus nerve, which helps slow the heart rate and promote parasympathetic activity. The posture mimics instinctive self-holding gestures seen in humans and animals under threat—gestures that naturally serve to limit external stimulation and reinforce internal boundaries. Head-turning also activates orienting reflexes, signaling safety to the nervous system. This combination makes the practice especially effective when you feel fragmented, flooded, or mentally gridlocked. Physiological markers include improved heart rate variability and vagal tone—key indicators of nervous system resilience and downregulation.
Open the Senses leverages the orienting reflex—a deeply ingrained, evolutionarily conserved response that helps the nervous system assess safety by attending to new or significant stimuli. When we’re stuck in looping thoughts or implicit fear states, the body may continue to operate as though danger is still present. By consciously engaging the senses—looking at colors or textures, listening for ambient sounds, touching nearby objects—we activate the orienting system and invite the brain to update its model of the present moment. This allows the system to recognize: “I’m here now. The danger has passed.”
Research shows that when we orient, the superior colliculus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) become more active. The superior colliculus helps direct attention and eye movements toward environmental cues, supporting real-time assessment of safety. The vmPFC plays a critical role in emotional regulation, helping to inhibit fear responses when threat is no longer present. Activation of these regions reflects a nervous system that is shifting out of defense and toward regulation—making orienting a powerful entry point for settling the body and returning to presence.
Pendulate strengthens interoceptive awareness and supports the restoration of what might be called the range of resilience—the ability to move flexibly between activation and rest without becoming stuck in either extreme. The practice involves alternating attention between a comfortable body sensation and a more difficult or uncomfortable one, while tracking each with curiosity and detail. This back-and-forth attention facilitates titrated exposure to distressing sensations interspersed with settling, allowing the nervous system to process them in manageable doses.
Neurophysiologically, this approach supports the integration of limbic and cortical activity, engages regions responsible for interoception (such as the insula), and helps discharge bound sympathetic activation. Over time, pendulation builds capacity for staying present with discomfort without flooding or dissociation—an essential skill in trauma recovery and stress resilience.
Engage Socially Humans evolved as profoundly social organisms whose survival depended on belonging to a group. Anthropological and evolutionary research suggests our nervous systems developed over millennia in close-knit communal settings that required cooperation, shared caregiving, and synchronized group rhythms. This collective context shaped the architecture of the mammalian nervous system—particularly the social engagement system, mediated by the ventral vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system. The practice of social engagement taps into this system, which regulates facial muscles, vocal tone, eye contact, and heart–lung rhythms—all of which are involved in establishing and maintaining social connection. When you engage in safe eye contact, experience warm physical touch, or are in proximity to another mammal (including pets), your nervous system receives cues of safety. These cues promote regulation not through effort, but through co-regulation—an evolutionarily conserved mechanism by which mammals modulate each other’s physiology through presence and relational attunement. This makes the practice particularly helpful when you feel numb, isolated, or beyond the reach of your own internal resources. Even virtual connection, while not as potent as in-person interaction, can still support these mechanisms through visual and auditory pathways.
Slow Steps works by shifting the body’s rhythm—which directly influences how the nervous system is operating. When we’re anxious, panicked, or hypervigilant, our movement tends to become fast, shallow, or erratic, reinforcing sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activation. Deliberately slowing down—walking with intention, feeling your feet touch the ground—tells the body that it no longer needs to flee or brace.
This kind of paced, grounded movement can also help release muscular bracing patterns that form in response to chronic stress or trauma. When you’re frozen or collapsed—often a sign of dorsal vagal dominance—initiating gentle movement helps restore motor activity and orienting capacity, allowing the system to shift out of shutdown. Moving slowly helps you reconnect with your body’s natural pacing and rhythm, supporting a return to agency, regulation, and present-moment awareness.
References
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