Nikki Smit Therapy

Nikki Smit Therapy Wellbeing isn't about staying calm. It's the capacity to stay present as experiences rise and fall.

A clearer, kinder way of understanding your nervous system, with curiosity and dignity. Occupational therapist, speaker and educator. 15+ years experience.

So what do we do? This is usually the first question I get.But before any suggestions: understanding how stress stacks i...
02/06/2026

So what do we do? This is usually the first question I get.

But before any suggestions: understanding how stress stacks is already a big part of the work. Some would say most of it.

When we can acknowledge the load, we're validating it, and that's often what lets some of it start to shift.

The next part is support. Almost none of this is meant to be done alone. We regulate in relationship, alongside people who can carry some of it with us.

And if you've been here a while, you know I talk a lot about micro-moments of regulation and proactive support. The point is to weave them into ordinary life, not save them for the hard moments.

Because when you're already overwhelmed, it's hard to think of what would help. The part of your brain that plans and problem-solves is harder to reach.

So we practise these things when there's more room, until they're familiar enough to reach for later, or for someone you trust to remind you.

A few I come back to:

Movement woven into transitions
Deep pressure while seated, something to hold or rest on your lap
Something to chew, or a mint to suck
Rhythm, through sound, touch, or movement
A longer exhale
Closing mental loops, easing the urgency, making room to create rather than only consume

And that doesn't mean there's nothing to do in the moment. There is. It's less about fixing the feeling and more about easing the tension, and most of that comes through support from others.

My account is full of these ideas, so have a look around

This is educational, not a substitute for the personalised support a real relationship can offer.

If you have three books on your bedside table and feel vaguely guilty about it, this one's for you.I almost always have ...
28/05/2026

If you have three books on your bedside table and feel vaguely guilty about it, this one's for you.

I almost always have 5 on the go. I used to think that made me a chaotic reader. Now I see it as the way my brain wants to read.

Reading helps me settle when I'm wired, and lift when I'm flat. Fiction at night because it tells my brain to shift gears, out of the day's noise and into a different world.

An audiobook on a walk when I want to move and think. One of the great unlocks of my thirties as a multiply neurodivergent reader.

Poetry as a meditation practice.

Nonfiction sometimes slowly in pockets. Sometimes completely immersed in a glorious hyperfocus tunnel.

This month's stack is almost entirely about presence. About attention, noticing, being with what's in front of you.

Ironic as my own attention has never once followed the shape the world says it should. Turns out dipping and scattering and disappearing into one thing for days is not a lack of attention. It's just my version of it.

What should I add to my next stack?

Can we please stop saying 'regulated' when we mean calm and compliant.The version we've been sold is essentially: stay c...
24/05/2026

Can we please stop saying 'regulated' when we mean calm and compliant.

The version we've been sold is essentially: stay calm, look composed, breathe through it, come back to centre. A sanitised version of nervous system work. One that quietly teaches you a feeling is a problem to manage and that the goal is to feel less.

But nervous systems weren't designed to feel less.

They were designed to move with what's in front of them. And the way we learn we can move with something hard is rarely by thinking our way there.

It's relational. We learn through being alongside someone whose system stays steady when ours can't. Through watching how they meet a difficult moment. Through finding our way back together when something has ruptured between us. This is how the body comes to trust that hard feelings are survivable.

It's also why the mindset shifts that matter rarely happen in the activated moment. They happen later. In reflection. When the body is safe enough to take in something new.

And the body doesn't get told it's safe. It gets shown. Through deep pressure. Rhythmic movement. Long exhales. The steady presence of another person. Small repeated signals that say: it's okay to be here right now.

If this resonates, Waves of Regulation is the guide I made for exactly this.

Comment WAVES and I'll send you the link.

This is educational, not a substitute for the personalised support a real relationship can offer.

🧡

Not because silence magically heals you. Because constant input quietly crowds out the moments where your brain does som...
23/05/2026

Not because silence magically heals you. Because constant input quietly crowds out the moments where your brain does some of its most important work.

We're living in a culture that's quietly trained us to optimise every second. Every transition filled. Every pause productive. Every quiet moment turned into a chance to learn something, answer something, get ahead of something.

The urgency is constant, and the cost is invisible until you start paying attention.

Here's what gets lost. There's a network in the brain called the default mode network. It comes online when we're not actively focused on anything in particular, and it's responsible for some of the most important work the brain does.

Connecting ideas. Processing experience. Generating insight. Making sense of things we've been carrying around for days.

It's why your best thoughts arrive in the shower, on a walk, in the car. The brain isn't switching off in those moments. It's switching modes.

When we never give it a chance, that network has less room to do its job. We end up with more input and less sense-making, more stimulation and less processing, more activity and less clarity.

To be clear, this isn't about input being bad. Some of us genuinely come alive through stimulation, conversation, music, ideas, and that's beautiful.

The question is whether we're still letting spaciousness in at all, or whether we've quietly optimised it out of our lives.

The brain doesn't switch off when we stop feeding it. It switches modes. And we need those modes.

Because spaciousness isn't just about thinking more clearly. It's about having the capacity to be with what's actually here.

When do your clearest thoughts usually show up?

🧡

This is educational, not a substitute for the personalised support a real relationship can offer.

Honestly I could get the last one tattooed on my arm.Somewhere along the way "being regulated" became another thing to p...
19/05/2026

Honestly I could get the last one tattooed on my arm.

Somewhere along the way "being regulated" became another thing to perform. These are reminders for the part of you that keeps checking if you're doing it right.

Regulation isn't a state of calm. It's your nervous system's capacity to rise to challenge, settle when it passes, and recover when you've been pushed too far. That capacity is built over time, through being supported through the shifts.

Which one was it for you?

Maybe send it to the friend who needs to hear it 🧡

There's a quiet shame that follows being floored by something that, on a different day, you might have absorbed.The mome...
14/05/2026

There's a quiet shame that follows being floored by something that, on a different day, you might have absorbed.

The moment you snapped at your kid over something tiny and lay awake at midnight running it back.

The morning a slightly critical email had you in tears at the kitchen table.

The thing you said to your friend that you've been replaying for days, trying to work out why you said it.

When your nervous system responds in a way you don't recognise, the voice that fills the gap is rarely curious.

"Why am I like this."
"I should be able to handle this."

That's not who you are. It's a nervous system in a particular state, reading the moment through everything it had already absorbed.

I see this in myself. I see it in clients. I see it in friends.

Understanding state-dependence doesn't dissolve shame on its own.

Brené Brown's research is foundational here: shame moves when it's named, spoken, and met with empathy. Connection is the work.

State-recognition can soften the inner verdict enough to make that connection more possible.

That's what my guide Waves of Regulation is built for. It walks you through the states your nervous system moves between and what each one might be asking for.

The aim is curiosity and self-compassion in place of the inner verdict, and language for what's actually happening underneath.

If you'd like a copy, comment WAVES below and I'll send you the link.

This is educational, not a substitute for the personalised support a real relationship can offer.

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