The therapist’s office is on the third floor of a building that smells like carpet cleaner and recycled air. Marcus sits in the chair across from her — good chair, intentionally comfortable, a chair designed to signal that this is a safe space for thinking — and he is, for the forty-third session in a row, talking about his thoughts. Specifically the thoughts he has at night, between roughly 11 PM and 3 AM, when his brain assembles a highlight reel of every embarrassing thing he’s ever done, every conversation he could have handled better, every decision that might blow up in his face tomorrow. He’s described these thoughts in precise detail. He knows their patterns. He can trace their genealogy. He has CBT worksheets that map the distortions. He can identify, without prompting, the exact moment a thought crosses from realistic concern into catastrophizing.
He is, in other words, extremely well-educated about his own overthinking. And his overthinking has not changed. Not an inch.
His therapist is not a bad therapist. She’s a good one, actually — rigorous, evidence-based, genuinely invested. The problem isn’t the therapist. The problem is the frame. For forty-three sessions, Marcus has been sitting in a comfortable chair, using his brain to examine his brain, trying to think his way out of a pattern his brain has been running on automatic for fifteen years. He’s been diagnosing the alarm system while the fire underneath keeps burning. And nobody in the room — not the therapist, not Marcus, not the CBT workbook sitting on the coffee table — has looked down at what’s actually generating all of it.
His body.
Marcus’s jaw is clenched right now, in this office, in this comfortable chair. Has been since he woke up. His shoulders sit forward and slightly elevated, which is where they spend roughly eighteen hours a day. His breathing is shallow — chest-dominant, not diaphragmatic — running around seventeen to eighteen breaths a minute, two to three above the parasympathetic baseline his body would need to stop broadcasting threat. His cortisol has been elevated since about 4 AM, when he woke up mid-loop and couldn’t climb back under. He is, in strict physiological terms, a man in mild but chronic threat response — not panic, not crisis, just a low-grade activation state his nervous system has been treating as normal for so long it no longer registers as a signal. It just feels like him.
And into this activated body, his brain is faithfully doing what brains do: producing thoughts that match the threat state. Racing, looping, catastrophizing, rehearsing. Not because the thoughts are irrational. Because his nervous system is running a fire drill and his mind is filling out the paperwork.
Marcus doesn’t have a thinking problem. He has a body problem, and he’s spent forty-three sessions analyzing the paperwork while the drill runs on underneath him — which is, when you actually sit with it, one of the more expensive misunderstandings currently operating inside modern mental health.
The Actual Problem: Overthinking Is a Report, Not a Root
Every intervention tried for the overthinking — the journaling, the meditation apps, the CBT worksheets, the “scheduled worry time” (a real thing real professionals recommend, as though anxiety could be Google Calendar’d into submission) — runs on the same flawed assumption: that thoughts generate the distress, and that changing the thoughts will therefore change the distress.
That assumption is backwards. Thoughts aren’t driving the state. The state is driving the thoughts. A nervous system in chronic sympathetic activation — a low-grade version of the same fight-or-flight response ancestors used when a predator showed up — produces thoughts calibrated to that activation. The rumination, the scanning, the catastrophizing: these aren’t malfunctions. They’re accurate reports from a brain doing exactly what brains are supposed to do when the body signals threat. The body says “danger.” The brain produces “danger thoughts.” You try to argue with the danger thoughts. The body says “danger” again. The brain refills the queue.
Call this the Body Signal Loop. It’s the mechanism every cognitive intervention misses: the body is upstream of the mind, not downstream. Until the body signal changes, what’s being edited is the printout of a document the body keeps regenerating. Edit as fast as you like. The printer is faster.
The Science: What Your Nervous System Is Actually Doing
The highest state, ventral vagal, is what Porges calls the social engagement system. Parasympathetic dominance: slow heart rate, relaxed musculature, open perceptual field, executive function online. In this state, the brain generates future-oriented, flexible, curious thoughts. Problems feel solvable. Uncertainty feels like possibility instead of threat. This is the state most people think they’re chasing through mindfulness apps.
The middle state is sympathetic activation. Heart rate elevated, muscles primed, peripheral vision narrowed, attention hypervigilant to whatever might go wrong. In this state, the brain generates threat-detection thoughts by design. It scans. It rehearses worst-case scenarios — not because you’re a pessimist, but because the nervous system is literally running a threat-preparation protocol. Rumination isn’t irrational here. It’s the brain doing exactly what sympathetic activation requires of it. The problem starts when this state becomes the default baseline rather than an acute response to an actual threat.
The third state, dorsal vagal, is shutdown — the freeze/collapse response that activates when threat runs so prolonged or extreme that fight-or-flight stops being a viable option. Depression, dissociation, emotional numbness. This is the state people sometimes fall into after years of unresolved sympathetic activation. The overthinker usually lives in the middle state — chronic low-grade sympathetic dominance — with occasional dips into the third.
What Porges identified, and what decades of subsequent research confirmed, is that nervous system state is determined primarily by the body, not the mind. Specifically by three physiological inputs: breath rate and depth, muscular tension patterns (particularly face, jaw, neck), and proprioceptive signals from posture and movement. The body sends these signals upward, continuously, and the brain stem uses them to decide which state to hold. This is the biology underneath the Body Signal Loop: chronically elevated breath rate signals threat. A perpetually clenched jaw signals vigilance. Forward-rolled, elevated shoulders signal bracing for impact. Each signal, minor on its own, adds up to a continuous upward message: we are not safe. Keep scanning.
Robert Sapolsky at Stanford spent thirty years documenting what chronic sympathetic activation does to the brain’s structure and function. His research, summarized in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and across dozens of peer-reviewed papers, identified the key damage mechanism: elevated cortisol. The stress hormone is essential in short bursts — it mobilizes energy, sharpens focus, prepares the body for the acute demand. But sustained cortisol elevation, the kind that comes from months and years of chronic sympathetic activation, does measurable structural damage to the prefrontal cortex (the seat of rational decision-making, perspective-taking, executive control) while simultaneously thickening and sensitizing the amygdala (the threat-detection center). The overthinker’s brain gets, over time, measurably better at detecting threats and measurably worse at evaluating them. It isn’t defective. It’s the predictable output of years of unaddressed body-level activation.
Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score brought a clinical dimension to what Porges and Sapolsky had already established in the lab. Van der Kolk documented, through two decades of clinical work with thousands of patients, that traumatic and chronic stress doesn’t primarily live in memory — it lives in the body’s habitual activation patterns, in the fascial tension, in the breath rhythm, in the postural holding. His team at the Trauma Center in Boston consistently found that cognitive therapies (talking about the problem) produced limited lasting change in patients with chronic stress patterns, while somatic interventions (body-level work — yoga, EMDR, somatic experiencing) produced the neurological changes cognitive work couldn’t reach. The memories stayed. The body stopped treating them as current threats.
The fascia connection deserves specific attention because almost nobody explains it. Fascia is the connective tissue surrounding and running through every muscle, and it has its own sensory nervous system — more proprioceptive nerve endings per cubic centimeter than muscle tissue carries. When the nervous system holds prolonged activation, fascia responds by contracting and thickening around the muscles, particularly the ones that hold tension during sympathetic activation: the psoas (hip flexor, the body’s primary fight-or-flight muscle), the thoracic spine, the neck, the jaw. Over months and years this fascial contraction becomes structural — it stops releasing between stress events. And because fascia is so densely innervated, that structural contraction sends a continuous proprioceptive signal to the brain: the threat posture is still active. The body has, quite literally, frozen itself in a state of readiness. And it keeps telling the brain about it.
Which is why the meditation app doesn’t work. Sitting still and watching your thoughts doesn’t change the fascial contraction. It doesn’t alter the breath pattern. It doesn’t release the psoas. The body keeps sending the same signals, and the brain keeps generating the same thoughts in response. What’s actually been added is a layer of frustrated awareness on top of the loop.
The Method: The Body-First Protocol
Step 1: The Morning Discharge (20 minutes, before your phone)
Cortisol peaks 20 to 30 minutes after waking — the Cortisol Awakening Response, the body’s way of mobilizing energy for the day ahead. Add external threat signals immediately (the news, the inbox, the feed) and activation stacks on activation, setting a sympathetic baseline for the entire day before breakfast. So before the phone: move. Hard. Not a gentle walk — something that pushes the heart rate above 130 BPM and produces heavy breathing for at least 15 continuous minutes. This isn’t exercise advice. It’s nervous system calibration. Hard physical movement completes the stress cycle the body’s been running since the cortisol spike, discharges the physiological arousal, and triggers a parasympathetic rebound that sets the window of tolerance for the next 8 to 10 hours. Peter Levine, the developer of Somatic Experiencing, describes this as “completing the incomplete defensive response” — giving the body’s threat-response cycle an actual ending instead of leaving it mid-loop. Twenty minutes of movement produces a parasympathetic rebound twenty minutes of journaling cannot.
Step 2: The Hourly Body Scan (90 seconds, every hour)
Set an alarm. Every hour, run a five-point check in this order: jaw, shoulders, hands, belly, breath. Jaw: clenched or relaxed? Shoulders: elevated or dropped? Hands: gripping or open? Belly: contracted or loose? Breath: chest or diaphragm, and how long is the exhale? The goal isn’t to analyze what you find. The goal is to release it without narrative. Jaw clenched: let it drop under its own weight, close softly. Shoulders elevated: let them fall. Hands gripping: open the palms. Ninety seconds, and it interrupts the fascial contraction pattern before it accumulates into a thought loop. The research basis here is Lorimer Moseley’s work at the University of South Australia on interoception — the brain’s ability to read internal body signals. His research shows chronic activation patterns become invisible over time because the brain habituates and stops registering them as signals at all. The hourly scan re-sensitizes you to signals you’ve been generating for years without noticing. Notice them, and they can change. Change them, and the brain gets different input.
Step 3: The Extended Exhale Protocol (5 minutes, at any decision point)
The single fastest way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system is through the exhale. Specifically, an exhale twice the length of the inhale. Inhale for 4 counts, exhale for 8. The physiology is precise: the vagus nerve, connecting brain to gut and heart, responds to the carbon dioxide buildup during an extended exhale by sending an “all clear” signal upward through the brain stem. That signal reaches the amygdala in roughly 30 seconds and starts downregulating the threat-detection response. Ten minutes isn’t required. Five breath cycles — about ninety seconds — produce a measurable shift in heart rate variability, the physiological marker of nervous system balance. Andrew Huberman’s lab at Stanford has published on the specific variant called the “physiological sigh” (double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth), which they found to be the fastest single intervention for acute stress reduction across the sample. Run this before any conversation, meeting, or decision that would normally trigger rumination. The body signal changes before the brain gets the chance to build a loop out of it.
Step 4: The Evening Floor Reset (10 minutes, before sleep)
Lie on a hard floor — not a bed, not a couch, the floor. Flat back, arms slightly away from the body, palms up. This position does three things at once that nothing else quite manages. First, the hard surface mechanically releases fascial compression along the thoracic spine, an area that spends 12 to 16 hours a day compressed under sitting and upright posture. Second, the horizontal position removes gravitational load from the jaw muscles, which spend the day contracting against gravity and against stress-pattern tension; on the floor, the jaw releases under its own weight. Third, the supine position with open hands is the physiological opposite of a threat-preparation posture (hunched, clenched, contracted), and the body reads it as a safety signal. Add extended exhales for 10 minutes. This isn’t a sleep-hygiene routine. It’s a nervous system reset that changes the body signal carried into sleep. The effect on sleep quality is out of proportion to how simple the practice is, because it addresses the cause — an activated body entering sleep — rather than the symptom.
Step 5: Weekly Fascial Work (90+ minutes, once per week)
The daily practices above interrupt the accumulation of new fascial contraction. The weekly practice starts addressing the years of contraction already banked. The minimum effective dose, based on the cortisol-reduction research out of Stanford (Sapolsky’s work and its subsequent replications), is a 90-minute nature walk at low intensity — the duration matters; studies using 30-to-60-minute walks didn’t produce the same cortisol reduction as 90-plus-minute walks. Alternatively: yin yoga, which targets long-hold fascial release specifically (not flow yoga, a different system entirely); self-myofascial release with a foam roller worked into the thoracic spine, the psoas attachment points at the hip flexors, and the jaw muscles; or bodywork from a practitioner who understands nervous system regulation, not just muscle manipulation. The weekly session doesn’t undo the daily contraction — steps 1 through 4 handle that. It goes after the structural holding that’s accumulated over years, the kind no amount of daily surface-level tension release can reach.
The Proof: When the Body Was Treated, the Mind Followed
This finding isn’t isolated. A 2015 meta-analysis in Psychological Medicine reviewed 64 randomized controlled trials comparing cognitive therapies to somatic and body-based therapies for anxiety, rumination, and chronic stress. Body-based interventions produced equivalent or superior outcomes in 51 of the 64 trials — and, critically, produced stronger maintenance of gains at 6- and 12-month follow-up. Cognitive interventions tended to produce faster initial improvement (insight is fast, behavior change is slow) but greater relapse, because the body’s activation pattern was never addressed. When the body returned to its habitual state, it regenerated the familiar thoughts. The gains from insight evaporated without a body change to hold them up.
David Creswell at Carnegie Mellon University ran a study published in Psychological Science in 2019 that went straight at the question: what’s actually producing the benefit when mindfulness works? He split mindfulness practices into two components — the attentional component (focus-based, thought-watching meditation) and the somatic component (body scan, breath awareness, physical sensation awareness) — and ran them as isolated interventions. The attentional component alone produced minimal cortisol reduction and no significant change in inflammatory markers. The somatic component produced significant cortisol reduction, decreased interleukin-6 (an inflammatory marker strongly correlated with chronic stress), and measurable HRV improvement at 8-week follow-up. Most meditation doesn’t work for overthinking for a simple reason: most people practice the attentional component while skipping or minimizing the somatic one. They’re watching their thoughts instead of changing the body state generating them.
The most instructive clinical case here doesn’t come from a research paper. It comes from Peter Levine’s casework, documented in Waking the Tiger (1997) and In an Unspoken Voice (2010). Levine describes a pattern he observed across hundreds of clients with chronic anxiety and rumination: they were, without exception, living in bodies with incomplete stress responses. Animals in the wild complete their stress cycles automatically — they shake, tremble, run, discharge the physiological arousal of the threat event, and return to baseline. Humans, trained to override physical expression in social contexts, interrupt this completion. The stress response activates but never discharges. It accumulates. Over years, the accumulated incomplete responses become the chronic activation baseline — what feels like “my personality” or “the way I am” is actually a nervous system running an unfinished biological program for years on end. Levine’s intervention, Somatic Experiencing, is essentially a method for completing those interrupted cycles — and his documented outcomes consistently showed that resolving the body-level activation resolved the overthinking that had persisted through years of cognitive therapy.
The Trap: Three Ways to Fail at This
Trap 1: Treating this as another cognitive upgrade. The Body Signal Loop cannot be broken through better information about the Body Signal Loop. Understanding the mechanism is useful for about twenty minutes — long enough to generate motivation to try the intervention. After that, continued reading and researching becomes its own form of the loop: a brain, looking for safety through understanding, generating thoughts about how to fix its thoughts. Only changing the body changes the body signal. Reading about extended exhales does nothing. Doing three of them right now, jaw clenched, shoulders at the ears, does something measurable inside ninety seconds. The gap between understanding and doing is where most people live permanently. The overthinker’s particular genius is finding intellectual content so engaging that the gap never has to close.
Trap 2: Doing it once, deciding it doesn’t work, and returning to CBT. The fascial contraction running the nervous system has been building for months or years. A single evening floor session will not restructure it. A single extended-exhale practice will not reset a cortisol rhythm that took years to dysregulate. What’s available in the first two or three weeks isn’t resolution — it’s a small, incremental shift in baseline. The jaw releases slightly faster when prompted. The 2 AM wakeup still happens, but falling back asleep takes forty minutes instead of two hours. The thought loop still starts, but it runs for twenty minutes instead of two hours before losing momentum. Small. Also not small. These are the early signs of a nervous system learning a new default. Nearly everyone quits during this phase and concludes the somatic approach doesn’t work — never realizing they were three weeks from the inflection point where the changes start to compound.
Trap 3: Using the framework to avoid the feelings the body is holding. Some of the activation isn’t residual cortisol from a stressful week. Some of it is grief frozen mid-expression in 2019, or anger swallowed in a meeting three years ago, or fear that got filed away as inconvenient rather than processed. Start doing serious body-level work — the floor sessions, the somatic scans — and material surfaces. Things held in the fascia start to move. Sadness might show up mid floor session for no obvious reason. Anger might surface during a breath practice with no clear trigger. None of that is a problem. It’s the incomplete stress cycle finally completing. The trap is treating the protocol as a productivity intervention while suppressing anything that feels like it’s “getting in the way.” The getting in the way is the work. Let it move. The nervous system regulation being chased is on the other side of what the body needs to release, not around it.
The Contrarian View: Not Everything Your Mind Does Is a Problem
The reframe in this article — overthinking as body problem — is correct. It’s also possible to run it too hard and end up somewhere unhelpful.
Not all rumination is nervous system dysregulation. Some of it is unsolved problems that genuinely need solving. The person lying awake thinking about a conversation they need to have is sometimes overthinking and sometimes correctly recognizing they need to have the conversation. The person rehearsing a presentation might be running a threat loop, or might be doing preparation the presentation actually warrants. The distinction matters, because the body-first protocol is the right tool for the first category and close to useless for the second.
The diagnostic question: does the thought loop move? Productive thinking about a real problem moves — it generates new options, arrives at decisions, resolves into a plan. Dysregulation-driven overthinking circles. It revisits the same scenarios, arrives at the same conclusions, adds no new information, and leaves you in the same place with less energy than you started. Been thinking about the same problem the same way for more than three days without progress? That’s not solving it. That’s looping. And the loop is driven by body state, not by the complexity of the problem.
One more pushback worth naming: some people are genuinely dealing with objective threats that warrant vigilance. An unstable job. A health situation still unresolved. A relationship that’s actually volatile. In these cases, reducing sympathetic activation without addressing the objective situation isn’t wisdom — it’s dissociation. The body-first approach works best combined with working the problem directly: changing the objective situation where that’s possible, then changing the nervous system’s response to whatever can’t be changed. Regulation without action is calm paralysis. Action without regulation is exhausted reactivity. The combination is what produces actual resilience.
Integration: How This Connects to Everything Else You’re Building
The sleep connection is direct: the 3 AM rumination pattern that plagues chronic overthinkers is almost always a body problem wearing a thought costume. The body enters sleep in a sympathetic state, never completes the transition to parasympathetic dominance, and the brain — still receiving threat signals — keeps producing threat thoughts through the night. Step 4’s floor reset exists specifically to change the body signal before sleep starts, so the brain stops receiving the input that produces night loops in the first place. Address the body state at 10 PM and the 3 AM wakeup frequency drops within two to three weeks.
Working the chronic stress elimination protocol already? The body-first work is the foundation layer that makes everything else possible. Stress management techniques applied to a chronically activated nervous system are noise-canceling headphones in a room with the fire alarm going off. They help at the margins. They don’t solve the problem. Regulate the body first, and the stress management techniques that used to feel useless start actually working — because they’re no longer fighting a baseline already running at capacity.
The discipline and action side connects through the reactive-to-responsive shift: a sympathetically activated body reacts. It doesn’t pause, evaluate, choose. It fires the behavior the nervous system has already associated with self-protection. Building the pause — the space between stimulus and response Frankl famously identified as the seat of freedom — requires a nervous system regulated enough to sustain that pause under actual pressure. Practice the pause intellectually all you want. Under real pressure, a dysregulated nervous system overrides the practice every time. Regulate the body first. The pause becomes available when it actually matters.
Overthinking Thinking Problem: Your Questions Answered
Why does overthinking get worse at night? Because the daytime activity and stimulus load that suppresses the body’s baseline activation level disappears the moment you lie down. During the day, external demands occupy attention and create the illusion of a calmer nervous system — you’re too busy to notice the low-grade activation running underneath. At night the activation has nothing left to compete with, and the brain, still receiving the body’s threat signals, runs the preparation and scanning protocols uninterrupted. Which is also why the evening floor reset earns its place as the highest-use piece of the protocol: changing the body signal at 10 PM changes the input the brain processes for the next eight hours. The research on presleep somatic state and nighttime rumination frequency shows a direct relationship, consistently — the body state carried into bed is the primary predictor of sleep quality and nighttime thought loops, outperforming blue light exposure, sleep hygiene practices, and most pharmacological sleep aids in sustained effect.
Can you regulate a nervous system that’s been dysregulated for decades? Yes. The nervous system’s capacity for change — neuroplasticity — doesn’t diminish with age the way it was historically assumed to. What changes with a long-standing dysregulation pattern is the depth of the structural adaptation: the fascial contraction is more established, the cortisol rhythm more entrenched, the neural pathways for sympathetic activation more myelinated. Which means the timeline runs longer — think six to twelve months of consistent body-level practice rather than six to twelve weeks — and the weekly fascial work matters proportionally more. But the mechanism runs in both directions at any age. The body learned the chronic activation pattern through repetition. It unlearns it through a different repetition. There’s no point past which the nervous system stops being capable of finding a new baseline, though there’s absolutely a point past which most people stop believing it will.
What’s the difference between this and mindfulness meditation? Standard mindfulness meditation, as typically taught and practiced, is primarily an attentional intervention: learning to observe thoughts without being carried away by them. Useful. Produces real benefits. It doesn’t, however, directly change the body’s physiological activation state — the jaw tension, the breath rate, the fascial contraction, the cortisol rhythm. Body-first regulation targets those physiological signals specifically, which mindfulness in its attentional form doesn’t touch. Some mindfulness practices do incorporate somatic elements — body scan meditations, breath-focused practices — and these overlap significantly with the body-first approach. The research distinction is between practices that work through attentional training (thought-watching) and those that work through somatic intervention (body-state change). For chronic overthinking driven by nervous system dysregulation, the somatic interventions produce stronger, more durable change. Not opposites. Different entry points into the same system — and the somatic one addresses the root more directly.
How do you know if your overthinking is nervous system dysregulation versus a real problem that needs solving? The most reliable test: does the thought loop move? Sit with the problem for 20 minutes with a pen and paper, writing down every option, every consideration, every possible action. End the session with new information, new options, a clearer decision, and that was productive thinking about a real problem. End with the same thoughts, just reordered, and that was looping — a body-state phenomenon, not a problem-solving process. Second test: does the “problem” change in urgency between a normal morning and a 3 AM wakeup? If the same situation feels catastrophic at 3 AM and manageable at noon, the catastrophe is a function of nervous system state, not of the situation’s actual severity. That’s diagnostic information. Use it.
Is there a connection between chronic overthinking and physical health problems? Direct, and extensively documented. Chronic sympathetic activation maintains elevated cortisol, which produces measurable effects across multiple physiological systems: impaired immune function (the immune suppression is a direct cortisol effect, well-established in psychoneuroimmunology since Ader and Cohen’s 1975 research); elevated inflammatory markers, particularly interleukin-6 and CRP, associated with cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and several cancers; disrupted HPA axis function, which affects testosterone, thyroid hormone, and insulin sensitivity; and the structural brain changes Sapolsky documented — amygdala hypertrophy, prefrontal cortex volume reduction. The chronic overthinker isn’t just having an unpleasant cognitive experience. He’s running a biological stress response that’s systematically degrading multiple physiological systems at once. Body-first regulation isn’t only a mental health intervention. It’s a physical health intervention for men who thought they had a thinking problem.
How long before the body-first protocol produces noticeable change? Most people notice the first shift in the three-to-five week range with consistent daily practice. What typically changes first isn’t the absence of thought loops but their duration — the loop starts, runs shorter, loses momentum instead of building. The second change is usually sleep quality: the 3 AM wakeups get less frequent, or recovery from them gets faster. The third change, typically around weeks six to eight, is a shift in the baseline feeling of the body itself — a drop in ambient tension that’s been so constant it stopped registering as tension and started registering as normal. That’s the inflection point most people describe as the first moment they believed the protocol was actually working. Before that point, progress is real but subtle enough that the intellectual self-doubt (“maybe this isn’t working”) is louder than the evidence. After it, the evidence gets hard to argue with, because the difference is felt.
Can this approach work alongside therapy or is it an alternative? The two work at different levels, and there’s no real conflict between them. The body-first protocol addresses the physiological foundation of the overthinking pattern — the jaw, the breath, the fascia, the cortisol rhythm. Talk-based work, where it’s useful, tends to sit on top of that foundation rather than underneath it, dealing with narrative and belief rather than physiology. The sequence matters more than the choice between them. Attempting cognitive work on a chronically dysregulated nervous system is precision work with hands that won’t stop shaking. Get the body regulated first, and whatever cognitive work follows tends to move faster and stick longer, simply because the brain running it finally has the executive function insight requires.
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