It’s 3 a.m. The house is silent, your chest is tight, your heart is racing, your breathing is ragged. Your mind keeps spinning through the same arguments. You feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Everyone keeps telling you to “stay strong” and “take care of yourself first.” Meanwhile, your nervous system is behaving like a smoke alarm that won’t stop screeching.
This is what divorce actually feels like in your body.
Divorce doesn’t just break your heart. It hijacks your sleep, scrambles your thoughts and turns ordinary tasks into monumental efforts. Your body feels permanently braced, as if something terrible is about to happen—because, biologically speaking, it already has. This is not about being dramatic. It’s a nervous system overload.
Your Nervous System Is Not Failing You
It’s Responding Exactly as Biology Designed It To
What you’re experiencing is a biological stress response. Divorce isn’t just an emotional crisis. It’s a biological emergency. Your body is stuck in survival mode—flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, suppressing your immune system, impairing your memory, and compromising your decision-making capacity.
As a medical doctor, I want you to know this upfront: divorce is not just emotionally painful—it is a full-body nervous system derailing catastrophe. Your brain registers the loss of a primary attachment as a threat to survival, and it responds accordingly. Sleepless nights, obsessive thoughts, sudden anger, emotional numbness, brain fog—these are not character flaws. They are predictable, designed-to-protect biological responses.
Which is exactly why trying to “think your way out of them” rarely works.
Why This Matters Right Now
You are being asked to make some of the most complex, consequential decisions of your life:
- Legal negotiations that will affect your finances for decades
- Co-parenting arrangements that will shape your children’s development
- Career decisions that will determine your future security
- Division of assets that took years to build
And you’re trying to make these decisions while your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for planning, judgment, and rational thought—is functionally impaired.
Decisions made in the grip of a dysregulated nervous system are reactive, impulsive, and often devastating to your long-term interests.
Who This Guide Is For
This guide is for you if:
• You feel emotionally hijacked and don’t recognise yourself
• Your body feels constantly tense, exhausted, or on edge
• You’re making decisions under pressure and fear
• You want to protect your health, not just survive the paperwork
• You’d like your nervous system to stop treating emails as mortal threats
Why This Guide Is Different
Most breakup advice focuses on mindset, motivation, or positive thinking—usually offered by people whose nervous systems are not currently on fire.
This guide takes a very different approach.
Nervous System Regulation During Divorce Protocol is a medically informed, evidence-based guide designed to help you stabilise your biology first—because without nervous system regulation, clarity is impossible.
There Is a Way Through This.
It Starts With Your Nervous System.
Not with positive thinking. Not with “self-care.” With clinically validated techniques for bringing your body out of survival mode and back into a state where thinking clearly is actually possible.
Inside This Guide, You’ll Learn:
✔ Why heartbreak activates the same brain pathways as physical pain
✔ How attachment loss creates a neurochemical “withdrawal state”
✔ What allostatic load is—and why chronic divorce stress affects your long-term health
✔ The four survival states your nervous system defaults to during divorce – learn to recognise which state you’re in – and why it’s sabotaging your decisions.
✔ How Polyvagal Theory explains your reactions (and how to work with them)
✔ Evidence-based tools used in trauma therapy—broken down into practical, step-by-step exercises you can use immediately.
✔ How to create a pause between trigger and reaction—Learn how to regulate yourself in the moment—before that email to your lawyer, before that conversation with your ex, before the decisions you can’t undo.
All explained in clear, human language—without dumbing down the science or overwhelming you with jargon.
This isn’t just about getting through the divorce. It’s about establishing a new baseline of safety, clarity, and autonomy that will serve you for the rest of your life.
A Regulatied Nervous System Changes Everything
Nervous system regulation is the foundation for:
• better decisions
• healthier boundaries
• clearer communication
• and a future that isn’t built entirely on the transient effects of stress hormones
Every day you spend in a dysregulated state is another day of impaired judgment, deteriorating health, and decisions you may regret for years.
“I thought I was losing my mind during my divorce. This guide helped me understand that my body was actually trying to protect me—and that changed everything. The science was reassuring without being overwhelming, and the tools were practical enough to use in real life. For the first time in months, I felt steadier and less insecure about my own reactions.”
— Claire M.
“What struck me most was how validating this guide was. Instead of telling me to ‘stay positive,’ it explained why my sleep, focus, and emotions were so erratic. Knowing there was a biological reason behind it instantly reduced my shame. I felt calmer within days because I finally knew what to do when my nervous system spiralled.”
— James T.
Download your Guide
Nervous System Regulation During Divorce Protocol
A Medical Doctor’s Guide to Calming Your Body, Protecting Your Health, and Reclaiming Stability During One of Life’s Hardest Transitions
No platitudes. Just 10+ pages of clinical insight and practical protocols you can start using today.
Note from The Author
As a medical doctor specialising in nervous system regulation and trauma recovery, I’ve watched too many intelligent, capable people make catastrophic decisions—not because they lacked judgment, but because their biology was hijacked by survival responses they didn’t understand.
This guide is what I wish every person going through divorce had access to from day one: a clear, clinical understanding of what’s happening in their body, and a proven roadmap for reclaiming stability, clarity, and power. Dr Margaretha Montagu