Why Your Child Is Dysregulated: Nervous System Regulation, Screen Time, and the CALMS Protocol with Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge | E178

🎒 Back-to-school season can bring changing routines, increased stress, new exposures, and added demands on the whole family. Support your family’s health this season with Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine’s Back-to-School 2026 resources.

Back-to-School 2026:

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/lp/back-to-school-2026/

In this episode of Made for Health, Dr. Aaron Hartman welcomes back Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, a leading expert in emotional and behavioral dysregulation with more than 30 years of experience helping children and families. Their conversation explores what happens when the nervous system becomes chronically overwhelmed—and why addressing behavior alone may miss what is actually driving a child’s struggles.

Dr. Roseann explains dysregulation as difficulty moving effectively between states of stress and calm. When the nervous system’s “stress cup” keeps filling without enough opportunities to release that stress, children and adults can remain chronically activated. That activation may show up through anxiety, emotional outbursts, attention difficulties, shutdowns, impulsivity, sleep problems, or other physical and mental health challenges.

Dr. Hartman and Dr. Roseann also take a close look at screen time and device dysregulation. Rather than framing technology as inherently bad, Dr. Roseann emphasizes the importance of boundaries, especially because children can have difficulty disengaging once they are deeply absorbed in stimulating digital content.

The conversation then moves into the heart of Dr. Roseann’s work: helping families regulate the nervous system first. Nutrition, gut health, magnesium, neurofeedback, PEMF, and other tools may all have a role, but she stresses that lasting change also requires consistent daily practices that help reduce nervous-system activation and create greater capacity for stress.

Key Topics Covered

What emotional and nervous-system dysregulation can look like in childrenWhy people can appear highly functional while living in chronic fight, flight, or freezeThe “stress cup” and why accumulated stress mattersADHD, anxiety, OCD, PANS/PANDAS, sensory challenges, and dysregulationDevice dysregulation and screen-time boundariesWhy smartphones and short-form content can be difficult for children to disengage fromWhy simply removing one physical stressor may not fully regulate the nervous systemNutrition, magnesium, gut health, mold, and nervous-system supportBig-T trauma, little-t trauma, and chronic eve