What are the opening hours?

Monday 09:00 - 19:00 Tuesday 09:00 - 19:00 Wednesday 09:00 - 19:00 Thursday 09:00 - 19:00 Friday 09:00 - 19:00

Project Play, Singapore (2026)

14/03/2026

This post was written on a walk this morning.

Voice notes, half-formed thoughts, a few pauses to look at trees, and the slightly chaotic process that happens when my brain starts connecting ideas.

Which feels appropriate, because the post itself is about something I’ve been slowly learning for years: working with my brain instead of constantly trying to correct it.

For a long time I tried to force myself into systems that looked productive but didn’t actually work for me. Sitting still for long stretches trying to sustain focus on demand. Waiting for perfect conditions. Doing everything myself.

None of that was sustainable.

What has helped more is understanding the rhythms of my thinking. Moving while I process ideas. Using tools for areas that take disproportionate energy. Creating pockets where curiosity can unfold, and other pockets where tasks get finished.

Protecting moments where nothing much is happening has also become important. Walks, quiet movement, or space to write or draw without needing it to become anything.

Interestingly, these moments often align with what neuroscience describes as the brain’s default mode network — a network involved in integrating experiences, connecting ideas and generating insight.

For some people, attention also follows patterns described as monotropism, where focus moves deeply into particular threads of interest. Those deep dives can be incredibly generative, but they also need structures around them so everyday life still works.

Learning this has been an ongoing process. It hasn’t been effortless. But slowly, understanding my wiring has created more flexibility.

And I see similar patterns across the lifespan in my work. Often the difficulty isn’t the brain itself. It’s the mismatch between how a brain works and the environments around it.

If this resonates, it might be something to come back to later. Sometimes we understand our minds a little differently each time we revisit these ideas.

And sometimes the best place to start noticing how your mind works…
is on a walk.

09/03/2026

We often expect ourselves (or our children) to reach for regulation tools right at the point things feel like they’re falling apart.

But by that stage the nervous system is already working very hard.

As arousal rises, the brain shifts resources toward survival. Executive functioning drops. Behavioural flexibility decreases. Working memory becomes harder to access too.

Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The very skills we rely on to pause, think clearly, or try a strategy are simply less available in those moments.

This is one of the reasons proactive nervous system support matters. Not because dysregulation won’t happen. It will. Being human means moving through different nervous system states. And many of us don’t notice those shifts until things already feel big.

But when supportive practices are woven into everyday rhythms, we often have more capacity overall. It becomes easier to notice earlier cues, shift things sooner, or recover more quickly afterwards.

Sometimes that looks like very small moments during the day. Stepping outside for a minute. Moving your body. Changing the sensory environment. Slowing your breathing. Pausing long enough to notice what your body might need.

And of course there will still be moments when things feel overwhelming. In those moments support, co-regulation, and reducing demands often matter most. When regulation tools are familiar, we can sometimes reach for them there too.

Small supports, repeated often, can make a big difference over time.

If you’d like more everyday ideas for building those supports gently into daily life, my Rooted in Regulation guide goes into this in more depth.

Comment ROOTED and I’ll send you the details.

06/03/2026

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how growth often happens right at the edge of our capacity, and how stepping into that space can require a certain kind of bravery.

It’s not about pushing through or forcing change. It’s about the space where challenge meets enough safety and support for something new to emerge.
It’s something I see every day in my work with both children and adults, and something I’ve had to learn personally too.

I recently had the chance to reflect more on this in an interview with where I shared a bit about my journey into this work, how my thinking around nervous systems and wellbeing has evolved, and why I believe risk and support often need to exist together.

Thank you to for the thoughtful conversation.

If you’d like to read the full interview, I’m happy to share it.

Comment ARTICLE and I’ll send you the link.

03/03/2026

I want to say this carefully.

Colour charts and structured regulation systems can be helpful for some. A lot depends on how they’re used.

But over time I’ve noticed something.

When tools become rigid, or when they’re used mainly to organise behaviour, regulation can quietly shift from internal support to external performance.

A nervous system does not regulate because it picked the “right” colour. It regulates when it feels noticed, understood and supported.

Timing matters.

When a body is overwhelmed, access to language and reflection drops. Asking someone to identify their zone in that moment can add pressure rather than support. Reflective skills are built outside of crisis, through modelling and everyday noticing.

There is good evidence that expanding emotional vocabulary supports wellbeing. Naming an experience can help us stay with it. But only when the language actually fits.

For some people, basic feeling words are enough. For others, they are not. Some experience emotion first as sensation, imagery, movement or energy.

Personally, I rarely choose just one emotion. I’ll often pick two or three. I’ve found body maps, colour gradients and visual descriptions far more representative of my internal experience than a single label. That flexibility has been more regulating than trying to fit into one box.

When “expected vs unexpected” becomes shorthand for compliance, or when “green” quietly becomes “good,” we risk reducing regulation to behaviour management rather than capacity building.

Regulation is not about looking calm or being in the “right” zone. It is about having enough support to stay with a feeling when we can, and enough connection to help us when we cannot.

Colour charts do not have to disappear completely. But they need flexibility and context.

If we only have one tool, we are more likely to use it rigidly. If we have many, we can adapt. When we are regulated ourselves, we are more able to notice when a tool is helping and when it is not.

Sometimes the real question is not “What zone are you in?” It is “What support do you need, and do I have the flexibility to offer it?”

As always, take what’s helpful. Leave the rest.

01/03/2026

I get oddly overwhelmed by morning routine content.

All the “win the morning” energy. The optimisation. All the steps.

Some mornings I’m just trying to move from horizontal to human.

And on the mornings I wake up already bracing, the last thing I need is another checklist.

There’s a reason mornings can feel intense.
Your brain is built to predict what’s coming next. As you wake, cortisol naturally rises and your nervous system shifts from sleep physiology into mobilisation.

Before your feet hit the floor, your body is already scanning for the shape of the day. Conversations. Noise. Deadlines. Logistics. Social demands.

That early activation is your system preparing.

Add in cumulative stress, unfinished thoughts from yesterday, disrupted sleep, background worry, and your bandwidth may already be thinner than you realise. It’s anticipation layered on load.

What I’m offering here isn’t a better routine. It’s a few invitations.

Light helps anchor your internal clock and orient you to time and space.

Delaying your phone gives your brain a moment before it absorbs other people’s agendas and emotions. (A work in progress for me).

Rhythm, whether that’s walking, music, swaying, or left–right touch, gives your nervous system something steady and patterned to organise around. The brain settles around rhythm. It likes knowing what comes next.

For me, mornings feel steadier when I do slightly less, slightly slower, and with more awareness of what my body is doing.

No overhaul or perfect system. Just small, repeatable cues that gently protect capacity and say, “We can begin.”

What helps your nervous system transition into the day?

19/02/2026

There’s a version of “growth” that quietly turns into endurance. Push through. Stay in it. Tolerate more.

But nervous systems don’t expand through force.

When intensity rises, the body moves into protection. Shutdown, avoidance, appeasing, pushing through… these are not failures. They’re intelligent strategies. They’re trying to help.

Capacity grows when that protection is met with safety. Not by flooding someone. Not by overriding signals. But by meeting what some people call the "growth edge" with support.

A mentor of mine describes it as learning to be "comfortably uncomfortable." And that comfort doesn’t come from grit or willpower. It comes from signals of safety in the body and from co-regulation.

I think of it less as a test of tolerance and more as a dance. There’s an art to staying close enough to intensity that it can be metabolised, without tipping into overwhelm. That art lives in relationship.

Children borrow our nervous systems. Clients feel our steadiness. And the truth is, someone else’s edge will activate ours too. We won’t get it right all the time. We’ll misattune. We’ll wobble. That’s part of it.

What builds safety isn’t perfection. It’s repair. It’s noticing when we’ve missed something and moving back toward connection. That’s what secure relationships are made of.

For sensitive and neurodivergent nervous systems especially, this distinction matters. Growth isn’t about enduring more discomfort. It’s about learning, slowly and relationally, that intensity doesn’t have to be faced alone.

These ideas are nuanced. I’m always thinking about them in my own work and relationships. I’d genuinely love to hear what comes up for you.

18/02/2026

This January I kept returning to a quote by Joko Beck: “What makes pain unbearable is the mistaken belief that it can be cured.”

The idea that suffering comes less from pain itself and more from our resistance to it. Anyone who has experienced a panic attack might recognise this. Fighting it tends to amplify it. Settling into it, however counterintuitive, shifts something.

Around the same time, I revisited Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. His reminder that we are finite. That life is not something to optimise our way through. There is no moment of final arrival when everything will feel settled.

All of this sat in quiet contradiction to the energy of January. Fresh starts. New goals. Better versions of ourselves. I have never felt particularly at home in that narrative.

January seems to amplify the fantasy that we should already be moving faster and feeling better. In my own work (and in my nervous system) I see the same pattern. There is no permanent state of calm waiting for us. In no version of life does it stop being hard, emotional or demanding. That is not a failure. It is the human experience.

Accepting that doesn’t mean we stop changing what we can. It means we stop chasing a fantasy of permanent ease.

What I am more interested in is something slower. Awe. Wonder. Letting the default mode network do what it does when we are not constantly trying to fix or improve ourselves. Making meaning. Strengthening connection. The small, ordinary moments that don’t need improvement.

A few bits of January:
Starting the year in New York, in actual winter. Cold mornings, heavy coats, slightly frozen and very grateful. Art. Food. Live sport.
Movement as a way back into rhythm.
Being cared for by thoughtful friends.
Making marks on paper, following a stone rather than an outcome.
Learning in Hong Kong with friends who continue to shape how I think.
Dog-sitting our god-pup.
Live tunes. Books I’ve been waiting to sit with properly.
Family visiting our little red dot.

Not a new version of me. Just a steadier relationship with being human.

14/02/2026

From a very young age, many of us are taught that being regulated means being independent, self-soothing, and not needing others. That support is something to grow out of. But human nervous systems do not develop in isolation. Regulation develops in relationship.

As a species, we are born neurologically immature and rely on caregivers for far longer than any other mammal. Our nervous systems learn what intensity, stress, and emotion mean through repeated experiences of being met by another person. Through tone of voice, facial expression, rhythm, proximity, and responsiveness, the nervous system learns whether activation is dangerous or survivable.

This is what co-regulation is. It is not about fixing feelings or making them stop. It is not about staying perfectly calm. It is about being tracked, responded to, and staying present in connection while something difficult is being felt.

Those experiences teach the nervous system something very specific: I can feel this. I will not be abandoned because of it. This intensity can move. I will survive it.

Over time, these relational experiences are internalised and become the foundation for what we later call self-regulation. But co-regulation does not disappear in adulthood. We continue to regulate in relationship across the lifespan, depending on context, stress, and what we are carrying.

This also means that co-regulation does not require one person to be perfectly settled. What matters most is responsiveness and attunement, not composure. Being met matters more than being calm. I will talk more about what this looks like in practice, including why co-regulation does not always mean going low, slow, or quiet, in the next episode.

If we have not met, I am Nikki. I am an occupational therapist, and Nervous System Diaries is where I share grounded, relational, and neuroaffirming ways of understanding regulation.

Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

12/02/2026

This piece has just been published in the New York Review, and it captures a lot of how I think about stress, overwhelm, and nervous system support.

Rather than treating stress as something to eliminate or push through, the article explores what it can look like to understand emotional responses as protective, shaped by experience, sensory load, and nervous system capacity, and why working with the nervous system matters.

If you’d like to read it, comment ARTICLE and I’ll send you the link.

Project Play

14/03/2026

09/03/2026

06/03/2026

03/03/2026

01/03/2026

19/02/2026

18/02/2026

14/02/2026

12/02/2026

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category

Monday	09:00 - 19:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 19:00
Wednesday	09:00 - 19:00
Thursday	09:00 - 19:00
Friday	09:00 - 19:00