📈 The Snapshot is the first version of a self-assessment tool that is designed to help you measure your progress, and the start, middle and end of this NSM course.

🤷‍♂️ As with all self-assessment tools, there will be a degree of subjectivity associated, so please hold your results loosely and view this as simply a tool for increasing your own curiosity.

✔️ This self-assessment is still very much a prototype (feedback welcome!) and seeks to illustrate some of the Nervous System related milestones that you may encounter whilst engaging with this work.

🙅‍♂️ Self-assessments can be extremely valuable tools for documenting and celebrating progress. However, they also risk fostering confusion or disappointment (especially early on) if we don't feel like our scores are as high as they could be.

👣 We are all coming to this work from different life-stages with radically different nervous systems. This is wonderful, and our invitation is to not compare or be concerned with anyone's progress except for our own.

🗺️ NSM is designed not to be outcome-orientated but intention and process driven. This is not a linear journey—however the positive outcomes that we are seeking will emerge as a by-product of consistent practice, experimentation and self-enquiry.

🔍 Perhaps the most important metrics to track not included in the self-assessment are the number of minutes and hours that you put into learning and practicing these protocols and the intensity of your desire to learn and stay curious.

🎯 The real goal for the coming weeks (and the rest of your life) is to foster your intrinsic + relentless curiosity for internal inquiry and self-experimentation. Ultimately you must become a scientist of your own lived experience.

Below you can find an example of my snapshot with estimated scores taken from 5 years ago when I begun learning about some of these nervous system regulation practices.

It's clearly not an exact science, and the areas that I'm working on currently are mostly in the 'self-awareness' category—finding ways of fine-tuning my environment and experimenting with wearable tracking devices, blood-markers etc.

Below you'll find a guide to help with making the most of this assessment (whilst remembering the caveats above!)

An increase in each of these areas of self-awareness will help you notice for yourself the impact that certain protocols have on your own nervous system regulation. This means that you don't have to take my word or the outcome of any study to see the effects for yourself.

The higher your degree of self-awareness the more rapidly you will be able to course-correct in any moment as well as feel motivated to continue investing time and effort to these practices.

It's also worth re-affirming that (except for quantitative tracking) these are all in fact skills as opposed to static traits, meaning that they can all be improved using the practices we'll be exploring during NSM*.

*here is one such study whose results indicated that interoceptive capacity can be improved using an 8-week Body Scan Intervention.

This section is is designed to assess your levels of understanding, confidence and consistency of engaging in protocols that are aimed at changing the state of your nervous system.

The sections are roughly mapped to each week of the NSM curriculum, so please don't worry if you score low in each of these areas at first as we'll be going into each in great depth over the coming weeks.

This section will give you a rough sense of whether or not your nervous system is generally well-regulated or if there is room for improvement.

It's important to be aware of any increases in these scores — and if they are correlated with an increased engagement with the protocols and experiments from the protocols above.

If you are consistently practicing the protocols above but not seeing an improvement after 8 weeks or longer then this is a cue for exploration and curiosity into other variables which might be at play.

Below is a v1 illustration of how the three categories relate to each other. Self-awareness (section 1) is illustrated as a fulcrum, the self-regulation protocols (section 2) is your lever for creating measurable shifts that are then seen as an increase in nervous system health and regulation.