Tay Lautner Just Shared the Grounding Techniques She Swears By for a Fried Nervous System

If your nervous system has felt permanently fried lately, you’re not imagining it. Between the doomscrolling, the group chats, the news, and the general state of being alive in 2026, most of us are walking around in low-key fight-or-flight. Which is exactly why “regulating your nervous system” has officially replaced “reducing stress” as the wellness shift of the year, since chronic stress mode wrecks everything from your sleep to your hormones to your focus.

On House Guest with Kenzie Elizabeth, host Kenzie Elizabeth sits down with Tay Lautner—nurse, mental health advocate, and wife of actor Taylor Lautner—for the coziest deep dive on how to actually come back down to earth. Here are the grounding techniques she swears by.

How to Calm Your Nervous System: Tricks Tay Lautner Swears By

The ‘shake out’

This is Tay’s go-to when she needs to either snap out of a funk or wake herself up. “I’ll literally just stand and shake my hands and my body and kick my feet and smile, like while I’m doing it,” she says. “It just kind of resets. I feel like it just gets rid of whatever is on you.”

It sounds ridiculous until you do it. But if you’ve ever felt stuck in your head, weirdly anxious for no specific reason, or like your brain and body are operating on two completely different wavelengths, it’s worth a shot.

The alphabet game

This is the one Tay reaches for when her brain won’t shut off at night. You pick a category, then work your way through the alphabet naming one thing for each letter. “Let’s say animals, and you name an animal, like A,” she explains. “You go down the alphabet.”

The magic is in the distraction. “You switch your brain into really trying to focus and think about that,” she says. It’s just enough mental effort to pull your mind off whatever’s looping, which makes it clutch for insomnia, pre-sleep anxiety, or any moment your thoughts are running the show. 

Naming what’s true

When you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, Tay says to just start naming objective facts about your surroundings. “This couch is white. My pants are linen. The microphone is black,” she explains. “Naming things that you see and removing your brain out of that anxiety, nervous, whatever thought process that you’re in, kind of just separating yourself out of it.”

It’s discreet enough to do mid-meeting, mid-spiral, or mid-awkward social situation. Think of it as a reality check for your brain when it’s five steps ahead of you, inventing problems that haven’t actually happened.

Pick up a hobby that uses your hands

Kenzie is a firm believer that half of life’s problems can be solved with a good hobby. “Hobbies give you independence. They give you a sense of self. They give you a life outside of it,” she says. But the real cheat code is picking ones that keep your hands busy, “because you can’t doomscroll because you’re using your hands.” She’s living proof it matters, too. After an overwhelming week of nonstop travel and shoots, she caught herself spiraling on her phone, thinking, “I feel horrible. I actually need to get off this thing.”

A few hands-on hobbies worth trying when you need to get out of your head:

• Gardening or repotting plants (she swears there’s something “so healing” about working on the yard)
• Cooking something from scratch
• Any kind of crafting, from pottery to jewelry making
• Even a gel manicure at home, which doubles as forced stillness

Stop isolating, even when you really want to

“Isolation is just bad for you most of the time,” Kenzie says. “When you’re isolating and only thinking about yourself, it’s making your issues so much bigger than they need to be.”

Tay lives this in real time. She’d gotten three hours of sleep before filming and wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, but showing up for a good conversation left her feeling better, not worse.

So the next time you’re tempted to cancel everything and disappear into your sheets, consider this your reminder that your brain isn’t always the best judge of what you need. Sometimes the thing you’re least in the mood for—a walk, a coffee, a phone call, seeing another human—is exactly what helps.

Listen to the full episode on House Guest with Kenzie Elizabeth, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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