Free · about 8 minutes · once a quarter

The Regulation Profile

Twenty-four questions across six domains, looking back over a month rather than a week. The weekly check tells you where you are. This one tells you which part of you is carrying it.

  • 24 items · 0–96
  • Six domains, scored separately
  • Once every 90 days
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What this is, and what it is not

It is an original instrument and it has not been validated. The Regulation Profile was written by Pen King Jr. Its six domains are drawn from constructs the stress and autonomic literature treats as markers of nervous system state — perceived load and controllability, return to baseline, restorative sleep, interoceptive awareness, end-of-day capacity, and sustained protective muscular bracing. Drawing on that literature is not the same as being validated against it. This has no clinical cutoff and no published reliability, and the same is true of the weekly Regulation Index. Both do now have published population norms — a reference distribution of how everyone who has taken them actually scores, at /instrument — which locates a score among other people's and still says nothing about whether the instrument is valid.

It cannot diagnose anything. Not ADHD, not anxiety, not burnout, not dysautonomia, not anything else. It is not a screener and a low score is not evidence of a disorder. If something about your health is worrying you, that is a conversation for a clinician, and there is a page here for them.

What it is good for is direction. Six numbers, four times a year, that you can put next to each other. Almost nobody has that, and having it is what makes it possible to say "recovery is what is carrying this, and it is not sleep" instead of guessing.

The scoring is open: it lives in regulation-profile.js, loaded by this page and by the server both, so the number you see and the number stored are computed by one piece of code.