Quick answer: The Regulation Profile is a 24-question assessment, taken once a quarter, that returns six separate domain scores instead of one summary number — Load, Recovery, Sleep, Noticing, Capacity and Bracing. The total is the least interesting part of it. Two people can arrive at the same total for completely different reasons, and what they should each do next is not the same. The six domains are what tell them apart.
The free Regulation Index is five questions and takes under a minute, on purpose. Anything longer does not get answered every week, and a weekly rhythm is the whole value of it — you cannot see a trend in a measurement you take twice a year.
But a five-item instrument has a real ceiling, and it is worth being honest about where it is. It can tell you that you are at 11 out of 25 and that you were at 14 last month. It cannot tell you why. That is the gap the Regulation Profile was built to close.
Where one number runs out of road
Imagine two people who both score in the middle of the range.
The first sleeps badly — genuinely badly, four or five broken hours — and is otherwise carrying a manageable week with a workload they mostly chose. The second sleeps fine and is being run at by a job that sets their calendar for them, with nothing left by six in the evening and a jaw that has been clenched since March.
Same total. Almost nothing in common. The first person needs their sleep addressed and would waste three months doing breathwork around a problem that breathwork does not touch. The second person could sleep nine hours a night and still be at the same number by Friday, because the load and the bracing are doing the work.
A summary score averages that difference away. It is still useful — direction of travel matters, and knowing you have dropped nine points since last month is genuinely actionable information. It just is not a diagnosis of what to change. Six numbers are.
What the six domains measure
Each domain is four questions, scored 0–4, for a subtotal out of 16. Each one was written against an established construct rather than invented from nothing, and each one answers a question you can act on.
Load — how much of your week is being set by things you did not choose, and how much of it you feel able to steer. This is perceived demand and controllability, and controllability is the half people forget. A heavy week you are driving is a different physiological event from a lighter week that is driving you.
Recovery — how fast your body comes back down once something has wound it up. If one domain is worth watching more than the others, it is this one. Activation is not the problem; almost everyone gets activated. The problem is a system that takes four hours to come down from a two-minute event, because at that rate the day runs out before the recovery does.
Sleep — not hours. Whether you get to sleep, stay asleep, and wake with something in the tank. Hours are the number people report and the least informative thing about it; you can lie in bed for eight of them and get very little back. This is also the domain most likely to be the actual bottleneck in an ADHD adult who has been told the problem is discipline, which is why sleep problems in adults with ADHD gets its own essay.
Noticing — whether you register what your body is doing early enough to act on it, rather than finding out afterwards. The technical name is interoceptive awareness, and it is the domain that gates all the others: a practice you only reach for after you have already snapped is a practice arriving twenty minutes late. There is more on this in interoception and ADHD.
Capacity — what is actually left of you at the end of an ordinary day, and how much of the week you spend running on empty. This is the closest thing in the instrument to a burnout read, and it tends to move slowly in both directions.
Bracing — the background holding that stays switched on when nothing is wrong. Jaw, shoulders, breath, scanning. Most people score worse here than they expect, because bracing is by definition the thing you have stopped noticing. It is the pattern behind why ADHD adults feel constantly tense.
Why the spread matters more than the average
When the six subtotals come back, the first thing worth looking at is not the highest or the lowest but the distance between them.
A flat profile — all six within a point or two of each other — usually means the whole system is sitting at one level, and the thing to change is the level rather than any single domain. That is a load conversation, or a sleep conversation, or an honest conversation about the size of the job.
A spiky profile means something specific is dragging. One domain four or five points below the rest is the most useful result the instrument can give you, because it converts a vague sense of not coping into a sentence: recovery is the problem, not sleep. That sentence is what a practice can be built around. “I feel dysregulated” is not.
Why once a quarter, and not once a week
Because the honest answer is that these things do not move weekly.
Your recovery speed is not different on Tuesday than it was on Monday. Neither is how much of your week you control, or how much is left of you at six. Asking a 24-item questionnaire every seven days would produce a chart that looked like data and was mostly measurement noise plus whatever mood you were in when you opened it.
Three months is roughly the shortest interval over which a real change in any of these domains becomes visible above that noise. It is also, not coincidentally, about as often as anybody will actually sit down for eight minutes of careful self-report without starting to click through it.
So the two instruments do different jobs and neither replaces the other. The weekly Index is the trend line; the quarterly Profile is the structural read underneath it. If the Index is drifting down for six weeks, the Profile is what tells you which domain is doing it.
What you actually do with the result
Three things, in order.
Read the weakest domain and only the weakest domain. Six scores is enough information to be paralysing, and a plan that addresses all six addresses none of them. The lowest one is the leverage point for the next three months.
Pick one practice that targets it and repeat it long enough to matter. A different practice every week is a hobby. The same practice most days for eight weeks is an intervention. The free reset library has twelve of them and no signup, and the honest truth is that which one you pick matters far less than whether you keep doing it.
Leave the total alone until the next one. Watching a quarterly number weekly is a way to make yourself anxious about a measurement, which is a genuinely absurd place to end up. The weekly Index is there for that. The Profile you take, act on, and put down.
Members can see their own six domains and their change since the last one on the dashboard, alongside the weekly trend. The comparison between the two — what the quarterly structure says versus what the last six weeks say — is usually where the useful surprise is.
What the Regulation Profile is not
This part is not a disclaimer at the bottom, it is part of the instrument.
RP-1 is original and unvalidated. It has no published norms, so there is no population you are being compared against and no percentile to read into. There is no cutoff, no pass, and no threshold that means anything clinically. It cannot screen for ADHD, anxiety, depression, sleep apnoea or trauma, and a low score is not evidence of any of them.
What it is, precisely: a structured way of asking yourself twenty-four specific questions you would not otherwise ask in that order, and a way of comparing today's answers to the ones you gave three months ago. That is genuinely useful and it is also all it is. If something in the results worries you — and the Sleep and Capacity domains are the ones that most often should — the next step is a clinician, not a longer practice streak.
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