You Were Built for Survival and Restoration: How to Understand and Regulate Your Nervous System

If you’ve ever felt like your body has a mind of its own — racing thoughts, tight chest, sudden fatigue, trouble sleeping — that’s your nervous system at work.

But here’s the good news: you’re not at its mercy.
You can learn to work with your nervous system instead of being run by it.

Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) affects everything from how you breathe, digest, and sleep to how you feel, think, and connect. And while it runs automatically, it’s not beyond your influence.

In fact, once you understand how it works, you can begin to shift your state — out of stress, into calm — with tools you already carry in your body.

Two States, One Brilliant System

Your autonomic nervous system has two main modes:

• Sympathetic, often called fight or flight

• Parasympathetic, also known as rest and digest

Let’s be clear: both are good. Both are needed.

The sympathetic state isn’t bad — it helps you take action, focus, train hard, move quickly, protect yourself, or give a talk in front of hundreds of people. It's what wakes you up in the morning and gets you through a deadline or a hike.

The problem is when you get stuck there.

When the sympathetic state stays on too long — when it becomes your “normal” — it stops being helpful. That’s when the racing heart, tight jaw, shallow breath, lack of focus, irritability, gut issues, and a myriad of other classic signs of chronic tension show up.

The parasympathetic state is where your body recovers. It’s the place where digestion, immune function, sleep, and cellular repair happen. It’s also where we can access DHEA — a key hormone that supports resilience, joy, and healing.

So while we want to predominantly function from the parasympathetic nervous system, it's not realistic or productive to stay there — we want to be able to shift deliberately and be the one driving the nervous system, not the other way around..

I often say: It’s not about being calm all the time — it’s about returning to calm with ease when we want to.

That’s nervous system flexibility.
And that’s a trainable skill.

How Can You Tell What State You're In?

Here are some signals:

Most of us live in a world that glorifies the sympathetic — the productivity, the hustle, the push.

But your health, your creativity, and your joy live in the parasympathetic.

What Helps You Shift?

Here are three starting points I use with students all the time:

1. Your Breath.
   The breath is one of the fastest ways to send a message to your nervous system. Shallow, chest-driven breathing keeps you sympathetic. Deep, slow breathing with good mechanics signals safety and stimulates the vagus nerve, the main nerve of the parasympathetic system.

2. Your Posture.
   If your body is tense or misaligned, you can't access the essential breath — and the nervous system gets the wrong signal. Alignment creates access to breath. Breath creates access to calm.

3. Your Emotional Patterns.
   Emotions like frustration, impatience, and fear reinforce sympathetic tone. Emotions like gratitude, compassion, and curiosity shift you into coherence — a measurable state that supports healing.

What Now?

Start by just noticing.
Where do you spend most of your day — in sympathetic or parasympathetic?
What helps you feel safe and at ease? How long are you able to sustain those feelings?

You don’t need to fix it all.
You just need to begin listening.

Your body has been trying to tell you something.
Let’s help you understand the language.

If you'd like to explore the tools I use with clients to soothe the nervous system, feel free to reach out. It would be a joy to guide you!