Burnout? Stressed? Not Sleeping? Your Vagus Nerve has the answers

Want to quit your job, fighting with friends, raging at your partner, battling constipation, and insomnia? It’s time to check in with your nervous system.

It could be anything. Your boss has called you in for an impromptu chat. You've been put on the spot in a meeting, and you've blanked. Or maybe the general anxiety of parenthood is taking a toll. Queue clammy palms, tensed muscles and a pounding chest.

These are all natural responses to stress. Necessary signals that alert us to danger in order to keep us safe. Only these days, in a world of competing priorities, doom scrolling and never ending appointments, our bodies can't tell the difference between being chased by a lion and being stuck in traffic.

And it’s affecting our nervous system. Rage, anxiety, insomnia. Lashing out at friends and family. These are all symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system resulting from the stress and trauma many of us deal with on a daily basis. 

I've taught over 20,000 across the globe how to reset their nervous system, helping them to  conquer anxiety, shutdown and a range of chronic health conditions. So I know no one has to live in a state of dysregulation forever. By cultivating a deeper understanding of our nervous system and how it responds to adversity, we can develop tools and strategies to help us gain control over our reactions, show up in our relationships and yes, get a decent night’s sleep. 

Understanding the nervous system’s role in the body.

Nervous system dysregulation signifies an imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in the body and can manifest in a range of physical and emotional symptoms. Put simply, if you’re spending days or weeks oscillating between a fight or flight state, swinging from burnout to dissociation or are suffering from chronic pain or gut issues, that’s a key indicator of nervous system dysregulation. 

If you want to check in with the state of your nervous system, start by asking yourself: 

• Are you feeling stuck on full volume? Your sympathetic nervous system may be in a state of mobilisation. Feeling like the ‘on’ button of life is jammed is likely to result in feelings of anxiety, rage, and overwhelm and can result in physical pain, constipation (the result of blood flowing from your organs into the limbs in preparation for flight) or insomnia (the result of too much sympathetic nervous system energy coursing through the body). Within your relationships, if you’re feeling reactive, critical, want to ‘storm off’ or quit your job in a blaze of glory, it’s a sure sign of hyperarousal.  
• Are you feeling completely switched off? Your dorsal vagal state has been activated. Conversely you feel immobilised or stuck on ‘off.’ This looks like feelings of apathy, a lack of motivation, procrastination and wanting to self isolate. You might lose your libido, find it difficult to reply to messages, stonewall those closest to you or generally annoy loved ones with your flakey behaviour. 
• Are you feeling stuck? This is characterised by the ‘freeze’ state where you feel hyper aroused and stuck at the same time. You might feel like you're pressing hard on your car’s accelerator, only the handbrake is on at the same time. 

A dysregulated nervous system is the result of unprocessed stress and trauma. 

Nervous system dysregulation can show up in a myriad of ways. A recent client came to me in a heightened state of dysregulation, the result of multiple traumatic experiences. ‘Emma’ was still processing the trauma of living through recent bushfires before COVID turned the world upside down. Following this, a traumatic experience with a difficult colleague meant her nervous system didn’t have time to recover from one shock before the next one hit.

She came to see me with gut and throat issues and chronic insomnia. When stressed, Emma would fall into a collapsed state where she felt like isolating in a dark, empty room. This was a sign her dorsal vagal state was activated. She would then come into a sympathetic nervous state and uncharacteristically flip out on her partner. The shame would send her back into the dorsal state which kickstarted a continuous loop of feeling either hyper aroused or completely immoble. 

Emma’s treatment involved creating a sense of safety within her body. By forming connections between her emotions and the sensations she was feeling in her body, Emma was able to process the stress and provide a corrective experience for the brain. 

By engaging in breathing exercises when she felt her nervous system being activated, Emma could redirect her attention and show the survival brain that she could effectively cope in times of stress. This was a powerful game changer and over time, transformed the way her brain responded to stressful situations. 

Begin your nervous system reset 

• Start with an awareness of the body: if you start to feel your jaw clenching, your entire body is tense or you feel out of control, take a pause. Simply recognising that your nervous system is a little out of whack is might be all it takes to bring yourself back to a regulated state. Once you do it again and again, you’ll find the stress activation that is stuck will dissipate. 
• Connect your body to your sensory experience: proprioception, i.e. knowing the position of your body in space, can help calm down a dysregulated nervous system. Try focusing on the connection of your feet on the ground and move that attention up through the body, concentrating on each of your joints. Staying connected to the body will help calm down the fight or flight response. 
• Educate yourself on the nervous system: unfortunately, our brain and nervous system isn’t optimised for calm, it’s optimised for survival and procreation. As a result we have a negativity bias which primes us to think something dangerous is going to happen. 

Recognising this allows us to shed the shame and blame we often place on ourselves for feeling natural human responses. And with this knowledge we have the agency to make healthier decisions that will serve us over the course of our lives.