We hear so much about the nervous system, cortisol, and stress, usually labeled as things that are bad and need fixing. Before we go anywhere near fixing anything, I want us to actually understand what all of this means, because these terms get thrown around constantly: nervous system health, regulation, dysregulation, cortisol, stress. Let's build a real foundation.

What your nervous system actually is

Your nervous system connects every system in your body. You have your central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord, and your peripheral nervous system, which is essentially everything else. Within that sits the autonomic nervous system, and that's the one we're focusing on.

Autonomic means automatic, just like it sounds. It's everything your body does without you thinking about it: your heart beating, your lungs breathing, blood moving, pupils adjusting, immune system working, digestion running. Thank goodness it's automatic, because it would be exhausting to run all of that on purpose.

Two systems, one continuum

The autonomic nervous system has two main divisions. Your sympathetic nervous system is your fight, flight, or freeze response, your stress response. Your parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest response. Together they create your levels of activation and rest.

Most people think of it as being one or the other, but I want you to picture a continuum instead, with a neutral point in the middle and lots of places in between. Because here's what I hear constantly, one-on-one and in coaching: "I just want to feel calm." And the reason so many of us crave calm is that we're running around stressed all the time, foot stuck on the gas in the sympathetic state, longing for the opposite.

But we don't actually want to live only in calm either. Sympathetic activation isn't all bad. It gives us excitement, motivation, the kick to get out of bed, the energy for exercise, and every big emotion from joy to anger. Negate all of that and life gets pretty boring. What we want isn't one or the other. It's the ability to move fluidly back and forth, instead of jamming between the gas and the brake.

Why modern life breaks this

Here's the problem. The part of your brain responsible for your stress response, your survival response, has not evolved beyond the stressors of thousands of years ago. Back then, stressors were big, acute, and short. Something major happened, then it passed, and the body returned to neutral.

Now we have activation piled on activation. Phones beeping, emails going off, aging parents, young kids, job demands, a partner, friends, a house to pay for, all stacked on top of each other. And your brain reads your email notification as a deadly lion in the woods, because it can't tell the difference. Stuck on the gas all the time, it becomes very hard to flow back down.

And when you've been activated for a very long time, you might land somewhere past stressed, in more of a burnout or freeze state: flat, dissociated, low motivation, low energy, hard to make decisions.

Where to start

The work is noticing. Where in your life do you feel stressed? Who and what activates you? This is exactly what daily reset actions help with, lifting the lid off the pot of boiling water to let some steam off and drop the pressure. But awareness comes first, because awareness is the first step to meaningful change.

The most useful place to begin that awareness is understanding your specific pattern, because activation shows up differently for every woman. My free Stress Blueprint quiz maps yours in about three minutes. Take it here.