This year, I have a lot less on my plate.

Fewer modules for university. Less pressure. Better systems. And more free time than I’ve had in two years.

To most people, this is the dream.

More time to rest. To finally read those books collecting dust on your shelf. Catch up on that long list of series and movies. To work on that hobby you wanted to start months ago.

Time to actually breathe and live.

But my experience had been anything but the dream.

I’d come home from work with nothing urgent to do, and instead of freedom, I felt restless. Fidgety. Searching for something — anything — to fill the time.

Helping with dinner.

Mindless scrolling (let’s not talk about it).

Watching something I didn’t really care about.

Just to put all the energy (and anxiety) somewhere.

I tried planning my weeks. Structuring my days. Journaling through the tension.

It would ease things for a while. But the restlessness always came back.

Then I couldn’t help but wonder:

If the normal tools aren’t fixing this — the more mental and mindset tools — maybe it isn’t a mental problem.

So I followed that thread deeper. Past my thoughts. Past my habits. Past my psychology.

Down into something I hadn’t paid much attention to before.

My body. Specifically, my nervous system.

Through still early, what I found changed how I understood the problems I was having: my restlessness, my anxiety, and my inability to relax.

It also explained why so many high achievers feel chronically wired even when life is finally going well.

This is what I’ve learned so far. I hope you find it practical and useful.

Here’s what most high-achievers do when they feel anxious, wired, or unable to switch off.

They try to think their way out of it.

They journal. They plan. They reframe. They tell themselves to relax, to be grateful, or to stop overthinking.

And when that doesn’t work, they try harder.

More journalling.

More structure.

More mental effort.

But all of this is directed at a problem that isn’t mental in origin.

This is the first and most costly misconception: thinking your nervous system responds to logic the way your brain does.

It doesn’t.

Your nervous system speaks the language of the body — of breath, feeling, sensation, emotion, movement, and safety signals.

Not of intentions, affirmations, or productivity systems.

And until you understand that, you’ll keep trying to solve a physiological problem with cognitive tools.

The result?

You stay stuck. And then, to make it worse, you add a second layer of stress: confusion about why the tools that usually work aren’t working.

Telling yourself to calm down when your nervous system is activated is a bit like telling your lungs to inhale when you’re underwater.

The instruction won’t land. And your body will reject it.

The part of your nervous system that drives the stress response operates largely below conscious thought.

It’s not waiting for you to have a good idea about it.

It responds to the signals coming from your body and your environment — not to your self-talk.

This is why people who are objectively doing well — less on their plate, more sleep, fewer deadlines — can still feel chronically on edge.

Their nervous system hasn’t registered that things have changed. That it’s safe to relax and switch off.

It’s still running the old programme, scanning for the next demand, the next threat, the next thing to solve.

Reframe: You can’t think your way into regulation. You have to signal your way there.

The second misconception is one that I think wellness culture has made worse: the idea that sympathetic activation — fight-or-flight response— is bad, and that the goal is to eliminate it and just be in your parasympathetic state.

This gets it wrong in both directions.

Your sympathetic nervous system is not the enemy.

It’s your engine.

It’s what gets you out of bed, gives you drive, sharpens your focus under pressure, and helps you rise to a challenge.

Without it, you’d be flat, unmotivated, foggy, and disengaged.

On the extreme, you would be dead.

At the same time, the parasympathetic state isn’t a destination to reach and stay in. It’s one part of a dynamic system designed to move.

The real problem isn’t being in fight-or-flight. It’s getting stuck there — and not knowing how to come out of it.

As physiotherapist and author Jessica Maguire writes in Nervous System Reset:

That line landed hard for me. Because I'd been framing my restlessness as something to eliminate, when what I actually needed was to learn how to move through it.

Here's a better way to think about what's actually going on inside you.

Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the part of your nervous system that operates largely below conscious awareness.

It regulates your heart rate, breathing, digestion, immune function, and stress response — automatically, continuously, without you having to manage it.

It has two primary branches that most people have heard of:

In a healthy, well-regulated system, these two branches work in balance — like a thermostat, constantly making small adjustments to keep you in an optimal range.

You feel the heat of activation when you need to perform, and you come back to baseline when the demand passes.

Maguire describes it this way: we each have an internal set point — the temperature at which we feel and function best. Our brain and body work together through the nervous system to return us to that set point after stress. Scientists call this homeostasis.

But there’s a third state worth knowing about.

Neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges introduced Polyvagal Theory in the 1990s, and while the science is still debated in some circles, the framework has been widely adopted in trauma therapy and nervous system work for a simple reason: it maps to lived experience in a way that's hard to argue with.

Porges identified a third state — a social engagement system — that sits between full activation and full rest. This is the state where we feel genuinely safe, connected, and open. Where we do our best thinking, our deepest relating, and our most creative work.

I won’t go deep into Polyvagal Theory here (maybe in another letter), but it’s worth knowing it exists.

One of the states most high-performers want to access (calm focus, presence, easy connection) is this third state.

And you can’t get there by force. You can only get there by regulation.

Psychologist Dan Siegel offers a related and useful concept: the window of tolerance.

Think of it as the bandwidth within which you can function well — activated enough to engage, calm enough to think clearly.

Within this window, you can handle challenges, feel your emotions without being overwhelmed by them, and return to balance after stress.

Outside it — either too activated (anxious, reactive, hypervigilant) or too shut down (flat, numb, disconnected) — performance and wellbeing both suffer.

The goal of nervous system work isn’t to live permanently within the window. It’s to widen your window.

To build a system that can handle more heat without tipping into dysregulation, and come back to baseline faster when it does.

Chronic stress — even low-grade, background stress — can recalibrate your set point.

If you’ve been stressed for long enough, your brain starts to treat that elevated state as normal.

It becomes the baseline your nervous system defends.

This is what was happening to me. Years of full plates, tight deadlines, and high output had trained my nervous system to expect pressure. When the pressure eased, my system didn’t relax. It went looking for more, not because it was broken, but because it had a setpoint.

The restlessness wasn’t irrational. It was my nervous system doing exactly what it had been trained to do.

Maguire names the cost of this pattern clearly: when we stay dysregulated for long enough without completing the stress cycle, we accumulate what’s called allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear of chronic stress.

Left unchecked, it doesn’t just affect how we feel. It affects how we function, recover, and perform.

The path out is not discipline or willpower. It's learning to work with your physiology and close the stress cycle.

At the centre of all of this is a structure called the vagus nerve.

It’s the longest cranial nerve in the body, running from your brainstem down through your neck, chest, heart, lungs, and gut.

It’s the primary communication highway between your brain and your body. And it’s the main mechanism through which the parasympathetic system operates.

The concept of vagal tone refers to how active and responsive your vagus nerve is.

High vagal tone means your nervous system shifts fluidly — it can activate when needed and come back down when the threat passes.

Low vagal tone means it gets stuck, stays elevated, and struggles to return to baseline.

Vagal tone is not fixed. It’s trainable. And that’s good news.

As Maguire puts it: with better vagal tone comes resilience and flexibility. The capacity to bend with the pressures of life without breaking.

This is the real goal: not a permanently calm nervous system, but a flexible one. One that can meet demands fully and return to baseline cleanly. That is what a regulated, healthy, high-performing nervous system actually looks like.

Nervous system regulation isn’t something you achieve once.

It’s a practice.

An ongoing process of understanding your body and sending safety signals that teach it to build the flexibility to move between states.

The tools and practices below are by no means exhaustive. These are the tools that I’ve tried and found most effective. And they are grounded in research.

(I’ll even highlight my favourites).

This is the fastest, most evidence-backed technique for downregulating your nervous system in real time.

The physiological sigh is a double inhale through the nose — a full breath, followed by a short second inhale to fully inflate the lungs — then a long, slow exhale through the mouth.

The science: the extended exhale stimulates the vagus nerve, activating the parasympathetic branch. Your exhale is your brake. The longer and slower it is, the more powerfully it signals safety to your nervous system.

When to use it: in the middle of a stress spike, before a high-pressure moment, or any time you feel yourself tipping toward reactivity.

Two to three rounds are usually enough to feel the shift.

Dr Andrew Huberman talks about this one a lot in his podcast, too.

Most people under chronic stress breathe shallowly — short, chest-level breaths that keep the sympathetic system mildly activated all day without them realising it.

Diaphragmatic breathing — breathing deeply enough that the belly rises rather than the chest — does the opposite. When the diaphragm engages fully, it sends signals along the vagus nerve that the body is safe and at rest.

How to practise: place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe so that only the bottom hand rises. Aim for a 4-count inhale and a 6-8 count exhale. Even five minutes of this daily shifts your baseline over time.

Cold showers, cold plunges, or even splashing cold water on your face trigger a sharp sympathetic spike — followed by a strong parasympathetic rebound. Done consistently, this trains your nervous system to regulate more efficiently after activation.

Research from Dr Susanna Søberg suggests regular cold exposure strengthens autonomic nervous system resilience — improving the speed and ease with which the system returns to baseline after stress.

Think of it as controlled stress inoculation: you’re practising the activation-recovery cycle in a safe, repeatable context.

Start with 30 cold seconds at the end of your shower. That's enough to begin.

Your body is designed to complete the stress cycle through movement. Historically, stress ended in physical action — running, fighting, or escaping. When we experience stress without any physical discharge, that activation stays held in the body.

Walking, in particular, is one of the most effective nervous system tools available. The bilateral movement — the alternating left-right rhythm of your steps — engages both hemispheres of the brain and has a direct calming effect on the amygdala. Pair that with the optic flow of moving forward through space (covered in a previous newsletter), and you have a full reset built into a 15-minute walk.

You don't need a long session. Regular movement throughout the day matters more than one extended session. If you feel wired, tense, or reactive — move first. Think later.

Because the vagus nerve is the primary pathway of the parasympathetic system, directly stimulating it is one of the most reliable ways to shift states. And you don't need any equipment to do it.

Simple, evidence-supported methods:

Consistent meditation practice doesn’t just train attention — it directly improves vagal tone and nervous system flexibility.

Regular practitioners show measurably higher heart rate variability, which is one of the most reliable markers of autonomic nervous system health.

Mental rehearsal works through a similar mechanism. Because the brain doesn't cleanly distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one, rehearsing a state of calm or safety — seeing it, feeling it, inhabiting it in your imagination — creates neural pathways that make that state more accessible in real life. You’re not just thinking about regulation. You're practising it.

Five to ten minutes daily is a good place to start. It compounds.

Grounding — making direct physical contact with the earth — is one of the simplest and most underestimated regulation tools.

Walking barefoot on grass, sand, or soil.

Sitting outside with your feet on the ground.

Emerging research suggests physical contact with the earth transfers electrons to the body, reducing inflammation and positively influencing the autonomic nervous system.

But even setting the research aside, the experiential effect is real and immediate: standing on the earth, breathing real air, feeling genuinely present in your body — it returns your nervous system to something ancient and settling.

There’s so much value in being in nature, specifically with how modernised society and architecture are becoming.

Mother Nature is calling us home, and she’ll no doubt welcome us with a big, warm hug that says, “you’re safe”.

You were not designed to be calm all the time.

You were designed to activate, respond, recover, and return. That full cycle — running cleanly — is what a healthy nervous system looks like.

It’s also what high performance actually requires.

The goal isn’t to eliminate fight-or-flight. It’s to stop getting stuck there. To build the adaptability to go hard when demanded and come down to baselines when the work is done.

For a long time, I thought the restlessness I was carrying was a thinking problem — something to journal or plan or reframe my way out of. But I'm learning it has far less to do with my thinking and far more to do with my body.

It doesn’t respond to logic.

It responds to signals.

And until I started sending it the right ones, no amount of mental effort was going to change what I was feeling.

Learning about the nervous system — really learning about it — is the beginning of something I will be grateful for, not just this year, but years to come.

I’m still in at the beginning, but things have already started shifting for me.

There’s a line from Maguire that I keep coming back to:

(I recommend reading her book if you want to start learning about the nervous system).

Your nervous system isn’t working against you. It’s working with the information it has.

Give it better information. And watch what changes.

Thank you for reading.

I hope it helped.

See you in the next one.

— Shana