Understanding Your Nervous System
A somatic guide to safety, connection, and healing
Your nervous system is not just reacting. It’s responding - intelligently, constantly, and often unconsciously to the world around you.
And it’s not just about being anxious or calm. It’s about connection, belonging, energy, truth, stillness, pleasure, and presence. It’s about how you’ve learned to survive and how you can use what you learned (often without invitation) to create a life where you are not forcing or seeking nor are you hiding or avoiding, a life where you belong to you and life no longer happens to you, it happens for you.
This is a guide to help you understand the three primary pathways of your nervous system, what happens when they’re in or out of balance, and how to begin recognising, and gently shifting your patterns so they serve you rather than you servicing them.
It’s not here to diagnose or fix you, but to give your experiences some language, and your body a little more space to feel.
Three Core Pathways of the Nervous System
Let’s break it down simply and clearly. There are three main branches of your autonomic nervous system that shape how you respond to life:
1. Sympathetic Nervous System
This is your get-up-and-go system.
It prepares you to act, speak up, move, respond, defend, chase, or create.
In balance: It brings focus, motivation, momentum, healthy boundaries, and vitality.
Out of balance: It can feel like anxiety, urgency, overdrive, reactivity, or panic.
2. Parasympathetic Nervous System (Dorsal Vagal)
This is your brake system, your deep stillness.
It slows everything down, allowing for rest, digestion, and surrender.
In balance: It feels like calm, presence, softening, and supported stillness.
Out of balance: It can feel like shutdown, withdrawal, collapse, dissociation, or numbness.
3. Social Nervous System (Ventral Vagal)
This is your connection system, and as Kimberly Ann Johnson teaches, it tracks the tone of voice, body language, eye contact, and emotional safety in every interaction.
In balance: You feel a sense of belonging, you are present, relational, playful, creative, and able to co-regulate with others.
Out of balance: You may find yourself fawning, people-pleasing, masking, over-accommodating, or hyper-aware of everyone else’s needs.
Regulated vs Dysregulated
None of these systems are bad or wrong. They’re just doing their job.
The goal isn’t to stay regulated all the time, it’s to become more fluid and more aware.
To recognise when you’re stuck.
To have choices and release attachments - this creates true freedom.
How Your Nervous System Responds: Towards and Away
Your body is always responding to cues of safety or danger.
Sometimes that looks like moving towards connection, action, or intimacy.
Sometimes it means moving away from overwhelm, threat, or discomfort.
These responses can be regulated (anchored, wise, choiceful)
or dysregulated (automatic, reactive, or patterned).
Sympathetic Nervous System
Regulated Towards:
Taking clear aligned action
Speaking truth, being decisive
Setting a boundary
Creating or initiating something
Dysregulated Towards:
Over-efforting
Reactivity or outbursts
Pushing past limits
Trying to control outcomes
Regulated Away:
Pausing to reflect
Stepping back to reset
Creating space and responding
Dysregulated Away:
Escaping
Shutting down communication
Avoiding discomfort or decision
Spiraling into anxious overdoing
Parasympathetic Nervous System (Dorsal Freeze)
Regulated Towards:
Surrendering into rest
Being still and present
Acceptance
Deep meditation or repair
Dysregulated Towards:
Disappearing in relationship
Numbness in intimacy
Passive resignation
Emotional disconnection
Regulated Away:
Resting by choice for self-care
Taking time to reset and recharge
Spending time alone or in nature
Dysregulated Away:
Collapsing emotionally or physically
Checking out
Feeling frozen, empty, or unreachable
Social Nervous System (Ventral Vagal)
Regulated Towards:
Eye contact, laughter, warmth
Asking for help
Intimacy and attunement
Honest conversation
Belonging
Dysregulated Towards:
Fawning or people-pleasing
Over-giving to avoid rejection
Performing, attention seeking
Hypervigilance in social settings
Regulated Away:
Setting a clear boundary
Stepping back with kindness
Choosing who you share energy with
Belonging to self
Dysregulated Away:
Withdrawing to avoid being seen
Fitting it
Masking your truth
Self-abandoning in the name of keeping peace
Becoming aware of these patterns lets you begin choosing new ones.
You don’t have to force change—you just have to start noticing.
The Freeze Response
What I have learnt from experience and being a student of Michaela Boehm, helped me put greater words and understanding to it is that not all freeze looks like collapse.
Functional freeze is when you’re still doing all the things, but your parasympathetic nervous system response is on. So you are working, parenting, helping, managing, and inside, you feel flat, numb, nothing, disconnected. You’re going through the motions of life, but you are disengaged because you are in survival mode your rational, strategic thinking is not on-line. We are not able to properly evaluate or navigate the situation when our sympathetic nervous system takes over to keep you safe from a perceived threat.
Freeze can feel like:
Emotional flatline
Low desire or unclear direction
Numbness in intimacy or sensuality
A sense of “something’s off” you can’t explain
Freeze is not failure. It’s a brilliant response when the system doesn’t feel safe to move.
And the way out?
It’s not through pushing or problem-solving.
“You can’t think your way out of freeze. You have to feel your way out.”
~ Michaela Boehm
Movement helps. Breath helps. Pleasure helps.
But only when it’s slow, attuned, and safe. No performative. No force.
Trauma is not what happened. it’s what happened inside your body when support was missing.
And it’s the patterns of dense energy that got stuck when no one was there to help you move through it.
We heal through co-regulation, not self-reliance
The social nervous system matters deeply, and it’s often where our earliest wounds lie
We build capacity gently, not by overriding or bypassing, but by slowly increasing our capacity of what we can feel and hold
Bit by bit.
Breath by breath.
There is no right or wrong place to begin.
Your nervous system is not broken. It’s not working against you.
It’s been protecting you, beautifully, silently and for a long time.
Now, maybe, it’s time to thank it… and listen to it more closely.
You don’t have to stay stuck.
You can move.
You can feel.
You can bring the gentle warmth of your attention and acceptance to what’s been frozen.
And from there, you can create a life where you are not grabbing and seeking nor are you hiding or avoiding, a life where you belong to you and life no longer happens to you, it happens for you.
Book a free discovery call to see how we can work together to build your capacity.