How to calm your nervous system when everything's too much

Boundaries that don't hold. Naff colleagues. A diagnosis. An addiction cycle. Isolation. AI dystopia dread. The slow erosion of human rights 🏳️‍⚧️. Or just melting into a puddle every time you step outside 🫠.

Take your pick. Most of us are carrying at least one.

I'm not here to fix any of that. Nobody can (not even Fred 🐈‍⬛). But I do think everyone needs an anchor. Something that gets your nervous system to stand down for an hour, so you can feel the ground again before you go back out into it all ⚓.

Yours could just be a breathwork session in your calendar. Sometimes knowing it's there is enough.

What an anchor has to do

Mine, right now, is a magical order I joined a couple of years back. Daily ritual, serious study and shit loads of memorisation (argh, it's a struggle).

It's a lot of work and I love it. And it carries over into life. I come out of ritual and still have to feed the screaming cat. This is a decent test of an anchor. If it's helping you escape the dreary bits, it's just a hobby.

Why breathwork specifically

Conscious connected breathing shifts your nervous system out of sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and into parasympathetic (rest-and-digest), on purpose, in under an hour.

That's not new age shite, it's vagus nerve physiology.

Gong baths lean on the same thing from a different angle. One study of sixty-odd people found real drops in tension, anger and anxiety after a single session. The ones who'd never done it before improved most.

None of it promises to fix the diagnosis, the addiction cycle, the naff colleague, unanswered text or the news. But what it DOES do is give your body forty-five minutes where it isn't bracing for the next thing.

Do that on purpose, repeatedly, and you've got a base to come back to 🫴.

You don't need a crisis to justify it

I say that as someone who forgets it's a choice more often than I'd like to admit 😐.

When we forget to stop, the nervous system frays quietly. Most of us only notice at crisis point. Not before.

You don't need to be in absolute bits to justify an hour of breathwork. Most people who come to me aren't. They're just tired of living in hyperdrive, like the rest of us urban rats 🐭.

If any of the list at the top hit close to home, reply or book an informal chat. No pressure. I love what I do so it's not a bind.

Ritual, breathwork, gongs, dancefloors or cats. However you find your anchor, hold onto it. The ground's still there.