Small ways I honour my nervous system

3 tips from a sensitive body

One of the hardest things for me about living in India is the level of stimulation present in the environment. If you’ve never been here, it’s hard to explain, but I once heard it described, accurately, as an assault on the senses. In nervous system terms, every trigger that you could think of (noise, crowds, smells, danger, unpredictability, and other stressed beings) is present to some degree, and some to an extreme degree.

It seems to be something that people who grew up here have adapted to¹, while people who haven’t probably never will. Since I fall into the latter category, and am also highly sensitive, it’s been a real learning process for me to take care of my nervous system while living here.

the disorienting quality of sensory overwhelm | Sam Szafran, Escalier 54 Rue de Seine, 1990.

What follows are a few guidelines I try to live by, that are designed to minimise stimulation, and thereby our nervous system’s tendency to mobilise (in lay terms, to go into the fight-flight response). Hopefully these are helpful regardless of whether you live in a stimulating environment, because I’ve tried to identify universal—and yet not-so-obvious—triggers that can be fairly easily mitigated. As you read, I encourage you to examine each point from both sides:

• Is this something I already do (and therefore helps me stay regulated), or

• Is it something I can’t/don’t do (and therefore contributes to mobilisation)?

---

---

Gaye Clear, Drifting Clouds, 2024. Mixed media on canvas, 16x16”.

1 · be early for everything

regardless of whether being late is socially or culturally accepted/“the norm”²

Being late can trigger the mobilisation or stress response in the nervous system, as the body literally speeds up to compensate for the perceived lack of time. Think: faster heart rate, faster and shallower breathing, more anxiety, tense muscles etc.

It can feel strange to show up to places early, and sometimes it makes other people feel uncomfortable. So clearly, balance this with the needs of others’ as much as is feasible. But if you are earlier than everyone else, there’s no problem at all, and it can even feel like a luxury.

The extra few minutes or moments are yours to settle in, appreciate the environment around you, take a few breaths, get comfortable and be ready for whatever’s coming. Your nervous system needs and loves these little moments of pause-to-prep—they’re like snacks for the brain. Many times you’ll find yourself using these moments to review what’s passed as well, which brings me to the next point.

---

2 · schedule buffer time between events in a day

*also allows you to be early more easily

This gives the brain and body time to process and decompress on an on-going basis, rather than leaving it all for the evening, by which point you might be too wired to wind down.

Buffer time also gives you a sense of closure after each thing, and allows you to prepare for the next thing. It leads to improved perception and cognition, because you’re not always in catch-up mode and can more easily be present in the here and now.

It also makes room for your inevitable biological needs (bathroom, water, food etc.) as well as the unavoidable interruptions of life (people calling, deliveries etc.)

---

3 · one thing at a time

aka. minimize interruptions and multitasking

Every time the phone goes off, the doorbell rings, or someone comes in and out of your space—your nervous system has to devote energy and time to assessing that stimulus and responding to it. These repeated pulls on your attention add up, and leave you feeling like you can’t focus, or you’re tired before you even start.

I include multitasking in this because trying to do multiple things at a time is like interrupting yourself over and over again. Attention gets pulled in and out repeatedly, leading to fragmentation, lack of focus and depletion. When you are regulated and in capacity, multitasking might be doable for some time—but if you are already stressed, overstimulated or overwhelmed, it’s only going to wind up the mobilised energy in your system even more.³

One of my favourite mantras for times of overwhelm is one thing at a time. I’m only going to do/attend to/take in one thing at a time. In other words, simplify (rather than diversify) the streams of your attention, and your nervous system will automatically start to slow down and regulate.

---

---

Angi Wallace, Carnations, from the Submerged Flowers project, 2024. Mixed media photography.

endnote

Nervous system work often pushes us into the uncomfortable territory of facing up to our own habits and unconscious tendencies, many of which are conditioned by culture and childhood experience. For example, if you’ve not regularly experienced being in environments that are restful and destimulating, it’s much harder to create them for yourself. And if you’ve been in environments and around people that are highly stimulating, you’ll very likely be matching and creating that same energy around you in your own life.

Our organism’s sensitivity is also, however, an indisputable ally. Our nervous system is picking up things from the environment all the time—and that is both potential for growth and limitation. We can lean in to our ability to adapt and create supportive neuroplastic change, or we can succumb to the pressures of the world around us and create dysfunctional neuroplastic change. In truth, the change is happening already; we can only choose how and where to direct it, and that, too, only some of the time.

The loveliest part of working with neuroplastic change is watching it build up and accumulate in the system. If we find what attunes to us, and learn to track even the smallest shifts in the direction we want to go—our bodies and brains respond tremendously, and the work starts to feel, if not effortless, then at least easier.

In the next post, I’ll share some big ways that I honour my nervous system. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you if any of these ideas resonated, or if you have your own little ways to support somatic and nervous system well-being.

1. Not all of them, and not totally. In my view, even those who have adapted to it will still be registering some level of subconscious/subliminal impact. The human nervous system is marvellous in its adaptive capacity, but it still needs certain basic, universal things to thrive (silence, space, privacy, slowness and rest among them—all of which are hard to come by here.)

2. *h/t Dr. Lorin Roche, my meditation teacher, for this advice

3. And as with many other things, the state of mobilisation makes us more likely to multitask, which in turn fuels more mobilisation, and more multitasking, and so on, in an unhelpful spiral. Resting attention in one thing at a time is a way to break that spiral—though it’s not always easy.