How to balance your dysregulated nervous system and transform your relationship with stress
As a holistic well-being coach supporting women on their journey to health and vitality, I often share the story of my own wake-up call. There was a time when I thought being constantly "on" was a badge of honour. Like many of my coaching clients navigating today's demands, my days were a blur of (mostly self-imposed) deadlines, commitments, and an ever-present undercurrent of subtle anxiety that I'd come to accept as normal.
It wasn't until my body began sending increasingly urgent messages that I embarked on the path that would not only transform my own relationship with stress but also guide me to become the holistic health coach I am today. Now, I support other women in recognising the signals of dysregulation and imbalance in their own bodies and finding their unique path to harmony.
What I've learned, both through my personal journey and in my wellness coaching practice, is that true vitality emerges not from rigid protocols but from understanding and honouring our body's natural rhythms.
Your guide to nervous system regulation
Understanding Your Nervous System: The Key to Stress Management and Resiliency
Just as nature moves through cycles of activity and rest, our nervous system is designed to flow between states of engagement and recovery. Yet in our modern world, many women find themselves stuck in patterns of constant activation, leading to nervous system dysregulation and, ultimately, burnout.
In my experience as both a practitioner and someone who has navigated burnout recovery, learning to recognise how my nervous system communicates has been like developing a new language; One that's both deeply personal and universally human. Sometimes it whispers through subtle tension in my shoulders, other times it speaks more firmly through disrupted sleep or digestive challenges.
Signs Your Nervous System is Seeking Support
Do any of these sound familiar?
- Difficulty sleeping despite feeling exhausted
- Constant tension in your body
- Feeling wired but tired
- Digestive challenges
- Emotional overwhelm
- Difficulty focusing or brain fog
Of course, there are many more symptoms that show up as manifestations of a dysregulated nervous system. These are simply some of the ones I see most often and the ones that we (society) have become used to medicating with caffeine, alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs.
If you're experiencing any of signs and symptoms right now, keep reading. Because there is a natural and holistic approach to regulation and recovery that can bring you back into harmonious balance.
Six Foundational Principles for Nervous System Regulation
Through years of exploring stress management for women through the lens of various teachings, modalities and traditions, I've found the same six foundational principles that ground my holistic coaching practice to be the same practices that invite the nervous system to find balance. I offer these not as prescriptions, but as possibilities for your own exploration and nervous system regulation journey:
1. Better Breathing for Nervous System Regulation
The Breath is our most accessible tool for bringing ourselves back into balance. When I feel overwhelmed, returning to my breath offers an anchor. Many of us are not breathing naturally and have manifested a stressful breath pattern that sees our rib cages locked, forcing shallow and rapid breathing and causing our shoulders to rise as we inhale. When we’re not breathing freely we create a stressful internal environment which activates our sympathetic nervous system and inhibits the systems in our body to rest, relax and repair.
A functional, natural breath allows our whole body to expand as we inhale. Our ribs open, our belly gently rises, our shoulders are relaxed and our breath moves in and out approximately 6 breaths per minute. Learning to breathe again, like you did when you were a baby, is a key step in regulating your nervous system.
Practice tip: Place your palms gently on your lower ribs and as you inhale, direct your breath outwards into your hands. Do this for 2-3 minutes each day to reconnect to your natural breath.
2. Hydration for Natural Stress Relief
So many of us underestimate the power of water in bringing our bodies into balance. Our body is composed of 75% water (some say over 90%) and maintaining an optimal balance of water and the minerals naturally found in it is critical for a harmonious nervous system.
Unfortunately, many of us are unknowingly chronically dehydrated, either from not drinking enough water or drinking poor-quality water. Dehydration signals the sympathetic nervous system to activate, creating internal stress and a cascade of symptoms that are often dismissed or misdiagnosed. Think fatigue, brain fog, muscle tension, impaired memory, headaches, and hormone imbalances. Without proper hydration, we inhibit our brain's ability to communicate with our body as well as all the other systems essential for health and well-being.
Staying hydrated is a simple yet powerful way to support the recovery of your nervous system.
Just remember, the quality of your water is just as important as the quantity. If you’re fortunate to have access to clean tap water, know it’s often full of chemicals and pollutants like PFAS, chlorine and fluoride, so filtering your water is essential to avoid the harmful effects these chemicals can have on your health.
Practice tip: Aim to drink half your pound body weight in ounces each day or 0.033 of your kilo body weight in litres. Use the daily water calculator below. If you’re drinking filtered water, add a pinch of quality sea salt to add back the essential minerals that are removed during filtration. And, please don't drink straight up tap water!
3. Nourishment for Nervous System Health
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for nutrition and nourishment. We all have unique bio-individual needs based on myriad health, genetic, environmental, gender and age-related factors. Yet, I believe these two universal principles are essential for everyone in cultivating and maintaining health and a regulated nervous system through the food we consume.
Natural, whole and where possible organic, wild and pasture raised food
You may have heard the advice that if it didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, don’t eat it. I find it a pretty helpful starting point when considering what foods will provide me with the essential life-affirming nutrients to support a balanced body and mind. In simple terms, choosing fresh vegetables, fruits, legumes, meats, fish, nuts and seeds should be the foundation of your diet. If accessible to you, prioritise organic plant foods, pastured meats and wild-caught fish to reduce the intake of chemicals that can disrupt your body’s systems and increase the burden on your body to clean out the toxins prevalent in most commercial food supplies.
The 80/20 rule
The 80/20 rule is all about honouring our very real human side! Eat for your body 80% of the time and allow room for your mind to lead your choices up to 20% of the time.
Pleasure is so important for well-being and depriving the parts of us (usually our minds) that crave a certain food has the potential to create more stress and dysregulation. Flexibility and allowing is important when it comes to well-being. We live in a very different world to the one our much healthier ancestors lived in, so I believe it’s important to acknowledge that some days we’ll succumb to advertising, the craving for nostalgic foods or the foods we use to self-soothe. This isn’t to say they are supporting us nutritionally and are not in some way creating imbalance, it’s just to say we are human and everything is an act of balancing.
Practice tip: Start listening to your body's response to different foods. Notice if the food in front of you illicts a sense of expansion or contraction in your body. Your intuition can guide you to choose the food that is most nourishing for you.
Resource: Visit my favourite products page for a list of some of my favourite healthy food brands and suppliers in the US, UK and internationally.
4. Movement for Stress Management
Finding ways to move that support nervous system regulation rather than triggering more stress has transformed my approach to exercise. Before I understood the principles of yin and yang in relation to movement, most of my movement practices, whether yoga, pilates, a gym session or a hike pushed my body into a yang state; an upregulated and stressful state that depleted me of energy and created the conditions for recurring injury. All of my movement practices were a “work out”.
On the other hand, Yin-centric movement, or “working in", cultivates an increase of energy and vitality, supporting the flow of energy through the body and promoting balance by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
For many of us, choosing to spend time “working in” can feel challenging, particularly if we have physical goals that we’ve been told require a certain number of training sessions, reps, sets and weights to achieve. Yet, if you want to create the conditions for long-term health and vitality, it’s important to understand when your body needs to ”work in” and when it has enough internal energy to “work out”. Not only is this approach essential for nervous system health it will also yield the best results for your physical goals.
When you learn to view movement through a holistic lens you begin to see how the way you move affects your physical and emotional state. It can either energise you or deplete you, create ease or pain and support the harmony of your nervous system or work against it.
Practice tip: Aim for 30 minutes of Yin-centric energy cultivating movement a day; Walking, Yoga, stretching, Qi Gong or Ta Chi. During this time to avoid any movement that increases your heart and breath rate as this can deplete the body of energy.
Resource: Visit my YouTube channel for a variety of Yoga, Daoist flow and embodied movement videos for you to practice at home.
5. Sleep Rituals for Nervous System Recovery
Creating space for rest and prioritising my sleep has been essential in my burnout recovery journey. Quality sleep is fundamental to nervous system health and stress management for anyone navigating a busy life.
Most of us know that sleep is important and yet we don’t prioritise it. Perhaps because we don’t fully understand the benefits of sleep and the negative repercussions of not getting enough. If all that resulted from a lack of sleep was a feeling of tiredness the following day, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so foundational to long-term health. We’d just have a couple of coffees and get on with our day, right? Sounds familiar!
What isn’t spoken about enough is how a lack of quality, restful sleep limits our body’s potential for repair and restoration. We inhibit our body from bringing itself back into homeostatic balance.
While modern life with its 24/7 availability of artificial light makes it easy to override our natural sleep patterns, our physiology remains deeply connected to the sun's natural rhythms, just as it has for thousands of years.
Your body follows a natural 24-hour cycle (circadian rhythm) that orchestrates various repair and restoration processes:
- Physical repair occurs primarily between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM
- Mental and psychological repair takes place from 2:00 AM until 6:00 AM
When we disrupt our natural cycle with our lifestyle habits, stimulants, work schedules and the myriad of internal and external pollutants we interrupt our own ability to heal.
Prioritising sleep and creating a sleep schedule that allows your body to align to nature's rhythms will support you to naturally balance your nervous system.
Practice tip: Create a nighttime routine that allows you to turn off screens at least 30 minutes before bed and wind down with a ritual like gentle stretching, meditation, breathwork or body brushing.
6. Mindful Thinking for Emotional Regulation
Whether through journaling or quiet reflection, I've found that giving space to our mental landscape is crucial for nervous system regulation. This practice helps process internal experiences and bring to the surface thoughts and emotions that might otherwise be suppressed.
As humans, our thoughts create our reality. Because our unique perceptions of experiences dictate our emotions, we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts.
A nervous system in disharmony can be greatly soothed and supported by a practice of mindful thinking. By learning to understand how our thoughts and thinking patterns can bring about feelings of fear, worry, anxiety and contraction we can shift ourselves into ease, openness, relaxation and joy by replacing unsupportive thoughts with supportive ones.
Becoming aware of our thoughts and taking responsibility for their impact on our sense of well-being is one of the most empowering practices I have learned and can share as a wellness coach. Your whole body and mind will thank you when you master the practice of mindful thinking.
Practice tip: Begin a daily journaling practice. For 10-30 minutes each morning allow yourself to write freely whatever arises without restriction. Notice how over time you become more familiar with thoughts that would otherwise have gone unexpressed.
Resource: Download my free daily journal template to support your self-connection practice.
Integrating The Six Foundational Principles For Nervous System Health Into Daily Life
The journey of nervous system regulation isn't about achieving perfect balance or adding more items to your to-do list. Instead, it's about creating sustainable practices that support your nervous system throughout the day. Day by day.
Simple Implementation Strategies for Long-term Well-being
Start with one practice from the six foundational principles that feels most nurturing.
Layer practices onto existing routines and rituals rather than creating new ones.
Download my devotion to well-being tracker below to help you build daily rituals.
Set reminders or use post-it notes to gently remind yourself to practice the principles.
Before making new choices, practice listening to your body's signals about what it’s most calling for.
Share this post with a friend and begin your journey together.
Remember that small, consistent actions support lasting change.
Your Path to Vibrant Wellbeing
As a holistic wellness coach, I've witnessed women transform their relationship with stress and health through these six foundation principles. What begins as simple practices often unfolds into profound shifts in how they experience their daily lives.
The journey to nervous system balance looks different for each person. You may find immediate resonance with breath work or discover your path through movement or mindful thinking. A personalised, holistic approach to well-being is a sustainable one; one that honours your unique story and your body’s wisdom.
How a Wellness Coach Can Support Your Next Steps
Whether you're just beginning to explore these principles or seeking deeper support on your wellness journey, remember that you don't have to walk this path alone. If you’re seeking support, as a holistic well-being coach, I'm here to:
- Guide you in discovering which practices resonate most deeply with your body
- Support you in creating sustainable routines that honour your natural rhythms
- Help you decode your body's signals and respond with embodied wisdom
- Stand witness to your transformation as you reclaim your vitality
I invite you to explore these principles with curiosity and compassion, noticing how your nervous system responds to different approaches. Your body holds deep wisdom about what it most needs to thrive – sometimes it just needs gentle guidance to remember.
Ready to dive deeper into your wellness journey? I offer personalised holistic coaching packages designed to support you in implementing these principles in a way that feels authentic and sustainable for your life. Let's connect and explore how we can work together to nurture your path to vibrant health and well-being.
About Farah Winning: As a certified holistic wellness practitioner specialising in the foundational principles for life-long health and harmony, I support women in finding sustainable approaches that empower them to experience lifelong health & vitality.
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