Nobody taught me how my nervous system worked. I went through school, university, early adulthood, a long marriage, entrepreneurship, extended legal proceedings, and nobody once explained to me the thing operating in the background of all of it.
Your autonomic nervous system has 3 primary states. Ventral vagal. Safe, connected, creative, clear. This is optimal. The sympathetic state. Fight or flight, urgency, anxiety. Appropriate in genuine danger and exhausting when it's constant. The dorsal vagal state. Shutdown, flatness, disconnection. The freeze response.
Most of us oscillate between sympathetic and dorsal. Too activated, then collapsed. The ventral state, where we actually thrive, requires safety. Safety requires specific inputs: connection, rest, rhythm, regulated relationships.
Everything I do in my practice is essentially helping people access the ventral vagal state more consistently. Not permanently. That's not how it works. But more often. For longer. With more ease.
What the 3 states look like in a kitchen
The names are clinical and the states are completely ordinary. You have been in all 3 this week.
Settled is the one where the washing up gets done without an argument in your head about it. You can hear what someone is actually saying. Your voice has a range to it. You think of something funny.
Activated is the one where you are moving fast and getting nothing finished. You reread the same message 4 times. You are short with the people you love most, because they are the ones in the room.
Shut down is the quiet one, and it gets missed because it looks like coping. You are on the sofa and you are not resting. The phone is in your hand and you are not reading it. Somebody asks what you want for dinner and there is genuinely nobody home to answer.
Why you swing between the last 2
Because activation is expensive. Nothing can hold that much output indefinitely, so when the bill comes in, the system drops you into the flat state to save what is left.
Which feels like failure, and is not. It is the same system doing the second half of a sensible job.
Then you rest a bit, something lands in the inbox, and up you go again. That loop can run for years and it can look, from the outside, like a very productive life.
The thing nobody mentions about the settled state
It is not a mood and you cannot decide your way into it. It is a set of conditions.
The conditions are unglamorous. Enough sleep. Food at roughly the same times. Something in the day that has a rhythm to it, a walk, a swim, washing up, anything repetitive. And at least 1 person whose company does not cost you anything.
That last one does more than the rest put together, and it is the one most of us quietly dropped first.
What people try, and why it tends not to hold
They go straight at the symptom. Breathing exercises for the racing, caffeine for the flatness, a holiday booked 5 months out.
They work, a bit, which is the problem. A technique applied to a system with none of the conditions in place is a bucket under a leak.
They also try to skip the middle. People in the flat state often want to go straight to settled and are offended by the suggestion that they may have to pass back up through some activation to get there. Shaking, restlessness, sudden tears while chopping an onion. That is movement, not relapse.
What to do instead, in order
Start with the conditions, not the techniques. 1 of them, not all 4. Most people pick sleep and most people should probably pick the person.
Then put 1 rhythm in the day that happens whether or not you feel like it. Small enough that a bad week cannot kill it. The usual mistake is choosing something impressive.
Then, and only then, the techniques are worth something, because there is somewhere for them to land.
What to notice
You are looking for the switch, not the state. The state is obvious in hindsight and useless at the time.
So: what was happening in the 2 minutes before. Who had just spoken. What you had just opened. Whether you had eaten.
And notice the way back, because everyone has 1 and almost nobody has clocked theirs. Cold water on the wrists. A particular walk. Getting outside the house. Talking to 1 specific person. Yours is already working. It is worth knowing its name so you can reach for it on purpose.
None of this is about staying settled. Nobody is settled all day and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. It is about recognising the state you are in, early enough that you get a say in what happens next.
Why the words are worth learning
There is a fair objection to all of this, which is that naming a state does not change it. True enough.
But it changes what you do with it. A flat Sunday that you understand as a state is a flat Sunday. A flat Sunday that you understand as evidence about your character is something else entirely, and it tends to last longer.
The words also give you something to say. It is a great deal easier to tell someone you are in the flat bit and will be better by Tuesday than it is to explain nothing and be unreachable.
And they stop you reaching for the wrong fix. Activation and shutdown feel like opposites and they are both the same system under load, so the answer to both is rarely a bigger push.
More like this
Your nervous system is running the show, here's what that actually means.
The body always speaks first, are you listening?
What trauma actually is, and why the definition changed everything.
If you want to talk about any of this, I am at anna@annalouoflondon.com, or on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/447738470156.