Most of us are living in a nervous system state that was set decades ago by things we didn't choose, didn't understand, and in most cases don't even remember. Your autonomic nervous system has 3 primary states.
Ventral vagal: safe, connected, creative, clear. This is where you want to live. Sympathetic: fight or flight, urgency, anxiety. Appropriate in genuine danger and exhausting when it's chronic. Dorsal vagal: shutdown, flatness, disconnection. The freeze response.
Those are the clinical names. Here is what they look like on an ordinary Tuesday.
The safe state is the one where the kettle going on is just the kettle going on. You can hear what someone is actually saying, rather than listening for the tone underneath it. Work takes the time it takes. You are not rehearsing conversations in the shower.
The urgent state is the one where everything is slightly too loud. You answer the email at 11 at night because it will not leave you alone. You are tidying while you are on the phone. Your jaw is doing something you only notice when somebody mentions it.
The flat state is the quietest and the hardest to spot, because from the outside it can look like calm. You are on the sofa and the evening goes somewhere. You cannot decide what to eat. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is interesting either.
Most of us bounce between sympathetic and dorsal. Too much, then nothing. On fire, then collapsed. The ventral state, the one where we actually thrive, requires specific conditions: safety, connection, rhythm, regulated relationships.
The bouncing is not a character flaw. It is a sequence. The urgent state costs a great deal to run, so the body eventually puts the brakes on, and the flatness that follows is not laziness. It is the bill arriving.
Which is why the week so often has the same shape. 4 days of getting everything done, then a Saturday where you cannot get off the sofa, then the quiet telling off that follows, which puts you straight back into the urgent state to make up for it.
What most people try first is willpower. A new system, an earlier alarm, a better planner, a decision to be more disciplined about it. It holds for a week or 2.
It stops holding because none of it speaks the language. Your nervous system does not read a plan. It reads your face, your breath, the tone of the room, whether the thing you are dreading is still in the diary. You cannot talk a body out of a state it went into without asking you.
The second thing people try is rest, usually a holiday. A fortnight off is lovely and it is not the same thing as settling. A body that only knows 2 settings will go to the flat one the moment the pressure comes off, which is why so many people spend the first 4 days of a holiday feeling slightly ill.
What does help is smaller and duller than either of those.
Rhythm, first. Not a routine you have to keep perfectly, just a few things that happen at roughly the same time each day. The body reads repetition as safety. It is the least glamorous thing on this list and it does the most work.
Then the body before the thinking. A long slow breath out, longer than the one in. Feet on the floor, weight through your heels. Cold water on your wrists. These are not calming tricks. They are messages sent in a language the nervous system already speaks.
Then other people. The state is catching, in both directions. 20 minutes with somebody who is not braced will move you further than an hour of trying to talk yourself round, and 20 minutes with somebody who is braced will undo your morning.
And then noticing, which is the part people skip. Not analysing. Just the question: where am I, right now, of the 3. Asked once in the middle of the morning and once in the evening, for a week.
Most people cannot answer it on the first day. By the end of the week they can, and that is the whole shift, because you cannot do anything with a state you cannot feel. Once you can name it, you have options. Before that you only have the state.
What people tend to notice first is not feeling calmer. It is the gap. The email arrives, the old reaction starts, and there is half a second in which you can see it happening. That half second is the beginning of everything else.
Everything I do in my coaching is 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.
And none of it asks you to understand your own history first. The pattern was set without your permission. It can settle without a full explanation.
More like this
Nervous system 101, everything you weren't taught that explains everything.
The Nervous System Decoder, what it is and why it is free.
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language.
If you want to know which state you are living in, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156. We start with whatever is going on for you.