What’s the Nervous System Got to Do With It?

If there is one concept that captures the heart of my work, it’s this: Your symptoms are the result of your nervous system trying to protect you over an extended period of time.

Stress. Anxiety. Depression. Muscle tension. Chronic fatigue. Digestive issues. Brain fog. Irritability. These aren’t random malfunctions or signs you’re “broken.” They are the body’s intelligent, automatic responses to one core perception: I am not safe.

Every sensation, emotion, impulse, and symptom is a piece of communication that you are experiencing in your mind or body from your nervous system. But because most of us were raised in environments that taught us to suppress our feelings, override our instincts, and push through pain, we never learned how to listen to the body’s language. The result is that we live largely cut off from ourselves—physically, emotionally, and instinctually.

When we live in this way for too long, cut off from ourselves and, to one degree or another, not feeling fully safe or fully expressed, the nervous system gets stuck in survival mode and symptoms become inevitable.

Survival Mode: The Root of Modern Suffering

Let’s look at some of the most common struggles people carry from a nervous system medicine perspective.

Stress

Stress isn’t simply “having too much to do,” it’s the body preparing you to fight or flee to deal with demands, challenges and dangers of life. Elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, tightened muscles, these are physiologic states designed to address threat. But when the threat is persistent—a demanding job, caregiving responsibilities, financial pressure, unexpressed emotions or unresolved trauma—the physiology never turns off. Stress becomes ever present, not an event.

Anxiety

Anxiety is the nervous system scanning for threat on high alert. It’s what happens when your internal danger-detection network gets stuck in the “on” position. Anxiety doesn’t mean your mind is irrational or there is something wrong with your body; it means your nervous system doesn’t feel safe.

Depression

Contrary to the myth that depression is a defect in your personality or your willpower, depression is a form of shutdown—a dorsal vagal survival response. When the system concludes, “I can’t fight, and I can’t flee,” it conserves energy. It collapses. It numbs. It withdraws. It’s not giving up; it’s protecting you the only way it knows how.

Muscle Tension and Pain

Muscles contract when the nervous system anticipates threat or to repress emotions. If the perceived threat never ends or feelings never expressed, the tension becomes chronic. This is body armor. Your system is literally bracing for impact and carrying your history.

These symptoms aren’t failures. They are messages. They are strategies. They are adaptations.

But here’s the key:
What the nervous system learns, it can unlearn.
Safety can be restored. Regulation can return. The body can change.

That is where the AIR Method comes in. 

The AIR Method, or Awareness, Interruption, Redesign, is a practical way to stop survival-mode patterns and teach the nervous system a new response. It’s not about forcing calm or overriding symptoms—it’s about interrupting the automatic protective pattern long enough to redesign the body’s response from the inside out.

Awareness is how we repair the separation between mind and our body. Its where we learn to listen to the body in its language of sensations, emotions and behaviors, experiencing them as they are, not as our mind analyzes or interrupts them. By attuning to what's actually going in the body, we can connect to the state of our nervous system, learn what is actually distressing it and tend to it. 

Awareness brings the unconscious into consciousness so you can work with it.

Interruption means creating enough of a break in the automatic survival response that the nervous system pauses and reorients. It is a pattern disruptor—something that stops the momentum of anxiety, shutdown, or tension. It might be a somatic exercise, breathing practice, vagus nerve technique or even a simple phrase that signals to the system:
We’re not doing the old thing right now.

Interruption is where the rubber hits the road in changing the habits of the nervous system.

Redesign takes advantage of the space and presence that interruption grants and guides your system to practice and choose a more adaptive, regulated and healthful alternative. Redesign practices include True Self practices like shifting into being a compassionate observer, seeking safety through connection, or inner child practices that make you feel cared for and loved. This teaches your nervous system that you are safe and don’t need to default into survival mode.

Redesign literally rewires the neural pathways in your brain and body and overtime,  the old patterns diminish and the new ones flourish.

The Way Forward

One of my teachers calls his practice Sacred Symptoms, and with each passing year I understand more and more the wisdom of that name. When you understand that your stress, anxiety, or shutdown aren’t personal failures but protective responses and messages that you can choose to listen to, something loosens. You stop fighting yourself and start partnering with your biology. With simple practices like the AIR method, you give your system the chance to update its patterns and remember what safety feels like. And when your body feels safe, your whole life opens.

On Campus

Weekend Format

The Secret Language of the Body

Nervous system immersion

January 16–19, 2026