How to reset Your Nervous System

By Mona Freund

Life is full of all sorts of scenarios that can lead to high stress and panic. These moments vary significantly in severity and can be almost anything, from forgetting a friend’s birthday card to getting a knife pulled on you in a street. After one of these events, it may take minutes or hours until you’re able to calm down.

This happens especially often in more dangerous scenarios, and leads to the famous fight, flight, or freeze response. When this occurs, your body releases hormones like adrenaline, strengthens your senses, and pumps greater amounts of oxygen to your body, causing elevated heart rate. This is an evolutionary phenomenon, a response from our nervous system developed to save ourselves from danger.

While most people are not in danger very often, this response can still occur in scenarios of high stress or panic, even if they’re not dangerous. To deal with this, it’s important to understand the nervous system, what it does, and why it reacts like this.

What is the Nervous System?

The nervous system governs most daily activity, including both basic and more complex neurological functions. It controls simple things like breathing and seeing to complicated processes like thinking, reading, and feeling emotions. It also detects perceived threats and triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response. 

Somatic therapy and other mental health management techniques primarily target the nervous system. Regulating this part of your body can help control a multitude of mental health symptoms, and it’s important to be able to reset your nervous system after a stressful event that triggers a fight, flight, or freeze response.

Signs you Need a Break

Before beginning any sort of therapeutic exercises, it’s important to identify the signs that your body may need a break. If you’re engaging in any of these four behaviors, it may be a sign that you need to take time and rebalance your nervous system.

• Fight – You may feel angry, terrified, feel like hitting something, or yell
• Flight – You may feel anxious, avoidant, feel like withdrawing from the situation
• Freeze – You may feel dissociated, shut down, spacy, and feel indecisive or possess a lack of motivation
• Fawn – You may feel co-dependent, apathetic, overwhelmed
  • This causes you to lose sight of boundaries and disconnect from your own needs to prioritize those of others

Figuring out which of these you are experiencing is key in taking steps to stop these feelings and recover.

4 Steps to Help Restore your Nervous System

If you’ve identified that you’re experiencing any of those symptoms, there are a few steps that anyone can take to help calm down.

#1 Breath Techniques

It may be simple, but breathing techniques can be very effective in reducing stress and panic. Breathing through your nose helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the piece of your nervous system that deals with the ‘rest and digest response.’ This helps you calm down after your flight, fight, freeze, or fawn response has been triggered. Breathing techniques can also take the form of yoga exercises, but most breathwork that is tailored for mental health will help activate your parasympathetic nervous system.

#2 Cold Water

Splashing yourself with cold water is another easy step that you can take to recover after a stressful incident. Taking a cold shower also has this effect. When studied, it was shown that adjusting to cold temperatures can help mitigate a body’s fight, flight, or freeze response, and increase the rest and digest response.

#3 Sleep

Sleep can help prevent a fight, flight, or freeze response. A lack of sleep is common among those with mental illness, and this can tax the nervous system, making a potential fight, flight, or freeze response both more common and more severe.

#4 Take a Break from Electronics

Taking a break from your phone can help alleviate stress and allow you to focus on a hobby or passion. Online activity has been linked to stress and depression. Nevertheless, it allows you to take the time and refocus yourself on other things, like socializing or meditation. Time is a valuable resource, and it’s important to take some time away from the busy and stressful environment of the online world to recalibrate yourself, and keep stress off of your nervous system.

Your fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response may be natural and unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean steps cannot be taken to help deal with it when it happens. With these few simple techniques, you can lessen the effects of panic and stress and help restore your nervous system to a calm state.

Author Bio

Mona Freund is a Senior Content Marketing Content Specialist with SiegeMedia

The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect all or some of our beliefs and policy.  Any links on this page do not necessarily mean they have been endorsed by Defying Mental Illness.

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