Stuck in survival mode? Here’s how to calm your nervous system.

Most of us are walking around in a low-grade state of fight-or-flight all the time, and we don’t even realize it, because it feels normal.

It looks like the tight jaw in the morning, the exhaustion that doesn’t lead to sleep, or the feeling of being on edge, even on a good day.

These are signs of a nervous system that never got the signal that it’s safe to come down.

In this article + podcast episode, I’m sharing a lesson from my new free video course called Everything is Terrible: An Anxiety Toolkit for the Age of Doomscrolling. It’s a five-lesson toolkit for people who care deeply about the world and are quietly exhausted by the weight of it. Each lesson is a standalone tool you can use when you need it.

You’ll discover:

• What’s actually happening in your body when you’re stuck in fight-or-flight
• How to manually activate your parasympathetic nervous system even when the external world is still chaotic
• Two specific breathing techniques you can use anywhere to send your body the “all clear” signal
• Grounding phrases for when your body has settled but your brain is still spinning.

You can also check out the full toolkit, Everything is Terrible: An Anxiety Toolkit for the Age of Doomscrolling. It’s for anyone who cares deeply about the world, stays informed, and is quietly exhausted by the weight of all of it. So… probably you.

Watch on Insight Timer (pro account required)

Read or listen on Substack (free)

The toolkit covers radical acceptance, nervous system regulation, how to stay informed without drowning, finding meaningful action that’s actually yours to take, and building daily practices that keep you functional when everything feels heavy. Each lesson is a standalone tool, so you don’t have to do them in order or do them all.

Today I’m sharing one lesson from that course, because I think it hits on something teachers specifically need to hear, especially given how much emotional labor you’re carrying just by showing up to work every day. You’re managing your own nervous system and everybody else’s simultaneously. That takes a toll your body keeps track of even when your brain has moved on.

Listen to episode 347 below, or subscribe in your podcast app

Sponsored by Retreats

Why your nervous system feels stuck in fight-or-flight

Your nervous system evolved to keep you alive. That’s its whole job. And for most of human history, the threats it was dealing with were immediate and local. A predator. A storm. A conflict with someone in your tribe. Something is happening right here, right now, that you could either fight or run from. Your body would flood with adrenaline and cortisol, your heart rate would spike, your muscles would tense, your digestion would shut down, because in that moment, none of that mattered. What mattered was surviving the next five minutes.

And then the threat would pass. The predator would leave. The storm would end. And your body would come back down. Your heart rate would slow, your muscles would relax, your breathing would deepen, and you’d return to baseline. You’d rest. You’d recover. And then you’d be ready for the next threat whenever it showed up, which might not be for days or weeks.

That’s how the system was designed to work. Short bursts of activation followed by long stretches of recovery.

Now think about what we’re asking that same system to do today. You wake up and check your phone. Before your feet hit the floor, you’ve already seen three headlines about a humanitarian crisis, a political scandal, and an environmental disaster. You go to work, where you’re managing your own stress while also absorbing the stress of the people around you. You come home and turn on the news, or you open social media, and it’s just more. More suffering, more outrage, more reasons to be afraid.

Your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a threat that’s right in front of you and a threat you’re reading about on a screen. Your amygdala, the part of your brain that processes fear, registers “danger” either way. It doesn’t care that the wildfire is three thousand miles from your house. It doesn’t care that the political crisis is happening in another country. It just sees threat after threat after threat, and it keeps flooding your system with stress hormones because, as far as it’s concerned, you are in danger. Constantly.

And because the threats never stop coming, your body never gets the signal that it’s safe to come back down. There’s no moment where the predator walks away, and you can exhale. You’re just… stuck. In this low-grade (or sometimes high-grade) state of fight or flight, all the time.

That’s why your chest is tight at night. That’s why your jaw hurts in the morning. That’s why you can’t sleep even though you’re exhausted. That’s why you feel on edge even on a “good” day. Your body has been running an emergency protocol for months, maybe years, and it hasn’t gotten the memo that you’re safe on your couch in your living room.

And I want to be really clear about this: there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re not “too sensitive.” Your nervous system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. The problem isn’t you. The problem is that we’re living in a world that is constantly triggering a survival response in a system that was built for a completely different kind of life.

So what do we do about it?

How to intentionally activate the parasympathetic nervous system

This is where understanding your parasympathetic nervous system becomes really useful. You have two main modes. The sympathetic nervous system is the gas pedal, the fight or flight response, the one that revs you up when there’s a threat. The parasympathetic nervous system is the brake. It’s the “okay, we’re safe now” signal. Rest and digest. It slows your heart rate, deepens your breathing, relaxes your muscles, and tells your body it can stand down.

The really cool thing is that you can activate the parasympathetic response on purpose. Your body has these built-in pathways, and when you know how to access them, you can manually send the “all clear” signal even when the external world is still chaotic. You’re essentially telling your nervous system, “I know there’s a lot happening, but right now, in this moment, I am physically safe, and I can come back down.”

Simple ways to calm your nervous system

There are a lot of ways to do this:

• Humming or vocal toning stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the main highway of your parasympathetic system
• Movement helps your body complete the stress cycle and discharge the fight or flight chemicals that have been building up
• Time in nature, even a few minutes standing outside, downregulates the nervous system
• Sound healing, including sound baths, works through vibration to activate that same parasympathetic response
• Small mindful moments throughout the day can keep you from building up to full activation in the first place.

I have sound bath tracks and mindful moment meditations for free on Insight Timer if you want to explore any of those, and we’ll talk more about building restorative practices into your daily life in a later lesson.

2 breathing exercises to calm anxiety fast

For now, I want to teach you the two tools that I think are the most useful when you’re already activated: the ones that work at 1 am when you’ve been scrolling for too long and your body is wound up and you need to come back down.

They’re both breathing techniques, and the reason breathing is so powerful is that it’s the one autonomic function you can consciously control. You can’t decide to slow your heart rate directly. You can’t tell your cortisol levels to drop. But you can change how you breathe, and when you do, everything else follows.

The physiological sigh technique

The first one is called a physiological sigh. Researchers at Stanford found that this is one of the fastest ways to downregulate the nervous system in real time. It takes about 30 seconds. Here’s how it works.

You take a double inhale through your nose, so it’s two quick inhales stacked on top of each other, and then a long, slow exhale through your mouth. The double inhale reinflates the tiny air sacs in your lungs that collapse when you’re stressed and breathing shallowly, and the extended exhale activates the parasympathetic response.

Want me to guide you through the breathing exercises? Listen here.

Let’s try it together. I’ll walk you through it a few times.

Take a breath in through your nose… and then sip in a little more air on top of that… and now let it all go out through your mouth, slowly, like you’re blowing through a straw.

Let’s do that again. Inhale through the nose… sip in a little more… and a long slow exhale out through the mouth.

One more time. Double inhale through the nose… and a long, extended exhale.

Just notice how you feel. You might feel a slight shift already. Your shoulders might have dropped a little. Your chest might feel a tiny bit more open. Even if you don’t feel a dramatic change, your nervous system registered that signal.

Extended exhale breathing for stress relief

The second technique is extended exhale breathing. This one is great for lying in bed when you can’t sleep, because it’s gentle and repetitive, and you don’t have to think too hard about it.

The principle is simple: when your exhale is longer than your inhale, it activates the parasympathetic response. So you breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of six or eight. That’s it. The extended exhale is like pressing the brake pedal over and over, sending repeated “safe” signals to your nervous system.

Let’s practice. Breathe in through your nose for four counts. One, two, three, four. And out through your nose or mouth for six counts. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Again. In for four… one, two, three, four. Out for six… one, two, three, four, five, six.

Let’s do a few more rounds at your own pace. Breathe in for four, out for six. If six feels comfortable, you can try extending to eight on the exhale. Find what feels right.

Keep breathing.

And when you’re ready, let your breath return to its natural rhythm.

Those two techniques, the physiological sigh and the extended exhale, are your emergency toolkit. They work at your desk after reading something upsetting. They work in the car, in a meeting, in the bathroom at a family gathering when you need two minutes to yourself. You always have your breath. You never have to go get it or set it up or find the right app. It’s just there.

Grounding phrases for an overactive mind

I want to offer something else here, because calming the body is essential, but sometimes at 1 a.m., your mind is still running even after your body has started to settle. You’ve done the breathing. Your chest isn’t as tight. But your thoughts are still going, still circling, still pulling you back into the spiral.

Sometimes what you need in that moment isn’t a tool that asks you to think. You’ve been thinking all day. Your brain is exhausted. What you need is something to rest in. A phrase you can repeat that gives your mind somewhere to land instead of the spiral.

So I want to give you a few options.

Calming mantras for anxiety and doomscrolling

The first one is “all is fundamentally well.” And I know, I know, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would make you throw your phone across the room. Everything is NOT well, that’s the whole point of this course. But stay with me for a second.

“All is fundamentally well” isn’t a statement about current events. It’s not saying the news is fine, politics is fine, the world is fine. It’s a much deeper claim than that. It’s pointing to something underneath all of it, the idea that at the most foundational level of existence, beneath the chaos and the suffering and the uncertainty, there is a ground that holds. Life continues. Spring follows winter. People keep loving each other and making art and raising kids and planting things. The fabric of existence itself is intact even when the surface is a disaster.

You don’t have to believe it perfectly. You just repeat it and let it do its work. “All is fundamentally well.” It’s like an anchor dropped below the waves. The surface is still choppy, but you’re tethered to something steady.

If that one doesn’t land for you, here are a few others you can try.

“I am safe in this moment.” Not safe from everything, not safe forever. Just right now, in this bed, in this room, I am safe. Because your nervous system needs to hear that, even when your brain is arguing with it.

“This is not mine to solve tonight.” That one’s for the people who lie awake trying to fix things at 2 am. It’s a permission slip. You’re not abandoning the problem. You’re acknowledging that nothing you do between now and sunrise is going to change the situation, and the most useful thing you can do right now is rest so you can actually show up tomorrow.

“I’ve survived every worst day so far.” That one’s not a platitude, it’s just a fact. Your track record for getting through hard things is 100%. That doesn’t mean the next thing won’t be hard, but it means you have evidence that you can handle hard things.

Pick the one that makes something in your chest loosen, even slightly. Or make up your own. The words matter less than the function: you’re giving your spinning mind something to land on instead of the spiral. A place to rest instead of a problem to solve.

A simple nervous system reset routine

So here’s what I want you to try. Next time you’re in it, next time you’re scrolling at midnight or lying in bed with your thoughts racing, try this sequence: first, do the breathing. A few physiological sighs, or a minute or two of extended exhale breathing. Get your body to settle, even a little bit. And then, once you’ve got a tiny bit of space, choose a phrase and let it repeat. You don’t have to force anything. Just breathe and rest in the words.

Over time, this gets easier. You start catching the activation earlier. You start noticing, “Oh, my jaw is clenched, I’ve been on my phone too long,” before you’re an hour deep. And you start reaching for these tools not as a last resort but as a first response.

More tools for anxiety, stress, and doomscrolling

If what you just heard resonated, I want you to know there are four more lessons in the Everything is Terrible toolkit that build on exactly this:

• Radical acceptance for when you’re burning through all your energy fighting reality
• A body scan practice for catching yourself before you’re an hour deep in a doom spiral
• Questions to help you figure out what meaningful action actually looks like for you right now
• An honest look at daily restorative practices that actually keep you functional when the world is a lot

Get it on Insight Timer

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