Your Nervous System is Your Energy House - Not Another Productivity Project
Updated: 16 hours ago
On completing the stress cycle & the Quiet Rebellion of Surrendering to Softness
At some point, somewhere between the rise of the wellness app and the algorithm discovering the vagus nerve, we managed to turn the nervous system—this ancient, mammalian intelligence that has carried human beings through fire, birth, migration, heartbreak, war, hunger, lovemaking, grief and the occasional truly catastrophic staff meeting—into another productivity project. This isn’t me bashing or suggesting these tools aren’t useful—quite the contrary—they totally are.
We monitor our sleep, count our steps, close our rings, watch our heart-rate variability, meditate for precisely twelve minutes, drink electrolytes from aesthetically pleasing containers and, if the internet is to be believed, apparently spend a substantial portion of our adult lives attempting to stimulate the vagus nerve.
And then, because human beings are nothing if not inventive, we become anxious about whether we are regulating our anxiety correctly.
The practices themselves are not the problem. Breath matters. Movement matters. Meditation can matter. Rest matters enormously. But I wonder whether we have quietly dragged the body into the same culture of performance that exhausted it in the first place, replacing be more productive with the slightly more enlightened-sounding demand to be more regulated.
The vocabulary changed.
The pressure did not.
And perhaps the nervous system—wild, rhythmic, nonlinear creature that it is—was never asking us to become better managers of it.
Wild idea here—but maybe it was asking us to listen.
Stress Embedded & Protecting Our Collective Peace
The American Psychological Association's 2025 Stress in America report found that average reported stress among American adults remained around 5 on a 10-point scale; 76% identified the future of the country as a significant source of stress, while among people significantly stressed by societal division, 83% reported at least one physical symptom of stress in the previous month, including anxiety, fatigue and headaches. Earlier APA data found work, money and health concerns affecting roughly two-thirds of adults as significant personal stressors.
These numbers matter because stress does not remain politely in the category we call “mental health.”
It enters through the jaw.
The shoulders.
The gut.
The breath held halfway between meetings.
The inexplicable exhaustion on Saturday morning after functioning beautifully all week.
The body that waits until vacation to get sick.
The tears that arrive not during the crisis, but while unloading groceries three days later.
This is one of the most useful ideas Emily and Amelia Nagoski offer in Burnout: the stressor and the stress response are not the same thing. A stressor may disappear while the physiological response it activated is still moving through the body. Removing the problem, completing the deadline, leaving the difficult environment or surviving the conversation does not necessarily complete what happened physiologically.
The email was answered.
The presentation ended.
The biopsy came back benign.
The divorce became final.
The children are asleep.
You made it home.
And still the heart is pounding.
The mind says, It's over.
The body, less impressed by our chronology, says, I know. I am still coming home.
This distinction changes the question. Instead of continually asking: How do I get rid of stress?
As if it’s something to fix, we could explore: What helps my body know that this particular moment is safe?
Discerning how to attune our awareness to questions that support our process helps the body use the present moment as an anchor.
Stress is not a moral failure.
The Nagoskis write that “wellness is not a state of being—it’s a state of action,” describing health not as permanent tranquility but as our capacity to move through the rhythms of activation and restoration rather than becoming chronically stranded in one place.
Elsewhere, they distill the point even further: “Stress is not bad for you. Being stuck is bad for you.”
This disrupts one of the more insidious ideas inside contemporary wellness culture: that a healthy person should somehow be calm—as if process is a defect rather than a deep capacity to move with the ebbs and flows of life.
Calm while parenting.
Calm during financial uncertainty.
Calm while grieving.
Calm when the relationship ends.
Calm when frightened.
Calm while receiving difficult news.
Calm while the world itself periodically appears to be on fire.
But a nervous system that never activates is not necessarily a regulated nervous system—shutting down or freezing is often an adaptive survival mechanism until it outlives its welcome.
Rest can become something we schedule efficiently between obligations, rather than return to with commitment.
Even self-care can become a beautifully branded form of self-surveillance.
This is why I return again and again, clinically and personally, to practices that invite relationship rather than mastery. Anything else is a chase, rather than a practice of embodiment.
We mobilize and settle, lean forward and retreat, reach for one another and pull inward, grieve and laugh, tighten and soften, sleep and awaken; health lives less in remaining forever beside the quiet lake than in knowing, increasingly, how to find the path back to it after walking through the woods.
That fluidity is profoundly different from emotional obedience.
Anger is not pathology simply because it is inconvenient or uncomfortable.
Fear is not dysregulation simply because we dislike feeling it.
Grief does not become unhealthy because it refuses our preferred timeline.
Sometimes the most regulated response available to a person is to cry so hard they cannot speak.
Sometimes we need to shake, dance, run, say no, bake cookies, read at sundown, call on our loved ones, sleep, sing and journal our hearts out why the body explores its way through.
And sometimes, perhaps most deeply, we simply need to sit beside a feeling for five minutes without assigning it into a problem to fix, monetize away or turning it into personal growth before you’ve explored the edges of its content and meaning—giving yourself this kind of stillness is the greatest gift—one that is unseen but felt tremendously.
That last one may be among the more radical practices available to us—our own soft return to gentleness towards the self.
As the great Andrea Gibson said,
“Commit to loving yourself completely. It’s the most radical thing you will do in your lifetime.”
As always, thank you so much for trusting me in your therapeutic journey. I am wholeheartedly grateful and I look forward to seeing you in session soon.
Here’s to a season of health, connection, intentional rest, and living in alignment with the things that matter to you most!
With warmth and gratitude,
Delia Berinde
MS, LPC, NCC
Therapist, Sound Healer, YTT-200,
Group Facilitator & Owner
Looking Forward Counseling
Lakewood, Colorado
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