How to Befriend your Nervous System

Brené Brown's book Strong Ground describes the foundational capacities of grounded leadership as: Self-awareness. Metacognition. Emotional regulation. Vulnerability. Trust. Strategic thinking. Courage.

I read this list and found myself nodding. Yes. All of that. Every single one of those capacities matters.

And then something else emerged.

Realisation that every single one of them requires one thing to be in place first. One thing that has to be available before any of the others can come online.

A well regulated nervous system.

Not in fight, flight, or fawn, where strategic thinking disappears and genuine vulnerability becomes impossible. Not in the shutdown state, where you are present in body but gone in every way that matters. Regulated. In what the science calls ventral vagal, and what I simply call home.

Your autonomic nervous system is not one leadership skill amongst many. It is the operating system that controls access to all the others. And yet almost nobody teaches leaders how it works.

This month’s newsletter is my attempt to give you the manual.

The first thing to understand is that your nervous system is always working, whether you are paying attention to it or not.

There is a process called neuroception. It runs below conscious awareness, continuously, without your permission or participation. Before a thought forms, before your thinking brain has registered anything, your nervous system has already scanned three channels: what is happening inside your body, what is happening in the environment around you, and what is happening between you and other people. The tone of voice. The microexpression. The quality of stillness when someone enters the room.

By the time you think something feels off, your body already decided. Your nervous system is your security scan, and it runs faster than your prefrontal cortex can catch up with.

And what it is scanning for, constantly, is safety. Because the moment it detects something other than safety, your whole system shifts.

Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory describes this shift as movement along a ladder. Three states. And understanding those states, really understanding them from the inside, is where the work begins.

At the top is what Porges calls ventral vagal. This is home. The most recently evolved part of our nervous system, built for safety, connection, and social engagement. When you are here, you can think clearly, take risks, be genuinely present, hold firm ground, deliver hard feedback, sit with complexity. Flow states live here.

I want to be clear about something, because it is often misunderstood: ventral vagal is not passive. It is not soft. You can be direct, fierce, unwavering from this state. What you are not, is a cue of danger to the people you lead. You are grounded rather than activated, organised rather than managed.

For me, ventral vagal has a particular quality. I think of it as a lava lamp: a gentle glow, a warm and encompassing hum, beautiful slow and purposeful movement. There is energy in it, but it is all of a piece. Or like watching the finest champagne in the glass, the tiniest bubbles rising and falling in continuous, unhurried motion. Fluid. Almost ticklish at the edges. Mesmerising in the way that only things that are completely alive and completely at ease can be. When I am here, I feel continuous with myself and with the room.

When safety cues drop away, you begin to descend. The next rung of the ladder is sympathetic activation: your body's mobilisation response. Fight, flight, or fawn. This is where your system begins to prepare for survival, and it does so in ways that are specific and physical and entirely automatic.

Fight arrives in me as a prickling energy in my arms. A kind of electricity that wants somewhere to go. Flight moves into my legs instead, a restlessness, an urgency to be somewhere else, anywhere else. And fawn, which is perhaps the least talked about of the three, I feel as a drawing in: tension across my neck, my jaw, my shoulders, and something like a nail pressed behind my heart. That last sensation makes complete sense to me now. The words that want to come out are not coming out. The clenched jaw is the body holding the line that the mind has decided it cannot cross.

None of these are character flaws. That matters. They are survival strategies, often learned early in life, now running automatically in the boardroom in response to cues that were never part of the original situation.

And then there is the bottom of the ladder. Dorsal vagal shutdown. The oldest survival response, the one your nervous system reaches for when fight and flight have not worked. When nothing else has kept you safe, the safest thing your body knows to do is to make you as small and unreachable as possible. To immobilise. To disappear inside yourself.

In shutdown, you move through the motions without being in them. For high achievers, it often looks functional from the outside: saying yes mechanically, answering emails, turning up. But inside there is nothing. When I am in dorsal, I feel like an empty cup. There is a hollowness in my chest, in my head, in my heart, that is almost spatial. And underneath it, a sensation I can only describe as wind moving through me, through the empty space where something warm should be. It is sad in a way that has no story. It is as though the world and everyone in it has simply disappeared, and there is only this wind, moving through in search of connection that feels entirely out of reach. Like I have been left behind somewhere, with no clear path back.

Knowing these states in your own body is not academic. It is the beginning of everything.

Within all of this, there is a structure worth understanding: the vagal brake. A circuit running from your brainstem to your heart, its job is to modulate your heart rhythm, and it is what gives us the experience of being alert as distinct from being alarmed.

When the vagal brake works, it releases just slightly, it allows the sympathetic system to provide energy without triggering the full stress response. No cortisol flood. No adrenaline surge. This is the biology of being switched on: energised, focused, fully alive, ventral vagal still present and accessible.

Alarmed is different. That is when the HPA axis fires, the ladder descends, and the survival response takes over. Strategic thinking becomes largely unavailable. You are reacting, often from a past that has nothing to do with the room you are currently in.

One state feels like aliveness. The other feels like hijack. They are not the same thing, and the difference between them is not willpower. It is biology.

What I have just described is the brake working as it was designed to. But for many people, it does not. Unprocessed trauma can dysregulate the brake so that even mild stressors trigger a full alarm response. And perhaps more commonly in the leaders I work with: chronic low-level stress, the kind that never quite spikes but never quite resolves, gradually wears the brake down until the capacity to return to ventral vagal becomes compromised. You get stuck in sympathetic activation, or slide into dorsal, and the ladder back up feels unreachable. This is not weakness. This is a nervous system that has been asked to carry too much for too long without adequate repair.

Here is what makes this a leadership issue, and not just a personal one.

Co-regulation is a biological imperative. It is not a wellness concept or a coaching metaphor. We do not regulate ourselves in isolation. When the ventral vagal system evolved, it linked the heart, the nerves controlling our eyes and ears, our voice, and the movement of our head into a single social engagement system: a hard-wired, face-to-face connection through which we search for safety in each other. We listen for sounds of welcome. We look for friendly faces. We orient toward people whose nervous systems tell us we can breathe here.

This is why the state you bring into the room matters as much as the strategy you bring. When you are regulated, the people around you have a better chance of regulating. When you are not, they feel it before you have said a word. Your nervous system is not a private matter. It is the first thing you communicate.

Which brings me to something I think is genuinely underrated: glimmers.

Most of us are far better at cataloguing what dysregulates us than what restores us. We know our triggers in detail. We have spent years learning them, often the hard way. But the glimmers, the micro-moments of safety and connection that begin to move you back up the ladder, we treat as incidental. Nice when they happen. Not something to design for.

A tone of voice. The first coffee of the morning. Music on the way home. A look from someone you trust. A hug that lands properly.

These are not small things. They are the beginning of the return journey. And I would love for that to change: to see leaders cataloguing their glimmers with the same seriousness and attention they bring to understanding what destabilises them. What are the small things that reliably bring you back to yourself? Name them. Use them deliberately. Build your days around them where you can.

To help you start, I have recorded a short guided practice using a method called SIFT: Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought. It was developed by Dr. Dan Siegel, neuropsychiatrist, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, and the pioneer of the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology.

SIFT works because the brain retrieves memories and states through association. When you identify your specific ventral vagal SIFT, the exact body sensation, the calming image, the precise emotional feeling, the grounding thought, you are essentially creating a neurological shortcut. Recalling that specific combination acts as a deliberate cue to your nervous system: this is what safe feels like. It is not a relaxation technique. It is a way of teaching your brain the fastest route back to regulation when the heat is on.

You can find A SIFT Practice for Leaders audio recording on my website.

How would it be to spend one week treating your nervous system not as an obstacle to manage, but as the most important instrument in the room?

With much love and a manual I wish someone had handed me sooner,
Dags