#195: Two Simple Principles for a Healthy Nervous System
Understanding and working with your nervous system is absolutely essential for building healthier relationships and developing more security within yourself. It's a foundational building block that can be genuinely life-changing.
When you develop an understanding of how your nervous system works and learn its language, something incredible happens. Those overwhelming experiences that once felt chaotic suddenly start to make sense. Not only can you understand them, but you can actually shift gears and work consciously with your system. You move from feeling like a passenger to being in the driver's seat of your own experience.
Myth-Busting: What a Healthy Nervous System Actually Looks Like
Let's start by dismantling a common misconception. A healthy nervous system is not one that stays regulated all the time. If you've been beating yourself up for getting triggered or experiencing stress responses, you can stop right now.
Experiencing stress, being triggered, and becoming activated is not only natural—it's actually desirable. Your nervous system is meant to adapt and respond, moving fluidly between sympathetic activation and a more parasympathetic state. It's designed to meet whatever the moment calls for.
The problems arise when:
Your system is constantly wired for threat, humming at a high stress level without returning to rest
You experience wild swings with erratic, disproportionate responses (like launching into a full-blown stress response over a simple follow-up email from your boss)
A healthy nervous system isn't one that's in rest mode all the time. It's one that responds proportionately to what's actually happening.
The Container Metaphor: Two Key Principles
Think of your nervous system as a container. There are two simple principles that guide everything:
Build the Container: Deliberately expose yourself to stress, pressure, and challenge to expand your capacity.
Fill the Container: Resource yourself with nourishing, restorative activities to maintain your wellbeing.
Principle 1: Building the Container
This is about deliberate stress exposure. Think:
Lifting heavy weights
Cold water exposure
Challenging physical movement
Public speaking
Asking for a raise
Having difficult conversations with friends
Essentially, anything that feels hard, pressured, or stressful that you consciously choose to engage with. The magic happens when you experience the discomfort and come out the other side thinking, "I survived that, I didn't die."
Your system learns: "Oh, that was uncomfortable, but we're still alive. We can do hard things safely."
Finding Your Sweet Spot: Uncomfortable but Safe
The best way to conceptualise the “sweet spot” is to picture three concentric circles:
Centre circle: Comfortable and safe (no growth happens here)
Middle circle: Uncomfortable but safe (this is your growth zone)
Outer circle: Uncomfortable and unsafe (this can shock your system)
If you're terrified of public speaking, jumping straight to speaking in front of 100,000 people might land you in that outer circle—potentially causing a panic attack and reinforcing fear rather than building confidence.
The sweet spot is challenging enough to push you, but not so challenging that you can't do it safely.
Principle 2: Filling the Container
This is what most people associate with nervous system wellbeing—all the lovely, regulating activities:
Quality sleep
Nutritious food
Sunshine and fresh air
Time in nature
Connecting with loved ones or pets
Hot baths
Whatever feels nourishing to you
Think of these as putting money in a piggy bank or marbles in a jar. These activities keep your container as full as possible, ensuring you're well-resourced and regulated.
Bringing It All Together
When you weave these two principles together—building your container's capacity while keeping it well-filled—you develop genuine stress tolerance. You move through life with resilience, trusting in your own capability and capacity.
Instead of feeling frayed at the edges constantly, you have enough in the tank to be present, experience joy, and take it all in. You're not on edge all the time because you know you can handle what comes your way.
Your Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Approach
The beauty of these principles is that there's nothing prescriptive about them. You get to fill in the blanks based on what makes sense for you, what feels good, and what feels manageable.
Consider these questions:
What might it look like for me to challenge myself in uncomfortable but safe ways?
How can I be more intentional about filling my container?
What nourishing activities could I weave into my daily life?
Remember, building a healthy nervous system isn't about perfection or constant regulation. It's about expanding your capacity to meet life's inevitable challenges whilst maintaining the resources to thrive, not just survive.
This approach to nervous system health forms the foundation of secure attachment and healthier relationships. When you understand and work with your body's natural systems, you're not just healing yourself—you're creating space for deeper, more authentic connections with others.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
You're listening to On Attachment, a place to learn about how attachment shapes the way we experience relationships and where you'll gain the guidance, knowledge and practical tools to overcome insecurity and build healthy, thriving relationships. I'm your host, relationship coach, Stephanie Rigg.
[00:00:23]:
And I'm really glad you're here. Foreign welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about two simple principles to build a healthy, resilient, adaptable nervous system. So if you've been around here for a while, you'd know that understanding and working with the body and the nervous system is absolutely essential to my work, to my understanding of how we move through relationships and also how we heal and develop more sturdiness and security within ourselves and within our relationships. So this is really foundational. It is an absolute building block. And, you know, I've said it before many times, and I'll say it again now. For me, developing an understanding of how my nervous system worked and really learning the language of my nervous system, developing a level of literacy and fluency around working with my body and really understanding the way my body works and its role in everything.
Stephanie Rigg [00:01:27]:
Emotions, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs. It is incredibly empowering because all of a sudden, these experiences that we can have that can feel really overwhelming start to make sense. And not only can we make sense of them, but we can actually shift gears. We can consciously work with our system and feel like we're in the driver's seat of our experience rather than feeling like a passenger. And all of these things are happening to us. And that experience of stepping into agency is nothing short of life changing. And I don't think that's an exaggeration in the slightest. So I'm going to be sharing in today's episode two really simple principles that guide everything I do in terms of how I think about my own nervous system.
[00:02:08]:
And that will allow you to apply that to your own life and the daily practises you might incorporate. And what I really love about the principles that I'm going to share with you today are there's nothing prescriptive about it. You get to fill in the blanks in terms of what makes sense for you, what feels good for you, what feels manageable for you, not about me telling you you have to do these 10 things every day in order to have a healthy nervous system. So it is very much a choose your own adventure, but these guiding principles really provide you with a clear map or a framework that you can then adapt to your own life. Okay, so before we get into today's episode. A quick reminder for anyone who is in or around London that I am going to be in town in early September. I'll be teaching about the patterns of self abandonment that so many of us have carried and how building really deep and embodied self worth and self esteem allows us to rewrite and transform our lives and relationships from the inside out. So I'll be giving a talk.
[00:03:05]:
There'll then be ample opportunity for Q and A and I'll be sticking around for a little afterwards to connect with you all. There are only 70 seats available, so it's going to be nice and intimate and they are already selling quickly. So if you are interested in coming along on Saturday 13th September, I would so love to see you there. It's such a rare thing to be able to connect in person, particularly when I obviously live on the other side of the world. So it would be wonderful to connect with you in person if you're in or around London and would like to come along. Okay, so let's get into this conversation around principles for building a healthy and resilient nervous system. So I want to start by myth busting a little and just dismantling this idea that I think a lot of people have around. A healthy nervous system is one that is regulated all the time.
[00:03:51]:
And I see this a lot when people are in the process of healing and growing and then will say like, oh, I'm really mad at myself because I got triggered by something, or I'm really mad at myself because I notice that I'm still experiencing moments of sympathetic activation, you know, still experiencing stress responses. And it's just so important that we understand that experiencing stress, that being triggered, that becoming activated is not only natural, but it's actually desirable. Our nervous system is meant to adapt and respond and move between sympathetic activation and a more parasympathetic state. You know, almost, almost constant state of fluidity. Right. Our system is designed to meet the moment, whatever the moment calls for. Now where we can get into trouble is where our system is so wired for threat and stress that we're either humming at a really high level of stress all the time and never coming back into a more rested, restorative state, or we have these wild swings and roundabouts and have this very erratic, up and down stress response where we're maybe responding to a stressor in a really disproportionate way because our system is so on edge, so wired for threat. So we get an email from our boss following up on something that we forgot about and we launch into like a full blown stress response as if something very, very bad and threatening is happening.
[00:05:13]:
So it's not that we never want to experience stress or we never want to be dysregulated. That would actually not be desirable at all, because nervous system and our stress response is beautifully protective and adapted to mobilise us to deal with threats and stress and pressure. But we do want to build our capacity and maybe recalibrate our system, create enough safety so that our responses are proportionate. So a healthy nervous system is not one that is just in rest mode all the time. It's one that is meeting what the moment calls for. Okay, so I now want to move into what these two key principles are. And it's very simple. I'm just going to share what they are and then I'm going to unpack each of them in turn.
[00:05:52]:
So if you think of your nervous system as a container, this is the visual that I like to use. We want to deliberately expose ourselves to stress and, and pressure and challenge in order to build the container. So we want a bigger container. And then we want to resource ourselves, we want to rest, we want to do nourishing, restorative things to fill the container. Okay. So you can use whatever visual or metaphor you'd like. But for me, this idea of the container is really helpful. So talking first about building the container, this is the domain of, you know, deliberate stress.
[00:06:25]:
So things like lifting heavy weights, things like cold water exposure, other forms of physical movement that feel really challenging to our system and that force an adaptation. But also other things like this might be public speaking for you, it might be asking for a raise, it might be having an awkward conversation with your friend about something they've been doing that's really been disappointing you. Basically anything that feels hard, that feels like pressure, that feels like stress, that you take steps towards and allow yourself to experience the discomfort of in a way that allows you to come out the other side saying, like, I survived that thing, I didn't die. And that teaches your system, like, oh, okay, we can do that. That was uncomfortable and we're still alive. So that gets filed away in your body as like, oh, okay, I don't have to, you know, go to great lengths to avoid ever having to do those things, because I can do it safely, because I actually am strong and capable enough and competent enough to do something hard and come out the other side. So a couple of caveats here. It's really, really important that we find the sweet spot of uncomfortable but safe.
[00:07:35]:
So if we just do comfortable and safe, you can think of that as like the centre of the circle, then we're never going to grow, right? That's just like only doing the easy things. That's staying in our comfort zone. The next layer of the circle is uncomfortable but safe. And this is our sweet spot where growth happens. Okay, so what is something that's uncomfortable but not so uncomfortable that it's going to shock my system? And that's what the next layer on the circle would be, uncomfortable and unsafe. So if I am terrified of public speaking and I decide to really push myself by standing in front of a hundred thousand people, and that's just way too big of a first step, so my whole body goes into shutdown, I have a panic attack and have to run off stage crying, that's not going to be a great learning experience for me. That's not going to send my system the message of, that was hard, but we could do it. That's too much, too soon.
[00:08:23]:
Likewise, to use an example of lifting weights. If I'm lifting weights that are really light for me, I'm not going to get any stronger. If I lift a weight that is way too heavy for me, I'm going to hurt myself. So we want to find that sweet spot of this is hard enough that it's really challenging for me, but not so hard that I can't do it safely. And so that first pillar of building the container of our nervous system is all about finding this sweet spot of uncomfortable but safe. How can I challenge myself, push myself, expose myself to discomfort in really deliberate ways that will increase my capacity, that will allow me to experience my own efficacy and competence that is extremely powerful for expanding our capacity capacity to hold and navigate so many of the inevitable stresses that life will throw at us. Now, the other side of the coin is what I think a lot of people associate with nervous system wellbeing and nervous system regulation, which is all of the nice stuff. And this is equally important, right? It's not to minimise or dismiss the importance of regulating activities.
[00:09:25]:
Things like getting quality sleep and eating good food and getting sunshine and fresh air and time in nature, connecting with friends or people that you love or pets, you know, having a hot bath. All of these things are really important. And you can almost think of like putting, you know, money in a piggy bank or marbles in a jar. These are all of the things that I'm adding into my container to keep it as full as possible as much of the time. And so when we weave together these Two principles of can I build my container so that I can hold more? And can I have all of these regulating things to hand so that I can ensure that I'm well resourced, well nourished, well regulated? That's what ultimately builds our stress tolerance, and that's what allows us to move through life with this sense of resilience, with this sense of trusting in our own capability and our own capacity, but also not feeling like we're frayed at the edges all the time and that we actually have enough in the tank that we can be present, that we can experience joy, that we can take it all in and not be so on edge all the time. So my hope is that that resonates with you and inspires you to think about how you might apply that to your own life. You know, what might it look like for me to challenge my in uncomfortable but safe ways? What might it look like for me to be more intentional about filling that container, about, you know, continuously nourishing myself and allowing myself to be well resourced as I move through the world? Okay, I'm going to leave it there, guys. I really hope that this has been helpful, as always.
[00:10:56]:
For those of you who leave reviews and send kind words, all of the things, I am eternally grateful, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks, guys.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
healthy nervous system, resilience, adaptability, nervous system regulation, stress response, building capacity, self-worth, self-esteem, relationships, attachment, security, nervous system literacy, emotional wellbeing, stress tolerance, strengthening nervous system, public speaking, deliberate discomfort, self-abandonment, self-growth, practical tools, self-agency, restorative activities, challenging yourself, comfort zone, nervous system healing, stress management, nourishment, regulating activities, self-nourishment, agency in relationships, stress adaptation