Listening to Your Body: How Your Nervous System Shapes Your World
At its core, one of your nervous system's primary jobs is to communicate information between your body and your brain.
This communication happens largely through the vagus nerve—the longest cranial nerve in the body, connecting your brain to your lungs, heart, stomach, muscles, and more.
There are two directions this communication can take:
Efferent signals: messages sent from the brain to the body
Afferent signals: messages sent from the body to the brain
And here’s something many people don’t realize. About 80% of the communication traveling through the vagus nerve is afferent—meaning it’s coming from the body up to the brain.
Your body is constantly sending information.
The question is—are you aware of it?
Interoception: Your Inner Awareness
Your ability to sense and interpret what’s happening inside your body is called interoception.
This includes signals like your breathing pattern, your heart rate, muscle tension, sensations in your stomach, and subtle shifts in energy and emotion.
Your brain is continuously receiving this information and asking:
“Am I safe?”
It interprets signals from your lungs, heart, muscles, and organs to determine the state of your system. So what happens when your body is sending signals like shallow, rapid breathing, tight or tense muscles, or elevated heart rate?
Your brain begins to form a story.
Something must be wrong.
There is something to be threatened by.
Even if there is no immediate danger.
This is how anxiety can arise—not always from what’s happening around you, but from what’s happening within you.
Your internal state begins to shape your perception.
The world can start to feel more overwhelming, more threatening, more difficult.
When We Lose Touch With Our Body
If we don’t regularly pay attention to these internal signals, we begin to lose accuracy in sensing and interpreting them.
This can look like two different patterns:
1. You feel everything—but can’t make sense of it. You’re aware of sensations, but they feel overwhelming, confusing, or even scary.
2. You feel disconnected from your body. You live mostly in your thoughts, rarely noticing your physical state.
Both of these can be signs of dysregulation.
Learning how to feel your body—and then make sense of what you feel—is a foundational part of nervous system regulation.
Why We Stay Stuck in Stress
We all experience stress.
We all have triggers.
But not all of us learn from those experiences. And we should. Those feelings of unease - when we aren't sure of ourselves or our capabilities - are a sign that our brain and body being primed to learn.
But many people become stuck in patterns of dysregulation instead of updating our knowledge (learning).
What does this dysregulation look like? It is often staying in a constant state of high alert (sympathetic activation), feeling wired but tired, struggling with anxiety or insomnia, relying on unhealthy coping mechanisms, or avoiding and disconnecting altogether.
When we don’t understand what our body is communicating, we can’t respond in a way that supports us.
So the cycle continues.
How Do We Begin to Shift This?
The shift happens with nervous system regulation—and it begins with awareness.
1. Awareness
Start by noticing your state throughout the day.
When you feel calm:
How are you breathing?
How do your muscles feel?
What is your energy like?
When you feel stressed:
Is your breath shallow or fast?
Where are you holding tension?
What are you focusing on?
Do you feel overwhelmed, avoidant, or agitated?
2. Regulation
Once you are aware, you can begin to gently shift your state.
You might ask yourself:
Do I need to slow down or energize?
Can I use my breath to regulate?
Can I bring myself back into my body?
Some simple ways to nourish or regulate your nervous system include connection with others (people or even pets), movement, time in nature, breathwork, meditation or stillness, massage or myofascial release, singing or humming, and/or play—doing something you genuinely enjoy.
The key is not to “check a box,” but to create moments of being, not just doing.
3. Building interoception and trust
With practice, you begin to increase your interoceptive awareness.
This creates something powerful: trust within yourself.
You start to recognize your internal signals more clearly, make more accurate, instinctual decisions, understand your emotional responses and label what you feel without being overwhelmed by it.
Emotions and physical sensations are deeply connected.
When you can observe both without fear, you gain the ability to choose how you respond.
This Is Something You Can Learn
Regulation is not something you are born with or without.
It is something that can be practiced.
But it requires willingness. A willingness to slow down, feel what is happening in your body, observing without judgement, and taking a few minutes each day to care for your inner world.
Often, we avoid this work because the feelings are too overwhelming or we believe we don't have enough time.
But the truth is it only takes a few minutes a day to begin changing your relationship with your body, your emotions, and your mind.
What would it look like to spend just a few minutes today noticing your breath…
softening your body…
and listening to what your system is trying to tell you?
Your body is not working against you.
It is communicating with you.
And the more you learn to listen,
the more calm, clarity, and control you begin to experience.
