What Stress Does to Your Nervous System & How to Support It

We often think of stress as something that happens in our minds—a mental or emotional experience. But stress is also deeply physiological. It affects our entire body, especially the nervous system, which plays a central role in how we perceive and respond to the world around us.

Understanding how stress works in the nervous system not only helps us make sense of our own reactions, but it also opens the door to healing. When we learn how to regulate and support our nervous system, we build resilience and create space for peace, connection, and presence.

Your Nervous System is Built for Survival

At its core, your nervous system is designed to protect you. When it detects a threat—whether it’s physical, emotional, or even just a perceived danger—it responds automatically to help you survive. This is what we call the “stress response,” and it’s powered by the “gas pedal” in your nervous system (AKA. the sympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system).

This response can look like:

• Increased heart rate

• Rapid breathing

• Muscle tension

• A rush of adrenaline

• Hypervigilance or irritability

These reactions are part of what’s commonly known as “fight or flight.” In some cases, your nervous system might also trigger a “freeze” or “fawn” response—especially if it perceives that fighting or fleeing isn’t possible. These patterns are not conscious choices. They are deeply wired, instinctive reactions that have helped humans survive for thousands of years.

Your Brain Can’t Always Tell the Difference

What’s fascinating is that your brain doesn’t always distinguish between physical danger and emotional threat. For example, a difficult conversation, feeling rejected, or being overwhelmed by your to-do list can all activate the same stress circuitry in your brain as being chased by a wild animal.

This is why chronic stress, relational conflict, or unresolved trauma can have such a lasting impact. When your nervous system is repeatedly or continuously activated without being given the chance to return to a state of calm, it can get stuck in “survival mode.” Over time, this leads to physical symptoms (like fatigue, headaches, or digestive issues), emotional dysregulation, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, and disconnection from yourself or others.

Chronic Stress Keeps You Stuck

Chronic stress keeps your nervous system on high alert. When this happens, your body is constantly scanning for danger, even in safe environments. This ongoing state of hypervigilance can make it difficult to relax, feel joy, or connect meaningfully with others.

For people who have experienced trauma, this pattern can be even more pronounced. The nervous system becomes conditioned to expect danger, and this can lead to reactions that feel out of proportion to the present moment. Importantly, these are not signs of weakness or brokenness—they are signs of a nervous system doing its best to protect you based on past experience.

Regulation is Possible

The good news is that your nervous system is adaptable. With time, care, and consistent support, it’s possible to shift from a state of chronic stress into one of regulation and resilience. This process involves learning how to send signals of safety back to the body and brain.

Here are a few ways to begin:

1. Deep Breathing and Grounding Practices
Breathing deeply and slowly activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the “rest and digest” branch—which helps calm the stress response. Grounding practices, like noticing your feet on the floor or tuning into your senses, can also help bring you back to the present.

2. Safe Connection
Co-regulation—the calming presence of another safe, attuned person—is one of the most powerful tools for nervous system healing. This is one of the reasons therapy can be so impactful. When we experience relational safety, our bodies begin to learn that we no longer have to be on high alert.

3. Mindful Awareness
Learning to notice when your stress response is activated is key. The more you can observe your internal cues (tightness in your chest, racing thoughts, shallow breathing), the earlier you can respond with compassion and care instead of reacting from a place of survival.

4. Be Gentle With Yourself
Remember: your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning—it’s responding exactly as it was designed to. Offering yourself kindness in those moments of overwhelm can be incredibly regulating in itself.

Healing is Not Linear

Nervous system healing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that involves repetition, safety, and support. But the more you practice regulation, the more resilient your system becomes. You begin to notice that stress still happens, but it doesn’t take over in the same way. You’re able to return to calm more easily, stay present with others, and respond to life’s challenges with greater flexibility and strength.

Whether you’ve experienced trauma, are facing ongoing stress, or simply want to feel more grounded in daily life, learning to work with your nervous system is a powerful step on the path to emotional and relational health. You’re not alone—and with the right tools and support, healing is possible.

Understanding & Healing Trauma

If you are coming to counselling to work through trauma, you are probably wondering what the roadmap to peace is. We will talk through how we understand trauma to provide an understanding of how we will work through it in counselling. 

How we understand what trauma is will really impact how we go about trying to heal it. 

What is Trauma?

When we think of something, “traumatic”, we might think of an event or experience. When we think of trauma as an event, we think of it as something that happened in the past.

Traumatic events can include:

• Things we typically consider to be traumatic like violence, abuse, war, car accidents, near-death experiences, medical procedures that went very wrong, etc.

• Trauma also includes exposure to chronic environments, such as neglectful childhood environments, frightening or unpredictable caregivers, systemic discrimination, colonization, bullying, etc. 

Trauma from chronic environments comes from being subjected to an unsupportive or dangerous environment and then having to adapt to this environment to survive. For example, having to hide your racial and ethnic identity due to systemic racism and white normativity.

When we speak about trauma, we are referring to the impacts of certain events, experiences, or circumstances. In other words, trauma is not just something that happened, but the lasting impact on our present-day lives.

Traumatic Memory: Implicit Memory

How does trauma show up in the here-and-now? Trauma can show up in our lives in the present moment through the following:

• Intense physical sensations in our body-  ex. feeling hot, having tense muscles, etc.

• Changes in perception - ex. feeling like we are being stocked, post-traumatic paranoia, intense suspicion, etc.

• Emotional reactions - ex. intense anger, fear, rage, anxiety, shame, etc.

• Thought patterns - ex. “I am a bad person and deserve to suffer”, “I will never be able to do anything worthwhile”, etc.

• Impulses- ex. a sudden impulse to run or attack someone, urges to self-harm, etc.

• Other PTSD symptoms - Ex. dissociation, flashbacks, nightmares, etc.

Implicit memories are non-verbal memories. They are stored in the part of the brain that does not record a story about what happened, but rather how you felt. It is kind of like one part of the brain writes the song lyrics (the story-based memory), but another part makes the melody (the implicit memory). So you might be singing the Sound of Music soundtrack, but to the melody of the shark music in Jaws.. Sound familiar?

When we experience intense forms of trauma or are very overwhelmed, the part of our brain that records timelines and narratives turns off. This means that we don’t encode the type of memory that helps you to remember that you went to the store, then took the number 5 bus downtown, then saw your friend, then you made a phone call, etc. We don’t record the story of what happened to make sense of our experience.

So rather than storing memory in a story format, our brain picks up and records sensory information through our five senses, body, and emotions. These get encoded as cues that will later activate your nervous system to ramp up a defensive state and our survival responses (like fight-flight-collapse responses).

Traumatic memory might also come back in flashes of imagery but without the full memory of what happened. Smells, sounds, sights, touch, and tastes can also be very powerful cues that your body/ nervous system encodes.

Activation and Triggering

Our body and nervous system are always scanning for safety and danger. When we experience something dangerous or traumatic, our body and nervous system form associations to help us recognize signs of danger in the future.

For example, if we were hit by a red car, in the future red cars may elicit the non-verbal memories associated with that experience (like your heart racing, feelings of anxiety and panic). 

If we don’t notice that our stress response is activated, we may generally feel “bad”, stressed out, anxious or depressed and then feel confused about why. This is what we call being “activated” or “triggered”. 

When you are in a safe situation and get activated, there are ways you can learn to turn off your activated nervous system and update it with the information that you are safe, which we will work on together in counselling. It can be frustrating how activation of the stress response can interfere with our daily lives, and how our internal experience may often feel incongruent with our situation.

For example, we might be with a bunch of people we love, but feel extremely lonely and disconnected; we might be walking through a safe street in our neighbourhood, and be overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. If trauma occurred in the context of our home, family, neighbourhood or close relationships, these areas of life might be riddled with landmines and activators.

Separating the Past and Present

When traumatic memory is stored as non-verbal, feeling memories, we often don’t recognize that it is connected to a past experience that is surfacing as an implicit memory. We can wrongly assume that our present environment causing these feelings.

This might surface as thinking “they embarrassed me”, “she was attacking me”, “he was accusing and blaming me”, rather than realizing that these emotions were being activated from implicit traumatic memories. This can cause challenges in our relationships and functioning in our daily life. We might also interpret these memories as reflections on our present environment: ex. “this is not a safe place”, “I can’t trust these people”, “I am going crazy”

When we know signs of activation and trauma symptoms, it becomes easier to recognize when we are activated and to feel in control of our experience.

In counselling, our goal is to first help restore a felt sense of peace and safety and to help you find ways of managing the activation. Eventually, the chronic activation of the nervous system settles down, and there are practical ways we can support this process. Once we do this, we can work on reprocessing what happened to bring deeper resolution. 

Additionally, we offer a therapy similar to EMDR called Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). This helps to connect the implicit feeling memories that keep getting activated with the story-based memory in the other part of the brain. This reduces how much activation you experience in your daily life and restores a sense of peace. Feel free to reach out to us to book a consult and learn more.