Nervous System Resilience: Bubble Baths Won’t Cut it
For years, when I heard the word resilience, I thought of those posters in dentist offices with mountains and eagles: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. (Cue eye-roll.)
But here’s the thing: resilience isn’t about toughing it out. It’s about how much capacity your nervous system has. And that, my friends, comes down to vagal tone, invisible stressors, and (surprise!) stuff we inherited before we even had a say in it.
Resilience = Capacity
Think of your nervous system like a container. When your container is spacious, you can handle life’s bumps—your boss’s passive-aggressive emails, the dog barfing on the rug, your kid asking for a last-minute school project run to Staples—without losing your cool. That’s capacity.
But when your container is small, even tiny stressors spill it over. Suddenly you’re yelling at the toaster because it burned your bagel. (True story.)
Enter Vagal Tone
Here’s the science-y bit (don’t worry, no test at the end): the vagus nerve is like the superhighway between your brain and body. High vagal tone = flexible nervous system. It means you can go into stress (because, let’s face it, life will stress you) and then return to calm without getting stuck in the “revved up” or “shut down” states.
Practices like deep breathing, humming, or even plunging your face in cold water are all practices that can help tone your vagus nerve. It’s like fitness for your nervous system.
The Invisible Stuff We Don’t Talk About Enough
Now here’s where it gets sneaky. Your nervous system isn’t just shaped by your daily life. You’re not stressed because you’re incompetent or too weak to handle things. There are invisible stressors that impact capacity too:
Epigenetics: Yep, you may be carrying stress imprints from your parents or grandparents. Your nervous system is likely to be heavily imprinted by the adaptations your ancestors had to make to survive. High stress=high sensitivity in the nervous system.
Social location: Where you sit in society—your gender, sexuality, race, income level—affects your baseline stress load. If you’re navigating marginalization or systemic inequities, your nervous system is working overtime before you’ve even spilled your morning coffee.
Chronic background noise: Not literal noise (although, hello leaf blowers at 7 a.m.), but the low-level hum of modern life: artificial lighting, economic uncertainty, climate anxiety, doomscrolling.
Rushing and pressure: The high-speed, high-demand pace that many of us live with creates conditions of urgency and increased stress. Pressure can be external demand, judgement or internalized pressures like perfectionism.
This stuff is invisible but real. And it eats into our capacity without us noticing—until we’re screaming at the toaster. Again.
Why This Matters
When I finally learned that resilience wasn’t about being tougher, but about growing compassion for what I was handling and maybe not even aware of. It’s about making changes that support my wellness too.
With awareness of how stress really works, I’ve stopped beating myself up for struggling with “small” stressors. Instead, I started focusing on the things that build capacity: nervous system practices, supportive community, and aligning my life with my values.
It’s also been key for me to create more capacity through somatic practice. Hooray for neuroplacticity - it’s never too late to rewire the nervous system if you’re dedicated.
Because resilience isn’t just a character trait. It’s biology. It’s environment. It’s (sometimes) choices. And it’s something we can grow.
Final Thought
So if you’re tired of hearing “just be more resilient,” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” (ugh). Here’s your permission slip to flip the script: resilience isn’t about gritting your teeth and pushing through. It’s about changing what you can and expanding your nervous system’s container so you can meet life with more ease.
And if you’re working towards changing “the system,” whether at work, culture or how it operates in your personal sphere, supporting your nervous system can help you preserve your well-being and energy while navigating change.
And maybe, just maybe, save a few toasters along the way.