Let’s retrain your nervous system to respond the way you want it to.

by Sharn Somasiri
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Have you had a tricky moment this weekend? A moment that made you feel anxious? A situation you walked into already feeling tense?

Most people don't realise that when you feel anxious or tense, it's not always the present moment causing it. It's your nervous system responding to a stimulus, and that stimulus is often something much older than today.

Your nervous system has been conditioned over time. Every experience, every moment you felt unsafe, criticised, or out of control, your body logged it. And now? It tries to protect you by firing the same alarm, even when the threat isn't really there.

So we need to interrupt the pattern.
When you're in an anxious spiral, your nervous system is running the show. It's scanning for danger and using every available channel to keep that alarm signal alive. If you only engage one or two senses, say, you focus on your breath but your eyes are darting around, or you're moving but your mind is still racing, your nervous system still has room to work with. It will find the open channels and use them to keep the spiral going.

But when you engage all of your senses at once? It no longer has an outlet. There is nowhere left for the alarm signal to travel. You crowd it out, not by force, but by presence.

That's why we stack.

Stacked finger breathing 4, 2, 4
Hold one hand out in front of you, fingers spread wide. Use the index finger of your other hand as your guide.

As you trace up each finger, breathe in through your nose, count to 4, silently or out loud if you can. Notice the sensation of the air entering your nose. Feel your lungs expanding and filling.

At the top of each finger, hold and count to 2.

As you trace down, breathe out slowly through your mouth and count to 4.
Feel the breath releasing, your body softening.

You are engaging touch, movement, sight, counting, and the physical sensation of breath, all simultaneously. Your mind is fully occupied. Any senses that could be a channel for anxiety to find its way out are all accounted for. Your nervous system has no remaining outlet to hijack.

This is the stack. And this is why it works.

Work your way across all five fingers. Take your time. Repeat if you need to. You can go backwards, returning your trace to it’s starting point.

You should feel much calmer now. And the anxious thought pattern should have dissipated.

Next time you will learn how to challenge those anxious thoughts and build a bank of evidence as to why they are incorrect, to lessen the power they have over you.