Debunking the nervous system reset.
At the start of every recent year, much ado is made about the idea of a ‘nervous system reset’.
Popular wellness platform Open has made waves with its nervous system reset, which is 30 days of 5-10 minute guided meditations.
If you want to save time, I’ll tell you now that ‘nervous system reset’ is purely a marketing term, like superfood, and there is no switch that can be flipped— especially one that can be triggered from 30 days of 5-minute guided meditations.
If you want to understand how the nervous system handles stress so you can make educated decisions about your strategies for well-being this year, read on.
What Is The Nervous System?
The body has three nervous systems:
1) The voluntary network of nerves under conscious control and distributed primarily to voluntary muscles
2) The involuntary or autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), which is usually unconscious and which controls the body’s organs and physiological functions, such as heart beat, blood flow and distribution, digestion, and body chemistries
3) The acupuncture system, which transmits the bio-energy to all the body’s structures and internal organs.
Source: Dr. David Hawkins, M.D., PhD, former Medical Director of the North Nassau Mental Health Center in Manhasset, New York, pioneering researcher in the field of consciousness, author, lecturer, clinician, physician, psychiatrist, and scientist.
Which Techniques Claim To Reset It
There is legitimate research demonstrating the efficacy of certain techniques in regulating the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and providing relief from stress. Let’s survey the field:
The idea of a nervous system reset was first popularized by Jessica Maguire’s book Nervous System Reset, based on Polyvagal Theory, first proposed by Dr. Stephen Porges, which suggests that the vagus nerve plays a crucial role in emotional regulation and stress resilience, and that techniques like deep breathing, mindfulness meditation, and cold exposure can influence vagal tone and shift the nervous system from a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) state to a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Autonomic Regulation is another widely studied measure of autonomic nervous system balance. Research supports practices like slow breathing, biofeedback, and mindfulness as ways to enhance HRV, which is linked to better stress resilience and emotional regulation.
Studies on therapies like Somatic Experiencing (created by Peter Levine) and EMDR (created by Francine Shapiro) suggest that trauma can dysregulate the nervous system, and specific body-based approaches may help restore balance.
Finally, studies show that practices like diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, and mindfulness meditation can modulate the ANS, reducing sympathetic dominance and promoting a more regulated nervous system.
What’s Actually Happening
Without discounting the validity of these techniques, they’re all centered on recovery from accumulated stressors and resilience to new stressors.
To quote Dr. Hawkins, these techniques are treating symptoms, not addressing the cause.
If practiced consistently over time, in great enough measure to counterbalance new stressors, they will likely yield a more regulated nervous system that is able to manage ongoing stressors more efficiently.
But crucially, the underlying accumulated stress is still there, taking micro-withdrawals from our reserve of adaptation energy every minute of every day, and the constant exposure to new stressors means the nervous system will spend a lot of time reacting and recovering and require constant regulation.
The Stress Equation
For ease of understanding, let’s assign a value of, say, 3/10 to the weight of the decades of accumulated stress you’re carrying around. You don’t actively think about that scary car accident in high school, but the memory of it is still there, chipping away at your nervous system day in and day out.
Now let’s assign an average value of, say, 4/10 to new stress exposure each day. Some days might be a 7/10, and others might be a 2/10, but on average, most days include at least a little bit of stress exposure.
And finally, let’s say 5/10 is the threshold at which we cross from parasympathetic (rest and digest) to sympathetic (fight or flight).
That means on average, our stress level is around (3+4)=7/10 every day. That’s going to require a lot of mindfulness and breath work in order to bring it back down to the parasympathetic zone.
And even in a best case scenario, after all that daily stress management work, our baseline is still a 3/10, because none of these techniques is capable of releasing the accumulated stress from years ago—only managing our ongoing response to it.
How Stress Works
I know people who have found value from the above techniques, and if you’re one of them, then by all means continue!
If you’re looking for a reset button for your nervous system, it’s imperative to first understand the mechanics of stress accumulation.
If you want a deep dive, I’ve published a very long and comprehensive overview based on the works of Dr. David Hawkins PhD, my own teacher, Dr. Thom Knoles PhD, and his mentors, Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Carew Eccles and Dr. Hans Selye, known as the father of stress for his formative insights about stress in mice.
If you just want the highlights:
Stress is accumulated every time our nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode in response to an overload of demands
Stress is stored deeply in the body-mind until it is released—potentially decades or lifetimes
Only deep rest has been shown to release deeply held stress
We get about an hour or two of deep rest each night we sleep
This is rarely adequate to release the amount of stress the average person today accumulates daily
Due to the insufficiency of sleep to release all stresses, we accumulate more and more each day
These accumulated stresses increasingly hijack our nervous system, making us feel stressed even in the absence of new stressors
Over time, our nervous system becomes more and more taxed and requires more and more regulation and recovery
So What’s The Answer?
The nervous system can’t be reset.
Many techniques are available to regulate the nervous system over time, effectively treating the symptoms of stress accumulation.
The only sustainable solution to this growing problem is to release the stress and avoid accumulating more of it.
In order to do that, we must get enough deep rest every day in order to release more stress than we’ve taken in, reducing the load over time and replenishing our ability to successfully avoid it.
While there are certainly other ways to do this, the most effective way I’ve found involves the use of a personalized sound vibration which allows the mind to effortlessly transcend thought and attain to a level of rest shown to be several times deeper than sleep. Some call it Vedic Meditation, though, by definition, it is not technically meditation at all. Semantics aside, it’s worked for hundreds of thousands of people over thousands of years, so there must be something to it.
If you’re interested in a sustainable solution to the silent stress epidemic this year, I highly recommend it.
If you’re happy managing the stress status quo, I hear the Open app is free to join.