Your nervous system is constantly, outside of your conscious awareness, scanning your thoughts, body and environment for cues of safety and cues of threat.

This process is called neuroception, and it determines whether your system tips into activation or settles into recovery.

In this piece, I’ll walk through the three perceptual systems that feed into nervous system safety, and show you exactly how to use them to shift state,  even in the middle of a stressful afternoon.

Earlier this week, I lost my footing a little.

I had coaching sessions stacked back to back, it was 33 degrees here in Lisbon, and I’d just come in from being outside. I could feel myself tipping into a familiar state: overwhelmed, rushing, moving too fast, being hard on myself for feeling like a literal hot mess. I threw some food together (scrambled eggs and toast with Nutella, my girlfriend was appalled, I blame it on the heat) and ate it standing up, while quickly checking my emails.

Now, I help people regulate their nervous systems for a living. And there I was, right before a session, wolfing down my lunch, my body tense, completely activated and irritated for no good reason.

But somewhere in the middle of it, I caught myself. And I remembered the one thing I come back to again and again:

So I purposefully slowed down my movements. Put my phone down. Softened my shoulders. Looked out of the window, far and wide. I ate the rest of my food slowly enough to actually taste it (eggs + Nutella, genuinely, don’t knock it till you try it.) I took a few slow, gentle one breath brakes.

I basically stopped treating the next five minutes like an emergency. And within a few minutes the whole system came down a notch. Not completely, but enough for me to center myself.

Let me tell you: night and day difference between how I would’ve been just a few years ago, where this irritation would’ve taken over my entire afternoon.

This is the question I’ve been fascinated with for the past 4 years, and why I’ve made this nervous system regulation work my full-time mission:

Why does going through the body work so much better than trying to fix things in the mind?

It has everything to do with this idea of “nervous system safety.”

Why you can’t think your way calm

We tend to believe that we can decide our way into feeling calm, engaged, present — using our conscious mind. That if we just think about things differently, or talk ourselves through it clearly enough, the right state will follow.

But that’s not really how it goes. Calm, connection, presence — these aren’t moods you choose. They’re nervous system states, and they emerge only when your system feels “safe” enough to let them emerge.

What is nervous system safety? Understanding neuroception

Now, by “safe”, I don’t mean physical safety in the literal sense. I mean it from an evolutionary, survival point of view: the underlying assessment your nervous system is making, all day long, far below conscious thought: “do I need to be vigilant and ready to act right now, or can I let down and recover?”

Depending on the assessment, your system will toggle between sympathetic activation (mobilisation) and parasympathetic activation (recovery).

That subconscious, always-on scanning of the environment for cues of threat and cues of safety has a scientific name:

Neuroception, or implicit threat detection.

Now, what’s fascinating is that neuroception doesn’t draw on a single source to make its assessment. It’s pulling from several streams of perception at once. And yes, while it’s all happening outside of your conscious awareness, there is also a lot you can do to influence this process once you understand the different perceptual systems.

Let’s look at each layer.

The three perceptual systems that signal safety to your nervous system

On the outside is exteroception — our sense of everything outside the body. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. How we use our eyes especially (wide and open or narrow and locked-in) sends very different information to our system about how to be. There I was, eyes glued to my phone, attention tunnelled into a tiny rectangle of emails. Narrow = cue of threat. When I put the phone down and let my gaze widen to take in the kitchen, the light, the actual room around me, I gave my system a very different external picture to work with. Wide = cue of safety.

Then there’s proprioception — our sense of where the body is in space: position, movement, balance, pace.

Rushing is like a threat signal to the system. Moving fast, bracing, lurching from one thing to the next — that’s what a body does when something is wrong. My body wasn’t reacting to danger; it was creating the impression of danger through the way I was moving. So when I slowed my movements and softened my shoulders, I was feeding it the opposite message: nothing here requires this speed.

(I think about this when I’m brushing my teeth as well. Do I really need to brush like a madwoman at 200 miles an hour? Can I slow down even a little bit?)

Closer in is interoception — our sense of the internal state of the body: heartbeat, gut, and, crucially: breath. The nervous system is constantly tracking how we breathe to gauge what state we’re in. Shallow breath and food shovelled down in thirty seconds is the internal signature of emergency. When I lengthened my breath, brought some rhythm back into it, and slowed down enough to taste my food, I changed the signals coming from the inside. (The exhale in particular is a powerful lever. Here’s the science behind why a longer exhale calms you down)

And wrapping around all of it is this process of neuroception, taking the whole picture (what’s outside, where the body is and how it’s moving, what’s happening within) and rendering its verdict: safe, or not safe. Activation or recovery. And based on that verdict, we feel the way we feel.

That’s what I shifted this particular morning. Not my thoughts. Not what was happening outside of me. I don’t have control over the outside world or other people. But I do, always, have control over my eyes, my breath, my movements, my pace.

• Expanding my visual field
• Releasing muscle tension
• Deepening my breath
• Slowing my movements

Why working through the body beats working through the mind

This is the case for working through the body rather than the mind. It’s a bottom-up approach, where we use the body to send signals to the brain. (Self-talk or re-framing are examples of top-down approaches, using the brain to influence the body.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I love thoughts and spend a lot of time in my head. It’s what makes us so uniquely human.

But we over-index on it. Conscious thought is just one stream feeding into our experience of life, and it’s a narrow, noisy one, especially when we’re activated. Standing in that kitchen, no amount of “calm down, it’s fine, just chill, what is wrong with you” was going to make me actually calm down, because the part of me deciding whether I am safe isn’t just listening to words. It’s listening to my breath, my body, my pace.

This is what I love about this nervous system regulation work. It’s all about learning to expand our awareness out of just the incessant thinking mind, and into the body, the breath, the sensory systems, the wider nervous system.

And that’s to me where real agency lives: not in winning the argument with your thoughts, but in choosing — deliberately — what signals you’re sending your system. And we’re not necessarily chasing big, dramatic shifts. We’re looking for 1% shifts. A slightly slower pace. A slightly longer exhale. A meal eaten slowly enough to taste.

It feels like a true super power once you notice you’re able to do this even in the midst of activation.