How to trick your nervous system into calming down when you're stressed at work

Fast Company

03-07-2025

Understanding how your body works can be the key to reducing stress. For example, you're probably aware of your fight-or-flight response —the body's way of preparing itself when it believes it's being threatened. What happens is your sympathetic nervous system is activated, pumping adrenaline and glucocorticoid steroids into your system that give you hyper focus, energy and strength to handle the situation.
Fight-or-flight was a survival mechanism during hunter-gatherer times, when the threat of wild animals was real. Today, however, it's often triggered by non-life-or-death events, such as the evening news, tight deadlines, or traffic.
On the flipside of fight-or-flight is rest-and-digest. It's the body's way of rebalancing itself after the danger has passed. In this case, your parasympathetic nervous system is in charge, decreasing your heart rate and blood pressure and providing a sense of calm.
Sometimes, though, the body has a hard time getting back into rest-and-digest. It stays in a state of stress and anxiety. When this happens, it's often due to your vagal tone, which is the activity in your vagus nerve, says Kevin Tracey, M.D., author of The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing..