Why Your Nervous System Keeps a Different Score
- Kym Burls
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
People come to somatic breathwork feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or like they've been carrying something they can't quite explain.
Afterwards, once the room is quiet and people begin settling back into themselves, I regularly hear a similar sentiment:
“I didn’t realise how much I was holding.”
I don’t think the breathwork created that realisation.
I think it simply revealed what was already there.
Most of us expect stress to arrive attached to something memorable: a difficult conversation, a deadline, bad news, a major life event. So when nothing obvious has happened, feeling overloaded can seem confusing or even unjustified.
But your nervous system may have been responding to something else entirely.
TL;DR
Core problem: We look for one big cause of stress.
Key reframe: The nervous system responds to accumulated adaptive load.
Practical implication: Notice the withdrawals before waiting for the slap.
Main outcome: Overload makes more sense when you look at everything your system has been adapting to.
What Exactly Does The Nervous System Count?
When people think about stress, they usually start by looking for a cause.
“What’s stressing me?”
If nothing obvious comes to mind, it’s easy to conclude you shouldn’t feel the way you do.
The nervous system doesn’t work like that.
Your brain isn’t simply waiting for life to happen and then reacting. It continually anticipates what might be needed, then continually adjusts physiology to help meet those anticipated demands. In neuroscience, this sits close to what’s known as predictive processing: the idea that the brain is constantly using past experience and present information to predict what is likely to happen next (Clark, 2013).
A meeting runs longer than expected. Someone’s tone of voice catches your attention. You switch between tasks for the fifth time in an hour.
None of those experiences are necessarily stressful on their own.
But they all require adaptation.
Your breathing may change. Your attention may narrow. Muscle tone may increase. Energy may be redirected. You may hold more information in mind while solving a problem or regulate an emotional response until there’s a better time to deal with it.
These are normal, healthy adjustments.
But adaptation isn’t free.
Every adjustment requires the body to redistribute its available resources, even if the cost is small enough that you never consciously notice it. By the end of the day, your nervous system may have been responding to far more than the handful of events you actually remember.
Does Every Little Thing Really Matter?
Buying a coffee probably doesn’t change your financial future.
Neither does paying for parking.
Or grabbing lunch.
Individually, each transaction is small. The balance changes because of the accumulation.
The nervous system works in much the same way.
Everyday adaptations can make small withdrawals from the body's available resources. Most resolve quickly. Others linger because the demand continues, recovery is incomplete, or another demand arrives before the previous adjustment has fully settled.
Researchers describe this cumulative physiological cost as allostatic load (McEwen & Stellar, 1993).
One paper describes the process behind it as the "predictive regulation of energetic resources” (Sterling, 2012), which I absolutely love.
That's a technical way of saying your nervous system is continually trying to anticipate what's coming next and distribute the body's available resources accordingly. It's maintaining stability not by keeping everything the same, but by continually adjusting to what life is asking of you.
That's exactly what allostasis means: achieving stability through change.
The problem is being asked to keep adapting without enough opportunity to recover. Over time, the withdrawals can begin to outpace the deposits. Not because one poor night’s sleep, one difficult conversation or one busy afternoon overwhelmed you, but because they rarely arrive alone.
Then Why Don’t I Notice It Happening?
Awareness doesn’t always keep pace with physiology.
Long before you consciously think, “I’m feeling overwhelmed,” your nervous system has already been making adjustments on your behalf. This is part of why the early signals are so easy to miss.
I explain this change in signal intensity through the idea of a whisper, a tap and eventually a slap.
It usually begins with whispers: your shoulders stay tense after work, you’re relying on another coffee, your breathing feels shallower than usual, or small frustrations linger longer than they once did. Easy to dismiss.
If nothing changes, those whispers often become taps. Concentration slips more easily. Switching off becomes harder. You reread the same paragraph without taking it in. Things that normally wouldn’t bother you start getting under your skin.
Many people explain those moments away.
“I’ve just been busy.”
“It’s been one of those weeks.”
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s the nervous system telling us the account has been running lower than we realised.
If the withdrawals continue to outpace the deposits, eventually the signals become difficult to ignore. For one person, that might look like lying awake despite feeling exhausted. For another, it might be becoming emotional over something seemingly insignificant or feeling like ordinary demands require far more effort than they should.
Those moments can feel as though they appeared out of nowhere.
In reality, they are often the first signals that became impossible to overlook.
Can Recovery Simply Wipe The Slate Clean?
Recovery is essential. But it isn’t an undo button.
Think about a challenging strength training session. The workout creates fatigue because your body has been asked to adapt to a physical demand. A good night’s sleep doesn’t erase the workout. It allows repair, replenishment and adaptation to take place so you’re better prepared for the next challenge.
The same principle applies to the nervous system.
Recovery helps restore the resources you've been drawing on throughout the day. It gives your physiology an opportunity to stand down, redistribute energy and prepare for whatever comes next.
If you're interested in this idea, I explore the role of recovery in much more detail in The Role of Recovery in Stress Adaptation.
But recovery can’t always compensate for a pattern of continual withdrawals.
That’s why someone can rest, sleep, take a break or even go away for a few days and feel better, only to find the same patterns returning once life resumes. The recovery may have been real. The problem is that the same demands often return with it.
Looking at stress this way changes where we start looking for answers.
Rather than only asking, “How do I recover more?”, it can be more useful to ask, “What has my nervous system been adapting to that I haven’t been noticing?” Often, the latter is a more useful question.
While recovery helps restore the account, it’s awareness that helps you understand what’s making the withdrawals in the first place.
So What Do I Actually Do With This Information?
The purpose of understanding this isn’t to eliminate stress from your life.
A healthy nervous system is designed to adapt. It will continue responding to changing plans, challenging conversations, deadlines, relationships and uncertainty for the rest of your days.
The value isn't in eliminating every demand. It's in becoming better at recognising the quieter ones before they become louder.
Over the next few days, try a simple experiment.
Instead of asking, “What’s stressing me?”, ask:
What has my nervous system been adapting to today?
Where have I been switching attention more than I realised?
Which demands have become so familiar I no longer question them?
Where are the withdrawals happening faster than the deposits?
None of those questions need to become another thing to obsess over. They're simply a way of changing where you look.
That's one of the reasons I created the Functional Breathing Reset. It's about helping people better understand how their nervous system responds to, and recovers from, the demands of everyday life.
References
Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine.
McEwen, B. S., & Stellar, E. (1993). Stress and the individual: Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine.
Sterling, P. (2012). Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior.
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