Nervous System Reboot: Finding Your Way Back to Flow

By Fleet Maull, PhD

The human nervous system operates on a scale that's hard to grasp. Billions of neurons firing in intricate patterns, constant communication between brain and body, automatic responses happening faster than thought. It orchestrates everything: our emotions, our sense of safety, our capacity to connect with others, and how we meet challenge and stress. And yet most of us move through life barely aware of it, until something feels off.

The health of our nervous system shapes our entire experience of being alive. When it's well-regulated, we have access to clarity, resilience, and creativity. When it's dysregulated, we suffer. What I've learned (from years of practice, research, and yes, from those years I spent in prison, where I had nothing but time to observe the workings of the human nervous system) is that we need to be proactive about our nervous system health. But not in the way we might think. We're not creating something from nothing or manufacturing calm through sheer willpower. We're reconnecting with something that's already there.

Watch a river. Watch weather patterns moving across the sky. Life is in flow. The energy of life is always flowing, always seeking balance, always moving toward harmony. And we're not separate from that. We're part of it.

The Whole-Body Intelligence System When we say 'nervous system,' most people think of the brain—that three-pound universe inside the skull with its 80 to 100 billion neurons. And yes, that's part of it. But we're talking about something much bigger.

You've got what some call the gut brain or, more precisely, the enteric nervous system, with its 100 million neurons embedded in the walls of your digestive system. These aren't merely relay stations that pass messages from the brain. They're doing their own processing and decision-making. Your gut is literally thinking, sensing, and responding.

The heart center isn't just poetic language either. Your heart contains approximately 40,000 neurons that form its intrinsic cardiac nervous system. It's sending more signals to the brain than the brain sends to it. Then there's the central nervous system with its autonomic branches—sympathetic and parasympathetic—constantly dancing between activation and rest.

And here's what fascinates me: we have neurons everywhere. With our skin, we sense temperature and touch. In our muscles, tracking tension and movement. With our blood vessels, we monitor pressure and flow. The peripheral nervous system extends throughout our entire body like the roots of a tree, creating a vast sensory-motor network that constantly gathers information and responds.

We can think of the whole body as one intelligent system—not a brain controlling a mechanical body, but an integrated field of awareness. When I mention the nervous system, I'm really talking about all of this. The whole intricate, interconnected web of sensing, processing, and responding that we are.

What Regulation Actually Means Dan Siegel talks about the 'window of tolerance.' I like to call it the zone of resilience. It's not your comfort zone; that's important to understand. When you're well-regulated, you can be facing rather challenging situations, but you have the confidence and resources to handle them skillfully. You have access to your neocortex, to good judgment, to the capacity to make sound decisions. According to Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory, your social engagement system is online. You're in responsive-relational mode rather than reactive-survival mode.

However, being human, we all get knocked out of this zone. Our nervous system becomes dysregulated. It can swing toward hyper-arousal, manifesting as either chaos in the form of frustration, upset, anger, or even aggression, or as various forms of rigidity in the form of obsessive thoughts, obsessive or addictive behaviors, and even a kind of paralytic freeze state. Or it can also swing toward hypo-arousal orshutdown manifestings as checking out,  dissociative states, or ultimately in rare cases a catatonic state or in animals what is called the feigned death response.  

When we experience any mental, emotional, or even physical difficulty, we're in some state of nervous system dysregulation. And that dysregulation comes from somewhere. Traumatic experiences and memories of threat create patterns. Sometimes they directly affect neural networks in the brain, disconnecting regions that need to be integrated. The connection between the lower brain (brainstem, cerebellum) and the upper brain (neocortex) can become compromised. Bottom-up versus top-down processing becomes desynchronized.

The Flow You Don't Have to Create So what is a nervous system reboot? What does it mean to reset? It's reestablishing homeostasis—the normal, functional, harmonic state of optimal regulation. But here's the key insight: we're not creating this state. We're reconnecting to what's already there.

Despite all the disruption we see in life, despite the chaos on every scale, life itself is in flow. The energy of life is in flow. There's a well-regulated, harmonic field of flow right here, right now, waiting for us to relax into it and tap into it.

Your body knows how to do this. Your brain knows how to do this. It's the natural state of things. We're not isolated physical creatures; we're energetic beings, matrices of energy situated in a larger matrix of energy—the energy of life itself. And we're profoundly relational. Our nervous systems are constantly signaling to and synchronizing with one another. A calm, regulated person can help settle an entire room. This is co-regulation, and it's one of our most powerful resources for healing.

Finding Your Way Back I know that for many of you reading this, the idea of flow, of ease, of feeling safe in your body might sound like something that exists for other people but not for you. Maybe you've spent years, even decades, feeling disconnected, anxious, shut down. Maybe the idea of 'coming home' to your body brings up fear rather than comfort. Maybe you can't remember the last time you actually felt grounded, settled, okay.

This disconnection is real. Trauma, whether it's "capital-T trauma" or the accumulated stress and overwhelm of simply being human in a difficult world, creates patterns of dysregulation that can feel permanent. Various levels of trauma often result in us feeling profoundly disconnected from our bodies. And here's the hardest part: it may feel unsafe, either consciously or unconsciously, to reconnect. The body itself can feel like dangerous territory.

I want to acknowledge that. If that's where you are, you're not broken. You're not doing anything wrong. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive. And the path back  (yes, there is a path back!) begins not with forcing yourself to feel something you don't feel, but with the gentlest possible rediscovery of safety in the body.

The Body as Gateway This requires grounding techniques. And I don't mean that in some abstract, woo-woo way. I mean actual practices that ground us in the body and connect us with the Earth. These can be traditional: chanting, singing, rhythmic practices, dance, swaying movements. They can be done individually or in community. 

Why rhythm? Because rhythmic movement helps restore our sense of balance. It brings us home. It reconnects us to the body, to the Earth. Stephen Levine has this methodology he calls 'pendulating'—where you have a safe place, you lean into discomfort, then you lean back to safety. For those with deeper trauma, we may need to titrate very gently, moving in a bit, moving out.

But it also comes down to simple self-care practices. Good nutrition. Plenty of rest. Massage, hot baths—any grounding self-care practice where we're expressing kindness and self-compassion to the body. Where we're finding a way into the body rather than staying perpetually in our heads. Connecting with the Earth. Connecting with nature. All these things are grounding and restore optimal functioning. And of course, all the different forms of meditation, breathwork, bodywork, movement practices—these are ways we tap back into inherent flow states.

Building the Neural Architecture Here's something beautiful about this process: the more we do it, the more we develop what I call a felt memory of feeling safe in the body, of good nervous system regulation. And we're not just creating a memory, we're actually building greater neuronal density in the neural networks that support this state. It becomes harder to get triggered out of regulation. Not impossible… sure, there will always be things that can trigger us. But we develop the capacity to find our way back more quickly and more easily.

Some people have never felt truly safe. For them, creating this experience often requires a therapeutic approach in a supportive environment. But many of us do have the wiring for safety. We had appropriate bonding in childhood. We can find our way there. The capacity exists.

The Practice of Remembering In this practice of resetting your nervous system, I want to offer you an alternative framework. Not 'How do I fix myself?' or 'How do I create something I don't have?' but rather: 'How do I remember? How do I reconnect? How do I tap into what's already here?'

Remember... Life is in flow. Your body knows how to find its way back to optimal regulation because it's a natural state, not something we have to force. It's something we can relax into. There are countless resources, countless pathways. What matters is developing the confidence that we can self-regulate, that we can co-regulate with others, that we're part of something larger that's already humming with harmonic coherence.

The reset isn't about creating a new you. It's about coming home to the you that was always there, beneath the layers of trauma, protection, and disconnection. It's about tapping into the flow that never stopped flowing, even when you couldn't feel it. That's where we begin. Welcome home.