Break the Cycle of Stress: Train Your Nervous System Like a Muscle
Stress Isn’t the Enemy — Stuck Patterns Are
You’ve been told stress is the problem. Meditate it away. Journal it away. Breathe it away. But here’s what I believe:
Stress isn’t the enemy. It’s your nervous system getting stuck in old loops that keeps you feeling empty, drained, anxious, and small.
As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, reminds us: the body holds onto what the mind tries to forget. If you don’t retrain the system, it will keep replaying the same patterns.
Your body is built to feel it all — but most of us were trained to shut down, avoid, or override. That’s not resilience. That’s survival mode.
It’s time for something different: training your nervous system like a muscle.
What Does Nervous System Training Mean?
Nervous system training isn’t about “hacking” your way to calm. It’s about building true strength and capacity, the same way you’d train at the gym. This take time, intention and determination:
Repetition builds resilience.
Load (stressors) becomes fuel instead of burnout.
Recovery rewires your system to bounce back faster.
Informed by Polyvagal Theory (Dr. Stephen Porges), we know the nervous system isn’t just fight-or-flight. It has pathways for safety, connection, and growth. When you train it, you stop being tossed around by chaos — and you start standing in the driver’s seat of your life.
Why Mindset Work Alone Doesn’t Cut It
Mindset hacks only scratch the surface. If you’ve tried affirmations, journaling, or “positive vibes only” and still feel stuck, this is why.
The missing piece? Your body. Your emotions. Your nervous system.
Until you train your whole system — not just your mind — you’ll keep looping the same patterns. Nervous system coaching goes deeper, creating embodied change that actually sticks.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dr. Dick Schwartz describes how we’re made of many “parts” — the messy, fierce, protective, tender. When we meet those parts instead of shutting them down, our nervous system reorganizes around strength, not survival.
4 Ways to Build Nervous System Strength
Here’s how to start reclaiming your wild core today:
Move Your Body Daily – Walking, lifting, dancing, shaking it out. Movement discharges stuck energy.
Breathe With Intention – Not to escape stress, but to expand capacity to hold it.
Feel Your Emotions Fully – The messy, fierce ones too. They’re fuel, not weakness.
Take Bold Action – Alignment comes from doing, not waiting until you “feel ready.”
These practices expand your resilience so you can live unapologetically bold — without burning out.
Want to go deeper? I just released the next part of this series:
→ 5 Signs Your Nervous System Is Overprotective (And What to Do About It)
Ready to Train Your Wild Core?
This is the work we do inside The Wild Method. It’s not about bypassing or numbing. It’s about building the capacity to live fierce, free, and fully alive. Together we figure out the blocks that might be stopping you from stepping into your full potential so you can live freely and authentically.
Check out my coaching offers: Ways to Train Your Wild Core
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References
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
American Psychological Association, “The Road to Resilience” (APA resource on stress and adaptation)