Four Key Concepts To Help Regulate Your Nervous System - The August Refresh, Archive Episode

This is the transcript of The Refreshing Leadership Podcast episode: Four Key Concepts to Help Regulate your Nervous System - The August Refresh, Archive Episode, published on 24th August 2026.

Welcome to the Refreshing Leadership Podcast, and specifically welcome to our August Refresh series. This month I am re-sharing some of our most impactful episodes centred around the theme of rest, rejuvenation, and being a little bit more dreamy.

If you're a longtime listener, there's a chance you might be hearing one of these episodes for the second time. This is actually good news - when I listen to a podcast episode the second time, that's when I actually integrate it into my life. The first time I'm listening at a cognitive, intellectual level, getting familiar with the concept, which is of course super helpful.

If you're listening for the first time, my hope is that all of the episodes this month will help you embrace a refreshing summer, whatever that means for you. I personally am taking a much-needed creative pause, and I encourage you to join me in your own version of that. I look forward to connecting with you in the second week of September, and until then, I hope these episodes help you to really embrace your own refreshing August.

A quick note: today's guest is Kate Brassington, and this podcast - Refreshing Leadership - actually has Kate to thank for its name. Kate's podcast was called Refreshing Leadership for a period of time. When that came to an end, Kate knew I had always been a real fan of that name, and was just so generous in offering it up to me, with lots of suggestions of what I could do with the podcast. This is also one of our most popular episodes.

The body to brain connection

Maya: If you didn't remember anything else from this whole session, you would remember this one thing: there is seven times more information going from the body up to the brain than from the brain down to the body. And yet modern day humans don't operate like that. We think the brain is telling the body what to do, because that's how we experience it. But it's the other way around.

In psychology and positive psychology we have all these terms - psychosomatic, somatopsychic, biopsychosocial, somatic. We have all kinds of ways of trying to link these things together. And I think it was a big moment in positive psychology when researchers like Kate Hephron showed us that it works from the body to the mind, and that's why the physical aspect is such a component of even psychological wellbeing.

How would you describe that process when you're working with clients?

Kate: I usually start by simply describing to someone how the body and the mind work together in the most basic terms, using Dan Siegel's Hand Model of the Head-Brain. Dan Siegel is a psychiatrist in the States, and his life's work is understanding how people respond automatically - the things you say when you didn't mean to say them, when you didn't want to react that way. That's his area of expertise, particularly in children, because children's brains are not as evolved to stop themselves from blurting something out.

His work in understanding how the brain develops is really helpful when we then, as adult owner-operators of this brain and body-mind combination, ask: how can we use this to best effect? How can I regulate myself? How can I behave in the way that I want to behave?

Regulate is a bit of a jargony word, isn't it? What it really means is: I don't want to be grumpy at people at work. I don't want to snap at my kids. Regulation is allowing yourself to moderate the reaction you might feel inside, because you want to behave in a slightly different way.

What is the polyvagal nerve?

Maya: Tell me a little bit about polyvagal theory.

Kate: At the beginning I said there is seven times more information going from the body up to the brain than the other way. The key motorway of that high-speed traffic within your body is the polyvagal nerve. It's called poly because it has multiple branches, and vagal because of where it goes. It runs from the back of your head, out of your brainstem, down through your neck, winds its way through your main passages with tendrils going into your heart, lungs, and digestive system, and winds its way on down through the body, splitting to go down each leg.

At the top, it's highly myelinated - think of it like super-fast broadband fibre of incredible quality. Information is passed in split seconds. Your heart, your lungs, a lot of the activities that happen in the brain and body are working together autonomically - automatically, without you telling them to do so.

It gets a bit slower as it goes down past the gut into each leg, because essentially the body and mind decided you don't really need as much feedback from down there - you're either going to be running, sitting, or lying down. Whereas all around your stomach, heart, and lung area, how we respond to emotions is very strongly connected to what's going on in that part of the body.

Maya: The first time I experienced this connection was through a type of breathing called hyperpressives, designed to help the core after having babies. You'd breathe out all the air in your lungs, creating a kind of vacuum state. I remember lying there feeling mentally in a very interesting space - highly relaxed, a bit spaced out, but amazing. That was my first experience of the parasympathetic nervous system. And once you get a taste of that, you know there's something there that really needs to be tapped into.

I was wondering if you had any specific ways of working with the nervous system that you encourage in your practice?

Kate: It's interesting that you mention breath. The polyvagal nerve goes in both directions - it's bidirectional. You're getting feedback from the body, and you're also giving instructions downwards. The main way you can see this happening is through breath. You can't tell your digestion to go faster, but you can change your breathing just by deciding to do so. This is where we can switch between the automatic aspect of the nervous system and the non-automatic - you telling it what to do. That's why breathwork in particular can be so helpful. It works, and it's universal to all humans. And you don't need any equipment.

Maya: The only challenge I have with breathwork is that it can feel a bit dull. You can quite easily put it off your to-do list in favour of something more interesting - a cool meditation, something active.

Kate: I'll probably be shot as a positive psychologist for saying this, but a lot of wellbeing practices can feel quite dull, because a lot of them are about regulating the nervous system and allowing the body and mind to come together in a calm way. For many of us in the modern world, that's a fairly dull place to be, because where the action is - where it feels exciting - is in the fight or flight state, responding to life, seeking safety via action.

One of the big takeaways around polyvagal theory is that this isn't all bad. This is how the system works in good and bad, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. It's highly enervating, for example, just to rush about your day and be busy. Look at the culture around busyness - "Oh, I have so much to do, I didn't get any sleep." The demands of life are attractive and exciting because they really feed into that part of the polyvagal system that helps you feel safe during action.

Nervous system regulation and modern life

Maya: Where I've been accessing a lot of this thinking around the nervous system is through sobriety podcasts. I'm really interested in alcohol consumption and moderation, and they talk no end about nervous system regulation. Part of using alcohol as a coping strategy is about a dysregulated system, and when you take that away, you have to do a lot more personal management of your nervous system.

I know that moment on a Wednesday or Thursday evening when I quite fancy a drink after my busiest days - and in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. But the next day I regret it, because even a small amount affects me. In that moment, though, there is an opportunity to take stock, pay attention to the body, and start that process of nervous system regulation through some of the conscious activities you've described, like breathing. There are probably others too - water therapy, for example.

Kate: There are so many beautiful ways, and when I work with clients I really invite them into a conversation around what they love to do. What helps you feel safe, secure, grounded, loved, held?

One of my favourite exercises is lying on the floor and noticing that you're not having to hold yourself up in any way, that you can't fall. I remember the first time I did that and realised I was holding tension in parts of my body in case I might fall - which was totally unnecessary, given I was already on a floor. I had to consciously think about letting go. It didn't switch off by itself.

This raises an interesting question about why our nervous system gets stuck in the switched-on state and doesn't switch off so well. I think some of the answer lies in comparing the modern world with the world that existed when this system evolved. The world has changed radically, yet the system hasn't. We've been given a car from the 1920s and asked to drive it down the autobahn to Berlin. It's an amazing machine, but the world has evolved around us at such a pace that it places demands on that nervous system that it was never built for.

Where it connects with trauma is this: it's very common in a trauma response that the trauma ends, but the trauma response continues. The body and mind are simply unable to find the off switch. And then you proceed into your modern day world with your smartphone and everything else, and the body and mind never get an opportunity to switch off.

Among my PTSD veterans, what can actually happen is that the body and mind work together in a way that feels safest, and if you become habituated to living at full speed and constant action - even after a battlefield trauma, where you were living at your most vivid - then suddenly coming into a calm, regulated, grounded state can actually be very dysregulating. You feel frightened.

This is why trauma-sensitive mindfulness is such a huge aspect of my work. I don't just say, "Here's a great breathing exercise, off you go," because I may be throwing someone into a calm, quiet space that they haven't been in perhaps ever, and their body and mind are not set up to associate that feeling with feeling safe.

Maya: Whilst that's the experience of veterans, it does seem to have strong parallels with aspects of modern-day living, where there are all these things bombarding us. And then we come away from that and we're restless, or listless, and we're not at ease. Can I make that parallel?

Kate: Absolutely. The machinery we have to operate is the same. The polyvagal nervous system, our body and mind and brain, operate together in the same way whether it's a great day or the worst day of our lives. We don't get a different system that switches on. It's the same one, configured for good days as well as bad.

If I'm rushing about and meeting deadlines, I have a great day. Some of my best work happens when I'm under pressure - who doesn't resonate with that? So it's about understanding what works best for you, and where you might be becoming habituated to being too active and unable to switch off, to the point where it's causing health problems, relationship problems, sleep problems, or anxiety. When the system doesn't get to shut itself down properly, those problems can manifest.

Maya: Is that where adrenal fatigue and burnout come from?

Kate: Totally. A lot of people come to me with burnout, or having been diagnosed with it. When we talk about a particular time in their life, they'll say, "There were days when I just couldn't get out of bed, and it felt awful because I'm normally in the thick of it." When you're normally in the thick of it, that's when you've used up all your resources, and the burnout takes over. There's suddenly nothing left. Burnout is, in a way, extreme nervous system fatigue.

When I help someone understand how their nervous system works, one of my early clients was a neurosurgeon who was struggling with her Viva exam for her consultancy. I felt really strange talking to her about how the brain works, and had to stop at one point and say, "I'm so sorry, you must know all this." And she said, "Nope. I know how to fix it. I know how to get bits of motorcycle helmet out of it. I don't know how to use it."

The freeze response

Kate: I should mention the third main response of the polyvagal system, because I've mainly focused on fight and flight. The third one is freeze, which can also be connected to fawn, and it's worth completing the picture.

Freeze goes from the very simple - noticing someone has glazed over when you're giving them feedback, slipping slightly into protection mode - all the way to a total cataclysmic shutdown of the nervous system where the body goes completely floppy. It's a spectrum.

At the milder end, it might look like checking your phone, having a glass of wine, looking out the window, seeing what's on the news. Something that allows your body and mind to slip into a kind of neutral gear for a bit.

At the most extreme end, it's a complete shutdown. This is something that has been widely misunderstood - for example in cases where someone is asked why they didn't fight back, and they say they simply couldn't. That's the freeze response, and it's now better understood because of the research in this area.

For my clients who are mainly in fight or flight mode and then experience burnout, they can end up in a freeze state - and they often don't recognise it. "I just couldn't get out of bed" is the same language used around depression. The black dog, the heavy cloud, it arrives. You didn't ask for it and you don't know how to make it go away.

When I hear someone talking about those kinds of experiences, I'm listening with a trauma-informed lens, wondering what might be going on for that nervous system that would mean the body has decided a bit of shutdown would be sensible.

Practical things that actually work

Maya: To wrap up this episode - given everything you know about the nervous system and the polyvagal nerve, what do you actually do on a daily or weekly basis to look after yourself?

Kate: I've done a fair amount of investigation of myself through polyvagal theory in a course led by Deb Dana. There's a polyvagal ladder, and you get really used to mapping your own system - because your body is interacting with a client before your mind has even thought of what question to ask.

I know that I operate best in fight or flight. I seek safety via action. I'm fast-moving, fast-thinking, fast-talking, with a big and vibrant personality. So when I need to switch off, simply lying down and thinking of nothing can actually send me into quite an anxious state because of my trauma history. I don't do any silent meditations at all. If I do a meditation, it's guided, and the person never stops talking - which is why Headspace doesn't work for me. Too many silent gaps.

Because I'm configured in fight or flight and action, what works better for me are activities that are still to do with wellbeing but are active. Yoga is in my should bucket - same as your breathwork is in yours. Would it do me any harm? No. Would I feel better? Yes. Do I ever do it? No.

What I do instead is weight training. I lift heavy weights, and I really enjoy the explosive power, the building of strength in my body. It's extremely grounding. I feel connected to the earth. I am not thinking about my problems or dramas or anxieties when I'm doing weight training.

The other thing I do is wild water swimming - cold water immersion, outside in nature. A cold bath at home just feels unpleasant to me. It has to be outside in the wildness, really feeling that extreme coldness biting through to the core, so that I'm not even there anymore. To me, it's like mindfulness on speed. That's when I can do silence.

And one of my favourite things: I lie in bed in the morning in those moments just after waking, and I remind myself that I'm being held. The bed is holding me, the building is holding us, the ground below is holding us. It brings me such comfort. That's when I'm in that social engagement state, that connected state. Before I leap into action and make breakfast and everything else, there's that lovely moment of: I am held, all is well.

Maya: I think people are going to love the way you've talked about all of those different things - the things we're told we should do, and then the reality of what actually works for you. It shows how hearing good advice only really starts to work when we personalise it and understand our own makeup.

I'd never thought of strength training as something that would support my nervous system. But I do see how it's grounding, and grounding is such an important word. For a while this summer, feeling grounded was really important to me - especially after we moved house and I felt a little disoriented. It's not common language, is it? In coaching or therapy we talk about being held in a safe space, but in normal life we don't really speak like that. And I think it can be really useful language.

Thank you so much, Kate. And thank you all for listening - I look forward to connecting with you next time.

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You can connect with Kate Brassington at https://katebrassington.com/

About Maya

Maya Gudka is an executive coach specialising in C-suite career progression and leadership development. She works with senior leaders in major organisations on strategic career planning, executive presence, and building sustainable influence. Maya hosts The Refreshing Leadership Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts globally and has nearly 300 episodes exploring the challenges faced by ambitious professionals.