Training Your Nervous System to Come Home

Our nervous system is the body’s built-in alarm and recovery system. It keeps us alert when we need to act quickly and helps us calm down when the danger has passed. The trouble is, sometimes it gets stuck on high alert. That can make ordinary life, shopping, driving, even relaxing at home, feel harder than it needs to be.

Hyper-vigilance is important when it’s truly needed. In combat, on the fire ground, in an operating theatre, or in any emergency, that heightened alertness can save lives. But for the vast majority of life, it’s not needed. And when it stays switched on, it can become exhausting, for us, and for the people around us.

In a recent podcast I was asked about something I’d written: the army trains you for war, but it doesn’t train you to come home. I come from a military family where hyper-vigilance, or its sister, numbing or shut down, seemed normal. Family members had been deployed to high-intensity environments where being on guard was essential. At home, though, that same state often became a barrier.

But it’s not only those who serve who carry this. Hyper-vigilance has a way of spilling out into family life, of being passed down in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Many of us who grew up around stress or instability learned to stay “on guard,” even when nothing threatening was happening. It becomes second nature.

So what do I mean by coming home? I mean the ability to have a regulated nervous system in ordinary life. And in the world we live in today, even for the most chilled of people, that can be a tall order. It’s something many of us struggle with, not just veterans or emergency responders. Hyper-vigilance may have kept us safe once, but when it lingers it narrows our lives. Left unrecognised, it can ripple through families, showing up as tension, impatience, or a sense of never really being able to relax.

The good news is: it doesn’t have to stay that way. There are ways of supporting the nervous system to return, to settle, to come home. It’s easy to get lost in stress or pulled into old habits, but coming back home means coming back to the present moment, meeting ourselves, and our struggles, with kindness. In many ways, it’s about belonging in your own body.

I appreciate that for many, working in high-stress environments is part of the job and it’s what keeps you alive. But when you come home and you’re in the local shops, just trying to choose a birthday card, and the environment becomes overwhelming, that’s not a place where hyper-vigilance is needed. The nervous system doesn’t know that. Stress is stress, and the body responds to supermarket queues or traffic when you’re late much like it might in a deployment setting where lives are on the line. Logically you know it’s not the same, but it’s not the mind that needs to know this, it’s the body. Which is why training our body, our nervous system, to know it’s safe is so important.

When our nervous system is on high alert, one of the most common strategies is to try and think our way out of it. We analyse, plan, replay conversations, run through worst-case scenarios, as if the right thought will finally unlock a sense of safety. It’s understandable; thinking is one of the tools we’ve been trained to rely on. But the truth is, overthinking rarely settles the body. In fact, it often keeps the nervous system switched on, looping through stress instead of releasing it.

That’s why practices that work directly with the body, breath, movement, meditation, are so important. They help the nervous system learn safety in a way that thought alone can’t.

This is what we mean when we talk about meditation, breathwork, and nervous system practices that bring the body back into a resting state instead of a fight-or-flight state. You might call it mindfulness, mental fitness, or simply learning to steady yourself, whatever word works for you.

Maybe part of the reason I write about this and feel keen to share it with the veteran community and their families is because I know what it feels like to live on high alert and how that affects my behaviours in unworkable ways, and also the difference it makes when you discover ways of coming home to yourself in a regulated nervous system that can return to baseline more easily. It’s a very different way of moving through the world.

Another way which can sometimes feel harder, is through relationship. We are social beings, and we transform in relationship: sometimes in painful ways, sometimes in healing ones. Talking about what we’re carrying with someone we trust can be transformational.

Too often we’re led to believe we have to do it all alone. But we aren’t hard-wired to “go it alone” our biology is about care and nurture. Human beings are not the survival of the fittest; we are the survival of the nurtured. From birth we only survive because someone cares for us, to a greater or lesser degree. If a newborn isn’t touched, held, or comforted, they don’t survive, that’s how essential relationship is to our biology.

Bringing that same attitude of care to ourselves often begins with the presence of just one other person.

It’s not a one-time fix. It’s training. Like going to the gym you wouldn’t expect one workout to make you fit for life. It’s the practice, repeated, that builds strength and steadiness. Nervous system regulation is just like that: training the mind and body to settle, again and again, until “coming home” becomes a familiar place. Regulation is learned, repeated, and possible.

And this isn’t about pathologising anyone. It’s about recognising that the nervous system is trainable. These are skills anyone can learn but they are especially useful for those whose training, environment, or upbringing has left the dial set too high for too long.

As Willa Blythe Baker writes, “The mind is not always honest with us, but the body always tells the truth.”

Resources for Training Your Nervous System

If you’d like to explore this more, here are a few accessible resources:

• 📖 The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk – A brilliant and very readable book on how stress shapes the body and mind, and how practices like mindfulness, yoga, and breathwork can help us come back into balance.

• 📚 Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine – A practical guide to noticing and releasing stored tension through body awareness.

• 🎧 HeadFIT for Life – A free MoD-backed resource with quick breathing, posture, and focus tools designed for the forces community (but useful for anyone).

• 🎙️ Combat Stress Podcast – UK veterans and clinicians sharing honest stories and tips on managing stress and hyper-vigilance.

• 🎧 Therapy in a Nutshell (podcast/YouTube) – Clear, short explanations of the stress cycle and simple tools to reset the nervous system.

• 🔬 Dharma Lab – An accessible project exploring the science of meditation, offering talks and resources on how contemplative practices reshape the brain and body.