New Year Nervous System Reset
With all the New Year resolutions, now is the perfect time for a nervous system reset, especially if it’s long overdue. Your nervous system influences your energy, emotional stability, motivation, and your ability to follow through on your goals. If it’s overwhelmed, no planner, routine, or resolution can truly stick. You may have heard the term “nervous system” before, but what does it actually mean?
What Is the Nervous System?
Think of your nervous system as your body’s internal communication and safety network. It’s constantly scanning both your environment and your inner world to determine whether you are safe, connected, in danger, or able to rest and recover.
Based on what it senses, your nervous system automatically adjusts your body without you even thinking about it. It regulates your emotions, breathing, heart rate, digestion, immune function, muscle tension, sleep cycles, and stress hormones. In other words, it shapes how you experience your body, your relationships, and your daily life.
Your nervous system plays a key role in whether you feel calm or anxious, energized or drained, open or guarded, present or disconnected. It forms the foundation of emotional regulation, resilience, and your ability to heal, grow, and follow through on change.
The Two Main Parts of the Nervous System
Your nervous system has two main branches that work together to keep you alive, regulated, and connected to the world around you.
Central Nervous System (CNS): The central nervous system includes the brain and spinal cord. This is your body’s command center, responsible for thinking, learning, memory, processing emotions, making decisions, interpreting what’s happening around you, and sending instructions to the rest of your body. Every sensation, thought, emotion, and movement passes through the CNS, it’s where your experiences are organized and meaning is made.
Peripheral Nervous System (PNS): The peripheral nervous system is the network of nerves that extends from your brain and spinal cord to the rest of your body. It allows you to sense touch, pain, temperature, and movement, move your body, react to your environment, and communicate between your brain and organs. Simply put, it’s how your brain and body stay in constant conversation.
Within the PNS is a powerful and automatic system called the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which operates automatically and regulates your stress response, emotional state, and sense of safety.
The ANS has two main branches:
Sympathetic Nervous System – “Fight, Flight, Freeze”: This branch activates when your brain senses danger, pressure, or threat. It prepares your body to respond by increasing your heart rate, tightening muscles, speeding up breathing, heightening alertness, and temporarily suppressing digestion and immune function. While protective, frequent activation can lead to anxiety, burnout, panic, and trauma symptoms.
Parasympathetic Nervous System – “Rest, Digest, Repair”: This branch activates when your body feels safe and supported. It slows the heart rate, deepens breathing, relaxes muscles, supports digestion, restores hormonal balance, and fosters a sense of emotional connection. This is your body’s natural state for healing, recovery, and regulation.
How Trauma Affects the Autonomic Nervous System
When the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is flexible and well regulated, it allows the body to manage stress, recover from challenges, and return to a state of balance. A healthy nervous system supports emotional regulation, stress resilience, and nervous system flexibility, which is our ability to rebound after difficulty and continue moving forward.
However, trauma and chronic stress can dysregulate the autonomic nervous system, keeping the body stuck in survival mode. When this happens, neutral or even positive experiences may be perceived as threatening. Replying to a text can feel overwhelming. Being called into a meeting can feel alarming. Sitting in traffic can trigger panic. For folks with a trauma history, the nervous system’s threat detection system often becomes overactive, constantly signaling danger even when no real threat is present. This is known as nervous system dysregulation and chronic fight-or-flight activation.
Living in chronic survival states can be exhausting and debilitating. Over time, people often develop coping strategies that help them survive, such as compulsive scrolling, emotional eating, overworking, binge-watching, substance use, or staying constantly busy, just in an attempt to regulate the nervous system and reduce anxiety. Understanding how trauma affects the autonomic nervous system is essential for long-term healing and trauma recovery.
For folks living with the impacts of trauma and chronic stress, restoring nervous system regulation can feel like beginning a new life. For all of us, understanding how our ANS shapes behavior, emotions, and relationships allows us to become healthier, more compassionate, and more connected human beings. By healing individually and collectively, we can interrupt intergenerational cycles of trauma and create safer, more resilient communities.
Types of Trauma That Dysregulate the Nervous System
There is a wide spectrum of experiences that can dysregulate the autonomic nervous system. These include:
Shock trauma, such as car accidents, medical emergencies, workplace violence, or sudden losses
Developmental and relational trauma, including emotionally unavailable caregivers, chronic criticism, inconsistent parenting, parentification, or growing up in unpredictable households
Chronic and systemic stressors, such as immigration stress, financial instability, racism, homophobia, housing insecurity, community violence, and repeated medical procedures
Trauma Is a Nervous System Experience
Emerging research in epigenetics suggests that trauma may be passed down genetically across generations. We now understand that trauma is not just what happened, it is what happens inside the nervous system as a result of what happened. Trauma is a physiological experience that impacts brain function, emotional regulation, and nervous system health.
Trauma, Attachment, and Relationships
Relational trauma directly impacts attachment and emotional safety. When caregivers were unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally unavailable, the nervous system becomes wired for protection rather than connection. As adults, this may show up as:
Difficulty trusting others
Fear of intimacy
People-pleasing
Emotional withdrawal
Feeling unsafe in close relationships
Even when connection is desired, the nervous system may continue to prioritize survival.
Healing the Autonomic Nervous System
The autonomic nervous system can be retrained to feel safe again. Healing occurs through co-regulation, trauma-informed therapy, and nervous system regulation practices. These approaches support trauma recovery, emotional regulation, and nervous system resilience.
Effective approaches include:
EMDR therapy (Meet our New York EMDR therapists at Moment Psychotherapy)
Somatic and sensorimotor psychotherapy (Meet our New York somatic therapists at Moment Psychotherapy)
Breathwork and body-based therapy
Time in nature
Gentle movement, yoga, and stretching
Safe, supportive relationships
As we step into 2026, remember: lasting change starts not with pressure, but with safety in your own body. Your nervous system is the foundation for everything you do - your energy, focus, emotions, and relationships.
This year, instead of forcing yourself to “do more,” try this simple intention: “I will notice my body cues and give myself moments of safety and restoration each day.” Even small moments like taking a deep breath, stretching, feeling your feet on the ground, noticing your heartbeat help your nervous system learn that it is safe, and that you are safe.
When your body feels safe, everything else flows more easily: your goals, your creativity, your connections, and your joy. Let 2026 be the year you listen, nurture, and reset from the inside out.
