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Start feeling more grounded—in just a few minutes a day.
Download the free 7-Day Nature Reconnection Guide and begin gently regulating your nervous system through simple, research-informed practices—no forest required.
We respect your space.
No spam. No noise. Just occasional, grounding emails with reflections, practices, and seasonal insights. Unsubscribe anytime—no hard feelings.
The Nervous System Isn’t a Problem to Fix – It’s a System to Befriend
- June 02, 2025
There’s a belief that’s quietly embedded in much of modern life: if something isn’t working, fix it. If it’s loud, quiet it. If it’s messy, clean it. If it’s uncomfortable—get rid of it.
For a long time, I treated my own nervous system this way. I thought of anxiety as a glitch, restlessness as something to manage, overwhelm as a failure of control. I read the books. Tried the techniques. Measured and monitored and tried to engineer stillness into being.
But nature, as it often does, invited a different way.
One morning, walking the bush track behind my house on Yuin Country, I paused to watch a group of magpies fossick through the damp leaf litter. Nothing particularly dramatic was happening. But there was something about the way they moved—alert but not frantic, responsive but not reactive—that stirred something familiar in me. They weren’t trying to be calm. They just were.
That’s when I realised: the nervous system isn’t a broken part of me to subdue or override. It’s a living system—like a forest—meant to be listened to, tended, and understood.
A Living System Within Us
Our nervous systems are shaped by thousands of years of adaptation. They’re designed to scan for threat, orient us to safety, respond to change. Just like flocks of birds, schools of fish, or the understorey of a forest, our bodies are wired to move between states—to shift, settle, and surge.
In our rush to feel better, we can forget to feel with.
True regulation, I’ve come to learn, isn’t about controlling sensations. It’s about cultivating safety and connection so our systems can soften naturally.
Nature as a Nervous System Mirror
Spending time in natural environments—whether a patch of sky between buildings or a sprawling expanse of bushland—gives our bodies cues that we are safe. The gentle rustle of leaves, the rhythmic crash of waves, the warmth of sun on skin: these aren’t luxuries. They are invitations to come home to ourselves.
We know from research and tradition alike that connection to nature supports nervous system health. Time outside lowers cortisol, balances heart rate variability, and fosters feelings of safety and belonging. But beyond the science, there’s an instinctive wisdom here: our bodies know how to be with trees. With birdsong. With the slow rhythms of the more-than-human world.
Befriending, Not Fixing
What would it mean to meet our nervous systems as we meet a wild landscape—not with judgement, but with curiosity and care?
Some days might feel like old-growth forests—resilient, grounded. Others, like scorched plains—tender and raw. Some days, the winds of stress will whip through without warning. And yet, if we learn to pause and listen, we might find a deeper capacity to weather them.
For me, this has meant small acts of reconnection: lying on the grass and noticing the weight of my body on the earth. Walking slowly enough to hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. Naming what I feel, without trying to change it.
This is not always easy. Especially in a society that measures wellness in productivity and self-regulation in performance. But the deeper I sink into the company of trees, the more I remember that aliveness does not need to be managed. It needs to be met.
An Invitation
If your nervous system feels wild or unpredictable or too much—perhaps it isn’t broken at all. Perhaps it’s responding, just as nature does, to the conditions around it.
Perhaps befriending it begins not with tools or techniques, but with trust.
So today, I offer this: step outside. Feel the air on your face. Let the land teach you what regulation looks like when it’s not forced, but lived.
Your nervous system is not a problem to fix. It’s a system to befriend. And like any good friend, it just wants to be heard.
About the Author
Sol Reed
Sol Reed is a queer writer, seasonal observer, and student of the more-than-human world. Raised between coastal dunes and eucalypt forest, Sol writes at the quiet intersection of grief, presence, and place—where reconnection is less a goal and more a remembering.
Their reflections draw from deep ecology, folk wisdom, and the subtle patterns of the Earth’s turning. With a background in arts education and storytelling, Sol invites readers into slower rhythms, deeper noticing, and the sacred ordinary of everyday nature.
Sol lives on Yuin Country in a handbuilt cabin near the sea, where they grow herbs, write by the tides, and believe that belonging is something we practise.
