Blog

By André P. Boezaart, MD, PhD, FASRA

It helps to think of the human nervous system as four connected parts, each with its own job.

The central nervous system (CNS) is the brain and spinal cord. It is the command center. It handles thoughts, feelings, and decisions.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs the jobs you never think about but can't live without: your heartbeat, your breathing, digestion, and blood flow.

The somatic nervous system (SNS) controls the movements you choose to make and facilitates your senses. It is your link to the outside world.

The enteric or "gut" nervous system (GUT) lives in your digestive tract. It has more nerve cells than your spinal cord, and it acts like a mind of its own, talking to the brain all day through nerve and chemical signals.

Together, these four systems work like a piece of music. Each part matters. Harmony is the goal. When one section plays too loudly, the whole piece falls out of tune.

When the stress system gets stuck

Inside the autonomic nervous system are two branches that keep each other in check.

The sympathetic system is the accelerator (fight-or-flight). The parasympathetic system is the brake (rest-and-digest).

In modern life, the accelerator often gets stuck. Alerts, deadlines, and worry keep the sympathetic system running hard, all the time.

What was meant for short bursts of alertness becomes prolonged hypervigilance. What was meant to be a useful alarm turns into slow harm.

A gland called the adrenal medulla releases catecholamines (stress hormones like adrenaline) and doesn’t stop. And another system, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, releases cortisol, and doesn’t stop.

The immune system slips into a low, simmering, inflamed state. Inflammatory signals called cytokines rise, blood vessel linings work less well, and the gut wall becomes leakier and weaker.

The nervous and immune systems, which are meant to be partners, start working against each other.

Calming the body through the senses

You wouldn’t think it, but your senses play a role in spreading calm throughout your nervous system. Each of the five senses offers a direct path to the parasympathetic system. These paths evolved to tell the body one thing: you are safe.

Sight. When your eyes rest on something wide and open, like mountains or the ocean, the visual part of the brain sends calming signals inwards. This lowers activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. A soft, wide gaze actually slows your heart.

Hearing. Gentle, patterned sounds calm us. Think of a mother's sing-song voice to a baby, a soft hum, ocean waves, or soothing music. These sounds work the tiny muscles in the middle ear and activate the vagus nerve. Your body tunes toward connection instead of defense.

Smell. Scent has a direct line to the brain's emotion centers. Aromas like lavender, bergamot, and frankincense lower stress activity and lift vagal tone (the strength of the calming vagus nerve).

Taste. Eating mindfully wakes up taste nerves that run along cranial nerves VII, IX, and X. This releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins and gets digestion moving, which is part of the vagus nerve's territory.

Touch. Massage, firm pressure, and gentle skin contact switch on special nerve fibers called C-tactile afferents. These signal safety and belonging. They raise oxytocin (a bonding hormone) and boost the calming system.

Put together, these signals tell the body you are safe and free to heal.

The vagus nerve: the body's anti-inflammation highway

At the center of all this calming is the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. It is a two-way highway linking the brain, the organs, and the immune system.

About 80% of its fibers are afferent, meaning they carry information up to the brain. They send sensory signals from the organs and body, including from parts of the outer ear called the cymba and cavum conchae, back to the brainstem.

Its efferent fibers carry signals the other way, down from the brain. They switch on the cholinergic anti-inflammatory reflex.

Here's how that works: the vagus nerve releases a chemical called acetylcholine. It attaches to receptors on immune cells called macrophages. This lowers inflammatory signaling.

This link between the nervous and immune system is what allows thought, emotion, and inflammation to "talk" to each other in real time.

Bundling the senses at the ear

When we stimulate the part of the vagus nerve in the outer ear, in the cymba and cavum conchae, we tap straight into those calming afferent (sensory) pathways.

Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) sends gentle electrical pulses to the very same circuits that music, touch, scent, and beauty stir up on their own.

It's as if all five senses were bundled into a single clear signal, all arriving together at a hub in the brainstem called the nucleus tractus solitarius.

Then, using the vagus nerve, the brain sends calming signals back down into the body. It steadies the heart, settles the gut, and quiets inflammation through that same acetylcholine pathway.

taVNS does not replace the senses. It amplifies their message. It reminds the nervous system what safety feels like.

Closing thought

At its heart, the path from stress to healing is a shift from sympathetic noise to parasympathetic calm.

Beautiful views, gentle sounds, soothing scents, delicious meals shared with loved ones, and a caring touch all send the same message the vagus nerve carries in every heartbeat: Be still.

‍

You slept. Properly. Not just an hour or two, but a full night. You canceled the meeting that was draining you, and your bloodwork came back fine, yet your body feels like it's bracing for something.

There is a reason you're feeling “wired but tired”, and it is why almost everything you try to fix the problem fails.

Let’s look at the wired part, then the tired part, before moving on to sleep.

Wired

Over time, chronic stress not only keeps the stress response going, but it also damages the mechanisms that are supposed to end it.

The stress response is managed by a system in the brain called the HPA axis.

Under normal stress, this system releases cortisol — a stress hormone — and then switches off. Under chronic stress, the off switch stops working.

Cortisol levels stay elevated. The nervous system keeps producing alerting chemicals, keeping the brain on edge even when there's nothing to be on edge about.

The nervous system can't easily tell the difference between an active threat and a habitual one. After enough time on high alert, it starts to treat that state as normal. The alarm doesn't turn off because the system has decided quietly and incorrectly that this is just how things are now.

This is the wired part.

Tired

There's a second consequence of sustained stress: low-grade inflammation.

Your fight-or-flight response evolved to prepare the body for injury. So stress primes an inflammatory response just in case you get hurt. Under chronic stress, that response never fully switches off. Inflammatory signaling proteins called cytokines stay elevated in your blood.

These pro-inflammatory cytokines talk directly to your brain, and their message is simple: there is an emergency, and we need to save energy for it. The brain responds with a set of changes that we all associate with being sick: deep fatigue, low mood, reduced motivation, social withdrawal, and difficulty thinking clearly.

What these days is often taken for weakness is merely an energy-saving strategy. Your body is doing exactly what it is built to do. It has just incorrectly decided that the threat is still active.

This is the tired part.

Why sleep doesn't fix it

Sleep can’t resolve this problem because sleep happens on top of this high-alert state.

In a healthy system, cortisol is highest in the morning and lowest at night. This helps regulate when you feel awake and when you feel sleepy. Under chronic stress, this rhythm gets disrupted. Your nervous system stays activated into the evening, making it harder to fall asleep and less likely for sleep to feel restorative.

Getting out of this loop requires nudging your body out of stress mode and into recovery mode.

And your vagus nerve is key here. It helps manage inflammation and is the pathway your body uses to switch from stress to rest.

What the target actually is

The underlying issue is an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system. The alert system is stuck and becoming sensitive to threat signals while the recovery system has lost its grip. The fix, then, has to address that directly.

The target is vagal tone.

Not a one-off reset, but a consistent practice that gradually shifts the nervous system back toward balance.

Evidence suggests that regular activation of the recovery system — through breathwork, vagus nerve stimulation, and structured recovery practices — can build resilience against chronic stress. It can reduce the inflammatory signals driving fatigue and help the nervous system relearn what calm feels like.

Wired but tired has a specific mechanism and specific target. A binge of sleep will help in many other ways, but for this dysregulation, small, repeated inputs matter more than dramatic resets.

Does stress ever feel like a real, physical threat to you? Nothing has actually happened, no danger is in the room, yet your body acts like something is about to attack you.

As strange as it may seem, to your nervous system, that reaction makes sense because, to your nervous system, the threat is real.

Your brain scans for danger all the time. A small almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala flags anything that might be a threat. It then signals another region, the hypothalamus, to get the body ready to respond. The hypothalamus turns on two stress systems at once. The first is the sympathetic nervous system, which releases adrenaline. The second is the HPA axis, which releases cortisol.

This is the fight-or-flight response. Your heart speeds up, blood pressure rises, muscles tense up, digestion slows, and focus sharpens.

The body runs this same response whether the trigger is a wild animal, an injury, or a short message from your boss.

Research suggests physical and psychological threats activate the same two stress pathways — the sympathetic nervous system and the HPA axis — releasing the same core hormones, even though the brain processes each kind of threat a little differently.

Physical threats are handled quickly by lower brain regions. Psychological threats involve higher-thinking areas — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. That's because they need to be interpreted. A deadline is only taken to be dangerous once you’ve decided it is. Your body then reacts to it as if it had teeth.

Why modern life confuses your stress system

Fight-or-flight evolved for one kind of problem: short, physical, and over quite quickly. A predator shows up, you run, fight, or freeze, and within minutes the threat ends. If you survive, your body powers down and gets back to normal.

The scientist Robert Sapolsky explains this in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. A zebra escapes a lion and returns to grazing within minutes. It does not sit under a tree worrying about the next attack.

Humans do. We ruminate. Cows are called ruminants because they chew cud. We chew the cud of our minds — endlessly replaying past mistakes or worrying about the future.

We can create a threat just by thinking about one. A deadline three weeks away, a text someone hasn't replied to, a meeting tomorrow, a vague message that could mean two things. Your nervous system treats each of these like real danger, but unlike a predator, they do not go away … they stretch out for hours, days, weeks.

Scientists call this an evolutionary mismatch. Your ancient threat system has not caught up to the modern world it is running in.

Why notifications, meetings, and deadlines feel so heavy

Modern stress has three features that make it especially hard on the nervous system.

It is anticipated.

Your body reacts to threats that have not happened yet. The dread before a meeting can feel as physical as the meeting itself.

It is social.

Conflict at work, feeling left out, or unclear messages can activate the same circuits as physical danger. Research suggests social pain and physical pain use some of the same brain pathways.

It is always-on.

Notifications, group chats, open inboxes, and constant availability mean your nervous system rarely gets the all-clear signal. The threat never fully ends.

A predator encounter ends, an inbox doesn’t.

What this does to your body over time

When the sympathetic nervous system and HPA axis stay active for too long, the body builds up what researchers call allostatic load — the wear and tear from being on alert too often.

Long-term cortisol dysfunction affects heart health, immune function, sleep, memory, and metabolism. Sapolsky’s research shows that chronic stress also weakens the parasympathetic nervous system, the part that calms the body down. Over time, the body has a harder time switching off even after the stress is gone.

How to read your stress response differently

Understanding the biology gives you new options.

If a tight chest before opening an email is a flaw, the only fix is to try harder, care less, or push through. None of those work, because none of them deal with the system causing the reaction.

But if a tight chest is your amygdala doing its job in the wrong environment, the question changes. How do you help your system finish the response and return to a calm state?

This is what nervous system regulation means. There’s no need to suppress your stress response when you can support your rest and recovery response.

Slow exhales activate your vagus nerve, which calms your body. Short pauses between stressful moments let your system register safety more often. Sleep, movement, and steady recovery habits train your nervous system to settle down more easily over time.

Evidence indicates regulation is trainable. Vagal tone — a measure of how well your parasympathetic nervous system works, often tracked through heart rate variability (HRV) — improves with steady, repeated practice. The goal is to handle stress by giving your body the signal that the threat has passed.

Vagus nerve stimulation is a precision-engineered and convenient way to do that every day.

The takeaway

When your body reacts to an email like it is a predator, don’t think of it as overreacting. It is a survival response, largely out of your hands. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do: spot a threat, ready reserves for action, protect you.

The mismatch is in the environment, not in you.

What do you think of when you think of yoga? Really supple people bending themselves into impossible shapes? Incense-filled rooms with rows of people lying down with their eyes closed? A gong? Is yoga slow and stretchy to you, or hot and hard? Plain and simple, or a complex mix of movement and Sanskrit?

The point is, yoga isn’t really one thing. It consists of multiple styles. Each instructor brings their own flair, wisdom, and understanding to each class. And it takes place in every imaginable setting.

Whatever you think yoga is, there will be an example out there to prove you right. But if you say “yoga is not for me”, you are almost certainly wrong.

While yoga is an ancient practice, it has many practical applications and benefits for the modern world. There are three ways yoga can support your daily life.

Yoga is a good exercise

Yoga’s physical exercises are called asanas. Asanas help develop strength, muscular and cardiovascular endurance, stability, and flexibility. Regular practise develops power, speed, agility, coordination, and balance. As a result, yoga can improve your heart and musculoskeletal health, protect against injury, and improve sports performance.

Like all forms of exercise, yoga boosts endorphins (feel-good hormones) and reduces cortisol and adrenaline (stress hormones). It also improves brain function by promoting the growth of new brain cells (neurogenesis), increasing blood flow, and boosting connections between neural networks in your nervous system (neural connectivity).

Yoga promotes healthy breathing

In yoga, movement is linked with breath (pranayama), and deep breathing is encouraged. Deeper breathing brings more oxygen to your muscles, enabling them to work more effectively. It also fuels your brain, helping to maintain focus. Controlled deep breathing also activates the rest-and-digest part of your nervous system (parasympathetic nervous system), shifting your body into calm mode and promoting better nervous system regulation.

The breathing you practice during yoga sessions can move into your everyday life. Deeper, more efficient breathing becomes second nature, and, when feeling overwhelmed, you are more likely to turn to breathing to restore calm and regain a sense of control.

Yoga is relaxing

While many types of yoga are far from relaxing, savasana (relaxation) is a core principle in yoga because the ability to rest and recover is essential to living a balanced life.

Rest is necessary for our brains and bodies to repair and rebuild. Resting refills our batteries and calms our minds, enabling us to refocus on what’s important and giving us the energy to achieve our goals.

In today’s fast-paced world of constant stimulation and pressure to achieve, many of us need to learn how to relax. Regardless of style or purpose, most yoga classes will end with a period of savasana, whether it’s just a couple of minutes of quiet time or a longer period of guided meditation.

This often feels strange or difficult to begin with, especially if you have ADHD, are a fidgeter, or tend towards constant busyness. But like all skills, we improve with practice. And savasana is not about clearing or ignoring our thoughts; its purpose is physical rest, nervous system rejuvenation, and the observation of thoughts without dwelling on them.

Yoga can be a space for simply being present, without the pressure to ‘do’.

Finding the right style

First, look for a class, in person or online, that fits your goals and personality.

If you like challenges and want to make big fitness gains, try Vinyasa, Flow, Ashtanga, or Power yoga. These classes will include exercises such as push-ups, arm balances, and explosive movement to build strength and power, and allow only minimal rest to increase your heart rate and build stamina. These classes can be as physically challenging as CrossFit or HIIT.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of yoga and get an all-round workout, plus some relaxation, look for Hatha yoga. Hatha classes are accessible to all levels and usually include strength, balance, and flexibility.

If you are a bit of a perfectionist or like to delve deep into the technical aspects of things, try Iyengar classes, where the focus is on alignment, with lots of detailed cueing and props to help you achieve the best version of each position. Iyengar can also be helpful if you have an injury or chronic condition, as it’s unlikely you will push too hard and make it worse.

If you love to sweat, Hot or Bikram yoga is done in a heated room. This style warms the muscles and connective tissues for deeper stretches. It also increases your heart rate, bringing great cardiovascular benefits.

If you’re looking to focus on activating your parasympathetic nervous system, seek out restorative classes. Restorative yoga encourages passivity and stillness, relying on soft props (bolsters and blankets) to reduce the physical exertion needed to achieve poses.

Finally, Yin yoga is a slow-paced class where poses are held for several minutes. This targets deep connective tissues, improving flexibility and circulation. The challenge of Yin yoga is both physical and mental: holding yourself at the edge of discomfort while avoiding fidgeting or distraction.

Giving it a go

Yoga is for you. You only have to spend some time finding the style, teacher, and community that appeal to you.

Do you want a relaxed atmosphere where students and teachers interact during class, or do you prefer a silent practice to allow you to focus only on yourself? Are you open to the spiritual side of yoga, or is it all about the science of the exercises?

Before joining a class, check out the instructor or studio’s website and social media, and don’t be afraid to contact them for clarity on what’s on offer. Online classes and apps are a great way to explore different styles, and they give you the flexibility of practicing when and for how long you want.

yōjō offers simple movement activities on our app. They only take a few minutes, are mostly drawn from yoga, and can be the perfect way to start experiencing its benefits.

‍

A few months ago, the gROW Atlantic Team, Vicki Anstey and Dr. Sophie Bostock, asked us a simple question: could yōjō help the team not only survive crossing the Atlantic in a row boat but make it across faster than any other female team?

We said we think so, let’s see.

This December, Vicki and Sophie will join the World's Toughest Row 2026: a 3,000-mile rowing race starting in San Sebastian, La Gomera, Canary Islands and ending at Nelson's Dockyard, Antigua. They're aiming to break the current world record for a female pair — 38 days and 12 hours — rowing two hours on, two hours off, for an estimated 1.5 million oar strokes.

They’ll face storms, salt, and silence. Sleep deprived and alone, they’ll have no support boat alongside them, no shore team, and no shortcuts — just two athletes, an ocean, and whatever they have brought with them, which happens to include their yōjōs, because peak performance, rapid recovery, and sustained endurance come from a well-regulated and flexible nervous system.

Meet the record-breakers

Vicki is a world record-breaking adventurer, TEDx speaker, and a leading expert on resilience, mindset, and human performance. She is a Certified Stress & Resilience Coach, UK Ambassador for Inspiring Girls, and one of the first women finalists on Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins. She holds two world records for rowing the Pacific Ocean unaided in 2021 and for cycling 3,000 miles across America in the 2024 Race Across America.

Sophie is a sleep scientist with a PhD, the founder of The Sleep Scientist, and a national authority on sleep, recovery, and the nervous system. She has worked with elite athletes, surgeons, military personnel, and Olympians on the science of rest, alertness, and resilience under pressure.

Between them, they hold decades of expertise in the exact systems yōjō exists to support: rest, recovery, regulation. Which is what makes this partnership feel so natural.

No strangers to nervous system health, Vicki and Sophie have been thinking about, teaching, and living autonomic flexibility long before they ever set foot in an ocean rowing boat.

What their bodies will face out there

It’s called the World’s Toughest Row for a reason.

More people have climbed Everest than have rowed across an ocean. For a two-person crew, the load is particularly unforgiving. There is no third pair of hands. If one of you is sick, injured, or simply exhausted, the other one rows.

To understand why this matters to us, it helps to understand what around 38 days of that environment does to a human nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system has two branches that work in balance. The sympathetic branch drives action, picking up heart rate, quickening breathing, elevating cortisol levels, and narrowing attention. The parasympathetic branch, carried largely by the vagus nerve, does the opposite. It slows the heart, deepens the breath, and shifts the body into the state where repair, digestion, and recovery happen.

In healthy daily life, these two branches alternate fluidly. You activate when you need to act. You recover when you don't. That flexibility — the ability to shift between drive and recovery on demand — is what we mean by autonomic balance, and it shows up in measurable signals like heart rate variability (HRV).

Ocean rowing collapses that flexibility.

Sleep is fragmented into 90-minute windows (usually less!), never allowing a full recovery cycle. Rowing through the night completely disrupts circadian rhythms. Cortisol stays elevated. Cold and salt exposure keep the sympathetic system primed. Caloric deficit and dehydration add further stress signals. The body, in short, is held in a state of near-continuous sympathetic activation for six weeks. Unfaltering stress.

When the dominant state will be one of stress, could parasympathetic support give Vicki and Sophie the snatches of recovery they need precisely when they need it?

Where we come in

yōjō exists for one reason: to help people maintain autonomic flexibility — the ease with which the nervous system shifts between drive and recovery. We do that by supporting parasympathetic activity through daily vagus nerve stimulation, human coaching, and data-driven personalized programs.

For Vicki and Sophie, who are about to test their nervous systems under conditions that compress years’ worth of physiological stress into 6 weeks, yōjō will be providing on-the-go access to their parasympathetic systems and a way to boost nervous system recovery through the full arc of this journey.

That means yōjō devices on board, with daily vagus nerve stimulation built into their training and racing routines. It means personalized protocols, tuned to each athlete's physiology, training load, and recovery profile. It means ongoing science support, from prep to finish, our science team reviewing data, iterating protocols, and answering the questions that come up along the way.

This is the cleanest possible expression of the science we build around. Helping two of the most physiologically literate athletes access recovery under conditions designed to deny it to them is precisely what yōjō is here to do.

Follow along

This is the start of an eight-month journey that will end on a beach in Antigua in early 2027. Between now and then, we'll be sharing the science, the milestones, and the data from Sophie and Vicki’s first training rows to their return to life after the race, and will be digging much deeper for a three-part documentary series called Do you, better.

If you want to follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram, we'd love to have you.

‍

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. We all feel it. Taking time off to rest doesn’t help. Sipping the air along the coast doesn’t replenish. Reading under a willow tree and listening to a whip-poor-will brings only momentary lightness. Every day begins with dread and ends with another well, at least we got through it.

Who can be blamed for turning on oneself?

Is this another failure of mine? Is it a discipline problem? Is it a matter of better time management or positive thinking? Is it because I walked under a ladder that one time? Do I lack grit?

No.

In this case, what feels like a willpower problem is more often a physiological one. And at its center is something called “allostatic load”.

What is allostasis

Allostasis is your body’s adaptive system. It maintains stability through change.

The baseball player out in left field who has sensed something in the body language of the batter starts to jog forward, his eyes locked on the ball flying from the pitcher’s hand. When the ball eventually pops up into the air, the player is already in motion, already underneath it, mitt reaching. This is allostasis.

Allostasis is your body predicting demands and preparing for them. It is why you begin to shiver when you step into cold air — your body has sensed the change in environment, knows a sudden drop in body temperature is possible and dangerous, and so rapidly contracts and relaxes your muscles to generate heat.

Prediction and preparation. The aim is homeostasis — internal balance.

This makes allostasis extraordinarily effective under normal conditions. The problem is what happens when those conditions are no longer normal.

What happens to the game if, after catching the ball and tossing it back to the pitcher, the baseball player does not return to his original position and instead runs around after imaginary fly balls?

Where the system begins to fail

There is a physical cost to allostasis. Changing bodily processes and triggering actions to pre-emptively maintain homeostasis have consequences. If allostatic processes are activated too often or stay activated for long periods, these consequences accumulate.

Called allostatic load, this accumulation leads to inadequacy and dysfunction.

If an allostatic process is activated frequently and never shuts off, eventually the changes it affects will grow less and less appropriate, its abilities to respond to anticipated needs stunted.

Your body, still driven by the need for homeostasis, sets other allostatic processes going to compensate.

Allostatic load is very obvious in chronic stress.

Your stress response is fundamentally allostatic and can cause a lot of damage if it becomes dysregulated.

Stress and allostatic load

During a stress response, your body releases adrenaline, cortisol, and pro-inflammatory cytokines. These are not inherently harmful. In the context of a brief, genuine threat, they are precisely what keeps you alive.

Adrenaline sharpens focus and mobilizes energy. Cortisol sustains the response and modulates immune function. Pro-inflammatory cytokines coordinate the immune system's rapid activation.

Duration is the problem.

When cortisol remains chronically elevated, your cells begin to downregulate their sensitivity to it, a biological response to over-signaling. The immune system, which normally depends on cortisol as a brake, begins to lose that brake. The result is immune dysregulation, which typically manifests as chronic low-grade inflammation.

Chronic inflammation is thought to weaken the lining of your gut, weakening the barrier between your gut and your bloodstream. Inflammation also spreads like a rumor, only deepening the problem. Chronic stress is widely accepted as a major driver of noncommunicable conditions such as metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic pain, and neurological conditions, including depression. A large UK Biobank study published in 2025, drawing on data from over 200,000 adults, found that allostatic load independently predicts cardiovascular risk.

This is how chronic stress becomes structural illness. And it isn’t your fault.

Why modern stress is a particular problem for this system

Your allostatic system evolved for a different threat landscape.

A predator appears. Adrenaline spikes. Cortisol sustains the response. You flee, or you fight. The threat resolves. The parasympathetic nervous system re-engages. Cortisol clears. The system resets.

The entire sequence from activation to recovery might take minutes.

Modern psychological stressors, however, seem never to resolve.

A difficult conversation with a manager, a delayed email, anxiety about financial instability, and low-level dread about the news all trigger your allostatic stress response. But then your body never gets the signal that the threat has passed. There’s always another email.

Whether the threat is a predator or a deadline, both converge on the same downstream stress response: the same hormones, the same physiological activation, the same suppression of recovery. Allostatic load is the result of an ancient adaptive system confronting conditions it was never designed for.

And you can feel it.

Wired by tired. Non-restorative sleep. And even the self-loathing, which one meets with the mantra of the modern world: work harder.

Why you can’t push through the accumulated load

The dominant cultural response to stress is effort.

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”.

Work harder, focus more, manage time better. Sleep when you’re dead.

This response makes intuitive sense if stress is understood as a performance or discipline problem.

It is exactly the wrong response if stress is understood as a physiological state. This is what people often get wrong about burnout. They miscategorize it and so mistreat it.

When allostatic load is low, the stress response is appropriately calibrated. You engage, you recover, you adapt. This is what the system is designed for.

When allostatic load is high — when the failed shut-off pathway has been running for months, when inflammation is chronically elevated, when cortisol sensitivity is impaired — the system is already dysregulated.

Pushing harder does not clear the load. It adds to it.

When a system designed for recovery is never given the conditions to recover, trying harder means feeling worse.

What recovery actually means in this context

To reverse allostatic load, you need to allow your parasympathetic nervous system space and time to do its job. And this is why the vagus nerve is getting more focus these days.

It is the primary arm of your parasympathetic nervous system. You can read more about ‘The Wanderer’ here. Activating the vagus nerve more regularly provides that parasympathetic moment. Slow deep breathing activates the nerve, particularly extended exhalation.

Sleep is also helpful as it is the primary window during which cortisol clears and inflammatory markers reduce.

Social safety and perceived control appear to reduce the frequency of allostatic activation in the first place. The more often you’re around people you trust in environments you know, the less primed you are for predict and prepare.

Heart rate variability, or HRV, is one of the cleaner signals of whether you’re accumulating allostatic costs or shedding them.

HRV reflects the dynamic balance between stress and relaxation activity — a measure of how flexibly your autonomic nervous system responds rather than how rigidly it holds a fixed state.

Research shows that HRV declines with increasing allostatic load. Improving vagal tone and HRV over time may help reverse allostatic load, but the link is tenuous and an active area of research.

What now?

The person who turns on themselves — who counts the ladders they've walked under, who wonders if it's a grit problem — is not weak. They are doing the only thing that makes sense when no one has explained the biology.

Now you have a better explanation.

Allostatic load is real, it is measurable, and it responds to the right conditions. The body that accumulated it is the same body that knows how to recover from it. It just needs to be given the chance.

Give your body a chance with yōjō.

‍