Nervous System Literacy : What is it? Why now?

Understanding your body to enhance creativity, collaboration, and resilience

For several years, I’ve been teaching designers and changemakers about trauma-informed practice. A hidden curriculum in this training has always been the nervous system. How our states influence the way we show up in life and work.

Learning about my own nervous system and my adaptive stress responses has been a game-changer. It has shifted how I work, how I relate, and how I care for myself. I believe nervous system literacy is a critical superpower for our fast, complex, and often overwhelming times.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed, especially when our window of tolerance is narrowed due to a lack of rest, saying yes too often, strong life circumstances, or the burden of feeling deeply about the state of the world.

For me, this showed up as moments of sudden activation. My breath would shorten. My heart would race. Heat would rise to my head. My thinking would cloud, and decisions became difficult. At the time, I didn’t have language for it — only the sense that something had shifted inside me.

Later, while studying trauma-informed practice during COVID, I discovered the connection between our nervous system and our ability to respond rather than react. Stress responses are not random. They’re physiological and psychological. Often shaped by early experiences — like the sting of not receiving validation from a manager, or the stress that arises when safety is missing in a workplace.

In these moments, creativity narrows and collaboration contracts.

During the pandemic, I saw dysregulation everywhere. Not just in individuals, but across whole systems: in online meetings, organisational decisions, even in my apartment building lift. We weren’t feeling safe together as a community, and without that sense of safety, clarity and creativity suffered.

This is where nervous system literacy comes in.

What is Nervous System Literacy?

Nervous system literacy is the ability to recognise how your body responds to the world and to meet those responses with care.

It’s not about staying calm all the time. It’s about noticing. Noticing when you’re present, when you’ve shifted into protection, and knowing how to come back.

Importantly, we don’t want to make ourselves wrong for feeling activated. Stress responses — like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn — are not bad. They’re natural, intelligent, protective reactions shaped by our biology and past experiences.

But when we pathologise these responses, we create more contraction.
What we need is awareness. The ability to pause before we react.
To have practices we can draw on to soothe ourselves back into a sense of safety and regulation.

Your nervous system is shaped by personal history, by the systems you work in, by your culture and environment. It’s not just individual.

It also carries your capacity to connect, imagine, collaborate, and create with others.

Why it matters now

We are living in a time of deep transition. Many of us are holding space for change in workplaces, communities, and families while inside systems that are under-resourced, overwhelming, or actively harmful.

We are asked to stay relational and imaginative, even when our own bodies feel frayed.

When our nervous systems are dysregulated—stuck in urgency, collapse, or numbness—our capacity for creativity and connection shrinks. We default to protection: speeding up, shutting down, withdrawing.

This isn’t a personal failing. It is the nervous system doing its job.

Nervous system literacy helps us be with what is.
It helps us stay connected to ourselves, each other, and the world, even when things feel hard.

Coming up in this series

Over the next few weeks I’ll share insights, tools, and stories from two decades of work in social change and from training more than 800 people in trauma-informed practice. Together we’ll explore how nervous system literacy can help you:

• reduce burnout

• foster collaboration

• unlock creativity in complex times

Because we cannot co-create change from burnt-out nervous systems. And the kind of change that matters always begins from the inside out.

This topic is at the heart of the book I’m currently working on, exploring how nervous system awareness can unlock creativity, resilience, and connection in the midst of complex change.

I invite you now to do a short reflective practice……

Return to Self: Building Your Noticing Muscle
Take a moment to pause and notice:

• What sensations are present in your body right now?

• Can you sense your breath without changing it?

• What does “home” feel like in your nervous system?

• As you’ve been reading, have you noticed any shifts in your state?

• Can you sense the space around your heart? What do you notice there?

This isn’t about achieving anything. It’s about gently building the muscle of noticing. Awareness creates choice.

Want to subscribe to this series on Substack?

Jax has started a regular article series on Substack about this topic.