We are living in a time that asks a lot from us.
The pace is fast. The pressure is constant. And the challenges we’re facing — climate disruption, burnout, inequity, polarisation — are layered and interconnected.
For many of us working in change, this complexity doesn’t just live “out there.”
It lives in our bodies too.
We feel it as urgency, exhaustion, overwhelm.
As a quickening in the chest or a collapse in our energy.
As the sense that no matter how hard we try, we can’t quite get on top of everything.
Most of us were taught to meet complexity by thinking harder, planning more, analysing our way through. But complexity doesn’t yield to force or cleverness.
It asks something different of us.
It asks for capacity.
And that capacity lives in the nervous system.
The capacity to be with complexity
Nervous System Literacy is the ability to recognise what state we’re in, understand why it’s happening, and know how to support ourselves to come back into presence.
It’s not self-help.
It’s a foundational skill for navigating modern life.
Because when our nervous system is overwhelmed, our world shrinks.
Our perception narrows.
Our thinking becomes rigid.
We lose access to curiosity, perspective and connection — the very qualities needed to work skilfully with complexity.
But when our system feels safe enough, something opens.
Our field of awareness widens.
We can consider more.
We can stay with the ambiguity a little longer.
We can hold competing truths without collapsing or fighting.
This is the heart of what I call our response-ability — our ability to respond rather than react.
Complexity needs more than cognition
Thinking matters, but it has limits. Especially when what we’re dealing with is messy, relational, emotional or systemic.
Often our body knows something long before we have the words for it.
This is because the nervous system is always scanning for cues of safety or threat. These cues shape how we interpret information and what options we can see.
When we’re dysregulated, we slip into survival: rushing, defending, pleasing, numbing, avoiding.
These patterns are intelligent — they kept us safe once — but they’re not always helpful when we’re trying to work creatively with complexity.
When we’re anchored, we have access to very different qualities: discernment, imagination, collaboration, care.
Nervous System Literacy helps us understand and work with this inner landscape.
Why this matters for people working in change
People who work in design, leadership, health, community, strategy and social innovation often carry the emotional and relational weight of the system.
You hold stories.
You hold tension.
You hold people’s hopes and fears.
You navigate uncertainty daily.
All of this requires a nervous system that can meet intensity without being overwhelmed by it.
Nervous System Literacy supports us to:
• Stay grounded in the midst of complexity
So we can listen deeply and sense what is actually needed.
• Notice early signs of activation
Before urgency or reactivity takes over.
• Work with emotions
So tension becomes information rather than something to suppress or bypass.
• Build relational safety
Because people feel our state long before they hear our words.
• Hold difference without collapsing
A regulated system can tolerate ambiguity; a dysregulated one cannot.
• Anchor groups and teams
Our nervous system is contagious. When we settle, others often settle too.
In a world of constant disruption, these are not “soft skills.”
They are leadership skills.
They are change-making skills.
They are survival skills.
The body as compass
When we’re anchored enough, the body stops being something we override and becomes something we can listen through.
It becomes an instrument for sensing the system.
We can feel when a conversation tightens.
We can sense when a room softens.
We notice what is emerging and what needs care.
Many change-makers I work with say that this shift — from thinking their way through everything to sensing their way — is what finally allowed them to work sustainably.
They stop abandoning themselves.
They notice when they’re at capacity.
They pause before reacting.
Their creativity returns.
This is embodied sense-making.
And it’s essential for navigating complexity.
Nervous System Literacy as a collective capacity
This work is personal, but it’s also profoundly collective.
Teams, organisations and cultures have nervous systems too.
They pulse with contraction and expansion, urgency and collapse, openness and fear.
When a group is stuck in chronic activation — always rushing, always pushing — decision-making deteriorates.
Relationships strain.
Imagination dries up.
When a group slows down enough to listen, breathe and regulate together, something shifts.
The system becomes more intelligent.
More relational.
More humane.
Nervous System Literacy gives us language for this.
It helps us design atmospheres of safety and collaboration.
It helps us create the conditions where people can do their best thinking and their best work.
This isn’t about making workplaces comfortable.
It’s about making them functional.
A practice for our times
We can’t remove complexity from the world.
But we can grow our capacity to be with it.
And when we do, we become more able to imagine, create and collaborate toward futures that are genuinely regenerative — not driven by urgency or fear, but by grounded presence.
This is why I believe Nervous System Literacy matters so deeply.
It’s not a luxury.
It’s not a niche.
It’s one of the ways we stay human while navigating whatever comes next.
Return to Self
Take a moment.
Feel your breath.
Notice where your body is meeting the chair or the ground.
Without trying to fix or change anything, simply sense:
What state am I in right now?
What might help me return to myself?
Nervous System Literacy begins here.
With noticing.
With remembering.
With finding our way home, again and again.