Why You Can't Manifest When You're in Survival Mode [NS Series, Pt. 1]

Hello my beautiful souls!

Welcome back to the Modern Manifestation blog. Feel free to listen in to today's topic in the podcast.

Let's be honest. There have been several times in my life where I felt like I was doing all the right things, taking the right actions, and still not getting what I want. I was super productive, with no results.

And if you've ever been there? Your frustration is probably part of why you found this post.

BUT, what if the problem isn't your mindset… it's your biochemistry?

Here's what I've come to learn over the years: sometimes something simply isn't meant for us. It happens…. But there are also times when something IS meant for us, but we've created a block. And more often than not, that block isn't in your mindset. It's in your body.

Today we're kicking off a four-part series on your nervous system—what it is, what it does, and why it might be the barrier standing between you and everything you're trying to call into your life. By the end of this mini-series, my hope is that you're going to understand your chemistry in a way that completely reframes how you approach your manifestation practice. So let's get into it.

Your Biology Hasn't Gotten the Memo

In the last 10,000 years, how we live has changed dramatically… but our biochemistry has stayed the same. We have grocery stores, central air, phones, traffic… the list goes ON.

While we have significantly more stress, our bodies are still running the same operating system as our ancestors—hyperaware of potential predators, famine, and physical survival. But UNLIKE our ancestors, our stressors trigger us a thousand times a day instead of a few. You might get a triggering e-mail every hour, or every time someone sends you a text because it’s another thing to add to your list.

While we don't have saber-toothed tigers anymore, we have emails, texts, calls. We have the news cycle. For some of us, we have mounting student debt, divisive politics, food quality issues, anxiety, and seemingly endless notifications about imminent deadlines. Our brains register all of it as threat. Every. Single. Day. And then we wonder why we’re exhausted? Why so many walk around emotionally dysregulated?

Thinking about all this… it's no wonder we are often doom scrolling. On one hand, we are asking our bodies (our beautiful strong bodies) to absorb an unprecedented volume of stress signals. And on the other hand, we're expecting these resilient bodies to remain open, receptive, and energetically aligned with abundance. And then we wonder why we feel resistance. Why we struggle to make or do things for ourselves.

The reality is that for many of us… it's not a willpower problem. It's a biology problem.

As Mastin Kipp said: "The life we want requires a nervous system that isn't addicted to stress."

Fun fact—your nervous system can become addicted to cortisol and adrenaline. And it can make us mistake toxic relationships for passion. This addiction can also make someone subconsciously procrastinate for the thrill of meeting a tight deadline. It can also be the reason someone struggles with work boundaries because they need their “hit” of stress at 9 PM on the couch. It makes some people feel alive. And by some people, I definitely mean Bre 5 years ago.  

Your nervous system controls all of this.

What Your Nervous System Actually Is

Your nervous system is the command center of your entire body. It processes everything from what you feel, to how you respond, and whether you feel safe or threatened at any given moment. For our purposes, we're going to talk about two modes of the system at work: the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest state. This is where your body feels safe. Your heart rate is calm, your digestion works properly, your mind is clear, and you are open and receptive to what's around you. You and your body are at peace.

The sympathetic nervous system is your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn state. This is your body's emergency response system. Your brain narrows its focus to one thing: survival. Your body is in threat detection mode—ready to respond to an attack. You're coiled up and tense.

As someone who has struggled with sympathetic dominance, symptoms for me looked like irritability, clenching and grinding my teeth, tightness in my muscles, and more. I also lived on the edge of my emotions, meaning it would just take one comment or one ambiguous email to set me off for the rest of the day. I was super unregulated emotionally.

We all know the people stuck in sympathetic dominance because these are almost always people that are also emotionally dysregulated. They’re the ones that are quick to yell, throw tantrums, blame others, and get an attitude with you. They are extremely REACTIVE. If you were to describe them, you would say they’re firey or passionate. And there’s nothing wrong with being passionate, as long as we remain compassionate to those around us.

In Chinese medicine, they appropriately relate fire to the sympathetic mode (inflammatory) and water to the parasympathetic mode (calming). Think about expressions we use like "We need to light a fire under their ass to get them going" to encourage action. Or pouring water on a burn to calm the skin.

Things work really well when there is balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic states. You easily toggle between the two as needed. What we don’t want is to get stuck in one or the other for long periods of time (dominance).

A well-regulated nervous system will move more fluidly between these states depending on what's going on around you. You encounter a stressor, your sympathetic system activates, you respond to the attack, and then the parasympathetic system steps in to repair and help your body return to its baseline—aka homeostasis.

The issue isn't that we experience stress or activate the sympathetic system. Experiencing a range of emotions, including the uncomfortable ones, is completely normal and healthy. If we weren't feeling them at all, we would probably be dissociating—a different kind of block entirely. The issue is when we get stuck in one or the other. When the stress response activates and never fully powers down. When irritation, frustration, anxiety, and rushing become your default way of being instead of the exception. Or when you're paralyzed and can't take any action. When you become passive.

Coming Up Next

Now that you have the foundation—what your nervous system is, how it works, and what it looks like when it breaks down, in the next post I’ll share how this impacted me. I'll share what happened when my own nervous system finally hit its limit, and what uncovering the root cause taught me about the way I was moving through the world.

If any of what I've shared today has you thinking differently about your body, stay with me. My hope for you is that this series is going to change how you approach everything.

Thank you for hanging out with me today. I will catch you in the next post!

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