The Story Your Nervous System Is Telling You
Every person carries two stories: the one they tell the world — and the one the body tells beneath it.
We like to imagine that our identity is shaped by choices, reflections, and conscious insight. But long before the mind creates a narrative, the nervous system has already written its own. Your physiology—your breath, your pulse, your sense of threat or safety—is constantly telling a story about who you are, what you fear, and how close you feel to others.
And like any story, it can be misread, interrupted, or rewritten.
Understanding that story begins with a simple truth: the nervous system is the original storyteller.
Why Stories Shape Us
Humans evolved to think in stories, long before we had language or culture. Storytelling remains one of the most powerful tools for transmitting meaning because it distils complexity into something emotionally and neurologically digestible.
Skilful storytelling has been shown to help listeners understand complex ideas in personal and memorable ways (Suzuki et al., 2018). It does more than convey information — it creates an internal shift. It activates empathy, supports self-reflection, and strengthens or challenges core beliefs (Gupta & Jha, 2022).
This is why a single story — whether told to us or told by us — can change the trajectory of a life.
Stories Build Resilience From the Beginning
For children, storytelling is not entertainment. It’s architecture.
It strengthens imagination, supports prosocial behaviour, and builds emotional resilience by helping them process experiences symbolically and safely. A recent systematic review found that storytelling plays a critical role in developing protective psychological factors, including resilience, in childhood (Ramamurthy et al., 2024).
In other words, stories are practice rounds for life. They teach the nervous system how to navigate challenge.
And this continues into adulthood, except the stories become more internal — narratives about our worth, our safety, our potential, and our place in the world.
Polyvagal Theory: Your Body Tells a Story Before You Do
According to Polyvagal Theory, the autonomic nervous system is organised hierarchically, shaped by evolutionary layers of the vagus nerve. At the top of that hierarchy sits the ventral vagal complex (VVC), which supports physiological flexibility, emotional regulation, and social engagement (Porges, 2025).
Here’s the key point: Your nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger — a process called neuroception — long before your conscious mind interprets anything.
This internal surveillance shapes the story you tell yourself about your life.
When your neuroception detects safety, your body allows for connection, curiosity, humor, hope.
When it detects threat, your physiology pulls you into mobilization (anxiety, hypervigilance) or immobilization (shutdown, numbness).
That shift in state changes what story feels true.
A safe body tells an expansive story. A threatened body tells a survival story.
When the Story Gets Stuck: Trauma and Autonomic Loops
Trauma disrupts the nervous system’s ability to update its storyline.
Individuals with trauma histories often remain anchored in defensive states even when danger has passed (Porges, 2025). This chronic autonomic activation creates a looping internal narrative:
“I am not safe.”
“Something bad is about to happen.”
“I can’t trust myself.”
When neuroception is tuned toward danger, access to the ventral vagal pathways necessary for connection and emotional regulation becomes limited. This leads to oscillation between sympathetic mobilization and dorsal vagal shutdown, with poor access to the stable, relational space in between.
This pattern underlies conditions like PTSD, depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder — all of which involve autonomic dysregulation interfering with psychological recovery (Porges, 2025).
In other words, trauma is not just a memory. It is a story the nervous system keeps retelling.
Vagal Tone: The Physiology of Your Inner Narrator
Vagal tone — the strength and responsiveness of the vagus nerve — is a key biological marker of how flexible and resilient your internal narrator is.
Lower vagal tone predicts decreased emotional resilience and increased stress sensitivity (Hage et al., 2017).
Higher vagal tone predicts stronger self-regulation, healthier social engagement, and faster physiological recovery (Kolacz, Kovacic & Porges, 2019).
Reduced vagal efficiency is also emerging as a marker for dysautonomia and functional disorders (Kolacz et al., 2019).
When vagal tone is impaired, the story your nervous system tells becomes narrow, rigid, and fear-focused.
When vagal tone improves, the story widens. More nuance emerges.
More options become available.
An Evolutionary Story Built Into Our Anatomy
The ventral vagal complex is not just a newer addition to the autonomic nervous system. It is an evolutionary repurposing of ancient circuits — a shift from pure survival reflexes to a system designed for communication, co-regulation, and social bonding (Porges, 2001).
This is why emotional safety is so powerful: it activates the most evolutionarily advanced pathways in the human body.
Connection calms. Safety restores. Co-regulation rewrites physiological stories that once felt permanent.
What Story Is Your Nervous System Telling Right Now?
Every breath, every heartbeat, every moment of tension or ease is a line in an ongoing narrative.
Your nervous system may be telling a story that feels familiar:
“I must stay alert.”
“I’m alone.”
“I can’t let my guard down.”
“Everything is fine until it suddenly isn’t.”
But stories can evolve. States can shift. Physiology can change.
If storytelling helps shape identity in children and adults alike (Gupta & Jha, 2022; Ramamurthy et al., 2024), then learning to understand and reauthor your nervous system’s signals is not just therapeutic — it is evolutionary.
When you learn to listen, you learn to intervene. When you intervene, you learn to transform.
Your nervous system is telling a story. The question is whether it’s the one you want to live in — or the one you’re ready to rewrite.
Work With Me
If you’re a founder, leader, or high-capacity professional, you don’t need motivation — you need clarity, self-command, and psychological precision. You need a way to navigate complexity with a nervous system that stays stable under pressure.
That’s where I come in.
I combine biology, psychology, and narrative strategy to help you make decisions you can trust, break friction cycles, and build a way of working that doesn’t burn you out. My clients come to me when they want depth, honesty, and a thinking partner who won’t let them hide from themselves.
If you want to explore whether we’re a fit, you can schedule a consultation here.
