Stress, the Nervous System and the Relaxation Response

By Dominik Heliosch | Studio Mettā

You probably already know that stress is not great for you. But do you know what is actually happening inside your body when you feel it? And more importantly, do you know that your body carries a built-in antidote, one that you can learn to activate at will?

This post is about understanding stress from the inside out: what it is, what it does over time, how to recognise when your nervous system has stopped coping, and what the science says about bringing it back into balance. Because once you understand the mechanism, you stop fighting stress and start working with your body instead.

What Is Stress: A Physiological Picture

Stress is not just a feeling. It is a full-body physiological response, one that evolved over millions of years to keep you alive.

When your brain perceives a threat, whether that is a predator, a deadline, or a difficult conversation, a small almond-shaped structure called the amygdala sounds the alarm. Within milliseconds, your hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, triggering what Walter Cannon first described in the 1930s as the "fight-or-flight" response.

What follows is a cascade of physiological changes, all designed to help you survive:

• Heart rate and blood pressure rise, pumping more blood to the muscles

• Breathing quickens to take in more oxygen

• Cortisol and adrenaline flood the bloodstream, mobilising energy reserves

• Digestion slows, as the body redirects resources away from non-essential functions

• Muscles tighten, preparing for physical action

• The immune system is temporarily suppressed

In short: the body shifts entirely into emergency mode. Every system is either ramped up or shut down in service of one goal: getting you out of immediate danger.

For that purpose, it is a brilliant system. The problem is that it was designed for acute, short-lived threats. Not for the sustained, low-grade pressure of modern professional life.

What Is Chronic Stress and How Does It Develop?

Acute stress is the short burst of pressure before a presentation, the sudden fright, the urgent deadline. The body responds, you get through it, and the nervous system returns to baseline. This is healthy and normal. There is even a form of positive stress, sometimes called eustress, the productive tension you feel before something meaningful and new. The kind that sharpens your focus and gives you energy rather than draining it.

Chronic stress is something different. It develops when the stress response is activated repeatedly, or simply never fully switches off. When work pressure is constant. When financial anxiety hums in the background. When relationship tension never quite resolves. When the body stays in a low-grade state of alert for weeks, months or years.

Over time, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body's central stress regulation system, begins to dysregulate. Cortisol, which is meant to spike and fall, remains chronically elevated. And prolonged high cortisol has far-reaching consequences throughout the body.

The Signs of Chronic Stress

Chronic stress is often invisible at first, because the body is remarkably good at adapting. Many people carry significant stress loads without recognising them as such, until something in the system breaks down.

Some common signs to watch for:

Physical: persistent fatigue even after sleep, frequent headaches, tight jaw or shoulders, digestive issues (IBS, bloating, irregular bowel), getting ill more often, low libido, disrupted sleep, increased heart rate at rest

Mental and emotional: difficulty concentrating, mental fog, irritability that seems disproportionate to its triggers, anxiety that does not have a clear cause, a sense of numbness or emotional flatness, reduced motivation, feeling overwhelmed by things that would not normally feel so big

Behavioural: reaching more readily for alcohol, sugar, or screens; withdrawing from people; neglecting movement or sleep; a persistent sense of "I should be doing more" even while exhausted

If several of these feel familiar, the nervous system may be asking for attention. Not as a sign of weakness, but as honest feedback from a system that has been working very hard for a very long time.

How the Nervous System Works

To understand stress regulation, it helps to understand the two main branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the part of your nervous system that operates largely below conscious awareness:

The sympathetic nervous system is the accelerator. It activates in response to perceived threat or demand, producing the fight-or-flight response described above.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the brake. It governs rest, digestion, repair and recovery. When it is dominant, the heart rate slows, breathing deepens, digestion resumes, the immune system restores, and the body repairs itself.

Health is not the absence of sympathetic activation. It is the capacity to move fluidly between these two states, activated when the situation calls for it, and settled again once the moment has passed.

Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, adds an important layer to this picture. It describes a third state beyond fight-or-flight: the social engagement system, mediated by the vagus nerve, which governs our capacity for connection, communication and genuine rest. When we feel safe enough, in our bodies, in our environment, in relationship, this system comes online. And when it does, regulation happens most naturally and most deeply.

This is why connection heals. It is physiology.

Self-Regulation and Co-Regulation

Self-regulation is the capacity to return your own nervous system to a state of balance through breath, movement, meditation, rest, or any practice that activates the parasympathetic response.

Co-regulation is regulation that happens through contact with another regulated nervous system. A calm, attuned presence, whether a therapist, a trusted friend or a massage practitioner, directly supports your own system in settling. Infants cannot self-regulate at all; they depend entirely on co-regulation with a caregiver. As adults, we develop self-regulatory capacity, but the need for co-regulation never disappears. It is built into our biology, and especially valuable during those periods in life when self-regulation alone is not quite enough..

Signs of a Dysregulated Nervous System

A nervous system that has lost its capacity to self-regulate often shows up as one of two patterns:

Hyperarousal (sympathetic dominance): anxiety, hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping, restlessness, irritability, racing thoughts, heightened sensitivity to noise or stimulation

Hypoarousal (dorsal vagal shutdown): exhaustion, emotional numbness, dissociation, withdrawal, low motivation, difficulty feeling anything at all

Many people cycle between both states, which is itself a sign that the system is struggling to find its centre.

The Relaxation Response: Your Body's Built-In Antidote

In 1975, Harvard cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson published "The Relaxation Response", one of the most important books in the history of mind-body medicine. Based on research conducted at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital, Benson made a discovery that was quietly revolutionary: the body does not only have a stress response. It has an equal and opposite mechanism, one that produces measurable, consistent physiological changes that directly counteract the effects of stress. He called it the Relaxation Response.

Where the stress response increases heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol and muscle tension, the Relaxation Response decreases all of these. Where stress shifts the body into sympathetic dominance, the Relaxation Response activates the parasympathetic nervous system, returning the body to its natural state of balance and repair.

What made Benson's work genuinely groundbreaking was his other discovery: this response can be deliberately activated. And the mechanism for activating it is remarkably simple.

How to Elicit the Relaxation Response

Benson identified four core elements sufficient to trigger the response, regardless of the specific practice used:

1. A quiet environment: reducing external stimulation

2. A mental device: a repeated word, phrase, breath or mantra to anchor attention

3. A passive attitude: when the mind wanders, gently returning without frustration

4. A comfortable position: though not necessarily lying down

Ten to twenty minutes of practice once or twice a day is enough to produce measurable physiological benefits. The specific technique matters far less than the consistent return of attention to the present moment. Benson found that meditation, prayer, progressive relaxation, yoga and even repetitive physical movement could all elicit the same response, provided these four conditions were met.

His conclusion: the relaxation response is not tied to any one tradition or technique. It is an innate mechanism of the body, and many different practices can activate it.

What This Means for Daily Life

You do not need an hour on a meditation cushion to begin shifting your nervous system. Benson's research suggested ten minutes is enough. Your nervous system learns through consistency, not intensity. Even simply finding a moment every day in which the body is not being asked to perform, respond or produce, where it can just rest, is enough.

This can look like sitting on a chair and breathing consciously. It can look like going for a walk without your phone. A few minutes of conscious body stretches before sleep. Any practice that creates Benson's four conditions: quiet, a point of focus, a passive attitude, a comfortable position. Over time, what changes is that the body, instead of running on chronic emergency, will have energy again for the things that actually matter. The gap between stimulus and response begins to widen. The capacity to choose rather than react grows.

A little side note: if this article made you curious about meditation and what it looks and feels like in practice, the previous post on this blog explores exactly that. You can read it here: Meditation: The Practice of Recognising Awareness

A Note on When to Seek Support

If you recognise the signs of chronic stress in yourself, and particularly if they have been present for a long time, it is worth considering support beyond self-practice. Working with a somatic coach, therapist or bodywork practitioner can offer something that solo practice cannot: co-regulation, skilled guidance, and a safe space to process what the body has been carrying.

The nervous system heals most readily in connection. It is simply how we are wired.

If you are curious about somatic coaching or Thai yoga massage as a support for stress regulation, I would be glad to connect. You can book a free introductory conversation at schedule.studiometta.com

Studio Mettā | Traditional Thai Yoga Massage & Somatic Coaching | Amsterdam Where traditional Eastern practices meet the modern mind.