A Simple Morning Practice for Your Nervous System

Supporting the nervous system is an often-overlooked part of healing, but one that can have profound benefits in improving how we feel and how our body functions. Our autonomic nervous system is what keeps our bodily functions running smoothly in the background, so it’s pretty important.

You may have heard people delineate the main modes or branches that our autonomic nervous system toggles between as rest-digest-repair mode (the parasympathetic branch) and fight-flight-freeze mode (the sympathetic branch). Technically that’s a little bit of an oversimplification of all the complex beauty that is our autonomic nervous system, but it’s how I and many others like to explain the ANS to our clients because it keeps things clear and concise, so we’ll just roll with it here.

When we’re dealing with chronic stress, trauma, inflammation, or other health issues, our nervous system may end up stuck in fight-flight-freeze mode, simply because it’s doing its best to try to protect us from perceived threats.

Evolutionarily speaking, this used to look like running from or fighting something big and scary that was an immediate physical threat, like a bear. And if things really go to shit with the hypothetical bear, it could also mean playing dead, which is the freeze or shutdown mode of the nervous system that you might be familiar with if you’ve experienced things like burnout, overwhelm, complex trauma, or depression.

Nowadays, however, those fight-flight-freeze responses are triggered less by bears or other acutely life-threatening situations and more often by chronic daily stressors like doomscrolling and too much screen time, financial pressures, work, family responsibilities, or conflicts with loved ones. It’s worth noting that other triggers that can tip your nervous system into sympathetic overdrive are blood sugar instability, not fueling yourself properly, poor circadian rhythm, and putting too much pressure on yourself.

Of course we still need that protective fight-flight-freeze mechanism to kick in sometimes, but ideally it’s not our primary state most of the time. We want to be able to move back and forth between nervous system states easily without getting “stuck,” and we want to be able to come to back to a calm, non-reactive, grounded state after a threat has passed.

When healing is a goal, one of our main jobs is to send our nervous system signals of safety, so that it can chill out and easily get back into rest-digest-repair mode.

That’s the mode where our body can do things like effectively extract nutrients from our food, rebuild tissues and repair inflammation, dial in immune function, produce balanced hormones, and take advantage of neuroplasticity to build new habits.

One of the simplest and most beneficial ways to support the nervous system is spending time outdoors, especially first thing in the morning. Think about it like this: we evolved spending most of our time outside, and yet our modern lifestyles take place mostly indoors.

Getting outside, in full spectrum UV light, for 10-15 minutes first thing in the morning (ideally before 10am) sends signals through the eyes to the pineal gland in the brain.

Those signals help establish a healthy circadian rhythm, support a restorative sleep-wake cycle, improve immune function and tee you up for an overall beneficial, body-wide hormonal cascade. That doesn’t happen through windows, unfortunately, as they block a portion of UV light that we benefit from, even though that part of the spectrum is invisible to the human eye.

I love how simple this can be. Maybe it’s a nice excuse to walk to a coffee shop or hang out on the stoop or in your backyard in the morning before work. Maybe you’re taking a brisk walk around the block before you dive into your day, or maybe it’s as easy as sticking your head out the window while you sip your tea. 

You don’t have to commune with nature (though feel free, that’s great for the nervous system too!) or make it a big ordeal, and you don’t need to gaze directly into the sun either (terrible idea, don’t do it!). 

Just try to get outdoors for a few minutes in the morning—but no sunglasses please.