All autonomic states are useful, beautiful, necessary. They are all required as options on our menu to help us survive. If you are reading these words, your Autonomic Nervous System is doing its job. If it wasn't, you would be dead.

And yet, autonomic states can become maladaptive when we get stuck in them. And guess what? Modernity is an engine for evoking maladaptive states.

This is both because we are not getting the kinds of quality inputs our ANS needs to feel safe and supported (nature, the rhythmic inputs of nature, community, signals of safety from belonging to community, meaning, purpose) and because there are so many threats around us: to our physical safety, our emotional safety, our sense of identity, our sense of what is right, our financial safety. These threats can happen with people we know or don't know, at work or home or anywhere, or just checking an email.

They can take the form of visual inputs, sounds, smells. Things that happen to us, things that happen to people we know, things that happen to people we don’t know.

When we feel unsafe, we might feel in danger, or under lifethreat. When this happens, our autonomic nervous systems retune.