If you’ve ever felt constantly tired, anxious, or emotionally flat, this week’s video is for you.
So many people are stuck in a stress response without realising it. Our nervous system can get stuck in “on” (fight/flight) or “off” (freeze) without our consent, and it can affect everything: our physical body, our emotions, our energy, and our relationships.
And I don’t want that for you.
I want you to feel calm, connected, and deeply alive.
Here are 3 ways this new video might help you:
✅ Explore the deep connection between our nervous system and emotional wellbeing, particularly focusing on the role of our hips.
✅ Understand how the sympathetic and vagus nerves influence our stress levels, mood, and physical state.
✅ Learn practical tips to relieve tension and enhance emotional balance.
This video aims to help you shift from states of anxiety and shutdown, to vitality and ease, fostering a more fulfilling life.
Are you ready to get out of survival mode and back into flow?
Rather read the transcript?
here it is…
You are doing all the right things. You’re eating well, moving well, and meditating still, but you’re feeling drained, anxious, and maybe shut down.
It might not be about what you’re doing. But rather, how your nervous system is wired, underneath all of that.
We can imagine our nervous system as the thermostat to our inner world. It’s constantly reading our environment and adjusting our internal settings in response. When it’s functioning optimally, we feel calm, connected, and energised. But when it gets stuck in survival mode, it’s like the temperature gets cranked to extremes. Too much, it goes into the fight/flight response; too little, and it freezes or shuts down.
Hello and welcome. I’m Sarah Gowans, remedial massage and craniosacral therapist, as well as emotional integration facilitator at BlossomingMe and the Healthy Learning Lounge. Here we are a sanctuary for you to tap into, to nurture your health, wellbeing, and positive mindset. We focus on helping you clear your stresses, tensions, and blocks so that are stopping you from living your most fulfilling life.
This week we’ll explore how our hips and nervous system wiring, particularly the sympathetic chain and the dorsal and ventral branches of our vagus nerve. How they directly impact our emotional state, our energy levels, and our ability to engage with the world. This is the science behind why trauma can get stored in our body and how your hips can play a starring role in your healing.
The sympathetic nervous chain chain when our, when our body’s accelerator gets stuck
Do you feel like you’re always on, even when you’re trying to rest? You might be stuck in sympathetic overdrive.
The sympathetic nervous system keeps us alert and ready, but it’s only meant to kick off during a real threat. When chronic stress becomes our baseline, our body stays in a heightened state, keeping our muscles tense, especially in the hip area, we have shallow breathing, and our mind is always on edge over time. This can contribute to burnout, anxiety, and disrupted sleep.
Maybe you’re struggling to get out of bed, or feeling numb, or like you’re in a fog all the time. You might be experiencing dorsal vagal dominance. A deep freeze state where our body quietly is shutting down to protect itself.
In the words of polyvagal therapist, teacher, and author, Deborah, Donna, “in Dorsal, the world feels unreachable even if it’s right in front of you.” When our body perceives inescapable threat, it drops into the dorsal vagal state, a freeze mode designed for our survival. We may feel numb, disconnected, or shut down completely. This can also look like chronic fatigue, depression, dissociation, and even digestive issues, and often goes together with collapsed posture and tightness in our hips and pelvis.
Ventral vagal our path to calm, connection, and confidence
What if feeling joyful, energised, and socially connected was less about our mindset and more about our biology?
The ventral vagus nerve branch of our nervous system is our social engagement nerve. According to neuroscientist Dr. Steven Porges, “the ventral vagus is the nerve of safety, connection, and possibility.”
When it’s online, we feel safe, calm, and curious. Our breath deepens, digestion improves, and relationships feel so much easier. It can also be linked to healthy hip movement because when our body feels safe, it wants to move.
Why do the hips hold so much emotion?
Have you ever cried during a hip opening pose in yoga and didn’t know why? You’re not alone. The hips house major nerve pathways and deep musculature like the psoas muscle, which is directly tied to which is directly tied to the stress response. Chronic gripping or holding here can create not just physical tension, but an emotional backlog. So, releasing these muscles can stir up our emotions because we’re also releasing protective, emotional patterns.
Studies show that chronic sympathetic nervous system activation is linked to anxiety disorders, sleep disruption, and systemic inflammation. Dorsal vagus states in particular can contribute to immobilization of our body, fatigue, and disassociation in trauma survivors, according to Steven Porges. While our high vagal tone, when our vagus nerve is functioning well, is associated with better mood regulation, heart rate variability, which is a key marker of our resilience, and an even stronger immune system response. Very useful against winter colds and flu.
Stress, according to Deb. Donna, “Is not in the event itself. It’s in our nervous system’s response to the event.” And, adds Liz Kosh in her book, the Psoas Book, “Our issues are in our tissues, and our hips are often in the frontline.”
When you consider that our psoas muscle has more proprioceptive nerve endings than any other muscle, making it deeply responsive to our emotional and stress levels, then our hips become a massively powerful way to impact them.
Here are a couple of practical tips to help you today:
- Small movements like Gentle Pelvic Rocking or Seated pelvic Tilts can help safely nudge our system out of freeze mode without overwhelming it.
- Humming, chanting, or singing can stimulate our vagus nerve, and for bonus points,
- Sway your hips. While you’re doing it, or add some hip, hip circles for a gentle psoas release,
Remember to approach all of these with curiosity, not force.
In Conclusion:
Our nervous system isn’t just a background player, then. It shapes how we feel, think, move, and connect. By understanding its role in our hips and pelvis, we can start to shift from states of anxiety, depression, or shutdown into vitality, engagement, and ease.
I hope you found value in today’s video, and if you did, please like and share it. And join us next week as we explore how the same system affects our digestion, chronic pain and illness, and our body’s capacity to heal, to help nurture your health, wellbeing, and positive mindset. So that you can live your most fulfilling life.
From my heart to yours, Namaste.
Sarah xx
At Blossoming Me, we’ve worked with so many people who feel stuck in cycles of pain and frustration. But the key to lasting relief often starts with understanding your body, not just where you hurt, but why.
Book your appointment here:
About Blossoming Me
BlossomingMe offers a fully integrated approach to your wellbeing. Located on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Sarah is our Cranio-sacral and Remedial Massage Therapist and health and lifestyle coach. She can help relieve those problematic knots, tightness and other specific ailments to promote a healthy recovery. These complementary massage therapies can be combined to suit your needs, and include: craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, remedial, swedish, and body-mind-massage.
Our qualified Osteopath, Alexis, offers a drug free, minimally invasive, “hands on” treatment focusing on the musculoskeletal system with its associated muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, bones and joints. Alexis takes a functional approach. This means that she focuses on the way a component (body part, tissue or group of tissues) performs its role, as well as the way the body works, performs and integrates as a whole. Our team can support you to improve your posture and therefore your overall health.
ional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health professional before you make any changes to your health regime, before dealing with new symptoms, and, if something you have read here has raised any questions or concerns regarding your situation.