The Nervous System Reset Routine
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Swart's set of deliberately tiny interventions for pulling yourself out of sympathetic fright-flight-fight and into parasympathetic rest and recharge during a working day. Her premise is that roughly seventy to seventy-five percent of people in the western world are far more stressed than they should be, and that when we lived in the cave, resilience was recouped naturally through nature, barefoot walking, campfires and the night sky. Modern life is bombardment across time zones, so recovery now has to be scheduled rather than incidental. The tools cost seconds: deep breaths that supply the brain with oxygen, a sharp inhale and long sigh, and switching from sharp near focus to a wide distant vista, which mimics the uninterrupted horizon view that is restful for the brain. The payoff she rates highest is knowing the control is yours.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Catch the shallow breathing
Under stress people breathe shallowly or hold their breath entirely, notably while scrolling on social media, without realising it. Noticing is the trigger for everything else.
- 2
Take ten deep breaths at your desk
The brain's two resources are glucose and oxygen. Once you've eaten, oxygen is the other thing you can supply it with, and ten deep breaths gives it a boost even when your breathing is normal.
Pro tip Anchor it to an existing cue, such as the shower or the top of each hour.
- 3
Add a sharp intake and a long sigh
A single sharp inhale followed by a really long sigh is Swart's quickest standalone reset.
- 4
Run the near-to-far vista switch
Spend one minute looking at something close and detailed, a leaf, a petal, a squirrel, then one minute on something large and distant, a tree, a building, a cloud. Moving from sharp focus to a wide vista is restful for the brain.
Pro tip Pair it with an existing walk or run rather than adding a new block to the day.
- 5
Escalate by time available
Tired and you have time for a nap, take it; no nap, go for a walk; no walk, ten deep breaths at your desk. Swart's point is that the smallest version still makes a difference.
- 6
Do an hourly two-part check-in
If you're at a desk, each hour ask how you're feeling emotionally and find a word for it, and check how deeply you're breathing. This doubles as emotional-intelligence training.
Pro tip A wider emotional vocabulary makes the naming step more useful.
- 7
Measure by trend, not by moment
If you use heart rate variability from a ring, bracelet or watch, Swart's rule is that it's the trend that matters, not any momentary reading.
Watch out A single red reading during exercise is not the same signal as chronic daytime sympathetic dominance.
In the wild
Swart uses the interview itself as the illustration. Sitting with Ali felt warm and relaxing to her, two former doctors resonating. But she points out that if the interviewer had been a different kind of person, deliberately quizzing her with challenging questions to trip her up, she could have had a fright-flight-fight response to it. Because she has trained the short resets and the longer-term resilience practices, she can find a way not to let someone push her into that state.
→ The additional benefit she names is not the lowered blood pressure or cortisol but knowing the response is under her control rather than dependent on outside factors, which she calls really empowering.
Common mistakes
Reading one HRV number as a verdict
Swart is explicit that trends matter more than any momentary value, and that elevated heart rate during exercise reads differently from psychological stress, so a single data point tells you very little about your actual state.
Waiting until performance visibly drops
She advises against waiting for deterioration before acting. Her own experience of the pandemic was that she coped because she had proactively built mindfulness and resilience beforehand, not because she started once things got hard.
Assuming stress recovery happens by itself
Cave-dwelling life recouped resilience naturally through nature and short acute threats. With information arriving 24/7 across time zones, unless you specifically do something to reduce the load, the trajectory is burnout.
From the transcript
“and even if we're breathing normally it's still good to take 10 deep breaths because it does give that boost of oxygen to the brain”
“or a petal or a squirrel or something like that's like close up right in front of you in great detail and then take one…”
“you can do a sharp intake of breath and just do like a really long sigh as well that's a nice little way to reset…”
From the episode
Change Your Brain: The Power Of Neuroplasticity And Braincare - Dr Tara Swart
Dr Tara Swart