At a Glance
Your nervous system controls everything from how you respond to stress to how you experience emotions. When it becomes dysregulated, you may feel anxious, tired, or emotionally reactive without understanding why. Learning to recognise the signs of a dysregulated nervous system is the first step to restoring calm, balance, and emotional wellbeing.
What Is a Dysregulated Nervous System?
The nervous system acts as the body’s command centre. It regulates vital functions such as breathing, heart rate, and digestion, while also managing emotional responses. Under normal circumstances, your nervous system moves fluidly between states of rest and alertness depending on what the situation demands.
When the system becomes dysregulated, those natural patterns of balance are disrupted. Your body may stay in a heightened state of alert for too long, or struggle to calm down after a stressful situation. This dysregulation can result in persistent fatigue, anxiety, or physical symptoms that don’t seem connected to a clear cause.
Hypnotherapy helps address this imbalance by calming the subconscious mind and teaching the body to shift from stress response to relaxation response more naturally.
Causes of Nervous System Distress
Several physical, emotional, and psychological factors can contribute to nervous system distress. Some of the most common causes include:
- Chronic stress: Constant exposure to pressure at work, ongoing relationship tension, or financial concerns can keep your system stuck in “fight or flight.”
- Past trauma: Unresolved experiences from childhood or adulthood can leave the nervous system overly reactive.
- Sleep deprivation: Irregular sleep patterns alter hormone balance and increase cortisol, which affects nervous system regulation.
- Lifestyle choices: Excess caffeine, alcohol, and highly processed foods can overstimulate or deplete your system.
- Lack of boundaries: Constant availability to digital devices or emotional demands prevents the body from resetting into its natural rest state.
Over time, these factors can quietly build up, leaving your body feeling constantly tense or drained. Addressing dysregulated nervous system symptoms early helps prevent chronic fatigue, burnout, or anxiety-related conditions.
Signs of a Dysregulated Nervous System
Recognising when your nervous system is in distress is crucial for healing. Here are some common dysregulated nervous system symptoms to look out for:
- Frequent fatigue, even after rest
- Sudden emotional changes or irritability
- Persistent feelings of anxiety, fear, or overwhelm
- Trouble concentrating or remembering details
- Muscle tension, digestive issues, or rapid heartbeat without clear cause
- Difficulty sleeping or shallow, restless sleep
- Feeling detached from your surroundings or “on edge” all the time
When this imbalance continues for a long time, your body begins to interpret everyday events as threats. Hypnotherapy for nervous system dysregulation treatment can promote deeper relaxation by interrupting these patterns at a subconscious level.
How to Fix a Dysregulated Nervous System
Repairing your connection with your body takes patience and practice. While there’s no instant cure, a combination of lifestyle changes, mindfulness, and therapeutic support can help.
Here are some simple tips on how to fix a dysregulated nervous system:
- Deep breathing and grounding exercises: Slow, intentional breathing activates the parasympathetic system, which promotes calmness.
- Regular movement: Gentle exercises such as yoga, stretching, or walking release stored tension.
- Healthy sleep routine: Aim for consistent rest to reset your circadian rhythm.
- Therapeutic support: Working with a clinical hypnotherapist helps you identify subconscious stress responses and reprogram them for balance.
- Mindful awareness: Practising mindfulness improves your ability to stay present instead of reacting automatically to stress.
For many people, hypnotherapy offers a structured way to retrain the nervous system so it learns to shift more easily from stress to calm. During hypnosis, your mind becomes deeply relaxed yet alert, which allows positive suggestions to take root. Over time, this strengthens emotional regulation and promotes a more stable sense of wellbeing.
Contact Susannah to Achieve Emotional Calmness With Hypnosis
If you often feel anxious, overstimulated, or emotionally drained, your nervous system may be signalling distress. Working with a professional hypnotherapist can help you retrain your body’s natural rhythm, reduce tension, and restore internal balance.
With over two decades of experience, Susannah Saunders has supported hundreds of individuals in overcoming emotional and physiological imbalances through a combination of hypnotherapy, coaching, and NLP. Each session is tailored to your unique needs and can be conducted in person at the London clinic or online for your convenience.
If you are curious about how nervous system dysregulation treatment could help you to rediscover calm and regulate your body’s natural stress response, reach out today. Susannah will talk you through how hypnotherapy can support your nervous system recovery and emotional resilience.

