Get better at stress. Self-regulation & the Feldenkrais Method

As a resilience and performance coach, I help busy and stressed professionals create alignment, cultivate equanimity, and boost vitality by integrating practical mind, body and lifestyle strategies. One of my main roles is to help clients get better at stress. This involves developing and embedding skills and tools that help better regulate their nervous system and stress response.

Self-regulation is your nervous system’s ability to shift between “go mode” and “recover mode” in a healthy way.

For a highly stressed individual, this matters because constant pressure can keep the body stuck in a low-grade alarm state. You may still be functioning, but inside the system is working too hard: breathing gets shallow, the heart rate stays higher than it needs to be, muscles remain tense, sleep becomes lighter, and it takes longer to recover after meetings, decisions, conflict, or bad news.

In plain terms, self-regulation is the skill of coming back to balance after stress.

Your body has two main branches of the autonomic nervous system. “Autonomic” means it runs automatically, without you having to think about it. One branch is the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares you for action. It raises alertness, increases heart rate, tightens muscles, and speeds up breathing. This is useful when you need to act fast, lead under pressure, or deal with a real threat. The other branch is the parasympathetic nervous system, which supports rest, digestion, repair, and recovery. It slows things down and helps the body settle.

Good self-regulation is not about being calm all the time. It is about flexibility. You need the ability to turn on when needed and turn off when the demand passes. The problem for many stressed leaders is not that they work hard. It is that the “on” state stays switched on for too long.

Breathing is one of the clearest signs of this balance. When stress rises, breathing often becomes faster, shallower, or held in the upper chest. That pattern tells the brain that there may still be danger, which can keep the stress response going. When breathing becomes slower, steadier, and fuller, it sends a different message: the body is safer, the threat has passed, and recovery can begin. This is one reason breath awareness is so powerful. It is not just relaxation; it is information to the nervous system.

Heart rate is another key marker. Under stress, your heart naturally beats faster so the body can mobilize energy. That is normal and helpful in short bursts. But when stress is ongoing, a persistently elevated heart rate can leave you feeling wired, irritable, or depleted. A well-regulated nervous system can bring the heart rate back down more efficiently after a stressor. This “recovery speed” matters. Two people may both face the same pressure, but the one who recovers faster is less likely to burn out.

Stress recovery is the real goal. Life will always include demands, deadlines, and difficult conversations. Self-regulation helps the body complete the stress cycle instead of winding you up further like a tightly coiled spring. When recovery works well, you may notice that after a tense call or presentation, your body returns to baseline more quickly. Your breathing evens out, your shoulders drop, your jaw unclenches, and your mind becomes clearer again.

This is where the Feldenkrais Method can be especially valuable. The Feldenkrais Method uses gentle movement and focused attention to improve how you sense and organize yourself. In practical terms, it helps you notice patterns you may not realize you are carrying: holding your breath while concentrating, gripping through the neck and jaw, collapsing through the chest, or moving with unnecessary effort. These patterns often go unnoticed because they become normal under stress. We all develop our own unique organisation and patterns around stress.

Feldenkrais is powerful because it works through awareness, not force. Rather than “pushing through” tension, you learn to sense small differences in movement, breathing, and ease. That gives the nervous system new information. And the nervous system changes through information. When the brain receives a clearer signal that movement can be smaller, softer, and more efficient, it often reduces excess effort. That can support a calmer state, better breathing, and smoother transitions between stress and rest. Indeed we can learn that there is more choice in how our mind and body organizes and responds to stress.

In other words, Feldenkrais can help you retrain the body’s default habits. If your system has learned to brace, hurry, and stay guarded, Feldenkrais can create moments of safety and ease that are deeply educational for the nervous system. Over time, that can improve homeostasis, which simply means the body’s ability to keep internal conditions stable and balanced. Homeostasis is not about perfection; it is about returning to balance after disruption.

A practical example: imagine you have just come out of a difficult board meeting. Your mind is still racing, your chest feels tight, and your breathing is high and quick. A Feldenkrais-based practice might begin with noticing how you are sitting, how your feet contact the floor, and whether your jaw is tense. You might make a very small movement of the head, ribs, or pelvis, while paying attention to how breathing changes. Often, when effort decreases, breathing becomes easier without being forced. That shift can help the heart rate settle and the whole system begin to recover.

This is different from exercise that aims to “burn off” stress, though exercise can also help. Feldenkrais teaches the nervous system how to organize itself more efficiently. It reduces unnecessary effort. That matters because chronic stress is not only about too much doing; it is also about too much unconscious bracing. A body that is constantly bracing spends energy all day long.

For a CEO, the payoff is practical. Better self-regulation can improve decision-making, patience, focus, communication, and sleep quality. It can also reduce the chance that one stressful event spills into the next. Instead of carrying the last meeting into the next one, you recover more fully and show up more grounded and centred.

A simple way to think about it is this: self-regulation is the ability to stay effective without staying stuck in stress. The nervous system needs both activation and recovery. Breathing, heart rate, and muscle tone show up as a pattern of organisation and reflect a system that is either stuck in activation or in balance. The Feldenkrais Method can be a powerful tool because it helps the body learn, through gentle awareness, how to let go of unnecessary patterns of tension and return to a more balanced state.

That is not a luxury. For someone under sustained pressure, it is a performance skill and a health skill at the same time.

Some questions worth considering.

Q. How does stress show up for you, in your mind, body and behaviour

Q. What are your go to strategies when you feel stuck in fight & flight?

Q. How are they working for you?

Q. What else can you embed on a daily basis to aid you in better nervous system regulation and balance?

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/4d8f0d_6c2d390732a847ccb2c5dc86284b8e88/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

 Jason leading a collective of coaches through a 9 minute Somatic Grounding Practice.