Your Nervous System Is Contagious

Nervous system regulation is contagious — and so is activation. We are swimming in a collective sea of it right now, catching each other’s states without realizing it. Here is what that means, and what we can actually do with it.

Prefer to read? The full piece is below.

Did you know that nervous system states are contagious?

Let us start with what we are facing collectively right now. Escalating geopolitical conflict. Technological displacement. Economic instability, and a general rise in survival pressure underneath all of it. And the weather. As I write this we are deep in a heat cycle, the kind where the air over the asphalt moves and everyone we pass has that particular look on their face. I do not know whether it is quite as intense as what we moved through in 2020, but it is close, and we are all being impacted.

When we live inside that kind of instability, something tends to travel alongside it: a quiet inner sense that our safety, our survival, might be at stake. When that sense takes hold, the nervous system activates. We move into fight or flight. And because these states are contagious, what I am really describing is that we are all swimming, right now, in a sea of activation.

Here is why I say the states are contagious. Imagine walking into a room where an argument has just happened. The argument is over. Nothing is happening in the moment. And yet we know, immediately, that something occurred in that room.

We often frame that experience through an energetic lens, or as a kind of extrasensory perception. I want to ground it another way. What we are picking up is the nervous system state of the two people who were just there, both of whom are very likely still activated. It reaches us through the things we were built to read and almost never notice ourselves reading: the rate of someone’s breath, the set of a jaw, how fast a person moves through a doorway, the pitch underneath a voice that is trying very hard to sound normal.

The nervous system is the energetic system of the body, and it taps into the larger energetic field, so I am not describing two separate things here. Our inner system is picking up on a surrounding field that is charged. Both frames point at the same event.

Now let me tell you how this actually went for me.

What happened in the car

Not long ago I was driving to an errand with my kids. A fire truck came up behind us, sirens blaring. I pulled over. The car ahead of me stayed in the lane and kept moving, then cut into a turn lane at the last possible second and nearly took out somebody else doing it.

After the truck passed, I pulled back into traffic. As I came up alongside her, she tried to pull out immediately in front of me and almost hit my car. No signal. No warning. I did not stop for her. I will be honest: I had already formed an opinion about her driving, and I was not feeling generous.

Then the horn. She leaned on it — a good ten seconds, far longer than any honk needs to be.

I looked at my kids and laughed and said, “Oh. I guess that one was for me.”

Notice that moment. Somebody laid on a horn at me for ten full seconds and I had enough room in my system to find it funny. I was fine.

But she was not finished. She pulled out behind me and rode my bumper. Then she swerved around, laid on the horn again, flipped me off, and yelled at me through the glass as she went past.

And suddenly, I was no longer fine. I was ready to fight. My hands were tight on the wheel, my chest had gone hot, my breath was fast, and my foot might have even hit the accelerator. I heard myself say out loud, “What an entitled bitch.”

That is not a character reference — or maybe it was. But that is just the sort of thing that arrives when the system is fired up. The activation landed in me, and it landed hard, and I want it here on the page, because the version of this story where I am serene throughout is useless to you.

Then I caught it. A moment, in my head, that said, “Stop.”

I sat there gripping the wheel, breathing, saying out loud: “Let it go. Let it go. It’s not mine.” Over and over. In the car, in real time, with my kids watching the entire performance.

I am fairly certain they were having two thoughts at once. Oh God, mom is doing her thing again. And also: thank God mom is doing her thing again, because the other thing that wants to flow when someone reaches a particular level of asshole is not soft, or calm, or peace-loving.

It was hard — to catch it, and to calm it down. I want to say that clearly. It was not graceful and it was not fast.

Where it came from, and where it landed

Here is the first thing I want you to see. I did not start out activated. She did. It came at me through a horn and a bumper and a hand out a window, and it got in. That is the contagion. Not a metaphor. It arrived through a windshield.

And here is the second thing, which matters more.

Somebody was rude to me in traffic. That is a small event. My response was not small. I was genuinely ready to chase her down and chew her out.

Intensity is information. When the size of our reaction does not match the size of what happened, the reaction is telling us that something else is underneath it. In my case I did not have to look far. My kids were in the car. Someone driving like that with my children a few feet away is not a small event to the part of me whose entire job is those two people. That part does not care about proportion. It never has.

So the field brought the charge. But the charge landed somewhere that was already loaded. That is almost always how it works.

The contagion does not create the wound. It finds it.

Which is why “don’t let other people get to you” is not advice. It is a wish.

What we can actually do with it

First: if the body is flooding, work with the body, not the story.

Heart pounding, chest tight, thoughts racing and building the case. And the case feels airtight. It always does; that is the tell. We cannot sort what is old from what is current while our system is screaming, because the part of us that does the sorting has gone offline. So do not start there. Breathe. Move. Make sound. Grip the wheel and say something ridiculous out loud, if that is what is available to us. Let the charge move.

Exhale longer than the inhale. Feet on the floor, weight dropping. Look around and name what is actually in the room, or in the car, or on the road in front of us. These are not calming techniques in the soft-focus sense. They are how we tell our body that the threat is not currently in the vehicle.

And if breathing is the only thing we can manage, use it. That is the practice. Not the warm-up to the practice. Creating the pause is the work, and it is most of the work for a long time.

The sorting comes afterward. When the body has quieted enough that we can think, then we can ask: what was the actual size of that? What came riding along with it? Is this about what is happening now, or is this touching something older? And most importantly, is it even ours?

Oftentimes the charge is not even ours; we just got picked up for the ride. That woman’s rage — for whatever reason it was present — was not about me. She had something activating her before I came along; I just offered a convenient target for it to land on. I know the charge was not mine because before we tangled, I was fine. I was fine even after the first horn. I carried calm ground into the whole thing and lost it only after the second pass.

And here is where the two halves meet. The charge came from her. But the reason it got in so fast, and hit so hard, was mine — the part whose whole job is those two kids in the back seat. The contagion was not mine. What it landed on was. Both are true at once, and holding both is the actual skill. So the question is not only whose the charge was. It is also why it found such a ready home. Reading the state we were in leading up to it, and comparing it to what happened after, is one of the clearest clues about what came from where.

The part I most want to offer

If activation is contagious, so is regulation. That is true, and it is the good news underneath all of this. That is not one more thing to carry, and I am not handing anyone another job.

I am not saying we have to be the regulated person in the room. Sometimes we cannot be. Sometimes that is because our system is already maxed out, or the capacity to absorb what is coming in is just not available. That is not a verdict; it is information. As someone who lives this work, that encounter still took me out of capacity for a solid minute, with an audience. It happens. And it is not worth beating ourselves up over. It is information, and it becomes practice, if we let it.

The instruction is smaller than that. When we notice we have gone from fine to furious in ninety seconds, recognize what just happened. Some of that was handed to us. Some of it was already ours. And then do the thing we were already doing: attend to our own nervous system. Learn our own signals. Build capacity.

That is the whole practice, and it has never been about anybody else.

The rest takes care of itself. When we are not adding to the sea of activation, we are simply not adding to it. We do not have to aim at that, or manage it, or take responsibility for the state of the room. It is a byproduct. We do the inner work and the effect on the field happens on its own, whether or not we are tracking it.

So I will close with a question — one for all of us. Whose state have we been catching lately, and what is one small practice that might help us return to our own?

If you want to go deeper on why our systems read and shape one another, Deb Dana’s work on polyvagal theory is a grounded place to start. And if you’re new to mapping your own states, begin with The Map.

Music: DiepThanhDK via Pixabay

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