Fight or flight and why your nervous system isn't broken

If you have ever wondered why you are in fight or flight so much and how to get out of it. You're not alone. Fight or flight is the nervous system state that most women think they're in...and they aren't always right. 

In the episode, yoga therapist and yoga teacher since 2009 Keri Marino unpacks how to recognize fight or flight, helps you understand why your nervous system takes you there, reminds you that you're not broken and highlights why yoga might be exactly what you need. 

To join the wait-list for my upcoming course, Yoga as Nervous System Medicine. 

Sign up here: https://kerimarino.eo.page/yogaasnervoussytemmedicine

Or if you are catching this episode after October 2026, find the course here: https://www.kerimarino.com/practice-with-me.html

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Next steps ⬇️

Grab a free yoga practice to Come Home to Your Body

-> https://kerimarino.eo.page/comehome

Start a consistent daily yoga practice in Daily Devotion - 21 days of 10 minute yoga practices plus email support to keep you on track

-> https://thenourishedwoman.heymarvelous.com/product/92272/lessons

Curious about working with Keri 1:1 - learn more about her sessions in person and online

-> https://www.kerimarino.com/get-11-support.html

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Connect with Keri or learn more about her offerings at www.KeriMarino.com  and on instagram @the_nourished_woman

A gentle note: The Nourished Woman Podcast is educational and not a substitute for medical or mental health care. Please listen to your body and consult your provider when needed.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:45

I have a lot of conversations with women and people in general about the state of your nervous system in my practice. And one of the things that I think is so interesting is that many people that I work with think that they are chronically in a state of fight or flight. And you might be, because it is a common one for people to get stuck in. But what I also find to be true is that many people who think that you are chronically in fight or flight are not. You are either just experiencing really heightened intensity around fight or flight responses, or maybe you're experiencing fawn or freeze and you've been calling it fight or flight. I made a nervous system check-in that I use in my practice in all of my paid programs. I have a course coming up on this if you want somebody that can like break it down for you. But if you think that you're in fight or flight, you might be. And I don't, I'm not here to tell you one way or another. Some signs that you might be in fight or flight are that you're feeling anxious or angry, you're feeling reactive and irritable, you're feeling a mobilization of resources in your body, you might have really busy thoughts, you're gonna feel less connected with your body, the sensations of it, but also things like hunger or thirst. And you're gonna feel like it's all on your shoulders, that you don't have time to take care of yourself, that no one else can do what you can do, you've got to do it all. You might want to get away from a situation, get away from people, leave the room, not deal with things. You want to get away. And so there's this spectrum, right? We've got fight and we've got flight in this list. Fight is more like um reacting toward someone, and flight is more wanting to move away from someone or something, more avoidant. And they're part of being human, just so you know, like having fight or flight responses are normal. And I think one thing that's really important to name is that we have in this culture, especially among yoga practitioners or people who are doing mental health work, we have a lot of confusion about regulation. And I see over and over again that women feel, I speak to the female perspective because that's my focus here at the Nourished Woman, but this could be applied to any person, any gender. There is this constant pursuit for regulation and feeling emotionally balanced and steady and stable. But that is not my fucking goal for you. I'll be honest. My goal for you as a listener or viewer of this video or episode is not for you to be calm, cool, and collected all the time because that's not real. That's that's fake shit. Like, real people are not calm all the time. Real people get angry, real people get sad, real people experience joy. Real authentic living is feeling fierce contentment just flood your body and like light up your heart and make you like drink in the nectar of the present moment. And it is also becoming mad as hell. Like it's all part of it. And so I think part of what we have to name here in this whole nervous system space, part of I've been in yoga therapy for 17 years, and I've been specifically teaching nervous system medicine through yoga therapy for 15 years. So I've been in this field a long time, and it drives me insane seeing all the like surface level hacks and all this talk about regulation all the time because it's just, it's just not the goal. A regulated, like a regulated nervous system, from my definition, is a nervous system that can do everything. It can go into fight or flight, it can move into the window of tolerance, it can do fawn or freeze. A regulated nervous system has the capacity to move between these different states. It is not that you're always going to be calm, cool, and collected. So your fight or flight is not a problem. It's not a problem. But you might be experiencing dysregulation in your nervous system, which means that your nervous system is basically spending more time than it needs to in one of these states. So it might have like a really high, um, a really narrow threshold, a high responsiveness, and it goes into fight or flight easily. And that that going into that fight or flight or sinking down into fawn or going into freeze doesn't match how you want to feel in your life. It doesn't match the version of yourself that you want to be. And so dysregulation in your nervous system is your nervous system really wiring up to these states in a way that feels incongruent with how you want to be. And this is a much more interesting question for me is how do I tend to my nervous system in a way, practice yoga in a way, engage with the tools and medicine of yoga or nervous system tending outside of yoga? How do I engage with that in a way that helps me to work on my nervous system's flexibility and ability to move in between these different states with ease and to be able to handle situations that I want to be able to navigate with more ease and grace and clarity and connection. Like, how do I actually practice yoga in a way that helps change who I get to be in my life? Because your nervous system is operating on past information. Your nervous system, in case you haven't listened to another episode with me about this, your nervous system is a protective system inside of you, which is beautiful. It wants to keep you safe. I had a woman in a workshop a couple of months ago that told me her nervous system was broken. And I have to just sit there and be like, you know, loving and accepting of where she is. And also inwardly, I want to shake, I want to shake you guys. Because your nervous system is not broken. I'm very frustrated today about all the nervous system misinformation that exists on the internet. So just bear with me because I'm a bit kooky about it. Um your nervous system doesn't break. Like, it's just not it's not broken. You're not broken. If you live a lot of your life in fight or flight, that sucks, and I'm sorry. But also, like, it's not broken. Your nervous system got there because it wanted to protect you. You're going into fawns so much because your nervous system just wants so badly to protect you. And that's actually really cool. Thank you so much, nervous system, for doing that. And also, like, your nervous system is operating on past information. It's not operating on the present moment, and you're living, you're living in the present moment, which is what our yoga practice is so beautifully helping us to remember again and again. Is like, yeah, okay, here I am in the present moment. Okay, here I am now. Here I am in my conscious choice. Here I am in a kind of deep relationship with myself where I can observe the responses in my body and I can notice what's going on in my mind, and I can also choose through the lens of my highest self who I am in this moment, how I engage with what's coming up for me, versus like just getting really like tangled up and bogged down in it. So if you wanted to open up your capacity to have a nervous system that responds differently in the present moment, I want to talk to you a little bit about how you can do that, because I think that that is a really powerful position, a powerful mindset, a powerful perspective for you to have rather than why am I going into fight or flight? Well, we know that you're going into fight or flight in a dysregulated way because your nervous system feels like it needs to protect you. That's why. Like you can stop your internet search right there. Past experience taught your nervous system it needed to protect you, and so it goes into this. And one other thing I want to say before we get into the ways that you can help yourself are that nervous system responses are not general, they are specific. So, for example, you might have a lot of activation in a social situation. Like if you're gonna go to a gathering or an event and there are a lot of people, a lot of people can have social anxiety. And so your nervous system might have a pretty narrow window of what it can tolerate. It's called a window of tolerance before it goes into fawn mode, before it goes into free, before it goes into fight or flight. So that's situ, that's a very specific situation with which you might want to work on expanding your nervous system's capacity. And it could be a million other things, like having a relationship with your partner where you have a higher level of intimacy and you can share like your inner truths of what you're navigating. That's another area that a lot a lot of women share. Like, I want to be able to say the things to my person about what I want sexually or what I'm thinking or feeling, or just those like harder things to share, like your capacity to be able to come into those situations and stay in your body and speak your truths. That's another area where you might want to work on your nervous system capacity. So let's get out of the like general terms. Let's stop our obsession with regulating to the ends of the earth because regulating is not calm, cool, collect it all the time. Regulating is you are a whole ass woman who can feel all the feels and also come back to your easeful state as well. Like you can move through all and you can spend a lot of time in your easeful state, your open state, your creative state. So let's talk about why, and granted, I'm biased because I'm a yoga therapist, so just keep that in mind. Why yoga, yoga therapy specifically is very good at helping you create different wiring, different default states, different patterns in your nervous system that will then ripple out into those specific situations that you're navigating and help your nervous system to feel more safe so that it's less intense in the way that it wants to protect you. Because we want your nervous system to keep protecting you in the situations that require it. If you're about to step out in traffic, we want your nervous system to go into a mode that stops you immediately. If you're in a dangerous situation, we want your nervous system to do what it's supposed to do to protect you. It's not bad that it wants to protect you. It's not matching, it's not congruent with how you want to be in those situations. And your yoga practice is uniquely positioned to help you in a way that a lot of this other nervous system stuff just isn't. There's so much like, oh my gosh, I feel like we're all being like flooded, flooded, flooded with nervous system regulating information all the time. In fact, I saw a yoga teacher that I respect a lot. She was like Instagram, she put up a substack today. She said, Instagram, stop trying to fix my vagus nerve. And I feel her. Like I feel the same way. We're bombarded with it. But also, there's the differences between female nervous systems and male nervous systems. There is differences between how female nervous systems regulate and come into a space where they have flexibility and resiliency that's different from a male nervous system. And there are also a lot of ways that our nervous systems are very similar and the same. So a lot of nervous system advice that exists out there is around optimization. So it is that like endless pursuit of regulation. How do I optimize my heart rate variability? And how do I? I'm sorry, I'm feeling so sassy today. I apologize, but it's just the truth. How do I do this exact right breathing practice in order to have a regulated nervous system and not be irritated when this or that happens? Like, how do I optimize? Yoga practice is not about optimization for optimization's sake. And I that's hilarious because I love optimization, but like personally, yoga is about well-being. Yoga is about integration of your whole self, your connection to your body, your mind, your spirit, your life. It is about your well-being. It is about integration, it is about connection to something bigger than you, about you feeling held and supported by the divine and by knowing deeply your own highest self and your spirit, like your Atma, and I like to call it the Atwoman. Yoga is not about optimization. To me, optimization is that pursuit of perfectionism in disguise. And well-being is about loving yourself. It is about being in a relationship with yourself where you are consistently tuning in and tending to yourself and caring for yourself. And you're it's not manipulative in that same way that optimization is. Well-being is about care, in my opinion. And then another way is that a lot of nervous system advice that's out there is about fixing something that's wrong. And I think that's part of why I've had this onslaught of people telling me, like, my nervous system is broken, I'm stuck in fight or flight, and I'm never gonna get out of it, like something's wrong with me. I think that this misinformation that's being spread, because let's be honest, like if you're watching a 30 to 90 second reel on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, you are only getting a very surface level dopamine hit of information. Versus if you consume something like this podcast episode or if you're watching it on YouTube, you are getting like actual information that you can then utilize and help. That's completely different. And so a lot of this information that we're getting right now is about fixing your nervous system. Fix it, it's broken. Ugh. It's not broken. Your nervous system has been trying to protect you, it's protecting you. That's not broken. Like, that's not I don't get it. You don't need to fix your nervous system. You want to be in relationship with your nervous system. You want to be the leader of your nervous system. Because what happens in reality is that if you're not like driving the wheel, like you as the highest self, soul, boss bitch here on this life, if you're not steering the car, then your nervous system and your past experiences will and your emotions will. And so what we're doing is just like boop, putting you back in the driver's seat and being in relationship with your nervous system. And another way that I think yoga is so much better is because yoga works with every single part of you. So much of the other nervous system tending information, your nervous system regulation information is really working on like just one single layer of your being. Like it's just working with your body, for example, but it's not working with the integration of the whole self. And so in yoga practice, we are applying the tools of yoga, the philosophy of yoga, the living wisdom tradition of thousands of years of yoga. We are applying that to your nervous system. So you are working on the four pillars, you are working on your body, you are working on your mind, you're, which includes your emotions and your thoughts and your beliefs, you are working on your relationship to your spirit, to your own highest self, but to something infinite and bigger than you. And you're working in the concept of your life, you're working with the whole and all these other more surface-level nervous system techniques are about optimization. They're about fixing something, and they're really focused on one slice of you. Versus yoga is about well-being, is about relationship, and it is about really working with your whole. And what I mean when I talk about yogic practice like this is I mean ongoing practice. Like you can't just do one practice and be like, check the box, magically I'm better. Like it doesn't work. Like yoga is meant to be practice in a devotional and ongoing way. And I'm getting emotional talking about it. I'm so tired in our culture of the surface level ideas about what yoga is because gosh, it is powerful and gosh, it is healing, and gosh, it has so much value in a world where there's just so much shit information. All right. Um, I mentioned earlier that I have some different ways that you can actually learn and apply this, apply all of this to your specific life. I am launching a course in October. It is called Yoga as Nervous System Medicine. And what it is meant to be, my love, is all of this information really systematized for you. Like, okay, do this, then do that, then try this and explore these different things. It is meant to be a grab and work through the process course that's digital, so you can do it from anywhere in the world. And it also really teaches you how to actually work with your nervous system. This is not some like random list of things that might work for you. These are like actual things that I know work for real women and also the guardrails of how to know if something's not working for you and the entire yogic system as like authentically as I can deliver it to you. So you get that four-pillared approach applied to you, but also like woman-to-woman, not super long. Like, I know I've been doing digital courses and things like this for years. I know if it's an hour-long thing, like you're just not gonna do it. And so, like, let's be honest, you might do it. You might be one of those people who's like, yes, give me the hour-long practice online for me to do by myself. Most of you aren't. And so these practices are just 15 to 30 minutes. You can learn them, you can apply them, and you can have time to actually work through them in a way that really works on the whole. The wait list is open for that. I'm not even enrolling for the course yet. Um, by the time you watch this, maybe you're watching it after October of 2026. So it is open if you're finding it later. My love, take away this. Your nervous system's not broken. It's not possible for it to break. If your nervous system is spending a lot of time in fight or flight, then that's because it has needed to. And also you are in charge and you get to write a different story for yourself, and you can absolutely influence the way that your nervous system is moving through your days, responding to your life. And a lot of that, obviously, in my opinion, comes back to your yoga practice, as long as you're practicing the kind of yoga that can help your nervous system, because not all yoga out there can help your nervous system. Some of it will just exacerbate patterns of fight or flight. So, that the course that I made is also here to help you with that. Let me know if this episode landed. I got a little more emotional than I normally do, but you know, we're all human here. Much love to you.