Nervous System Literacy

Post-Growth in Practice (Part 2)

This is Part 2 in an ongoing series on building everyday resilience in the face of ecological, systemic, and cultural collapse – what I sometimes call “soft-prepping.”

• Part 1 explored digital resilience – how to stay grounded and discerning in an accelerating information landscape. You can read it here.

• Part 2 (this piece) looks at nervous system literacy – learning to recognise and regulate our internal states as a form of resistance and repair.

• Part 3 turns toward resilient imagination – how to think about the future without collapsing, and why vision is a vital part of staying steady in times of contraction. Read it here.

• Part 4 explores the middle path – how to navigate the space between fantasy and fatalism, and how to stay aligned without retreating or giving in. Read it here.

It’s a misty morning here, the kind I love most. We live in a curious little hillside valley that looks like farmland but is actually three hundred metres up the side of a mountain, a geography that gifts us with strange and beautiful weather - sometimes bathed in cloud while the town below blazes in sun, sometimes utterly still while the coast is lashed by wind. These mists feel like portals, transporting us to a slower and older time.

Our valley used to be a self-sufficient little hamlet. You can still see signs of it if you know where to look. Our friends and landlords live in what was once the farm store that supplied the village, back when everyone travelled by horse and cart and cars hadn't yet arrived to decimate the local communities, forcing people down into the town for supplies. I often find myself imagining that time, not just as a remnant from the past but as a model we might one day return to. Our neighbours already share crops and meat when we can. To never have to leave for work or supplies would be a dream.

I also find it important to acknowledge that this valley, like so much of this land, carries a deeper and more difficult history. Many of the families in this area are direct descendants of the original settlers, including our landlords, and while I can see the pride in the histories they have inherited, I also know that this pride sits alongside a story of dispossession that is still unfolding. My mum shared a piece this morning about the violence carried out against Indigenous peoples across Australia and New Zealand, and it reminded me how close we still are to those wounds. I don't have answers. I only know that any future I try to imagine here must begin with remembering what was taken, and what can never be fully repaired.

Living with that kind of tension is just one of the many paradoxes we have to exist inside in this time. Beauty and grief, pride and shame, lessons and loss, all woven together. We are living inside the fall of Western civilisation, and it was always going to come with suffering, just as its rise came with suffering, and just as so many are already suffering today - from extraction, from displacement, from direct cultural and colonial violence.

This brings me to the focus of this piece: the importance of tending to the nervous system, even, and especially, when we can't directly change our circumstances. This is not necessarily scientific or evidence-based. The science around the nervous system, and the adjacent polyvagal theory, remains hazy and ever-evolving. But anecdotally, reframing my own struggles through a lens of nervous system depletion has shifted more for me than years of pathologising ever could.

When I stopped thinking of myself as stressed and started seeing myself as empty or under-resourced, something shifted. It wasn’t that I was weak or broken or fundamentally flawed; it was simply that I was depleted. My rope was short, my reserves were low, and I needed, urgently, to find ways to refill the well (this is also now widely known as “mum rage”). Before this realisation, I would spiral into shame, wondering what was wrong with me, comparing myself to my husband, who was always steadier and calmer, and deciding he must have been built better for this life. But funnily enough, when he spent longer stretches alone with the kids, he began snapping too, becoming overwhelmed, scattered and unable to manage even the simplest tasks.

It wasn’t until my psychologist offered a different way of seeing things that I began to accept that maybe nothing was wrong with me at all, and that I was simply depleted. I half-joked that I probably needed to go for a walk every morning before doing anything else, not really believing it was possible in the chaos of small children. But the next morning I woke early and off I went. That one small act sparked new orientation. I felt lighter, steadier, and I kept going. Not always every day, but enough to notice the slow repair taking place inside me. I was calmer. The children responded to me differently. My husband said it felt like he had me back. The light in my eyes returned. I began to write again.

Alongside that, I had to get serious about my time. Like so many women, I spin a great number of plates: my PhD, bookkeeping for my husband’s business, the household, the endless small acts of parenting, and now this writing life. When I let the edges between these tasks blur, I dissolve into a scattered, frantic version of myself who is useful to no one.

It turns out boundaries are not just parenting advice; they are the backbone of nervous system regulation. So I started with small, practical shifts: no work when I’m alone with the kids, no drafting Substack ideas over my morning coffee, no scrolling my phone in the afternoon when I could be folding washing or preparing for the next day. Instead, my husband and I trade a few precious hours each weekend, giving each other time to work, rest, or move our bodies. It’s still a work-in-progress, but it has allowed us to be calmer and more connected.

Viktor Frankl wrote that everything can be taken from a person except the last freedom: the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance. It is tempting to misread that as a call to grit your teeth and push harder, but I don’t think that was his meaning. I think he was speaking to the tiny, stubborn flame of dignity that remains even when everything else has been stripped away - and to the quiet, radical act of protecting it.

I know that nervous system work may be out of reach for many, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. But for those of us who can afford, even occasionally, to step back from the onslaught of bad news and cultivate a different kind of focus and attention, I believe it is vital that we do so. We were never meant to carry the weight of the world in our pockets. If you have not checked your screen time lately, you might find the numbers shocking. I know I did. There is a difference between being informed and being flooded, and the latter will eventually take us away from our own lives, hollow us out, leave us brittle and joyless.

This is why I believe nervous system literacy belongs inside post-growth thinking. The world is shifting beneath our feet - economically, ecologically, politically - and the systems we have relied on are faltering. We are heading into more uncertainty, not less. If we are to meet this time well, if we are to build something gentler and saner on the other side, we will need our full capacities intact. That means staying regulated enough to imagine wisely, love fiercely, and adapt at the pace reality demands.

Of course, the pressure to "do better" is relentless, and I do not want to add to that noise. In individuals or spaces that present as progressive or radical, there is a push to be more ethical, more sustainable, more 'conscious'. It is a beautiful instinct, but it can harden into a kind of moral rigidity - one that fractures communities, exhausts individuals, and recreates the very dynamics we are trying to dismantle. If your pursuit of virtue keeps you hypervigilant, burnt out, unable to rest, that too is unsustainable.

We are still living inside the old systems even as we work to imagine new ones. We still need phones, cars, grocery deliveries. We still need grace. Progress is not built through purity; it is built through slow, clumsy, determined adaptation.

This, to me, is what post-growth psychology is about: the slow, real work of adapting to a different way of living in the world.

I have been trying lately to think of myself more like a battery than a machine. Machines are expected to run until they break. Batteries are meant to be recharged. This shift in perspective has made it easier to take moments for myself without guilt, knowing that replenishment does not take away from the people I love, it gives them a better version of me. I am also building small, dependable rituals with my girls - special times each day that are just for them - so they know their time is coming, and can let me step away when I need to reset.

The practices I reach for are simple ones: breathing, mindful moments, movement, small shifts in the stories I tell myself. They're not intended as radical changes or quick fixes. But they help build capacity, slowly over time, with compassion and commitment. An approach we'd be wise to adopt everywhere.

You are not meant to be calm all the time. Most people aren’t. What matters is noticing when you are off-balance, and knowing what you need to find your way back.

As we move through these uncertain times, tending to our nervous systems feels like a small but essential act of resilience. In the paid section below, I’m offering some tools and reflections that I hope will support you in the work.

I am still offering 50% off subscriptions for readers of this series. I hope this makes this work more accessible, while still supporting my family. If it is still not affordable for you but you would love access to the paid resources, please just send me a direct message and I will comp you.