Balancing the Three Elements of Our Physiological Neurology

The Autonomic Nervous System

In modern life, particularly within the world of business and productivity, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) is chronically overstimulated. It becomes dominant. Our global workforce operates in a near-constant state of sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activation — a survival mode designed for brief bursts of exertion, not sustained activity.

The SNS, often described as the body’s accelerator, fuels the four F’s:

• Flight

• Fight

• Fuck

• Fawn

This physiological mode channels blood to the muscles, sharpens reflexes, and prepares the organism for action. In our current era, this has become a chronic state of “work, work, work.” It is the embodied reality of stress.

As Hans Selye first proposed in his pioneering work on stress, chronic activation of the SNS leads to internal exhaustion. True osteopathic medicine offers an intervention — a therapeutic recalibration of the somatic architecture that overloads the system, helping restore balance and relieve the ANS from its state of hypervigilance.

The Parasympathetic Response: Struggling to Reassert

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is designed to bring the body back into rest, repair, and reorganisation — the three R’s. But when SNS overdrive becomes normalised, the PNS must work overtime to maintain minimal regulation. It becomes dominant not in balance, but in compensation.

Instead of operating rhythmically, these systems become locked in oscillation, with the PNS trying to mitigate an unchecked sympathetic response.

Stress and the Cerebral Bias

Stress, curiously, is a phenomenon that is left-brain dominant. The left hemisphere, linear and analytical, governs language, time, and strategy — but also controls and defends. It is this cerebral hemisphere that tends to fuel sympathetic arousal.

By contrast, the right hemisphere processes holistically. It reads context, emotional nuance, and environment. In many traditions, the right brain is associated with the feminine, the receptive, and the wise — a steward of parasympathetic tone.

Yet in modern culture, we privilege left-brain function. The result:

• Overdoing

• Overthinking

• Overriding the animal and vegetal systems

• Suppressing our innate capacity to reset and regulate

In most mammals, the flight-fight response naturally abates within 90 seconds. Humans, however, override this automatic reset. The neocortex — our crowning evolutionary development — often interrupts the autonomic system’s return to balance.

Rather than letting the hypothalamus and midbrain initiate parasympathetic restoration, we impose narrative, judgement, or agenda — and so the cycle of stress continues.

Being vs Doing: Reclaiming Human Integrity

The modern human rarely enters the state of being. We act, perform, strive — but seldom rest in our existence. We are not human beings, but humans doing. Our physiology reflects this distortion.

Balance is not achieved by simply switching off. It requires returning to a state of coherence, where the right hemisphere is allowed to participate, and the body is invited to remember what it once knew.

Dhikr: The Science of Remembrance

In Sufi practice, dhikr (remembrance) is a spiritual technology. It redirects the mind’s fragmented chatter toward singularity — the remembrance of the Source, the Real, the Self. It bypasses the left brain’s drive for control and aligns it with the right brain’s more profound knowing.

“The feminine yearns to find its origin; the masculine what it has lost.”

— Ibn al-Arabi

Dhikr is a mechanism of return. It bridges the gap between scattered effort and inward unity. It can be silent, audible, embodied, or breath-based. There are many forms — la ilaha illallah, Om shanti, Brahma Brahma — but the aim is not formulaic. It is intentional attunement.

When remembrance is engaged, the left brain’s striving becomes surrender, and the right brain’s knowing becomes expression. This integration re-establishes parasympathetic dominance, not through passivity, but through profound inward activity.

Tuning the System

There are no universal prescriptions. Anything that draws the mind inward and softens its compulsive search — that cultivates single-mindedness in the midst of fragmentation — becomes a remedial force.

In doing so, the nervous system remembers itself. The human becomes again what it was designed to be: a noble, rhythmic, responsive creature, rooted in coherence, capable of care, contemplation, and creation.