All of Yoga

32. How (and why) to activate your parasympathetic rebound

Share episode

In this episode of the All of Yoga podcast, we’re exploring a topic that could completely transform how you approach stress, recovery, and your daily energy levels: the parasympathetic rebound. If you’ve ever felt stuck in “go, go, go” mode, wired but exhausted, this episode is for you.

We’ll explore:

- What the parasympathetic rebound actually is (in plain English)

- Why it’s essential for long-term resilience and creating helpful habits

- How to activate it using yoga, breathwork, and neuroscience-backed tools.

You’ll learn how to shift out of survival mode, complete your stress response, and create the foundation for new, helpful habits that support your future self. 

Plus, I’ll share practical tips you can start using today, like elongating your exhale, practicing yoga nidra, and grounding through mindful movement.



Mentioned in this episode:

🧠 Yoga & The Brain: The Neuroscience of Stress Recovery – Watch my free masterclass packed with science, tools, and a clear path forward. Watch it here

💜 8 Weeks to Nervous System Resilience – Ready to fully shift your relationship with stress? Join our brand-new course designed to help you rewire your stress response and build lasting resilience. Take a look here 

👀 See the shownotes here



Previous episodes to check out:

Episode 1: Yoga Nidra for deep sleep, listen here

Episode 22: Yoga Nidra for becoming your best self, listen here

Episode 29: What Stress is Doing to Your Brain, listen here

 

If you’ve been feeling stuck in survival mode, this episode will give you the tools and insights to take your first steps toward calm, clarity and resilience. Don’t forget to share this episode with anyone who could use a little more balance in their life.

Share your thoughts or questions by leaving a review, we’d love to hear from you!

💻 Practice yoga online with Yoga Hero, just £9.99 per month here

💌 Sign up to our newsletter here (it's really good!)

🤩 Become a yoga teacher with Yoga Hero here (we're in the Top Ten in the UK! 🙌 )

[00:00:00] Hi, and welcome back to the All of Yoga podcast. I'm Holly, and today we're exploring something that could completely shift how you think about stress, recovery, [00:01:00] your energy levels throughout the day, and your habits; your parasympathetic rebound. This might sound like a bit of a mouthful, but stay with me.

 In previous episodes, we've had a focus on stress and understanding stress, and this is really important. In the many years I've been working as a yoga teacher, I have had so many conversations with people who are looking to reduce their stress and the impact that stress is having on their lives.

Maybe they want to reduce impulse shopping, overeating, drinking, overworking, and so on. These are all habits and often, sometimes they're coping mechanisms that is mechanisms to cope with the demands, the stress of daily life. [00:02:00] And usually these conversations start with the person saying that they're really overwhelmed at the moment, which is causing an increase in- insert coping mechanism -and so they are looking for a new job if their stress is work related, considering calling it a day with their friend if their stress is because of a certain friendship, they're considering taking a loan out if their stress is financial troubles.

Now you nor I should ever judge coping mechanisms ever. often the person is aware of the unhelpful behavior and being judged on it will not magically make it disappear.

In her book Rewire, Nicole Vignola says, and I'm paraphrasing, if you could beat yourself up into better behaviors, then all your behaviors will be perfect based on how much of a hard time you give yourself.

But it doesn't work.

Neuroplasticity, and that's what new behaviors are. They are [00:03:00] neuroplasticity. That does not come from putting yourself down. New, more helpful behaviors come from, and this is incredibly important, the relaxation response, right? The parasympathetic rebound. And because the world that we live in will always have challenges, there are always gonna be conflicts with people in your lives, there may well be financial pressures ongoing, and you know what? Even if we all went and lived in a cave, there would be challenges in there too. So learning to cope with stress, learning to manage stress is vital. In fact, I honestly believe it's non-negotiable, and that's why I keep saying I wish this was taught in primary schools.

So what we're talking about today, it's not just about helping tense muscles relax or helping you sleep a little bit better, [00:04:00] it's genuinely about improving your life. Activating the parasympathetic rebound after periods of stress so that you can focus on creating new, helpful habits, new behaviours that don't cause more stress for your future self.

In this episode, we'll explore

what the parasympathetic rebound actually is in plain English,

why it's essential for long-term resilience.

And how you can start activating yours with the help of yoga, breath, and neuroscience.

Let's get cracking.

 Understanding the stress response. Let's start with what happens in your body during stress when your brain perceives a threat.

Whether it's a tiger walking into the room that you are in at the moment, it's a tight deadline, a tough conversation, or someone beeping their car horn. [00:05:00] It activates your sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight response. And this happens really quickly. Your heart rate increases, blood is rerouted away from the digestive system and the reproductive system, and towards your skeletal muscles to allow you to fight or to flight to run away from the stress trigger.

Your brain becomes hyperfocused on survival. This is all absolutely amazing if you are running from a tiger. But it's less helpful when the threat is your overflowing inbox, right? When the threat is something that doesn't have a clear endpoint. Because here's the thing, we are not designed to stay in this sympathetic state.

So in an ideal world, once the threat has passed your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response takes over, which slows the [00:06:00] heart rate, relaxes the muscles, so they're not prepared for action anymore, reactivates digestion, restores balance, and so many more things. This shift from stress to safety is the parasympathetic rebound.

But when stress is chronic, when it's ongoing, when there's no clear endpoint, we stay stuck in survival mode.

But here's the catch. This parasympathetic rebound isn't necessarily automatic and it doesn't always happen just because the stressful moment is over. Have you ever had a really challenging day, maybe a deadline day or a day where it felt like everybody needed something from you or nothing went to plan, you got home, you still felt really wired in the evening, and then you struggle to fall asleep at nighttime even though you're [00:07:00] exhausted. That is a sign that your nervous system hasn't completed its rebound, and there's a few, um, quite disturbing reasons that this can happen.

Firstly, it might be because you've become habituated to stress. It's almost your normal. This is pretty scary, but it doesn't have to be permanent, so don't lose hope.

It might be because you're still mentally replaying the event, which keeps your stress response active.

And in a moment, I'm gonna talk about the value of yoga in managing stress. And of course, one of those things is that It helps us choose what to think about. So rather than replaying the event, we can purposefully place our focus on something else, which then allows the parasympathetic rebound to happen.

And it might be because you [00:08:00] never felt truly safe to begin with, maybe due to previous stresses, so your body doesn't have a safe relaxation response to return to. And what's fascinating is that the brain actually adapts to chronic stress. Listen to episode 29, what stress is doing to your brain for much more on this topic.

 How to activate your parasympathetic rebound. So how do we turn this around? Well, this is where the magic of yoga comes in. The key is not to just wait for recovery to happen. The key is taking steps to make it happen. Here are some ways to support your parasympathetic rebound.

Breath work.

Longer exhalations signal safety to the brain. Simply elongating your exhale should activate the relaxation response and [00:09:00] start to bring you back to balance. Please, whenever practicing anything like this, if you experience any discomfort, do something else.

Yoga nidra. This powerful practice has an endless list of benefits. We have a few yoga nidra practices on the podcast already. Check out episodes one and 22 to get you started.

Grounding through movement.

Slow mindful movement gives your body the message; i'm safe. Gentle yoga flows, body scans, walking meditations, they all help. But if you are so wired that the idea of slowing down is just plain madness, that actually makes you feel quite stressed, then do some big movements first, some big squats and lunges to work the leg muscles and the core muscles. The idea here is that this completes the stress response. It completes the fight or flight [00:10:00] action, then allowing for parasympathetic rebound.

If this resonates with you, if you've been stuck in go, go, go mode, and you want a sense of relief in your body, then know this.

The parasympathetic rebound is not just for people who are already relaxed or people who have loads of time available.

It's for you and it's absolutely something that you can learn to activate, even if you've been stuck in survival mode for a really long time.

To go deeper here, I love to invite you to watch my free masterclass, Yoga and the Brain, the neuroscience of Stress Recovery.

It's packed with science, tools and a clear path forwards, and you can watch it for free right now. The link is in the show notes. And if you are ready to fully shift your relationship with stress and finally support your nervous system from the inside out, our [00:11:00] brand new course, eight Weeks to Nervous System Resilience might be the perfect next step for you.

Thank you so much for listening, and if you found this episode useful, please do share it with your friends and family, and as always, happy practicing.