13 Subconscious Habits Secretly Wrecking Your Nervous System (and What to Do Instead)

We share 13 everyday habits that quietly overload the nervous system and offer clear, practical swaps that build calm, energy, and focus. Start with one change, layer slowly, and teach your body safety through kinder rhythms and routines.

• why phone-first mornings spike cortisol and what to do instead
• screen apnea and a simple hourly breathing reset
• calm, present eating to switch on rest and digest
• single-task sprints to end multitasking stress
• caffeine timing for steady energy and better sleep
• micro-movements that release stored tension
• creating silence zones to reduce sensory overload
• progressive muscle release to stop clenching
• white space and systems to prevent overscheduling
• kinder self-talk that soothes the stress response
• blue light limits and wind-down rituals
• safe emotional release without shame
• honoring hunger, sleep, and focus cues

If you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend who's always stressed out. If you try one of these swaps, let me know. I love hearing your wins.

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Transcript

Coming Home And Setting The Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Dipali. I am a storyteller, a speaker, and a mum who is learning every single day that healing isn't about finding yourself. It's about coming home to who you always have been. I have walked through darkness and learned that the most powerful stories come from the cracks because that's exactly where the light enters. So if you're ready to stop pretending, start feeling, and finally living life on your own terms, welcome home. And also, welcome back to the self-help podcast with me. I'm your host, and today we're diving into something that affects literally every single part of your well-being, your nervous system. Now, when I say nervous system, I'm talking about the network in your body that controls everything: your stress response, your sleep, your digestion, your focus, and even how safe and grounded you feel in your own skin. Here's the problem. Many of us are unintentionally wrecking our nervous system every single day, and the kicker, we don't even realize it that we're doing it. Yeah, that can be exhausting. What I'm talking about are the subconscious habits. The little things, the normal things that everyone does, all of those things over time overstimulate, exhaust, and confuse your nervous system. But here's the good news. Once you see these habits, you can choose differently. You can retrain your body to feel calmer, more resilient, and more in control. So in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through 13 subconscious habits that are secretly wrecking your nervous system and exactly what to do instead. This is going to be practical, relatable, and hopefully eye-opening. By the end of this, you'll have a checklist of nervous system-friendly swaps that you can start today, in fact, immediately. So let's just jump right into it. Starting your day with the phone. We all do it, right? Most times to just look at the phone and see what time it is. Do we have an extra hour to sleep or cuddle around with our kid? And there's something really magical about going back to bed after you're woking up, right? You roll over, grab your phone, and boom, you're hit with text, email, messages, whatsapp, good news, bad news, everything before you even sat up on the bed. Now that spikes cortisol, and I've been guilty of doing that too. I don't want to say what I'm not able to preach. I have done this all my life, and it's only recently I've realized that I'm this is not the first thing I should be doing in the morning. Because that clearly spikes your cortisol, your stress hormone first thing in the morning. And over time your brain learns this. Wake up is equal to stress. Wake up and just run. Be on the go. It's time to rush, get out of the bed, jump out of the bed. And getting out of the bed in peace and quiet is very different from just jumping out of the bed to do something that maybe you've missed, say, to prepare the breakfast or make your coffee, get your kids ready for school, or for that matter, even rush to work. Now what to do instead? For the first 20 minutes of your day, please keep your phone away. You can get an alarm clock. You can keep a digital watch in your room or the wall clocks. They're not old school, they still work perfectly fine. Look at the clock instead of your phone and let the damn phone be away from you. Drink your water, stretch, pray. Just do whatever helps you feel grounded and start your day on a positive note. Step outside for light, open up the curtains, open up the windows, go outside in the balcony for a moment if you cannot stay still. All of this trains your nervous system to wake gently up without any chaos and rush. Now, holding your breath without realizing it. It's called screen apnea. We've all heard of the term sleep apnea, but what I'm talking about is called screen apnea. You're typing, scrolling, or concentrating, and your breath gets shallow or even pauses. Now, see, this is happening because you're in a rush, but your body interprets this as danger. Now, what to do instead? Every hour practice box breathing. Inhale for four, hold, exhale for four. Hold for four, inhale, hold, exhale, and release. It resets your vagus nerve and signals safety that you're okay. Then a third habit, which is secretly and quietly wrecking your nervous system, and we do it all the time, which is rushing through your meals. Having your morning coffee while you're preparing breakfast or while you're taking your first call of the day. Or just having breakfast while you're in a meeting. Or while doing your laundry. Eating while stressed or distracted keeps your body in the fight or the flight mode. Digestion shuts down, leading to bloating, fatigue, and nervous system overload. And also think about it. Like I have never, I mean, very few days makes make for an exception to this rule. But I but I never I rarely eat my lunch or my breakfast or my dinner, whatever, in like rush. I may eat something in the car, but that doesn't necessarily equate to being in a rush. I have a habit of sitting and enjoying my meal. And I believe we all, all of us, all of you listening, everybody can take five to ten minutes out from their busy day and all the chaos that's going around to simply sit and eat and just disassociate from everything. And I've realized if I don't, like if I'm in rush and if I don't sit and enjoy my meal or my tea, I just don't get the feel of it. Like I don't want to do it. I'd rather not eat it. It's very difficult for me to bring myself to a point where I'm like shoving things down my throat. In a rush, I can't do it. And I've realized every time I've eaten, overeaten, or you know, when you're not focused on what you're doing, you also tend to overeat. Also because you're trying your mind is trying to compensate for the lack of better terms. Your mind is trying to compensate you're working so hard, you're being so productive, might as well eat an extra dose or something which is not super healthy, right? So I have tend to overeat and just tough my face and then immediately, almost immediately, regret it. So I have stopped doing it. You cannot rush your digestion, you cannot rush your nervous system simply because you don't realize you have five minutes in a day to sit and enjoy your meal in nice and quiet. Now, what to do instead before eating, pause for 10 seconds and take out those five to ten minutes for enjoying your meal, for nourishing your body. I know my husband has this habit of don't call me for lunch or don't call me for breakfast, just give me breakfast on the computer table. I I wanted to go do my work while I eat, or I want to have my meetings, or my schedule is so jam-packed. I am literally not free until 12:30, and that then it's lunchtime. So I know it can be hard with the busy work schedule, but as much as possible, we must try and take out those five-10 minutes just for ourselves for nourishing our body and eating good food. And before you eat pause for 10 seconds, look at your food, be grateful, thank God, and thank all the people that have worked so hard to bring that food on the table for you. Take one deep breath, acknowledge it, and this activates rest and digest mode so your body can actually absorb nutrients. Number four is the habit of constant multitasking. I've been guilty of doing this all the time. Your brain actually wasn't designed to juggle between emails and WhatsApp and Instagram and doing grocery and laundry all at once. It's like even when you're listening to me, it's like sounding a lot. It's it's overbearing. Constant task switching switching floods your uh nervous system with micro stressors, right? What what can you do instead? Try single task sprints. Set a 25-minute timer, focus on one thing only. It could be preparing your breakfast, preparing your lunch, getting the most creative deep work done, preparing for a meeting, folding your laundry, ordering groceries, or doing online shopping. Just reserve those set timers for for whatever it is that you're doing, and then break. Your w your nervous system will love the continuity rhythm and completion. Try it. And also I've realized as I've grown older, because my mind is so cluttered at times, I find it exceedingly difficult to just focus on one task at hand. Say if I'm doing the laundry, I will just it will occur to me that okay, we're running out of the milk in the fridge, so I will quickly go to the app and start ordering milk. No, that's and I have to retrain, rewire my mind to focus in the moment now, and I may just write, send a note, keep a note in the grocery list out of milk. So next I can move on to it, and then I can switch between. I don't have to switch between tasks. I want to finish what I have. Then habit number five is using caffeine as your crutch. I know it's impossible to give up your morning coffee or tea. I can't do that. If somebody were to ask me, give up your morning tea, I'll be like, no, then what is left in my life to do? I always wake up looking forward to my first sip in the morning. I can't give up my tea. I may reduce it now. I have actually reduced it to just one cup a day, one, but I can't completely give it up and I understand what you feel. But coffee on an empty stomach, energy drinks after 3 pm, or you know, getting that afternoon slump and opening a diet cook, all of this is wrecking your nervous system. And and I have realized with age, with growing older, my caffeine tolerance has come down really fast. Like the day I have my tea, or say an isolated, after 2 pm in the afternoon, or even green tea for that matter, I I don't know if it's in my mind, but I've realized that on those nights I have difficulty falling asleep, and then I I also have this tendency to wake up somehow at the abrupt hour in the late night, early morning, and just have difficulty falling back asleep. So I have like made it a point to not have caffeine, any any sort of caffeine after 2 pm. And it has really helped my sleep. It has helped me sleep faster, like go on the bed and without a lot of turning and tossing, falling asleep, and then also able to continue and sustain that sleep until maybe early on in the morning. So caffeine overstimulates your adrenals, leaving your nervous system wired but really tired. So, what you can do instead is instead of coffee your tea first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, load up, just guzzle down a lot of water and have coffee after breakfast, not before. So, swap your afternoon caffeine for a herbal tea or say water. You'll sleep better and your body won't be on the edge. And it's about rewiring your mind. Every time you have this craving about having a cup of tea or coffee, just remind yourself it's really not worth losing my sleep over. Your mind will tell you better. Then is the habit of skipping movement. I'm guilty of this. When stress builds up, but you sit all date. When stress builds up, it comes from all different corners and directions. Your help won't show up, your cook will not come, you have important meetings to attend and presentations to give, meeting decks to prepare, your kid will be extra cranky, you'll end up having a fight with your partner, there is a load, there's a pile of laundry sitting in the living room waiting for you to do it. Everything comes at once. I get it. Now, all of this is a colossal mess for your nervous system, and your nervous system has no way to release it. And the tension, all of this gets trapped in our body. So, what you can do is understand that life isn't going to be all rosy and easy. There will be tough days, there will be hard days, but all this while you've been able to do it all. Like, even if you felt in the moment it was all too exhausting for you and you were overwhelmed with the reality, you were able to somehow manage it. You have that strength within you. So, you what you need to do is you need to tap on your strength, tell your mind that okay, the house has always been a mess. There have been tough meetings, there have been difficult conversations with your friends or with your family or stakeholders, whatever that you have always done in the past and you've done really well, you can do it. So just calm your mind and only focus on the thing that matters the most. And please don't forget to move. Even if it is moving around your house, tidying it up, taking five, ten minutes of break in the day. Or if you haven't been able to move all day, just go for a quick walk in the evening or hit the gym, whatever helps you. Stretching. We all have time while we are heating up our coffee in the morning for the fifth time. Just stretch while you're waiting for it to heat up in the microwave, shake out your arms or walk for two minutes every hour. Think of it as emotional dusting for your nervous system, and it also helps you disassociate, like it takes your focus away from you and from what you are into, right? So please do not skip movement. Number seven is the endless noise, like the constant chatter, the podcast. And it's ironic that I'm the host of a podcast and I'm saying it because I have realized it. Background TV, non-stop podcasts, one after the other, YouTube videos, constant notifications, hundred tabs open on your laptop, your phone ringing all the time, all of this, your nervous system is never able to get any moment of peace and quiet. Over time, this is like a static in your brain. It bothers it. So, what you can do is build silent zones. Don't try to overclutter your life with a lot of noise. Like you can play a nice quiet sleep music or birth music in the background, but that's about it. No phone, no talking, no loud noises, no music, no jazz. Let your nervous system breathe. Number eight is clenching muscles. Many people unconsciously clench their jaw, like tighten shoulders or drip fists. This signals that I'm bracing for danger to the body. Your body, like it doesn't know. But what you're telling it, it appears to be true to your body. So what you can do instead is try a progressive relaxation, scan your body, notice tension building up, tightening in your chest, that that pit that's not forming in your stomach, and deliberately release. Because if you don't release, it will compound and in no time it will manifest into any anxiety and anxious thoughts that you keep spiraling into and you have no way out of it. Do this while you're waiting in traffic, or whenever you feel like anxiety is taking the best of you, just do it, or before bed. Number nine is the habit of overscheduling yourself. I know I do this all the time because I need to be productive. I need to give my best every single day. Back-to-back commitments with no time downtime keeps your body in the survival mode. In the busy week, taking time for nail appointments sounds impossible, right? But do it. It's for your own good. Even if you love being busy, your nervous system still needs recovery time. What you can do instead is schedule white spaces in your calendar in the day. Yeah, in the entire course of the day. 10 minutes between calls, one scheduled evening, unscheduled, unscheduled evening a week. Protect your buffer zones like medicines. So, what what I typically used to do is wake up, get ready for work, send my kid to daycare, and then do work, be at it, and then pick up my kid from the day's care, daycare, go to the grocery store, and undone grocery sitting on the dining table, it bothers me. So if I go to the grocery store and I do some shopping, I have to put it where it belongs the moment I reach my house. So I don't want to do that on weekdays. Now I've reserved days on the weekend when I do it. Specifically, I reserve day and time, a window of time where we go do the grocery, come back, arrange. Because you know, every time you make a Costco run, you have so much that you've collected only for you to arrange it in the fridge. And then when I'm properly arranging things in the fridge, I'm like, okay, might as well give it a deep clean, also. So, you know, all of this keeps adding up and takes away your family time, takes away your time for rest and doing things that really, really matter. So, what you can do is you can protect your buffer zones like medicine and create systems that work for you. I have done a lot of work and rework to understand I don't need more time, I need more systems that will help me make the best use of what I have, and those systems will allow me to optimize my time and spend in places where I really need to. Like spending time with my kid when we when we are done with the work and he's out of the day care. That is most important to me. So protect your time and peace like it, like your life depends on it because it does. Number 10 is negative self-talk. Oh my god, every time you criticize yourself or you keep telling yourself stories, your fears, your judgments, no different than someone else yelling at you. Now, what you can do instead is practice self-soothing language. Be kind to yourself. If you brought if we broadcast what you say to yourself, you will be shocked. If we if you talk to your friends the way you talk to yourself, you will have no friends. So instead of okay, I'm so stupid, try, I'm learning, I'll figure it out. Your nervous system listens to you and it listens to your inner tone. So please make sure that it's kind and nice and loving. Habit number 11: no blue light, blue light at night. Scrolling in bed tells you, tells your brain that it's still daytime. Start winding down an hour or two before your actual bedtime. Turn off all the lights, maybe set up some cozy lights, warm lights that help you wind down and call it a day. Melatonin, your sleep hormone, gets suppressed, leaving your nervous system restless and overstimulated. Like, ever wondered you've gone to bed tired, but after 15 minutes of doom scrolling, you're not sleepy anymore. And you're tossing and turning till 1 or 2 a.m. That's because your sleep hormone is disturbed. You your nervous system is restless and you will not be able to sleep until it calms down. So what you can do instead is dim screen before two hours. If you cannot do two hours, start with one, start with 30 minutes, whatever helps you get going. Or use blue light filters. Even better, swap scrolling for reading or journaling. Keep the candle on the bedside table. If you do not have a candle, keep a book next to your bedside table. So when you go to your bed, you're tempted to pick it up and read it. Or keep your diary so you can journal and write how your day went and what would you like to do for the next day. So this brain dump releases everything that's bothering you, that is overloading your brain, and you can have a peaceful sleep later. Habit number 12 is suppressing emotions. When we suppress things, when we suppress emotions, we become toxic. When you feel angry or sad, but immediately shove it down because you don't want to upset anyone, you don't want to make uh a scene out of it because you want to be kind to the other person, that emotion doesn't somehow disappear. It sits in your body and it becomes toxic and it manifests into illness because that is your nervous system in tension, in worry, in stress, holding up to things which don't belong there. What you can do instead is practice safe release. Cry out if you need to. Crying is not a sign of weakness, it's strength. I promise you. Write it out or find a way to nicely tell someone that they have behaved incorrectly, wrongly, rudely with you. I, for one, cannot imagine living my life in a way where I am suppressing my emotions. I can't do it because I know it keeps building inside me and then makes me supremely bitter, resentful, and negative. And I cannot do that to myself. Shake your body. It actually helps you. It releases your emotions. Because emotions are energy, they need an exit. They cannot pile up and sit in your body all the time. They don't belong there. And the last one on the list is ignoring natural rhythms. Your body has cues, it has cycles: hunger, sleepiness, burst of focus. Now, when you override them with caffeine, when you don't listen to your body, or when you override with work pressure or late nights or forcing yourself to be in any social setting or situation where you don't want to be, all of this gets your nervous system confused. What you can do instead? Start, please, for the love of God, start honoring your signals. Eat when you're truly hungry, not because you follow I eat three times or three meals a day. Rest when you're tired. Take advantage of natural focus speeds. Work with your body. Your body is working for you and is not against you. So please learn to understand the cues that your body is giving and honor it. So, yeah, there you have it. 13 subconscious habits that might be wrecking your nervous system and simple swabs that you can start right now, today. And here's the thing we don't talk often about. Nervous system healing isn't about perfection. It's not about quitting your phone or moving to mountains. Although I wish that was an option. It's about awareness. It's about noticing the little patterns that wear you down, and only you can correct them. And choosing something kinder for your body. Start with one habit that resonated with you the most. Maybe it's putting your phone away at night. Maybe it's breathing and being grateful before your meals. And once that becomes natural, layer in another. Over time, you will see that these small shifts rewire your nervous system into resilience, calm, and balance. And if you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend who's always stressed out. They might not even realize that these habits are affecting them. And if you try if you try one of these swaps, let me know. I love hearing your wins. And until next time, remember your nervous system is listening to how you live, how you talk to yourself, how you behave, how you reason. So do it well. Speak to it with calm, with kindness, and with consistency. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.