Nervous System Health Archives

More about the relationship between body, brain and behaviour

by Pingel Braat | Mar 4, 2026 | Ignite your sparkle, Nervous System Health

How do you attend to yourself and your body?

In the previous two blog posts, I discussed the law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, and how this also exists internally between our mind and body. And how the body mirrors the way we treat it, how we care for it, and how we think about ourselves through specialized brain cells called mirror neurons.

How you think about yourself and what you tell yourself about your body, your wellbeing, your needs and how you take care of yourself is largely reflected in the way you pay attention to your body’s messages, the way you move, eat, rest and the daily structure and routines you create for yourself. How you do anything is how you do everything.

When your body and nervous system often feel not heard in their feedback, your biology responds with a protective reaction, a defence mechanism. It may happen that the increase in intensity exceeds the bandwidth of your nervous system and body to process, resulting in your system becoming stuck in its defense mechanism. It does not feel safe with the incoming information arising from your movements, actions, and efforts. It reacts by shielding itself, closing itself off, contracting, freezing its capacity for moving…

This has a direct effect on how your system subsequently interprets signals from your external environment. Your movements influence the perceptions of your senses and your interaction with your environment. This can be experienced as feelings of tension, heaviness, or through increasing hyper vigilance, shadow breathing and emotions of fear, frustration, anger, sadness, a harsh inner critic chattering, limiting beliefs surfacing, and feelings of fatigue, low energy, and even sadness. Overtime this tension patterns can lead to little capacity to digest life, anxiety, chronic physical tension, immune disorders, tightness, gut stress, and low energy. Not cool! Happily you can help your system un-freeze.

We can help heal our neurobiology from habits of fear and hypervigilance by changing how we move and attend to sensations.

Here is what you need to know…

Your nervous system will only tell your muscles to release their contractions when it feels safe. Less is more here. It’s like talking to an animal or a baby. Instead of yelling at a little one, we whisper little messages in a soft, friendly, calm, rhythmic, and gentle tone. Your conscious movements are like that tone of voice. Small, gentle, slow, and smooth movements tell the autonomic nervous system that the body is safe, that it will not be hurt. They tell the nervous system that it is being listened to and that its pace, rhythm, and capacity are being honored. They evoke sensations of pleasure and ease that are sent to the central nervous system, inviting it to give the signal to let go. And when the tension in the body is released, our emotional inner landscape and mental landscapes also change, as does our perception of the outside world. A softer body and a relaxed nervous system look out into the world with openness, trust, and curiosity instead of hypervigilance, distrust, and fear.

Changing the response of our neurobiology does not happen through forcing ourselves or taking big leaps. It happens in the subtle interaction between intention and action. The moments when we pause and listen to the impulses our system gives us to feel better.

It comes down to moving slowly and attentively, while listening to the feedback from our body. This includes the way you eat and engage in daily action. And as you explore the roadmap of movement choices, you help your nervous system by paying attention to the sensory and emotional signals of pleasure and ease. Because through combining our actions with sensations of pleasure, and ease, we do exactly what our nervous system needs to rewire deep-rooted patterns of tension, vigilance, overwhelm, and fear. That is, we help it to change its attention pattern to sensations of pleasure, ease, and expansion so that it can rebuild trust in spontaneous interactions with its environment. This way you will soon no longer move through life with the brakes on, but can truly enjoy the experience of aliveness. That is what I call rekindling your inner Sparkle.

How about your inner Sparkle?

In the retreats from “Freeze to Flow” and “Pause, Listen, Reconnect with your Body”, I guide you to help your system feel safe again and meet life with trust and joy.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

by Pingel Braat | Mar 4, 2026 | Body Intelligence, Changing the story, Nervous System Health

Your body reflects your beliefs and images about yourself and the world.

The law of reciprocity, the social principle whereby an action is repaid in kind, also exists internally between our mind and body. The body mirrors the way we treat it, how we care for it, and how we think about ourselves through specialized brain cells called mirror neurons. Those neurons fire when we perform an action related to ourselves or our environment, and when we observe someone else´s action. They connect action to sensation and emotion, the language of your biology. Your brain does not distinguish between someone else’s actions and your own actions. Your brain ‘mirrors’ those actions as if they come from a force outside yourself.

If you are often hard on your body, speak harsh words to yourself, neglect the needs of your body and soul, or if you do not understand your body’s way and overburden it, your mirror neurons mimic that stress.
On the other hand, being kind to your body through care, appreciation, good nutrition, compassionate thoughts, and moving in tune with your body’s natural pace, rhythm, and capacity can create a “mirror” that reflects a self-organizing system that radiates joy, vitality, inner peace, self-confidence, and self-compassion.

Here is the thing. We are often unaware that we are unkind to our bodies and behave in ways that are not in tune with them. We have unconscious beliefs and expectations, embedded in our culture, that we have grown up with and that have conditioned us not only in how and who we have to be but also in how we use and perceive our bodies and their rich language of emotions, sensations, and movement. We may have internalised cultural beliefs that we are not good enough, that we must prove our worth by working hard, sacrificing our needs for others, dimming our light, or suppressing undesired emotions. Our body keeps that score. And here is the catch. This internal cycle of expectations and perceptions in your brain defines selfhood. How you “see” yourself in your mind determines how your body tries to look and organise itself to match your mental image.

What do you tell yourself?

Would you like to move those inner stories that are not serving your body and life?

My 7 Day dance healing retreat “Reclaim your Inner Freedom” is designed to help you move those stories that dim your sparkle and experience a lasting sense of wholeness and well-being again.

Do you define your boundaries based on pain or pleasure?

by Pingel Braat | Apr 13, 2025 | Body Intelligence, Nervous System Health, Somatic Awareness

A while ago, I wrote about respecting and growing your boundaries. In particular, your boundaries to yourself. These could be boundaries from your nervous system or your body to you, or the limits you impose on your body. Today I want to share something about the boundaries that are about ourselves and the window of pleasure.

Often, people become aware of their boundaries only when physical or emotional pain comes into play. Pain then becomes the measuring stick by which boundaries are defined. Boundaries formed by the fear of pain are often all-or-nothing boundaries; an on-off switch because when pain occurs, our system steps on the emergency brake or shuts down.

To feel pain, you need pain.  

In Feldenkrais sessions, I find that many people, when they no longer feel their pain, immediately start looking for the pain. Their attention is, so to speak, hijacked by the pain. This leaves them in a vicious circle of pain. The thoughts, feelings, and movements are so focused on avoiding pain that it actually reinforces pain, creates more pain, and sometimes leads to chronic pain and tension patterns… An attention pattern, under the spell of pain, causes people to experience needless pain for a long time. Why?

Pain and the nervous system in a nutshell

If we experience pain anywhere in our body (emotional pain included), it is because pain receptors in a certain area in our body perceive a certain stimulus that can cause harm to the body. We experience this as pain. A message is sent to the central nervous system. Once the brain understands what has happened, it sends a message, to the muscles to make a movement or prevent movement so that no further damage occurs and the damage is limited. I call it a kind of protection program.

All sorts of things are also set in motion in the body to heal the pain. In addition, the pain is stored in your brain’s memory library along with the emotions, and sensations associated with this particular pain. And every time there is a similar emotion or sensation, your brain sends the protection program for this pain back to the muscles.

Besides physical pain stimuli, our ‘Something is wrong’ thoughts and anxious emotions also trigger stimuli to which the central nervous system responds with this pain-protection program.

Sometimes we keep sending stimuli to the brain with our ‘pain-oriented’ thoughts and emotions, long after the actual physical pain has healed.  This constant pain stimulation makes our nervous system over-stimulated and increasingly sensitive to pain. It can even change certain neural networks as a result. It expands the original protection program more and more and fires it more often and faster.

As a consequence, pain in one area of your body can cause long-term tension in your whole body, psyche, and mind, causing you to lose a lot of energy and bandwidth in feeling and moving. Even such traits as curiosity, flexibility, creativity, and solution-oriented thinking then often take a back seat.  This is a vicious neurobiological circle, which we can break by consciously focusing our attention differently. The beauty is that both the body and our nervous system then have much more room to tap into their self-healing capacity.

Window of tolerance or window of pleasure?

Besides focusing on what hurts, we can also turn our attention to what feels okay or perhaps even pleasurable. By doing this, we again widen our bandwidth and our variety of feelings. I like to call this expanding the window of enjoyment or pleasure as quoted by Steve Hoskinson from Organic Intelligence® in preference to your window of tolerance.

When we direct our attention to pleasurable sensations, we move out of fear and all fear-oriented tension patterns. To feel pleasure, all we need is a very small pleasurable sensation somewhere in the body, even if just in your fingertip or your little toe. We find pleasurable sensations more readily by focusing on what feels easy rather than strenuous, and effortful. For example, we experience ease by moving smaller, softer, slower, and more mindful.

When you make movements with very little effort, your brain is again able to register the differences between different movement options and choose what is most efficient, pleasurable, easy, and comfortable. With these new choices, the brain can rewrite the pain protection program and create better-feeling patterns.

Our brain’s need for our physical antennae

by Pingel Braat | Apr 10, 2025 | Blog, Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about becoming more aware of how you use your senses – the physical antennae that monitor the physical world around you. They help the nervous system organise itself and they give the brain the right information to map itself in the here and now.

An important task for our brains, as the incoming information helps the brain create a predictable outcome to face the situations life brings us as efficiently and energy–savingly as possible.

When our brain does this successfully, we experience it as having the energy to do the things that are meaningful to us, and to have a sense of ease, peace, and joy as we move through our daily lives.

Play, play and play

by Pingel Braat | Apr 9, 2025 | Blog, Ignite your sparkle, Nervous System Health, Video

We find much of our ease and pleasure in play. You only have to look at small children and see how they get fully absorbed in playing, and then how they enjoy themselves. Indeed, playing helps us to be completely in the present moment, and to feel carefree and joyful for a while. When we play, our attention is not so focused on our more intense inner world.

For us adults, it would be healthy if we spent more time in our playful infant mind space, where curiosity, awe and wonder dance together. Play awakens our creativity and inventiveness. It creates space in our minds.

So why not play more? Everything in our daily lives can be ‘play’ by approaching it with a playful attitude. Our brains love it. It is a powerful nutrient for a resilient nervous system. And it gives space and relaxation in the body. Let’s talk about play…

Help your brain come home by using your visual sense, your eyes

by Pingel Braat | Apr 9, 2025 | Nervous System Health, Video

In this video, I talk about using the visual sense as a way to regulate the nervous system and help the brain map itself into the here-and-now physical- and human environment.

Did you know that our eyes play a big role in our social engagement? In this video, I will tell you about it.

I introduce you to a few minutes of orientation in your physical environment by letting your eyes off the leash of thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations inside. And to invite your mind to be a passenger of the eyes that wander.