If you have read any of my writing or taken one of my classes, you may already be aware that I’ve been teaching yoga and meditation for over twenty years. You may also know that, most of that time, I was quietly managing chronic anxiety — the kind that doesn’t announce itself dramatically, but just hums beneath everything. I knew all the tools. I used them and they helped. My anxiety would ease, then return, like a tide I couldn’t stop.
It took me more than twenty years — two decades of practice, study, teaching, and a lot of honest self-examination — to finally understand what was actually happening. And when I did, it didn’t come as a single revelation. It came gradually, the way real understanding usually does. Piece by piece, something started to make sense.
The missing piece wasn’t a better technique or more discipline. It was understanding my own nervous system. And one significant epiphany along my long path of self-understanding was when I discovered a framework called Polyvagal Theory. Without knowing it at the time, I had been relating to my body in a way that was similar to the framing of the Polyvagal Theory. Learning it in detail seemed to ground what I felt intuitively, and it gave me an overwhelming feeling of comfort and safety, like I was on the right path.
The Willpower Trap
Our culture has a story about anxiety: if you’re anxious, you need to think more clearly, try harder, or develop more discipline. Meditate. Journal. Breathe. Push through. And while those things can help, they miss something fundamental. When you’re stuck in an anxious state, your nervous system is running an ancient survival program – one that has no interest whatsoever in what your rational mind is telling it.
You can’t logic your way out of a biological response. You have to work with the body, not around it. This is why so many people feel like they’re failing at relaxation. They’re not failing. In many cases, they’re just thinking about it wrong, or using the wrong tool.
What Is Polyvagal Theory?
Polyvagal Theory was developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, and it offers one of the most useful frameworks I’ve ever encountered for understanding anxiety – and for actually doing something about it.
The basic idea is that your autonomic nervous system (the part that runs automatically, below conscious thought) doesn’t just have two settings — “stressed” and “calm.” It has three distinct states, each with its own physiology, emotional tone, and behavior.
State 1: Ventral Vagal – Safe and Connected
This is the state we’re designed to spend most of our time in. When your nervous system detects safety, the ventral vagal complex activates and you feel calm, open, socially engaged, and present. Your digestion works well. Your voice is warm. You can think clearly and connect with others.
This is not a luxury state. It’s your biological home base.
State 2: Sympathetic – Fight or Flight
When your nervous system detects threat – real or perceived – it mobilizes. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, your breath becomes shallow and fast. This is the survival response, and it’s brilliant when you actually need it. The problem is that for many of us, it gets stuck in the “on” position.
Chronic stress, unresolved trauma, relentless pressure – all of these can keep the sympathetic state perpetually activated, even when the danger is long gone.
State 3: Dorsal Vagal – Freeze and Shutdown
This is the oldest and most primitive response. When threat becomes overwhelming and escape seems impossible, the nervous system shuts down. You might feel numb, disconnected, exhausted, or empty. Depression often lives here. So does the hollow feeling of burnout.
Understanding these three states was genuinely life-changing for me. If I paid attention, I could witness myself going through all three states at one time or another, sometimes within a single day. For the first time, I was able to understand what was going on in my body – not just my mind.
Why Yoga Works (At a Nervous System Level)
Yoga has been practiced for thousands of years. But only recently has modern science caught up to explain why it works so well for anxiety and stress.
Here’s the short version: yoga is one of the most effective tools we have for shifting your nervous system state from sympathetic (fight or flight) back toward ventral vagal (safe and connected) – and it does this through the body, not the mind.
Your Breath Is a Direct Line to Your Nervous System
The vagus nerve — the key player in Polyvagal Theory — runs from your brainstem all the way down through your heart, lungs, and digestive organs. It’s essentially the body’s information superhighway between your brain and your gut.
Here’s what makes this extraordinary: breathing is the one autonomic function you can consciously control. And when you change how you breathe, you change your nervous system state. Specifically, slow, deep breathing with an extended exhale activates the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system and stimulates the vagus nerve. This is not metaphorical. It’s measurable. Your heart rate variability (a key marker of nervous system health) changes with every breath you take.
This is why pranayama – yogic breathwork – has such a profound effect. It’s not mystical. It’s neurological.
Movement Completes the Stress Cycle
When your nervous system activates a stress response, it’s preparing your body to move – to run, to fight, to escape. When that movement never happens (because you’re sitting in traffic or staring at a screen), the stress energy gets stuck in your body.
Gentle, intentional movement – the kind we practice in yoga – helps complete that stress cycle. It gives the body a chance to process and release what’s been held.
Interoception: Learning to Feel Safe from the Inside
When you feel calm, present and aware of your body sensations, you develop what is referred to as interoception – your ability to sense what’s happening inside your own body. This matters enormously for anxiety, because anxiety often lives in the gap between what our rational mind thinks and what our body is actually signalling.
And when you regularly practice tuning in – noticing sensation, breath, and physical state without judgment — you start to develop what I think of as a body-based sense of safety. You become less frightened of your own internal experience. And that, over time, is profoundly calming.
Before We Get to the Practices
I want to pause here for a moment, because I know what some of you might be thinking. These sound too simple. I’ve tried breathing exercises before. I’ve done yoga. It didn’t fix anything.
I hear that. I thought the same thing for years. And I want to be honest with you: these practices won’t cure chronic anxiety, and I’m not going to tell you they will. What they will do — if you approach them with consistency and a little patience — is begin to shift the conditions inside your body. Slowly, and then more noticeably over time.
The key word is body. That’s what makes this different from most advice about anxiety. We’re not trying to change your thoughts or reframe your perspective. We’re working directly with your physiology — with the actual biological systems that generate the anxious state in the first place. That’s a different intervention entirely, and it requires a different kind of practice: less effortful, more receptive. Less about pushing through, more about creating the right conditions and then getting out of the way.
Twenty years of anxiety taught me that you can’t force your nervous system to feel safe. But you can invite it. Repeatedly, gently, and with practices that speak the body’s own language.
That’s what these five practices are designed to do.
5 Practices That Directly Regulate Your Nervous System
These aren’t generic relaxation tips. Each one works through a specific physiological mechanism to shift your nervous system toward safety — or, in the case of the first practice, to shake it loose from wherever it’s gotten stuck. I’ve used all of them personally and with students over more than two decades.
1. High Ventilation Breathing — Breath of Fire and Bhastrika
Why it works: Most breathwork for anxiety focuses on slowing down — and that’s important. But sometimes the nervous system isn’t wound up; it’s shut down. Stuck in that flat, foggy, disconnected state where slow breathing just makes you feel more inert. This is where high ventilation breathing has been, for me, genuinely transformative.
Breath of Fire (rapid rhythmic breathing driven by sharp exhales through the nose) and Bhastrika (forceful, bellows-like breathing through the nose) both flood the body with oxygen, generate heat, and mobilize energy that’s been frozen or suppressed. The effect is hard to describe until you’ve felt it — a kind of clearing, a reset, a return to aliveness. Mental fog lifts. Stuck energy moves. The nervous system wakes up without tipping into panic.
Watch tutorials on both practices here: Bhastrika Pranayama (Bellows Breath) and Kapalabhati (Breath of Fire).
Note: High ventilation breathing is powerful. If you’re pregnant, have high blood pressure, or are new to breathwork, start gently and consult a teacher or healthcare provider.
2. Extended Exhale Breathing
Why it works: The exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The longer the exhale relative to the inhale, the more calming the effect — this is the counterpart to high ventilation breathing, and together they give you tools for the full range of nervous system states.
Try this: Inhale for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 6 to 8. Repeat for 5 to 10 minutes. This is one of the most evidence-backed interventions for acute anxiety, and one of the most portable — you can do it in a meeting, in bed, or in a bathroom stall before a hard conversation.
3. Humming or Chanting
Why it works: The vagus nerve connects directly to the muscles of your throat and voice box. Vibrating these muscles — through humming, chanting, or even gargling — stimulates vagal tone directly. It’s a remarkably simple practice that I return to again and again, especially when I’m feeling flat or disconnected.
Try this: Hum a single note on your exhale for 5 minutes. Feel the vibration settle into your chest. Let it be effortless. This isn’t about the sound — it’s about the sensation.
4. Restorative Yoga Poses
Why it works: When you hold a supported, comfortable position with your full body weight released into the floor or props, you send a powerful and unambiguous signal of safety to your nervous system. There is no threat. Nothing is required of you. The body can finally rest — and over time, it begins to remember what rest actually feels like.
For people who have lived with chronic anxiety for years, this can be surprisingly emotional. Not because anything dramatic happens, but because genuine stillness becomes available in a way it hasn’t been for a long time.
And it’s easy to do! Try one of the online restorative yoga classes on DoYogaWithMe.
5. Orienting Practice
Why it works: One of the fastest ways to shift out of threat mode is to slowly and deliberately take in your environment through your senses. This is called “orienting,” and it’s what mammals naturally do when a danger has passed — a kind of checking in with the present moment to confirm: I am here. I am safe.
Try this: Sit quietly and slowly turn your head to look around the room. Let your eyes rest on something pleasant — light, colour, texture. Feel the weight of your body in the chair. Notice the temperature of the air. Take a breath. This deliberate, unhurried noticing sends a direct signal to your nervous system that the threat is not present.
The Shift I Want You to Make
If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: anxiety is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It’s evidence that your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do — trying to protect you. The work isn’t to suppress that response or fight it. The work is to help your body learn — slowly, consistently, with practice — that it is safe.
That’s what yoga has given me. Not an absence of anxiety, but a felt sense, in my body, that I can come back to safety. That there is a home base. And that I know how to find my way back to it. That shift has been more valuable to me than any amount of willpower ever was.
Ready to Go Deeper?
If what you’ve read here resonates – if some part of you recognizes that what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, and that there might be another way – I’d like to invite you to explore my online 28-day program, Freedom from Anxiety.
It’s a program I developed not just as a teacher, but as someone who genuinely needed it. Someone who spent two decades trying to think and willpower his way out of a chronic anxious state, before finally understanding that the body needed to be part of the solution.
Freedom from Anxiety combines breathwork, gentle movement, and mindfulness practices in a structured, progressive format designed for real life, even for those who are super busy and still want to feel better. Every practice in it works through the same nervous system principles we’ve explored in this article.
If you’re ready to stop managing anxiety and start actually shifting it, I’d love for you to join us. The next cohort launches on May 25, 2026 and you can learn more about it here: Freedom from Anxiety May 25th cohort.
Take care and have fun on your path.
David Procyshyn is a leading voice in the world of wellness — a writer, speaker, story-teller, yoga and meditation teacher, and founder of DoYogaWithMe, who blends ancient practices with modern science to help people heal from chronic anxiety. He lives in Victoria, BC.
Check out his other articles related to this topic:
The Science Behind How Anxiety Becomes Chronic
7 Simple Mindfulness Steps to See Anxiety with New Eyes
How to Relax Deeply (And Why It Can Be Hard to Do)
Tags: anxiety, polyvagal theory, nervous system, yoga for anxiety, breathwork, vagus nerve, restorative yoga, mindfulness, panic, stress relief, somatic healing