What Is Up With My Nervous System?
What Is Up With My Nervous System?
A presentation on chronic stress, burnout, and how to help your nervous system reset
Wired and tired. Jumpy. Foggy. Irritable. Fried. We have a lot of names for it: Type A, perfectionist, people pleaser, micromanager, anxious. Underneath all of them is the same thing: a nervous system that’s stuck on alert.
In What Is Up With My Nervous System?, Trent Morrow, LCSW, owner of L & B Counseling in Charlotte, NC, explains why so many people feel constantly on edge even when life is relatively safe, what chronic stress does to the body, and practical tools to help the nervous system calm down.
Who This Presentation Is For
- Employers, HR teams, and employee wellness programs
- Leadership teams and high-pressure workplaces
- Healthcare teams and caregivers
- Parents and parent groups
- Schools, educators, and administrators
- Churches and community organizations
What Participants Will Learn
The Problem: A Mismatch
Our nervous systems were built for short bursts of physical stress, followed by rest. They’re wired to seek safety, quick to panic, and slow to calm down. Today’s environment keeps them activated through constant demands, multiple virtual worlds at once, and no real off switch.
Environment usually wins. But the nervous system can also keep sounding the alarm even when the environment is safe.
The Haunted House Effect
Like walking through a haunted house, many people move through life braced for something to happen, checking and double-checking, never fully relaxing. The presentation explains why that constant readiness is exhausting and how to recognize it.
What It Looks Like
Nervous system stress shows up in three main ways:
- Hyper-energy: perfectionism, anxiety, and the need to control
- Misdirected energy: people pleasing, fawning, and overgiving
- Low energy: apathy, withdrawal, and shutting down
What’s Contributing
- Mislabeling: everyday struggles increasingly get described in clinical terms, and those labels can become part of a person’s identity rather than a passing experience
- Unreliable information: social media and AI can reinforce self-diagnosis through confirmation bias
- Competition for limited resources: spots on the team, seats at elite colleges, “good jobs,” and uncertainty about technological change
- Parenting styles: helicopter, snowplow, and concerted cultivation approaches, along with anxious attachment
- 24/7 comparison culture: comparison is natural and healthy in small doses, but now it’s constant, with infinite environments and voices
What Chronic Stress Does to the Body
Long-term stress is linked to effects across the body, including:
- Cardiovascular: high blood pressure and strain on blood vessels and the heart
- Immune and inflammatory: fatigue, heightened pain sensitivity, and links to autoimmune conditions
- Gastrointestinal and metabolic: digestive issues such as IBS and changes in blood sugar regulation
- Neurological: brain fog, poor sleep quality, elevated cortisol, and increased risk of depression
Participants also learn the roles of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol, which can act as both a bully and a hero.
The Motivation Puzzle
Do you need to feel motivated before you act, or does action create motivation? Do you have to be good at something before trying it? The talk explores how stress changes our relationship with effort and reward.
The Flight and Freeze Default
We live in one of the statistically safest eras in history, yet many people feel more internal risk than ever. The result is avoiding risk, spending more time alone, chasing easy wins, and seeing the world in all-or-nothing terms.
Solutions
The Healthy Human Recipe
Sleep, diet, exercise, socializing, hobbies, and healthy challenges are the foundation of a regulated nervous system.
Risk Exposure
Seek “Goldilocks” challenges, hard enough to stretch you but not overwhelm you. Over time, this raises your stress threshold, builds resistance to fatigue, and trains your body to move between effort and rest.
The Swiss Army Knife of Parenting
Match your parenting approach to your child’s needs in the moment. For adults, it starts with knowing your own emotional temperature.
Short-Term Stress Relief
- Know your emotional temperature and have a system to check it
- Double breath (physiological sigh)
- Movement
- Changing your environment
- Asking for help
- Healthy distractions
- Spirituality and mindfulness
- Reframing
The Big Picture
- Separating causation from correlation and calling for better research
- Age-of-exposure standards for technology
- Nervous system regulation classes in schools, like financial literacy requirements
- Education on the pros and cons of technology
- More “sandboxes,” safe places to take risks and fail
- Cultural re-norming around rest, risk, and comparison
Key Takeaways
- Many common struggles, from perfectionism to people pleasing to burnout, share a nervous system root
- Our biology is mismatched with our modern environment
- Chronic stress affects the whole body, not just the mind
- Safe, manageable challenges build resilience more than avoidance does
- Simple, repeatable tools can help the nervous system reset
About the Presenter
Trent Morrow, LCSW, is the owner of L & B Counseling PLLC in Ballantyne, Charlotte, NC. He speaks to organizations, schools, and community groups on stress, nervous system regulation, youth mental health, and the impact of technology on how we live. His presentations blend clinical insight with practical tools people can use the same day.
Presentation Details
- Length: [60–90 minutes, including Q&A]
- Format: In-person in the Charlotte area or virtual
- Customizable for workplace, healthcare, parent, or educator audiences