The internet is full of warnings about our ‘dysregulated’ nervous systems. But, experts say, you don’t need to reset yours – you might just need to make it more flexible. Here’s how (and no, you don’t need an acupressure mat)

Whether it’s tapping the side of your hand or standing on a vibrating plate, suggestions on how to “reset” your nervous system are saturating the internet. Cold water plunges, humming, gargling, yawning and spiky acupressure mats are all being touted as ways to help us “regulate” and return to calm. If you’re still talking about feeling “stressed”, you’re behind the times; now, says the internet, you are “dysregulated”.

The nervous system is an integral part of being human. “It’s essentially the body’s communication and control network,” says Dr Serena Lai, consultant psychiatrist and associate medical director at London Psychiatry Clinic. “Made up of the brain and spinal cord, it communicates with the entire body through nerves, helping us to sense what is happening around and inside us. When we have that information, we can process it and coordinate a response.”

We are surrounded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures – and most of it barely registers. Time to slow down and take it all in …

What was the last thing that made your body feel good? Maybe it was the first sip of tea or blast of water in your morning shower, the warm silk of a cat’s back arching to meet your fingers, pulling on a T-shirt softened by repeated washing or the moment you align the numbers on your bike lock and it releases with a weighty clonk? Maybe somewhere you encountered a paper coffee cup with a cardboard sleeve embossed with ridges that offered “a surprisingly gratifying tactile delight”? Maybe you’ve never considered paper cups much; I hadn’t before I read that in Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff: The Sensory Enchantment of Everyday Life.

The Small Stuff is a manifesto for tuning into the tiny opportunities for gratification being human offers, even in increasingly frictionless, AI-enabled, automated lives. Starting from that paper cup, Bogost – an interdisciplinary academic at Washington University, video game designer and writer – explores how we’ve become what he calls “dematerialised” and how to fight back, analysing the idiosyncratically pleasing qualities of plastic drinking fountain tumblers, using “steel-crank-roll paper towel dispensers” and – don’t tell me this one doesn’t resonate – peeling the plastic protective film off, in his case, a wooden knife block (I have happy memories of doing this on our microwave door).

From an elevated heart rate to weakened immunity, experts explain the hidden physical costs of chronic stress – and why our bodies aren’t built to stay on high alert

You wake up later than planned, so it’s a rush to get everything sorted out ahead of the school run. While you’re waiting for the toaster, idiotically, you check your phone. Something has happened, and your timeline is a scalding-hot mess of the worst takes imaginable. One of your children has left their shoes somewhere unfathomable, and there’s an envelope on your doormat scolding you for driving in a bus lane.

You’re undeniably stressed, and your body’s likely to respond by ramping up the same biological systems that evolved to deal with inter-tribe disputes and mammoth attacks. But is there a downside to being stressed – and having these systems switched on – all the time? Take a calming breath, and let’s dig into the science.

Being unremarkable is often seen as a sign of moral failure – yet finding joy in the everyday can lead to a mindful, luminous experience

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

Lately I’ve been playing with a thought experiment: what if I was told the rest of my life would be completely ordinary? Not bad, just unremarkable.

My immediate response is, “well, ordinary is better than awful” (forever the optimist), and then almost immediately (and embarrassingly), “this is not how life is meant to play out! I want something more!”

When your boss asks to meet, do you assume you’re about to get fired? Experts explain this common pattern

Your boss asks you for a meeting later in the week; you have never received negative feedback, but you automatically assume you’re about to get fired. Thoughts begin to swirl as you imagine the consequences: soon, you’ll be unemployed and unable to pay your rent.

Or, perhaps, when your partner is a little late coming home, you visualize a terrible accident on the motorway, their car crushed in the pile-up.

Find out how bad your mental mush is

How bad is your brain rot? Tally up your scores to see your results.

None 3pts

1-3 2pts

4-6 1pts

6+ 0pts

Never 3pts

Sometimes 2pts

Frequently 1pts

Almost always 0pts

Meditate 3pts

Read 3pts

Watch TV 1pts

Doomscroll 0pts

Almost never 0pts

Less than once a week 1pts

At least once a week 2pts

2-3 times a week 3pts

Never 3pts

Occasionally 2pts

Frequently 1pts

Basically always 0pts

7+ hours 3pts

6-7 hours 2pts

Less than 6 hours 1pts

Almost never 0pts

Less than once a week 1pts

At least once a week 2pts

2-3 times a week 3pts

6+ hours 3pts

3-6 hours 2pts

1-3 hours 1pts

Less than an hour 0pts

Next to me, obviously 0pts

Somewhere else 3pts

Never 3pts

Occasionally, if it’s important 2pts

Pretty much every time 0pts

Feel like too much low-quality screen time is making you … dumber? From focusing on your environment to ‘washing’ your brain, experts share tips on how to sharpen up and keep your mind fighting fit
Plus: how rotten is your brain? Take our quiz to find out

Ever had one of those days when you get nothing done but still somehow feel exhausted? Of course you have: brain rot, the Oxford word of the year for 2024, isn’t yet in any medical dictionaries, but it’s probably best understood as the decline in cognitive abilities that comes from endless exposure to easily digestible information. And, thanks to the ubiquity of short‑form video and social media, it’s almost certainly on the rise.

“When we’re engaging with this sort of media, our brains are both underworked – because the information is easy to understand – and overworked because there is so much information to absorb,” says Dr Wendy Ross, a senior lecturer in psychology at London Metropolitan University. “That’s why you end up tired even if you’re just scrolling on your couch.” Want to throw the process into reverse and recover your attention? Here’s how.

Andreas Graf lived without screens and no idea of the date or time. The conditions were often brutal – but he found kindness and friendship as he rode

In April 2022, Andreas Graf set off on his bike from his home in Norway. His dream was to cycle to India. A week later, having reached Sweden, it was already becoming more of a nightmare. “It was pouring with rain and I was lying in my tent in my half-wet sleeping bag and I was like, I could be in my very cosy Oslo apartment,” he says. “I had this good life, a career, a partner, and I had left everything behind.”

He was 31. Friends were settling down. Graf had a well-paid job in industrial engineering, but was still renting in a houseshare. “I had started to think about whether to make a financially reasonable and sensible decision, or do something else. I went for option two.”

The boundaries between work and leisure are being blurred, but it’s vital for your health to learn how to turn off. Whether you do your job from home or not, here’s how to reset and reclaim your private time

• Sign up here to get the whole series straight to your inbox

Marilyn Monroe once said: “A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.” Only these days, you can. The march of technology, the rise of hybrid and remote working, and an increasing culture of presenteeism (working longer than contractually required, or when sick) have blurred the boundaries between work and leisure.

Research by Business in the Community (BITC), a UK-based responsible business network, shows that 55% of employees feel pressed to respond to calls or check emails outside work, while high workloads drive two in five to work overtime. Yet switching off from work when you aren’t working (psychological detachment, to give it its scientific name) is vital not just for your health, but for productivity.

We are often so busy and yet when the opportunity arises to do nothing, we can find it uncomfortable. Here’s how to lean into boredom – and unlock the imagination

• Sign up here to get the whole series straight to your inbox

On a rainy afternoon last weekend, plans got cancelled and I found myself at a loose end. Given that I’m someone who likes to have backup plans for my backup plans, my initial response was panic. Now what? I wandered aimlessly from room to room, grumpily tidying away random items.

Noticing for the first time in weeks that most of my houseplants were critically ill, I decided to give them a spa day. I moved the worst cases to a south-facing windowsill and painstakingly removed the (many) dead leaves. For good measure, I organised a triage box containing plant food, a mister and a watering can. I might have got carried away and ordered a “beautifying leaf shine” too.

From Agatha Christie doing the dishes to the cancer surgeon inspired at the theatre, an idling brain suddenly seems able to join the dots

If you really want to solve a problem, try doing nothing about it. Fold some laundry. Stir a risotto. Go for a run, watch a film, try to entertain someone else’s baby: anything that involves pottering about in an undemanding yet still vaguely engaged way, which absolutely couldn’t be classed as work but isn’t totally vegetative either. It may not be the productivity hack any go-getter wants to hear, but it’s surprising how often a spell of aimless noodling around frees an otherwise overworked human brain to make the kind of lateral mental leap that helps everything fall into place. And I’m not just saying that to justify a New Year’s Day spent lying hungover on the sofa, ploughing through the last of the Christmas cheese.

For the eminent cancer surgeon Michael Baum, it was a night off with his wife at the theatre that allowed him to suddenly join the dots. After watching a scene in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia where one character explains chaos theory to another, Baum had his own personal eureka moment: what if this mathematical concept, used to describe complex systems that may seem haphazard but have a hidden underlying pattern to them, could also explain the otherwise puzzling way in which cancer grows and spreads? The result of that one stray thought as the interval curtain rose was an innovation in chemotherapy, and a gratifying rise in survival rates.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

You don’t have to wake at 5am or commit to hardcore exercise. But by working out a handful of habits that suit you, and introducing them slowly, you can change your life

• Sign up here to get the whole series straight to your inbox

The first thing to say about the ideal morning routine is that it probably doesn’t exist. Yes, endless influencers promise that they have tweaked, tested and fine-tuned the process of revving up for the day, but how history’s most productive people actually get things done is so varied that it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions. Beethoven, reportedly, used to count out exactly 60 beans for his morning cup of coffee, while Victor Hugo downed two raw eggs after reading a daily missive from his mistress. Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, wakes at 3am for pre-workout prayer, chasing up his gym time with a few holes of golf and a jolt in the cryo chamber before he even thinks about doing any work.

It is clear, though, that having some sort of routine is key: a set of automatic actions that you do every day, to ease you into your responsibilities with a bit of momentum and a fresh frame of mind. And there is some stuff that seems beneficial enough that everyone should be doing a version of it, even if individual methods differ: one person’s meditative bean arithmetic, after all, is another’s mindfulness. But if you want to finesse your routine, the key is to add one change at a time. “When you focus on a single behaviour,” says the behaviour change specialist Dr Heather McKee, “you build confidence through quick wins, and give your brain the clarity and dopamine hit it needs to automate that action. Once that habit feels natural, you free up mental space to layer in the next change.” But what habits should you be building?

Because our senses are so limited and the nature of all things so transient, what we know to be objective reality is a momentary snapshot of the whole picture

• Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life

The latest iteration of OpenAI’s video generator, Sora 2, spells troubling times for objective reality. Even before the introduction of generative AI, an increasingly polarised political atmosphere meant we could barely agree on the same set of facts.

But for Buddhists, reality has always been something to be sceptical about.

Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva,
while contemplating profoundly the Prajna Paramita,
Realised that the Five Skandhas are empty,
and thus he was able to overcome all suffering.

Form, all the things our sensory organs can smell, taste, see, feel and hear.

Feelings that arise when we perceive things.

Perception is the lens through which we label things and assign value or worth like bananas are delicious or this article is boring.

Mental forces, or volition, are the actions and reactions to things and the feelings and perceptions that come from them.

Consciousness is the last because it its the aggregate or heap of the rest together. It is our memories and the human hard drive from which we draw from to inform how we will respond to new forms, feelings and sensations.