The Problem Isn't Your Nervous System
There is a pattern worth noticing. Systems that demand constant productivity, compliance, and self-management create conditions in which human bodies struggle. When those bodies respond—through anxiety, exhaustion, illness, withdrawal, overwhelm—the response is named as a problem. A solution is offered: therapy, coaching, protocols, optimisation, self-care.
The solution is almost always aimed at the individual. The conditions remain unchanged.
Unnatural Systems, Natural Responses
Capitalism requires perpetual output. Patriarchy polices emotion and enforces roles. Colonial structures sever people from land, language, lineage. Industrialised education asks children to sit still for hours and calls movement a disorder. Families are isolated into nuclear units and expected to function without village, without rest, without adequate support.
These are not natural conditions for human nervous systems.
When distress arises in response to these conditions, it is often not a sign that something is wrong with the person. It may be a sign that the conditions themselves are incompatible with wellbeing.
Yet the framing rarely goes this way.
Instead, the body's response becomes the focus. Labels are applied. Interventions recommended. The individual is asked to change, adapt, regulate, heal—so they can return to the same environment that harmed them.
Pathology as Product
There is an economy built around this.
Distress is identified, categorised, named. Once named, it becomes treatable. Once treatable, marketable. Workshops, apps, programs, supplements, protocols—all offered as pathways back to functioning.
People who are struggling deserve care. Therapy can be meaningful. Nervous system work can offer real relief.
But something shifts when healing becomes an industry. When "wellness" is sold back to people whose unwellness was produced by the very systems now profiting from the cure.
When the solution is always individual, the cause is never structural.
The question what is wrong with you gets asked repeatedly. The question what is wrong with this rarely gets airtime.
Whose Interests Are Served?
When parents are told their child needs therapy to manage behaviour that emerges from overstimulation, exhaustion, or unmet need—the school is not asked to change.
When workers burn out under impossible demands and are offered resilience training—the workplace is not asked to change.
When people carry intergenerational grief, displacement, or the weight of living in systems not built for their bodies—they are offered individual healing plans. The systems are not asked to change.
There is a politics to where we locate the problem.
Locating it in the individual protects the structures. It keeps the focus on coping, adapting, improving—rather than on questioning what kind of life is being asked of people in the first place.
What Else Might Be True
This doesn't mean therapy is useless or that nervous system support has no place.
It means the frame matters.
A widened frame might ask:
What conditions is this body living inside?
What has been demanded of it, and for how long?
What connections have been lost—community, rest, meaning, land, lineage?
Whose pace is this person being asked to keep?
What would need to change for this response to no longer be necessary?
These are not questions aimed at optimisation. They are questions aimed at honesty.
Sometimes the most accurate thing a nervous system can do is struggle. Sometimes distress is not a sign of brokenness but of clarity—a body registering that something is wrong, even when there is no language for what.
A Different Orientation
There may be value in support that does not ask people to become more efficient at tolerating harm.
Support that names conditions alongside symptoms.
That holds the limits of what individual work can do.
That does not turn every struggle into a project of self-improvement.
That leaves room for grief, refusal, rest that is not earned.
The goal is not a regulated nervous system that can endure anything.
It may be something closer to honesty:
about what has been lost,
what is still being asked,
and what would need to return for the body to stop sounding the alarm.
Related Resources
Important Information
This piece reflects on nervous system distress within systemic and ecological contexts. It is not intended as clinical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and is not a substitute for professional support. The reflections shared here do not discourage anyone from seeking therapy or other forms of care. Rather, they invite consideration of the broader conditions in which distress arises and is addressed.
