The protocol a practitioner uses herself — and recommends to patients who are chronically overstimulated.
There's a gap between what most doctors tell their patients about stress and what they actually do about their own. The standard advice — sleep more, stress less, try meditation — is true but incomplete. It tells you what to do without telling you why it works, or how to do it in a way that actually fits into a real life.
We sat down with a functional medicine physician to ask a more specific question: not what she prescribes, but what she does. Her own morning, her own wind-down, her own non-negotiables — and the reasoning behind each one.
What follows is that conversation, edited for length.
Start at the beginning. What does your morning actually look like?
The first thing I do — before anything else — is avoid my phone for the first twenty minutes. That sounds small but it's probably the highest-leverage thing I do. The moment you check your phone, you've activated your sympathetic nervous system. You've introduced information that requires processing, comparison, reaction. Your cortisol, which naturally peaks in the first thirty to forty-five minutes after waking in what's called the cortisol awakening response, gets hijacked by whatever's in your inbox or your feed. You're starting the day already in a stress response before you've made your coffee.
So the first twenty minutes are mine. I drink a large glass of water. I do some form of breathing — usually a few rounds of box breathing or just slow, extended exhales. I try to get outside or at least get natural light through a window. Those three things — hydration, breathwork, light — set the tone for everything that follows.
What does the breathwork actually do, physiologically?
The vagus nerve is the primary highway of the parasympathetic nervous system — it runs from your brainstem down through your heart, lungs, and gut, and it's responsible for bringing you back to baseline after a stress response. Breathing is one of the few autonomic functions you can consciously control, which means it's one of the most direct levers you have on your nervous system state.
When your exhale is longer than your inhale, you're signaling to your vagus nerve that you're safe. Heart rate slows. Blood pressure drops. The prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation — comes back online. The amygdala, which drives fear and threat response, quiets down.
I usually recommend starting simple: four counts in through the nose, six to eight counts out through the mouth. Do that for five minutes and measure how different you feel. Most people are genuinely surprised.
What do you tell patients who are chronically overstimulated — the ones who can't seem to downregulate no matter what they try?
The first thing I tell them is that their nervous system isn't broken — it's adapted. It's done exactly what it was designed to do, which is stay alert and mobilized in the presence of sustained threat. The problem is that modern life presents chronic low-grade threat in the form of information overload, financial pressure, social comparison, ambient noise, and never-ending decision-making. The sympathetic nervous system doesn't know those aren't predators.
So the work is partly about removing inputs — reducing the chronic activation load — and partly about building what I call parasympathetic capacity: the nervous system's ability to return to baseline more quickly after being activated. That capacity is trainable. It improves with consistent practice, the same way cardiovascular fitness improves with consistent exercise.
Practically, I look at five things: sleep consistency, movement type, nutrition, breathwork practice, and what I call the evening transition — how someone moves from the active part of their day into rest. Most people have no evening transition. They go from screen to bed and wonder why they can't sleep.
Talk about the evening transition.
This is where I spend a lot of time with patients because it's where the most leverage is and where most people have the least structure.
The nervous system needs clear signals that the day is ending. Dimming light triggers melatonin production and begins the biological wind-down. Reducing cognitive load — stopping decisions, stopping information intake, stopping screens — removes the sympathetic stimulation that keeps cortisol elevated. Temperature drop, which happens naturally in the evening and can be supported by a slightly cooler bedroom, is one of the strongest sleep-onset signals the body has.
What I tell people to do: at some point in the evening — it doesn't have to be rigid — create a thirty-minute buffer before you intend to sleep. Dim the lights. Put the phone down. Do something that requires presence but not effort: a slow walk, light stretching, reading something that isn't news, a conversation that isn't about logistics. Something warm or something cold and still to drink. The point is to give your nervous system permission to downshift.
What role does nutrition play in nervous system regulation?
Significant — and consistently underestimated. The gut-brain axis is a bidirectional communication system, and the state of your gut directly influences your nervous system state. Chronic inflammation in the gut produces neuroinflammation. Dysbiosis — an imbalanced gut microbiome — is associated with anxiety, depression, and impaired stress response. And magnesium deficiency, which is extraordinarily common in people who eat a standard Western diet, directly impairs the nervous system's ability to regulate.
Magnesium is involved in over three hundred enzymatic reactions in the body, including the regulation of the NMDA receptor, which is involved in stress response. I test almost every patient for magnesium and find deficiency more often than not. Dark leafy greens, nuts and seeds, legumes, fatty fish, avocado — these are the foods I prioritize for nervous system support.
I also look at what people are using to self-regulate. Alcohol is the most common one — and it's the most counterproductive. It feels like a parasympathetic activator because it's a central nervous system depressant, but it actually disrupts the sleep architecture that allows genuine nervous system repair. The short-term calm comes at the cost of the deep rest you needed.
What do you actually use to wind down in the evening?
Magnesium glycinate is a non-negotiable for me — 300 to 400mg in the evening. It supports GABA activity, which is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter — the brain's own brake pedal. Ashwagandha has good evidence for HPA axis regulation and cortisol reduction with consistent use. I'm also interested in cannabinoids — specifically CBG, which has a different profile than CBD and appears to have genuine affinity for receptors involved in stress response without the sedation that makes some people feel foggy.
I try to be in bed with the lights off by the same time every night, even on weekends. That consistency is probably the single highest-impact thing I do for my nervous system, more than any supplement or practice.
Last question: what's the one thing most people get wrong about nervous system regulation?
They think it's about eliminating stress. It isn't. Stress is not the problem — chronic, unresolved stress with no recovery is the problem. The goal isn't a life without activation. It's a nervous system that activates when it needs to and returns to baseline reliably. That's resilience. That's what we're building toward.
And it builds faster than most people expect, once they start giving it the conditions it needs.