NERVOUS SYSTEM REGULATION AMONG THE MOST RESILIENT PEOPLE
HANNA MARKUKSELA
“Even the positive stress can burn you out if you don’t rest”
Hanna Markuksela (@biohackingpsychologist, @hannamarkuksela) is a psychologist, body-oriented trauma psychotherapist, nutrition coach, and author. She uses a multifaceted approach in her working philosophy, complementing a vast array of scientifically verified techniques with heartfelt, honest, and unbiased client service.
Her tools of the trade-in deciphering the body-mind-connection consist of skilled implementation of the latest psychological studies, smart technology, and well-established traditions in her areas of expertise.
Throughout her career Hanna has provided consultation and mentoring for a large and diverse group of clients, providing them comprehensive means to control and balance their nervous system. The feedback on her body of work has been overwhelmingly positive, emphasizing the holistic nature of her approach to better and more organized well-being.
According to Hanna, we are animals with a disproportionately large cerebral cortex. The frontal cortex in the brain is what you need for making good decisions. Too much stress can turn it off., which is why knowing your limits is important: You can fly really high but not too high.
Try the Butterfly Technique: Put your thumbs together, place them on your chest, and on your own pace tap your chest. It’s really good if there’s no one to hug.
It is important that you find the balance in your own way. You have to find your way to let go of difficulties when you can’t control them. Learn more from Hanna’s talk!
Hanna Markuksela explores nervous system regulation, offering practical techniques like Body
Find your own way to let it go when you cannot control everything. Be vulnerable enough to ask for help and treat your problems early, so you don't have to try to be strong all the time.
Summary
- Understanding the zones of hypoarousal, optimal performance, and hyperarousal is essential for early stress regulation and maintaining peak mental functioning. - Grounding tools like the 4-8 breathing technique, the butterfly hug, and sensory awareness exercises can shift the nervous system from survival mode to rational thinking. - Physical movement, such as short bursts of exercise, helps the body metabolize stress hormones like cortisol, preventing the biological damage caused by chronic stress accumulation. - Recognizing individual sensitivity levels is vital; "orchids" require more intentional environmental regulation and nature-based calming to thrive compared to more stubborn "dandelions." - Resilience and longevity are supported by focusing on the present, maintaining an optimistic outlook, and practicing radical acceptance toward circumstances beyond one's control.
Article
Nervous System Regulation And Resilience: Practical Tools For Stress And Optimal Performance
A Short Talk With Unusually Lasting Reach
At Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland, on 16 October 2020, psychologist and body-oriented trauma psychotherapist Hanna Markuksela offered something rarer than biohacking jargon or miracle promises. In her presentation, *Nervous System Regulation Among The Most Resilient People*, she distilled stress physiology into a language of lived experience: the body as witness, the mind as interpreter, and resilience as a practice rather than a personality trait.
Markuksela, who has worked across psychology, trauma therapy, nutrition coaching and performance support, framed her talk with a line that cut through the culture of relentless optimisation: “Motivate yourself to take care of your relaxation even better and learn to be relaxed about stress.”
It was not a call to avoid pressure. It was a plea to understand it early, regulate it intelligently and stop mistaking exhaustion for excellence.
The Three Zones That Shape Human Performance
At the heart of Markuksela’s talk was a simple but powerful map of the nervous system: hypoarousal, optimal arousal and hyperarousal.
Hypoarousal, she explained, is the state of depletion, emotional flattening or shutdown. It can follow prolonged overwork, poor sleep, depression or avoidance. It is the zone in which energy disappears and effort begins to feel futile.
Optimal arousal is where performance becomes fluid. “Optimal arousal is the state where you have your workflow, you communicate better, and you make better decisions,” Markuksela said. It is the zone most people seek but rarely know how to protect. Here, cognition remains sharp, social connection is easier, and stress is not absent but proportionate.
Hyperarousal, by contrast, is the territory of overactivation. It may look like anxiety, irritability and shallow breathing. But it may also arrive disguised as inspiration, euphoria or ambition. Markuksela was careful to dismantle the comforting fiction that only negative stress harms us. Positive stress, too, can drive a person beyond their limits if it erodes sleep, recovery and perspective.
That distinction mattered. In a culture that often celebrates hustle, intensity and emotional overclocking, her warning landed with force: “You can fly really high and fast, but not too close to the sun. You have to know your limits.”
When Stress Silences The Thinking Brain
One of the most striking points in the presentation was Markuksela’s insistence that stress is not just a feeling. It is a physiological event with cognitive consequences.
Humans, she said, remain animals despite our enlarged cerebral cortex and advanced systems of thought. Under too much acute stress, the frontal cortex, the part of the brain required for focus, decision-making and emotional regulation, can effectively go offline. In moments of overload, people do not simply feel worse. They think worse.
This was more than a clinical observation. It was a rebuttal to the moralism that often surrounds stress. A dysregulated nervous system is not weakness. It is biology.
“When it comes to stress, it really helps our coping to admit that we haven't gone so far from nature,” Markuksela said.
That return to biological realism shaped the entire talk. Stress, in her telling, was not an enemy to conquer but a force to read accurately. The earlier a person recognises the signs, racing pulse, chest tension, poor concentration, irritability, euphoric overdrive, the easier it becomes to shift course before damage accumulates.
The Body As The First Site Of Recovery
Markuksela’s approach was notably practical. She did not leave the audience with abstractions about self-awareness. She gave them tools.
One was a version of Body Mind Bridging, a grounding method that begins by neutrally naming a stressful situation, almost like a news headline, and then observing what thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations arise. From there, she guided listeners through a 4-8 breathing rhythm, followed by focused awareness of sounds, physical sensations and visual details in the environment.
The purpose was not distraction. It was recalibration.
By moving attention through breath, senses and body, the person interrupts the spiral of threat-driven thinking and creates enough internal distance to return to a more regulated state. The method, in Markuksela’s framing, was especially useful because it could be repeated in cycles, making it adaptable for both mild stress and more entrenched dysregulation.
She also shared the Butterfly Hug, a deceptively simple self-soothing technique developed in the aftermath of disaster response work. Thumbs together, hands placed on the chest, alternating gentle taps at one’s own pace. The movement mimics the regulating effect of touch when no one is there to offer it.
“It’s really good if there’s no one to hug,” she suggested in the broader spirit of the talk.
The deeper message was unmistakable: regulation is not always glamorous. Sometimes it begins with tapping your own chest in a conference hall, learning again that safety can be signalled from within.
Stress Hormones Need An Exit
If the first half of Markuksela’s presentation focused on awareness, the second moved toward release.
Wild animals, she noted, often experience intense but temporary stress. They run, they escape, they rest. In doing so, they metabolise stress hormones through movement. Humans, by contrast, frequently remain seated inside social systems that keep the body activated while denying it the chance to complete the cycle.
Her point was both evolutionary and contemporary. Cortisol and other stress chemicals were not designed to stagnate in office chairs, meetings and inboxes. They require physiological processing.
Short bursts of movement, push-ups, sit-ups, brisk exercise, can help the body clear the hormonal residue of stress before it hardens into chronic wear. In this sense, movement is not only fitness. It is neurological housekeeping.
Yet Markuksela did not romanticise biology. She acknowledged that humans, like hierarchical primates, can become trapped in social environments where chronic cortisol elevation is sustained by power dynamics, conflict or constant vigilance. One cannot always flee the troop. But one can build a counterweight.
“You have to have something opposite for your stressor,” she said. “You have to balance your system.”
The Orchid And The Dandelion
Among the most compelling parts of the talk was Markuksela’s discussion of sensory processing sensitivity, often loosely described as high sensitivity. She treated the subject with unusual seriousness, drawing a line between popular personality language and scientific investigation.
Not all nervous systems process the world equally. Some people, the so-called “orchids”, take in sensory information more deeply. Under the right conditions, they flourish with exceptional richness. Under harsh or overstimulating conditions, they become more vulnerable to dysregulation and burnout. Others, the “dandelions”, are more robust in difficult environments.
This was not, in Markuksela’s account, an excuse for fragility. It was a call for precision. People with heightened sensitivity may require more deliberate recovery, better environmental boundaries and stronger contact with nature to remain well.
Water, especially flowing water, she noted, can have an immediate calming effect on the system. Mindfulness, yoga and sensory regulation practices may be not indulgences but necessities for those whose physiology is more permeable to noise, crowds, eye contact and overstimulation.
The argument carried quiet political implications. In a world that rewards constant exposure and overextension, some forms of health begin not with adaptation to the environment, but with refusal to be shaped entirely by it.
Resilience As A Way Of Thinking
Markuksela’s presentation was grounded in physiology, but it did not end there. She connected nervous system regulation to long-term resilience, and resilience to the habits of thought that protect the body over decades.
People who live long and healthy lives, she said, often share certain mental patterns. “People who live long and healthy usually avoid ruminating, have an optimistic outlook on life, and maintain a non-judgmental attitude.”
This was not motivational fluff. It was presented as a form of cardiovascular and psychological conservation. Rumination prolongs stress. Non-judgmental awareness reduces unnecessary internal friction. Optimism, when realistic, helps preserve energy that would otherwise be burned in repetitive dread.
Markuksela illustrated this through the example of her great-grandfather, who lived to nearly 106 and whose relaxed, accepting way of meeting life left a strong impression on her. His strength, she suggested, was not invulnerability but an ability to let go of what he could not control.
That lesson became one of the talk’s emotional anchors. In a performance-oriented setting, where the temptation is always toward mastery, Markuksela argued for something humbler and perhaps harder: radical acceptance.
Trauma Leaves Scars, But Not Final Ones
There was a generosity in the way Markuksela spoke about trauma. She did not reduce it to diagnosis or spectacle. She described trauma and chronic stress as leaving “biological scars” in the body, marks that can shape arousal, sleep, mood and reactivity long after the original event has passed.
But she was equally clear that these scars were not destiny.
Body-oriented therapies, including EMDR and other somatic approaches, can help reverse patterns that talking alone may not fully reach. Her clinical perspective gave the presentation weight here. Recovery, she argued, often requires methods that involve the body directly, because trauma is not stored only as narrative. It is also embedded as sensation, reflex and physiology.
Just as importantly, she urged people not to postpone care. The mythology of toughness, of enduring until collapse, was one of the clearest targets of her talk. Vulnerability, in her view, was not a sentimental virtue but a practical intervention. Ask for help early, before the nervous system has been pushed into chronic survival.
A Quiet Rebellion Against Burnout Culture
What Hanna Markuksela offered at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki was not a productivity system wrapped in softer language. It was a critique of the very impulse to live at permanent peak.
To regulate the nervous system, she suggested, is not merely to function better at work. It is to reclaim the conditions under which a life remains inhabitable. To sleep when inspiration tempts you to stay awake. To move when stress accumulates in the blood. To seek water, touch, breath, rhythm and nature before collapse forces the issue. To know whether you are orchid or dandelion, and stop judging the needs of one by the standards of the other.
Most of all, it is to recognise that resilience does not come from endless endurance. It comes from timely adjustment, honest limits and the ability to return, again and again, to the present.
In an age that confuses overstimulation with vitality, her message felt both deeply practical and faintly radical. Relaxation was not the opposite of ambition. It was what made sustainable excellence possible.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki