Why chronic stress can make supermarkets, holidays and even rest feel overwhelming—and how movement may help.

I started studying retained primitive reflexes because of my work with autistic children and young adults.

Then I began noticing something in adults.

Not necessarily the reflexes themselves.

The behaviours around them.

Learning more about retained primitive reflexes. These are the ones that babies do to protect and soothe themselves. Think of making a baby jump, boo, and noticing their arms and legs splay wide. Or the way a baby arches its back into a gentle stroke of its lower back. These reflexes all serve a purpose for newborns who are learning to navigate the world and most of these involuntary protective movements are replaced with voluntary ones. In some children they can persist for longer periods of time, this is often associated with certain neurological or developmental conditions. Their reappearance in adulthood can also be clinically significant.

But reading about them gave me pause to ask a question.

I see people who suffer motion sickness in yoga classes, handstand and ring work, even on the ski erg (I hate that thing). I see people being highly activated by loud noises and vivid environments. These to me looked like classic signs of retained primitive reflexes, but I know these people have experienced times when they didn’t display these symptoms.

I wondered these symptoms could lay somewhere in the background.  Whether a system that learned how to use the appropriate voluntary replacements could, if the nervous system was highly overwhelmed, start to reintegrate them again. Perhaps as a last resort fall back to a system that can no longer cope with the stimulus it is experiencing.

Reading the literature, I almost had myself convinced that I had retained these reflexes too.

Then I remembered the Disney Fireworks. Standing in my teens and even mid-thirties with my family while crowds bellowed, music boomed and wizzes and bangs were a symphony. Then that day I got on a plane by myself, to Costa Rica for Yoga teacher training. I wasn’t stressed about getting to the airport. I didn’t worry about getting lost or not making my connections. It didn’t even enter my head. My bags did get lost on the way, so I arrived in Costa Rica with no toothbrush, change of underwear or appropriate clothes for the first day of training. This could have freaked me out. It didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me to freak out. I just shrugged, reported it to the airline, got in the taxi and hoped the hotel had at least a toothbrush for me.

Psychologists believe that our nervous systems have a ‘window of tolerance’.  The range of stimulation and emotional arousal we can tolerate while still being able to think, process and being connected with the situation. Being 20 minutes late to an interview  to some might be highly navigable, despite being stressful, to others, this might send them into a tailspin of emotional outpouring, getting lost and not being able to think their way to a call to let the interviewer know they are running late. A settled nervous system finds that level of spontaneity exhilarating, playful and joyful. To a burned-out system lack of control has lost this sense of play. Adding spontaneity to a system without the safe ability to play is less tolerable to it than sitting next to someone eating a tuna and onion sandwich on a bus in the rain. And like most things, it doesn't happen overnight. Spontaneous weekends away are replaced with planning who will have the kids, planning how you will get Friday’s work done so you can leave the office at a decent time, planning how you will get school uniforms washed and ironed without the usual Sunday afternoon slot, worrying about whether you remembered the kids swimming gear for their lesson on Saturday morning, oh and the goggles, and did you remember to tell Grandma they need a snack after. Your window of tolerance shrinks. Planning becomes necessary, then it becomes the norm, then when you don’t need to do the planning anymore, it is just the normal window you live in and a romantic meal out becomes a chore.

And don’t beat yourself up if you recognise some of this in yourself but you were never spontaneous in the first place.  For those career-oriented guys and girls, the prolonged thinking, planning and shield wielding through continuous stressful days can easily mean that a supermarket feels like a warzone. Being under that much unpleasant and perceptively uncontrollable stress for a prolonged period has the real potential to lead you to burnout. As we approach burnout the brain loses what is called its sensory gating mechanism. There is a system in your brain that takes sensory information from your environment and redirects it to the parts of your nervous system that need it. When you are burning out, this information filtering becomes a very difficult job.  Background noise, flickering lights, the bustle and jostle of a crowd becomes louder because less of it is being caught by our natural filter. Your brain then receives everything from the environment, in HD. Getting all this information at once is too much for your nervous system. That’s why the thought of going on holiday feel like the end of the world. The idea sounds lovely for other people, you just need to comfy up at home. Processing the more stimulating environment takes a lot of energy leaving very little for remembering the things you absolutely knew you needed when you went into the shop.

For my globetrotting adventure junkies who now find themselves paralysed by navigating anywhere further afield than the journey to and from work and yet run businesses, have families you are not broken if you can no longer stand to navigate your car further than your place of work and back. High levels of continuous stress can disrupt the way you can physically see the world.  Your brain relies on information fed from your eyes and ears to know where you are in space. When you are highly stressed and trapped in fight or flight, your visual field narrows and your auditory perception shifts too so that you can more easily scan the landscape for predators. Your neck locks up too, as if the rest weren’t enough. All of this means that the signals your brainstem receives and sends to your nervous system are very distorted. Imagine it like a phone conversation with someone in a really bad signal area where all you get is the odd word or noise, it’s like that. Anxiety can contribute to a feeling of dizziness and dizziness can heighten anxiety, a potentially self-perpetuating loop that is deeply un-pleasant and all of thi can certainly can make navigating a new environment exhausting.  

Why the Calisthenics and Yoga are here to help

It might seem like a strange mix of modalities, body weight strength training and grounding, slow (sometimes), breath work based movements and yet…

For some people, especially those who have a very highly challenged nervous system, asking them to take a yoga class is like asking them to go on a cage dive with a shark, with no cage or oxygen or instructor. I get it. Asking a burned out nervous system to be still, to pause to turn inward is not the way we roll here.

Calisthenics on the other hand is tolerable because the foundations are hard and yet you can take the movements at your own pace. They use exercises that look aspirational, pull ups and press ups with movements that look impossible like handstands, planches etc and add a complexity to a workout that you won’t get from just picking stuff up and putting it down (btw, you should also pick stuff up and put it down too). Both movement systems challenge both your brain and your body at once.

To perform in either type of class you need to move slowly, be conscious of what your body is doing while it’s doing something totally alien. You are putting your body into a stressful position, this time, it’s on your terms. You get to decide when you have had enough kick up attempts, when child pose is your best friend, when you could pull just a little bit higher and even though it’s hard, nothing bad happened, in fact you felt more than a little elated that your nose just grazed the top of the bar. One of the questions I get most often when I am teaching handstand is ‘how do I learn to breathe when I am upside down’. I just smile. I can’t teach you that, it just comes. But the fact that you noticed you weren’t tells me that you are connecting more than you realised with your body. It tells me that your nervous system is calming down significantly in the face of this challenge. All of these things teach your nervous system that challenge isn’t always danger.

That you can learn to tell it the difference.

This type of training gives you back control of your body. They let you learn what stress feels like in a planned, structured and predictable way. They let you build your window of tolerance back up so that when you find yourself in a supermarket, it feels like the mosey round the shops it is supposed to.  With this new found tolerance who knows, one day you might just find yourself taking a day trip by yourself to the next city, just to see what’s there.

So, my original question was: can primitive reflexes re-emerge in burned-out adults?

Looking at the evidence, I can’t find anything to support that conclusion—although, from the outside, some of the behaviours can look remarkably similar.

A burned-out system still has to keep you functioning. It adapts in the best way it knows how, using the capacity and resources available to it.

My job is not to tell your nervous system that it is getting everything wrong. It’s not. It’s coping. My job is to give you the tools to help settle that system, meet challenge without always experiencing danger, and gradually build your capacity back up.