# Zen and the Art of Nervous System Maintenance

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-buoyant-leader-7043386/zen-and-the-art-of-nervous-system-maintenance
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-buoyant-leader-7043386/zen-and-the-art-of-nervous-system-maintenance.md
Podcast: [The Buoyant Leader](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-buoyant-leader-7043386)
Published: 2026-05-15T06:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://howiejacobson.india-explore.in/captivate-podcast/zen-and-the-art-of-nervous-system-maintenance
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/96442ce4-6f57-4f63-97de-ea27f475d3a3.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-buoyant-leader-7043386/episodes/zen-and-the-art-of-nervous-system-maintenance
Duration seconds: 388

## Resource

One aspect of taking care of yourself that’s often overlooked is nervous system maintenance. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll define your nervous system as the body’s opportunity/threat scanner. It’s constantly pinging your environment, looking for clues that you’re either safe (and should focus on finding good stuff, like food, mates, or season two of Beef) or you’re in danger and should focus on hightailing it out of there or preparing to fight). When this system works, you spend your energy wisely. You make good decisions. You respond rapidly to change and take appropriate and proportionate action when called for. When your nervous system is out of whack (that’s some fancy neuroscience jargon thrown in to impress you), you over- or under-react to threat. You either miss clear danger signals, or (more commonly) respond to every glance, utterance, email, or traffic light as an invitation to extend your adamantine claws and fight. In other words, what can look like an objectionable personality (what Bob Sutton refers to, in organization development jargon, as an “asshole”) is often based on a miscalibrated survival imperative. And that’s good news. We don’t know how to cure “asshole.” But we know a lot about repairing and maintaining the nervous system, to restore it to a state of sensitive harmony with its environment. And it starts with the body. The Diagnosis: Unchecked Allostatic Load Your allostatic load is how much stress your body is carrying at any given time. When it’s high, it takes very little additional stress to catapult your nervous over the red line — the point where your nervous system flips from “thoughtful and strategic” to “eat or get eaten” mode. Not a great look at team scrums or standups. Allostatic load is a big problem in our modern environ…

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