Musings
5 Yoga Poses to Calm Your Nervous System Right Now
There are days when your body is running a programme you didn’t choose.
Your chest is tight but you don’t know why. Your jaw is clenched and you only notice when someone asks if you’re okay. Your shoulders have crept up toward your ears again. You’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t seem to fix.
This is your nervous system, doing what it knows best. It’s not broken. It’s just been on high alert for too long, and it’s forgotten how to come down.
Yoga can help, but not in the way you might think. Not by pushing through a power flow or holding a handstand until your arms shake. The kind of yoga that calms your nervous system is slower, gentler, and far more ordinary than what you see on places like Instagram. It asks you to feel rather than perform.
Here are five poses I come back to, again and again, when my own system needs settling. They work with the lower chakras, root, sacral, solar plexus, the parts of the body where we hold stress, fear, and the residue of doing too much for too long.
1. Child’s Pose (Balasana)
This is where I start when everything feels like too much. Knees wide, forehead to the ground, arms stretched out in front or resting by your sides. The forehead pressing gently into the floor sends a direct signal to your vagus nerve: you are safe.
There’s nothing to achieve here. No alignment to perfect. Just the feeling of the ground holding you, and the slow widening of your breath into your lower back. Stay for as long as you need. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Your body will tell you when it’s ready to move.
This pose works with the root chakra, the part of your system that decides, many times a day, whether it is safe to rest.
2. Bridge Pose (Setu Bandhasana)
Lie on your back. Feet flat, hip-width apart, close enough to your body that your fingertips can brush your heels. Press gently through your feet and let your hips rise. Not as high as they’ll go, just high enough to feel the front of your body open.
Bridge is a gentle heart opener, but it’s also deeply grounding. Your feet are planted. Your shoulders are anchored. The lift comes from the earth up, not from effort. It’s a conversation between the root and the heart, between safety and openness.
If you’ve been carrying something heavy, emotionally, not just physically, this pose creates space in the places that close down first. The chest. The hip flexors. The front of the throat. Hold for five breaths and lower slowly, one vertebra at a time.
3. Locust Pose (Salabhasana)
Lying face down, arms alongside your body, palms facing up. On an inhale, lift your chest and legs gently away from the floor. Not dramatically, just enough to feel your back body engage.
This pose strengthens the muscles along the spine that hold you upright all day. But more than that, it activates the posterior chain, the back of the body, the part we can’t see, the part that literally has our back. When your nervous system is dysregulated, the back body often feels weak or absent. Locust wakes it up. It says: you are supported from behind.
Hold for three breaths and release. Repeat two or three times, resting your cheek on the floor between rounds.
4. Puppy Dog Pose (Uttana Shishosana)
From all fours, walk your hands forward and let your chest melt toward the floor. Hips stay high, stacked over your knees. Forehead or chin rests on the ground.
This is a gentler version of Downward Dog, and it’s one of the most effective poses I know for releasing tension across the shoulders and upper back, the places where we hold the weight of responsibility. It’s a surrender pose. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, practical way. The kind of surrender that says: I don’t need to hold everything up right now.
Breathe into the space between your shoulder blades. Let your heart be heavy. Stay for a minute or two.
5. Legs Up the Wall (Viparita Karani)
This is the pose I recommend more than any other. Sit sideways against a wall, then swing your legs up so they rest against it. Shuffle your hips as close to the wall as is comfortable. Arms out to the sides or resting on your belly. Close your eyes.
That’s it. That’s the pose.
Legs Up the Wall reverses the blood flow, calms the baroreceptors in your chest and neck, and activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-digest response that so many of us have lost access to. It’s the physiological opposite of fight-or-flight, and it requires absolutely nothing from you except lying there.
Five to fifteen minutes here can shift your entire day. I’m not exaggerating. If you do nothing else from this list, do this.
A Note on Nervous System Regulation
Nervous system regulation isn’t about being calm all the time. It’s about having the capacity to move between states, to activate when you need to, and to settle when the moment has passed. Most of us have lost that flexibility. We’re stuck in one gear, usually high alert, and we’ve been there so long it feels normal.
These poses don’t fix that overnight. But they start a conversation with your body. They remind your system that it knows how to come down, it just hasn’t been asked in a while.
If this resonates and you’re curious about where your energy is right now, take the free chakra energy quiz. Ten questions, instant results, and a starting point for listening to what your body has been trying to tell you.