How time is an illusion to the Nervous System

By Kyel Godfrey-Ryan

Everyone is overwhelmed right now. We are existing in a time of great change and uncertainty and no one is left unaffected. We wake up everyday immediately hit with massive shifts in the economy, in global order, with inflation still raging, education changing and job insecurity. Shifting. All our systems are shifting. The modes of communication are shifting. Goodness even the words we use to identify ourselves, our feelings and our communities are shifting. I am hearing people explain these experiences of overwhelm and anxiety that feel as if the ground below them is shifting. 

Often, in my line of work, I am consulted around how to handle stress and anxiety with individuals as well as with corporations. I believe the scale of the overwhelm we are experiencing is not only due to outside factors, but also our nervous systems memory of another, recent time of global shift. Though Covid was 5 years ago, we still are living with its imprint on our nervous systems. We lived through a global pandemic where fear, death and misinformation reigned. We were locked in, isolated, masked, vaxxed and living in a world of uncertainty. We lost loved ones and jobs and we had the largest population shift in the US over the last 50 years. We changed. All of us. I am experiencing 10x the number of calls for support than I did five years ago. 

We existed in a world, as an individual, in 2019, that is now a very different 2025. The change of this world also changed us, each of us, profoundly.  We all have a before and after version of ourselves, which is one of the most wild and under-discussed aspects of COVID. It doesn’t matter if you got the virus, got the vaccines, or how you experienced that period. Everyone has a before and after iteration of themselves, we all collectively, shifted.

We are shifting again

Our nervous systems don’t know the difference between five years ago and five minutes ago. It's why you could experience a challenging time as a child and still feel as though you are fighting those moments decades later. We use the word trauma as exchangeable with anxiety or depression. The truth is, trauma shifts the entire system to a parasympathetic state, while depression or anxiety is a byproduct of an extended time in a parasympathetic state. Trauma, or a traumatic experience, is something that creates a break in the nervous system so strong it locks into the most hyper-viligent state that exists for a human body. Almost as if your nervous system is an AI recording bot, analyzing every person involved, every action and every aspect of this/these trauma-inducing experiences, while also signaling an alert that something is unsafe and harmful. 

The ‘recording’ of these events is only the first step. The fast-follow here is how your nervous system and neurological system team up to file them. This process, again, much like the AI used today, is imperfect, highly fallible and yet built with the intention of making your life easier. This is why, at times, side-effects from un-healed trauma can seemingly pop-up as if out of nowhere and leave you feeling raw, confused, angry and embarrassed. There are many useful tools to successfully heal trauma, tuning is one of them, as it allows the nervous system to balance, which is the first and most important aspect of the recovery process. That said, I have been explaining how trauma affects an individual, but I want to get back to how trauma affects the collective. 

The Nervous System of the Collective

This brings us to today. The reason you, or the majority of everyone you know, are in a state of absolute locked panic, fear, anger or shut down is that our nervous systems are being hit again with a Covid-level amount of change. We, humans, cohabit in a collective whether we understand that or not, and there is a symbiotic relationship to our existence here. Covid magnified our interconnectedness on a tangible level tying together collective health, resources, dependencies and outcomes in a way never before experienced on the planet. It also introduced a vector of heightened and maintained vigilance, fear of death, killing vulnerable people, global compliance, disruption of all global markets, supply chains, disruption to education, disruption to medical access and isolation. Everywhere, all at once, every human on the planet existed in a shifting reality that produced intense, near-endelable, trauma. 

The impact of this is not just an individual impact of trauma, but the collective impact of trauma. The tools needed to collectively repair were not presented by our leaders, we just all moved forward, shaky and uncertain. So now, this AI recording bot of a nervous-system, is not just sending us warnings, it's also sending warnings to the entire collective. Any shift, particularly drastic ones with uncertain outcomes, will send everyone into a tailspin experiencing not just the current reality, but the individual body and the collective body reacts as if it's living in the now and the timeline we experienced during Covid.

What do you do when the world feels like it’s on fire and you are existing in a tinder box?

The first step is to understand your own power and responsibility within the collective. The collective isn’t some spiritual esoteric concept, rather, it is the inherent interconnectedness of your own community.  Your immediate collective is quite literally, the 5 people you interact with most. Those are the ones who have the greatest impact on how you process the world and most likely, that relationship is mutual. The concentric circles of your collective expand infinitely until they include every human on the planet, but it all starts with yourself.

Healing your nervous system will directly impact others. A healthy nervous system is a balanced nervous system. This doesn’t remove all the stress, sadness or loss that comes with life, but it does allow for natural sanguine response to the most unpleasant aspects of it.  A healthy nervous system removes the sense of overwhelm and it acts as a shield against collective stress/collective dysregulation. A healthy nervous system allows for the space for you to feel yourself more than reacting to others.

How a calm Nervous System can calm the chaos

Here’s an example: Imagine a woman is having a meltdown at dinner, the people around her are embarrassed or uncomfortable and her partner is yelling “Just calm down. Relax”. Has that ever worked? Even one time, has screaming at someone who is struggling to just get better, ever made them get better? Now let's imagine that same scenario, where that woman’s partner now takes her hand, kisses her on the forehead, and walks her to a quiet place to sit. They just sit and breathe for a bit. Eventually, she explains why she was upset, and they find a resolution. The only difference in these scenarios is that in one, the partner has a healthy nervous system and isn’t triggered by another having an experience. Also, in the second scenario, the women, just by being around someone who has the capacity to stay present and kind, can self-regulate. 

A healthy nervous system also has social-contagion aspects to it, as we all crave that sense of peace. Everyone feels better when they are around someone who is calm, present and quick to laughter. The antidote for collective trauma is personal mental and physical health. When we are dysregulated, the extremely sophisticated tools of our nervous system are pulling out data to prove that we are under attack. That is only magnified when we are experiencing this same effect from every feedback loop of our outside world. The antidote for this is cultivating the healthiest nervous system you can and being a warrior for your own wellbeing. 

We might be in a shifting time and yet can create our own shifts to unlock our own vital peace