Most of us were taught to recognise stress by its loud symptoms. Almost nobody teaches us to recognise its quiet ones.

Anxiety, a short temper, racing thoughts at 2am — these are the versions of dysregulation everyone knows how to name. But there's an entire other category that tends to go completely unrecognised: the flatness that sets in after a long stretch of pushing through, the sense of being present in a conversation while feeling strangely far away from it, the numbness that gets mistaken for calm because at least it isn't chaos.

Physiotherapist and nervous system specialist Jessica Maguire, in The Nervous System Reset, describes this using a simple, genuinely useful image: the nervous system as a thermostat, capable of running too hot or too cold. Too hot looks like anxiety, reactivity, a mind that won't switch off. Too cold looks like shutdown, numbness, disconnection — and it comes from exactly the same underlying dysregulation, just expressed in the opposite direction.

Most people spend years treating only the hot symptoms. This session is about finally seeing the whole thermostat.

Why Read This One Together

Maguire's book splits into two halves — first the science of how the nervous system actually works, then the practical tools for working with it. It's detailed, grounded in real physiology, and genuinely useful on its own. But a book about recognising your own patterns is almost always better read in company, because your blind spots are exactly the parts you're least likely to catch by yourself.

This isn't a session where you need to have finished the book, or even started it. It's a conversation — where someone else's experience of running "too cold" might suddenly explain a pattern you'd never quite named in yourself, and where naming it out loud, in a room with other people doing the same, tends to land differently than reading it alone ever could.

What This Session Explores

• The core ideas from The Nervous System Reset, discussed in plain, accessible terms — no science background required
• The difference between the "hot" and "cold" versions of a dysregulated nervous system, and why only one of them usually gets noticed
• Honest reflection on which setting you tend to default to, and in which parts of your life
• Simple, grounded practices from the book that don't require you to have read it cover to cover
• A genuine group conversation — not a lecture, but a space where your own pattern gets to be seen alongside everyone else's

Is This for You?

✔ You're curious about the book, whether or not you've picked it up yet.
✔ You've noticed you go quiet or numb under pressure, rather than visibly anxious — and never quite knew what to call that.
✔ You relate more to shutting down than to panicking, and wonder if that's actually "fine" or something worth paying attention to.
✔ You prefer discussion-based sessions over guided, instructional ones.
✔ You want a space to recognise your own patterns through conversation, not just reading alone.

No need to have read the book in full. Come with whatever curiosity you have.

Meet Your Guide — Akanksha Srivastava

Akanksha has a gift for making even technical, science-heavy material feel immediately personal and easy to sit with. Warm, clear, and genuinely relatable, she doesn't lecture through a book's ideas from a distance — she sits inside them with you, asking the questions that turn a concept like "nervous system dysregulation" into something you can actually recognise in your own Tuesday afternoon.

In this session, she won't tell you which setting you run on. She'll simply create the kind of space where figuring that out, together, becomes easy.

Reserve Your Spot

Not every broken system looks broken.
Some of them just look quiet.

Come find out which one you've been living in.