14 Days Into Uncertainty: What War Taught Me About the Nervous System
I am writing this 14 days into war. 14 days of alerts, of nights interrupted, of plans cancelled, of a life that looks almost normal on the surface and feels anything but underneath.
It started on February 28, 2026. I was at Villa Sage in Dubai, alone, having lunch at Angel Cakes before leading my monthly sound bath. My plate was in front of me. I couldn't finish it. My stomach had closed before I understood why. Then the notifications came. Missile alerts from Abu Dhabi. Seconds later, a call from a close friend — she had been at the beach in Abu Dhabi when she heard a very loud explosion. She was shaking. I could hear it in her voice. Everyone told me to stay in Dubai. The road wasn't safe. Wait it out. But all I could think about was Nour — my cat, home alone, windows open — and Zen, my dog, still at Whistle & Fetch. The thought of them alone in whatever was unfolding made every rational argument collapse. I got in the car. I drove to pick up Zen first, then straight home. For the entire drive, I chanted. I did breathwork. Not because I was calm — I was not calm at all — but because my hands needed the wheel and my nervous system needed something to hold onto. Sound was all I had.
What Shock Looks Like When It's Yours
When I got home, Nour was under the bed. Eyes wide, body flat, completely still. Zen had been frightened at daycare and the moment he walked through the door, he started vomiting. Two animals, same experience, two different expressions of the same thing: a nervous system flooded with threat. I set up my singing bowls right there on the floor. Not as a session. Not as a practitioner. As someone who needed to do the only thing she knew would reach all three of us at once. I played. Zen stopped vomiting. Nour came out from under the bed. We sat together on the floor until the room felt different. That first night, when the alerts came to Abu Dhabi, I sheltered in the maid's room — the most interior space in my home — while most of my neighbours moved to the garage. Glasses had shaken earlier. Sounds I had no name for. My priority was simple and animal: keep everyone close, keep the frequency in the room steady. Nobody tells you that shock is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. It arrives as a closed stomach, a strange calm, a body making decisions the mind hasn't approved yet. That's not weakness. That's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Sleeping Through It — and What the Body Knows
What surprised me most across these 14 days was the sleep. Despite the alerts arriving in the middle of the night, despite the uncertainty and the ongoing quiet calculation of stay or go — I slept. Not perfectly, but deeply enough. I would wake up seconds before an alert. Not from the sound — before the sound. Something in me knew. The nervous system never fully switches off; it keeps scanning, tracking, listening at a frequency below conscious awareness. Rather than fighting this — rather than catastrophising the waking — I chose to receive it as the body doing its job. Paying attention. Staying present. Keeping me safe. After each alert, once the all-clear came, I used self-hypnosis to return to sleep — guiding myself back down through deliberate suggestion, slowing the breath, softening the body state by state. It worked every time. Not because the fear was gone, but because I gave the nervous system a clear instruction: the threat has passed, you can rest now. Fear is not the enemy. Fear is the body saying: I am here, I am paying attention, I love this life. The goal was never to silence it — only to stay in conversation with it.
On Staying: Trust as Regulation
I had so many doubts. Every few hours the calculation shifted. The not-knowing is one of the most exhausting states a nervous system can hold — not acute danger, but prolonged uncertainty. The body doesn't know how to fully rest when it can't predict what comes next.
What allowed me to stay — what allowed me to sleep, to function, to choose presence over panic — was trust. Not naive trust. Earned trust. The kind that comes from watching leadership respond to a crisis with steadiness, precision, and a complete absence of noise. When those in authority model calm, decisive action in a moment of collective fear, it sends a direct signal to the nervous system of an entire community: you are held, this is being handled.
That quality of leadership — the kind that prioritises clarity over performance, care over spectacle — is itself a form of co-regulation at scale. It is what a loving, capable presence does in a crisis: it doesn't add to the noise. It becomes the frequency others can orient to. I felt it. It mattered.
There was also the pressure from family abroad — the calls, the messages, the urgency to leave, to come back, to be somewhere that felt safer to them. I understood it. I also had to be honest: Abu Dhabi is home. Leaving would have cost me more — in groundedness, in trust, in integrity — than staying. Setting that boundary clearly and with compassion was itself a regulation practice. It required me to be more settled in my own decision than their fear.
What Has Actually Helped: Tools for Living Inside Uncertainty
These are not theoretical. These are the practices I have used every single day for the past two weeks:
Extended exhale breathing: Inhale for 4 counts, exhale for 6–8. This directly activates the vagus nerve and tells the brain stem the threat has passed. Five minutes before sleep, and any time the body tightens.
Chanting and humming: Vocalization stimulates the vagal branches in the throat and activates the social engagement system — the first thing to go offline under chronic stress. Even ten minutes of sustained toning shifts the internal state measurably.
Grounding — feet on the earth: After every single all-clear notification, I went downstairs and put my feet on the sand. Sometimes in the water. I listened to the birds. This is not a metaphor — direct contact with the earth discharges excess electrical charge from the body and signals safety through the senses. Science calls it earthing. The body just calls it relief.
Self-hypnosis: A guided process of deliberate suggestion that brings the body into a deeply receptive, calm state. I used it to return to sleep after every night alert — instructing the nervous system to downregulate once the threat had passed. With practice, it takes minutes.
Somatic movement: Gentle shaking, stretching, and orienting the body in space. The nervous system stores unexpressed survival energy as tension. Movement, even slow, deliberate movement, helps complete the cycle and prevent that tension from calcifying into chronic stress.
Limit news consumption: Doomscrolling is not information — it is activation. The nervous system cannot distinguish between witnessing a threat on a screen and experiencing it directly. Set intentional windows for checking news, and step away from the feed. Staying informed is important; staying immersed is costly.
Community: Do not underestimate this one. The nervous system heals in relationship. Isolation amplifies threat. Being with people — even virtually, even briefly — activates the co-regulatory pathways that no solo practice fully replicates. Reach out. Stay connected. Let yourself be steadied by others.
I teach nervous system regulation. I have spent years working with trauma, sound, and the body's capacity to find its way back to itself. And for the past 14 days, I have been a student of everything I teach. My stomach closed before I understood what was happening. I drove a road I shouldn't have driven. I sat on the floor with a sick dog and a terrified cat and played my bowls because it was the only language we all shared. I woke before the alerts and put my feet in the sand after them.
Regulation is not the absence of fear. It is what you do with your breath while you are still afraid.
Frequently Asked Questions
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A. Yes — and it's important to say this clearly. Regulation doesn't prevent fear responses. It doesn't stop the amygdala from firing or cortisol from releasing when there's a real threat. What it gives you is a faster route back, and enough capacity to stay functional within the response. Even practitioners get scared. The training shows up in what comes next.
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A. Self-hypnosis is the practice of guiding yourself into a deeply relaxed, receptive state through focused attention, deliberate suggestion and imagination. Unlike sleep, which the mind cannot force, self-hypnosis gives the nervous system a clear instruction: the threat has passed, it is safe to rest. Research supports hypnotherapy as an effective tool for reducing anxiety, improving sleep quality, and processing stress, particularly in trauma-informed applications.
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A. Earthing — or grounding — refers to direct physical contact with the earth's surface: bare feet on sand, grass, or soil. Research published in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health found that earthing reduces cortisol, lowers inflammation markers, and improves heart rate variability. Beyond the physiology, the sensory experience of feeling the ground — hearing birds, feeling water — signals safety to the nervous system through multiple channels at once.
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A. Sound healing works directly on the autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. Low-frequency vibration from singing bowls shifts brainwave states from beta (alert, anxious) toward alpha and theta (calm, integrative) and has been shown to reduce cortisol and lower heart rate. In a period of collective uncertainty, a group sound bath — such as our upcoming sessions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai — also offers the co-regulatory benefit of shared, held presence, which no solo practice fully replaces.
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A. Difficulty sleeping, appetite changes, heightened alertness, emotional swings, and physical tension are all normal stress responses during a period of genuine threat. If these symptoms persist for more than a few weeks after the stressor has passed, or if they are significantly impacting your daily life, relationships, or ability to function, it is worth working with a trauma-informed practitioner. You don't have to be in crisis to deserve support.
