How your body’s most powerful system got caught in the evolutionary gap, and how it can learn to bridge it.
The Hidden System Running Everything
There’s a hidden system inside you directing every breath, heartbeat, and movement. It’s the most complex network in the known universe. The human nervous system.
Stretching around seventy kilometres of nerves through your body and containing more connections than there are stars in our galaxy, it’s the first system to form in the womb and the last to shut down at the end of life. It perceives, learns, and organises everything you do, feel, think, and become.
Every sensation, behaviour, and healing process is coordinated by this intelligent, adapting web of communication. It doesn’t just keep you alive – it shapes how you experience being alive.
Your nervous system is responsible for the reality you live. It truly is the foundation of your life.
The Iceberg of Awareness
Scientists estimate your nervous system processes around 11 million bits of information per second, yet your conscious mind can only handle about 50 bits. That means more than 99.999% of your experience happens beneath your conscious awareness.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes this background activity as the proto-self — your body’s constant, unconscious monitoring of itself. This ongoing conversation between body and brain gives rise to emotions, perceptions, and ultimately your sense of “self.” It’s the unseen lens shaping how you interpret reality.
So the part of you that feels like you is actually built on to of a vast, unconscious foundation of neural activity.
When stress becomes stuck in that unconscious layer as Physically Retained Stress (PRS), it doesn’t just tighten muscles, it quietly reshapes your mood, behaviour, and perception of what’s possible. Calm starts to feel unsafe. Overwhelm becomes normal. Life seems limited.
Evolved in the Wild, Now Trapped in the Modern World
As we explored in our previous post, your nervous system evolved for a natural world of fresh air, natural food, movement, community, and clear day-night rhythms.
Its job was simple: detect threat, respond fast by fighting or fleeing, then reset once safety was achieved.
Today, that same ancient system is bombarded by artificial light, inbox overload, and emotional noise. It’s a world of endless stressors with no clear “off switch.”
Your stress response, once designed to protect you in the wild, now works overtime in the human zoo. When it stays “on” for too long, the nervous system stops learning. It becomes trapped in the very state it’s meant to overcome.
Instead of adapting and returning to balance, it keeps reinforcing stress. This is called mal-adaptation – when healthy responses are hijacked and become Physically Retained Stress.
A System That Learns – for Better or Worse
The same process that leads to PRS can also hold the key to recovery.
Your nervous system is a learning system. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This principle, known as neuroplasticity, describes the brain’s ability to change itself.
Every posture, emotional reaction, and thought leaves an imprint. When stress responses keep firing, the brain literally rewires itself to look for threats — even when none exist. Over time, defence becomes the default operating system, and distorting tension patterns never leave.
But here’s the good news: in the right environment, with specific inputs to guide the unconscious nervous system, that same learning ability can resolve stress, reorganise and upgrade itself.
When the nervous system receives gentle, precise cues of safety and coherence, it naturally begins to shift from survival toward growth. This is neuroplasticity working as nature intended – turning stress into learning. Shifting from survival to growth.
Bridging the Evolutionary Gap
It’s difficult to override 11 million bits of unconscious stress with 50 bits of conscious willpower.
But your nervous system can learn to do it for you, from the inside out.
At Foundation Neurostructural Chiropractic, we work with this natural learning capacity through a process called Neurostructural Optimisation. A gentle, evidence-based approach that helps your nervous system recognise and resolve Physically Retained Stress.
It’s not about forcing change from the outside; it’s about guiding your system to develop new strategies from within.
When your nervous system restores safety, it discovers the clarity and resources to learn, reorganise, and evolve.
Posture opens. Sleep deepens. Energy returns. Thoughts become clearer. Life feels different, because the system running your life is different.
To build a great life, you must start with a strong foundation.
If you’d like to understand how your nervous system can learn to adapt, regulate, and thrive in today’s world, click here to book your free introductory consult* today.
With Love,
Andrew Maher.
NeuroStructural Chiropractor.