How Moving to the Country Has Soothed My Nervous System
Image by Crispin Jones/Unsplash
Just before Christmas, Laura, me and our sweet little cat, Juno finally moved out of the big city. We are both Londoners, born and bred, so this was a big deal. Honestly, I resisted this move for years – Laura wanted to leave but I just wasn’t ready. I worried about leaving everything familiar, comfortable and convenient. I worried about moving away from our friends. I worried about living too far from my son, whose life is in London. I worried about finding the country too quiet, too dark at night, just too different.
And you know what? As so often, my wife was right. Because our house in a quiet village in East Sussex already feels like home. And I love it here. It’s so peaceful – I often just stop, and listen, and hear… nothing. No sirens. No cars roaring past. No drunk people yelling at night. No roadworks. Just a gorgeous silence, broken only by the sweetness of birdsong.
And the air! In winter it is so clean and cold it’s like drinking water straight from the fridge. All that lung-inflaming pollution, a thing of the past. And even in the bleak month of January, it’s beautiful here – rolling hills and silent woods a short walk from our house, a lovely garden just waiting to erupt with life in spring. I keep thinking to myself, ‘Why didn’t we do this years ago?’
Soothing my nervous system
One of the most obvious benefits is that I just feel, well, calm. My poor, frazzled nervous system has settled. Being a highly sensitive person, it has become obvious to me in recent years how much urban life affects me. The noise, bright lights, polluted air, traffic, aggressive vibes, and hordes of people, especially in the centre, just got too much for me (and Laura, another HSP). As an internal family systems therapist, I’m also acutely aware of the impact of different environments on my inner parts, especially the young ones. And they gave me the message, loud and clear: the city was too much for them.
Another system to be mindful of is the nervous system, that wondrous branch of information-carrying nerves flowing from your brain, down your spinal chord and into every extremity of your body. Dr Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory teaches us that there are three main branches of the autonomic nervous system (which regulates stuff you’re not consciously aware of): dorsal vagal, sympathetic and ventral vagal. If you live in a big city, I guarantee that your sympathetic branch (triggered during the fight-or-flight response) will be firing up on a daily, if not hourly basis. Urban life just doesn’t feel safe for humans because – as I have often written in these posts – we are not designed by evolution to live that way. We are evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer bands, no more than 100 people, and mostly extended family. That sympathetic branch of the nervous system was also designed for this existence, but only when hyenas were chasing us, or aggressive tribes invaded our village. Not for every minute of every day.
High sensitivity is also an evolutionary inheritance, by the way – it’s very helpful to have some members of the tribe who notice every movement in the environment, or rustle in the bushes, however subtle. Just as it’s useful to have less-sensitive individuals who can hunt and fight, because they are less bothered by pain or physical discomfort. This is why around 20 per cent of the population are HSPs, like me and Laura, and 20 per cent are highly insensitive persons, who are often extroverted and crave the urban noise and bustle we have escaped.
Lessons for us all
I am keenly aware that not everyone can just up sticks and move to the country. Many of you probably live in urban environments – and some of you are very happy to do so, which is great. I’m guessing some others would like to leave the city but are stuck. Tied to your job, or kids’ school, or relatives, or because of financial constraints. And I totally get that – again, I am pushing 60 and it took me this long to make the move! But I think there are helpful lessons for you, even if you live in a big city, either by choice or necessity.
The first one is to adapt your daily life, as much as you can, to your level of sensitivity. This took a long time for me to figure out, but I have been doing it steadily for years now. I just stopped going to loud, hectic places unless I had to. It is possible to live in the city and avoid the craziest, noisiest, most people-packed areas, if you choose. Even if you have to go to those places for work, try to find oases of peace, of nourishing green space, as often as possible. Research increasingly shows the benefits of spending time in Nature for your physical and mental health. And if you think about our evolutionary trajectory, that makes sense – humans lived in wild spaces for millions of years, so I think we crave them in a deep, unconscious, visceral way.
You may enjoy noisy, stimulating environments, which is fine. But if you’re more sensitive, don’t force yourself to spend time in these environments because of the shoulds: ‘I should like noisy bars, all my friends do,’ or ‘I should go to that party, even though I don’t feel like it, because otherwise I’m a party-pooping loser’. Don’t do it – your nervous system will be grateful, trust me.
This is especially important if you have experienced trauma in your life, because your nervous system is likely to either be in a fight-or-flight/sympathetic or dorsal vagal/freeze state most of the time. It’s just what trauma does to your brain and body, because they move into a state of readiness for the bad things to happen again, even if those things are (I very much hope) in the distant past. Or a frozen, collapsed, dorsal-vagal state if you’re depressed or everything feels too scary and overwhelming. If any of this is true for you and you need a way to feel a bit calmer, safer and more at peace without fleeing the city, try my Safe Place Meditation by clicking on the button below.
It’s one of my favourite Insight Timer practices and is designed to help you create an imagined place of safety, even if your environment is not as tranquil as you would like.
I hope you find it helpful – sending love from leafy Sussex,
Dan ❤️