_edited.png)
Are You Stuck in 'Fight/Flight'? Understanding Sympathetic Dominance and Your Path to Balance
- Kate Duder
- Sep 25
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 6
In our fast paced world, many of us feel like we're constantly on the go, juggling multiple demands and rarely hitting pause. While being productive feels good, for some, this relentless pace isn't just a feeling. It’s actually a physiological state where your body is in overdrive and if we do this for too long we can get stuck in the fight flight response. It is sometimes referred to as sympathetic dominance, and can often be a critical, yet often overlooked, factor in burnout and chronic illness.
Years ago when I was facing having to leave my job due to severe fatigue, my osteo asked if I had read Dr. Libby Weaver’s book "Rushing Woman's Syndrome,". It brought this concept to light, describing how modern pressures can lead to us being trapped in our ancient "fight or flight" response. It was an eye opener for me. It made me realise that the relentless fatigue I was experiencing was real, not in my head and not just normal tiredness because I had a 'busy life', as my doctor had suggested. This situation won't show up in blood tests so many doctors won't relate to what's happening for you.
But what does this really mean for your body, your energy, and your wellbeing?
The Science Behind Sympathetic Dominance
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) has two main branches:
The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS): This is your body's accelerator, responsible for the "fight or flight" response. It kicks in when you perceive stress or danger, releasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, but also enables us to focus on work, get excited and play sports. Your heart rate increases, digestion slows, and your body prepares for action (1).
The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS): This is your body's brake, responsible for "rest and digest." It promotes calm, lowers heart rate, aids digestion, and helps with recovery and healing. It balances out the SNS to ensure your body is able to recover after stress, activity or exercise.
Ideally, these two systems work in a beautiful dance, constantly adjusting to your environment. In a healthy system, a stressful or engaging event triggers the SNS and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis to release stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Once the threat or perceived threat is gone, the PNS activates to calm the body down.
However, chronic stress, from work deadlines, financial worries, family demands, poor sleep, trauma, or even perceived threats from your environment or social media can disrupt this process and lead to the SNS being constantly "on."
The constant "on" signal from the SNS overrides the parasympathetic's ability to promote rest and recovery. This creates an imbalance, where the body remains in a heightened state of alert even during times of rest. This is what is called sympathetic dominance and it requires activities that help reset the nervous system to help regain its balance.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wellbeing research done by Massey University in 2024 has shown that one in two employees, or 57 per cent of the workforce, fall within the high burnout risk category, which is double that of December 2023 (2).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Research clearly demonstrates the physiological impact of prolonged SNS activation. Chronic elevation of stress hormones like cortisol can lead to inflammation, fatigue, impaired immune function, blood sugar dysregulation, high blood pressure, inability to lose weight and even changes in brain structure affecting mood and memory (3,4,5). This can be a driver for all sorts of chronic illness and a key element of burnout.
The Burnout Connection: More Than Just Being Tired
For those experiencing burnout symptoms or navigating a complex illness, sympathetic dominance isn't just a contributing factor; it can be a central mechanism.
When your body is constantly in fight-or-flight you can experience:
Energy depletion: Your body constantly mobilises resources for perceived threats, leaving little for recovery, repair, or even daily functioning. This can lead to profound fatigue, a hallmark of burnout and many chronic conditions.
Worsened symptoms: An overactive SNS can exacerbate other symptoms and conditions including gut health, hypertension, allergies and intolerances, chronic pain, insulin sensitivity, sleep issues and weight challenges.
Mental fog and overwhelm: The constant rush of stress hormones coupled with fatigue can impair cognitive function, leading to brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and increased feelings of overwhelm.
Sympathetic dominance provides a scientific explanation for why you feel the way you do but can also offer a tangible path to regaining control.
Finding Your Balance
If you’re feeling this way and have been to the doctor, you may have had a cortisol test done and they may be treating you for other conditions such as insulin resistance or chronic pain. On the other hand they may have told you that all your blood tests are fine and you're just a bit tired, but you feel it's more than just being tired.
If i could go back 10 years, the one thing I would tell myself is to listen to my body and that it isn't normal to feel that tired all the time.
Treatment for other conditions is useful, however the journey to recovery requires an additional approach – one that listens to your body and understands its unique responses.
This is where understanding your symptoms, what triggers them, how your body responds to daily activities and improving your stress, nutrition, and sleep provides the additional factors for success.
Check out my free symptom, data and activity tracker to help you understand what’s going on, find your triggers and help you balance your activities to improve how you feel.
The key to getting out of SNS dominance is in resetting your nervous system and balancing the SNS and PNS to ensure your body has the right environment for recovery and healing.
A few things that can help are:
vagal nerve stimulating exercises such as singing humming or gargling, cold water on your face or a cold shower if you can tolerate it
finding restful activities that you love and incorporating these into your days
mindfulness or meditation
deep breathing
binaural beats - sound of two slightly different frequency tones played in each ear that encourages the brain to shift into a state of calm
yoga, stretching or gentle movement,
hydration and proper nutrition
gratefulness
laughter
good quality sleep - check out these sleep optimisation tips
It’s often a matter of finding what works for you, which can be a process of trial and error. To help eliminate some of the guess work heart rate variability tracking can provide concrete data to work with, by helping you see what activities enable rest and recovery and when we need to rest.
The Power of HRV Tracking: Your Internal Stress Dashboard
How can we actually see if you're stuck in sympathetic dominance? And how do we manage our activities to know what works or doesn't work?
This is where the power of heart rate variability (HRV) tracking becomes a game-changer.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) tracking with quality wearable devices such a Garmin or Firstbeat shows when your system is in sympathetic vs. parasympathetic activation throughout the day and night. It can pinpoint exactly when stress peaks, when recovery truly happens (or doesn't), and how specific activities, stressors and changes to your lifestyle impact your energy, sleep and recovery.
So what is HRV?
HRV is the variation in time between your heartbeats. Our heart beat isn't like a metronome, like many people think, there is slight variation between beats and the greater the variation the better. HRV is a objective measure of your autonomic nervous system's balance - its ability to easily shift between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity as needed in response to our environment.
A higher average resting HRV generally indicates a more dominant parasympathetic (rest and digest) system – meaning your body is resilient, adaptable, and recovering well.
A Lower average resting HRV indicates stress, fatigue, or illness, and less resilience and often points to sympathetic dominance (6).
Rather than just tracking an average HRV reading (like most smart watches and fitness trackers do) it can be tracked continuously, day and night with a device like Garmin or Firstbeat and this helps to:
Connect the Dots: See how your daily activities - a tough meeting, a workout, a good night's sleep, or even a stressful conversation, directly impact your body's stress and recovery levels.
Objectively Monitor your Progress: Move beyond how you feel subjectively by providing concrete data to understand what’s working or not working with changes you are making to your routine or lifestyle.
Refine your Pacing: Learn precisely when your body needs rest versus when it can handle activity. This is crucial for preventing crashes and managing conditions where fatigue or post-exertional malaise (PEM) is a concern.
Validate your Experience: For many, seeing the data for themselves validates their fatigue and struggle, helping to counter the feeling of being dismissed and leads to gaining back your sense of control.
At Inside Matters, part of my health coach expertise lies in helping you interpret this data. Combine this with a deep understanding of chronic illness, nutrition and how lifestyle can impact your health, and together we can develop a personalised strategy for moving forward with clarity and control.
We can use HRV these insights to help you intentionally shift out of sympathetic dominance, foster recovery, and ultimately reclaim your energy and live with vitality.
Wondering How Health and Nutrition Coaching could help you?
As a health coach, I specialise in helping people navigate burnout or complex health challenges, something I understand deeply from personal experience.
My approach is collaborative, compassionate, strategic and focused on you! I’m a good listener who meets you where you are, and together, we’ll find simple, realistic next steps and practical tools that give back a sense of control, so you can move toward improved energy and living your best life.
THOUGHTS or QUESTIONS? - comment below
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Share on Facebook
Share on Insta
Share on LinkedIn
References
Bhattacharya, P. T., Misra, R., & Tadi, P. (2024). Physiology, heart rate variability. In StatPearls. National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541120/
Esler, M. et al. (2010). Point: Chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system is the dominant contributor to systemic hypertension. Journal of Applied Physiology, 109(6), 1996-1998. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/prev/20171106-aop/pdf/10.1152/japplphysiol.00182.2010
Yasu, H. et al. (2017). Low Heart Rate Variability and Sympathetic Dominance Modifies the Association Between Insulin Resistance and Metabolic Syndrome ― The Toon Health Study ―. Circulation Journal, 81(10), 1475-1481. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/circj/81/10/81_CJ-17-0192/_pdf
Walker, H. K. (1990). The Clinical Presentation of Liver Disease. In H. K. Walker, W. D. Hall, & J. W. Hurst (Eds.), Clinical Methods: The History, Physical, and Laboratory Examinations (3rd ed.). Butterworths. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK278995/
Anna-Karin Lennartsson, Ingibjörg Jonsdottir, Anna Sjörs, Low heart rate variability in patients with clinical burnout, International Journal of Psychophysiology, Volume 110, 2016, Pages 171-178, ISSN 0167-8760, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2016.08.005.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016787601630681X
Comments