The quote’s second sentence makes the mechanism explicit: a regulated nervous system is treated as a performance tool. Regulation doesn’t mean feeling good all the time; it means having the capacity to return to baseline after stress. In stress physiology terms, that resilience is often described through the balance between sympathetic activation (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic recovery, especially vagal tone (Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, 1994).
Once you see your nervous system as the engine beneath attention, memory, and decision-making, stability stops sounding like self-help and starts sounding like operations. You’re not merely managing emotions—you’re managing the platform your cognition runs on. [...]
