'After my brother died, my body shut down in a yoga class. This is what it taught me about grief.'

It was supposed to be healing. I'd tried it before and had come out feeling calmer, centred and more relaxed. We started with lots of breathwork. Deep, slow exhalations. Held for as long as possible.

Five minutes in, I started to notice a drop in my energy levels. I felt like I couldn't move. At first I had tunnel vision and I felt anxious, but then the room went fuzzy and it was hard to focus. I felt disconnected from everything and everyone around me, especially my body. It was as though my sensations and emotions were numb. For a few hours after the class, I still felt an impending sense of doom. Like I was alone in a dark room even though I was surrounded by people.

I'd attended a Yin yoga class hoping it would help me recalibrate following the death of my brother. The class itself was great. The teacher was amazing and Yin Yoga had really helped in the immediate aftermath of Sam's death when I felt flat, numb and disconnected from my body.

Sam was 34 when he died by suicide. Without warning, I was flung into the hardest period of my life. Burnout and stress were compounded by a deep, inescapable grief. Physically, I was crippled by severe stomach cramps and couldn't sleep for weeks on end.

I didn't realise it at the time but my nervous system was dysregulated.

Following a traumatic event, our nervous system can become unbalanced. Generally, this will manifest in one of two ways.

Our sympathetic nervous system is activated and we enter a state of hyperarousal. Commonly known as the flight/fight response, we may feel angry, anxious and overwhelmed. I often liken it to feeling like the 'ON' button of life is jammed. If we spend too long in a state of sympathetic nervous system dysregulation, it can manifest as physical pain, insomnia or gut issues.

Or we can enter a state of dorsal vagal shutdown (DVS) or hypoarousal. This is the freeze/flop response and in this state, you guessed it, feels like our 'OFF' button is locked in place. Fatigue, numbness, depression and not being able to get off the couch are classic symptoms of DVS. It also slows our heart rate (a term called bradycardia) and breathing rate.

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For people with a history of trauma, meditation can make nervous system dysregulation worse.

Research has shown that mindfulness alone can actually increase both the intensity and duration of nervous system dysregulation, making sensations feel more intense and last for longer.

Paying attention to the stress response and sensations arousing from it (racing thoughts, butterflies in the tummy, intense emotions and shallow breathing) can be interpreted by the body as a threat. This reduces your ability to self-regulate and can exacerbate symptoms: anxiety can quickly turn into panic.

Stillness can also feel unsafe if you have a history of trauma. If your nervous system is accustomed to being on the lookout for danger, stillness may be a cue to your nervous system that you're vulnerable and that you need to get out of there. Forcing yourself to be still and to 'power' through mediation exercises can actually lead to more panic and dissociation.

Despite what the internet says, not all therapies are good for our nervous system.

Ice baths, mindful meditation, flotation tanks. If your algorithm is anything like mine, social media is a minefield of strategies and tactics to help us recover from our grief or trauma and get us back to our most optimised state. Complex concepts are often oversimplified and don't always hold space for those experiencing significant grief or trauma.

Most meditation practices on their own won't re-regulate the nervous system in dysregulation. If you're experiencing strong anxiety and activation, or strong shut-down and dissociation from your body, meditation is probably not going to be the right fit for you at that point in time.

It's a similar story with ice baths. Touted for their seemingly countless psychological and physical benefits, ice baths may not be the best for someone in a DVS state. When we're in DVS, our blood vessels constrict and blood moves from our extremities into our organs to protect and conserve energy. So we may benefit more from warmth, not cold, to help blood circulate into our arms and legs and shift us out of freeze or collapse. Warmth and weight, i.e. from a weighted blanket, will also give someone in DVS proprioceptive input, allowing them to reconnect with their body which can be an antidote to the dissociation and numbness that often arises after traumatic stress.

This doesn't mean that you should never meditate or that meditation is wrong or bad. It also doesn't mean that everyone should give up their ice baths. However, anyone who has experienced grief or trauma should approach these therapies gently and from a place of informed understanding of what their nervous system needs at any given time.

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How can we become more wellness-literate?

We can use trauma sensitive sequencing to examine how we're feeling and what's going on in our external environment. Trauma sensitive sequencing engages neuroception processes; the neural circuits that allow our bodies to detect whether people, places or situations are safe or dangerous. We can use this information to choose activities that will help bring our nervous system back to a regulated state.

Put simply, we want to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves in a way that honours what our nervous system needs at the time.

For anyone in a highly mobile state of hyperarousal, movement is key. The mobilising energy from your sympathetic nervous system is telling you to move so it's best to discharge that energy. Following this, breathing exercises may help to relax the body's stress response, lower blood pressure and decrease heart rate.

For anyone who is in a state of freeze or panic, breathing exercises or meditation can take them further into dysregulation. Instead of forcing them to plunge into an ice bath or sit still in a meditation class, orienting to the environment and the body in ways that upregulate or downregulate the nervous system, depending on the state you're in, will help realign and return to a state of safety and regulation.

What to do if you feel your trauma has been triggered.

If you're meditating and you notice an increase in your heart rate, your anxiety gets worse, you don't feel safe sitting still, it doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong, or that there's something wrong with you. It just means that this isn't the right tool for you to use at that moment.

Instead, finding the tools that best attune to the state that you're in will have a greater chance of bringing you back to a regulated state. Before entering into any activity or therapy, I recommend taking a nervous system informed approach by employing the 3Cs.

Choice: is the class or activity giving you options? If you find yourself feeling dysregulated, can you choose to move around, open or close your eyes or take a breather?

Using "if then" statements can really help. For example, 'if I feel overwhelmed, then I'll open my eyes.' 'If I start to feel spacey and vague, then I'll get up and move around.' 'If I notice I'm feeling more anxious, then I'll open my eyes.'

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It's important you feel you have options. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work for people experiencing grief and trauma. Dysregulation is amplified in times when people feel powerless and like they lack agency.

Context: is the person running the class or activity giving you adequate explanations of the what, why and how they're asking of you? Following a traumatic experience, you may even look for practitioners who are trauma informed and understand how the nervous system works.

Connect: does the person running the class or activity make you feel safe, connected and engaged? If the message that you continue to receive is that you're doing something wrong, or you just need to try harder, it's probably not the right class for you at that moment. Remember, there is no one perfect practice or exercise for everybody – and you have the most insight into what's working for you and what's not.

Grief and trauma will often throw us into a state of nervous system dysregulation. If we're already facing other stresses when this happens, the effects can be significant and long-lasting. Despite the saying, time often doesn't heal all wounds.

This doesn't mean we can't return to balance. The nervous system is dynamic. It's continually learning through experience. As you cultivate more autonomic awareness, and recognise that your responses are your physiology trying to keep you safe, you develop more trust, autonomy and confidence in taking care of your needs.

My story is just one example of many about the amazing progress we can all make by harnessing the body's inbuilt capabilities to cope, and most importantly, recalibrate.

Jessica Maguire is a former physiotherapist, educator, author of the Nervous System Reset, TEDx speaker and mother on a mission to free people from nervous system dysregulation and all its painful side effects.

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