by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Is Serving Others the Secret to Nervous System Regulation and Living in the Flow State?
The quality of our experience of life most often comes down to the way that our nervous system is regulated and able to deal with reality:
By “regulated” I don’t mean that we feel ‘good’ all the time, or that life suddenly becomes free of challenge, uncertainty, or discomfort – what I mean is actually something much simpler and far more important:
That we’re not chronically stuck in fight–flight–freeze and that our nervous system has the flexibility to downshift out of ‘threat’ when there’s no real danger present.
The short version is that a regulated nervous system is one that can allow the parasympathetic branch – responsible for “resting and digesting” instead of the fight or flight of the sympathetic branch – to do its job and let us feel a basic sense of safety, connection, and presence instead of endlessly scanning the world (and ourselves) for problems.
When the nervous system is regulated, life feels workable; when it isn’t, everything feels like an emergency and we wonder why we’re always ‘stressed’ or living in the Void.
There are, of course, many ways to support regulation at this ‘basic’ level:
Yin yoga, breathwork, learning to breathe through the nose instead of the mouth, emotional mastery, stress management, quality time out in nature, and honest self-inquiry all play their part and I use many of them myself and with clients (and have written about them on this site).
In this article, though, I want to talk about something that is often overlooked or misunderstood:
A shift in orientation rather than a technique and a way of meeting life that moves us out of ego and into realness – serving as a stance that allows us to stay grounded in ourselves without becoming obsessed with ourselves.
This stance is SERVICE.
Not in a performative, self-sacrificial, or martyr-like way but as a natural expression of wholeness:
When we serve others from a place of realness, we regulate our nervous system almost as a side effect because we’re no longer organised around ‘threat’, defence, and self-protection and – instead – can begin to create our lives and relationships from rest instead of stress.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Serving Others & Nervous System Regulation: What We’ll Cover in This Article
- Is Serving Others the Secret to Nervous System Regulation and Living in the Flow State?
- Serving Others: Wholeness, Fragmentation, and the Nervous System
- Sympathetic Dominance and the Narrowing of Reality
- The Unholy Trinity: Shame, Guilt, and Trauma
- Serving Others as a Doorway Out of Ego
- Grounded, Not Self-Focused
- Serving Others: Bringing It Into Practice
- Serving Others & Nervous System Regulation: The Final Word
Serving Others: Wholeness, Fragmentation, and the Nervous System
Everything we do in life is motivated by one of two underlying orientations:
We can always choose to move either towards wholeness or fragmentation.
Wholeness is not ‘perfection’ – nor is it spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity, or pretending that we’re not all walking through life with at least one or two wounds.
All wholeness means is that we’re connected as closely as possible in a given moment to the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality as it is. From this place, we experience ourselves as interdependent with life rather than as isolated units trying to survive on our own.
Fragmentation, by contrast, is the state of being split within ourselves:
It is what happens when we have underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma and so end up identifying with with ego, denying or repressing the shadow self, and building an unreal identity that must constantly be defended against the ‘threat’ of reality itself.
When we’re coming from a place of fragmentation, we relate to the world transactionally rather than relationally and so life becomes something to manage, control, or extract from, rather than something to participate in.
This is all relevant to nervous system regulation because when we consistently live from a place of wholeness, our nervous system receives a constant signal of safety – not because nothing difficult ever happens, but because we are no longer at war with ourselves or reality.
Because of this, there is less internal resistance, less bracing, and less need for hypervigilance (all of the things that cause the nervous system to freak out and get stuck in fight or flight).
Fragmentation always produces the opposite effect to wholeness because when we’re split inside ourselves and there’s a massive gap between the ego and the shadow self, then the nervous system stays on high alert.
This is because when we’re not ready to face and accept ourselves and our realness, there’s always something to protect, something to hide, and something to maintain – the end result of all this is that the ego becomes a fragile structure that must be defended from both internal threats (uncomfortable emotions, shame, and truth, etc.) and external ones (other people, feedback, uncertainty, and change, etc.).
As a general rule, the more our choices and habits support wholeness (realness), the more regulated our nervous system becomes.
This isn’t some mystical made-up nonsense – it’s the basic mechanics of the human experience because a system that doesn’t have to constantly defend an unreal image of itself doesn’t need to stay in fight–flight–freeze.
Sympathetic Dominance and the Narrowing of Reality
There is another rule that works in the opposite direction:
The more dysregulated the nervous system becomes, the more attached we get to the ego.
When the sympathetic nervous system dominates, perception narrows a bit like a horse wearing blinkers and so the field of vision reduces so that survival can be prioritised.
This is useful if a car is about to hit you or something like that but it’s completely disastrous if it becomes a permanent way of relating to life.
In this narrowed “blinkers on” state, we become rigid and end up clinging to familiar identities, beliefs, and self-images because they feel predictable and allow the ego to filter everything through its existing story – not to find truth but to maintain its illusions of itself.
This creates distance everywhere and at every level:
Distance between us and our own emotions, us and other people, us and reality itself.
In this state, the world starts to feel hostile or overwhelming, not because it necessarily is, but because we are perceiving it through a threat-based lens and projecting our own fragmentation out into the world around us.
Once this loop is established, it reinforces itself and so dysregulation strengthens ego, ego increases fragmentation, and fragmentation keeps the nervous system on edge.
The only way to break the cycle is to get REAL again.
The Unholy Trinity: Shame, Guilt, and Trauma
Underpinning all of this is what I often call the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or unresolved trauma:
These are not character flaws – they’re just adaptive reactions to life that once served a purpose but that – when left unexamined – turn our relationship with ourselves into a threat.
Shame tells us that who we are is ‘wrong’; guilt convinces us that we must constantly make up for something ‘bad’ that we did; trauma keeps parts of the nervous system and our identity frozen in the past. Together, they create the perfect conditions for ego to feel necessary and to keep its hold over us.
It all boils down to the fact that if being with ourselves feels unsafe, the we’ll cling more rigidly to identity to get a sense of validation and control and we’ll become self-obsessed – not because we’re vain but because we’re trying to survive.
Unfortunately, this self-obsession further dysregulates the system because the more we monitor ourselves, the more the nervous system reads ‘danger’ and more ‘danger’ it senses, the more it pulls us back into the familiar patterns of ego.
This is the loop that keeps so many intelligent, self-aware people ‘stuck’ in life and stops them from ever growing real.
Serving Others as a Doorway Out of Ego
This is where serving others becomes quietly revolutionary when it comes to staying regulated and growing real because – when we genuinely serve – something fundamental shifts:
Attention moves away from how we are being perceived and towards what is actually needed and the ego loosens its grip – not because we ‘fight’ it but because it is no longer being fed.
The ego always TAKES which is why it constantly seeks validation, reassurance, control, and certainty but service, by definition, GIVES – it asks of itself and the world “What is required here?” rather than “What do I need to maintain my image?”
This immediately changes our nervous system’s posture because we step out of defence and into participation.
Serving others also moves us from the illusion of independence into the reality of interdependence:
Ego wants to believe it is separate and self-sufficient but realness recognises that we exist in relationship and that when we serve, we align with truth, and life begins to flow rather than being something we keep forcing and/or resisting.
On a physiological level, this is not just philosophy that sounds ‘nice’ or whatever:
Numerous studies in social neuroscience and health psychology show that helping behaviour is associated with the release of oxytocin, sometimes called the “bonding hormone”. It also helps with reductions in cortisol, the primary stress hormone.
Further to this, research from institutions such as Harvard and the University of California has linked altruistic behaviour to improved heart health, lower inflammation, and greater emotional regulation.
In other words, service literally tells the body that it is safe to relax.
But there’s also something even deeper happening:
When we serve, we have no choice but to come from a place of realness because we simply can’t give something real without contacting what’s already real within ourselves.
This means discovering and expressing our actual gifts and showing up in truth – not as whatever performance we think will earn approval.
What this basically means is that when we serve others, growth becomes inevitable, because stagnation, stasis, and ego never have anything real to offer. To give, then, we have to move beyond ego and all of the nervous system dysregulation that comes with it and step into the flow of life.
From this place, threats lose their power:
Internally, we’re less frightened of emotions or shadow aspects because we’re not trying to preserve a static self-image; externally, we’re less reactive because we’re engaged in contribution and participation rather than only ever taking in a state of defence.
Service doesn’t make us passive – it aligns us with reality.
Grounded, Not Self-Focused
There’s a common fear that serving others means losing ourselves in some way but, in reality, the opposite is true:
Real service requires grounding because if we’re not connected to ourselves, we either burn out, become resentful, or turn service into another strategy for the ego to get what it thinks it wants.
True service arises from fullness, not depletion, and fullness always comes from the wholeness of being real.
When we’re grounded in realness, we can act without constantly checking how we are doing, how we look, or whether we are ‘enough’- this means that the nervous system senses coherence and so there’s less internal conflict, less self-surveillance, and more ease as we perceive less external threats too (because perception is projection).
This is what it means to live in the flow – not a forced blissed-out state where nothing goes wrong but a way of moving with and into life rather than against it.
If you’re ready to go even deeper into realness and nervous system regulation then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Serving Others: Bringing It Into Practice
To shift into the “service” way of being for regulation, you need to embody your own REALNESS:
This means that you need to start with a real foundation in your relationship with yourself which means reconnecting with what is true for you beneath identity (ego) and performance (ego-driven behaviours instead of presence).
Practices that bring awareness to the body, breath, and emotional landscape are essential here but regulation ultimately begins with honesty and the capacity and commitment to start facing yourself.
From this foundation of realness, you need to create a real vision – not a fantasy about your “best life” or whatever but a direction of service that allows you to both grow and give at the same time.
Ask yourself where your experience, skills, and hard-won understanding could genuinely help others and find a way to use this to bring more of your values into the world – this anchors your growth in meaning rather than mere self-improvement.
The next step is to break this vision into goals:
Keep them concrete and relational and make sure you know who you’re serving, how, and in what context of their own journey into realness.
Next, you need tcultivate habits that support both growth and regulation:
This might include daily nervous system practices, setting and maintaining boundaries that prevent overextension, and regular reflection to ensure that service remains real rather than ego-driven.
Finally, you have to take ACTION (this is the most important step) – not ‘perfectly’ or heroically but consistently.
Let your service become a regulated rhythm rather than a role.
When we serve from realness, the nervous system settles because it no longer has to defend a false self so we can move beyond threat, shame, and fragmentation – not by fighting them, but by outgrowing them.
In that movement, life begins to feel like something we are part of again.
Serving Others & Nervous System Regulation: The Final Word
Ultimately, the nervous system doesn’t regulate because we tell it to calm down but when it receives enough evidence that we’re safe, connected, and participating in life rather than defending ourselves from it.
Serving others in a real way provides that evidence in a way that very little else can because it removes us from the closed loop of the ego’s self-monitoring and places us back into relationship with reality.
When we serve from realness, the body no longer has to brace against life:
We’re not trying to protect an image, manage perception, or outrun shame – instead, we’re simply responding to what is actually here in the ‘Now’.
This allows our system to soften and the constant scanning for threats to subside – not because the world has changed but because our orientation to it has (“perception is projection”, again).
This is why service cannot be faked or forced:
The ego can mimic it for a while – turning helping into another performance or survival strategy – but that version of service eventually exhausts the nervous system rather than regulating it.
Real service only emerges when we’re grounded in ourselves, honest and humble about our limitations, and willing to give what is genuinely ours to give.
Seen this way, service isn’t something we need to wait to do after we have healed, regulated, or transcended ego – instead, it’s part of how healing and regulation actually happen because it draws us out of fragmentation and back into interdependence (where life flows because we are no longer resisting it).
The quiet truth is that we don’t find safety by retreating further into ourselves:
We find it by standing firmly in ourselves and then moving outward, offering something real.
When we do that, regulation stops being a problem to solve and becomes a natural consequence of living in alignment with reality.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to grow real and start showing up in your own life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you uncover the path forwards.
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