Back to Grazing™: A Horse Led Framework for Nervous System Regulation in Real Life

Have you ever driven to work and realized you do not remember parts of the drive? Or opened your phone to do one thing and found yourself scrolling twenty minutes later without remembering what you were even looking for? Or sat down at the end of the day and thought, where did the day even go?

That is not you being lazy or distracted or bad at mindfulness.

That is autopilot.

And for many people, autopilot becomes the default way of living, especially for those who are high functioning, responsible, capable, and carrying a lot.

Back to Grazing™ is the foundation of my work, and it is also the framework I recently taught in a presentation on stress, presence, and nervous system regulation. While the phrase itself is rooted in the wisdom of horses, the framework is designed to stand alone as a practical way to return to safety inside the body, especially for people who live busy, high demand lives and find themselves carrying stress from one moment into the next.

Most people do not burn out because they are incapable. They burn out because they are functioning on a nervous system that rarely gets to fully settle. They stay productive, show up for others, manage responsibilities, and get through the day, but their bodies remain on alert. Over time, this becomes exhausting. Eventually it starts to feel like your life is happening, but you are not fully in it.

Back to Grazing™ is a way to interrupt that pattern. It teaches you how to process stress in real time so you are not rolling dysregulation over into every moment until it becomes your baseline.

The Real Issue for Most People Is Autopilot

One of the biggest reasons people stay stuck in stress is not because they are doing life wrong. It is because they are doing life on autopilot. Autopilot is what happens when your body is moving through your day, but you are not fully in your day. You are technically present, but mentally you are somewhere else, already thinking about what is next, what you forgot, what could go wrong, what you need to respond to, what you should have said, or how you are going to get everything done. It becomes a way of living where you are constantly functioning, but rarely actually arriving.

Autopilot often looks normal because it is so common, but it has a very specific feeling. You say, I’m fine, but you are not. You eat without tasting a single bite. You read the same paragraph three times and still could not tell me what it says. You make endless checklists but still feel out of control. You multitask everything and somehow still feel behind. Your days blur together like one long to do list. You check your phone before you even get out of bed. You cannot remember the last deep breath you took on purpose. You wake up tired and you go to bed tired. You get irritated by small things you used to let slide. You are constantly on but never truly present. You are living for the weekend and it disappears in a blink.

Autopilot can look like productivity from the outside, but internally it creates disconnection. It keeps your nervous system in a constant state of forward motion, always anticipating, always scanning, always preparing. Over time, it becomes difficult to feel grounded, because grounding requires something autopilot does not allow: being here. Back to Grazing™ begins by interrupting autopilot, because presence is not something you force through willpower. Presence is something you return to through the body, one moment at a time.

If you are reading this and thinking, yes, that is me, I want you to know something important. This is not a personal failure. It is a nervous system pattern. And patterns can be changed.

The Brace for Impact Mentality That So Many People Live In

There is another pattern I see constantly, especially in women and high functioning professionals. It is what I call the brace for impact mentality. Brace for impact is what happens when your nervous system is trained to believe that if you relax, you will fall behind. If you soften, you will lose control. If you stop scanning, you will miss something important. If you stop carrying everything, everything will fall apart.

This is not always obvious, because it can hide inside what looks like responsibility. But internally, it feels like you are bracing for the next thing before it even arrives. You brace for the next email. You brace for the next conflict. You brace for the next problem. You brace for the next person who needs something. You brace for the next thing you have to manage. Even when things are technically okay, you are preparing for what could go wrong. You are pre solving problems that have not happened yet. You are carrying a low level tension in your body as if relaxing would be unsafe.

When you live like that, your body never gets the message that it is safe. That is why so many people feel exhausted even when nothing extreme is happening. It is because their system is always tight, always braced, always holding. Back to Grazing™ is not about pretending life is not stressful. It is about teaching the body how to stop living braced all the time.

Before you keep reading, take one slow breath in and let your exhale be a little longer than your inhale. Drop your shoulders if you notice they are up. This is what it looks like to begin returning, even in the middle of your day.

Why Horses Were the Beginning of This Work

Horses are prey animals. Their nervous systems are designed to be highly sensitive to changes in their environment, which means they naturally track safety, threat, and uncertainty with incredible accuracy. They do not rely on logic to determine whether something is safe. They rely on their bodies. They respond to what they sense. They respond to energy. They respond to the nervous system state of what is happening around them.

When a horse feels uncertain, you can usually see it in their behavior immediately. Their body becomes more alert. They may shift their feet, tighten their muscles, raise their head, hold their breath, or become restless. They are not being difficult. They are responding honestly to what they perceive.

When a horse feels safe, their body returns to a different state. They soften. Their breathing deepens. They settle. They may cock a hind leg. They graze. They return to what is natural.

This is one of the most important lessons horses teach. Regulation is not something you force. It is something that returns when safety is present. That observation became the foundation of Back to Grazing™. It is the recognition that humans also have a grazing state and most of us have simply lost access to it, not because we are broken, but because our lives and patterns have trained us to remain on alert.

The Stress Snowball: How We Carry One Moment Into the Next

Many people assume their stress is coming from too much to do. While workload absolutely plays a role, what I see more often is that the real issue is not the number of stressful moments. It is what happens after the stressful moment.

A stressful email comes in, the body tenses, and you push through. A difficult interaction happens, your heart rate increases, and you move on to the next task. A thought enters your mind that triggers worry or self doubt, and you keep going.

The external moment may be over, but internally the stress response remains active. If that response does not resolve, it stacks. Over time, it becomes a snowball. You are no longer reacting to what is happening right now. You are reacting to everything you have been carrying for hours, days, sometimes even years.

This is one of the reasons people reach a breaking point out of nowhere. The moment was not too big. The accumulated load was. Back to Grazing™ teaches a different way. Instead of rolling stress forward and calling it normal, it teaches you how to process the moment while it is happening so you can stay present inside your life instead of living in constant internal pressure.

A Grooming Session That Became a Lesson in Presence

One of the clearest examples of this work happened during a grooming session with a young man. He came into the session visibly anxious. His body was tense and his energy felt busy, like he was bracing or anticipating something going wrong. The horse was on cross ties and was also unsettled, moving and shifting, almost dancing in place.

Nothing unsafe was happening, but the nervous system state in the space was elevated. When humans feel tense, horses often reflect it because they are responding to the quality of energy and safety around them, not to the surface level story of what we are doing.

Instead of trying to force the horse to stand still or pushing the young man to just do it, we slowed down and returned to the most basic regulating tool we have: breath. We took a few deep breaths, focusing on slowing the exhale, softening the body, and coming back into the present moment.

Within a short time, the horse began to shift. The movement softened. The horse cocked a hind leg, which is one of the most obvious signs of relaxation and settling. As grooming continued and the nervous system state in the space stayed calmer, the horse eventually let out a full body sigh and shake, one of those powerful releases that you can feel in your own body when you witness it.

I asked the young man what he was experiencing in his body in that moment. He paused and said, I have no thoughts.

What he was describing was not trying to be mindful. It was the actual felt sense of presence, where the mind quiets because the body no longer feels like it needs to stay on high alert. That moment showed, in real time, what Back to Grazing™ is truly about. It is not about controlling stress. It is about returning the body to safety so that presence becomes possible.

Why the Brain Keeps You Stressed Even When Nothing Is Wrong

A key educational piece of this framework is understanding what is happening in the brain when we feel anxious or overwhelmed. The amygdala is the part of your brain responsible for detecting threat. It is designed to keep you alive, not to keep you peaceful. It is constantly scanning for danger and responding to perceived risk.

The challenge is that the amygdala does not always distinguish between a real threat in the environment and an imagined internal threat created through thoughts. In other words, the body can react to a future worry or a mental scenario as if it is happening right now. This is why you can feel your heart race while sitting safely at your desk, or why you can feel tension rise while driving in your car, even when there is no immediate danger present.

Your body does not respond to logic first. It responds to perception. And if your mind is generating threat signals, your body will follow. Back to Grazing™ gives you a way to intervene, not by arguing with your mind, but by sending safety signals to your body that help the nervous system return to regulation.

The Back to Grazing™ Framework: Notice, Pause, Return to Calm

Back to Grazing™ is built on three simple steps that can be used anywhere. It is not a practice you do once a day. It is a way of meeting your life moment by moment so that stress does not accumulate into overwhelm.

The first step is notice. This is awareness. You begin to recognize the signals that tell you that you have shifted into stress or protection. This might show up as shallow breathing, tension in your shoulders or jaw, feeling rushed, feeling scattered, irritability, or overthinking. Noticing is important because most people only realize they are dysregulated once they have already hit a breaking point. Back to Grazing™ teaches you to catch it earlier, when the stress snowball is still small.

The second step is pause. Pause is the interruption. This is where you stop long enough to create space between what is happening and how you respond to it. Most people move through stress without pausing because pausing feels inefficient or uncomfortable. But pause is where regulation begins, because pause is what tells your nervous system, I am not in immediate danger, I can slow down.

Pausing can be as small as taking one conscious breath. It can look like relaxing your shoulders, unclenching your jaw, or placing your feet firmly on the ground before you respond. It can mean waiting ten seconds before you send the email, speak the words, or rush into the next task. The pause is not about doing nothing. It is about stopping the stress cycle from rolling forward unchecked.

The third step is return to calm. This is the moment you send safety signals to your body so it can shift out of protection and back into regulation. Calm does not always mean you feel peaceful instantly. It means your body begins to settle enough that you can think clearly, respond with intention, and stay connected to yourself.

Returning to calm can be as simple as a slower exhale, softening the belly, or placing a hand on your chest for a few breaths. It can mean orienting to your environment and reminding your body that you are safe right now. The goal is not to eliminate stress. The goal is to complete the moment so you do not carry it forward.

An Invitation to Unsubscribe to Conditional Wellness

So many people live inside what I call conditional wellness. It is the belief that you will finally feel better once everything else is handled. Once the workload slows down. Once the kids are older. Once the meeting is over. Once the season passes. Once life feels easier.

Conditional wellness sounds responsible, but it quietly trains your nervous system to believe that peace is always in the future. It teaches you that calm comes later, that presence is something you earn after you finish everything else. And for most people, that later moment never arrives, because life continues to require you.

This is also why work life balance feels impossible. The problem is not that you are failing at balance. The problem is that balance is often treated like a destination, as if life will someday become perfectly even and manageable, and only then will you be able to breathe. But real life is not perfectly balanced. There will always be demands. There will always be responsibility. There will always be seasons where more is required of you than you would prefer.

The question is not whether stress will exist. The question is whether you will keep carrying it forward until your body forces you to stop.

Back to Grazing™ is an invitation to unsubscribe from conditional wellness. It is a return to the kind of internal safety that allows you to meet your life without abandoning yourself. It is a reminder that your calm does not need to wait until the chaos ends. Presence is not a luxury. It is a skill. And it is available in small moments, even in a full life.

If you have been living on autopilot, bracing for impact, and carrying stress from one moment into the next, let this be your permission to begin returning. To notice what is happening inside you, to pause long enough to interrupt the pattern, and to return to calm in a way that your body can actually feel.

Not later.

Now.

And slowly, moment by moment, the snowball stops.

You come back to grazing.