From Fight or Flight to Flow: Calming the Nervous System to Heal Your Pelvic Floor
Why Healing Cannot Happen in Fight or Flight
If you’ve been doing pelvic floor exercises but still feel tight, painful, or stuck, and are disappointed that your body isn’t doing what you had hoped, read about or been told it would. Your nervous system may simply be asking for a level of safety before strength.
I see this in my clients every week. Women who have followed all the advice, done the strengthening, committed to the exercises… and yet their symptoms remain or sometimes get worse. The body is still bracing.
Often, it is not a strength problem. It is a nervous system problem.
Many of the women I see or work with via my Pelvic MOT have a real awareness of their pelvic floor and notice that their symptoms worsen during periods of stress, anxiety, burnout, hormonal shifts, or emotional overwhelm. You might notice this too like your body is constantly gripping, even when you’re resting.
That isn’t a sign weakness. It is actually a survival response. This is when healing does not come from forcing muscles to work harder. It comes from helping the body feel safe enough to let go.
A calm pelvic floor begins with a calm nervous system.
Woman gently touching the still ocean water
Your Body’s Survival Mode Explained
What Is Fight or Flight?
Fight or flight is the body’s natural survival response, governed by the sympathetic nervous system. It is designed to keep us alive in moments of danger by increasing muscle tone, speeding up breathing, and preparing the body to act.
In short bursts, this response is a protective and really important one. It helps you to run away from and escape that tiger! But our modern life rarely allows it to switch off. There is a perpetual tiger prowling and this can lead to chronic stress. Coupled with emotional pressure, trauma, postnatal recovery, peri-menopause, lack of rest, or simply holding everything together for everyone else around you. Can lead to the nervous system remaining in a constant state of alert.
During sympathetic activation, blood flow is redirected toward the large muscles of the limbs, the heart and lungs and away from the organs of digestion and reproduction, you don’t need these for the time it takes to escape the tiger. The pelvic floor, which is closely linked to parasympathetic regulation, often loses variability and becomes protective. Which would be fine for short bursts, but not for months and years. When fight or flight becomes your baseline, the body never fully returns to rest-and-repair mode.
And your posture and pelvis is often where that tension settles.
Why Stress Shows Up in the Pelvis
How Fight or Flight Affects the Pelvic Floor
When the nervous system is dysregulated, global muscle tone increases. That includes the pelvic floor.
In my studio, I often see women whose pelvic floor is holding at 60–70 percent tone throughout the day without them realising. and this can be because of poor posture patterns that have developed over time due to repetitive life movement choices (tucking your bum under when you drive, standing with one leg bent when you cook, crossing your legs at your desk, carrying your bag on one side, wearing high heels all the time, holding your breath when you focus, clenching your jaw) It feels normal to them. Until it doesn’t.
This can lead to:
Persistent pelvic floor tension
Pain during intimacy or internal exams
Difficulty fully relaxing after exercise
Bladder, bowel, or sexual dysfunction
A sense of heaviness, pulling, or pressure
Stress also changes how we breathe. Shallow chest breathing and abdominal bracing reduce circulation, mobility and awareness through the pelvis. and that belly breathing you do to relax may be creating additional pressure issues too.
Over time, the pelvic floor may become overactive and painful, not because it is weak, but because it has been working too hard for too long.
This is why pelvic floor pain and chronic pelvic tension often fluctuate with emotional stress.
How Breathing Tells Your Body It Is Safe
The Role of Breath and the Vagus Nerve
Breath is one of the most powerful tools we have for nervous system regulation for pelvic pain.
The vagus nerve, a key part of the parasympathetic nervous system, helps shift the body out of fight or flight and into rest, digestion and repair.
Slow nasal breathing with a longer, softer exhale increases vagal tone. This improves heart rate variability, reduces global muscle guarding and allows the diaphragm and pelvic floor to regain coordinated movement.
The diaphragm and pelvic floor are designed to move together. When breath becomes shallow and restricted, the pelvic floor often grips. When breathing slows and expands into the ribs and back body, the pelvis can soften and respond reflexively.
Breathing patterns matter just as much as strength when it comes to calming the nervous system and pelvic pain.
You Cannot Relax a Muscle by Forcing It to Work Harder
Why Strengthening Alone Is Not Enough
If the pelvic floor is already holding at a high baseline tone, adding repeated contractions like kegels or the sqeezy app without restoring variability can reinforce bracing rather than function.
This is where many women with an overactive pelvic floor become more symptomatic, and are often told that they need to do more of the same but what’s missing is that before strength the body needs calm.
Down-regulating the nervous system allows muscles to lengthen, release and respond appropriately. From there, strength can be built in a way that supports the body rather than overriding it.
Hypopressives help create functional, well-coordinated muscles. Not tight ones.
Creating Lift and Calm Through Breath and Posture
How Hypopressives Support Nervous System Regulation
Hypopressive exercises offer a powerful, gentle way to calm the nervous system while supporting pelvic floor health.
Rather than forcing contraction, hypopressives use breath control, rib expansion and postural elongation to create a reflexive lift of the pelvic floor.
This approach:
Encourages slow, regulated breathing
Expands the rib cage and lifts the diaphragm
Reduces downward pressure on the pelvic organs
Activates the pelvic floor without gripping
Improves postural awareness
The pelvic floor does not operate in isolation. It is part of a continuous fascial network connecting rib cage, diaphragm, spine, hips and jaw. When the nervous system tightens the system globally, the pelvis responds locally.
Because hypopressives work with the nervous system rather than against it, they are especially supportive for chronic pelvic tension, postnatal changes and stress-related symptoms.
Letting the Body Complete Its Stress Response
Somatic and TRE Approaches to Shift Out of Survival
In my studio, I also work with somatic approaches and Trauma Release Exercises to help the body complete stress responses that were never fully discharged.
Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises use the body’s natural tremoring mechanism to gently release stored survival energy from the nervous system, where it often gets trapped with no viable outlet.
These tremors are not something to control. They are best met with curiosity and an open mind. They are an innate neurological reset.
When guided safely and slowly, this work can soften deep pelvic gripping, reduce guarding patterns and restore a sense of grounding.
For many women, nervous system regulation becomes the missing piece in pelvic floor therapy in Edinburgh and beyond.
When Calm Is the Missing Piece
Signs Your Pelvic Floor Needs Nervous System Healing
You might notice your symptoms flare during stressful weeks.
You might feel constant clenching you cannot consciously relax.
You might hold your breath without realising.
You might feel disconnected from your pelvis, or even slightly unsafe inside it.
These are not signs that you are broken.
They are signs that your body has been protecting you.
Safety Is the Foundation of Healing
Why Trauma-Informed Support Matters
Pelvic floor healing is not always just physical. It can be neurological and emotional too.
In my studio, trauma-informed support means consent, pacing and choice. It means we do not push through resistance. We listen to it. When the body feels safe, variability returns. Breath deepens. Muscles soften. Strength becomes sustainable.
Nervous System and Pelvic Floor Support in Edinburgh and Scotland
Working With Me
In my East Lothian studio and online across Scotland, I work with women whose symptoms have not resolved through strengthening alone.
We begin by restoring safety, though breath, posture and nervous system regulation. From there, we build functional, reflexive strength from that foundation.
Support is available through 1:1 sessions and online options, so you can explore healing at a pace that feels right for you.
From Survival to Flow
You were never meant to live in a constant state of alert, modern life has had a huge impact on this, keeping us in a constant state of low level fear and anxiety. When the body finally feels safe, breath deepens, tension softens and healing becomes possible. Finding calm and space for you is not weakness or you being less productive. It is about you filling your cup and making space for your body to feel safe enough to let go so that it can build strength.
Your pelvic floor does not need more force. It needs safety, patience and permission from your nervous system to return to flow.
Free breath video
Questions you may have
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Questions you may have 〰️
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Yes. Chronic stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing global muscle tone and often contributing to pelvic floor tension and pain.
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For many women, nervous system regulation is the missing piece in resolving chronic pelvic tension.
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When taught correctly and introduced gradually, Hypopressives can help restore reflexive function without reinforcing gripping patterns.
