Breathe before you Begin: Resetting your Nervous System for the New Year
The start of a new year often carries the pressure of needing to ‘hit the ground running’. I’ve been sucked into this too, many times. You might feel the quiet hum of ‘new year, new me’ energy—the push to improve, achieve, or reset everything overnight. But here’s the truth: your body doesn’t respond well to haste. It responds to steady safety. Your mind won’t deliver clarity simply from chaotic thinking and ruminating. It needs a spaciousness of calm.
Grounding for New Years’ new beginnings
Your nervous system doesn’t know that it’s a new year. It simply responds to your internal state—how you breathe, how you rest, how you move. When you start your year rushing, scrambling, or reacting, your body gets the message: it’s time to brace. But when you begin the year grounded, your nervous system receives an entirely different signal: it’s safe to expand.
Science calls it state-dependent functioning—your mental state determines your capacity for focus, creativity, and follow-through. When you’re stressed, your prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for clarity and decision-making) shuts down. When you’re calm, it reopens. That’s why breathwork is such a powerful place to start, because the breath allows all parts of the brain to re-connect and work in collaboration with each other (creative and analytical, emotional and survival…), not in isolation.
When your nervous system is grounded, you make better decisions. You can listen more deeply. You move from intention, not impulse. That’s what real change is built on—not force, but regulation and grounded, steady action.
Instead of pushing yourself to have it all figured out by January 31st, I dare you to spend the first month of your year prioritising everything that lights you up, inspires you, energises you and nourishes you. From this place, you can re-discover what your true priorities are (and cultivate a year more aligned than the last).
Try my 20 minute free Breathwork for Stress audio to ground and presence yourself before checking in with what your 2026 priorities are.
Forget new years’ resolutions
January is the perfect moment to pause before you start. To breathe before you plan. To ask yourself not what you want to achieve, but how you want to feel as you do it. For years I’ve been prompting women in my community to focus more on how they want to feel, rather than what they want to do.
For example, this year you might want to feel more spacious. And this might mean;
limiting the kids’ after-school activities, or at least only allowing them to choose ones that don’t require your attendance all the time.
delegating more in the home (and at work),
committing to saying no at least once more per week,
decluttering your office space (and potentially another space in your home - one that you see regularly),
wearing more stretchy gentle fabrics (instead of tight high-waisters that limite your breathing potential),
focussing on embodying a natural and functional breathing pattern that feels expansive and nourishing (rather than stressful). Breathe with my guidance here.
By focussing on how you want to feel first, and then making decisions based on this—you’re eliminating the time-waster of doing something you ‘think’ might work, and then realising that in actual fact, it doesn’t lead you to your desired outcome. This is goal setting 101.
This year, may your resolutions become rituals of regulation and feeling into what you truly want. Because from a calm self, clarity always follows.
Looking for something a little more compact? The Centering Commute audio inside the Busy Woman Breathwork Pack was created for moments like this. The transitions, the moments between, the switching of roles. Whether you’re driving to work, transitioning from one part of your day to another, or starting a whole new year, this 5-minute practice helps you reset your nervous system and re-enter your body.
Through slow, even breaths and gentle awareness cues, it invites you to release what’s behind you and arrive fully in what’s next. You don’t need to overhaul your life—you just need to keep coming home to yourself, over and over again.