How to Regulate Your Nervous System When the Problem Can't Be Solved
Almost four years ago I spent time at the Next Practice Institute, learning how to work with complexity from Carolyn Coughlin. That week has stayed with me ever since. It did not hand me a set of answers. It gave me a way to keep moving when there are no answers, which Carolyn describes as dancing with complexity rather than trying to survive it.
The part I did not expect was how much of it lives in the body. When a problem refuses to hold still, the state of my nervous system does more to shape what I can see and do than the quality of my thinking does.
So when Carolyn, co-leader of Cultivating Leadership and co-author of Unleash Your Complexity Genius, joined me on the Flourishing Edge podcast, I went straight for the thread that matters most to anyone running a team, a change effort, or a company where the answers keep moving.
Here is the claim I want to make in this article. Settling your nervous system is the first move in complexity. It is not a wellness extra you get to once the real work is done.
Complex vs Complicated: Why Your Hardest Problems Won’t Hold Still
Some problems can be figured out. Your taxes. A car engine. An optimal workflow. Carolyn puts it:
Complicated problems are problems that can be solved. They have knowable solutions.”
Find the answer once and it works again in similar situations. Rocket science belongs in this group. It takes deep expertise and years of effort, and it is still only complicated, because the laws of physics behave the same way every time you test them. Hard is not the same as unpredictable.
Complex problems work differently. They have many moving parts, and the connections between those parts keep shifting, so the same action can produce a different result each time you try it. Raising children is the example Carolyn uses. Anyone who has raised two children knows that what worked with the first child often fails with the second, and that what worked yesterday may not work today.
Work is full of this. You announce a restructure, and one well respected person on the team takes it badly. Their reaction shapes how their colleagues read the news, which shapes how three other teams respond, and a week later you are managing something that was never in the plan. Nobody could have mapped that in advance, because the outcome depended on people, relationships and history rather than on logic.
Carolyn states the consequence plainly, and it is the part most leaders skip over:
Groups of people are inherently complex, which is why we talk about leadership as being inherently complex.”
I see the cost of missing this in nearly every transformation I have worked on. A company puts 90% of its effort into the technical side of the program, the systems, the processes, the new operating model, because those parts can be worked out. The other 10% goes to the people side, and that 10% gets treated like a technical problem too. The communication plan, the training schedule and the launch event all get mapped out well in advance, as though people were one more workstream to deliver.
You do not know how people will respond. Carolyn’s prescription is a healthy dose of humility about how much you can actually make people change. Mine is a question I now ask before any initiative starts: does this involve getting people to do something? If the answer is yes, the work is complex, and my plan is a hypothesis rather than a solution.
The Tadpole Pond: How Complexity Feels in the Body
You do not need a framework to tell you that you are in complexity. Your body has already told you.
Carolyn’s picture for it is a pond so thick with tadpoles that it looks like you could scoop them up by the handful. You reach in, they scatter, you come up with nothing.
Every time you put your hands in the pond, they disperse and you get nothing.”
It should be easy and it is not. I should be able to figure this out and I cannot.
That grasping feeling has a predictable companion: the urge to work harder, get smarter, find more resources. It is the exact urge that made most of us successful. My own version is a sentence I catch myself thinking more often than I would like to admit.
I am trying so hard, I am running so fast, and yet I am still in the same place.”
After that comes exhaustion, then frustration, then the quiet question that no leader says out loud. Am I actually good enough to lead this?
Here is the trap. When we keep trying to solve something that cannot be solved, we are banging our heads against a wall, and that state comes bundled with an activated nervous system. Fight or flight. Tunnel vision. From there the very things complexity asks for, wide attention, curiosity, experiments, connection, are close to impossible. The harder we push, the less capable we become.
The first job is not to think better. It is to change state.
How to Regulate Your Nervous System in Under a Minute
The good news is that you already carry the tool. Breath is one of the few parts of the autonomic nervous system we can partly control, which makes it, in Carolyn’s words, a direct access to our nervous system.
The move is embarrassingly simple. Take a long out breath. Make it an audible sigh. The exhale switches on the parasympathetic system, and you can feel the change within a few breaths. The ancients did not know why it worked. They just knew that it did.
Science has since caught up. A 2023 Stanford study in Cell Reports Medicine had 111 people practice five minutes a day for a month. The group doing cyclic sighing, which is two inhales through the nose followed by one long exhale, showed the biggest lift in mood and the largest drop in physical arousal, ahead of mindfulness meditation. Five minutes. No app required.
Then use the body. Carolyn’s sequence, which I have adopted almost word for word: notice what is tight. If your shoulders are up, drop them. If your attention is stuck in your head, and when you are activated it always is, bring it down to your feet and press them into the floor until you feel gravity. If you can, stand up and walk. Go outside.
My addition is nature, even in miniature. We are lucky to live in Boulder, though you do not need mountains for this. Ten minutes next to a tree, or beside a plant in the lobby, with your phone left behind. Sitting under the maple outside my office, looking closely at a single leaf, I watch the blur resolve into detail, and the curiosity that comes back is exactly the curiosity the problem needs.
Then protect the thing underneath all of it, which is sleep. Carolyn thinks of herself as a good sleeper. Her ring data after a five hour night before a four in the morning board call showed almost no REM at all. The data did not make her life boring. It made her choices visible. Most of us wake up to a phone and train our sympathetic nervous system to be on fire from the first minute of the day.
Changing that is the cheapest leadership training I know. It is also why emotional regulation sits at the center of our work with leaders at Happiness Squad. Nothing else we teach lands without it.
Notice Wider: Why Outliers Are the Signal, Not the Noise
Once your state has shifted, the next move is one that a client of Carolyn’s once rejected as too dull to teach senior leaders.
We can’t tell these senior leaders that the thing they need to do more of is notice. That’s not very sexy.”
It is not sexy. It is also the whole game, and it runs in two directions. Inward: what is happening in me right now? Outward: what is happening around me that I am not seeing?
In the classic gorilla experiment by Simons and Chabris in 1999, roughly half the viewers counting basketball passes never saw the person in the gorilla suit walk through the middle of the frame. We screen out most of what is in front of us on a good day. Under stress we narrow further and lock onto threats.
Complexity asks for the opposite. Scan widely, and pay special attention to the things that do not fit the story you already hold. Carolyn and I were both trained in consulting to treat outliers as noise. In complex systems, outliers are the most valuable data you have.
Kim Cameron’s work at the Center for Positive Organizations points the same way. The energizers and positive deviants in a system are where the learning lives. Most of us conform. A few have the courage to be positively deviant, and your job as a leader is to get curious about them before you get corrective.
Carolyn is honest about why this is hard. Paying attention to outliers feels to our bodies unsafe. One more reason the breath comes first.
Be Experimental: Why 80% of Your Experiments Should Fail
If complexity cannot be solved, how do you make progress? You probe it.
Dave Snowden’s phrase for this is safe to fail experiments, and Carolyn’s description is precise. An experiment is different from a decision or an initiative because it is small, it is cheap, it is quick, and the whole point of it is to learn. By that standard around 80% of them should fail, in the sense that they do not do what you thought they would. If everything works, you were not experimenting. You were deciding with extra steps.
What Carolyn and her co-author Jennifer Garvey Berger found over years of client work is that leaders rarely struggle to understand this. They struggle to do it. So the genius became being experimental. Unattached to any particular outcome. Playful. Curious the way a toddler is curious when they drop food off the high chair to see what the grown-ups will do.
Why is that so hard for adults? Because we are attached to our identities of knowing stuff. A leader should know. A leader should be in charge. Being experimental is not only counterintuitive, it is counter to who we think we are supposed to be.
I see this every week. Ask a senior team whether vulnerability matters and every hand goes up. Ask them to say “I don’t know” in front of a peer they are competing with for the next role, and the room goes quiet. My honest estimate is that the share of leaders who can comfortably say it has moved from about 5% to 10%.
In an eighteen month journey we are running with a large food company, one of the biggest moves we are normalizing is simply asking each other for help. We start with the few who are willing, so the space becomes safe enough for the rest.
I share a little, which lets you share a little, which lets me share a little more.”
Laughter, Love, and the Workplace Culture Complexity Needs
Carolyn offered a reframe of vulnerability that I have not stopped thinking about. She calls it letting yourself be known. That includes “I don’t know.” It also includes “I do know, my view is an outlier, and I am going to say it even if it disrupts the peace.”
Harmony is the enemy of complexity friendliness.”
A team that protects the peace loses the outlier voices it needs most. Comfortably numb is not the same as aligned.
Two capacities make that kind of candor survivable, and neither shows up in most competency models.
The first is laughter. Playfulness moves a group into the parasympathetic state where wide scanning becomes possible, and shared laughter builds trust. Research on laughter and social bonding finds that we feel closer to the people we laugh with. Laughing at someone destroys trust just as fast, so the care matters. In complexity you cannot write a process for everything, so what you have is people and trust. A team that cannot laugh at its own misses will not experiment, because, as Carolyn said, if we are not getting it wrong, we are not doing it right.
The second is love. The publisher tried to talk Carolyn and Jennifer out of the word. They kept it.
“We spend so much of our lives in the workplace. If there isn’t love in that place, I think that’s really sad.”
Love here means genuine positive regard, the kind that lets you tussle productively with the people you trust most. It is also the most reliable route into a settled nervous system there is.
Start Monday
- Before your next hard conversation, take three long, audible out breaths. Drop your shoulders. Feel your feet on the floor.
- Ask of your biggest initiative: does this involve getting people to do something? If yes, turn the plan into three small, quick probes, and say out loud that you expect two of them to miss.
- Find the outlier. Who on your team sees this differently, or is already getting a result nobody else is getting? Get curious before you get corrective.
- Laugh at your own last mistake in front of your team. It is the cheapest trust building exercise available.
Carolyn’s parting advice was the simplest, and it is where I would start.
“Pay attention to your nervous system. It is probably the most important lever that we have, and it’s a thing we actually have some agency over.”
Learn more about Carolyn Coughlin on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Carolyn Coughlin. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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