The Science of Resilience: HRV, Breathwork, Movement, and How to Train Your Nervous System

“My main character trait is that I am very resilient.”

We have all heard it before in the middle of a job interview. But what does resilience even mean? Resilient to what, for how long, and at what cost?

Modern neuroscience and trauma research increasingly frames resilience as one’s physiological capacity: the nervous system’s ability to move fluidly between states, respond to stress, and return to baseline.

This was an incredibly important realization for me and one that has defined my life. Through trauma, generational patterns and a life-changing accident at 21, my nervous system became wired to stay in a state of chronic dysregulation. What followed was a decade of self-discovery, healing, and optimisation to get back to my “resilient” self. 

Over the past year I have also interviewed many leading clinicians, scientists, and performance experts on The Beyond Tomorrow Podcast and in this article, I synthesize my lived experience, scientific literature, and conversations with experts to provide you with some ideas on staying resilient in a fast-changing world. An important caveat, I am not a physician or an academic, so nothing here should be taken as medical advice. Severe anxiety, trauma symptoms, and medical conditions warrant professional support.

Firstly, can you actually measure resilience? 

If resilience is the capacity to absorb stress without losing function, then it needs a measurable self-report. HRV is not perfect, and Matt Kaeberlein also cautioned on The Beyond Tomorrow Podcast: “Don’t trust the numbers that you get from devices or direct to consumer companies, because oftentimes they don’t tell you what the error is.”

But, HRV remains one of the most pragmatic proxies we have for autonomic flexibility, particularly when interpreted in context.

Salim Najjar gave me a useful tip: “You cannot compare your score to anybody else’s score.” The signal is intra-individual. It becomes meaningful when anchored to baseline and interpreted alongside sleep, training load, illness, circadian disruption, and psychological stress.

Mechanistically, day-to-day HRV variation can be understood as the net output of competing inputs: sympathetic drive, parasympathetic modulation, inflammatory signalling, and metabolic strain. 

But the real value is in the behavioural and physiological experiment it enables. HRV can act as a prompt to ask: what variable changed? Was it sleep duration? Was it training too hard or being too sedentary? Was it the red-eye flight, the three shots of tequila at the longevity conference, psychosocial load, or simply the tail end of a virus? The number becomes a starting point for causal reasoning. 

So with a compass for mapping resilience and regulation, here are four modalities that have helped me move the resilience needle forward

1. Breathwork: a direct input into autonomic state

Breath is one of the few physiological functions that is both autonomic and voluntarily modulated. That makes it a direct route into an arousal state, with downstream effects on attention, affect, and perceived stress.

In my conversation with world record breath-holder and freediving world champion Stig Severinsen, he captured the principle so well: “The way you breathe is the way you feel. And the way you feel is the way you live.”

A slow nasal inhale followed by a longer, controlled exhale is one of the simplest ways to shift arousal state, particularly when repeated consistently rather than deployed as a one-off intervention.

For something practical, try Stig’s 5–10 breath reset:
Breathe in through your nose for 5 seconds.
Pause gently for 1 second.
Breathe out slowly for 10 seconds, like you are hissing.
Pause again for 1 second.
Repeat for 2–5 minutes.

It has been a revelation for me and something I practice religiously especially before going on stage. 

2. Sound and neuro acoustic therapy: sensory scaffolding for regulation

Sound is often treated as passive input, yet it is one of the most immediate modulators of attention and emotional state. In certain contexts, it can function as sensory scaffolding, reducing cognitive load and helping the system exit persistent hypervigilance.  I regularly attend sound baths and will almost instantly find my nervous system shifting gears within the first few minutes. 

In my conversation with longevity physician and high-performance expert Dr. Jack Kreindler, he described an emerging category of interventions he calls: “Neuro acoustic therapy - a new class of modalities which usually involve either recordings of nature or music or both combined. It completely immerses you through a spatial audio system being played at such high fidelity that you just no longer recognize yourself as being separate from the sound.”

The scientific question is not whether sound “heals” in a vague sense, but what it modulates: arousal, attention, threat appraisal, and the speed at which the system returns to baseline.

3. Movement: completing stress physiology rather than suppressing it.

Movement is one of the most reliable ways to metabolise sympathetic activation because it gives the stress response a biological “endpoint.” Acute exertion recruits sympathetic drive on purpose, but in a context the organism interprets as controlled, and that repeated exposure can improve autonomic flexibility rather than entrench hyperarousal. It also improves sleep pressure, stabilises mood through multiple neurochemical pathways, and increases interoceptive awareness, the ability to accurately sense internal state and distinguish fatigue, anxiety, and true threat.

On a personal N=1 level, Zone 4/5 work has been especially transformative because it forces the nervous system to tolerate intensity, maintain coherence under load, and then downshift effectively afterwards. I also regularly use the one-day reset from Human Garage, which, in my experience, helps unwind accumulated tension and restore a sense of structural ease that helps me “feel” myself. Garry Lineham’s work on fascial alignment has shaped how I think about resilience in the body: if the body is chronically braced or compensating, baseline load rises, and regulation becomes incredibly hard. 

4. Plant medicine: catalysing release 

For some, resilience work hits a ceiling because the system is holding stored threat, grief, or hypervigilance that does not fully resolve through sleep, training, or breath alone. In those cases, carefully held plant-medicine work can act less like a “hack” and more like a catalyst: a short window where entrenched defensive patterns loosen enough for meaningful psychological and physiological reorganisation, provided the setting is safe, screening is serious, and integration is prioritised.

Ruben Orellana, a Peruvian curandero who has worked with the plant medicines of the Andes for over 50 years, described the mechanism to me through a different lens: “The meaning of this medicine, the meaning of this ceremony, the meaning of this tradition is to allow your body to release.” He argues that modern life trains us “to hold on,” when the body is constantly trying to do the opposite.

While certain plant medicines have had a completely transformative impact on my own journey, I must emphasise the legal and clinical realities. Many of these substances remain illegal depending on jurisdiction, and any exploration requires serious preparation, careful screening, and appropriate medical supervision.

A practical frame: resilience as experimentation, not ideology

Resilience becomes useful when it can be observed. HRV, sleep quality, resting heart rate, and subjective state can be treated as outputs. Breath, movement, sound exposure, and recovery become inputs. The aim is not optimisation for its own sake, but restoring flexibility: the capacity to tolerate stress without getting trapped inside it. 

Re-framing has also changed how I relate to my own story. The move from victim to gratitude and abundance has been pivotal in my journey, and in living a life that is truest to me. Instead of “why has this happened to me”, I now say “this happened for me.” I believe that nuanced shift has changed my life. And instead of treating resilience as a virtue, I see it as a system property now. It was never whether I was strong enough, rather whether my recovery capacity was keeping pace with my load.

And so as you ask the question “am I resilient?”, remember it is not something constant nor a  badge. It is a biological capacity that can be trained through mental work, breath, movement, sound, sleep, and the environments we build around ourselves.