Your Nervous System’s Best Investment — Part 3 of 4
By Eva Selhub, MD
Think back to a moment when you felt at your best — a time when everything came together with an ease that felt almost effortless: your thinking was clear and fast, and you felt genuinely connected to the people around you and to something larger than the task at hand. Athletes call it being in the zone. Musicians call it being in the pocket. Leaders often describe it as the moment when the room shifts and everything clicks. Whatever you call it, you know the feeling. What did you feel?
When most people examine that memory closely, they note the state had a particular quality beyond performance itself. They report a sense of presence and a feeling of connection — to the work, to other people, or to something that transcended the immediate moment. Many describe a sense of awe — that feeling of being in the presence of something vast and beautiful, whether a landscape, an idea, a piece of music, or a human being fully alive in their gifts. Some describe it as love. Not the sentimental version of that word, but a biological state — the felt sense of being held by something larger than the anxious, goal-seeking self.
This is what most people dismiss as immeasurable. Nice if you can get it, but not something a serious person builds a strategy around.
———
What Every Wisdom Tradition Already Knew
Every serious contemplative tradition in human history has pointed toward this state — and toward love as its ground.
The Daoist concept of wu wei describes effortless action in alignment with the natural order — the experience of doing without straining, of the self stepping out of its own way and allowing something more fluid to move through it. The Buddhist understanding of non-attachment describes the release of the grasping, anxious self — and what becomes possible when it quiets. The Sufi tradition speaks of fana, the dissolution of the ego into a larger presence. The Christian mystics described grace as a state in which the self stops efforting and something else takes over. In the Vedic tradition, the experience of being connected to something beyond the individual self — to consciousness itself — is understood as the natural ground of health, creativity and peace.
These are consistent descriptions, across wildly different cultures and centuries, of a specific physiological state the human nervous system is capable of inhabiting. One in which the chronic threat response quiets, the self-referential machinery of the brain settles, and a different quality of awareness and capacity becomes available. Modern neuroscience has spent the last two decades mapping exactly what these traditions have been pointing toward for millennia.
———
The Neuroscience of the State
The brain has a network called the default mode network — the architecture of self. It generates the ongoing narrative of who you are, what you need, what you fear, what others think of you. When you are caught in rumination, self-criticism, anxiety about the future or regret about the past, the default mode network is running the show. It is the neurological structure of the box — the walls of self-perception that define and limit what feels possible.
Awe quiets it.
Research by Dacher Keltner and colleagues at UC Berkeley found that awe — the emotion that arises when we encounter something vast that challenges our current understanding of the world — is associated with reduced activation in the default mode network (Monroy & Keltner, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2023). The self quiets. The boundaries dissolve. What the mystics called union and the athletes call the zone share the same neural signature — the self-referential machinery steps back, and something more expansive moves into that space.
The physiology is equally precise. Awe is associated with elevated vagal tone, reduced sympathetic arousal, increased oxytocin release and reduced inflammation (Monroy & Keltner, 2023). That is the same physiological profile as the Love Response® — the parasympathetic state in which the HPA stress cascade quiets, the immune system regulates, the prefrontal cortex operates with full clarity, and the body returns to the balance it has been reaching for all along. Flow, as the research now confirms, is what becomes available when the nervous system inhabits this state — the salience network moving fluidly between imagination and execution, self-talk gone quiet, action arising without the friction of fear (Physiological Assessment of Flow, Scientific Reports, 2025).
This is the biological mechanism that every high performer has touched in their best moments, that every wisdom tradition has understood intuitively, and that clinical medicine is now able to describe with neuroimaging, biomarkers and autonomic measures.
———
The Love Response® Is the Biology
The Love Response® is a physiological state — one the nervous system already knows how to inhabit, because it is the state the nervous system has been trying to return to all along.
When love is present — in any of its forms, social, self-directed, or spiritual — the body’s regulatory chemistry shifts in ways that are measurable and reproducible. Oxytocin quiets the amygdala and the HPA axis. Endorphins provide the stabilizing signal of relief that tells the system the challenge has been resolved and balance has returned. The dopaminergic reward system encodes the experience as worth returning to, and the nervous system learns to move toward it. The default mode network, no longer running the threat narrative, releases its grip on the self, and something more spacious becomes available.
This is what the mystics called grace, the Daoists called wu wei, Csikszentmihalyi called flow, and athletes know as the zone. It is also something every person who has ever loved deeply, been moved by beauty, or stood in genuine awe has touched directly.
The three pillars of the Love Response® — social love, self love and spiritual love — are three gateways into the same biological state. Social love — the genuine experience of connection to and from another person — activates the oxytocin system and shifts the body into safety and presence. Self love — the inner relationship with oneself characterized by compassion rather than judgment, by trust rather than fear — regulates the threat response at its root, in the beliefs the nervous system holds about whether it is safe, enough, and worthy of being supported. Spiritual love — connection to something larger than the individual self, whether through nature, through practice, through community or through direct experience of awe — quiets the default mode network and opens the state that performance, creativity and healing all depend on.
———
So What Does This Mean in Practical Terms?
The peak state you remember — the moment of effortless performance, of clarity, of connection — was a biological state your nervous system moved into when the conditions were right. And the conditions can be cultivated.
Awe is more available than most people recognize. Research shows that brief experiences of awe — a few minutes in nature, a piece of music that opens something in the chest, a genuine moment of connection with another person, a problem so elegant it produces wonder rather than anxiety — produce measurable shifts in vagal tone, inflammation and mood that persist well beyond the experience itself (Monroy & Keltner, 2023). Awe is present in the ordinary fabric of a life that is paying attention.
The practice of cultivating the Love Response® begins with the same foundation established in piece two: awareness. Noticing when the default mode network is running its threat narrative. Noticing when the body has contracted into the defended, striving, self-focused state that keeps the box walls solid. And then — deliberately, practically — introducing the conditions that shift the biology. Connection. Beauty. Stillness. Compassion toward oneself. Contact with something larger.
The final piece in this series brings all of this together — the three pillars of social love, self love and spiritual love as a concrete, buildable infrastructure, and what working with this biology deliberately looks like in a life organized around performance, leadership and the desire to sustain and thrive.
