The autonomic nervous system is often simplified into two parts: the sympathetic nervous system—commonly associated with fight or flight—and the parasympathetic nervous system—often referred to as rest and digest or rest and recover.
Most people understand these as automatic responses. Something happens, and your body reacts.
But what’s often overlooked is this:
We can influence which system becomes dominant—simply by how we frame the challenge in front of us. Think, but don’t overthink, and you can make difficult more accessible!
The Framing Problem
When we perceive a threat as something we can confront—something within our capacity—we activate the sympathetic nervous system. We become alert, engaged, ready to act. The reason we often end up setting a record mid-workout, or get our first pull-up under fatigue is not because it’s physiologically optimal, it’s because we’ve acted instinctively, using our fight response, before the rational brain has become involved. In short, we fight!
But when a challenge feels too big—too overwhelming, too far beyond us—we don’t fight harder, we shut down, we shift into a parasympathetic response, we freeze, hesitate and avoid! That time you almost cleaned a weight, but then on the next attempt you just deadlifted it? You’ve lost your sympathetic arousal—that necessary combination of hormones, biomarkers and narrowed mental clarity that keeps us in a state of flow. The external noise has crept in, created doubt, and we have shut down.
While the autonomic nervous system is automated, at least to begin with, it can be influenced and, with a little practice, overridden. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the phrase “Flow State”, a mental condition during which athletes and performers become so embroiled in their current activity—making a daring ski run, performing acrobatics in the circus, or performing a piano solo—that they can’t go wrong. They’ve shut out all external influences, have tunnel vision only for the action they’re performing, and it feels effortless. A more accessible version of this phenomenon is sometimes called “Runner’s High”, where, regardless of pace or ability, you get into the zone and the running feels just a little more effortless than usual. This usually happens a little while into a run, after you’ve accumulated some fatigue and, at least in theory, should be struggling more. But instead, we optimise our sympathetic tone and embrace the activity. We remove excess conscious thought, focus on one or two key points—maybe landing light, maybe keeping the upper body relaxed—and move with our best efficiency.
This is the counterintuitive part: make something feel too difficult, and instead of rising to meet it, you remove your ability to even try.
The Hierarchy of Evidence
A few years ago, I began thinking about this in terms of what I call a Hierarchy of Evidence—a way of understanding how believable a challenge is to us.
At the bottom sits the weakest form of evidence: it’s theoretically possible—conceived, modelled, maybe even engineered, but still distant. A step up from that, it’s been done, but rarely; proof exists, but only at the absolute edge of human capability. Then we move to things that are done with some regularity, but only by elites—visible, repeatable, but still outside of our immediate world.
From here, things start to come closer. Someone you know has done it; maybe not you, maybe not someone identical to you, but it exists within your network and suddenly it feels less abstract. Closer again, someone like you has done it—similar background, similar starting point—and this is where inspiration really takes hold because the gap begins to feel bridgeable.
Then we move into your own experience. You’ve built toward it yourself, you’ve laid some groundwork, you’ve created a logical next step. Beyond that, you’ve done it before—once or twice—so you know it exists within your capability, even if it’s not yet consistent. Then it becomes something you can do with some regularity, still challenging but no longer foreign. And finally, it becomes something you do without hesitation—part of your identity, something you no longer question.
Why This Matters
Every step up this hierarchy strengthens belief, and belief isn’t soft or abstract—it directly affects your physiology. It determines whether you engage or shut down, whether you lean in or hesitate, whether you fight or freeze.
Making Difficult More Accessible
The goal, then, isn’t just to “get better,” it’s to move challenges down the hierarchy—to take something that feels distant and bring it closer, to take something that feels impossible and make it believable. And the turning point—the moment things really begin to shift—is often when someone close to you does the thing, because it’s no longer happening “out there,” it’s happening in your world, and once it’s in your world, it’s within your reach.
The Role of Training
This is where good programming becomes an art. You can’t just throw yourself at the hardest possible version of a problem every day—that leads straight back to overwhelm, and back to freezing. Instead, you build exposure, you accumulate evidence, you create repeated, manageable confrontations with the challenge. Each attempt adds to the case you’re building for yourself: I can do this—maybe not perfectly, maybe not yet, but I can. And over time, that “maybe” becomes certainty.
Final Thought
Most people don’t fail because something is too hard—we naturally tend to attempt things that are within reach. They fail because they’ve framed it in a way that makes engagement impossible.
So the question isn’t, “How do I make this easier?” It’s, “How do I make this feel possible?” Because once it feels possible, everything changes. You don’t avoid, you don’t freeze—you make difficult more accessible!
