Emma Toms - The Confident Wellness Coach

What Does Your Nervous System Look Like?

Not on a diagram. In your actual life.

Maybe it looks like waking up already thinking about everything you need to do.

A jaw you don't realise you're clenching.
Walking quickly when you're not actually late.
Checking your phone without knowing why.
Saying “I'm fine” when you're exhausted.
Feeling guilty when you sit down.
Overthinking a conversation that happened three days ago.
Being incredibly capable until suddenly, you're not.
Getting irritated by something tiny.
Needing everyone else to be okay before you can relax.
Or finally having time to rest and discovering you have absolutely no idea how.

I didn't recognise many of these things as signs that my body was under stress.They were just me. My habits. The way I lived.

This awareness is important. Your nervous system isn't something abstract happening somewhere inside you.

You live it.
In your pace.
Your breath.
Your thoughts.
Your relationships.
Your reactions.
Your ability to rest, connect, concentrate, play and feel present in your own life.

So don't ask How do I regulate my nervous system?
But ask What does my nervous system actually look like today?

Notice.

Just begin to learn the language of your own living body.

Because awareness comes before change and sometimes recognising what has been happening is where everything begins.

The Living Body begins this October.
Join me. Booking link in bio.

September always feels like a threshold to me.
Not quite a new beginning.
Not quite the end of something either.

A moment where you become a little more aware of what you're carrying.

We talk about change as though we need to become someone completely different.

A new routine, mindset, a better version of ourselves.

But I'm less interested in reinvention.
And more interested in choice.

What am I taking with me?
What has served me beautifully?
What am I ready to put down?

Not everything we carry is bad.

My determination has carried me through some enormous things.

My independence has helped me rebuild.

My ability to work hard has created a life and a business I care deeply about.

I don't need to get rid of those parts of myself, but I also don't need them running everything.

So much of this work happens in that tiny space between what we feel and what we automatically do next.

The urge to say yes.
The need to fix.
The familiar thought.

But instead of following it you notice.
Inside it is choice.

This is why awareness comes before regulation in The Living Body.

Before we start adding tools, we learn to recognise our own body.

Stress. Sensation. Patterns. Emotional imprints. The identities we've built around coping.

Not so we can throw everything away and start again.
But so we can decide what still belongs.

Maybe this Autumn is about carrying forward what you love and putting down what you've carried for far too long.

The Living Body begins this October.
Six weeks of learning to understand, listen to and work with the body you're living in.

Join me. Link in bio

So much of what we call personality is what we have practiced for a very long time.

The way we react when someone is disappointed in us.

The apology that leaves our mouth before we've even decided whether we've done anything wrong.

The yes when we mean no.

The need to explain ourselves.

The shrinking.

The voice inside that says don't be difficult, don't get it wrong, don't let anyone down.

Eventually these responses become so familiar that we stop experiencing them as responses at all.

We experience them as us.

I'm an anxious person.
I'm a people pleaser.
I'm too sensitive.
I'm not confident.
I'm just someone who has to work hard.

But this is where awareness becomes incredibly powerful.

Because there is a moment, sometimes only small, between what happens and what we do next.

And when we've spent years living quickly, reacting quickly, overriding quickly, we can miss it completely.

The body has already braced.
The thought has already arrived.
The old story is already running.
And off we go down the familiar road.
Again.

The work isn't to judge that response. It makes sense that the nervous system reaches for what it knows.

The work is learning to notice it happening.

The jaw.
The belly.
The breath.
The thought.
The urge to fix, defend, disappear, perform or please.

And with enough awareness, we begin to find that tiny gap.

A little more space between stimulus and response.

A moment in which we can ask
Is this who I am now?
Or is this something I learned to do?

Identity can feel fixed. But something learned leaves room for something new to be learned. Slowly.

In the ordinary moments of our lives.

Notice.
Pause.
Choose again.
And again.

Until the new response becomes familiar too.
This is one of the deeper layers of The Living Body.

Not just learning how to regulate a nervous system, but understanding the person we learned to become inside it.

And discovering there may be more choice there than we realised.

Join me in October for The Living Body.
One space already taken

I’m Emma
Emma Toms - The Confident Wellness Coach

I’m an Integrated Wellness Coach, IEMT Practitioner and Safe and Sound Protocol Provider based in Glasgow, and I work with people who are struggling with stress, anxiety, burnout, emotional overwhelm and that feeling of knowing something needs to change, but not quite knowing where to begin.

A lot of the people who come to me have already tried a lot.

They understand themselves. They’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, tried therapy, meditation, yoga, mindset work, supplements, exercise, better routines…

And yet their body is still telling a different story.

They’re exhausted but can’t properly rest.
They overthink everything.
They’re more reactive than they used to be.
They push through until they can’t.
Their sleep, digestion, hormones or health have changed.
They know what they should be doing, but somehow can’t seem to make it stick.

This is where my work is a little different.

I work with the mind and the body, because we don’t experience life from the neck up.

Stress is physiological as well as psychological, and when we’ve spent years adapting, coping, caring for everyone else, working, raising families, navigating illness, relationships, loss, hormonal changes and simply getting on with life, those adaptations can become so familiar that we start thinking they’re our personality.

I’m just an anxious person.

I’ve always been like this.

I’m terrible at resting.

I just have to get on with things.

Sometimes what we call personality is a pattern the body learned a very long time ago.

Alongside my 1:1 work in Glasgow and online, this October I’m bringing much of what I’ve learned through my professional training, my work with clients and my own lived experience into a new six-week online course:

The Living Body.

It’s about understanding the body you are actually living in.

We’ll explore stress and capacity, body awareness and interoception, the nervous system, safety and regulation, identity and old emotional imprints, rest and recovery, and finally how we bring all of that together so change becomes something we can actually live rather than another thing we have to try harder at.

There will be education, reflection and simple embodied practices, with a workbook and guided resources to help you continue the work between sessions.

It isn't a six-week promise to fix your life.

It is an invitation to understand yourself differently.

To become curious about what your body has been carrying, what it has learned, what it might no longer need and what becomes possible when we stop fighting ourselves and start listening.

The first cohort begins October 2026 and is £195, with lifetime access to the course resources. This first cohort will never be offered at this price again.

I also offer 1:1 IEMT, nervous system and integrated wellness sessions in Glasgow and online, including longer-term support for people who want to work more deeply.

If any of this sounds familiar, feel free to message me. I’m always happy to have a conversation about whether the course or 1:1 work might be right for you.

Emma Toms — The Confident Wellness Coach
Integrated Wellness Coach | IEMT Practitioner | SSP Provider
Glasgow & Online

www.emmatoms.com

https://www.emmatoms.com/service-page/the-living-body?referral=service_list_widget

Module Three of my COSCA counselling training. Done.

Ten weeks of psychodynamic therapy, CBT, the person-centred approach, attachment, human development, patterns, relationships and inevitably, ourselves.

I don't think you can study why human beings become who they become without turning the mirror towards yourself.

And there has been a lot of that. Maybe that's why I took the course on.

Reflection. Self-evaluation. Looking backwards. Looking underneath. Asking why.

In my 50s I know now that quick fixes never worked for me.

The things that changed me were slower.

Understanding my patterns. Learning where they began. Recognising beliefs I never consciously chose. Learning to listen to my body. Building self-trust. Learning to feel rather than fix.

Slowly understanding that self-awareness isn't about endlessly analysing ourselves.

It is about knowing ourselves well enough to have choice.
To recognise the old road before automatically walking down it again. To notice when the past is quietly reaching into the present. Eventually, to become somewhere safe for ourselves to land.

My final reflective presentation brought another piece of that. The words reflected back to me by this beautiful group of women:

“I value learning from you.”
“Beautiful voice.”
“Poetic and inspiring words.”

And the one that really landed… "BIG HEART.”

Maybe part of knowing ourselves is learning to receive the good too. Not brushing it away. Not shrinking from it. Not immediately explaining why it isn't really true. Just letting it land.

Healing isn't just about uncovering what we've buried. It's also about uncovering the beautiful parts of ourselves we haven't quite known how to believe.

So I finish these ten weeks grateful.

For the theory. For the mirrors. For the difficult bits. For the laughter. For these wonderful women. And for the privilege of continuing to learn about what it means to be human.

A little wiser. A little softer. A little more myself.

Big heart and all.

And absolutely bloody knackered!

Hollyanna’s story didn’t begin with fibromyalgia.

Long before her own health deteriorated, there were experiences that shaped the way she learned to exist in the world.

Hollyanna was born into a high-control religious group. Eventually, she made the decision to leave and was shunned by the community she had known.

There is something enormous in that sentence that is easy to skim past.

Leaving a whole environment isn’t simply changing your mind about something. It can mean losing belonging, certainty, relationships, identity and the structures around which your life has been built.

I Am Jen Wilson, The Healing Rebel

Working at the Roots, Not the Branches: Hollyanna on Nervous System Dysregulation Hollyanna on nervous system dysregulation, recovering from severe f...

This is a brilliant video, and one I think is incredibly important if we are ever going to change the way we understand stress, trauma, illness and human behaviour.

The video asks a powerful question: why isn’t trauma treated as a public health priority?

Because trauma does not simply live in a story about something that happened to us.

It can shape the nervous system. It can influence how safe we feel in our own bodies, how we respond to relationships, pressure and uncertainty, how quickly we move into fight, flight, freeze or shutdown, and the patterns we carry into everyday life.

This is something I talk about constantly.

We have become very good at treating individual symptoms, behaviours and diagnoses, but often much less curious about the body underneath them and what that body has had to adapt to over many years.

When we begin to understand the nervous system, the conversation can shift from “What is wrong with this person?” towards “What has this body learned it needs to do to survive?”

That doesn’t mean blaming every illness or difficulty on trauma, and it certainly doesn’t mean we abandon conventional healthcare.

It means widening the lens.

Understanding stress physiology.
Understanding adaptation.
Understanding the relationship between mind, body, environment and lived experience.

Most importantly, recognising that healing cannot always happen through thought alone.

If you are interested in nervous system health, trauma, chronic stress, mind-body medicine or simply understanding human beings a little more deeply, this is well worth your time.

A really important watch.

Why Isn't Trauma Treated as a Public Health Priority? A Nervous System Expert Explains In this video, I explore the question, 'Why is trauma not treated a...

My life is changing.
And so is my energy.

I'm 51 now, moving through menopause, and I can feel something shifting that is about so much more than hormones or a changing body.

I am changing.

I am listening differently.

To my body.
To my energy.
To what feels good.
To what doesn't anymore.

I have less capacity for bu****it.
Other people's, certainly.
But certainly my own

Less appetite for pushing through.
For abandoning myself.
For giving precious energy to things that don't deserve it.

There is less time ahead of me now than there has EVER been.

There is something deeply clarifying about that.
I want to respect that time.
I want to respect my body.

I want to keep learning.
To go deeper.
To walk slowly.
To laugh loudly.
To love well.
To play more.
To make beautiful things.

I want my life to be art.

Messy.
Layered.
Changing.
Alive.

I don't want to spend this part of my life trying to return to a younger version of Emma. Although she comes everywhere with me.

I want to meet myself. Here and now.
And keep meeting her as she changes.

That's the thing about a living body.

It never stays still.

It responds.
It adapts.
It ages.
It teaches us.
It becomes.

My living body is changing every single day.
And so is yours.

Maybe the invitation isn't to resist it.
Maybe it's to listen.

Join me in October.

Six weeks
Online
90 minutes

See you there

Tonight on a coaching call with Jo Bell | Coach for Visionary Women 💫 I explored a part of my identity I know very well.

The determined one.
She's gritty. She works hard. She pushes through. She gets things done.

For much of my life I've been proud of her, and rightly so. Determination has taken me through illness, enormous changes, building businesses, starting again and many moments when giving up would probably have been easier.

But as we explored her, I noticed I could physically feel her.
In my jaw. Clenched. Braced. Almost fighting her way through life. I realised how closely determination had become associated with pressure.

Keep going.
Work harder.
Don't stop.
You'll get through it.

There was nothing wrong with this part of me. She had done an extraordinary job. But she was still doing a job I no longer needed her to do.

So we checked in with her and we gave her more space. More gentleness.
Acceptance.
Compassion.

I could let that part of myself know I've got it from here.

I've spent years building steadiness and balance. I have more choices now. More awareness. More capacity to listen to myself.

She doesn't have to protect me by working quite so hard anymore.

She can rest.
She can go for a walk.
She can play.
She can even have some fun for a change.

This is exactly why I'm so interested in identity within The Living Body.

Sometimes the things we call our personality are also adaptations.

The strong one.
The independent one.
The helper.
The perfectionist.
The achiever.
The one who never gives up.

We don't need to get rid of these parts of ourselves. But we can become curious about why they're working so hard and whether they still need to.

Sometimes change begins simply by noticing and giving an old part of ourselves permission to put down a job it has been carrying for far too long.

Thank you Jo, as always, for the beautiful space and wisdom.

Join me for The Living Body online in October.
Links in bio