The phone call came at 3am, eleven days after her son was born. "My body never turned back off." 📱
Emma wasn't crying because the baby was crying, he'd actually gone back to sleep. She was crying because her heart wouldn't stop pounding, her hands wouldn't stop shaking, and she couldn't explain to anyone, not even her husband asleep beside her, why she felt like this even in the quiet moments. It took six weeks and a midwife who finally asked the right question to name what was actually happening: a nervous system stuck in hypervigilance, wired to protect a newborn, that had never been taught how to switch back off.
If you flinch at the baby monitor before you've even registered the sound… if you can't fall asleep even in the rare windows when the baby does… if your body feels braced and alert no matter how exhausted you are… you are not broken, and you are not alone.
This isn't a book about becoming a calmer, more zen version of a mother who never struggles. Early motherhood is genuinely hard. Nothing here erases that. What it does is give your actual nervous system, the physical machinery underneath the exhaustion, a way to carry this season without staying stuck in constant alarm on top of everything else.
Inside you'll learn:
🍼 Why hypervigilance after birth is normal, and where the line into something more is
🍼 The Ninety Second Reset, built for a body that's never truly alone
🍼 One-handed vagus nerve exercises you can do mid-feed
🍼 What to say when visitors overstay or you feel touched out
🍼 A 14-day plan built around a newborn's actual schedule, not a fantasy one
Emma is doing better now. Her body finally learned it was allowed to rest.
Read these pages, and give yourself the manual nobody hands new mothers.
Claire Wardel writes practical, compassionate books about nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and finding calm in an overstimulating world.
Her interest in the nervous system began close to home, after watching someone she loved struggle for years with chronic stress while insisting he was “fine.” Determined to understand what was happening beneath the surface, Claire began exploring the science of stress, the nervous system, breathwork, vagus nerve practices, and body-based approaches to feeling calmer and more grounded.
Claire is not a clinician, and she doesn't write like one. Her aim is to take ideas that can feel complicated or clinical and turn them into simple, approachable practices that ordinary people can actually use in everyday life.
Her books are written for anyone who wants to understand their body better, feel more at ease within it, and discover practical ways to support a calmer, steadier nervous system.