A car came out of the side road. You braked. Nothing touched anything.

You drove on. Your hands were still unsteady at the next set of lights, which is normal.

What is not what it used to be is that you were still humming two hours later, at a desk, doing something else entirely.

Same with the argument at seven o'clock that was over by ten past. At one in the morning you were still running the sentences.

You have decided you have become thin-skinned. You have not. What has changed is not how hard you react. It is how long it takes you to come back down.

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Your autonomic nervous system has two halves. The sympathetic side accelerates you for a threat. The parasympathetic side, carried largely by the vagus nerve, is the brake that returns you to baseline afterwards.

The accelerator is the dramatic one. The brake is the one that determines what your evening is like.

Heart rate variability is how that brake gets measured. Not your heart rate, but the tiny variation between one beat and the next, which reflects how much vagal control is operating.

Strong brake, high variability, quick return. Weak brake, flat variability, a long slow descent.

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Martinelli, Sorpreso and colleagues measured heart rate variability in 109 women, 71 in the menopausal transition and 38 postmenopausal, and published in PLOS ONE in 2020.

Women with moderate to intense menopausal symptoms had significantly lower heart rate variability than women with mild symptoms, across every vagal index they measured.

Their conclusion was that the women with more intense symptoms showed reduced vagal control.

Not more stress in their lives. Less braking capacity in their bodies.

This is the reframe worth keeping.

You are not overreacting to the car, the email, the tone of voice. Your initial reaction is probably the same size it always was.

What has changed is the tail. And a long tail from the seven o'clock argument is still running at eleven, which is a large part of why falling asleep got harder in exactly the same years as everything else.

Do this, because it is the intervention that works directly on the measurement.

Slow breathing at about six breaths a minute. In for four, out for six, no strain, shoulders down. Five minutes, twice a day.

Not only when something has happened. The point is to train the system when it is calm, so that it brakes better when it is not.

When you have been jolted, your body has mobilized for effort it did not get to spend. So spend it.

Stairs, two flights, briskly. A ten minute walk, fast enough to be slightly breathless. Anything hard enough to complete the arc rather than leaving it idling.

Then stop feeding it. No difficult conversations after nine, no email read in bed, nothing requiring a decision in the last hour of the day.

Move the hard conversation to the morning, when your brake is at its strongest. This is not avoidance, it is scheduling a task for when the equipment works.

And if you wear something that reports heart rate variability, read it as a weekly trend. A single low morning is a number, not a verdict.

You did not become thin-skinned. Your brake got weaker, and nobody told you it was trainable.