By Dawn Browning | Nervous System Health | Conscious Breathing | Mind-Body Wellness
You want to stay sharp.
You want the energy to do your best, deep work, move between the different demands of your day without carrying one straight into the next, and still have something left for yourself and the people you love.
And sometimes that becomes harder to do. You may be struggling to identify how to manage your energy.
Your energy fluctuates. Certain interactions or situations leave you unexpectedly zapped. Something that usually works suddenly doesn’t. Or you feel like you’re doing all the right things, but not getting the result you expect.
The women I work with aren’t defeated by this. They’re curious.
What is happening here?
That curiosity is at the heart of how I work.
Core values at HolSol Wellness
Curiosity, Responsibility, and Respect
Three values underpin my work: curiosity, responsibility and respect.
Curiosity means paying attention before automatically looking for another thing to do.
What are you noticing? When does your energy change?
What happens between meetings, after certain interactions, before a difficult conversation or during a particularly demanding period?
How are you sleeping?
What is happening with your breathing? What are you noticing about your mental and emotional state?
The (often under-appreciated) key is building awareness of what affects you, how and when.
It's not about obsessively tracking every variable, biometric or 15 minutes of your schedule.
Responsibility is what you do with that awareness.
We can't remove every stressful circumstance from our lives—and I don't think that's the goal.
We can get better at recognising what is happening and creating some space between the stimulus and our response.
For me, that is the foundation of self-regulation: having awareness, self-adjusting as and when needed, and having more choice over how we respond to our circumstances.
Noticing and choosing instead of simply reacting.
Not striving to be perfectly regulated, nor being perpetually calm.
Self-regulation is having awareness, self-adjusting as and when needed, and having more say in how we respond to our circumstances. Self-regulation is developing and sustaining agility.
And then there is respect.
Respect for your intelligence. Respect for your circumstances.
Respect for the fact that what works for someone else may not work for you — and what works for you today may not be what you need in a different situation.
There is a high level of bio-individuality in this work.
The aim is to help you understand yourself well enough to ask:
What is the most appropriate response for me in this moment, right now?
Because, you're not looking for another list of things you're supposed to do, am I right?
The four domains of the HolSol Energy Web™
I've lived well with type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease, for more than 40 years.
Regulation, therefore, isn't an abstract wellness concept to me. It has been part of my everyday reality for most of my life.
That experience, my work as a research scientist and Ph.D., and my work with dozens of women have taught me to pay attention to patterns and to the way different systems affect one another.
When it comes to energy, I see four domains emerging again and again:
Breathing. Metabolism. Sleep. Nervous-system state.
These four domains are interwoven. Together, they form what I call your Energy Web, the framework at the heart of HolSol Wellness.
I call it a web deliberately.
The domains are intimately connected—no—they are interwoven. A stretch in one domain distorts or reshapes the others.
A poor night's sleep doesn't exist in isolation. Neither does what or when you eat. Your breathing responds to what's happening around you—even your thoughts. Your nervous-system state affects how you move through your day, rest, respond and use your energy.
Understanding those relationships helps us move away from:
What else should I be doing?
and towards:
What am I noticing — and what do I need now?
Science, Spirit and Sol
You'll see three threads running through everything I teach.
Science. I'm a research scientist and Ph.D., and I believe we can use science to better understand and manage our energy, moods, minds and more. I value evidence, and I know the importance of being able to trust the source of the information you're using.
Spirit. Our experiences shape our reality. The techniques I teach, principles I share and practices I guide you through aren't things I simply learned so I could teach them to somebody else. They are things I use in my own life.
Sol. Sol means sun, but it also sounds like “soul”. In the same way the word bridges language, my work bridges modern science with ancient yogic wisdom. I know this is a AI-gen phrase you see all over the place these days. In this case, my fingers are typing the words. It is true and makes it practical, accessible and, importantly, fun.
Breathing is one of the four domains for a reason. It's the fastest one to reach for, and it settles the others.
Start with one practice.
You can experiment with my Steady State Reset for the moments you notice your energy needs to settle. Free, and yours to keep…
FAQs: The Energy Web and How I Work
Q: What exactly is “The Energy Web?”
A: The Energy Web is the HolSol Wellness framework for understanding your energy. It maps four domains that shape how you feel and function: breathing, metabolism, sleep, and nervous-system state. I call it a web rather than a list because these domains affect one another. A short night's sleep changes your breathing. A demanding afternoon changes your appetite. Working with the web means noticing those connections instead of optimizing one thing in isolation.
Q: Is this just biohacking or tracking my metrics?
A: No. You won't find me asking you to log every biometric or account for each fifteen minutes of your day. The aim is awareness of what affects you, how, and when, so you can make a better choice in the moment.
Q: Do I need to be into yoga or spirituality for this to work?
A: No. I'm a research scientist, and I value evidence. That said, yoga is widely misunderstood as religion in the West. I am a devoted yoga practitioner, and I teach practices and tools that have worked for me. The tools I teach are not beliefs you have to adopt.
Q: You mention metabolism. Does that mean you give nutrition or diet advice?
A: No. I'm not a registered dietitian, nor am I am medical doctor. It is outside my scope of practice to prescribe meals or macros. When metabolism comes up, we're looking at how your energy responds to things like timing and steadiness. I'll point you to the right professional when nutrition is the question.
Q: What does “self-regulation” actually mean here?
A: Having enough awareness to notice what's happening, adjusting when you need to, and having more choice over how you respond. Not being calm all the time. Noticing and choosing instead of simply reacting.
Q: How is working with a scientist different from other wellness approaches?
A: I care where information comes from and whether it holds up. I'll tell you what the evidence supports, what's promising, and what's simply my own experience, and I'll keep those honest and separate.
The Energy Web™ is a framework developed by Dawn Browning, Ph.D., founder of HolSol Wellness.
