The Science of Stress Recovery and Emotional Resilience – Interview with Marie Keutler

Marie Keutler spent years training as a psychotherapist before she noticed the gap that would eventually become Baseline. Clients who understood their stress perfectly and still couldn't find their way back to calm. Yoga training, breathwork, somatic practice, and her own published research on self-compassion all fed into the same realisation, that the body needed to be part of the work, not just the mind.

In this interview, Marie talks about why nervous system regulation has become one of the most important conversations in mental health right now, the practical tools that can shift an overwhelmed or shut-down body in minutes, and the lesson building Baseline taught her about resilience, that it was never about pushing through in the first place.

Marie Keutler, Psychotherapist & Somatic Therapist, Yoga & Breathwork Teacher, Founder & CEO of Baseline

What first drew you to combine psychotherapy with somatic practices, breathwork, and nervous system work?

It started with a kind of professional restlessness. Early in my training, I wanted to understand people from the inside out, what drove them, what held them back, why we do the things we do even when we know better. But the more I learned, the more disconnected I felt in my own life. I knew so much, and somehow that made it harder, not easier, to actually feel calm, present, and content.

The shift came from places that had nothing to do with my training on paper. A yoga teacher training. A breathwork training. Moments away from the noise where I dropped into a state I'd only ever read about, quiet, alive, present without performing it. Living fully. I remember thinking, this is what baseline actually feels like. Is this what life is supposed to feel like? It made me quite sad, realising how far away from it I'd been living.

"Is this what life is supposed to feel like?"

That question wouldn't leave me alone. What's the point if we only get to feel like this a few moments a year, especially once I realised I hadn't actually felt that state in years? So I went deeper into the body-based work, somatics, movement, breath, nervous system science, and found a way back that didn't depend on a retreat or a holiday. Psychotherapy gave me the why. The somatic work gave me the how.

What are you noticing in clients that convinced you the body needs to be part of the healing process?

The moment I trust most in a session isn't when a client finally puts something into words. It's the moment after, when something in their body changes. Shoulders drop. Breath shifts. Their eyes go softer. Someone who's been articulate about their pain for months, sometimes years, suddenly feels it move through them instead of just describing it.

I had a client tell me it felt like she'd gained a superpower. She was getting more done, sleeping better, her relationships had shifted, and nothing about her circumstances had actually changed. What changed was her capacity to regulate, not just understand what was happening to her.

I've seen this pattern over and over. People can talk about their stress with total insight and still be stuck inside it. The body doesn't update on insight alone, it updates on repetition, on small consistent signals of safety. That's the part talk therapy alone often can't reach, and it doesn't take months. Sometimes it takes minutes, with the right tool, repeated enough for the system to relearn.

Why do you think nervous system regulation has become such an important conversation in mental health today?

I think we've collectively hit a wall with purely cognitive approaches. For years, the message was understand yourself and you'll feel better, journal it, reframe it, talk it through. That's valuable, but a lot of people did all of that and still felt wired, flat, or one notification away from being overwhelmed.

At the same time, the science caught up. HRV tracking and wearables have put words like stress score and recovery into everyday language, and that's made people aware their body is holding information their mind doesn't have access to. There's also the simple reality of constant low-grade activation, notifications, and an always-on culture that never properly resolves. Our nervous systems are responding to a pace of life they weren't built for.

So the conversation has shifted from how do I think differently about my stress to how do I actually help my body come down from it. That's a more honest, more useful question, and it's why nervous system regulation has stopped being a niche therapy term and become something people are genuinely curious about.

Where do you see traditional wellbeing approaches falling short when it comes to stress and burnout?

Most traditional wellbeing tools are still fundamentally top-down. Journaling, mindset work, even a lot of meditation apps, ask you to think your way into a calmer state. That works for some people, some of the time. But if you're properly activated, if your nervous system is already in a stress response, your thinking brain isn't always the part that's available to you.

I also think a lot of wellness culture has quietly become another performance. Streaks, badges, daily targets, guilt if you miss a day. That's the opposite of what a dysregulated nervous system needs. It needs permission, not pressure.

Then there's the gap between knowing and doing. Most of my clients already know they're stressed, they know meditation exists, they know they should sleep more and slow down. Knowing has never been the missing piece. What's missing is something simple, fast, and body-first enough to actually use in the moment it's needed, not at the end of a long day when the moment has already passed.

What inspired you to create Baseline, and what gap were you hoping to fill outside the therapy room?

I kept seeing the same gap in my therapy room. Clients could understand their stress beautifully, talk about it, name their patterns, and intellectualise it from every angle. But in the actual moment, mid meeting, mid meltdown, mid 2 am spiral, they couldn't access calm. Insight didn't translate into a felt shift fast enough to matter.

I built Baseline because therapy happens once a week for fifty minutes, and dysregulation happens constantly, in the small ordinary moments of an ordinary day. I wanted something that could sit in that gap, body-first, one to three minutes, that meets you exactly where you are, wired, flat, overwhelmed, and gives your nervous system a real, physiological reason to come back to baseline.

There's also something more personal behind it. I could only ever see so many clients, and my waitlist kept growing. One of my biggest missions now is making this kind of regulation accessible to far more people than I could ever reach one-on-one. Regulation is contagious too, in the best way. A manager who finds their way back to baseline changes their whole team, with knock-on effects at home, with family, with friends. Moments at baseline shouldn't only be for people who can afford therapy.

Often the people who need it most have the least time to take care of themselves, which is exactly what the three minutes is for. The aim was never to replace therapy. It was to give people access to regulation outside of it too, in the moments therapy can't reach, because life doesn't pause for an appointment.

When someone feels overwhelmed or shut down, what is one simple body-based practice that can help them reconnect with themselves?

It depends, honestly, we're all different, and it depends on which state you're actually in. If you're overwhelmed and wired, a sigh breath or a slow exhale through pursed lips can help release some of that charge. If you're shut down and flat, you need the opposite, a bit of gentle activation. Letting your eyes move around the room, or a few seconds of shaking out your hands and arms, can bring you back into your body before you're anywhere near ready to relax.

The most important thing is meeting the body where it is, not forcing it into a calmer state before it's ready. When I'm genuinely stressed, the last thing I want to do is close my eyes and take a deep breath. I need to release first, close the stress cycle, before my body can settle.

What I love about all of these is there's nothing to believe in or understand first. You don't need to know the science for it to start working. That's the whole premise behind Baseline too, body-first tools that meet you in whatever state you're actually in, not the state you think you should be in.

After leading retreats around the world, what shifts do people often experience when they step away from the pace of everyday life?

What I notice most is how quickly people drop into a state they didn't realise they'd lost access to. Away from notifications, the next task, and performing being okay, something in people visibly softens, usually within the first day. Shoulders come down. Conversations slow down. People sleep properly, often for the first time in months.

But the real shift isn't the calm itself, it's what people learn about how they got so far from it without noticing. A lot of people arrive saying they're fine, just tired, and by day two realise they've been running on empty for a long time and calling it normal.

What I love watching most is how much more themselves people become, like the layers of conditioning and chronic stress had numbed them without them realising, and underneath it, their actual character comes back. People laugh more, they're more present, more connected to what they actually want and need, not because we've solved their life for them but because they've reconnected with themselves enough to actually listen.

People often expect retreats to be serious, and they're always a little surprised by how much lighter they leave. What I care about most is what happens after. A retreat that only works on a beach isn't actually useful, so we spend real time bringing even a small piece of that state back into an ordinary Tuesday, because that's where people actually live. The goal was never the escape, it's proof the calm was there inside them all along. Mostly, people just need that felt sense, their nervous system relearning that it's safe to trust it. It's such an honour to do this work.

Your work often emphasizes curiosity over judgment, how can that mindset change the way we relate to ourselves during difficult seasons?

Judgment keeps you stuck in the story of what's wrong with you. Curiosity gets you closer to what's actually happening, which is the only place change can start from.

This isn't just a nice idea to me, it's something I researched and lived. I conducted and published research that looked at self-compassion as a buffer between perfectionism and wellbeing, and the pattern was clear, the people who could meet their own struggling with curiosity rather than criticism recovered faster and more fully than the people who tried to think their way out of it through self-judgment.

In practice, say you've just snapped at someone, instead of asking what's wrong with me, you ask what was my body holding before that happened. It's a small shift, but it changes your nervous system's experience of the moment. Judgment puts you into a kind of internal threat state, curiosity signals enough safety to actually look at what's going on. Looking is the first step toward anything changing.

We don't need to love everything about how we react. Even moving from judgment to just tolerating it is enough to shift something. Our mind and body have good intentions, they're not the enemy, they just sometimes have outdated ways of responding. As simple as it sounds, we can't hate ourselves into change. Leaning in with compassion and curiosity creates space for a shift. Judgment does the opposite.

If there is one thing you would like people to understand about resilience, what would it be?

That resilience was never about pushing through, even though that's how most of us were taught to think about it. The version I believe in now is about how quickly and how often you can return to baseline after life knocks you off it, not about how much you can withstand before you need to. It's a balancing act, a kind of training, finding a baseline, losing it, finding it again. Life is messy and not perfect, this was never about forcing one state, it's about moving with it and having a way back.

I see this in my own life. I now work more than I ever have, and I'm building something genuinely demanding, but it comes from a completely different place than it used to. Less forcing, more clarity. Better fuel, not just more effort. The difference isn't that less is happening, it's that my nervous system has learned how to recover in the gaps instead of staying activated through all of it.

If I could change one thing about how people think about resilience, it would be this, it's not a fixed trait some people have and others don't. It's a skill your body can practice and get better at, in minutes, not months, with the right, repeatable signal often enough. It's about having the capacity to live fully, and the tools to come back to that capacity when life takes over.

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