The Psychology of Home: Why Your Nervous System Needs Walls

The Psychological and Energetic Purpose of a Home

I want to talk about a stupidly simple idea this week. It's the reason we all feel more secure when we have a home.

The reason only hit me after I ditched my perfectly curated apartment to become a "digital nomad.” The contrast has taught me something I should have seen coming:

We don't just want homes. We need them.

Because without them, we're basically inviting chaos to take up residence in our nervous systems and start trashing the place.

Let’s explore.

Meeting an Influencer Who Actually Had Her Shit Together

Since beginning my nomad travels, I’ve met a lot of people who are floating through life just fine without a fixed address. One of them was an influencer from New York who, at first glance, I assumed was all gloss and no depth.

Surprise, surprise. It turned out I was being a judgmental prick.

She was genuinely authentic. Her online persona wasn't a performance; it was just her, naturally belonging in spaces designed for people who photograph well.

She was smart, too. And she had this one line that stuck with me—stated with an unfortunate backstory about parental abuse:

"I never felt a sense of home until I found it inside myself."

I admired her courage to be vulnerable. But still, this statement seemed like the kind of spiritual platitude that sounds profound but means nothing.

I was wrong, of course. But I wouldn't understand why for months.

Why "Home" Doesn’t Always Happen Where You Live

There are lots of reasons a physical home might not feel like a safe base:

• It’s unstable or ever-changing

• It’s filled with conflict or chaos

• It was never really yours to control

Apart from a brief stint of uncertainty during my parents’ divorce, I've been fortunate. My sense of home always safely surrounded me.

That looked like:

• Having control over my environment

• Controlling the vibes that came in and out of my space

• Knowing everything had its place and purpose

But what happens when you can't have any of that? When instability means you can't wrangle your environment into feeling like home?

My sense is that you've got two choices:

1. Try and inevitably fail to create "home" in another person; or

2. Bring your home's walls from your property line right up to the edges of your skin (the influencer’s solution).

We all know what the first option looks like. It's banking everything on your partner, then falling apart when they leave. It's attachment disguised as love, when really its just outsourced security.

But what the hell is option two? Here’s how I figured it out.

My Accidental Experiment in Portable Peace

I spent years unconsciously creating an external fortress. My apartment became this masterpiece of a controlled environment—jungle vibes in one room, zen den in another.

Being a Virgo made this feel effortless. Everything had its place, every surface had its purpose, and I'd stocked my space with everything I could possibly need.

Coming home felt like exhaling into something that could hold me when I couldn't hold myself. But eventually, I began doing the internal work—meditation, yoga, getting my lifestyle sorted.

My nervous system was beginning to stabilize. Peace was starting to follow me around instead of waiting for me at home.

Soon I had two sets of walls—property walls and “skin walls”—and they were getting redundant. This was good timing too, because I was in love and needed to throw away my life to chase after a boy.

How to Maintain Movable Walls

One lovestruck morning, I mentally simulated the highs and lows of leaving everything I’d curated behind and was shocked at how easily I could do it. I didn't need the external home anymore because I'd accidentally built an internal one.

My walls had become portable.

Things didn’t work out with the boy in the end, but he served his purpose: He revealed that my hunger for adventure had outgrown my need for security.

So, I packed up, and I left.

As I started bouncing from place to place, my routines doubled in importance. Yoga, strict food habits, and alone time weren’t optional. They were the scaffolding holding up my inner home.

Without them, I’d crumble.

Many nomads figure this out the hard way. Rhythm and routine aren't just nice-to-haves when you're constantly moving—they're survival mechanisms. Your nervous system needs something to hang on to.

Your habits become your new home. But I hadn’t figured any of this out yet—I just thought I was just being disciplined.

Here’s when things came full circle and I really made the connection.

The Morning My Environment Caught Me

The other night, I broke all my rules, pretty much all at once:

• I ate sushi (not ketogenic),

• drank an entire pot of jasmine tea before bed (caffeinated, apparently—whoops),

• smoked cigarettes (plural),

• binged Sex and The City (until the early hours), and

• didn’t exercise the next morning.

But when I woke up, predictably dysregulated, something unexpected happened.

Instead of white-knuckling my way back to stability in time for my 9AM conference call, my environment caught me.

After hotel hopping for several weeks, I'd decided in the days prior to properly rent an apartment for my remaining time on the Vietnam coast.

Over those days, I'd been unknowingly creating a sense of home in this newly rented space—stocking it with fresh food, arranging my things logically, buying a scented toilet thingy, and figuring out how to get ambient music playing through the TV.

I didn’t realize what I was doing or why until it served me in this moment: I woke up, felt like shit, recalled where I was, and immediately felt the stabilizing force of "home."

My dysregulated insides calmed almost instantly—faster than they had in months—because this little apartment rose to meet me. Not because it was fancy, but because I’d brought it “under my control.”

With my indulgence, my interior walls collapsed, but like a second layer of defence, my newly built external walls saved the day. My scattered nervous system exhaled into this external stability.

That's when all of this clicked—the stabilizing force of an externalized home.

It was only when I developed my "skin walls," abandoned my apartment walls, lived with only my skin walls, then regained some apartment walls that I saw the whole cycle at work.

I’ve learned what "home" really means, what the hell that influencer was talking about, and why people cling to their homes for dear life: When you create an external home, it gives you room to let your energetic gut hang out.

And, well… most people’s energetic guts are permanently hanging out because the majority of us aren’t taught about nervous system regulation and its levers.

But when you’ve got an external home, you don't need to maintain perfect internal energetic integrity because the control, stability, and certainty around you does the heavy lifting.

It was a big “a-hah!” moment for me—and I can see all of its mechanics.

I think they’re absolutely fascinating.

Home Is Your Walled Garden

Right now, I’m grateful I’ve got an external setup that’s working for me. Six weeks in one place feels like a luxury—and, honestly, my arms were getting tired from all that yoga holding my internal house together.

But here’s the truth: Some people need the external home to get their healing done. That’s not weakness—that’s wisdom. Sometimes your body needs the extra help. Sometimes your chaos needs a container.

The next challenge, though, is learning to draw those walls in close. Each time you choose internal regulation over external dependency, you're training skills that become automatic.

You're teaching your system that safety isn't a location—it's a capacity—which is useful because the world doesn’t care how stable your apartment is when life decides to get messy. And it will get messy.

But the ability to stay steady in the middle of that mess?

Now that’s true freedom.

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Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic—where we talk nervous systems, energetic sovereignty, and how to stay calm when the ground beneath you moves.

If you're working to build a home you can carry with you, subscribe for more reflections on spiritual grit and staying regulated through life’s chaos.