Your Nervous System: An Owner’s Manual
How well do you know your nervous system? Apart from a basic science lesson or two in school, I spent my early adult life mostly unaware of what mine actually was and what it did – and eventually ended up facing near-burnout.
Now, after a decade teaching psychology, mindfulness and neuroscience, I see our nervous system as a major key to understanding so much about us, our health and our behaviour: the state of our nervous system is the state of ourselves. That’s why this month’s blog is all about that lightning bolt & relaxation machine that’s so key to our experience of being human. When we can know how it works, how it’s evolved, what it needs, and how to be good caretakers of it, we can change the game.
Your Nervous System: a 101
Our nervous system has 2 main branches: the accelerator (sympathetic system) and the brake (parasympathetic nervous system). When the accelerator branch lights up, it’s like turning the speed and intensity up in the body – GO-GO-GO!! Our heart rate flies up, our adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormone) levels skyrocket, and we feel our temperature rise. This is where our primal fight or flight responses live, or as I affectionately like to call them – ‘the 4 F words’: fight, flight, faint and freeze. These responses evolved to step up in short-term emergencies, when we have a sense of perceived threat that needs to be dealt with immediately.
On the other side of the accelerator, we have the brake. When the parasympathetic nervous system comes into play, everything slows down. We calm down, we digest, we absorb nutrients, we rest. It’s no surprise then that this branch is often referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ system, where we process, both physically and psychologically, all the activity and chaos of our emergency response and day to day life. This is where we’re designed to spend the most time, in the long-term, and it helps us recover from the fast lane of the sympathetic nervous system.
As hunter gatherers, our nervous systems were perfectly evolved to the highly threatening environment we found ourselves in. With a threat around any corner, life or death situations were part of daily life, from facing a sabre-toothed tiger to an attack from a tribe. Once the threat had passed though, we would naturally regulate the nervous system due to the fact we were so physically active, living off the land, sleeping in tune with the natural cycle of the sun: all things that help the body to rest once the danger has gone.
The Game has Changed
Flash-forward a few millennia, and our lives have changed beyond recognition. We’ve swapped tigers and tribes for modern demands and modern problems: awkward social situations, global pandemics and crap bosses. Things that won’t necessarily kill us, but our survival mechanism puts on the alarm bells, because it’s an all-or-nothing kind of system. So that’s why we feel our hearts pounding when we hear the news, or see our boss’s name flash up on the screen, or think about a meeting coming up with Sheila, our passive aggressive colleague. Nowadays we’re also mostly sedentary (apart from a bit of exercise here and there), we eat food that isn’t necessarily nutritious, we live largely through tech which fires up our stress levels constantly - and we don’t sleep or rest enough. This is where so many of our modern health and wellbeing issues come from: we’re so often feeling frazzled and exhausted because our internal accelerator (meant for emergency situations) is overused, and we rarely put on the brake. Since human evolution takes thousands of years, we’re essentially living with a system inside our bodies that doesn’t yet fit the demands of the modern day – it just hasn’t caught up yet. We’re somewhere between our primal human reality and the speed and overwhelm of the tech-information age, in an in-between state of over-stimulation and constant acceleration.
So what does all this mean? Basically, unless we learn how to put the brake on regularly and regulate our nervous systems on an ongoing basis, it’s unlikely we’ll feel balanced, calm, or even feel sane. We’re more likely to feel like headless chickens running around in a state of mild panic most of the time - and we’ll be far less productive, too. This is why so many of the top diseases in our modern world are related to too much stress (cortisol) in the body – heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune issues. And it’s not our fault; it’s the fact that how we’re programmed to function is at odds with the daily demands and realities of modern life.
Regulating Your Nervous System: Consciously
Many organisations that work in high intensity situations – e.g. the Navy SEALs, paramedics - use practices and take daily action to help regulate the nervous system, and we are no different. We need to know how to look after our nervous systems as we would do our cars or houses – they need daily maintenance, too.
We often regulate our nervous system instinctively – we do things to raise our energy and reduce our tension so we can feel more harmonised. But the things we do instinctively aren’t always good for us: they’re usually shortcuts to feeling ok that can end up being bad habits – for example, having too many glasses of wine, eating a ton of chocolate or excessive online shopping. We also tend to find it hardest to relax when we’re most stressed, because the alarm bells are telling us we need to stay in high-alert to survive.
When we can work with our nervous system consciously instead, and learn to put on the brake with intention, little actions go a long way. Here are some activities we can do to activate our rest and digest system – even for 5-10 minutes - to feel more balanced daily:
Activities to Put on the Brake
Spending time in nature - e.g. parks, forests, near bodies of water or trees
Speaking to friends, family and loved ones
Creative activities - e.g. drawing, writing, making (the more we enjoy, the better)
Daily walks
Short, regular breaks at work - ideally every 90 minutes for 10 minutes
Massage and bodywork
Reading
Complementary therapies - e.g. acupuncture, reflexology
Gentle exercise - e.g. yoga, gentle stretching
Moderate and high intensity exercise - e.g running, dancing, cycling
Electronic days (or hours) off – no phones or devices
Mindfulness - e.g. Calm
Breathing techniques – e.g. 4-4 breathing, breathing in & out for the count of 4
Anything else that helps us come out of that ‘go go go’ state of being!
So, over to you.
What do you do to help yourself relax, switch off, and rest? If you don’t want to do it for you - if it feels too selfish, or luxurious, or out of reach - make time to do it for your nervous system instead. It’s a machine that needs to be looked after, just like any other– but this one is inside us. And it will most definitely thank you.
