Your Beautiful Nervous System and Anxiety
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In short your nervous system consists of your brain, spinal cord and nerves. It is a highly complex system of interconnected signals that manages most of your physical actions and processes. Think of it as the command center of your body. Right now, and I do mean right now, your nervous system is sending thousands of messages, including:
Reading the room's temperature, should we sweat to cool us down or shiver to warm us up?;
To identifying the amount of light in the room, is it time for us to go to sleep? Then, it's time for the pineal gland to start secreting melatonin;
Down to your digestive tract, is it time to go to the bathroom or eat?
As mentioned above, there are 3 main components to your Nervous System: the Brain, Spinal Cord, and Nerves. A strong nervous system helps us to adapt quickly and respond to stimuli. This is essential in our modern-day world, as our external world is constantly stimulating us. If your nervous system becomes overtaxed, you become vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and illness.
While there are so many components of the nervous system, I want to be sure to keep this blog short and simple to ensure you have the knowledge required to understand where your anxiety comes from and to include simple steps you can do from your own home to help reduce these anxious moments.
Located deep in the center of your brain, and its primary concern is survival. It's primal and very powerful, it can actually override the rational parts of your brain to ensure its needs are met, and generally does not concern itself with consequences. This part of the brain is essential and was designed to take over in times of extreme stress or fear to keep us alive. However, this can also be triggered when we perceive a threat to our survival, like a social media faux pas or our boss seeing us coming in an hour late for the third time this month or even a challenging relative. Ever feel scared when you're watching a movie? This is because your body perceives what it sees in front of it to be a scary situation, and your body reacts. While these things will not result in our demise, our brains have been trained to trigger the sympathetic nervous system, which is tied to flight, fight, or freeze, resulting in anxiety, depression, and illness.
Sympathetic Nervous System
This system is considered the crisis management team and is what the body calls on when responding to stressful situations. It's called the stress & sweat and gas pedal system. When triggered, it will:
Dilate your pupils to let in more light so you can see better (for your to see better)
Releases adrenaline to increase your heart rate and quickens the breath to provide energy and oxygen to fuel a rapid response to danger
Adrenaline also releases glucose for quick energy to flee and tenses the muscles.
Blood is rushed to your legs and arms to ensure you can run quickly, which leaves less blood for your essential organs, including your rationale brain.
All while your brain is being flooded with the stress hormone, causing you to have racing thoughts.
With all this going on, it is no wonder you feel completely debilitated by your anxiety; it's a lot. Oh, and I forgot to add that another symptom of an overactive sympathetic nervous system is the inability to digest food properly, which stops you from getting the most out of your food. That's right, anxiety may be hindering your digestive activities.
Parasympathetic Nervous System:
It is responsible for relaxing your body after stressful or dangerous situations. It also helps to run vital processes, like your digestion. It's commonly known as the brake pedal, rest & digest, and feed & breed. Many kundalini yoga postures use the breath of fire and flapping of the arms to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, then leverage the calm down period after to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system through observing the mind and breath. A strong nervous system is essential in aiding your capacity to handle stress. This is a bit of what yogis call yoga off the mat, as we are showing our clients how to go from high-stress breath to calm and collected. Super cool, right?!?
Also, I want to note that anxiety is not a bad thing. It's there to keep us alive, we just want to stop it from triggering for perceived threats, so we can live more enriched lives.
Try this Mental Activity:
After you have an anxiety attack, reflect back on what started it and truly ask yourself if it was a real threat or perceived threat. Best way to gauge whether the scary outcome actually happened or was all in your head?
View these moments not as failures but as opportunities to grow. To connect with yourself on a deeper level and begin communicating with your nervous system.
Begin adding a daily breathing practice into your life. It could be yoga, meditation, or just focusing on deep breathing for 3 to 5 minutes daily.
Start identifying these attacks when they happen. "I'm having an anxiety attack." And employ deep breathing (fill your lungs with air, as though you are breathing into your belly, ribcage, and upper chest. Then you exhale completely, reversing the flow, repeat a few times). And if you're not perfect the first few times, keep practicing. We are rewiring the way your brain works and this takes time.
Also, I cannot stress this enough, please do contact and work with an energy healer: Reiki, acupuncture, cupping, yoga instructor, sound therapist, Pranic Healer, Qigong, etc. The main goal is to balance your energy centers.
Try These Physical Activities (which activates the Shu Acupressure Points along your spine, activating energy pathways to vital organs):
Spinal Rolling
Plow Pose
Forward Bend
Armpit Hold (place left hand under right armpit and right hand under left armpit. Pull your shoulders up as high as they will go, as if they are going to touch your ears. Hold for 3 to 5 minutes). I like to play meditative music in the background when I do this.
Tapping If you need extra, try tapping. Take your left hand and put it over your heart. Feel where the pinky bone and ring finger meet, you’ll feel a “V” like structure. In between this “V” begin tapping with your other hand. In your head or out loud repeat, “I am safe”. Repeat on the other side or until “the anxiety” (not yours) is gone.
The journey ahead will be a beautiful road with many bumps, but these bumps are opportunities for you to become more connected to your inner strength and power. It's time to see your inner strength shine bright.
With love,
Jeri
Originally Posted: August 29th, 2023 Updated: December 14th, 2024
