The Ups And Downs Of The Nervous System
The Ups And Downs Of The Nervous System
written by Taylor Neal
The phrase “nervous system regulation” gets used quite regularly in therapy and wellness spaces to refer to tools and practices we can integrate into our own lives to keep us functioning within our windows of tolerance more often.
Simply put, nervous system regulation is a genre of practices and tools for keeping the various parts of the nervous system in balance. Like with any multifaceted system, harmony and functionality depend on maintaining symbiosis between all the working parts, therefore when the different systems within our nervous system are functioning in harmony with one another, we feel more in control of our bodies and state of being throughout the day. Often however, due to a myriad of factors in our lives, different parts of our nervous systems end up feeling like they have to kick it into overdrive to keep us safe. Most commonly, this is a fleeting experience and doesn’t affect us in a long-term way. Sometimes however, learned survival tools of the nervous system become our body’s default, which can cause us to feel a lack of control around how we respond to, and interact with, the world around us.
Many things can trigger the nervous system to overcompensate in different ways. Sometimes, this is useful for our survival. Our bodies learned this behaviour in response to experiences we have had and/or ongoing circumstances we have had to navigate. Our bodies are extremely intelligent, and these tactics were learned for the sake of our survival in times when they were needed. But the problem with any worker that has been told they need to work multiple times as hard to keep the program running, is that once they start working at this level over long enough time, they often don’t know when, or how, to switch off. It becomes habit.
If your nervous system has developed it’s own strategies for protecting you in the past, you may start to notice feeling less in control of your state of being on a daily basis. The nervous system has taken matters into its own hands to keep you going, and now as you try to get things operating back in a harmonious, sustainable way, your nervous system may not remember what a regular day in the shop felt like before crisis mode ensued.
Nervous system regulation then, is the practice of supporting your nervous system to come back out of its overdrive state, into that place of harmony and balance where all parts are working together again. A collaborative, supportive team dynamic rather than all responsibility falling onto one team member to get the whole crew’s jobs done.
To understand how to regulate your nervous system, we have to start to understand how our nervous systems work, so we can learn to collaborate with them in a more constructive way.
Your Autonomic Nervous System
The nervous system is a complex web of smaller systems operating with different job descriptions and different specializations in and throughout the body, to keep everything connected and responding to our external environments, while simultaneously delivering messages to all different parts of your body telling it what to do and how to behave.
An entire breakdown of the nervous system would be an encyclopedia, but for our purposes in regulating our nervous systems, what is important to know are the two major systems that make up the Autonomic Nervous System; the Sympathetic Nervous System and the Parasympathetic Nervous System.
The Autonomic Nervous System is responsible for maintaining and regulating internal organ function in your body by supporting smooth muscles and glands. To do this work, it relies on the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems, which work hand in hand like a partnership in which opposites attract. In many cases, opposites attract because they complement one another; one picks up where the other leaves off, and vice versa. You can also think of this as passing the baton in a relay race.
If you’re familiar with the terms, you can think of these two systems as Yin and Yang. You can also think of them as fire and water, hot and cool, action and relaxation.
The Sympathetic Nervous System is Yang/fire/hot/action. If you think of fire/hot/action, you’ll surely be able to recall some physical environments or activities that foster this sort of energy and bodily reaction. HIIT training classes and other physical fitness spaces are a good example, because the environment is literally designed to target the sympathetic nervous system. The main goal of the sympathetic nervous system is firing your body up to get things done, fast.
It does this by restricting certain bodily functions to prioritize immediate need for action, which makes it the catalyst of the body’s fight or flight response. When the sympathetic nervous system is in charge, heart-rate increases, pupils dilate, and airways expand, while things like digestion and sexual desire get put on hold, so the body can respond with immediate action to whatever the circumstance may be; life or death situations like being chased by a lion, or times of chosen activity such as a strenuous workout. Practices that aim to activate this system are often referred to as Up-Regulation, because the body is working itself up to be able to do whatever it needs to do.
By contrast then, the Parasympathetic Nervous System is Yin/water/cool/relaxation, and while the Sympathetic Nervous System is responsible for fight/flight, the Parasympathetic covers feed/breed and rest/digest. When there is no perceived immediate threat, this system kicks in to keep things operating smoothly and healthily throughout the body. To help with digestion, salivation, rest, arousal, and other necessary bodily functions, heart-rate slows down, breath slows and softens, and an increase in blood flow directs to the reproductive organs, making sexual desire more accessible. As you can imagine, this system is key in supporting ourselves to cool down from more activated states, such as stress and strenuous physical exertion, to a place of relative calm. Practices such as yoga, breathwork, or going for that long walk in the woods, support the parasympathetic nervous system to take the driver’s seat. These practices designed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system are referred to as Down-Regulation, because the goal is to bring the body down from it’s fight or flight state of action, to a place of more slowness.
The way these systems interact with spaces and environments happens through the space’s targeting of either up-regulation or down-regulation, through cues that speak to the five senses; lighting/visual stimuli (sight), sounds and music (hearing), scent (smell), textures and materials (touch), and sometimes even through food and beverage for taste (think of how a restaurant is designed around the type of food they serve, or how the experience of drinking a beer at home after work is vastly different than drinking the same beer in an over-crowded, noisy pub). The five senses absorb information from the world around us, and communicate to our nervous systems what needs to happen; if we are safe and can rest and digest, or if we are being faced with a threat and need to act fast, now.
Evolutionarily, these two systems were designed to keep us alive, which is why the options may seem a bit black and white for the modern human. More commonly than being either in a state of pure rest or pure action, we will find ourselves somewhere in between in contemporary life.
Working with our early human nervous systems, the infinite stimuli in our world can trigger responses from the nervous system that may feel confusing. We may find ourselves all of a sudden overwhelmed and activated while walking through a shopping center (up-regulated) even though we are not perceiving any immediate threats on a cognitive level. We may feel defensive or compelled to run away during a conflict with our partner(s), even though there is no apparent threat to our physical safety.
There are many things rooted in past experience, trauma, and generally in the way our society is structured, that cause these more up-regulated states to engage when we may not need them to.
Because our sympathetic nervous system was set up for survival (fight/flight response), when humans were more commonly being chased by lions than walking through busy shopping centers, it sends our body into survival mode whenever we are in environments that simulate traditional threats; loud noises, certain smells, intense lighting, being immersed in herds of fast moving mammals. Our body responds before our brains have time to in most cases, as a way of keeping us alive.
However, when we don’t need the fight/flight response, or when we can’t seem to get out of this state, we may find ourselves overwhelmed and stressed-out at times when it doesn’t serve us, which then impacts how we show up in the world and in our relationships, and how we feel on a foundational level throughout the day. In these cases, developing down-regulating tools can be useful to bring the system back down to a relative base.
Similarly, we may find ourselves in a state of system overwhelm due to external stimuli, emotional state, or any other trigger that manifests in a freeze response. This is the parasympathetic nervous system showing up to protect you in the way it knows how. When we find ourselves in freeze, up-regulating strategies are useful to help the body and mind come back online.
So, the challenge is to develop a more intimate relationship with our nervous system, so we are able to recognize the signs in our body when we are moving into an up-regulated state so we can regulate our nervous systems in the moment and move through the world in a more tolerant way.
Some Tools for Up-Regulating
Developing your own toolbox for nervous system regulation will be an ongoing process, and it will look different for each of us based on our lived experiences, our needs, and quite frankly how our unique brains operate.
We all have different songs that get us in the dancing mood, in the same way we may all have different ways of getting our body moving again when it needs to. So, this list is far from exhaustive, but these are some quick strategies for up-regulating that can be useful when we just need something to grab on to to get us going again.
Focus on the inhale, let the exhale take care of itself. The heart rate increase whenever we breathe in, so by focusing on the inhale and letting the exhale happen passively for a couple breath cycles, you’re helping your body get the blood pumping faster, almost immediately
Remind your body it can move by moving it. If you feel physically stuck, it can be helpful to choose one body part and remind your body it can move by moving that one body part. It can be a finger, a foot, an elbow, an eyebrow - whatever feels accessible. From there, you can try to add some other parts of your body until you feel able to move fully again.
Put on the dancing music! Having a couple of songs, or even a pre-made playlist of songs you know get you moving can be a useful way to bring a little pep into your step when you feel like moving and doing is practically impossible.
Some Tools for Down-Regulating
Many of the things that work as down-regulating exercises look and feel similar to the things we see in many health and wellness spaces, such as yoga studios and spas, or even photos on Instagram captioned “self care.”
This is because we live in a society where it is often quite rare to have access to down-regulating as a general part of our day, when everything is always “go go go, do more, work harder!” These sorts of spaces and resources often have to actively be made and carved out, but even then each of us will have different things that work for us.
Maybe a hot bath by candle-light isn’t your cup of tea, or simply not realistic when you have three kids running around the house in the evenings. But that doesn’t mean you can never support yourself. Below are just a couple of things that can be done quickly, and with relatively little prep, so you can start to get a little bit of a handle on your own sense of balance.
Focus on the exhale, let the inhale take care of itself. The heart rate slows whenever we breathe out, so by focusing on the exhale and letting the inhale happen passively for a couple breath cycles, you’re helping your body slow your heart-rate, almost immediately.
Make some noise with the breath. Taking a deep breath and then letting out some noise (a sigh, a humm, a vowel sound) with the exhale can help release stuck tension by physically moving it out of the body through sound a bit at a time.
Somatic self-holding. Put one hand under the opposite armpit, and then cross the other arm over your chest to hold onto the opposite bicep. Let your head fall down, so your chin tucks toward your chest. It can feel good to gently rock from side to side, and perhaps close your eyes. This helps to bring a sense of felt safety to the body.
For more tips on nervous system regulation, and how to add more supportive elements to your own physical space, stay tuned for our next article, Stress In Space.