Know Your Nervous System
One of the greatest tools for creating ultimate self-care is to know your nervous system. The main software that runs your stress or relaxation response is the autonomic nervous system.
Imagine this scenario:
You wake up after a decent night’s sleep and start getting ready for work. You wake up the kids to get them moving to get ready for school and go into the kitchen to get breakfast ready.
Your nervous system is more or less in harmony.
As you walk into the kitchen you see that the dishwasher leaked all over the kitchen floor during the night.
Your sympathetic nervous system spikes to give you energy to clean up the mess quickly, and then call or leave a message for a repair company. Then, there is a rush to get breakfast for everyone.
Just barely getting the kids ready and out the door to go to work, the kids are dropped off and you are still irritated and the traffic is making it worse.
You are now at a choice point.
You continue to be irritated and resign yourself to a miserable day.
Or – you do this:
Stuck in the traffic jam, you quickly set your playlist for your favorite relaxing music, your breathing and heartbeat starts to calm down and the irritation level starts to drop. You get to work feeling calm and ready to make arrangements for the repair.
This is our daily dance with the autonomic nervous system.
You have two choices to help you with this dance:
- You can either be aware of it and do your best in managing the dance
- Or let it run on an unconscious level and be at the mercy of the software.
The image below might be an illustration of the state of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in 70 to 90% of us.
The figure weighing down the scale in the foreground represents the chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Its job is to keep you safe.
Some days feel like this little guy is jumping up and down on his side of the scale!
The other figure trying to get a foothold represents the parasympathetic system. Its job is to help you rest, digest and heal. It is trying to bring these two halves of the autonomic nervous system into balance.
Creating Harmony in Your Nervous System
The truth is – the autonomic nervous system is never in balance!
It’s like standing on one foot, without holding on to anything for stability, and trying to stand completely still and in balance. It just doesn’t happen in most people!
There is always a little bit of movement that constantly adjusts the stability of your body as you stand on one foot.
Try it and notice what happens. If you want to have even more fun with this, try standing on the other foot. You might notice that each foot has a different level of stability.
It’s the same thing in the dance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
Even though it may never be in balance, it can be in harmony.
Events happen all day long that can either stimulate the release of hormones to raise our alertness and stress levels or hormones to create relaxation.
Having a full basket of self-care tools helps the parasympathetic nervous system get both feet on the other side of the scale and bring it into harmony – at least for the moment.
On the other hand, if you start going over and over the morning’s events in your mind, and then tell the story to everyone you see at work, this just keeps the sympathetic nervous system jumping up and down on the scale and knocks the other guy completely off the scale.
Are you beginning to see how the harmony works?
The Sound Wellness blog is loaded with many powerful tools to support your dance with your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems – to create more harmony in your life. There are also many opportunities for you to add to your self-care basket on our YouTube channel.
Here is a link to a playlist filled with more tools for your self-care basket:
Unprecedented Times and An Opportunity
We live in unprecedented times of change and chaos. This has created a great deal of uncertainty, fear and concern in many people.
The impact of the amplified fear of living through a global pandemic has created an epidemic of negative mindset. And an enormous number of people who are more focused on the inner chatter of the mind than on the world around them.
This is unbelievably detrimental to your health and results in chronic stress.
Stress (including the incessant chatter) hijacks the thinking part of your brain. And leaves it at the mercy of the emotional brain and unconscious behavior.
It is absolutely essential to have a collection of tools and techniques that can bring you back to the present moment and reconnect you to the calm and inner peace at your core.
These unprecedented times also offer us a great opportunity.
As we find ways to be present to the calm and inner peace within, we open our hearts to resilience and compassion.
Compassion grounded in inner peace will transform our world.
In Health and Harmony,
