Nervous system Regulation

Why nervous system regulation is so important

When you experience symptoms of trauma or high stress, your autonomic nervous system has become dysregulated. That is where the symptoms largely come from. In order to heal you need to help your nervous system to come back into a more balanced state.

How do we do that?

We need to find ways to influence this part of your nervous system directly. This is a deeply unconscious part of us that functions automatically, without our conscious participation. Therefore, we can’t easily talk ourselves out of the way our body is behaving. We need to employ tools that talk to the nervous system directly.

Those tools can involve bringing your awareness to particular sensations in your body, directing your breath in certain ways, using movement and sound in order to influence your nervous system state. When we engage with our body in these ways, we are speaking the language of the body. As opposed to trying to think our way out of the way we are feeling.

That is why the most effective ways to heal symptoms of trauma and stress involve working though the body.

What actually happens in our bodies when we experience stress or trauma?

And what does our autonomic nervous system have to do with it?

Our autonomic nervous system regulates a lot of our basic functions, such as our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels etc. And this part of our nervous system also regulates our survival response, responding to threat when necessary and relaxing us when we feel safe.

When we do perceive a threat, commonly our survival response will trigger the fight and flight response, enabling us to act within a split second to be able to flee the situation or fight back. In order to do that our body needs to mobilize an incredible amount of energy. So, there are a multitude of physiological changes that happen very quickly, such as our hear rate accelerating, our breath quickening, cortisol triggering a release of glucose into our bloodstream, our muscles getting ready for action and many more. That response is governed to a large extent by the sympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system.

If we are able to successfully navigate the situation and the threat is gone, the parasympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system now fulfills a different role, which is to regulate our body back down to a calm state.

If we are not able to deal with the threat successfully, we might employ a different survival strategy, which is the freeze response. Our body becomes very still to heighten our chance of survival.

These survival responses have evolved over many thousands of years and are quite similar in all mammals. They are designed to deal with short term situations of threat and being able to regulate back to a state of safety when the threat is over.

And here is the difference between a threat that we can navigate and trauma:

Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing or threatening event that overwhelms our ability to cope.

When something overwhelms our ability to cope, our body and nervous system can get stuck in the survival responses and we might develop lingering symptoms.

Other reasons why we might not be able to regulate back to a state of safety might be that we are disconnected from our body responses and overrule what our body needs to do with our thinking mind. We might have many repeating traumas over time where our nervous system learns to stay in a survival state. We might have childhood traumas where the situations we have to deal with overwhelm our young system’s ability to regulate.

In the case of chronic stress, we respond in a very similar way as we do to threat. Our fight and flight response kicks in to deal with the stressor. Some of us also go into the freeze response if our nervous system is used to that. And since the stress is ongoing, we don’t get a chance to regulate.

And then we might end up in a chronic state of dysregulation of our autonomic nervous system.

What does dysregulation look like?

It can express in symptoms such as:

• Anxiety or panic

• Feeling hypervigilant

• Being unable to fully relax, always needing to be on the lookout for something or needing to stay busy

• Uncontrollable anger

• Feeling unsafe when unwarranted

• Chronic states of fear or worry

• Chronic tension

• Feeling stressed all the time

• Racing, uncontrollable thoughts

• Feeling out of control, overwhelmed

• Feeling helpless

• Insomnia

• Feeling frozen or shut down

• Feeling numb or dissociated from your body or your feelings

• Depression, lethargy

Now, you may think that you have never really had to deal with a highly threatening situation and therefore it does not seem you have any trauma, but you do experience some of these symptoms.

Trauma is often hidden, and we don’t necessarily know why our nervous system has gotten stuck in survival responses. That does not make it any less serious.

There are many reasons why our survival response might have gotten triggered in our past and then was not able to regulate back down.

The imprints on our nervous system start with our time in the womb, depending on whether that environment felt safe or not. Our own birth can quite commonly lead to a heightened survival state. Even when there are no complications, this is an extremely intense experience for the newborn. Then, our experiences as an infant are very formative for our nervous system. Did we feel held, nurtured and protected? Or, did we not get our needs met and not experience the holding environment that let us feel safe? Even if our caregivers had the best intentions, some of their actions might have impacted us negatively. As children, did we experience things that scared us that we did not know how to process? Did we have accidents, injuries, surgeries that affected our bodies in a traumatic way?

You can see, this could go on – we often have experiences in the past that affected our survival system that we don’t even know about.

And here is another fact about trauma:

Trauma is not in the event but in the perception of our nervous system to an event or situation.

So, we might not think of something as traumatic but our survival system reacted to it that way.

The good news is that we don’t actually need to know exactly why our nervous system is in a dysregulated state. We can still work with the symptoms and with practices that allow our nervous system to come into more regulation.

Here is a helpful visual: