Sympathetic Nervous System Quotes

During the time of stress, the “fight-or-flight” response is on and the self-repair mechanism is disabled. It is then when we say that the immunity of the body goes down and the body is exposed to the risk for disease. Meditation activates relaxation, when the sympathetic nervous system is turned off and the parasympathetic nervous system is turned on, and natural healing starts.

if you accept the pain as a natural process and refuse to give in and give up, you will engage the sympathetic nervous system which shifts your hormonal flow.

right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions.

During deep NREM sleep specifically, the brain communicates a calming signal to the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch of the body’s nervous system, and does so for long durations of the night. As a result, deep sleep prevents an escalation of this physiological stress that is synonymous with increased blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.

Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations).

Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant.

When we are chronically stressed out [stuck in sympathetic nervous system activation], detrimental somatic changes become ingrained in our bodies. Here are some of the most common examples of body-harming reactions to Cptsd stress: Hypervigilance Shallow and Incomplete Breathing Constant Adrenalization Armoring, i.e., Chronic muscle tightness Wear and tear from rushing and armoring Inability to be fully present, relaxed and grounded in our bodies Sleep problems from being over-activated Digestive disorders from a tightened digestive tract Physiological damage from excessive self-medication with alcohol, food or drugs

There is overwhelming evidence that meditation can increase focus and decrease anxiety, depression, and cortisol flooding. There is evidence that it decreases activation in the amygdala, one epicenter of fear in the brain, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. People who meditate are able to unstick themselves from cyclical, dangerous thinking and see things from a calmer, more positive perspective. The sympathetic nervous system, or the fight or flight system, is activated by stress. This is the system that gets us ready to run. The counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system, the resting and digesting system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, slows breathing, and directly counters the stress response. Meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s literally the antidote to stress. Plus, it’s what all the evolved, cool girls who look good without makeup are doing, according to social media.

Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11 Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.12 We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands.13 Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved.

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions.

The close connection of the central nucleus to elements of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) provides the amygdala with a great deal of influence over the body.

Flight is fear—avoidance—whereas fight is anger—approach—but they’re both the “GO!” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system. They tell you to do something.

One of the quickest ways to feel happy is through the pranayama technique called circular breathing. When you equalize the lengths of your inhale and exhale, you balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic sides of your nervous system.

A recent invention, vocal language may date back only ca. 200,000 years. As human primates, we have not fully come to grips with the prolonged, face-to-face closeness required for speech. Speaking to a stranger, e.g., stresses our autonomic nervous system's sympathetic (i.e., fight-or-flight) division, which a. speeds our heartbeat, b. dilates our pupils, and c. cools and moistens our hands. The limbic brain's hypothalamus instructs the pituitary gland to release hormones into the circulatory system, arousing our blood, sweat, and fears.

Breath control training will change your body and mind in remarkably positive ways. It will tune your nervous system and allow you to activate the parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous systems at will, helping you to perform in a stressful environment or to excel in competition.

Emotion manifests itself simultaneously with an alteration of the internal secretions, the circulation, blood pressure, respiration, etc., but equally, unconscious contents excite, and in neurotic cases disturb, the sympathetic nervous system either directly, or indirectly, via the emotions aroused.

the body is equipped with what Cannon named the stress response, also known as the fight-or-flight response, a survival mechanism that gets flipped on when your brain perceives a threat. When this hormonal cascade is triggered by a thought or emotion in the mind, such as fear, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis activates, thereby stimulating the sympathetic nervous system to race into overdrive, pumping up the body’s cortisol and adrenaline levels. Over time, filling the body with these stress hormones can manifest as physical symptoms, predisposing the body to disease over time.

A.W.E. is a doorway to profound presence, spaciousness, ease and peace - a fast track to transcendence. Part of the reason awe doesn't come naturally to some people is that their sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive more often than is necessary. Many of us don't feel safe enough to open up to awe.

When the attachment figure is also a threat to the child, two systems with conflicting goals are activated simultaneously or sequentially: the attachment system, whose goal is to seek proximity, and the defense systems, whose goal is to protect. In these contexts, the social engagement system is profoundly compromised and its development interrupted by threatening conditions. This intolerable conflict between the need for attachment and the need for defense with the same caregiver results in the disorganized–disoriented attachment pattern (Main & Solomon, 1986). A contradictory set of behaviors ensues to support the different goals of the animal defense systems and of the attachment system (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Morgan, 1996; Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2001; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). When the attachment system is stimulated by hunger, discomfort, or threat, the child instinctively seeks proximity to attachment figures. But during proximity with a person who is threatening, the defensive subsystems of flight, fight, freeze, or feigned death/shut down behaviors are mobilized. The cry for help is truncated because the person whom the child would turn to is the threat. Children who suffer attachment trauma fall into the dissociative–disorganized category and are generally unable to effectively auto- or interactively regulate, having experienced extremes of low arousal (as in neglect) and high arousal (as in abuse) that tend to endure over time (Schore, 2009b). In the context of chronic danger, patterns of high sympathetic dominance are apt to become established, along with elevated heart rate, higher cortisol levels, and easily activated alarm responses. Children must be hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid danger yet primed to quickly activate a dorsal vagal feigned death state in the face of inescapable threat. In the context of neglect, instead of increased sympathetic nervous system tone, increased dorsal vagal tone, decreased heart rate, and shutdown (Schore, 2001a) may become chronic, reflecting both the lack of stimulation in the environment and the need to be unobtrusive.

As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you. It also frequently projects you into the future, imagining danger in upcoming social events. Moreover, hypervigilance typically devolves into intense performance anxiety on every level of self-expression

Thus wailing and pounding the walls in grief or leaping about and shouting in ecstasy can place similarly large demands on a diseased heart. Put another way, your sympathetic nervous system probably has roughly the same effect on your coronary arteries whether you are in the middle of a murderous rage or a thrilling orgasm.

Using the examples above, the sentence that emerges from a dorsal state of collapse, “I’m so tired, I could give up,” could be changed to, “I’m so tired, I could rest for a bit.” The sentence that is fueled by sympathetic activation, “I’m so angry, I could scream,” might become “I’m so angry, I could take a break and come back in a while.

Stress often produces short-term “fight-or-flight” responses; when the threat passes, the body tends to return to equilibrium. But evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time—by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem. Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations). Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action? When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing. Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off.

Parents recognize this as the “sugar high,” but it’s actually the negative feedback system of energy balance at work. The cookie stimulated insulin release, which drove energy into fat tissue, which released leptin, which reached the hypothalamus, which activated the sympathetic nervous system, which led to increased energy expenditure, including involuntary contraction of muscles, aka fidgeting—all to maintain energy neutrality.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) mediates the body’s response to arousing circumstances, for example, producing the famed “fight or flight” stress response. To use the feeble joke told to first-year medical students, the SNS mediates the “four Fs—fear, fight, flight, and sex.” Particular midbrain/brain-stem nuclei send long SNS projections down the spine and on to outposts throughout the body, where the axon terminals release the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.

With few exceptions over the past half century, every experiment that has investigated the impact of deficient sleep on the human body has observed an overactive sympathetic nervous system. For as long as the state of insufficient sleep lasts, and for some time thereafter, the body remains stuck in some degree of a fight-or-flight state. It can last for years in those with an untreated sleep disorder, excessive work hours that limit sleep or its quality, or the simple neglect of sleep by an individual.

Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means money in is pocket. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, cajole, pray or curse-he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot.

single regulatory system.5 All are a product of the synchrony between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS): the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.6 These are the “reciprocals” Darwin

Coming safely into stillness requires the ventral vagus to restrain the escape movements of the sympathetic nervous system and join with the dorsal vagal system while inhibiting its movement into protective dissociation. For many clients, the autonomic challenge of becoming safely still is too great. Without enough cues of safety from another Social Engagement System to co-regulate or the ability for individual regulation through a reliable vagal brake, the autonomic nervous system quickly moves out of connection into collapse and dissociation.

Joseph LeDoux at New York University has shown how the BLA learns fear.fn14,20 Expose a rat to an innate trigger of fear—a shock. When this “unconditioned stimulus” occurs, the central amygdala activates, stress hormones are secreted, the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes, and, as a clear end point, the rat freezes in place—“What was that? What do I do?” Now do some conditioning. Before each shock, expose the rat to a stimulus that normally does not evoke fear, such as a tone. And with repeated coupling of the tone (the conditioned stimulus) with the shock (the unconditioned one), fear conditioning occurs—the sound of the tone alone elicits freezing, stress hormone release, and so on.fn15

For as long as the state of insufficient sleep lasts, and for some time thereafter, the body remains stuck in some degree of a fight-or-flight state. It can last for years in those with an untreated sleep disorder, excessive work hours that limit sleep or its quality, or the simple neglect of sleep by an individual. Like a car engine that is revved to a shrieking extreme for sustained periods of time, your sympathetic nervous system is floored into perpetual overdrive by a lack of sleep. The consequential strain that is placed on your body by the persistent force of sympathetic activation will leak out in all manner of health issues, just like the failed pistons, gaskets, seals, and gnashing gears of an abused car engine.

EXCITED was not the right word. Stevie NEEDED to go back and she WANTED to go back, but the accompanying emotion was anxiety. Anxiety and excitement are cousins; they can be mistaken for each other at points. They have many features in common - the bubbling, carbonated feel of the emotion the speed, the wide eyes and racing heart. But where excitement tends to take you up, into the higher, brighter levels of feeling, anxiety pulls you down, making you feel like you have to grip the earth to keep from sliding off as it turns. This was the sympathetic nervous system at work, her therapist had told her. To work with anxiety, you had to let it complete its cycle. Steve tapped her foot against the SUV floor, telling the cycle to get a movie on. What was she anxious about? Going back to the case, going back to her friends, going back to her classes, going back...

If you’re not sleeping well, your body interprets that as an emergency,” Roxanne said. “You can deprive yourself of sleep and live. We could never raise children if we couldn’t drop down on our sleep, right? We’d never survive hurricanes. You can do that—but it comes at a cost. The cost is [that] your body shifts into the sympathetic nervous system zone—so your body is like, ‘Uh-oh, you’re depriving yourself of sleep, must be an emergency, so I’m going to make all these physiological changes to prepare yourself for that emergency. Raise your blood pressure. I’m going to make you want more fast food, I’m going to make you want more sugar for quick energy. I’m going to make your heart-rate [rise].’…So it’s like all this shifts, to say—I’m ready.” Your body doesn’t know why it’s staying awake. “Your brain doesn’t know you’re sleep-deprived because you’re goofing off and watching Schitt’s Creek, right? It doesn’t know why you’re not sleeping—but the net effect is a physiological sort of alarm bell.” In

Weight stigma can contribute to health problems in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious one is that it’s stressful to be stigmatized for your size, and stress takes a physical toll on your body. The scientific term for this toll is allostatic load, meaning the cumulative effect of chronic stressors on multiple systems in the body: the cardiovascular system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and metabolism. Because it looks at the entire body rather than isolated parts, allostatic load has been shown to be a more robust predictor of chronic-disease risk than other markers. And the research is clear that weight stigma has seriously detrimental whole-body effects. One study that followed close to 1,000 participants for ten years found that those who reported experiencing significant weight stigma over that period were twice as likely to have a high allostatic load as those who didn’t—regardless of actual BMI.5 In other words, weight stigma is an independent risk factor for physiological stress.

In another experiment, Stanley Schachter and Ladd Wheeler asked participants to take part in a study of the effects of a vitamin compound on vision. Participants received an injection and then watched a fifteen-minute comedy film. Unbeknownst to the participants, the “vitamin” was actually epinephrine in one condition, a placebo in another, and chlorpromazine in a third. Epinephrine produces physiological arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rate and slight tremors in the arms and legs. Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that acts as a depressant of the sympathetic nervous system. The researchers reasoned that because the participants did not know that they had received a drug, they would infer that the film was causing their bodily reactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, people injected with the epinephrine seemed to find the film the funniest; they laughed and smiled the most while watching it. People injected with the chlorpromazine seemed to find the film the least funny; they laughed and smiled little while watching

The unconscious is the psyche that reaches down from the daylight of mentally and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous system that for ages has been known as the "sympathetic." This does not govern perception and muscular activity like the cerebrospinal system, and thus control the environment; but, though functioning without sense-organs, it maintains the balance of life and, through the mysterious paths of sympathetic excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost life of other beings but also has an inner effect upon them.

The housecleaning our bodies perform while we sleep is powered by the shakti that energizes the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and autonomous nervous systems to send instructions to the lymphatic system, the pituitary gland, and a host of other places in our slumbering forms. Whether it is blood circulating in the veins and arteries, a nerve impulse jumping a synaptic gap in the brain, our body straining while running the hundred-meter dash, or the working out of a physics or organic chemistry problem, our shakti provides the energy to accomplish the activity.

Polyvagal Theory proposes a neurophysiological model of safety and trust. The model emphasizes that safety is defined by feeling safe and not by the removal of threat. Feeling safe is dependent on three conditions: 1) the autonomic nervous system cannot be in a state that supports defense; 2) the social engagement system needs to be activated to down regulate sympathetic activation and functionally contain the sympathetic nervous system and the dorsal vagal circuit within an optimal range (homeostasis) that would support health, growth, and restoration; and 3) to detect cues of safety (e.g., prosodic vocalizations, positive facial expressions and gestures) via neuroception. In everyday situations, the cues of safety may initiate the sequence by triggering the social engagement system via the process of neuroception, which will contain autonomic state within a homeostatic range and restrict the autonomic nervous system from reacting in defense. This constrained range of autonomic state has been referred to as the window of tolerance (see Ogden et. al. 2006; Siegel, 1999) and can be expanded through neural exercises embedded in therapy. See: throughout

The Nervous System of man is divided into two great systems, viz., the Cerebro-Spinal System and the Sympathetic System. The Cerebro-Spinal System consists of all that part of the Nervous System contained within the cranial cavity and the spinal canal, viz., the brain and the spinal cord, together with the nerves which branch off from the same. This system presides over the functions of animal life known as volition, sensation, etc. The Sympathetic System includes all that part of the Nervous System located principally in the thoracic, abdominal and pelvic cavities, and which is distributed to the internal organs. It has control over the involuntary processes, such as growth, nutrition, etc.

So how much sleep is enough? Generally, sleep specialists recommend that adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, though there is no perfect number for the amount of sleep you may need personally. Doctors and scientists agree on one thing overall, however: Getting too little sleep—five hours a night or less for most people—results in a wide range of cognitive and physical impairments. Neurons in the brain can’t consolidate the information you’ve taken in, so you don’t store memories and you lose the ability to use this information. Add to this the compromised motor control, lack of focus, and difficulty with decision making and problem solving that come with sleep deprivation, and you may think twice about catching The Tonight Show and choose to turn in earlier than usual. Stress When your brain is bombarded with stimuli that trigger anxiety, you experience stress—a series of biological and chemical processes throughout your body that initiates a fight-or-flight response. In a nutshell, here’s what happens: Your sympathetic nervous system, commanded by the hypothalamus—a small area at your brain’s base—releases stress hormones that ready you to deal with whatever threat has emerged. First, your adrenal glands (on top of your kidneys) release adrenaline, which causes increases in breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. These glands also release cortisol, which increases

When we take deep, long, slow breaths, we can actually stop the “fight or flight” portion of our nervous system (called the sympathetic nervous system) from overreacting to different types of stress. The sympathetic nervous system goes into high gear when our brain activates it in the presence of perceived danger.

To calm baby in distress, hold her swaddled against your body and gently tap her back in the rhythm of a heartbeat, while playing white noise. You will notice baby relaxing much more easily because of the positive neurological effect of the heartbeat rhythm and her proximity to you. She receives the message that she's back in the safety of the womb. Her sympathetic nervous system sends signals throughout her body to switch off the stress response because she's safe. Her heart beat slows, her breathing calms and her muscles relax

Here are a few things yoga nidra can do: Activate the relaxation response and deactivate the stress response (which improves functioning of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and the endocrine system). Increase immunity and the ability to fight germs and infections (Kumar 2013a, 82–94) Improve heart functioning by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol (Pandya and Kumar 2007) Decrease pain Improve control of fluctuating blood glucose and symptoms associated with diabetes (Amita et al. 2009) Significantly improve anxiety, depression, and well-being in patients with menstrual irregularities and in those having psychological problems (Rani et al. 2011) Manage pre- and postsurgical conditions (Kumar 2013a, 56) Reduce insomnia and improve sleep: while not intended as a substitute for sleep, one hour of effective yoga nidra practice is equivalent to about four hours of sleep (Kumar 2013a) Increase energy, especially when needed most Reduce worry and enhance clear thinking and problem solving Improve and refresh your outlook Replace mood swings and emotional upsets with greater emotional understanding and stability Develop intuition and increase creativity Improve meditation and enhance its benefits Integrate, heal, and revitalize your body, mind, and spirit Enhance your Self-awareness and ability to experience witness consciousness (defined later in this chapter) Transform thoughts and feelings of separation into a direct experience of wholeness Finally, one of yoga nidra’s prime benefits is that it brings yoga’s essential teachings to life that have been handed down to us over the ages from the Upanishads, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Bhagavad Gita, Tantric texts, and others.

The Stress-Busting Effects of Exercise The anti-inflammatory effect is one way that exercise protects us from depression, but exercise does something else to protect us, and it comes back to how we react to everyday stressors. Remember the sixth sense, the vagus nerve? Well, the vagus nerve does more than give us a gut instinct. It’s also part of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) that determines our reactivity to stressors. Although 80 percent of the messages from the vagus nerve go from the body to the brain, giving rise to the sixth sense, the other 20 percent go from the brain to the body to neutralize stress. It’s the yin to the sympathetic yang. The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) dominates during stress; it’s always anxious to speed things up and insists you have one of two options: fight or flight. But the PNS knows how to slow things down (rest, digest), and it is especially good at bringing the body back to its homeostatic happy place after a stressful event.

When choice is limited or taken away, or when we have a sense of being stuck or trapped without options, we begin to look for a way out. In this search for survival we may feel the mobilizing energy of the sympathetic system with some form of anxiety or anger, or we may feel our energy draining as we are pulled into a dorsal vagal collapse.

Exactly how and why sleep disruption is linked to certain forms of cancer is also becoming clear. Part of the problem relates back to the agitating influence of the sympathetic nervous system as it is forced into overdrive by a lack of sleep. Ramping up the body’s level of sympathetic nervous activity will provoke an unnecessary and sustained inflammation response from the immune system. When faced with a real threat, a brief spike of sympathetic nervous system activity will often trigger a similarly transient response from inflammatory activity—one that is useful in anticipation of potential bodily harm (think of a physical tussle with a wild animal

Even so, our nervous systems can really only issue two commands: tension or release. This is the interplay between the sympathetic and parasympathetic wiring. In a moment of crisis, we can engage all of our physical and emotional powers to combat the situation we’re in, or we can relax and let the chaotic forces do with us as they will. At some point our personal powers have limits. There’s only so much that any of us can do. In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins.

When I feel anxious, I feel a crushing sensation in my chest.” I may then say to a patient: “Focus on that sensation and see how it changes when you take a deep breath out, or when you tap your chest just below your collarbone, or when you allow yourself to cry.” Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.

Whenever you inhale, the sympathetic nervous system is activated slightly, creating a slight increase in heart rate. Exhaling does just the opposite: turning on the parasympathetic nervous system and activating your vagus nerve slows the heart as you exhale. This is why many breathing techniques practiced in yoga are built around extending exhalations. The breathing technique in which one gradually makes the out breath longer works by progressively slowing the heart and thus aiding relaxation.

Did the sentence emerge from a ventral state where the words feel regulated, interesting, and filling? Did your words come from your sympathetic state, bringing a flavor of danger and a feeling of being fueled by too much energy? Or maybe the words emerged from your dorsal state and captured the sense of losing hope, disconnecting, and shutting down.

Start with finding the color of your center dorsal circle. Then add the color of your surrounding sympathetic circle. And finally the color of your ventral outer ring that holds the others in a circle of safety.

I sometimes hold my hands clasped tightly together imagining dorsal, spread my fingers apart, just touching, for sympathetic, and then have my hands wide apart to hold the other two in ventral.

I sometimes hold my hands clasped tightly together imagining dorsal, spread my fingers apart, just touching, for sympathetic, and then have my hands wide apart to hold the other two in ventral. Along with hand motions, explore other ways to hold your states. You might imagine holding three different-sized balls of light or three streams of energy. Take a moment and experiment with the variety of ways you can hold your states.

You’ll recognize cues of safety in the ways you feel alive and anchored in regulation and cues of danger in the ways your sympathetic and dorsal survival states activate. Bring perception to these experiences and see where your neuroception takes you.

Emotional flashbacks are also accompanied by intense arousals of the fight/flight instinct, along with hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system, the half of the nervous system that controls arousal and activation. When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal.

The endorphin system, too, is dependent on supportive, attuned relationships early in life for its development. “Face-to-face interactions activate the child’s sympathetic nervous system,” writes Louis Cozolino, a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. “These higher levels of activation correlate with increased production of oxytocin, prolactin, endorphins, and dopamine; some of the same biochemical systems involved in addiction.”[7

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing. Inhaling through the left nostril has the opposite effect: it works as a kind of brake system to the right nostril’s accelerator. The left nostril is more deeply connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest-and-relax side that lowers blood pressure, cools the body, and reduces anxiety. Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, to the area that influences creative thought and plays a role in the formation of mental abstractions and the production of negative emotions. In 2015, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recorded the breathing patterns of a schizophrenic woman over the course of three consecutive years and found that she had a “significantly greater” left-nostril dominance. This breathing habit, they hypothesized, was likely overstimulating the right-side “creative part” of her brain, and as a result prodding her imagination to run amok. Over several sessions, the researchers taught her to breathe through her opposite, “logical” nostril, and she experienced far fewer hallucinations.

This is because deep, steady breathing activates the calming parasympathetic nervous system, while rapid or ragged breathing triggers its opposite, the sympathetic nervous system, part of the fight-or-flight response.

I diagnose it by taking a careful history and by simply feeling hands. Cold hands (in warm rooms) are the result of reduced circulation due to overactivity of the sympathetic nervous system, which causes small arteries in the extremities to constrict. People with chronically cold hands often have disturbances of digestion and other body functions rooted in internal tension; if it persists, this imbalance of autonomic nerves can lead to serious problems

Emotional flashbacks are also accompanied by intense arousals of the fight/flight instinct, along with hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system, the half of the nervous system that controls arousal and activation. When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal. When despair predominates, a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur. A sense of feeling small, young, fragile, powerless and helpless is also commonly experienced in an emotional flashback, and all symptoms are typically overlaid with humiliating and crushing toxic shame.

Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart.

After ACTH is released into the bloodstream, it reaches the adrenal gland and, within a few minutes, triggers glucocorticoid release. Together, glucocorticoids and the secretions of the sympathetic nervous system (epinephrine and norepinephrine) account for a large percentage of what happens in your body during stress. These are the workhorses of the stress-response.

if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something.

The answer is all the usual suspects—too much sympathetic nervous system arousal, too much secretion of glucocorticoids. But another factor is relevant, one that is wildly controversial, namely estrogen.

A bit like a bouncer in front of a nightclub, who controls how many people enter the club depending on its capacity, our vagus nerve controls how we react to stress and helps up- or down-regulate the nervous system accordingly. When there is too much activity within the club, as in too many people (too much stress), the vagus nerve restricts new people from entering (sympathetic fight or flight response). Once things get a bit quieter inside and more people have left the club (coming back up the ladder), the vagus nerve allows for new people to enter (ventral vagal social engagement response).

happening in my highly distressed state of mind. A psychiatrist later explained that in order for someone to perform sexually, their sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems have to be operating at the same time, which isn’t possible when your brain is on operational overdrive.

The predominance of vegetation symbolism means not only the physiological predominance of the vegetative (sympathetic) nervous system; it also denotes, psychologically, the predominance of those processes of growth which go forward without the assistance of the ego.

Biology textbooks tell you the opposite action of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. One produces cold, blue-white anger, the other flushed apoplexy. Roy's was the pink sort. He was a big blonde man, with Viking bristle to eyebrows and mustache.

The ManAlive program teaches how the “angry man” is more often a response to experiencing a threat to their “image,” which triggers a fight or flight response. When the sympathetic nervous system gets triggered – breathing is more rapid, heart rate increases, blood pressure goes up – men call this stimulated response “anger.” In fact, anger is more often a response to injustice. What these men are experiencing is not anger but an arousal state. This is key information for men to have because, as they learn to interrupt this hyperarousal, they have more oppor-tunity to connect with what they may actually be feeling.

Difficulties with concentration are correlated with sleep impairment, especially insomnia, arising from hypervigilance. The insomniac person is always on alert, which increases his or her stress-hormone levels and heart rate, and turns on the sympathetic nervous system. One of the roles of histamine, released in response to stress, is to ensure that you’re wide-awake. These processes make relaxation and sleep difficult.

For a moment, Simon's sympathetic nervous system forgot he was arachnophobic. The sight of those spindly legs rising, like an ink drawing popping out of paper into three-dimensional space, should have caused a surge of adrenaline, a yelp of panic, and at least three feet of involuntary back-peddling.

What I would give to talk to Grandpa right now. In panicked moments on my first backpacking trip in Latin America, I’d called him from a pay phone just to hear his calming, rational voice for ten minutes before my credit ran out. “Your sympathetic nervous system is just manipulating you,” he’d tell me matter-of-factly. “A classic biological fight-or-flight response. All you need to do is take back control. Close your eyes to eliminate external stimulation. Then take a long, deep breath and release it slowly.” Though he’d given the instructions years ago, I stood outside the gas station and did what I’d been told. Eyes closed. Breathe in. Breathe out. “Now, instead of focusing on all the things that have gone wrong,” Grandpa would then say, “think about the next right step forward you could take to move things in a positive direction.

The alarm that goes off in our head makes our neurons activate the pituitary gland, which produces hormones that release corticotropin, which in turn circulates through the body via the sympathetic nervous system. The adrenal gland is then triggered to release adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline raises our respiratory rate and pulse and prepares our muscles for action, getting the body ready to react to perceived danger, while cortisol increases the release of dopamine and blood glucose, which is what gets us “charged up” and allows us to face challenges.

When something stressful occurs, our bodies are wired to release an entire cocktail of chemicals into our bloodstream to activate the sympathetic nervous system’s fight/flight/freeze/appease defense response. This is meant to be a short-term strategy to keep us alive. Once the event is over, our bodies are supposed to return to a state of parasympathetic nervous system balance, where we can function as usual in a calm and clear-minded way. But bigger traumatic events can activate our natural stress response to such a degree that our nervous system is overwhelmed and dysregulated to the point that this chemical cocktail is unable to be processed and we are left unable to fully recover. This can have a lasting effect on the nervous system, and when left untreated, trauma can interfere with our ability to inhabit our bodies, exhibit mental flexibility, function in everyday ways, learn, grow, love and securely attach.

The threat that we experience does not even need to be real, but the repeated perception of a threat, day after day, can push our nervous system into a traumatized state. When this happens, we are living in survival mode, stuck in sympathetic dominance and unable to access our ability to recover and thrive.

This grand strategy of breaking your food down into its simplest parts and reconverting it into complex storage forms is precisely what your body should do when you’ve eaten plenty. And it is precisely what your body should not do in the face of an immediate physical emergency. Then, you want to stop energy storage. Turn up the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, turn down the parasympathetic, and down goes insulin secretion: step one in meeting an emergency accomplished.

The sympathetic nervous system kicks into action during emergencies, or what you think are emergencies. It helps mediate vigilance, arousal, activation, mobilization. To generations of first-year medical students, it is described through the obligatory lame joke about the sympathetic nervous system mediating the four F’s of behavior—flight, fight, fright, and sex.

The sympathetic nervous system eases down when we feel secure and safe and can wear our natural faces—relaxed, confident, aware, and healthier.

of the fight/flight/freeze stress response system. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems make up the autonomic nervous system. “Autonomic” means it doesn’t need any direction from us. The sympathetic nervous system sends stress hormones to activate fight or flight, like turning the dimmer switch all the way to “on.” The fight-or-flight responses are meant to occur quickly and strongly to meet immediate danger. Unlike the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system slows things down. It turns the dimmer switch to “off” to activate the freeze part of the stress response (Porges 2011). It is also responsible for the rest/repair/restore functions that help to return your body, heart, and mind to balance once the threat is gone. The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems usually work well together. But with post-traumatic stress, fight/flight/

Our brain responds to intense emotions by activating the sympathetic nervous system: our heart rate goes up, stress hormones and/or endorphins are released depending on the emotion, and (when pressured) we prepare to flee or freeze.

when we count our breaths or repeat a calming phrase while breathing, we regain balance and control because the area of the brain in charge shifts from the brain stem to the motor cortex. Breathing also helps us to reset the autonomic nervous system by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and inhibiting the sympathetic (excitatory) one.

Taking care of the gut starts in the brain, where annoying, exasperating, enraging, or furious thoughts gather like storm clouds and cause a rise in your sympathetic nervous system. This invariably leads to muscle tension, higher blood pressure, sweaty palms, cold hands and feet, irregular heart rhythm, confused thinking, and gut and immune system problems.

Many people in our population suffer from chronic overactivity of the sympathetic nervous system, as if it were reacting to an emergency that never ends, and this is surely one root of hypertension.

You should breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose! * * * Consequences of chronic mouth breathing: - Face distortion because mouth breathing affects the facial profile. John Mew who pioneered the field of Orthotropics found that the face becomes long and teeth become bucky over time in habitual mouth breathers. - Dental crowding - Tooth decay: This is because mouth becomes very dry overnight from mouth breathing. After 3-4 hours of mouth breathing, the mouth pH becomes more acidic. When teeth are acidic (< pH 5.4 ) they start to deteriorate and tend towards decay. - Anxiety, because when breathing through the mouth, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. The vagus nerve connects the brain to the gut and regulates our stress response. Engaging in relaxation and nose-breathing can help with vagal toning and regulation of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. - Gut dysbiosis because of the sympathetic activation making parasympathetic digestion less effective. - Brain fog - Learning difficulties - Night time bedwetting in children

In recent years, scientists have come to understand that consciously controlling your breath can have huge benefits on your overall system, primarily with regard to the regulation of your nervous system in relation to anxiety, depression, and restlessness. The vagal response is the stimulation of the vagus nerve, which runs down along the anterior portion of your spine from your brain to your internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, a signal is sent to the brain to reduce your blood pressure and calm your body and mind, reducing stress and helping to manage chronic illness, as healing can happen only in a more relaxed state of being. For example, if your amygdala, the nerve center at the lower-central part of your brain, is agitated, it triggers your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and your fight-or-flight response. You may become anxious, fearful, reactive, or frozen. Once triggered, this response lasts at least 20 minutes, but you can often find yourself stuck in this state for much longer. According to Dr. Mladen Golubic, an internist at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, when in this state, you take shallow chest breaths, sometimes halting the breath completely, extending the effects of your SNS response. By taking deeper and fuller breaths, especially by allowing the abdomen to relax and expand, the vagus nerve is stimulated, and calm can quickly be restored. This calming and stress-reducing response is called the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) response, or vagal response. When your SNS is calmed, you have more access to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, boosting your ability to think clearly and rationalize. Dr. Golubic goes on to say, “The vagal response reduces stress. It reduces our heart rate and blood pressure.” This regulation of the nervous system is one of the primary benefits of a consistent pranayama practice.

To summarize, our autonomic nervous system is made up of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems with the vagus providing the primary pathways for the parasympathetic system through the dorsal and ventral branches.

The right nostril is a gas pedal. When you’re inhaling primarily through this channel, circulation speeds up, your body gets hotter, and cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate all increase. This happens because breathing through the right side of the nose activates the sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” mechanism that puts the body in a more elevated state of alertness and readiness. Breathing through the right nostril will also feed more blood to the opposite hemisphere of the brain, specifically to the prefrontal cortex, which has been associated with logical decisions, language, and computing.13

ventral, sympathetic, and dorsal, experiment with naming your states with your own labels. Turn inward, connect with each state again, and see what names you hear (e.g., sunny, stormy, foggy; flow, chaos, collapse; connected, activated, gone). Write down combinations of names that catch your interest and play with them until you find three that fit together and represent your experience.

In addition to this quick, short-term adrenaline-fueled response, the sympathetic system also responds to distress with the release of cortisol.

the three pathways of the autonomic nervous system (dorsal, sympathetic, and ventral) emerged and formed the building blocks of the system (hierarchy). Our preferred place, the place where we find experiences of health, growth, and restoration, is anchored in the ventral vagal state of safety and connection

The image I have been using recently for the ventral vagal state is a colorful umbrella that is sheltering the sympathetic and dorsal vagal states, keeping them safe and dry.

The function of the vagal brake is to allow us to feel, and use, some of the mobilizing energy of the sympathetic nervous system without being pulled into the survival state of fight and flight.

Daily practice of yoga, which often correlates with improved health, decreases the total amount of beta activity/outer directed attention/sympathetic nervous system function and conversely increases alpha or theta wave activity/inner directed attention/parasympathetic nervous system functions.

these days I got rather intimate with my sympathetic chain; after being treated like a biblical sand for decades I ain't gonna skip my season of anger, no way.

Beta wave activity in the brain correlates with outer-directed activity and dominance of sympathetic nervous system functions. Alpha wave activity, and lower brain frequencies, correlate with inner-directed passivity and dominance of parasympathetic nervous system functions.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions. Let’s take a moment and test this theory together. Try to focus on what you’re feeling and where, and this will ground you in the present moment. By focusing on how you are responding, you essentially remove yourself from being consumed by your emotions in that moment. This brings you back into your sensory perception and moves the response in your brain back into the cortex and neocortex. This transition helps bring you back into a more logical state where emotions are not controlling your reactions.

When our internal danger response system is out of whack, we may experience excess sympathetic nervous system activity that is characterized by anxiety, heart palpitations, tremors, high blood pressure, excessive sweating, a dry mouth, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and/or frequent urination. Small doses of quaking aspen bark restore balance to the autonomic nervous system and relieve anxiety and worry by grounding the electricity of the mental sphere in the waters of the emotions.

As a traumatized child, your over-aroused sympathetic nervous system also drives you to become increasingly hypervigilant. Hypervigilance is a fixation on looking for danger that comes from excessive exposure to real danger. In an effort to recognize, predict and avoid danger, hypervigilance is ingrained in your approach to being in the world. Hypervigilance narrows your attention into an incessant, on-guard scanning of the people around you.