Nervous System - Wired To Survive, Designed To Rest

Your Nervous System Has a Voice, Learn to Listen
Most of us were never taught what it feels like to truly feel safe in our own body. This episode introduces the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, fight-or-flight versus rest and repair. You'll begin to understand why so many of us stay braced, and what it means to finally let that go. Awareness is always the first step home.

Transcript

Welcome back, Find a comfortable position, Let your hands rest, You can sit or simply lie down, Relax your shoulders, Relax your belly, Exhale out from your chest and relax your tailbone and take two short inhale and a deep exhale. In our last episode, We talked about tears, About why we cry, What tears are made of, What they are trying to do, Today we go one layer deeper, Today we talk about the system that tears are a part of, Your nervous system. You have heard this phrase before, Fight or flight, Maybe you have felt it, Heart racing, Breath shortening, Jaw tightening, A sudden sharp alertness like every cell just switched on, That is your sympathetic nervous system, It is ancient, It is fast and it was designed to keep you alive, When your nervous system detects a threat, Real or perceived, It floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol, Your heart rate climbs, Your muscles prepare, Your digestion pauses, Everything non-essential shuts down because right now the body has one job, Survive and then there is the other side, The parasympathetic nervous system, Sometimes called rest and digest, This is the state where your body heals, Where digestion works, Where sleep is deep, Where the immune system functions, Where you can actually feel something without being overwhelmed by it, Here is the truth that most of us were never told, We are not meant to live in a sympathetic activation, It is a gear not a home, It is meant to be entered quickly and exited once the threat has passed but for many of us, The threat never seems to pass, The emails keep coming, The pressure doesn't lift, The relationships feel complicated, The body stays braced not because there is a lion in the room but because the nervous system has forgotten what safety feels like, This is not weakness, Neither is it's a personal failure, This is what happens when a system designed for short bust of stress is asked to run that way indefinitely, The nervous system is not broken, It is doing exactly what it was designed to do and just needs permission to come down, So what does a regulated nervous system feel like? It feels like a breath that reaches all the way down, It feels like being able to sit still without restlessness, It feels like responding to something difficult without immediately reacting, It feels like being okay with what is, Does that feels familiar or does it feel like something you only glimpse occasionally on a quiet morning in a moment of stillness after a really good sleep, For many people it does and that gap between how you are living and how your body is designed to live is exactly what this series is about, In our next episode we meet the bridge between these two states, A nerve, Ancient, Wandering, Extraordinary, The vagus nerve and we will meet a practice born thousands of years ago in India that works differently with this nerve to bring the body home, For now one small invitation, Sometime today, Not in a dramatic way, Just quietly, Place one hand on your chest and ask yourself, Am I praised right now or am I resting, Not to fix anything, Just to notice, Awareness is always the first step, Take a breath in and slowly out, I will see you in episode 3.