De-Stress the Nervous System
And reach your goals faster and with less stress!
Let’s start with a single celled organism, we’ll call him Frank.
Frank is just chilling in a petri dish, not doing a lot. He has a certain amount of energy inside of him keeping him alive for now, but he cannot survive forever. At some point, he will need food so, unless there is food put in the petri dish, he will just sit there until he uses up his available energy. Eventually, he will die because there is not enough energy left to repair and regenerate him.
What happens if we add a negative stimulus to Frank’s petri dish? If we add an acid to the petri dish, then Frank will sense a threat to his survival in his environment and will use precious energy to move directly away from it. What if instead of an acid, we add a morsel of food to Frank’s petri dish? Now, Frank will notice the positive, survival stimulus and will use energy to move towards the food.
Here is the important part: The amount of energy expended to either move away from the bad thing or towards the good thing is the same, but the motivation behind each movement is different.
The hormonal and neurological pathways Frank will use to either go towards the good thing or away from the bad thing are very different. To put things into perspective, you have 100 trillion Franks inside your body that are reacting to stimulus, either to a positively towards goal or negatively to fear or stress.
Now, let’s dive into the nervous system itself starting with the Autonomic nervous system. Think of the Autonomic as the processes that happen, for the most part, without cognitive thought. This system can be broken into three branches.
First Branch: The Enteric
The Enteric branch includes the gut, intestine, and the stomach. There is a connection between the gut and brain, but the brain is not required. The gut can be solo. (Think about somebody in a coma. How do they stay alive for so long? We feed them, but the food is digested by itself without the brain’s help).
Second Branch: The Parasympathetic
The Parasympathetic Branch is the branch of rest and repair. This is when Frank is sitting in the petri dish before the stimulus enters, conserving energy, because there is no new energy coming into the system. Similarly, when you sleep, your Parasympathetic system helps you rest and repair your hair, skin, nails, bones, muscles, and all the things we need to survive and be healthy.
Third Branch: The Sympathetic
The Sympathetic branch is in charge of the fight or flight response, which often gets confused with the stress response. They are not the same! The Sympathetic deals with the energy to move and there are two different neurotransmitters or hormones that can actually move us.
Norepinephrine – With the negative stimulus, Frank is going to use a lot more norepinephrine to run away.
Acetylcholine – With the positive stimulus, Frank is going to use a lot more acetylcholine to run towards.
Norepinephrine is a stress hormone and acetylcholine is an activation. One is positive and one is negative. More importantly, acetylcholine is also used to rest and repair, and that is why Frank will die if he does not get the positive stimulus of food at some point. Likewise, you will die if you do not eat for a long enough time because your acetylcholine needs to be replenished with rest, water, and nutrition. Your body needs these things in order to stay alive. If you are in a sympathetic drive for too long without being in an actual stressed out state, then you might use too much acetylcholine and the cell will die. Ultimately, you need the parasympathetic and the sympathetic to be balanced with each other.
A real-life example is if you want to lose a bunch of weight. You may go to the gym and work out for four hours until you cannot feel any of your muscles anymore and are so sore the next day that you can barely move. The first thing to consider is, do you have enough acetylcholine left in the system to repair your body after your workout? Are you able to break down the food, drink enough water, and sleep enough to repair? No. And if the acetylcholine was used up in the first hour of your workout, then you had three hours of ridiculously high levels of stress in your body where you are breaking down the tissue faster than they can be repaired. This is where a personal trainer can come in with the right amount of exercise your system can handle. This is where you need to make sure you are getting enough rest, hydration, and food to repair the body enough to maintain the level of success that you are looking for.
The same depletion of acetylcholine happens with Frank if he is constantly wasting energy running away from negative stimulus. Eventually, he will starve to death because there is not enough repair stimulus left in his cell and he will break down. Again, you have 100 trillion Frank cells in your body. So if you are constantly in a state of breakdown because of this stress response, rather than a growth response, then that is a big problem.
This is where I like to introduce goals. If you have a goal, you need to know what it is going to take to get yourself there and what it is going to take to repair. It requires both sides of the sympathetic branch, the norepinephrine and the acetylcholine. If you do not have both sides, you will be constantly running away from things, wasting energy, hoping in vain, it will help you reach your goal.
Now, let’s dive into the other side of the nervous system, the Somatic branch, where the magic happens. The Somatic branch is comprised of our:
1. Senses
2. Muscles
3. Responsibility
Our senses, such as the visual system, the auditory system, the gustatory system, or the feeling system, are all programmable. We come into this world with no idea what is what. Our eyes barely work, and over time, they are programmed as we are exposed to different stimuli. If our exposure is negative, then our senses start to get programmed, by themselves, to see the world as a threat. We are constantly putting more and more negative stimuli, more norepinephrine, into our cells.
To take it up a notch, let’s say your senses are telling you there are multiple problems, not just one negative stimulus in your cell. Eventually, you will be pushed directly away from the negative stimulus, even if your goals are in a slightly different direction. That is a problem because now you mentally want to go directly towards your goals, but there is more information from the senses driving us away from our goals. This system is great for survival, but it is not great for helping us to reach our goals and thrive.
Our muscles are also programmable. How many people do not work out and then wonder why they are not reaching their fitness goals? Well, the body itself is actually saying, “Hey, this goal is too far away. I see everybody else on Tiktok and Instagram achieving incredible fitness goals, but I can’t get off the couch.” The cells start dying because they cannot reach the positive stimulus. You have to get the muscles back into a state where they can actually move again, and then you will be surprised at how much you can achieve.
Lastly, responsibility, which is the ability to respond. It is really difficult to live a happy, healthy life when your body cannot actually do what you want it to, when you are constantly sensing everything in your environment is a threat. Eventually, you start to get into a learned helplessness response where you may say to yourself, “I have a certain amount of energy. I can pick up the remote and that is about it”. This starts to lead to a lethargic, apathetic state, which is no fun. I have been there myself.
The fastest way to change — to program yourself to go after your goals and live a happy fulfilling life — is to go after your somatic nervous system (not the autonomic, at least not at first). If you spend time reprogramming your somatic system, you will start to strengthen your acetylcholine pathway and lean less on your norepinephrine stress pathway. The more often you do this, the more your body forgets to use your stress pathway, unless there is an acute stress. If someone jumps out at you, you run and fight, but then to get back to your goals and start going after the easier pathways, the ones that do not stress you out as much.
If you feel ready to de-stress your nervous system, then clearly defining the goals in your life should be your first step. What is your dream? What are your objectives? What is the thing that you really are here to do on earth? What is the thing that you love and that makes you love yourself and other people? If you do not know, never fear! Reach out in the comment below, email me at omid@fourlightswellness.com, or join my newsletter here.
Lastly, I have an entire course called Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress about how to actually fix overly stressed nervous systems with easy exercises, specifically for people that have a lot of stress in their lives, whether from daily experiences or deeper traumas. I would love to help you program all of your cells to go more towards your goals.
I hope this information is helpful to you and as always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day. I’ll talk to you in the next one.