Your Nervous System Explained

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As we head into the holiday season, I want to give you some ways to prepare your nervous system for ALL the things coming your way. With all of the holiday buildup, family visits and kids being home for winter break, your nervous system is going to get activated and you're going to need to work harder to reset it. 

You’ve probably heard me talk about your stress response. As a parent, your stress response gets activated pretty often. Your brain interprets misbehavior or another everyday situation as an emergency, your brain sounds the alarm and your body gets flooded with “stress juice”. 

Today, I’m zooming out to talk about the bigger picture of your entire central nervous system. And I’ll show you how you can use your own nervous system to calm yourself more quickly. 

Your Nervous System Explained

There are two main parts of your nervous system. The first is your sympathetic nervous system. You might also have heard this talked about as your fight/flight/freeze/faint/fawn response). The second part is your parasympathetic nervous system, which includes the vagus nerve. 

The two parts work together to help you respond to stressful situations and then decrease that stress response, kinda like a teeter totter. One is activated at a time, while the other is decreased. 

Think of your nervous system as an information highway running through your body at all times. It takes in information through your senses and tells the brain how to respond to what you are experiencing. Neurons (brain cells) carry this message all throughout your body. 

If your brain interprets any of this information as dangerous, it triggers your stress response and activates the sympathetic nervous system. To your brain, a threat can be something like a kid spitting in your face or getting a bad grade or spilling juice all over the table. Stress juice floods your body, giving you the oomph to respond to the danger. 

When your stress response is activated, there is a period of time where you aren’t able to regulate your nervous system. When that threat has passed, you start to come back online and your parasympathetic nervous system comes into play. 

The parasympathetic nervous system is your best friend when it comes to managing your stress response. It has its own network of nerves and helps relax your body after periods of stress or danger. 

It typically activates on its own after a stressor, but when we have triggers coming at us all the time (like in parenting life), it gets weakened and doesn’t respond as well. That’s why you need tools to reset the system on your own. 

When we talk about calm and taking pause breaks to reset, the parasympathetic nervous system is the piece that we’re resetting. 

Chronic Stress

Your stress response is healthy and necessary. But often, our brains misinterpret things (like spilled juice being a life-or-death emergency). Parenting is a lot. What ends up happening is that you have a lot of demands and stressors coming at you one after the next, and you don't always have enough time to recover from them.

This causes us to be chronically stressed. We constantly have stress juice pouring through our bodies, and it makes it really difficult to stay calm.

This is what’s going on when you find yourself getting angry and annoyed about every single thing your kid does. You’ve probably been in an activated stress response for a while, so you are dysregulated. 

As a mom, you’re dealing with stressors all day long, especially if you have more than one kid. But there are little breaks in between.

Our goal is to practice getting ourselves into the parasympathetic nervous system so that we can more easily recover from stress. We want that teeter totter to go easily up and down so that we flow smoothly between the two states of stress and non-stress. 

The way to do this is to intentionally activate your parasympathetic nervous system in times of calm. This helps strengthen the response so it’s easier for you to access when you do get stressed. 

Strengthening the Parasympathetic Nervous System

Regulating your nervous system is like digestion - stress juice comes up and it’s got to get out somehow. 

The best way to do this is to preset or reset your nervous system most days through rhythm, relationship or reward. 

In general, I think the best thing is taking 20 minutes of movement a day. If you don’t have a 20-minute chunk of time, the goal is still to focus on soothing yourself, but those 20 minutes can be spread throughout your day.  Some of my favorite stress reset exercises take less than a minute to do, but it’s enough to let your nervous system see that you’re safe and okay. 

Some examples of resets during your day include:

• Taking a walk before dinner
• Doing a YouTube yoga class
• Calling a friend to chat
• Lighting a candle
• Hugging a pillow while taking some deep breaths, noticing the sensations in your body and observing what is around you
• Think back to a moment in the past when you felt safe and connected
• Listen to some music or a podcast you love while your kids are watching a show

I also encourage you to reframe the time you spend doing these reset activities. You’re not ignoring your kids. This is also parenting. You’re recharging so that you show up the way you want to as a mom. The cool thing is that your kids will probably start doing it with you, and they’ll learn to reset their own nervous systems from a young age. 

Your stress response isn’t going away (and we don’t want it to). What I want for you is to not get stuck there. You don't have to stay stressed and activated all the time. 

This holiday season, I hope you’ll spend time thinking about your nervous system and taking care of it as much as you can. Go for walks, connect with other adults, nurture healthy sleep habits, spend time in nature and be KIND to yourself. 

You’ll Learn:

• The two parts of your nervous system and how they work together
• Why managing your stress is so important
• Signals that you’re in a stress response
• Some of my favorite mini stress resets (and where you can get a list of them for free)