What the heck is nervous system (dys)regulation?
If you’ve been dealing with a lot of stress lately, then you’re probably feeling it in your body. You might feel run down and exhausted, sleep deprived, and more. It turns out that many health problems that stem from stress are actually rooted in nervous system dysregulation. Keep reading to learn what that means and what you can do about it.
You, Your Body, and Stress
We’ve all been there. That looming deadline. The dreaded email from a colleague. A blowout fight with your partner. Or just chronic worrying about a loved one. You feel your heart rate speed up and your temperature rise. Your breath quickens and you may even start to sweat.
Your stress response is turned on- or in other words, the sympathetic state of your autonomic nervous system has been activated. It’s fight-or-flight time.
Your autonomic nervous system- which controls a long list of involuntary bodily functions like breathing, digestion, and sexual reproduction- has two states:
Sympathetic- ‘fight-or-flight’
Parasympathetic- ‘rest-and-digest’
Normally, these two states turn on and off regularly and exist in balance (also called homeostasis). You need both to survive. But many of us lack that balance- our nervous system is dysregulated and we’re living in fight or flight. Let’s look at why that might be.
Understanding the stress response
Originally, humans’ stress response was designed to help us to escape life-threatening danger. If you were living in the wild and came face to face with a lion- for example- your sympathetic nervous system would switch into high gear.
Your adrenal glands would start pumping out cortisol and adrenaline, to help you think quickly and respond to danger. Stored blood sugar would be released into the body, sending energy to your limbs so that you can escape the impending threat. And non-essential bodily functions like digestion and sexual reproduction would be put on hold so that you could focus 100% on the task at hand.
Today still, all of this happens nearly instantaneously when your brain perceives a threat. But here’s the kicker:
It doesn’t matter whether the threat is a hungry lion or a traffic jam. Your body will respond just the same.
That would be fine, except that humans tend to have a tough time getting out of fight or flight mode. There’s a famous book that highlights this distinction between humans and other animals, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” (by Robert M. Sapolsky). When a lion attacks a pack of zebras, their stress response is activated and they flee. Maybe the lion kills one zebra. At that point, the threat is gone, and the rest of the zebras go back to chewing grass and living their lives, as if nothing happened.
We humans struggle with that. When we get stressed, it’s almost always a non-life-threatening situation. So we’re not running or fighting off an enemy. There is no physical response. All those hormones that are released into the body when the sympathetic nervous system is activated start to accumulate.
The other thing is, humans have a hard time letting go of stress. Think about the last time you had a fight with a friend. There was the moment that the fight happened. And then there’s all the time that you spent rehashing it in your mind, activating your stress response again and again.
When the sympathetic nervous system gets turned on too often and you don’t have effective stress comping mechanisms in place, physical symptoms will appear. You’ll also notice some emotional/mental symptoms emerge, too.
