S E18: Ep 18 – Your beginners guide to the nervous system

Hello and welcome to the Pain Free Living Podcast with me, your host, Bob Allen.

And what I'm going to do today is to give you a little bit of a heads up on the nervous system.

It is really, really complex.

This is a short podcast so I'm not going to go into the ins and outs in detail.

I'll do that in a longer podcast another time.

So today all I'm going to talk about is how you can hack the nervous system to improve your well being in a very simple way.

So before I do that, I need to give you a little bit of a breakdown of the nervous system and how it all fits together because then it will make what I say later on just a little bit easier to picture and how that might work.

So starting at the top level, we've got the nervous System basically controls 11 of the other body's systems.

Those other systems include the circulatory system, muscle control, it includes the bones, it includes the digestive system, the heart, the lungs and breathing, whole rafter systems.

What the nervous system is, it's like that information superhighway, taking information from the nerves into the spinal cord to the brain.

Brain modifies that information, then it comes back down the spinal cord and out into the periphery.

So you've got the central nervous system, which is the brain and the spinal cord, and then you've got the peripheral nervous system, which is the muscles and joints and also this other box called the autonomic nervous system.

And that's the thing that I'm going to talk about.

So key thing about the autonomic nervous system is we don't have voluntary control over what that does.

Now the autonomic, I know they're throwing a lot of information at you, but it is quite relevant.

So the autonomic nervous system that consists of three other systems.

So you've got the parasympathetic nervous system, you've got the sympathetic nervous system, and then you've got the enteric nervous system.

Now I'm going to lump the enteric and the parasympathetic nervous system together just to make things a little bit more simple.

And now we get onto the bit that hopefully you'll be able to relate to a lot more.

So we've got the sympathetic nervous system and we've got the parasympathetic nervous system.

Sympathetic nervous system controls the organs, muscles and joints, et cetera, for your fight flight or Freeze side of the system.

So if you back in the olden days when saber toothed tigers used to be around the corner, you were encountering something that looked like a sober toothed tiger, it would increase the heart rate, increase blood pressure, it would reduce the blood flow to the digestive system.

So all the stuff that you didn't need to fight the thing or run away from it or basically freeze.

So you make yourself as small as possible, don't move and hopefully it will just go straight past you.

That was key to our survival back in the day.

In our 247 switched on society, we tend to spend a lot of time in that sympathetic side of the nerd assistant.

Where we are going, where we're either on our phones, we're watching the latest box set, we've got a deadline to hit on our work, we have the boss emailing us at 12 o'clock midnight because there's something that we haven't done that we need to do, etc.

Etc.

So we spend a lot of time in that kind of aroused state where we're ready to fight something, fight it, run away from it or do something else.

So we spend a lot of time with the sympathetics up here somewhere.

The parasympathetic nervous system.

Now that side of things is more about rest, digest and restore.

So it's when you've had a good meal, it's when you are listening to music, it's when you are relaxed, taking a hot bath, those sorts of things to calm the system down and to get you back on a more even keel.

Little bit of sympathetic is a good thing because it helps to hit deadlines.

I'm one of those people that likes to leave things till the last second and then get it done because my brain goes right, get this stuff done now.

And having a increased heart rate, increased blood flow, increased breathing, those sorts of things help you prepare to do that thing, whether it's going to an interview, hitting a deadline, whatever that is.

On the other side of the coin we've got the rest and digest bit where we kind of down regulate and we like to chill out or whatever.

Whichever way we do that, whether it is listening to music or watching the latest box set or going for a long walk in nature, those kinds of things all help to downregulate.

Point I'm making with this one is that you got sympathetics, you got the parasympathetics sympathetics, good.

Gets you ready to do stuff, gets you ready to deliver things.

That's great.

Parasympathetics rest, digest, chill out, do nothing.

So what tends to happen is we tend to be very much in the sympathetic side which can lead to high blood pressure, it can lead to headaches, loss, increased muscle tension, poor digestion.

So constipation, ibs, all those sorts of things are related to what we call sympathetic overdrive.

The good news is that you can bring up the parasympathetics and to help down regulate the sympathetics and you bring up the parasympathetics by doing things like taking the time to, to do some deep breathing, taking the time to do some meditation, taking time to do yoga or whatever it is that you like to do that helps to calm your system down.

So the more you can up regulate that parasympathetics by just taking time out for yourself, the less stressed you are, the less stressed you feel, the better you sleep and those sorts of things.

So it's to say that regardless of how stressed you are, regardless of what else is going on, you can work on increasing that parasympathetic overdrive, that parasympathetic load that helps calm the system down and your body will thank you for it.

So yeah, that's it for today.

So it's a little bit of a very, very quick run through the nervous system and how it's structured but also to give you an idea of if you are feeling stressed, there are things that you can do to calm that system down.

I'll put a link in the show notes to other ways that you can increase the parasympathetic side of the system and hopefully help you to calm down and to have a better, longer life.

So that's it for today.

I hope you enjoyed that.

If you've got any questions, drop them into the comments below.

Tell all your friends, tell your stress friends that there is a way that they can take back control of that system.

Amount of drive by improving there by breathing more by breathing better, go for long walks in nature, those sorts of things.

So yeah, that's it for today.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Tell all your friends if you did.

Don't tell your friends if you didn't.

Thank you and I'll see you at the next one.