Regulate Your Nervous System
How To Significantly Reduce Chronic Stress
We are so used to feeling stressed that sometimes we don’t even realise how stressed we are feeling. It feels perfectly normal to have a mind that is racing at 100 miles an hour; to be constantly doing, doing, doing, and to struggle to sleep because the brain has so much to process.
It feels normal until we realise… that it isn’t quite right. Maybe the body starts to send signals that we can no longer ignore, or maybe the first symptoms of burnout come up (anxiety, memory loss, overload, struggle to focus…).
What if you could balance your nervous system so that you hardly ever get into that overload mode? What if there were strategies and tools you could use to decrease overwhelm and think more clearly?
In this article, I will explore how you can regulate your nervous system so that you are more balanced, and experience significantly less chronic stress.
Nervous System: SNS & PNS
Before we look at what techniques you can use to reduce chronic stress, let’s look at stress itself. There are two types of stress:
Acute stress: This stress is short-term and a result of an immediate situation. This could be having a challenging conversation, or dropping your cup of tea. Something immediate happens that triggers a stress response in the body. Acute stress could also be when you are holding a presentation or giving a performance of any kind. Often the most memorable events in our lives are linked to acute stress, which is why they say that stress can be positive! Some of our best moments were linked to acute stress.
Chronic stress: This is long term stress, that lasts days, weeks, or even months. This could be because of on-going worries around work or personal life. It is this type of stress that impacts your health, and increases the risk of many diseases.
Our body is meant to deal with acute stress, not chronic stress. The challenge in today’s society is that we have come to normalise chronic stress, and ignore the long-term consequences of it.
How we deal with stress depends on our nervous system! It is the nervous system that directs our internal response. It has two main branches:
Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS): Commonly refferred to "fight or flight". The SNS gets you ready to go, to move, to take action. The SNS is linked to our survival mechanism, meant for us to react to external threats. When the SNS is triggered, this increases your heart rate, blood pressure and releases stress hormones such as cortisol.
Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS): Commonly refferred to"rest and digest". The PNS acts like a break onto the body, after the danger has passed! The PNS promotes relaxation, by lowering your heart rate and blood pressure.
Most of us, in this fast paced world, have an overly active SNS, and need to regulate our nervous system by activating more our PNS.
That being said, if you struggle with depression, or lack of momentum, then it could be that your PNS is more active, and you need to incorporate more activities to activate your SNS (these activities could be: exercise, cold exposure etc.).
Regulating your nervous system is correlated to regulating your HPA Axis (Hipotalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis). The HPA Axis is your ‘gas/break’ pedal. If you continue to see something as a threat, the HPA will continue to tell your body to release cortisol… This leads to long term chronic stress. On the other hand, once you stop seeing the current situation as a threat, the HPA axis acts like a break and the stress hormones diminish, and you can relax again!
Short Term Regulation
If you are feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and drained, what are some tools that you can use now to shift and activate your PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System)?
Coherent Breathing: This is my go-to method when I am feeling stressed. Many relaxation methods involve breathing and there is a reason for this! It works! Coherent breathing helps you to feel grounded and calm.
Implementation: Close your eyes, and breathe in for 5 secs, breathe out for 5 secs. Do this for 5 to 10 minutes and notice how much calmer you feel afterwards.
Impact: Coherent breathing activates your vagus nerve, which is part of your PNS, and helps you to relax. A study showed that the levels of GABA (that regulates neural excitability) increased after coherent breathing.
Humming: This is something I only discovered recently and it works like magic, especially if you are highly stressed. It relaxes the whole body and mind.
Implementation: Close your eyes and block your ears (this means that you get no external input from the world and shut off all stimulation). Hum out loud one note until you are out of breath. Repeat. Do this for five minutes or so.
Impact: Humming enables greater exhalation. This stimulates your vagus nerve. Humming instantly makes you feel calmer.
Reframing: The previous tools were somatic tools (using the body) but there are also cognitive tools (using the mind) that can support a decrease in stress. Reframing works like a charm.
Implementation: Given any current situation, ask yourself: ‘How else could I look at this situation?’, ‘How will I feel about this a year from now?’, ‘What can I learn from this?’
Impact: By changing your perception of the current situation, you change your emotional response to it. This in turn affects how your body perceives the situation, can support a shift from an overly active SNS to stimulating your PNS.
There are many other tools that can support you on the moment to deal with stress. The main thing to remember is:
Pause: Stop the overstimulation
Breathe: Come back to the body
Perception: Shift your thoughts
There are also long term tools you can use to ensure greater regulation of your nervous system.
Long Term Regulation
By practising long term strategies, you can build greater resilience and diminish chronic stress. Here are the core methods you can put in place for long term regulation:
Cold Exposure: Everybody who knows me, knows that I am a great fan of cold showers and have been for years! Cold exposure in any way (cold showers, ice baths, morning dips in the sea/lake!) activate your stress response. This means that over time, you start to adapt to this stress response and it makes you more resilient to stress. This is why cold exposure is referred to as hormetic stressor.
Implementation: Begin with a brief cold shower, or cold dip of approx. 30 secs to one minute. You can increase over time if need be, but 1min - 3min already has lots of health benefits!
Impact: Through cold exposure, your body releases of norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that enables greater focus and alertness! That’s why I am hooked to cold showers, because they make me feel alive and alert!
Note: Saunas have a similar effect, as they are also a hormetic stressor. So if you hate the cold that much, alternating sauna & cold showers or simply just saunas also works great!
Exercise: People who exercise regularly get sick less. Why is that? There are several factors. One of them is that exercise boosts the immune system. Another reason is that by putting the body under physical stress, it helps to cope and be more resilient with mental & emotional stress.
Implementation: Daily exercise of any form support your mind or body. This can be a full workout, a run, but also a yoga session, or walking.
Impact: Exercising is magical because it both activates your SNS (when you are exercising), and then your PNS (after you have exercised). It also helps the body to release endorphins, that make you feel great!
Fasting: Yet another hormetic stressor! Fasting helps you to get used to physical stress, and cope better with stressful situations.
Implementation: There are a ton of variants when it comes to fasting. Intermittent fasting is the most common (skipping breakfast or diner), but also fasting one day per week/month. When it comes to fasting, tune into your body and check how you feel. From experience, I have noticed that men do better on fasting than women (though some women also enjoy fasting!), this is probably linked to the hormonal cycle of women.
Impact: During fasting, the body goes through a process called autophagy, where the body breaks down and recycles damaged cells and tissues. This autophagy process removes damaged and dysfunctional cells, which supports a healthier body. A healthier body, leads to a healthier mind, and a healthier way of managing stress.
Deep Relaxation: Exercises that promote deep relaxation, such as yoga nidra, self-hypnosis, guided meditations support the regulation of the nervous system by activating your Parasympathetic Nervous System.
Implementation: Try a guided NSDR (Non Sleep Deep Rest) practise for 20min to 30 min. You can even lie down and do a body scan. Notice afterwards how light you feel, how much tension has evaporated!
Impact: NDSR practises reduce stress hormones, such as cortisol and help you to feel more relaxed.
Important note! If you are feeling close to burnout, hormetic stressors such as cold exposure, fasting and exercise can be too much for your body. In a state of high stress, the best process to regulate your nervous system are breathing and calming exercises, guided meditations, and time off! This means time away from work, time away from tech devices etc.
Last Thoughts
There are many techniques that you can use to decrease chronic stress in your life. A powerful combination of long term strategies (like meditation, exercising and cold exposure) with short term methods (coherent breathing) will enable you to better regulate your nervous system.
Lastly, if you can pause during the day and just check in with yourself: How are you feeling now? This will increase your body and emotional awareness. Through this renewed awareness, it will be easier for you to regulate yourself.
Awareness always comes first. Progress and transformation follows.
Enjoy the journey,
Thank you for reading,
Katie