The Autonomic Nervous System
In western society, we have become experts in science, history, mathematics, engineering, architecture, robotics, programming and so many other languages, but we have completely forgot the languages of our bodies. We got used to have physicians telling us what our body needs, instead of being the first receptors of our internal messages.
Being embodied requires a certain level of comprehension on how our physiology affects our behavior, our choices, our relationships and our well-being. We can acquire that knowledge that is not only cognitive but also somatic, or we can go a lifetime without coming close to understanding this sacred physical form in which we experience life itself.
“Awareness also means learning with the signs of stress that are in our own bodies. How our bodies telegraph us when our minds have missed the cues. In both human and animal studies, it's been observed that the physiological stress response is a more accurate gauge of the organisms real experience then conscious awareness of observed behaviour.”
Gabor Mate
The nervous system and our stress responses are lenses through which we can become familiar with our inner selves, our physiology, our behaviors, and the patterns we use to navigate life, opening the doors to the transformations we needed to achieve a more fulfilling life.
The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) lays the foundation from which our life experience is built. Everything we do, from waking up to resting, changing direction, backing away, calling for attention or seeking isolation, eating, crying, arguing, setting boundaries, etc. – everything is guided by our ANS.
Hopefully, after learning a little bit about it, you’ll be able to follow more the wisdom of your body and a little less your mind.
The ANS is responsible for:
Automatic bodily functions – digestion, heart rate, breathing, urination, pupil dilation (e.g. if we look in the direction of a bright sun, our pupils will go small, or they will open up if we’re in the dark), our sexual arousal, hormonal release, metabolism, our sleep cycle, tissue repair, ALL of what happens automatically in order to keep our body functioning is thanks to the automatic nervous system;
Our survival responses – fight, flight or freeze (we’ll explore each of them ahead);
Social engagement – the capacity to connect with other humans, other creatures and the world where we live in.
This essay is going to be focusing more on the second and the third, but it’s good to keep in mind that our survival responses come from the same neural pathways that regulate the healthy functioning of all the other systems.
Why should we learn about the ANS?
To become closer to who we really are and recover the agency of our lives.
We grow and develop from the relationships we establish with the environment. From the sounds and movements in our mother's womb, to the relationship with our parents, friends, our home, our community, with objects or physical places, the ANS is constantly collecting information, "learning" about what’s life, and re-adapting our neurophysiological patterns of protection or secure connection. By default it will seek safe connections and avoid the exchanges that aren’t perceived as safe.
It’s not that the ANS judges on whether something is “good” or “bad”, it just 'analyzes' each situation to manage the risk and seek for safety, well below the level of our conscious awareness. Even before the brain makes meaning of an event, the ANS has already initiated an adaptive survival response based on neuroception – that is the unconscious perception and autonomic response to the cues of safety, danger, and life-threat that might come from within our bodies, from the world around us or from the connections we establish with others.
“Every autonomic response is an action in service of survival”. No matter how congruent or irrational an action is, from the mind’s perspective, it’s always an adaptive biological survival response.
We often seek to understand the 'why' of behaviors and attitudes, attributing judgments and beliefs about who we are, based on the things we do, often burdening ourselves with guilt and shame. The inner critic we all have is a product of a society that doesn't recognize or promote a compassionate understanding of our basic survival principles, a society that fuels separation, instead of connection.
As mentioned above, there is always autonomic activity going on, otherwise we would need to choose when to inhale and exhale, consciously control all phases of digestion, the direction of the blood in our vessels, or tell our bladder that’s time to empty out. Everything we do involuntarily is thanks to the activity of this complex system, responsible for maintaining homeostasis, managing the functioning of all organs according to the readings of safety and danger.
What makes the ANS so interesting is that when we face a threat, this innate automation takes over our entire existence, including our rational mind and behavior. Meaning that most of our experiences of feeling stuck or lacking control, are related to the functioning of our ANS and its levels of regulation/dysregulation.
When we feel safe enough, we have control over our behavior.
When we don’t feel safe, it’s the autonomic nervous system that takes the wheel of our life, our choices and our thoughts.
For example, if we’re walking down a park with a close friend, relaxed and cheerfully sharing our week, observing the surroundings with curiosity, we will feel free to choose if we want to change direction, or stop by the lake to watch the birds. But if we hear a sudden loud sound at the end of the park, we’re going to immediately and automatically stop our conversation, turn around and look in the direction of the sound. We’ll experience the urgency to identify if the source of that sound represents a real life threat or not. The need to orientate ourselves to danger is part of our autonomic response.
Another common example might be, we're in the kitchen preparing a meal, choosing the ingredients, listening to a podcast, and being aware about the time because we want to have the lunch prepared before our kids arrive. Suddenly, a sharp knife slips from our hand. In less than a second, even before we’re able to make any though about it, we spread our legs apart on a jump and try to avoid the cutting instrument from falling on our feet. It’s automatic, and completely out of our control.
We need this innate capacity to constantly track and respond to cues of danger or safety.
The ANS is constantly accessing what’s going on in the environment and also inside of us, putting all that information together to determine if we’re safe enough to be granted with the freedom of choice. Otherwise, mother nature will take care of survival for us. The greater the perception of threat, the more it will control our behavior, or more involuntary the behavior will be.
So far, it is fair to say that the ANS is constantly working on our behalf. And it is. But while other mammals go through their lives completely guided by this instinctual wisdom, humans are gifted with a more complex brain that starts developing in early childhood. This rational and more goal-oriented part of our brain also plays a role in the way we experience our autonomic responses, and it can contribute to the inhibit the completion of our survival impulses. The unresolved conflicts between instinct and reason are at the root of many of our blocks. E.g. not being able to cry or safely express our emotions might be because we learned that it wasn’t safe to do that in our childhood – we prevent an autonomic impulse with the associations of our higher brain (crying meaning violence, critic, or abandonment).
Understanding a little more about our physiology gives us the opportunity to bridge the gap between the conscious mind and what happens in our body, reducing the segregation of the parts that we are, the feelings of hopelessness, and opening us up to experiences safety to be ourselves.
The separation between mind and body is an illusion.
Up and down – the waves of life
The nature of autonomic reactions mobilizes considerable amounts of energy in order to recruit different systems to act together for survival. We need to tense the muscles and use our vestibular ability (detecting position and movement) to turn the body around or avoid a falling rock. When we’re trying to swim out of the sea, our breathing becomes faster so that we can bring in more oxygen, and our heartbeat increases so blood and oxygen can spread more quickly.
In face of danger, we go through a complex activation process that requires high levels of stress energy running through our body and that’s normal. But this process is designed by nature to go up and come down. When the threat is no longer present – e.g. the knife didn't catch our feet, or we realized that there’s no real threat at the end of the park, we should be able to come back from the stress response into a state of relaxation and self-autonomy again.
We’re supposed to feel a little shaky inside, experiencing a flush of adrenaline throughout our body, some kind of agitation moving in our deep layers that slowly settles down, at the same time that we become able to re-orientate ourselves in time and space and rationally realize that there’s no more threat. We should come back into a relaxed, organized state and be able to keep with our plans for the rest of the day.
To put it simple, the survival response goes by this sequence:
Relaxed state – Perceived threat – Energy gathering – Action – Release – Relaxed stated
This activation/de-activation process happens all the time, from the potentially threatening situations I've just described to the silliest situations like when our ice cream threatens to fall off the cone.
Our biological wisdom does its best to keep us in the most balanced state and not spend more time than necessary on the stress response, with our heart and lungs running fast and all the extra tension in our muscles. It’s exhausting and affects the healthy functioning of our entire organism.
The thing is that many of us have faced experiences perceived as so intense and overwhelming that the ANS had no way to actively protect ourselves other than shut down. Or we've been exposed to adverse situations and unsafe environments long enough to become hypervigilant, constricted to look out for danger everywhere, even when there’s no real sign of a threat. In either case, the high amounts of survival stress energy collected in the past for actions like fight, flight, or imposed immobilization remain trapped in the body. Instead of finding a way out through the neural circuit, they remain disorganized in our physiology.
That creates a ongoing conflict between action-immobilization that we call trauma from a neurophysiological perspective.
Part of the ANS remembers that it is safer to suppress that energy, while another part tries to complete the response of action and release the excess of energy. This friction produces a state of unbalance in our entire physiology and shapes the anxious, defensive or avoidant patterns of behaviors, beliefs, and thoughts.
Without awareness and understanding of how our ANS works, the hyperactivation will keep running our lives based on the memories of how we responded to the threatening events in the past, reinforcing the paradoxical behavior of “I need to move but I can’t”.
The levels of autonomic dysregulation determine the stability we experience in our lives simply because the energy used to perpetuate old survival responses is not available for other healthy functions and behaviors, from our immune and hormonal activity to our motivation, curiosity, and drive for action.
The next paragraphs will give you a basic understanding of the anatomy and physiology of your ANS and how it impacts our beliefs, relationships, and health.
The three pathways of the autonomic response
We have a Central Nervous System – brain and spinal cord; and we have a Peripheral Nervous System. The ANS is part of the second one. The bundles of nerves that come out of our brain and spinal cord and spread throughout the rest of our body.
There are two main branches of the ANS, one is the Sympathetic Nervous System and the other is the Parasympathetic Nervous System and they work together to protect us by evaluating safety and risk. They are always on guard, surveying every moment what’s happening within and around our bodies.
This mechanism of vigilance happens automatically, without involving the higher cognitive (thinking) parts of our brain.
Sympathetic (fight-or-flight; action driven)
The sympathetic branch is composed by the nerves that arise from the spinal cord. It is connected to muscles, organs and glands, and is responsible for mobilization, for preparing our body for action.
Exercise: close your eyes and try to visualize the nerves that come from the middle of the back in the thoracic and lumbar regions of the spine.
Then try to place your hands on your back, reaching with one hand to the region below the neck and with the other try to find a place from the waist up.
The space that remains between your hands is approximately where the nerves of your Sympathetic NS start before reaching the organs like your eyes, heart, lungs and stomach.
This pathway responds to the cues of danger by triggering the release the stress chemicals (adrenaline and cortisol) and fueling the fight-or-flight response. It’s about protection and it's also about exercise and activity. It's the sympathetic that keeps us alert, upright, and able to speak and move through the world.
Parasympathetic (rest-digest-and-connect; freeze; immobilization)
The parasympathetic nervous system is the break that regulates the levels of activation in the body and the activity of the sympathetic nervous system.
But instead of understanding the parasympathetic response through a single pathway, the Polyvagal Theory (by Dr. Stephen Porges) explains the existence of two distinct pathways, both traveling within the vagus nerve – the cranial nerve X.
We have 12 pairs of cranial nerves and the vagus nerve is the longest one, being the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system. You can find many pictures of this nerve on the internet, it’s quite impressive because it travels widely throughout the body affecting several organ systems and regions. It contains both afferent sensory fibers, as well as motor efferent fibers, sending information from the central nervous system to the muscles and viscera, at the same time that it collects information from our sensory organs and viscera to the central nervous system.
Curiosity! 80% of the vagus nerve fibers are afferent, and only 20% are efferent, which means that there is much more information being sent from the body to the brain than the other way around. So much of our behavior and drive in life are affected by what unconsciously happens in our bodies and we now know that the idea that the mind controls the body is, to say the least, inaccurate. They are part of a complex dynamic, influencing each other, and there will always be some elements that we can control and many that we cannot.
That’s why it is so important to work at the level of our physiology and not just on a cognitive level. We can not overcome our blocks, fears, and limitations just by working with the mind when there’s so much going on down there.
The vagus nerve comes from the brain stem at the base of the skull and goes in two directions – down through the lungs, heart, diaphragm, stomach and gut; and upwards, where it connects with other nerves in the neck, throat, eyes, and ears.
As mentioned above, this large nerve is divided in two neuronal pathways – the ventral vagal and the dorsal vagal, and is both responsible for responses of immobilization and also connection:
Ventral Vagal – This pathway is unique to mammals. It's because of this portion of the ANS that humans, our furry friends, the wild mammals will always “feel” stronger together. We biological know that we need each other to survive.
It works above the diaphragm (the muscle that separates our chest cavity from the abdominal cavity), influencing heart rate and breathing, and also integrates the Social Engagement System along with the facial nerves. It connects our heart and lungs to our facial nerves, responding to cues of safety and supporting feelings of secure engagement and social connection. It gives us the capacity to connect with others, to feel love, reciprocity, compassion, to be able to read social cues, to resonate and attune with each other.
Differently from the dorsal vagal (our emergency break), the ventral vagal ideally slows the heart rate down gradually under stress, more like a gentle coming down.
The mammalian vagus is only partially developed at birth and continues to mature during the first few months postpartum through adolescence. But the first six months is when its development is strongly potentiated by the engagement with the mom, or the primary caregiver, through the process of co-regulation and attunement to the baby’s needs and helping the baby to modulate he’s response to the environment. This early engagement is fundamental and will impact our capacity to self-regulate later in life, decreasing the possibility of remaining stuck in defensive responses.
Dorsal Vagal – this is the most primitive part of our nervous system and responds to cues of extreme danger, inhibiting social connection, self-awareness, and it’s usually predominant when we feel frozen, numb, “not here” or collapsed. It affects organs below the diaphragm, particularly those regulating digestion.
It does not only governs our freeze response but also rest, digest and repair functions. The difference is in how much energy is going into this portion of the system:
If there's tons of energy going into these fibers (in face of an overwhelming challenge) there’s that big freeze emergency brake, inhibiting action and thought;
If it's just a gentle amount of energy flowing through that part of the system, it slowly lowers the heart rate, blood tends to go to the core to support all those rest, digest and repair functions, less oxygen consumption, lower metabolism and letting the body go into a safe conservation mode like when we are sleeping.
A wide variety of experiences can happen along the spectrum of dorsal vagal activity. Depending on the circumstances and our internal perception of safety, there will be an adaptation on how much energy flows there. We may be experiencing a very nice relaxed rest and chilling, with a slower heart rate and our breath just gentle, or we may feel frozen and the breath may almost seem to stop, become nearly imperceptible, and we may get numb in the limbs because of the blood rushing to the core to protect the vital organs.
So, ventral vagal and dorsal vagal assume slightly different functions in face of threat and safety. They are both part of the parasympathetic nervous system but while the dorsal vagal takes us out of connection into immobilization, the ventral vagal moves us into social connection and co-regulation.
Exercise: to connect with your vagal pathway, place a hand on your check or over your eyes, and the other hand over your heart. Then move your hand to the abdominal area, feeling your gut. Explore with your hands these three areas and imagine the vagal fibers connecting all these organs inside your body.
Hierarchy of evolution
From a developmental standpoint, the dorsal vagal pathway is the oldest of the three, and its origins can be traced back to vertebrate ancestors and cartilaginous fishes 500 million years ago, with the primary function of metabolic conservation. Our freeze/immobilization survival response has the main goal of assuring metabolism and vital functions.
The next to develop was the sympathetic branch and its mobilization response, which evolved from the reptilian period around 300 million years ago. Reptiles and fish learned to flee and eventually fight for survival.
More recently (lol), almost 80 million years ago, the third neuronal pathway was developed – the ventral vagal pathway. Their patterns of engagement and social bonding are unique to mammals and much more refined in primates, where the ventral vagus is, as we have seen above, neuroanatomically linked to the cranial nerves that are responsible for facial expressions and vocalization. It influences the muscles of the throat, face, middle ear, heart, and lungs, orchestrating our emotions and affective bonds.
Survival Responses
In our everyday life, we naturally shift between different states of survival response in a fluid adaptation to our environment. Rationally, we may not identify any threat but the autonomic nervous system is working under our awareness to keep us safe, healthy, and physiologically functional, no matter if the menace to that balance is going out on a social meeting or just the feeling of hunger.
Let's take a look at how these internal autonomic states can translate into behavior and how they condition our lives if we get stuck in a long-learned pattern of survival.
Ventral State
Our natural state of safety, calm and socially availability. It is rooted in our ventral vagal pathway, and in this state, our heart rate is regulated, our breath is full, we can engage and focus in friendly conversations and faces, and tune out from distracting noises.
It is easy to connect with the world and the people around us. We feel naturally safe with others. We can experience fun, curiosity, joy and peace. This is the state from which we’re able to take actions from a place of confidence, ease and trust. We experience feelings of regulation, being productive and organized, and finding time to play.
Our sleep quality improves, as our digestion, our immune system and our overall sense of well-being.
Generally, when we feel threatened or apprehensive, we tend to look at each other first, try to orient ourselves in space and get someone's attention. We seek for our mammalian collective survival instinct instead of trying to figure out all by ourselves. This happens because the ventral vagal is our most powerful and quicker defensive mechanism. When social engagement is available and we deeply trust in our bonds, our physiology doesn’t tend to get stuck in other survival responses.
Every trauma has some kind of attachment wound involved. Something that broke, weakened, or didn’t allowed the development of ventral vagal pathways. Being traumatized means that at some point we felt completely alone in our experience and our survival mechanisms had to escalate to the phases that we’re going to see next.
Sympathetic State
When we are triggered by a sense of danger and there is no “pro-social” behavior that fixes the situation (e.g. no one is there to help, our voice is not heard, or when something happens too quickly), our neurophysiology goes backwards in the evolutionary timeline to the sympathetic response – fight or flight.
In this state our heart-rate accelerates, our breath becomes short and shallow, and we are filled with a sense of alertness, scanning our surroundings and preparing to move at any moment. We tend to find it difficult to sit still and friendly human voices seem to be further away.
Feelings of anxiety or anger may be present, although sometimes hidden from our awareness. We feel moved to react defensively and take some action that can go from pushing someone away (behavioral or verbally), avoiding an impact by turning the body around, running away from a place, to aggressively expressing emotions or opinions.
On the other hand, assertively expressing how we feel and setting boundaries are healthy ways to use our sympathetic energy.
When we successfully complete these actions and have the necessary time to release the survival energy that was required for those actions to take place, we will eventually return to feeling safe and socially engaged again.
When those actions cannot be completed, the stress energy gathered for survival purposes (e.g. the energy that makes our heart beat faster or tenses our muscles) remains in our system. Our physiology will then tend to repeat the sympathetic response, like a broken record, over and over again, in order to complete the response.
When our system remains stuck in the sympathetic response, it can lead to anxiety, panic attacks, disorganized anger, inability to concentrate and permanent distress. It can also affect our relationships and our health, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleeping problems, memory impairment, headaches, chronic pain and muscle tension, digestive problems and increased vulnerability to disease.
Dorsal State
The third pathway, the dorsal vagal pathway of the parasympathetic branch, is the last resource. It is our oldest mechanism for survival and it’s meant to keep our most basic functions and withdrawal from calling attention to us if we’re facing a deadly predator. This response only takes over when we have a sense of being completely trapped, hopeless or unable to respond to whatever is going on. It’s when the easiest way to preserve life is not saying anything, not knowing, not feeling, it’s an experiencing of almost not being. It’s our primary survival response of immobilization.
Our dorsal vagal system overcomes the sympathetic response in order to maintain life, creating a separation between mind and body, and other elements of the experience – dissociation.
It happens when in face of a threatening situation, we can’t find help using our ventral pathways, we don’t have the time to run or the strength to fight using our sympathetic response, and we go into freeze, shut down and dissociation.
Prolonged states of dissociation can translate into memory problems, chronic depression, isolation, lack of energy for the simplest of tasks, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, digestive issues, low blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and other health conditions.
Why do we get stuck on survival responses?
As mentioned earlier, after a survival response (mobilization or freezing/immobility) we should be able to release the stress energy gathered either for action or to hold the body still, and come back into a relaxed state, able to engage and connect with ourselves and the environment, similar to what happens to other animals in the wild.
For example, if we think about someone who almost got injured on a car accident but survived by hitting the brakes with their legs and gripping to the wheel with all their strength. Maybe some of you have been through a similar situation. In this case, facing a real perceived threat, there was an immediate mobilization reaction of pressing the breaks and grabbing the direction of the vehicle, with the powerful dorsal vagal activity blocking that sympathetic response until the car stoped. After realizing that, it might take a few seconds until the cognitive realization of safety kicks in. That’s when the person might feel their arms and legs shaking and a huge rush of heat spreading through the body.
But because we don't learn any of this, and the society we live in fosters the separation between our thinking minds and what goes on in our bodies, we often tend to suppress the natural release of stress energy after an overwhelming event. This leads to extend the stress response, preventing us to rest and recover our rational thinking, our conscious autonomy.
Remaining in the stress response more than it’s absolutely necessary has a high cost on our physiology and our psychological well-being but it often happens in these two scenarios:
When a threatening event was so great that triggered such an intense response to an extent that we completely disconnected from ourselves, creating a separation between the different elements of the experience – emotions, sensations, images, behaviors, and meaning become separated fragments, disorganizing the rest of our physiology;
When we’re exposed to danger over a long period of time, receiving cues from the environment that reinforce our perception of being in danger, which primes the stress survival response to be our default.
In either cases, the release of the stress energy is blocked or suppressed in our physiology and we become conditioned to focus on anything that might represent a potential danger, reinforcing the pattern, with our hearts beating faster, and our thoughts running crazy in our head.
Coming back to regulation
From the moment our nervous system starts developing in our mother’s womb, it evolves in relationship with the environment.
It’s from that early that we become vulnerable to the creation of traumatic memories. For many of us, the nervous system is overloaded with stress energy. Not only the chronic daily stress we got used to deal with, but also all the old survival memories that remained unprocessed and stored in our physiology. Adverse events in childhood, misattunement from our caregivers, shock traumas, illness, significant losses, unexpressed emotions, etc.
All of this creates a disruption in the normal functioning of our nervous system – instead of going through natural fluctuations of up and down, transitioning between activation and de-activation, our automatic nervous system becomes stucked in hyper-arousal or closed in shut-down.
We know that early experiences shape the nervous system, but we also know that every ongoing experience can reshape it – that's called neuroplasticity.
The body is always trying to find ways to get back into a state of balance. When our survival mechanisms remain stuck, our bio-intelligence will try to create opportunities to complete the survival responses that were not possible in the past, even without the presence of any real threat. That’s why many of us repeat the same behavioral and relational patterns and that’s why, at a certain point, we feel that something is not right and we might need to do something about it (otherwise you would probably not be reading this).
If we are alive, our old defensive mechanisms definitely worked, but our nature is to evolve and change and explore new possibilities. Becoming aware of our repetitive defensive patterns is the first step to get free from traumatic autonomic memories.
The second step is directing our attention to the cues of safety from the outside and from inside our bodies. Re-learning how it is to feel safe, how does our body responds when we do the things we like to do, when we are with the people we enjoy spending time with.
To bring more regulation into our system, we need to make some space inside, so that it gets easier to create exit pathways for the old survival stress energy. Building capacity and resilience requires the restoration of movement and fluidity, getting familiar with curiosity and pleasure.
Of course, releasing traumatic memories and completing the unfinished responses is transformational but, working on our nervous system capacity is the basic pillar to overcome trauma.
There are a few rules to the universe. And part of those rules affect how our bodies respond to stress and danger. We have been under threat in many moments of our lives, ones stronger than others. Our bodies have been responding to these life challenging situations in the best way they could. When the danger is not present or imminent anymore, we can consciously direct our attention to the cues that, in the present moment, tell our ANS system that it is safe enough to be here.
If the environment doesn’t provide those cues, we might need to create them or seek for help, for the support of someone like a friend or a therapist. Experiencing that we can trust in someone is, just by itself, one of the biggest antidotes for the fixation of trauma.
What a regulated nervous system looks like?
It means you become closer to who you really are. Many of us who grew up with instability, absence of some sort, misattunement, or experience any kind of trauma, our personality forms around those experiences as an adaptation. We often believe that we’re something that we’re actually not. So, a lot of our daily choices like the clothes we use, our job, the accounts we follow, our relationships, our yes’s and our no’s, all of that is greatly influenced by our survival adaptations.
As we grow this inner capacity for self-regulation, we’ll need less and less of this old survival strategies and we’ll be able to show up as our true self. It can also be frightening and create resistance, realizing that some of our preferences are actually very different from what we have been acting out. That’s why is so important to do this work at your own pace and with the support of some therapist, a safe group or someone that can fully see you.
Regulation means that we become less reactive, with no emergency in acting out of a stress situation because we trust in our biological wisdom. Stress comes in, spikes the chemical reactions in our system, and it comes down without the need to do anything specific to intentionally slow it down. That somatic mechanism will become more familiar and natural, not taking complete control over our behaviour. Instead, we’ll be able to flow between the waves of activation/deactivation, without remaining stuck up there in the hypervigilance or in down in collapse.
And as a reminder, well being doesn’t mean absence of survival responses. We experience health, comfort, and ease when the three parts of our ANS work together. When not everything in our life is wonderful but we are able to acknowledge or problems, explore options, ask for support and be creative about our choices.
I would like to leave you with this metaphor used by Deb Dana to describe how it is to live with a regulated nervous system:
«The dorsal vagal system runs the basic utilities of the home. This system works continually in the background keeping our basic body systems online and in order. When there is a glitch in the system, we pay attention. When all is running smoothly, the body’s functions work automatically. Without the influence of the ventral vagal system, the basic utilities run the empty house, but “no one is home.” Or, if we are home, the environment is one that brings no comfort. Everything is turned down to the lowest possible setting—enough to keep the air circulating and the pipes from freezing. The environment is just habitable enough to sustain life.
The sympathetic branch can be thought of as the home security system maintaining a range of responses and armed to react to any emergencies. This alarm system is designed to trigger an immediate response and then return to standby. Without the influence of the ventral vagal system, the alarm system receives a steady stream of emergency notifications and continues to sound the alarm.
The ventral vagal system allows us to soak in, and savor, this home we are inhabiting. We can enjoy it as a place to rest and renew by ourselves and as a place to join with friends and family. We feel the “basic utilities” running in the background. The rhythms of our heart and breath are regulated. We trust that the “monitoring system” is on standby. The integration of systems allows us to be compassionate, curious about the world we live in, and emotionally and physically connected to the people around us.»
(Dana D. 2018, The polyvagal theory in therapy: engaging the rhythm of regulation)