Nervous System 101

All right. Welcome to our first lesson. In this first module, I'm going to lay the foundations, give you kind of the 101, the basics of the nervous system and hormones. And in the next module, I'm gonna talk about why that's important and talk about the impact of stress on women's bodies, and then after that, I'll talk about the root causes of stress for women in our culture in modern women, and then I'm gonna talk about what you can do about it. So let's get started with nervous system basics. So when we take things in through our senses, the nervous system is the first stop for interpreting whether that input is something that is safety for us or whether it's something that feels like a threat. So the word trauma is essentially… sometimes we think of trauma as the big T events, but trauma is basically anything that our system cannot fully process or digest, a nervous system response that couldn't complete itself. So when we see ourselves running certain patterns or have certain nervous system dysregulation, what that means is our system's trying to work through whatever it was that it couldn't fully digest and process. So why this is important is that our nervous system responses and impacts impact our health and especially our hormonal health, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about tying those two together. So when we live in this chronically stressed state, it creates imbalance that cascades through our body and it's important to understand our nervous system and to understand how to read the signposts of our nervous system so we can understand what chronic states we may be in that are contributing to states of imbalance that is cascading through our system. We are going to… Being balanced doesn't mean that we're always calm. We are going to be responding to the world. We are going to have an activated nervous system. Nervous system health is really just about how we're able to process and recover from whatever stress we're dealing with, so learning about our nervous system states is really important for understanding where we're at and how we are recovering and kind of completing the processes of stress and how they're impacting our body. In this slide, I'm gonna talk about the primary branches of the nervous system and how they act in safety and how they act in threat. So we have three primary branches of the nervous system, though the social nervous system is really a part of the parasympathetic nervous system, but I'll talk about them as three separate branches. So in safety, the social nervous system is responsible for things like bonding, contact, and communication. The sympathetic nervous system is… Think about the sympathetic nervous system as action: getting up, taking action, exerting energy to get what you want and what you need in life, ideally exerting no more energy than what you need to exert to get what you need and want. So it's related to drive, focus, and healthy aggression. The parasympathetic nervous system is where we go in order to rest and recover and rejuvenate. So this is where we sleep, we wind down, we relax. This is referred to often as the rest and digest branch of the nervous system. So under threat, the social nervous system… we will have a tendency to fawn or fit in. Women in particular are more impacted by the social nervous system because we are hormonally more wired for bonding and we can see that makes sense, right? Like, we have to bond with babies whether or not we have children. We are designed to bond with our babies for their protection and for the promotion of the species. So we're more attuned to the social nervous system and we're more impacted by things that happen in relationship and in community. So under threat, our tendency may be to fit in or fawn. So fitting in can look like isolation or camouflaging, camouflaging our own needs, our desires, or who we really are, or fawning over others, so hypersocializing, people pleasing. That's a big one — like putting other people’s needs before our own chronically. There's gonna be times where we obviously do that, especially if we're mothers. Um, the sympathetic nervous system is what we think of as the fight or flight branch of the nervous system. So when we fight, we're moving towards a threat, and that can look like, on a basic level, just arguing. And the flight response is when we're trying to get away from the threat, so we're trying to avoid and leave that situation. And then lastly, the parasympathetic under threat is the freeze or the collapse response. So freeze can look like procrastination, as one example. Collapsing can look like resignation. So if you think about it this way, when the bunny’s being chased by, let's say, the wolf, that bunny's gonna kick into that sympathetic response, so it's gonna run, right? It's going to kick into the flight response, try to get away from the threat. And then when it gets really highly activated, when it gets to the point where it's so stressed, it's going to go into more of a parasympathetic state where it's gonna freeze, collapse, and then its body will be flooded with endorphins that numb its system to protect it from what's gonna happen next. And when we're under threat in a highly activated parasympathetic state, it's actually the highest level of activation. We can feel that sense of numbness in our system. So it's important to recognize some of the emotional signposts of chronic dysregulation. So when we're in these states consistently — like, we're always going to have moments of feeling activated — it's not to say we should never feel this way, but it's important to see when we're chronically in certain states, what that's telling us about our nervous system. So in terms of the social nervous system, the fit-in response at a low level can look like loneliness, and more activated can look like isolation all the way up to imposter syndrome. Fawning at a low level can look like niceness up to appeasement or acquiescing. In the sympathetic nervous system, the fight response at a low level can look like irritation, frustration, moving up to anger, rage, all the way up to annihilation. The flight response at a low level can look like worry, anxiousness, fear, all the way up to terror and panic. And then in the parasympathetic nervous system, the freeze response at a low level can look like confusion, disorientation, numbness, moving up to apathy, helplessness, resignation, and collapse. So this is an invitation for you to just check in: which one of these resonates most? And again, we may not just be in one state that we are running. We may find that there are times we tend towards certain states, so this is really just a way for you to start considering where your nervous system's at and how you can help to understand the language that your body's speaking to you. So make sure you go check out the guide in our course hub, and then I'll see you in the next lesson.