The autonomic nervous system has two main divisions: The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. They work together to help keep your body balanced and alive.
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The Sympathetic nervous system is known as the fight-flight-or-freeze mode and you can think of it as an alarm system that switches on in states of emergency. It releases adrenaline and cortisol, raises heart rate and blood pressure, regulates blood to large muscles, and suppresses non-essential functions like digestion. The Parasympathetic nervous system is known as the rest-and-digest mode. It conserves and restores energy. It lowers heart rate, supports digestion, deepens breathing, and promotes healing and immune function. Its main nerve is the vagus nerve, and is the most beneficial mode to be in most of the time.
These two branches are not strictly one or the other, they are both always active to varying degrees. Autonomic flexibility is the optimal goal here. It allows you to operate in what people call, “the zone,” or, “flow-state.” This involves maintaining a calm baseline in the parasympathetic mode and having the ability to spike the sympathetic system when needed, being able to then rapidly down-regulate back into the parasympathetic.
News, marketing, and political media keep people in a more sympathetic activation state. They deliberately use fear and scarcity to keep the viewer feeling threatened. A person who is stressed and stuck in fight-flight-or-freeze for hours is getting poor digestion, immune suppression, anxiety, and impaired higher-order thinking. It reduces analytical thinking and increases reliance on external authority. Kept under the sway of the sympathetic system for too long, people will look for quick answers and trusted authorities rather than scrutinizing information carefully.
The Yerkes-Dodson law, written in 1908, says that a properly balanced level of arousal produces optimal performance. Low arousal leads to boredom and poor results, moderate arousal boosts focus and efficiency, and excessive arousal leads to stress and mistakes. The flow-state, where you lose track of time and produce your best work, lives right at the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve.
For humans that want to heal their body and enter the flow-state at will, there are the simple practices of pranayama, controlled breathing, which have been taught for millennia.
Pranayama exercises utilize breath retention and slow prolonged exhales to shift the body into a parasympathetic state primarily by stimulating the vagus nerve and overriding the brain’s automatic stress responses. Controlled breath works to override “fight-flight-or-freeze” mode and induce a state of biological relaxation.
Deep inflation stretches the lung tissues and the diaphragm. This stretching triggers the body to send signals to the brain of complete safety, actively suppressing the sympathetic nervous system and slowing down heart rate and blood pressure.
Holding your breath causes carbon dioxide to build up in the bloodstream. This causes a slight drop in blood pH, which optimizes oxygen delivery to the brain. Holding the breath at the top of an inhale maintains prolonged pressure on the vagus nerve that has a calming effect. This balance stimulates theta brain waves, associated with deep meditation and creativity.
Making the exhale longer than the inhale utilizes a natural cardiovascular phenomenon called Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA). Prolonging the exhale directly extends the body’s chemical process of heart rate regulation, and will relax the body into the parasympathetic.
Box Breathing is a breathing practice where you inhale, hold, exhale, and hold in equal ratios. The equal segments maintain stable, healthy levels of CO2 in the blood. The precise counting blocks the amygdala from focusing on perceived threats, and breaks the loop of anxious thoughts. The equal balance of inhales, exhales, and holds, trains the autonomic nervous system to stay steady, composed, and highly adaptable under pressure.
The more you practice in calm conditions, the more automatically it activates in stressful ones.
[Via: gregreese.substack.com]