240: The Nervous System and Trauma

Today we are talking about your nervous system. Maybe you already know all this, but I want to share it anyways, as I find it to be valuable to understand.

The reason I want to talk about this as well is so often when you are dealing with something catastrophic and traumatic like grief, you can start to wonder what’s wrong with you, why is everything falling apart, and why can’t you just figure this out.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s not because you’re not doing enough. It’s because you haven’t gotten the right tools, assistance, and resources for things to change. You are doing everything you can right now just to survive. And I hope today’s episode will explain how what you are experiencing in terms of triggers, trauma, health issues, or whatever it may be is not your fault.

So your peripheral nervous system has two parts, the autonomic nervous system, and the somatic or voluntary nervous system. The voluntary nervous system is where you can control functions in your body, like raising your arm, walking, talking, and those kinds of things. The autonomic nervous system is broken down into technical 3 parts, the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, and the enteric nervous system, but we are only going to be talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.

The SNS- sympathetic nervous system is where you get more activated, your body is alert and ready to run. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated all the rest and digestion, restoration, and repair in your body shuts down. When a zebra sees a lion, and its mind reads threat, it’s not interested anymore in eating, sleeping, or any sort of relaxation that might happen. This works well for zebra because for zebra this turns on and off easily. For humans, it doesn’t serve us very well all the time, because sometimes our mind continues to read a threat when there is no threat happening any longer. I’ll explain more about that later.

The PNS- the parasympathetic nervous system is where your body can calm down, your body can go into that rest and repair. This is where you can sleep, your digestive system is working well, and your body can go into maintenance mode for all those kinds of things.

If you think of the PNS and the SNS as two different sides on a weighing scale, you know those that go up and down. When the sympathetic nervous system is high, the PNS goes low or shuts down, because if there is a threat, or there is something to be watching for, your body and mind don’t want you to be thinking about eating, it doesn’t want you sleeping, and it certainly isn’t going to waste energy on maintenance and repair.

So to turn the SNS off, the PNS has to be turned on and come up. So the more your body goes into parasympathetic actions, and the threat is gone and it feels safe, then it can do all those things like sleep, repair your body, maintain systems, things like that. This is where you can feel love, safety, and connection, be present.

So, earlier I mentioned how zebra can have a threat happen, its mind reads information, and the zebra's mind makes the threat bigger so that’s all it sees, and then when the threat is over, the zebra doesn’t even remember that it happened. Because for zebra if it’s not happening, it doesn’t exist.

For us humans, this is how it works for us. The mind reads information and sees threats, and then the mind enlarges the threat so it gets bigger, and it’s gotten too large for our mind to process, and then the sympathetic nervous system is turned on, and because the mind continues to read the information that the threat is continuing to happen, the sympathetic nervous system can’t be turned off, because your body and mind are still trying to protect you.

So, if you think of this information your mind is continuing to read what is happening currently. So what happened is finished, but your mind continues to read it as happening currently. So your body continues to stay high in the sympathetic nervous system.

It’s like this data that came into your processor in your mind, and it blew up because of the meaning and the situation and whatever, and if you imagine that this information coming in is like a marshmallow, and it needs to go through a tube to go click into place into memory and storage, but with all the meaning and gunk and the blowing up of the marshmallow, the marshmallow got too big, and it can’t move through the tube.

Thus, your mind continues to read threats, and your body stays in a state of hypervigilance and stress because your mind is constantly reading a threat, even when there is not a real threat right now.

So, a huge part of helping this is clearing where the marshmallow got huge, and clearing those marshmallows out. This is helping clear the spot where the mind is processing information and letting the mind know that it’s not happening and there is no current threat.

This is by far the best way because then you aren’t constantly trying to calm your body down, it’s not getting worked up in the first place, because there is no threat.

But then, the other parts are, just continuing to find ways to move into your PNS so that your SNS has to calm down. Because remember you cannot be in PNS if your body is in a state of fight or flight. Your body can’t be calm and relaxed, it’s reading threats everywhere and it’s in a state of alertness looking for the next thing.

I wanted to share this all with you, for one, to understand more about what is happening in your body if you’re experiencing this kind of this, but also for you to know that it’s not that you aren’t trying hard enough or not relaxing enough.

There’s nothing you can do logically to calm your body down when your mind is continuing to perceive a threat. So it’s not that you aren’t thinking good enough or aren’t doing enough, it’s just this little spot in your processor that’s got a little bit of a fuzzy read on the situation. It’s jammed. And when you clear that, your body no longer needs to be on alert and jumping at every situation.

I want you to know that your body can come into relaxation again, and when you are in the Parasympathetic nervous system, this is where you will finally be able to sleep peacefully, your body will have more energy to heal, rest, digest, and start caring for your body because it now can, because this is what it does when it’s in repair and maintenance mode.

I don’t know if you find this as fascinating as I do, but also, you don’t have to know anything about this, and all you heard from this episode is that sleepless nights are not something you need to live with forever. That stress, trauma, anxiety, and all the things that keep you in a fight or flight mode are not just something you need to continue to live with, and not only that, it will just continue to cause more stress and harm to your body the longer you continue to live with it, and so that clearing that marshmallow out is possible and something that can be done for you.

Go check out my free video on anxiety and grief at www.meganhillukka.com and you can learn more about this and how to begin clearing this out of your processor and finally get your body in a relaxed, repair, and maintenance state.