There are two ways that your nervous system plays
a direct role in anxiety and depression. Your alerting, activating system, your autonomic
nervous system, can get stuck on or stuck off. And most of the people who get stuck in
these states, they don't realize it. They're trapped in these cycles, and they just feel
chronically anxious or chronically exhausted. But the good news is that when you learn to
identify what's happening, you can change it. [Music] According to polyvagal theory, there are three
states of the nervous system. There's safety, also known as ventral vagal or the
parasympathetic response. There's activation, which is also known as the sympathetic response
or the fight/flight/freeze response. And there's the overwhelm or shutdown response, the
immobilization response, which is also known as dorsal vagal which, confusingly, is also
a parasympathetic response in your nervous system, but it's a more primitive state. So what does a
healthy nervous system look like? You might think that if you're healthy you're calm all the time,
but that's not the case. A healthy nervous system is adaptive and accurate. A person with a healthy
nervous system probably spends much of their time feeling relaxed or safe, but when there's a real
or immediate danger they can respond very quickly with a fight/flight/freeze response or even an
immobilization response. They can take action and then restore their sense of safety quickly.
So a healthy nervous system has a broad range of emotions. You can feel calm, love, activation,
excitement, stress, right? But also joy and fun. You can get quite activated, even stressed, and
take action - meaning that after a stressful event it could return to calm pretty quickly. With
a healthy nervous system you're able to relax, sleep well. You're able to eat when you're hungry
and stop when you're full. Your body can heal and repair and restore. If you're listening to
this and you're feeling a sense of hopelessness, like this is an impossible goal, I just want
to remind you your nervous system is like a muscle. When you learn to use it in the right
way, when you exercise it in the right way, it can become healthy and strong. Your your
nervous system is modifiable. It can learn, develop, change, and adapt. So if you're stuck in
chronic stress, it's because your nervous system learned that. And if if it learned that, it can
learn the other way too. Okay. So let's talk about how to do that. Our body has a really interesting
feedback loop. Our brain, probably through a part of our brain called the insula, is constantly
scanning your body to see how it's functioning, and it uses sensations to determine if the body's
running all hunky dory or if there's a problem. So when your body's in pain or if something's
not working right, it sends a message up to your brain that it's it's in danger. But when
your body is calm or soft or relaxed, it sends a message from your body to your brain to chill
out. And this is called a bottom-up approach to nervous system regulation. When we calm our body,
we calm our mind. So what does an anxious nervous system look like? So one form of an unhealthy
nervous system is called sympathetically dominant, or nervous system hyperarousal. It's when your
fight/flight/freeze response is highly active. It's stuck on all the time. And the unfortunate
thing is that anxiety makes us more sensitive to threats, so when we're anxious we actually get
more anxious. So if you're stuck in the on mode you might feel like you're on high alert all
the time. Uh you'll have a stronger reaction to threats, and that reaction might happen more
quickly and to a higher level of stress. So this means that you're less accurate. You're more
likely to interpret things as more dangerous than they are. You're you're more likely to take
offense when none is intended or you're more likely to feel scared or stressed or overwhelmed
even when you're safe, and you might feel more uh agitated or irritable. So when you're in the
stuck on state you might feel jumpy, jittery, an upset stomach, or you might crave carbs. Um
your heart and breathing's faster. You might feel the need to keep moving or stay busy or to
overthink things, and you might also have a hard time concentrating, uh focusing, or remembering
things. So this is, you know, it's like your nervous system is stuck in the on position all
the time. You might have a hard time sleeping, relaxing, settling down, or playing, and you
just might feel like you're on edge all the time, uh like you're always alert or always vigilant. So
usually when people are sympathetically dominant, their alerting muscle is strong. Usually in this
mode you're able to get stressed out and get get stuff done, but you might have a hard time having
fun, or you feel anxious when you try to relax. So your nervous system isn't flexible. It's rigidly
stuck in the on position. And this can be a result of trauma or chronic stress, but it can also
just be a habit that we fall into. Um it could be caused by worrying too much or just simply not
knowing how to self-regulate. And again, this is like a muscle, right? This part of your nervous
system that gets activated has become like very strong. But the part of your nervous system, the
parasympathetic response, that relaxes is weaker, so it has a harder time kind of overriding that
fight/flight/freeze response. But like a muscle, what you exercise you strengthen. So you can
rewire this um through a constant process of nervous system regulation. Uh you you can
check in with your body multiple times a day, multiple times an hour. Remind yourself that
you are safe, and then choose to consciously engage the parasympathetic response in
your body. You are choosing to regulate your nervous system. And it might be through
something like a slow breath or softening your gaze or whatever your favorite grounding skill
is. Now, we're going to talk more about that, more about nervous system regulation in another
video. But the main idea is when we're stuck in an on state we have a hard time turning on
that parasympathetic response. Okay. The third state of anxiety in the nervous system
is called nervous system hypoarousal. And this is when your body um turns on like this
shut-down-and-conserve mode. It's it's when you're overwhelmed. So when you've experienced a
threat that was too big or too much or too fast or too long or you've done it without support or
resources, um when you're isolated and ashamed, your body might go into this protective
mode called shutdown mode. And um again, this isn't your body body out to get you. You
aren't broken. This state is actually a survival response. It's an attempt to conserve energy,
um to avoid antagonizing an enemy, or to stay hidden. And this can be really functional in the
short term. But when you get stuck in this mode, it's essentially a trauma response. Now, just to
be clear, um getting stuck on, the hyperarousal mode is, also could be a trauma response. But
um when we're stuck off, this can happen if you experience a huge tragedy or even simply if you're
just worn down by chronic stress. In a huge event, shutting down is that last survival response.
And with chronic stress you just get depleted. Like stress uses up energy, resources, nutrients.
You spend a lot of time running and not enough time repairing and healing and resting, so your
body gets worn down. So whether it's a short, intense event or a chronic stress, nervous system
hypoarousal can look like burnout or depression. You may feel sluggish, tired, frozen, numb. Um
you might have a slow metabolism, slow heartrate, breathing, low energy, low motivation. I mean,
why try if everything's impossible and awful, right? You might have a hard time feeling pleasure
or excitement. There's cognitive symptoms too. Uh so hypoarousal impairs creativity. People describe
like a brain fog. Um it slows thinking. It seems to impair memory and concentration, and it's shown
to uh contribute to poorer problem solving and uh difficulty initiating and completing tasks and
also contributes to procrastination. This state of nervous system hypoarousal, does that sound
like burnout to you? Does it sound like depression to you? Like it's crazy to me that no one is
talking about the nervous system aspect of these condition. Chronic stress or severe stress or
trauma can lead to these physical symptoms of high hypoarousal. If you're in this stuck off state,
you might also experience like social withdrawal, uh decreased sexual desire, a lack of interest in
hobbies or activities that you used to enjoy. Now, sometimes this does look like these quick bursts
of energy or exertion, like you sprint and get something done and - like panicky action - and
then you collapse into exhaustion. Just because you may be experiencing this uh nervous system
hypoarousal, it doesn't mean that it's permanent. You can retrain your nervous system. Um treatment
for this state I think requires maybe three steps. And the first one is self-care to restore physical
resources or getting safe in the first place, right? But to restore these physical resources
- sleep, nutrition, rest, uh taking care of your body with like medical treatment and support
or exercise. And then the next step to get to, get back to that state of safety is um activation.
So you have have to actually get moving. You have to move through the polyvagal ladder through
activation to return to calm. And then lastly, you know, you got to create a sustainable
approach to solving problems, so finding a way to face and solve problems so that they
don't become overwhelming all the time for you. So whether that's, you know, getting your
financial ducks in a row, sticking to a budget, or setting boundaries with people, or learning to
actively accept what you can't change, you you've got to learn to restore and return to a sense of
safety. Okay. So I've mentioned trauma a couple of times in this video and throughout this course.
What does trauma have to do with this? So trauma, or at least my understanding of trauma, is your
brain and body's deep learning system. When you experience an extremely painful or dangerous or
threatening event or a chronic stressor for years, anything that overwhelms your ability to respond,
trauma is your nervous system's subconscious way to record those circumstances and create quick
reactions. So if you're a soldier at war um and you're, on a clear day you're driving a
Humvee and you can smell the exhaust and you see a backpack on the side of the road
and it turns out the backpack was a bomb and and you have this dangerous experience, your
nervous system is going to pair clear skies, smell of exhaust, and backpack with threat to
my survival. Okay. And so that's like a deep learning system. So suddenly when you're at
home, um without realizing it you might smell some exhaust or you might have a bright, clear
sky or you see a backpack laying on the ground, and your nervous system kicks on that threat
response system without you even realizing it. And your nervous system may go into the sympathetic
response, like this fight/flight/freeze response or anger or agitation, or it might kick all
the way into the shutdown response for no apparent reason. And so suddenly you're
feeling panicky or angry or depressed, and you don't know why. And that's because that
trauma response is essentially a stored response, a learned like memory that it recorded of those
stimuli to trigger that that reaction in your nervous system. Let me give you another example.
Um if you're a child in an abusive home uh and you know that when your mom comes home cranky from
work that it's time to like keep your head down, to lie low, to hide, or withdraw. And if this
happens enough over and over as a child, if that hide-and-shutdown response gets really ingrained,
you may develop a response at work to avoid every form of confrontation, but you don't even realize
you're doing it. Like it's this deep subconscious learning. So so this is one way to understand
trauma, is to see it as deep and a subconscious form of learning that your nervous system does
to keep you safe from threats. But unfortunately, these defense mechanisms don't really serve us
that well in the long run. And when we get rigidly stuck in these patterns of hyper or hypoarousal,
it interferes with our health and our mental health and our ability to enjoy life. So what can
we do about this? We can't just treat anxiety or trauma or depression or burnout in our head or in
our thoughts. We have to treat it in our body, in our nervous system. So the first step is becoming
aware. So I'm going to make a wild guess right now that you don't actually know what anxiety is like
in your nervous system and that you're constantly trying to distract yourself from uncomfortable
sensations, or you're constantly intellectualizing about it, or maybe you've just never been taught
to notice what's going on in your body. So the first step is becoming more aware of the state
of your nervous system. And one word for this is interception. It's our ability to kind of scan
our body and see what's going on. So in the next section I want you to use the workbook to explore
what anxiety feels like in your nervous system, what the activated hyperarousal response feels
like, and what the shutdown response feels like. And then in this whole section of the course
we are going to take a deeper look at how to regulate your nervous system, how to turn on
that parasympathetic response, and what to do with anxious sensations. So - and and just to
back up a little bit, if you'd like to learn more of the basics of how your nervous system
works, how to understand the fight/flight/freeze response and the parasympathetic response and
some really essential grounding techniques, um you can learn those in my free course,
uh Grounding Skills for Stress, Anxiety, and Trauma. So I'll link that below. So you really
can learn to identify these states of anxiety and trauma in your nervous system, and you can learn
how to regulate your nervous system so that you can become healthier. You can overcome anxiety
and trauma, and you can become more flexible, able to relax and feel more joy, be more playful,
and allow your body to heal. So this video is day 20 from my online course Break the Anxiety Cycle
in 30 Days. And if you want to take the full course you can also check out that link in the
description. Thanks for being here. Take care. [Music]
