Balancing the Nervous System

What is the science behind relaxation?

Can we balance our nervous systems with science-informed mindfulness?

The answer is yes.

By developing more intelligence on the design of your brain and nervous system, you can learn how to navigate your neural circuitry to create more balance. You may be able to learn how to choose different states of being by mapping your internal landscape of thoughts and emotions. With regular practice, you can re-design your neural circuitry to adapt to new situations with increasing ease.

The Nervous System

When you meditate for one minute a day, you can re-design your body. Meditation, or mindfulness practice, can act on three levels:

• systemic, or whole body

• cellular, at the level of the building blocks of your body

• genetic, modifying how our spiral libraries of possible selves get translated

By simply exhaling one long breath, you can engage a system called the "parasympathetic nervous system" or PSNS. Let's call it the "Para" for short. The Para engages muscle relaxation, rest and digest mode, and chills out the rate of your heart beats, slows your breath, brings down your blood pressure, and sets your brain into a different state. The different brain state is called "alpha brainwave state"; let's call it Daydream Brain for short. Not only can you engage Daydream Brain, you can also calm the Amygdala, which is the area of fear, flight, freeze, and fight. So you can create more calm.

So the Para:

• relaxes muscles

• improves digestion

• slows heart speed

• slows breath speed

• brings down blood pressure

• calms the Amygdala

• shifts your state to Daydream Brain

The practice of meditation can take this one step further. Not only does meditation or mindfulness strengthen your Para tendencies or habits, it may also shift your hormone balance into a more optimal state. By changing the mode of the HPA Axis, - the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adreanal axis - mindfulness can lead to reduce stress chemicals like cortisol, and in this way can contribute to weight loss around the waistline, as well as a rebalancing of sex hormones. This happens because, when the body doesn't need to "steal" building blocks for cortisol from other hormones like testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, then the building blocks are still available for these sex hormones. DHEA and Growth Hormone, among other hormones, may be increased, and this can lead to more lean muscle mass. When these two hormones are stimulated, there can also be action via thyroid stimulating hormone and prolactin that then supports a strong metabolism. So, in summary, a regular meditation practice can do the following:

• downshift HPA activity

• bring down cortisol

• rebalance sex hormones

• boost DHEA and Growth Hormone

• strengthen metabolism

• help you lose weight around the midline

Studies at UCLA have shown that even meditating or practicing mindfulness for 1 minute a day, leads to weight loss over one month's time. For those of you interested in weight loss, or seeing a physical shift in response to your mindfulness practice, you might choose to measure your waist before and after one month of daily mindfulness. 

How you re-design your brain: image from Indiana University Blog 2017.

The Vagus Nerve

Mindfulness can help to optimize a large nerve in the body called the Vagus Nerve. You may be able to learn to simply empower yourself to activate the VN by simply sitting still and focusing on the breath. 

By consciously spending time in Para mode, you strengthen the tone of your VN. 

The VN connects to many body systems. For example, when you get a "gut reaction", it may be a reaction of your VN to whatever is happening, positive or negative, bad or good, or neutral. Ideally, we want to cultivate a way to view many things from a neutral standpoint, as this allows the whole system to become more responsive and adaptive, so that behaviour and thoughts and actions can be chosen, rather than out of our control.

The VN is the tenth cranial nerve, and it reaches from the brain stem to the abdomen along many key organs, such as the diaphragm, the heart, the lungs, and the esophagus which connects your stomach to your throat. The VN is often triggered when we have stress, to balance out the fight, flight, fear, or freeze response that is activated by the sympathetic nervous system, or Sympa for short.

The Sympa is part of a reaction to negative situations by causing the Amygdala to be triggered into one of the following reactions:

• fight

• flight

• fear

• freeze

• fawn

When balanced, the Sympa is effective in that it increases alertness and readies you for action. When you get overwhelmed by a build up of stress or a sudden terrible event, your Sympa triggers your Amygdala into action and one of the five reactions above occur.

The Sympa is balanced out by the Para. You can think of these metaphorically as two different muscles. One is like the biceps and one is like the triceps. For optimal balance, you need both the Sympa and the Para to be equally strong. A lot of us today walk around with a very strong Sympa and a week Para.

When we breathe in there is a small increase in heart rate, and when we breathe out, there is a small decrease in heart rate. This change is called the "heart rate variability", or HRV. Let's call it the HRV, the Heart Flex, as when it is a wider difference, that means there is more flexibility of the heart, which is protective from heart attack, and shows that you are adaptive to stress. You can increase your Heart Flex by practicing positive emotions, like kindness, compassion, happiness, joy, and tenderness.

Negative emotions, as well as significantly aging us, cause the Heart Flex to narrow. This can lead to increased risk of heart attack. The study of this relationship is the new area of medicine called Neurocardiology. The relationship between stress and the heart may explain why women physicians, to whom patients often feel more comfortable expressing or venting negative emotions, have a higher risk of heart attack and die ten years earlier than the average working woman. Studies have shown that venting emotions does not benefit the person venting or those listening, especially if the venting goes on for more than thirty minutes. The venting is actually likely to increase Amygdala activation and may increase the risk of heart illness. Instead, acknowledging emotions as a transient reaction and learning an adaptive response to your emotions while taking responsibility for your reactions and emotions, is an intelligent way to process negative emotions.

When your VN is toned, and Heart Flex wide, then you may have:

• more flexible emotional responses to strong stimuli

• good heart health

• emotional resilience

• good overall health

• less inflammation

• less risk of heart attack

• more branches to your neurones

In addition to increasing VN tone by mindfulness, you might also increase VN tone by:

• a lot of cardio exercise

• long distance running

• swimming

• cycling

Balancing your Systems

So how do you apply this?

Classic mindfulness and meditation exercises may help you engage your Para and your VN. Given my understanding of the research to date, it may be optimal to combine several techniques:

• regular cardio exercise

• mindfulness after cardio exercise using deep breathing techniques

• cultivate and regularly practice positive emotions

• learn adaptive responses to negative emotions to protect the health of your heart and of those with whom you regularly engage

• daydream positive scenarios: past, present, or future

• practice mindfulness daily

• consider a practice of yoga which combines movement, positive emotion, and deep breathing

Then notice, when stress occurs, if you can "shift state" by deep breathing, thus activating the VN and potentially add daydreaming mode, while focusing on feeling a positive emotion in the centre of your chest. You might synthesize these three by imaging that you are breathing in a beautiful colour, or twinkling oxygen, or sunlight, and breathing out the stress.

You may choose to be playful, exploring your ability to shift mode in various situations. 

Wishing you the best,

Dr. M.  ~

Literature References

Meditate Your Weight, book by Tiffany Cruikshank, 2016.

Feeling Stressed? Researchers at IU are studying how stress reshapes the brain. Rachel Skipper, January 17, 2017. Popular literature, Indiana University.

Mindfulness Meditation improves connections in the brain. Carolyn Schatz, April 8, 2011. Popular literature, Harvard Health Blog.

Izquierdo et al, 2006. Brief Uncontrollable Stress causes dendritic retraction in infralimbic cortex and resistance to fear extinction in mice. In: The Journal of Neuroscience.