Finding Balance Can Be Easier Than You Think

Some of the biggest physical and mental health problems that people experience are related to imbalance of our nervous system. I recently got to catch up with one of my patients that I worked with years ago to help her with anxiety and heart palpitations. It was so effective that it became the foundation of a simple method that I teach that anyone can use for more balance and health in their lives. The lesson that I learned from this patient is that so many of us are living in “Flight or Fight Mode”, the one that is there to help us to run away from the “saber-toothed tiger.” Unfortunately many people are living their lives continuously in that running away or “emergency mode”. Some of the problems that this can cause include hypertension, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, PTSD, and insomnia. There are many more, but this should give you an idea of how wide ranging the effects of this imbalance can be.

To understand this better, let’s take a quick look at our nervous system. The nervous system is composed of the brain, spinal cord, and all of the nerves in your body. A good way to envision this is “nose to tail” or brain to toes. It expands throughout our entire body, and it works together as one unit made up of many parts. For the most part, the messages from the brain to the nerves go in both directions: from the brain to the nerves and from the nerves to the brain. The important concept to grasp here is that our nervous system is in our entire body. We are so much more than just our brains!

Now for those of you who want to geek out with me for a minute, here’s the breakdown and if you don’t want the details, just skip to the next paragraph! The nervous system has two main divisions: the Central Nervous System (CNS) which includes the brain and the spinal cord acts as the control and communication center and the Peripheral Nervous system (PNS) which includes all nerves outside the CNS, is further divided into the Somatic Nervous System (voluntary body movement and sensation) and the Autonomic Nervous System. The Autonomic Nervous System regulates involuntary functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing and has three branches: the Sympathetic (fight or flight), the Parasympathetic (rest and digest), and the Enteric (gastrointestinal) Nervous Systems. 

Here’s the important thing to grasp:  the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic nervous systems do opposite things in the body. The Sympathetic Nervous System prepares your body for activity, we’re alert and in “fight or flight” mode. The Parasympathetic Nervous System is doing its thing when we’re in a state of rest, when digestion is optimized, when we’re sleeping, and when we feel calm and safe. These two parts are really what we need to understand on a basic level to have better control of our health, stress, and anxiety. There’s much more complexity than that but what I’ve found is that if we get too caught up in the details, it can just make us stressed out. Finding balance is easier when we keep things simple for a lot of reasons.

Our Autonomic Nervous System is designed to automatically maintain a state of balance, but unfortunately cultural and societal influences have taught us that we’re supposed to do what we’re told, “lean into it”, push ourselves, do more, get it done, and meet the external demands that we or others put on us. It isn’t our fault really, we may have had traumatic life experiences that haven't yet healed, or because it unfortunately real self care often isn't prioritized as important. Over attention to all the outside stuff has become a way of life in the world today that makes us think we need to stay in survival mode in order to succeed. It can be useful at times, but when we don’t get a break from this mode, things start to feel lousy. It can impact our psychology, our health, our work, and our personal life. We become caught in the hamster wheel and can’t find a way to get off it. 

When our nervous system remains primarily in fight or flight mode, we flood our gas tank with cortisol, stay in a constant state of stress, our bodies don’t self-regulate or heal as well, and our intuition and creativity are less accessible. This pattern keeps us in a vicious cycle of stress that we can’t escape. When we’re stuck in our heads, our thoughts spiral out of control. It can cause panic and frustration, prompting us to seek salvation elsewhere. Unfortunately, this can result in self-medication with substances or alcohol, reliance on prescriptions that fail to address the underlying issues, spending money on ineffective remedies or online methods that don’t really work, or opting to evade the problem altogether by escaping our own reality. This keeps us disconnected from where the real answers reside: within ourselves.

There are things that really can help change the autonomic nervous system like medications that slow the heart rate or numb overactive thought processes, a hug or support from someone who cares. We can take a vacation or escape to a retreat or monastery, do yoga or tai chi to connect through movement, biohacks like tapping your body in various places or wiggling your earlobe, and therapy or cardio to “get the stress out”.  But what I’ve found is that these often only create short term change and don’t address the underlying cause. If we truly want to balance and “rewire our nervous system”, we need something that creates long term change and this involves, as they say, “doing something different”. 

What I want to do is give you the power, moment to moment, to step off the hamster wheel, to learn to catch yourself and pause, to quickly and easily decrease the fight or flight in any moment we need to, and eventually do it on autopilot all the time. It’s about giving you the controls so you can easily downshift the machine of the human body you’re living in. It puts you in the driver’s seat, because if you can notice where you are and where you want to go you really do have the power to do something about it. 

When we remember that we are more than our brains and that our nervous system goes all the way to our toes, we relate to our bodies in a normal, connected, and healthy way. When we do it fairly consistently, simply by paying a bit of attention, we really can rewire our nervous system and allow it to function in a more relaxed state. This stops the flood of cortisol, decreasing stress and anxiety and making us feel much more normal. The remarkable and beautiful aspect of learning these skills is that it empowers us to profoundly help ourselves any time and anywhere. If you want to know what I’m talking about, take 10 seconds to notice what happens when you drop your attention down to your feet… How does it feel?

If our attention is in our head and our thoughts, it literally keeps us out of balance. We’re off center, un-grounded, and running around like chickens with our heads cut off. The more we remember to use our awareness to center ourselves in our body, feel our feet on the earth, and listen to those gut feelings, the more our bodies are able to work the way they were designed to work. And trust me, it’s pretty amazing how much capacity we have to really feel good in our lives and how easy it is to do. The revelation that I had that caused me to create my online course, is that when we connect to our nervous system in a simple and healthy way, it connects us to our wholeness, mind, body, and spirit and makes everything work better on so many levels. 

I’ve seen my patients and course participants use this work to decrease heart palpitations, stop panic attacks, heal difficult relationships, control their pain, and feel fulfilled in their lives. Our inherent connection is wired into us, just waiting for us to sink in, feel, and use it the way it’s designed to be used. It’s simple and something anyone can do if they want to feel better. This simple method of body awareness counteracts external stressors that overwhelm our nervous system when left unchecked. It’s a shift in our attention that with a bit of practice, becomes easy, and even automatic and that’s where the real magic happens. We feel normal, rested, and more like ourselves. Balance enables the optimal functioning of our autonomic nervous system and can help us in so many ways, including our mental and physical health, creativity and fulfillment, and overall sense of well-being. This place of inner balance puts us on a path of interconnectedness where we can truly integrate and support our whole selves, mind, body, and spirit.