Calming the nervous system

Calming the Nervous System to support your gut

As our lives get busier, more demanding and stressful it becomes harder to regulate our nervous system. Even if you are taking holidays, sleeping 8hrs and managing days off, is your nervous system actually ever shifting out of stress mode and into rest mode. Even on holiday are you still thinking about work or stressful situations back at home? The autonomic nervous system directs your energy to the right place at the right time and helps you deal with stressful and demanding situations which can come in many forms, training, work, travel, trauma and overstimulation. When needed it will push you into the sympathetic nervous system, a primitive nervous system that mobilises an enormous amount of energy in response to the stressor.  Pupils dilate so you can see better your heart rate and respiratory rate increases so you can run, fight or hide, more glucose is released into the bloodstream to make more energy available to your cells, it releases stress hormones and sharpens focus so you can respond and perform when you need to, helping you the stressors you are encountering in your life. The problems arise when your body stays in this higher gear state for too long and then struggles to switch back into recovery mode.

How is stress related to the gut?

Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, change your guts microbial balance, it weakens the intestinal barrier, reduces diversity of bacterial species and fuels inflammation. If you are getting stuck in this sympathetic state due to stress, you are continually in the alert and readiness mode instead of the repair and recovery mode and your energy is being used to increase your heart rate, and stress hormone activity instead of supporting recovery, balance, diversity, tissue repair, hormone balance and restoration. Sleep will become lighter and less restorative even when you are still getting the same total hours and you will have less energy to fulfil your usual daily activities. In scientific terms living in stress is living in survival.

Parasympathetic activation however, triggers your body’s ‘rest and digest’ state, lowering your heart rate, reducing your blood pressure and stimulating digestion. The parasympathetic system is largely governed by the vagus nerve which allows your body to prioritise repair, energy conservation, immune function and of course an optimal gut environment and modulates signals between the brain and the body. The gut-brain axis is the communication link between the gut and the brain, most people believe that serotonin is produced in the brain but actually 90% is produced in the gut. The health of your gut and your microbiome has a huge effect on your brain, sleep and your mental health.

The vagus nerve is therefore an important communication link between your gut and brain and if you are experiencing a lot of stress in your life it can affect your vagal tone, which is vital for this communication to work effectively. Low vagal tone can be caused by stress and getting stuck in these ‘flight or fight’ patterns that will in time affect your digestion, the microbiome, cognitive function and your resilience.

Parasympathetic stimulation

You can stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and vagus nerve to recover from anxiety and a ‘fight or flight’ response yourself, at any time during the day or night, giving you complete control over your stress response. The more you activate this system and build your vagal tone the better equipped you will be to dealing with stress in the future. So it is not only an immediate tool to help you in stressful situations it has a long term beneficial implication on your health.

Deep Breathing:  take a long, slow, deep breath, right down into your belly, you should see it rise as the diaphragm fills with air. The key here is to make sure your exhale is longer than your inhale. To start, inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 6 seconds and build up to 8 seconds. This should not be forced or uncomfortable.

Meditation and Stillness: finding a meditation practise that suits you or simply sitting in stillness and quiet allows for your autonomic nervous system to move you into the parasympathetic and recovery system. It shifts you out of ‘fight or flight’ dominance and into ‘rest and digest’ activation. Through focused breathing and awareness it can help to lower cortisol, decrease heart rate and strengthen vagal tone. The deep slow breathing that comes with mediation especially the longer exhales stimulate the vagus nerve signalling to your body that you are safe and allows time for rest and repair.

Regular practise improves heart rate variability (HVR) which is a key indicator of your body’s resilience and ability to recover from stress. It has been shown to reduce activity in the amygdale (the brains fear centre) and increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex which governs executive function,  decision making and emotional regulation which prolonged stress reduce.

It calms the default mode network (DMN) which is associated with mind wondering and negative thought loops and helps you live with more awareness and right minded thinking. It enables you to recognise that your thoughts which can often be negative, fear based and full of guilt, create an emotional response. Once you recognise these thoughts are just that, a thought and not a real life event, but past life events playing on repeat, you can decide to be carried away by them or choose to let them go.

Rather than hiding from the pain and fear these thoughts have created or by trying to blunt it, or push it down, you to look at it head on and realise that it no longer actually exists in this present moment but only as a memory. A memory that has likely been distorted by the mind and that barely resembles the truth. Scientists believe that most memories can be distorted by as much as 50% making them highly susceptible to outside suggestion and personal bias. They are not static recordings, so your current state of mind will alter the original memory greatly.

Your body needs to feel safe, loved, and held to heal, to move out of the cell danger response, to move into the repair and recovery that is its natural biology. You are in charge of this process, your mindset, your outlook, your want to live a full and happy life full of gratitude and love. To wake each morning and embrace the day, to say thank you for each breath, to say thank you for this new day and to give, to forgive and to love. It is an old cliché, but you really do only live once, so live it well, live it happy and live it fulfilled, whole and complete.

Meditation provides a natural pathway to rebalance the nervous system by reducing sympathetic overdrive and boosting parasympathetic activity. It teaches you to ease off the accelerator and apply the brakes, helps you to reduce overstimulation, improves sleep and digestion especially before or during a meal. There are so many different types of meditation and I would highly recommend trying to find the right one for you. It should be something that you enjoy, look forward to, and that brings you peace and joy, enhancing your life not something that you dread or try to avoid.

Sometimes simply sitting in the moment, with awareness of everything around you, the noise of the traffic, children playing or the birds singing, the feeling of your breath entering your body, the sunlight through the window on your skin. Notice your thoughts; you are not trying to stop them, which is impossible by the way and an often misconceived idea of meditation, but the idea is to not be carried away on them. Think of them as clouds or waves that you watch, go by, come and go, come and go, you can be the observer of them and notice in time that you do not need to react to them. Merely recognise them, ‘oh here comes the thought about so and so...’ Remember if you are in awareness of something you are not it, you cannot be the thought and observe it at the same time. It gives you separation from it and it in turn releases its control over you.

Meditation enables you to find your intuitive voice, the voice that comes from your heart, the voice of love and reason, forgiveness and empathy. It is not something that you should endure or find difficult. In fact you will often be drawn to it, a book, video, a person you can relate to and resonate with. I personally love Jon Kabat Zinn, Eckhart Tole, Jack Kornfield, Sadghuru, Joe Dispisenza, the Dali Lama and more recently David Kasneci. I found each of them, at the time I needed them, and at a time I was ready for what they would teach me.

Vagus Nerve stimulation: Humming, singing, chanting and gargling all activate your parasympathetic nervous system. And although at first this may seem uncomfortable or embarrassing, when you get immediate relief from a stressful situation or a bout of anxiety, it becomes a very useful tool and will become quite normal. Trust me, I use this technique a lot in the car and have got quite used to chanting, humming and singing in traffic and it feels quite fulfilling and enjoyable. You can do this at night if you wake up and find it hard to get back to sleep, on a walk, or on the way to work, the beauty is you can use this technique whenever or wherever you are. I find chanting Sadghuru’s; Aum (om) 21 times very powerful. You can find this on YouTube. You can also splash cold water on your face and hands, or take a cold shower.

Gentle Movement: It is hugely beneficial to be moving throughout the day, trying to make sure you get up at least every 60mins or so if you sit down a lot at work for example. Adding a light stretch with your arms up to the sky and then down to the ground if the situation permits, or open your arms out to the side, opening your heart chakra is great!

Some light restorative yoga, just 10mins in the morning or evening is very beneficial especially before dinner or bed calming the system before you eat or sleep. I try to do some yoga every evening before I make dinner, even if it is just for 10mins.

Walking, especially slow mindful walking in nature is again hugely beneficial. Look at the wildlife around you, stop and breath in the fresh air; touch the trees, the flowers, and the soil. Being outdoors every day is essential to building a resilient and healthy gut and exposure to different environments is important to build diversity in the microbiome and the different bacteria you find outside. Being outside is hugely beneficial to health and the immune system and being exposed to different elements including sunlight and the cold. Walking after you have eaten especially your evening meal as this tends to be a larger meal of the day, is also good for digestion, motility and your microbiome.