"I feel like I am all over the place..." How understanding your automatic nervous system can help you in times of high stress Part 1

THE ANS & HOW TO FLATTEN OUR OWN CURVE

Mary Attridge, ATR-BC, ATCS, CMHC

I’d like to introduce you to something that all of us have: an Autonomic Nervous System, or ANS. Why, you might ask, are you introducing this now, of all times? Well, it’s been trying to get you to notice it for some time over the last 6-8 weeks or so and I told it I’d get a personal audience with you for it. See, the ANS is very important right now and it’s doing a lot of work. It’s responsible for making those involuntary functions and responses in your body. Sometimes it shows up as regulated and sometimes as dysregulated. Maybe you’ve heard the terms “Sympathetic Nervous System” or “Parasympathetic Nervous System?” When you breathe? That’s the ANS controlling that function. When you salivate at thinking about the next time you’ll have sushi? Start to tear up during Steel Magnolias? All of these responses and more are autonomic. We don’t think about them; they just happen in our body and it’s normal. 

So what does all of this have to do with now? Let’s go there, shall we? Please follow this diagram that my friend and I made to help illustrate how the ANS works. We’ll break this information into 2 parts since this will be a minor lesson in neuroscience. We’ll start with going over a regulated nervous system vs a dysregulated one and then in the next part we’ll go over ways to help support greater regulation in our ANS and flatten that curve inside each of us. 

Understanding your automatic nervous system and its response to trauma.

Many of us prior to now had a relatively regulated nervous system (Don’t worry if you didn’t, I’ll talk about that as well. You’re not alone and you are ok.) That regulated nervous system looked a lot like that blue wave you see in the middle band of the diagram. When stress occurred in our daily life, we felt relatively safe. We also felt physically in balance, rested, calm, alert, and connected with others. We could experience the stressor and actually learn at the same time because the stress was not overwhelming. Not to mention we probably had better sleep quality!

Now let’s look at that orange line that vascillates between the upper and lower bands. That’s a dysregulated nervous system. See, the ANS has a hub that is a part of the oldest, most primitive part of the brain: The Limbic System. It tells us whether we need to fight or flee, freeze or submit  when there is an imminent threat. Throughout the tens of thousands of years that we’ve been around, this system has worked quite well to trigger the release of adrenaline so that we could have the physical braun or speed to fight off that saber tooth tiger… and survive! 

An ANS becomes dysregulated when that limbic system either has a really big stress that throws us into the “panic” zone or we have lots of stresses, big and/or small that keep happening at regular or irregular intervals. Think of a dog who’s trying their best to guard their home and they keep getting door knob ditched; they’re going to be a bit more “yappy” than usual and more things than usual are going to cause them to bark. Is any of this sounding familiar?

So when a stress occurs and the system is dysregulated, it will usually go into a state known as “hyperarousal.” We’re more edgy, we feel like there’s imminent danger that we need to fight or flee from. In fact, our ANS has had the same amount of adrenaline released into it that it would’ve needed to fight or flee from the aforementioned saber-toothed tiger back in the day. We’re usually not sleeping well, we’ve got increased heart rate, shallow breathing, irrational thinking, we feel fear and panic in this state. It’s incredibly taxing and exhausting to be there.

In another move for survival, though, our ANS will crash into “hypoarousal” and this is when we might start to have some scary thoughts as we try to stop the distress from the threat within ourselves. We feel depressed and exhausted and aren’t typically up for a whole lot of social interaction. We have a lot of brain fog (trouble concentrating or feeling motivated kind of thing), too. If you already had stressors you were trying to figure out prior to COVID, once everything starting flooding our world about it, you may have found yourself more in this kind of state to begin with.

This constant bouncing back and forth between these two states is what many of our friends and clients are experiencing right now. Here is a quick review:

A summary of your ANS

The responses you are having to current stressors can also bring up past trauma. Bouncing between the two extremes might leave you feeling like an emotional yo-yo. In the next blogpost we will talk more about HOW to get back to a well regulated state and leave the yo-yo feeling behind.