Your Nervous System Needs TLC

by Baxter and Nina

Nerve Cells

Although we tend to think about the nervous system only when we’re feeling stressed (or nervous!), your nervous system is essential for your survival. Basically, it provides the following essential functions:

• Controls background processes that keep your body alive and healthy, such breathing, maintaining normal temperature, and adjusting blood pressure to match activity.
• Responds to external stimuli (which come in through our senses), such as having a positive reaction to a beautiful smell, a pain response to a burn, or a quick reaction to an oncoming car 
• Obeys our conscious mental instructions, such as to talk, move, or breathe more slowly. 

By communicating through your nerves, your nervous system constantly monitors the internal activities of your body systems, attempting to keep them in a healthy balance called “homeostasis.” It also monitors your environment to assess if it is safe or dangerous, and sends messages to your body either to relax and enjoy or act quickly to get to safety. 

Your nervous system is made up of two main parts: the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. However, even though we—and our anatomy books!—always discuss the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system as two separate systems (see below), they are really a continuation of one another and are in constant communication with each other about the state of your body. 

Chronic stress has a negative effect on your nervous system, contributing to the development of anxiety, depression, sleep problems, lack of concentration, and memory impairment. Therefore, using your yoga practice to keep stress levels in check and to manage your stress during challenging periods, will support the health of your nervous system overall. Additionally, besides by staying generally healthy through exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet and drinking enough water, getting enough rest, and avoiding smoking, you can support the health of your nervous system by:

• Treating conditions that can negatively impact the system, such as diabetes and hypertension.
• Avoiding alcohol and drugs that affect the nervous system. 
• Decreasing use of over-the-counter medications, because as you get older, these can negatively affect your nervous system. 
• Testing your hearing and vision regularly (when they are not working well the brain has a harder time recording information).
• Cultivating brain health (see 6 Ways to Foster Brain Health with Yoga). 

Now let’s have a look at the individual components so you can understand how they all work together, how important they are for your basic survival and functioning in your daily life, and how yoga can help you keep your nervous system healthy. 

Neurons. The basic component of your nervous system is a specialized cell called a neuron, which are both part of your brain and also make up your nerves. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, and its neurons are densely packed and are only 10 microns long. While aging results in the loss of some of our brain neurons, the ability of our brains to grow and change (brain plasticity) means that continuing to stimulate our brains with learning will actually cause our brain neurons to grow and existing brain neurons to be repurposed. 

Neurons connect the brain proper to your spinal cord, and from the spinal cord connect to neurons in your peripheral nerves. Using your asana practice to maintain healthy posture and proper alignment of your spinal bones will help to keep your spinal cord safe from pinching and narrowing, which could cause nerve dysfunction or pain. 

Your peripheral nerves consist of longer neurons, which can be up to 1 meter in length. They transmit messages through the nerve via electrical signals and use chemical neurotransmitters to send the impulses from one neuron to the next. A sedentary lifestyle and structural injuries can negatively impact your peripheral nerves. With a regular asana practice, you can release holding patterns around your nerves, allowing them to function them better. 

Central Nervous System. Made up of your spinal cord and your brain, your central nervous system receives and processes information from all over your body. In response to conscious thoughts, your central nervous system sends nerve impulses to your peripheral nervous system to make the requested action happen. And in response to nerve impulses that your central nervous system receives from your senses and your autonomic nervous system (which keep your background systems in balance), your central nervous system sends nerve impulses to make your body react appropriately. 

Besides communicating through your nerves, your central nervous system also communicates with your organs and the rest of your body through chemical and hormonal messages, for example, by releasing the stress hormone adrenaline when you need to react quickly. 

Peripheral Nervous System. Consists of nerve fibers that branch off from your spinal cord and extend to all parts of your body, including your neck, arms, torso, and legs, as well as all your muscles and internal organs. The nerve receptors and long nerves that travel all over your body and back to your central nervous system are either delivering information to your central nervous system or receiving instructions from it. For example, when you decide to raise your arms in Warrior 1 pose, your brain sends a message via the peripheral nervous system to the appropriate muscles. Or, when you’re stressed, your peripheral nervous system speeds up your heart rate. Likewise, if you cut yourself, taste some chocolate, or sniff a flower, your peripheral nervous system communicates lets your brain know all about it. 

The peripheral nervous system is divided into somatic and autonomic systems.

Somatic Nervous System. Provides voluntary control of your body movements. In yoga, we use our somatic nervous system when we practice poses, perform breath practices, stay still when we meditate, and consciously relax muscles in restorative poses and guided relaxation. Obviously we want our somatic nervous to function optimally because to function well in our daily lives we need quick and coordinated responses to our mental requests for movement or rest. You can use your asana practice to support the health of your somatic nervous system by practicing a wide variety of poses and movement patterns to activate all those nerves on a regular basis, and by practicing balance and flow poses to keep your proprioceptors (the nerves that allow you to sense where you are in space) healthy. 

Autonomic Nervous System. Regulates involuntary body functions, such as heartbeat, blood flow, breathing, and digestion. It’s called “autonomic” because it works autonomously (automatically) without your conscious effort. (You don’t need to tell your heart to beat the same way you need to tell your front knee to bend to 90 degrees in Warrior 2 pose. Voluntary movements, such as knee bending, are controlled by your somatic nervous system.) 

Although the functions of the autonomic nervous system are generally involuntary, some of them are not outside of your awareness, and they may be influenced by your state of mind. For example, although you can’t tell your heart to beat faster or more slowly, you can feel it beating. And when you’re calm, you’ll notice that your heart beats more slowly and when you’re afraid or angry, you’ll notice it beating more rapidly. 

The autonomic nervous system is divided into two parts that function in tandem with each other: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Learning about these two systems and how they interact with each other is one of the secrets to learning to keep your stress levels in check (see Life Changer: Understanding Your Nervous System). 

We hope this little anatomy lesson helps you understand the importance of your nervous system and the value of giving it active attention as you age. All the yoga tools at your disposal, including asanas, meditation, breath practices, relaxation practices, and even yoga philosophy, will help you support its good health.

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Re-Patterning Your Nervous System: Practice for the Real World

by Nina  

Katja Huiras, Age 50

“I think Korb misses a key issue—asana practice induces a stress response in a controlled setting that we can use to retrain our brains. The real world is where we exercise our newly retrained brain, but it is very hard to actually do the retraining there. So for me the 'practice' aspect to yoga is very profound—I use yoga to practice how to respond to stress or unpleasant realities. Without the freedom to experiment and play with my capacity, it is not really possible to develop any degree of 'mastery' over my stress response. So for me, asana practice literally walks me through and teaches me how to cope with stress and unpleasant realities. Then I can use and build on those tools off the mat. I think Korb misses the need for practice and play.” — Comment left on our post Changing the Brain's Stressful Habits

Wow, I was so pleased and grateful when I read that comment back when I wrote my post Changing the Brain's Stressful Habits because our reader not only said added exactly what was missing from my post but they expressed themselves so clearly. And rereading the comment again, I was happy all over again because this is very topic I want to address in today’s post. That’s because while Baxter discussed how we can use yoga to change our habits in general his post Changing Your Habits with Yoga, I feel one of the most beneficial habits we change with yoga is the way we habitually react to stressors in our lives. 

This is because training ourselves not to react so strongly to stressors gives us the ability to choose a different way of reacting to them. Just recently I learned from Dan Libby, who teaches yoga to veterans (see veteransyogaproject.org), that in stress mode our thoughts narrow and become limited to fight or flight strategies, while when we are calmer, our thoughts are more expansive, and therefore include a much wider range of possibilities. (I wish I had the illustration he used in his talk at the SYTAR conference that showed the limited number of thoughts you might have in stress mode vs. the much larger number you might have in the same situation if you’re not reacting so violently to the stressor.) He says:

"The basic gist is that regulating our autonomic nervous system, which really means activating the more newly evolved part of the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagus nerve, allows for an expansion of your thought-behavior repertoire. Instead of having a limited, narrow, tunnel-vision, like we do when our sympathetic nervous system is dominant, we have more cognitive and behavioral options available to navigate our world."

In Dan's presentation, he was talking about veterans with PTSD, but even someone like me can relate because, for example, back in the day, I had a bad habit of overreacting to work deadlines my boss gave me by going into a full-fledged panic, something that was not particularly helpful as you might imagine. 

In Yoga: Changing the Brain’s Stressful Habits in Psychology Today, neurobiologist, Alex Korb wrote: 

“Your brain tends to react to discomfort and disorientation in an automatic way, by triggering the physiological stress response and activating anxious neural chatter between the prefrontal cortex and the more emotional limbic system. The stress response itself increases the likelihood of anxious thoughts, like "Oh god, I'm going to pull something," or "I can't hold this pushup any longer". And in fact, your anxious thoughts themselves further exacerbate the stress response.”  

“Discomfort and disorientation” is another way of describing a “stressor,” which is anything that has the potential to stress us out. And we do have habitual or “automatic” ways of reacting to our stressors. But in that same article, Korb discussed how by using our breath and mindfulness to stay relaxed as we encounter “stressful” yoga poses, we are unconsciously retraining our nervous systems to stop reacting in our habitual way to stress. And that this retraining can help us handle stress more effectively in our everyday lives.

 “Even actions as simple as changing your posture, relaxing the muscles on your face, or slowing your breathing rate, can affect the activity in your brain (beyond, of course, the required activity to make the action). These changes are often transient, but can be long-lasting, particularly if they entail changing a habit.” 

This is exactly what I mean by “re-patterning your nervous system.” According to Korb, this process is happening unconsciously when you take a yoga class and your teacher asks you to do a pose that scares you, that challenges you physically, or that makes you uncomfortable for some reason. So I guess we’re all doing a bit of this already (and maybe that’s one reason practicing yoga makes us feel better both in the classroom and in the “real world”). 

But if you have some habitual patterns of reacting to stressors that you’d like to change (we used to call them “buttons that get pushed” as I remember), you can work with this technique consciously in your home practice. Start by adding poses to your practice that tend stress you out in any way and find ways to approach them gradually and in a relaxed fashion. And after noticing your habitual thought patterns as you practice those poses, take a nice, deep breath as you face down “the enemy.” For example, in my early days of practicing, I worked toward kicking up into Handstand at the wall—which terrified me—by doing Handstand in a doorway to get me used to the feeling of being upside down on my hands. Eventually I gained the confidence to do the full pose without the negative, self defeating thoughts that were preventing me from getting up. I also worked on Urdva Dhanurasana, which was so unpleasant for me, both by doing more passive backbends and just plain old befriending the pose by doing it frequently. But those are just examples; each of us different and you’ll have to figure out the right poses or practices that will work for you. 

And although both Korb and our commenter both only addressed using the asana practice to re-pattern your nervous system, I’m sure you can use the meditation practice the same way. For although meditation will eventually trigger the relaxation response, sometimes sitting down to meditation can be initially stressful, especially if you’re new to it, if you know you’re going to be sitting with difficult thoughts and emotions, or if you will be sitting for a particularly long period of time. And perhaps for some of us practicing pranayama, which entails sitting or lying still for extended periods of time, or even practicing restorative yoga, which likewise means being still and quiet, could serve the same purpose. Once I did an hour-long Savasana with a teacher, and although I caught myself thinking, I’ll never be able to survive this (I tend to get hyper), I made it through with no problem!

How about you? Are any of you working on facing difficulty in your yoga practice?

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