Hi everyone,
For anyone that's seen me around, you'll know that I do long posts so apologies in advance.
Why does my heart race? Why do I get headaches? What's wrong with me? Do I have cancer?!
Crash course: Everyone has a 'sympathetic nervous system (SNS for short)'. It controls our flight or fight (FOF for short) response. Most of us are familiar with this since it's the whole 'ahh a bear' in the caveman days. It's important! We need it. But in anxiety, it's overstimulated. Which means our FOF response is responding constantly to what it thinks are threats but aren't - like thoughts, deadlines or traffic.
Our SNS controls our flight/fight response. It increases our breathing rate, releases glucose to the liver, speeds up our heart-rate, constricts our blood vessels, releases adrenaline, slows down our digestion. When there is a bear, this is awesome. We need energy to run/hide and the last thing we need to do is digest lunch!
But given there's often not a bear, this leads to things like headaches, aches and pains, dizziness, fatigue, chest pain, digestive problems and nausea, heart palpitations, sleeping problems, twitching, tingling, you name it... {This is the part that means it's probably not cancer}
So this explains anxiety so you can stop reading if you like, but there is good news.
We also have a PNS which stands for parasynthetic nervous system. It's kind of the opposite to the SNS. It stimulates digestion, slows down the heartbeat and all the good things. Here, our body is happy. We rest, digest, sleep, build strength. Fight or flight happens in SNS but not in PNS. PNS is our happy state.
When people rave about breathing techniques, mindfulness, relaxation, therapy or even dogs - this is why. The more we can 'hang out' in PNS, the less we're likely to be in our Fight or Flight mode. Which is why it takes lot of practice.
Hope that this all makes sense and helps you understand a little more about what's going on 🙂
