In our Freeport, Maine campus we have two dimmer switches. If you turn them both down, the room is pitch black. If you turn them both up, the room is very brightly lit. But, if you adjust them carefully - and skillfully - you get the optimal lighting to illuminate the unique qualities of the room.
The human nervous system is the lighting system of human perception.
Trillions of nerves interwoven into a beautiful and unfathomably complex network of sensory inputs and messenger signals. Every thought, sensation, and perception that we experience is possible only due to this system of nerve cells that make experience itself possible.
If the nervous system was called The Experience System we might be more curious to learn how it works. And to become better navigators of the experience called life.
What we see, hear, feel, and sense is perceptual and personal rather than objective.
We are each living in our own reality, literally.
A taste, a sound, a form of touch, these are all experienced differently due to our unique nervous system. We are truly living in our own worlds.
When Worlds Collide: A Gentle Collision With A Shared Reality
Social harmony is a rare and beautiful thing.
It is different from social conformity.
Social conformity happens when a group of people who see and experience the world in a very different way pretend to see and experience it in the same way for the sake of fitting in, or, far more often, out of fear of being casted out.
Social harmony ensues when unique individuals who are experiencing the world differently can meet on the plain of a shared reality.
This requires the ability to value the objective truth above our own personal preferences.
If a room is yellow, and you hate the color yellow, you have the ability to recognize that many people find it pleasant, and that the entire world was not built with you in mind.
This is a boring example of a much more sophisticated set of concessions and social contracts that define the meeting grounds of our shared social experience.
If someone’s political opinion makes you angry, and you can not navigate your own nervous system in order to formulate a clear, concise, counter opinion, you fly off of the handle. As a result you strengthen the position of the person offering the counterpoint by the inability to steady yourself and present an idea with poise, skill, and respect for the diversity of opinions necessary in order to create a society that works for more people than you.
Nervous system navigation is the skill of the century in an age where stress, anxiety, and depression are raging out of control. Our ability to control our reactions, thoughts, and perceptions through the skilled navigation of our own nervous system prevents us from crashing into one another in the world of ideas, ideologies, and physical conflicts escalating throughout the world.
Navigating the Nervous System is The Key To Clarity in a World of Conflict, Aggression, and Disconnection
Navigating the nervous system is the practice of skillfully shifting two dials to create a clear perception of the environment that you are in.
Dial 1: The Sympathetic Nervous System: This branch of the nervous system is responsible for the action portion of our lives. Fight, flight, sex, training, high performance output. ON!
Dial 2: The Parasympathetic Nervous System: This branch of the nervous system is responsible for the recovery portion of our lives. Rest, digest, recovery from training, the downshift following high performance output. RECHARGE!
The modern economy is built on products, pills, and potions that help us access the desired state of the nervous system.
We drink caffeine or energy drinks to become more sympathetic nervous system dominant, and we consume sleeping pills or alcohol to become more parasympathetic dominant. Alcohol is an interesting example, because the typically desired response is to first feel supercharged and then to fall fast asleep. These are examples of our reliance on the marketplace to navigate our own nervous system with some degree of agency.
The Tools Come for Nervous System Navigation Come Pre-Installed: Breath, Cold Plunge, Sauna, and Building a Resilient and Adaptive Nervous System
The practice of navigating our nervous system with agency and skill isn’t something you can read about. It’s something you have to do. Real Time Resilience is a term that we coined to describe the ability to navigate the nervous system anywhere, anytime. In a traffic jam, an argument, or an unexpected barrier on the road to our most important goals.
At Physiology First we use the sauna, cold plunge, and physical training with a focus on breath control as methods to build a working skillset in nervous system navigation while getting to better know ourselves.
Join Physiology First Online for weekly lessons in nervous system navigation and learn about the power of your body in the supportive ecosystem of our Physiology First community.
If navigating the nervous system were a switch that we could flip, we would be switched fully on, or fully off, on either side of the ACTION and RECHARGE curve. This is never an ideal state for clear perception of the world. Even in as sympathetic dominant an environment as a physical altercation, the ability to remain calm, composed, and measured is a survival skill. Just watch a boxing or MMA match and notice how “all sympathetic” turns out for the opponent who turned the lights up too brightly to see..
Navigating our nervous system is the skill of adjusting two dials. We have the opportunity to build the skill every time that we breathe, train, and learn about the power of our physiology, first.
“The Physiologically Literate Parent” is a new, interactive webinar series coming in February! Join now and be part of a growing global movement of parents and youth who are learning about the power of their physiology together!
Try this simple exercise in nervous system navigation for yourself, and then stress test the practice next time that you feel the world shifting your internal state. Learning to take the wheel of our physiology isn’t just a skill set, it’s a mind set. Evolution isn’t over, and these are the skills that allow us to adapt, and evolve, on purpose.
Nervous System Navigation Exercise:
Inhale, exhale, run across the room with no breath. (If you are pregnant or have any preexisting medical conditions do not engage in breath hold training.) Repeat 3 times. Feel how the sensation of breathlessness is similar to the sensation of anxiety. It is, literally, the same physiological response. Instead of waiting for anxiety to come, you sought it out in order to deepen your relationship to your body and to train the anxiety response. After the third round, use this simple exercise to lower your heart rate. Take a small inhalation through your nose, a slightly fuller inhalation through your nose, and a long, soft exhalation through your mouth. Repeat until your heart rate is back to normal, or even lower than it was when you began the exercise. This is an example of you entering a sympathetic dominant state, and transitioning into a parasympathetic dominant state, with the tool of your breath. You can lower your heart rate at any time, or raise it. When you’re preparing to speak to a large room, or working to put yourself to sleep after a long day, the ability to control your heart rate with your breath and navigate your nervous system is a power tool for performance and recovery. This is just one of the tools that we are sharing with your and families across the globe at Physiology First and through our new live webinar series The Physiologically Literate Parent beginning in February.
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