Most of the health outcomes in your life will be determined by a part of your nervous system that most people know almost nothing about. Those who do know that it exists understand it almost not at all.
I am speaking about your Autonomic Nervous System. The Autonomic Nervous System has some extraordinary ambassadors, but it still needs nervous system whisperers to translate the profound insights of modern neuroscience into language and frameworks understandable and actionable by everyday people. And what we know about the ANS needs to be actionable by you, because you can, through understanding and practice, shape your deep nervous system to create enduring wellbeing.
You can shape your deep nervous system to create enduring wellbeing.
I'm going to say that again, because this is very good news. Your nervous system is plastic, which means that it continues to change and learn and grow throughout your life, based on how you use it. By learning to interpret, converse with, experience, and support the foundational needs of your Autonomic Nervous System, you can re-shape your nervous system in the direction of enduring wellbeing. In my career I have watched this happen many thousands of times, both with people who were very very ill, and with people who did not know they weren’t living to their deepest and fullest potentials. The needs of your deep nervous system are pretty simple, yet they are not easy to meet in the context of modernity.
You see, your Autonomic Nervous System has two primary functions. One of them is the governing of the interior of the body: your heartrate, breathing, digestion, immune function...all the things that have to be coordinated inside your body that you don't consciously think about. This is why the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is sometimes referred to as the Automatic Nervous System.
The second function is as important, yet less understood by the general public, and is related with this governance function, specifically addressing safety. You see, the ANS is tasked with determining, in any given moment, whether the totality of your experience is, on balance, tilting toward safety, danger, or lifethreat, and then, based on this information, shaping the energy processing templates that govern your experience.
Your ANS determines your moment-to-moment experience of safety or threat.
There are a set of neural systems in your body that determine, in each and every moment, if you are safe, in danger, or under lifethreat. (This neural perception is called neuroception.) Based on this realtime analysis, which updates every micro-second, these systems re-tune your entire body, the same way a graphic equalizer dials up the bass and dials down the treble on a stereo, shaping the sound that comes from it. These master control switches govern the way your body feels inside, the way you experience yourself, what emotions are available to you, the range of thoughts you will think, how you perceive what is happening around you, and the behaviors available to you. Far less than one percent of the general population understands how this system works, because it is the specialist knowledge of a subset of the study of autonomic physiology called Polyvagal Theory, and when most people here the term 'Polyvagal Theory' they do not know what it means at all.
Your ANS looks nothing like this sound mixer in a recording studio – but this is exactly what it does.
What these systems do is activate and de-activate energy processing templates in your body. What on earth, you ask, is an energy processing template? An energy processing template is essentially a tuning preset that governs the way that energy flows through your system.
An energy processing template (an autonomic state) is a tuning preset that governs the way energy flows through you.
Your body is constantly transmitting and receiving information. Your body contains a liquid system (blood pulsing through the circulatory system) wet-wired to an electrical system (your nervous system) that together generate an electro-magnetic field centered in your heart, the oscillations of which are detectable by a magnetometer 8 feet away from you. This field has a very precise form. The processing templates, governed by your ANS–and activated based on safety, danger, or lifethreat–radically re-shape the way that this energy flows through your mindbody system. It determines whether it expands or contracts, whether it is centered in your head or your heart, whether it mobilizes you into action or immobilizes you into stillness. It precisely governs the shape and depth of the river of energy flowing through you, its turns and bends, eddies and rapids and slow still pools.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Neurobiology of Connection to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.