Geology of the Nervous System

A guest post edited and curated by Molly Weingrod, LSW from Autonomic Compass: Finding Home in Your Nervous System

The Autonomic Nervous System is the deepest geologic layer of the nervous system. It is universal, far beneath language, beneath culture. Your deepest neurological strata.

The Autonomic Nervous System has two functions. First, it is responsible for maintaining the internal milieu. I’m using the French word here, because this is how it is talked about by health professionals. Homeostasis, or homeostatic balance are other words used for this: maintaining the inner workings of your body in dynamic balance. All the things that you don’t have to think about. Unlike, say, moving your arm to pick up a glass of water, the autonomic nervous system beats your heart, breathes your lungs, pulses your digestion, dilates your pupils, contracts your blood vessels...all without you doing anything. You don’t have to tell it to take care of any of this stuff; it does it automatically. For this reason, you can think of it as the Automatic Nervous System.

Secondly, and this is really important and unknown to most people: it shapes the banks of the river of energy flowing through you. It literally dials up and down the master control switches that govern how your body responds to your inner and outer environment. Both of these functions relate to survival.

And if your Autonomic Nervous System believes that you are in danger, even if your ordinary sense of self does not, it will severely change how energy and information flow through your body, and therefore your mind. Like glasses you cannot take off, it will change how everything feels and appears inwardly and outwardly in a split second.

I’ve spent the past fifteen years rigorously studying the geology of this deep nervous system with well over a hundred advisors. The company I lead has created the world’s most accurate map of it. And learning to read that map is going to improve your life a lot because it will give you direct contact with the part of your nervous system that is driving the most fundamental systems that govern your moment-to-moment experience of wellbeing. Literally every system in your body is downstream of the Autonomic Nervous System. I cannot think of a single system that is not.